hex horizontal

You know how we occasionally like to ruin your listening pleasures by unearthing skewed grooves whose primary directive we’d like to think is to mess with your head and melt your hi-fi. Well frankly things don’t get as skewed, head messing and hi fi destructing than an ultra limited cassette emerging on limited issue from the Geweih Ritual Documents imprint. Just 80 of these babies from a label whose previous releases includes an equally limited Insect Ark outing who I’m certain in my belief in saying we’ve featured in previous despatches when dinosaurs roamed the earth and these missives came whittled in stoned slabs. Anyhow latest offering is from duo Hex Horizontal who by the tags appear to hail from Los Angeles and briefly describe themselves as experimental avant garde jazz no wavers which in truth is as good a starting descriptive point as any. Their 8 track ’influx I – plastique’ set – incidentally the first of four planned releases recorded live to 2 track in their burbank studio – certainly reveals an irrefutable admiration for all things Henry Cow and This Heat whilst simultaneously finding itself forging a hitherto kinship with the assembled noise niking masses of bands currently bearing the name Andy Pyne upon their credits – see Kellar, medicine and Duty, the black neck band of common loon et al. basically composed of the kind of sounds you’d associate with strangled guitars, misused effects pedals and an impishly deranged attitude in refusing to kowtow to any prescribed musical form, hex horizontal add a whole new context to the notion of freeform into the bargain frying the ears and minds of all who hear – obtuse, awkward and off radar, stuff like ‘dry heave vaccine’ ominously pitches its tent in the shit n shine camp while those much loving of their sounds fractured, dipped in acid and sounding like sonic nails scratching down the chalk board will do well to take up matters with the frankly caustic ‘stuck pig’ which worrying comes replete with as were riffage butchered to sound like shrieking pig cries. Elsewhere there’s the festering agit gouged head butt that is the shock treated ’don’t walk, run’ with its acutely angular math contortions while for us, best of the gathering is the macabre dream flashbacks visited upon by the disquieting appearance of ’invalid daydream’ clearly spooking us like nothing we’ve heard since the early days of moonwood and lee noble. http://www.geweihritual.bandcamp.com/album/influx-I-plastique