This is something of a family affair from the respectable artists that comprise the Community College and Epicene camps in Dayton, Ohio. All of these cats have done their time and made a mark in the tape and CD-R American “noise” underground and are now bringing it to the stage and a choice slab of vinyl. This 7” was hastily assembled and released to commemorate a tour of the artists involved back in March and it's an attractive release packaged with some lovely textured brown home-made paper in a numbered edition of 100 copies on black vinyl. Seems like a logical next step to me; nothing sells at a gig like a hand-packaged 7”. What these guys do is hardly your everyday pedestrian noise though. They transcend the pedal abuse and 'noise for noise sake' shit and create some intriguingly fucked up aural landscapes.

Nicholas Ceparski and Jonathan Enrique Barajas are the current incarnation of To-Night Golden Curls. The duo's contribution here has some serious gravity akin to the dense fog of a particularly humid morning. Like any morning though bird songs, traffic din and other sundry sounds manage to cut through the haze however muffled they may be. Such mornings can be disorienting as you hear everything through open windows but can't see a damn thing because of the low lying clouds. This track has a similar acousmatic effect. Heavy drones, some sporadic peals, a moaned voice and scratchy rhythmic loops weave a web of dimly-lit intrigue. It's pretty lo-fi, but gets the job done even as the track ends prematurely. More of this would certainly be welcome.

Apparently the soloists that record under the names Teeth Collection and Plasmic Formations have a rich history together, both as members of various other projects and in a previous duo Ghost Of Obtuse.

Name games aside, this is their first effort collaborating using their contemporary nomenclatures. These cats obviously work really well together. There's a real sensitivity to dynamic momentum and textural diversity here that is rare in a lot of today's underground electronic/noise music. Underlying the track is a simple two-note figure that serves a grounding element to tie everything together. In some circumstances this could be considered lazy, but here it's pretty damn clever considering the menagerie of electronic and acoustically derived sounds that are riding over it. It reminds me a bit of some of Throbbing Gristle's better concert moments in the 70s and early 80s when the chaos coalesced into some semblance of order purely by chance. My hunch is that these two are a little more in control and that their live performances were absolutely transcendent. Hell, what do I know?

Keep an ear out for both (all three?) of these projects and Epicene's impressive roster of releases that include much more than just electronic music. Mick Barr and Weasel Walter? Send me that shit yo!