Past a certain level of abstraction, the sonic drama of noise resides almost entirely in its ability to enact transitions. Some folks pursue the epic crescendo, smirking as its climax gradually dawns on the subjected. The harsher of the lot — think Prurient or John Wiese — exploit surprise: each composition elapses as a series of events, little assaults on complacency and tonal integrity. Noise that is organized as a murkily gridded system of differences responds to the fact that pure tone, no matter how finely wrought, in a static state won’t transmit the frisson of radical manipulation that a more variegated approach supplies.
Secret Abuse, a project of Jeff Witscher’s, manifests this durable paradox in the most tangible, material way. Violent Narcissus is not a particularly eventful record, and to behold a physical copy is to confront what seems like acres of undifferentiated grooves sprawling and shining across the platter. They periodically clump up (earplugs!) but then disperse once more into Witscher’s shimmer-drone backwater. His method is pretty airtight, but with time its product seems ever more like a pattern of safe alternation, an eroded vocabulary slouching toward aphasia.
Witscher was in L.A. for a bit, but he’s re-decamped to Iowa City, Raccoo-oo-oon country, and the shimmer-drone that dominates Violent Narcissus might be read by a lesser man as indicative of these surroundings, a pregnant submission to the putative wilds. So might the titles and de facto themes; naturalistic imagery (“Red Salamander,” “Aureole”) rules the day. But in an obvious sense, Secret Abuse addresses the mediation of such encounters by technological or merely perceptive apparatus. The default sound here is a processed wash of guitar and static, layered and multiplied beyond common calculus; it’s a thick, sometimes suffocating ether that eclipses any habitable state of nature.
For all its self-imposed stasis, then, the record raises pertinent questions, or at least manufactures the arena in which they might incrementally be posed. Its slanted ambience makes few explicit utterances, but a message comes across all the same.
1. Domino
2. There Are Times in the Morning
3. Dust
4. Red Salamander
5. Blank Cartridge
6. Pulse
7. Gaze
8. Aureole
9. Oak Body
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