Fatcat Records

The fifth installment in FatCat's split 12" series, Bannlust v Chasm shifts the emphasis back onto electronix, and merges two markedly different sounds and takes on construction. Chasm is an alias for Robert Hampson, former singer / guitarist with late-'80s guitar noiseniks, LOOP, and still working under his awesome, dark ambient guise as MAIN. Bannlust’s tracks form a moody, but mesmeric machine-space of cavernous crunch-pulses, digital glitches, stuttering rhythms and, most audibly, towering washes of dirty, electro-synth noise.

Chasm is an alias for Robert Hampson, former singer / guitarist with late-'80s guitar noiseniks, LOOP, and still working under his awesome, dark ambient guise as MAIN. In the chasm incarnation, Hampson pares away his usual layered guitar-drones in favour of a more fractured, beat-based approach. Lovingly laboured over, the three tracks are created through a micro-engineered process of close-microphone recording and concrete experimentation. Sounds are lifted from a wide variety of unusual sources, including masking tape peeled off of a desk; tools scraped against the body of a guitar; a razor blade scraped across a glass pane, etc. Expanded and processed through FX, these become highly abstract, original noises, resulting in a complex, intriguing body of work as beats, clicks, drones and tones encircle one another.

On the flipside, Bannlust is the project of Science City label-founder, Marco Fischer. In early '98, Marco released his first album as Bannlust on the ultra-hip Vienna label, Sabotage. Entitled 'Digital Tensions', this worked a space somewhere between the complex, fractured leftfield electronica of Autechre, and the dark (increasingly vogue) European electro of underground producers like I-F (who provided a remix on the album), Electronome and Le Car.

The three tracks provided for FatCat's spilt series form a moody, but mesmeric machine-space of cavernous crunch-pulses, digital glitches, stuttering rhythms and, most audibly, towering washes of dirty, electro-synth noise.