Azfarat - All Things End and Other Delightful Yarns

It was back in September that Azfarat released his debut album Peace and Quiet on the Bugs Crawling Out Of People label, garnering what attention he could with his focus on noise and industrial, with themes from futurist and dadaist ideas. While the lack of rhythm and sometimes blistering sounds that emerge from one's speakers may not appeal to many, there is still a niche crowd that absolutely adores this kind of scattered sound. And Azfarat should easily be able to appeal to that audience.

While I missed his debut album and still have yet to go back and listen to it, I am coming in at the midpoint in a trilogy of releases that started with Peace and Quiet. Moving on to today, All Things End and Other Delightful Yarns continues forth in this trilogy, releasing a three track single that not only continues the harsh noise that Azfarat has accustomed to, but also introducing a bit of spoken word shenanigans into his arsenal.

Poor Fellow Velociter is the first track on the album, and it's also where the aforementioned spoken word swamps come into play. Now, the words that flow out of the artist's mouth are definitely poetic and without slurs. What exactly is being spun out is a story, but, to me, it was something that will be interpreted differently depending on who's listening. As for the music, groans and ambiance accompany the words, but it's never enough to make the spoken word antics leave the foreground. The noise stays relatively low, not completely destroying your ears, but more or less leaves an eerie feeling in your gut.

Passive Dribbles then comes in next, with more static sounds, choral samples playing in the background, and just more bits of random sounds placed in succession. Deep pitched words than come out, sounding as if it's skipping on purpose, which adds to the overall atmosphere. It isn't until around the six and a half minute mark that we first receive a slam of bass destroying noise. And I loved it. And I wanted more of that. Thankfully, the third and final song Knucklehead leaves off with more noise. Completely ear distorting, stomach turning, and ruthless, the noise was obnoxious, and there were multiple samples of people speaking layered over one another. It was chaos in music form.

Now, this single isn't necessarily the best sounding thing in the world by far, but that's also something that's explained earlier by the artist. He describes his work as an experience, not necessarily music; his music is something that's supposed to reflect upon yourself and make you just think. While it may be hard to do so, and while I may not have felt that way at all during my listening experience, perhaps there are others out there who will. But, in any case, the guy is good at making your ears hurt, and that's usually what I expect from noise. So, good on him.

The single is available from Bandcamp for free/name-your-price model at the artist's page. Dec 21 2014