The musical collective Output:Noise’s first compilation is a ghostly, unsettling affair. Compiled from a series of live improvisations featuring members of the collective playing together in various combinations, the five pieces on show conjure strange atmospheres and tense moods. It’s a subdued yet threatening melange of droning synthesisers, scratchy glitches, shimmering delays and broken frequencies. Its ancient telegraph signals and outer space radio waves and voices in the static slowly blank out all else and command your attention, without ever restoring to shock tactics or an excess of noise to achieve these aims.
However, as all compilations are, it is at times a little hit and miss. While the good folk involved in its creation and assembly have mostly managed to make something coherent and whole out of something diverse by definition, the two centrepiece tracks (simply entitled ‘1.’ and ‘4.’) let this ideal down somewhat. At a combined length of twenty-six minutes they make up more than half the album’s length, and while they don’t exactly wear out their welcome, they do end up trying your patience a little, both resolving in an all out wall-of-noise assault to make their final point.
A deliberate act, or one born of the sheer grunt work in playing a fifteen-minute piece? Either way, it is only a minor detraction. For you could say that this is exactly why their album is seemingly so unified in vision: the sheer act of the live performance itself. Output:Noise’s music feels played, rather than created. You can feel the members interacting; despite the usual audience waffle, this is very much a “live” album. And it is this that allows the album to get so far under your skin, to be such a satisfying work, to feel like an organic, living, breathing thing.
Lach Walter
