Sissy Spacek – Gong CD
Sissy Spacek
Gong CD
Helicopter, H 165
New CD edition of the cassette originally released by Torn Light, presented with two bonus tracks, doubling the total run time. “The two sidelong tracks comprising Gong are meticulously assembled symphonies of spine-rattling junk noise, warped and moody musical fragments, damaged electronics, and some really superior blasts of tumbling, crashing metal/glass/detritus, demented garble, peals of metallic whirr, snippets of classical piano, smears of eerie, mold-stained orchestra . That a-side "The Entropy Effect" kind of hits the nail right on the head with the title, unfurling a lengthy sprawl of apparent random destruction events, bits of murked voice, really strange environmental sounds, blurts of demonic bass-tone abuse. Mysterious moments of ambiguous beauty surface like bloated corpses here and there, cast out alongside some obviously thoughtful tape-edit cut-up, and it never gets boring. Kinda tweaks a nerve in my upper back that's resonant with both Stockhausen and K2. An exercise in both off-the-cuff avalanche chaos and mindful collage, skirting the sometimes dry and clinical tone that some other artists in this field seem to be hemmed in by. A celebration of collapse and disintegration, or at least that's how this piece strikes me. Flipping over to "Pierced Ears", it's a continuation of the sound palette and indiscernable structures. Glitchy, chopped up cacophony, shifting metal objects and deep rumbling echoes, ghostly piano and mumbled utterances. Bizarre gasping sounds, pregnant pauses between collapsing monoliths of metal and shattered glass. Actually, there's an increasingly unsettling vibe here, seeded on the first track but germinating here into a vaguely menacing mass of aural actions. Starts to get pretty creepy once you've settled into its roughly fifteen minute runtime, field recordings of violent poltergeist activity positioned next to malfunctioning heavy machinery and some really wild tape-noise manipulations. Creaking materials and hushed male voices. Skittering percussion and gales of vomitus visceral gargle. Scaffolding being pushed over with great force into a pneumatic press. Gnarly squeaks, mechanical shrieks, and trippy application of delay effects. There's a little more of those ultra-brief flashes of silence here, but they only further the unease. There aren't many artists like Sissy Spacek that can make "junk-noise" performances as engrossing as they do here, even though the stream of sonic consciousness captured on the tape definitely transcends the limitations of that style of experimental noise music.” (Text by Crucial Blast)
Shipping November 13, 2025
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