It’s time again to get your ears blasted out with this triple treat from our friends at Troniks and Helicopter. Troniks is the label run by Phil Blankenship, whose name we will see a few times in this review. Helicopter is the label run by none other than John Wiese, who, like Phil, is one of the artists on these CDs. As long as I can remember, the Troniks website has been http://www.iheartnoise.com/, and it always made me smile. It still does because “Yes, we do!”
Lefthanddecision is the project of Phil Blankenship, solo, and it has been active in the late 90s and early 00s. I remember meeting him for the first time in Amoebe Records in Berkeley, where he guided me through some of the sales bins, and I went out with way too many releases to carry home on the flight back. Still grateful though 😉 He was active as LHD back then, so yeah, there were a few of those in there too. He developed himself as an artist after that, and now he is one of the names where I’m always curious what happens next. Troniks has become one of the leading noise labels, and the collaboration with Helicopter solidifies this status. Under LHD, he no longer releases music, but more on that later, because we’re focusing on the period from 1997 to 2002.
“1997-2002” is a double CD with 130 minutes of noise. Beautiful noise with various aspects. Saturated layers of drone basses, some feedback, some structure, some structure missing. Twenty-one tracks, all untitled, and according to the promo text, ‘sound from the early self-released cassettes, material culled from rare international releases, live performances, and beyond.’ No sources can be found on which track was released when or where, but if I’m honest, that was of no concern to me. As it stands now, this collection has turned out to be great.
The tracks on this album are carefully put in this order, I think, because there is an overall flow to the pieces. The length of the tracks ranges from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. It might indicate that the longer tracks are from live performances, but let’s face it, how often have we all been to concerts which ended after a few minutes of sonic eruption, and we were left with the feeling we wanted more. So I could be very wrong there (I probably am).
This is an excellent album, as you might have understood, and I look forward to listening to it more often in the future. The noise and drone parts in here are hypnotic; the extremes are deafening, and the atmosphere is thrilling. All reasons to try it out on Bandcamp and decide you need it.
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