NONHORSE - HARAAM, CIRCLE OF FLAME CD (RTB#18) REVIEWS AQUARIUS Nonhorse is the work of one Gabriel Lucas Crane who spends his day job rocking in the group Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice, but when he's on his own, it's a whole 'nother sonic ball of wax. Ot maybe ball of old busted cassettes would be more like it. Each track, always clocking in at either 3:12, 3:13. or 3:14, is a dense assemblage of random sonic detritus, fuzzy indistinct song fragments, manipulated tape drop outs, ringing phones, sound effects, huge swaths of buzzing distortion, looped bits of detuned guitar, slabs of damaged percussion, the sounds of tapes rewinding and fast forwarding, abstract guitar shimmer looped and slowed down, snippets of classical music, crackle and static, everything murky and indistinct, blurry and smeared into strange cross-eyed soundscapes. It's a bit like John Oswald for the ADD set, but when the mania subsides just a little, and sounds are allowed to shimmer and fade, the sound becomes remarkably beautiful, like Dialing In, all blown out and gorgeously crumbling to bits before our ears, or like a more corrosive lo-fi version of our favorite soundscapers, Jasper TX, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Philip Jeck, the same sort of milk eyed warble and disembodied drift, but assembled from a pile of junkyard tapes. A seriously drug addled mashup of light and dark, pretty and ugly, noisy and serene, and somehow it works. In a big way. Completely dizzying and confusional, warped and warbly, but in it's own ugly duckling manner quite pretty. If all that blissed out fuzzscape crap is a little too mellow for you, but you still want to be dragged off to some other world, Nonhorse might be the little red pill you've been waiting for. Mastered by the Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson. BOOMKAT Nonhorse is the solo incarnation of Gabriel Lucas Crane who participates in the Vanishing Voice element of Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice. For this, his debut solo album, Crane’s cassettecore noisescapes are finally given centre-stage, and the resultant scrapyard of lost sampled recordings and general audio debris makes for a truly dizzying listen. This is noise music at its most primitive, with a collage approach being the principal technique at Crane’s disposal. The severe tapedeck mangling never quite allows the source material to reveal itself, but throughout the album’s thirteen tracks there’s a strong sense of variety and sonic dynamism, with Crane by turns summoning up walls of howling feedback, cut-and-paste slapstick plunderphonics and Henri Chopin-like concrète manipulations. Noiseniks should also be aware that this magnificent mess was mastered by Yellow Swans’ din monger, Pete Swanson. VITAL WEEKLY #571 Somehow I missed out the whole neo-folk scene, so Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice is alien to me, other than that I know they have quite a reputation. The neo-noise movement however didn't miss me, but to be very honest, I think it's pretty much old wine in new bottles. Badly recorded, worn out ideas. Nonhorse is the solo project of Gabriel Lucas Crane from Wooden Wand but he plays neo-noise. A couple of cassette players, a turntable or two and some effect pedals. Due to some conceptual thingy all tracks last 3.13 minutes, but they are far from ideal popsongs. The recording quality isn't as bad as some others do in this genre, but the music itself sounds pretty outdated. Take a cassette from Odal from 1988 and you pretty much get the same, but with the beloved hiss. Probably I am alone in the desert with this opinion but perhaps I am just an old man. (FdW)