AVXDL is an art and music project formed in the fall of 2017 by Jackson Norton and Matthew Giuffre. They recently released Cave Metal which as they explain are single take live recordings. Everything is improvised and there are no overdubs or redos.
Most of these songs sounded like the tail end of an epic jam. Back in my college days (twenty years ago) we would throw up a couple of mics at band rehearsal and record our jams. This sounded so similar in many ways and I wonder if they are into like minded bands. “100,000 Feet Tall and Made Out of” is the first song and well it starts with drums and lmost instantly just builds into white noise, feedback, distortion and more white noise. There are no beats and no notable melodies either. It’s just a wall of sound that oscillates and it is so lo-fi it’s hard to know where it begins and where it ends. “Roy Batty” is more or less just an extension in terms of aesthetics. There is a tad more separation and there is a beat sort of but for the most part it's chaotic and walls of white noise upon more white noise eventually smother the song . “Move” is somehow more lo-fi than anything that came before. “An End In Itself” is more ambient but also the most realized song. It sounded like it was recorded in a different room as if the sounds were ghosts. I’m an engineer these days and the first advice I’d give the band is to see what they can do to either work with an engineer or learn a little more about the process. I know the noise art they are going for and recordings like this benefit from intricate engineering so you can go down the rabbit hole of sounds that might be arising from these soundscapes. The music felt like it was trying to be somewhere between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Deafheaven. That being said the improvisation (besides the last song) sounded more like the secret track “Endless Nameless” that Nirvana used to play at the end of their shows. It was a cool payoff but you wanted to hear some of their songs first before you got there. There can be a moments of beauty in this psychedelic swamp but the recording quality has to be good enough to hear the nuances and details. I’m thinking ribbon mics, warm EQ’s, a 1176 and plate reverbs would be some of the things that could be used to create that separation. These are things you should find in a local studio. This is an art project about improvisation that seems to want to embrace the chaotic nature of sound. But it also begs the question what is possible if they worked on a composition for days or months? This band has some potential and talent. No matter if they made another improvisation album next or one more focused on composition I’m interested in where they go from here. Take a listen.
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