Spastic Colon. Long Beach.

Long before I reached the legal and metaphorical age of manhood, my much-older stepbrother tried to freak out his fatty little brother with mysterious transmissions intercepted on his presumably short-wave radio. Couple minutes of static, interspersed with single-tone beeps of variable length, then more static. Maybe Conet Project demo recordings, maybe Morse code messages from a young Osama bin Laden during his first party out in the Afghan mountains. Maybe the very first radio frequency transmission put out by Nikola Tesla, still bouncing around in the ionosphere.

Erik Hoffman (member of the Brain Trust behind this massive release) and Jorge Martin, together known as SPASTIC COLON, have contributed a piece equally suggestive of dislocation from particular time and place. While many recordings immediately evoke very specific environments – arm-mangling factories themselves mangled by the unstoppable forces of oxidation and full moon winter graveyards being among my recent faves – this piece generates enough variation around a simple signal to suggest something closer to a Found Magazine family album, a slowly pieced-together series of images the meaning of which depends at least as much on who collects the pages as on who makes the snapshots.

It opens with a slow tone, which provides the axis around which the rest of the scratches and swells are arranged. At first, this tone is accompanied by a hollow thumping and faintly-echoing pulse, sounding not unlike a factory error skip in the record. Toward the end, it resolves into what sounds like the medical machine slowly grinding to a flatline – a placement which it’s hard not to read some kind of meaning into. In between, it sounds at times like that damn clock on my bookshelf waking me up in the morning, or at one point like the teleporter on Star Trek; at times the noise swells to the point of interrupting itself with a sudden blast of density, as if its own weight suddenly threatens the stability of the physical grooves cut into the record, forcing a sudden retreat to a temporary full stop before finally returning to its constant underlying source, which itself remains unmoved and unchanged.

And it’s this stable background which lends coherence to the piece as a whole. Through its various arrangements and transformations, a constant reference point remains available to orient oneself by, itself not bound to the various settings it finds itself in, and presumably capable of reasserting itself regardless of whatever happens around it. When I first forced this record onto my turntable (and I mean forced: the hole was cut a little small, so I had to physically press it into place), I was first struck by the thinness and simplicity of the piece. While sparse and quiet layering has not exactly been absent from much of what I’ve heard in the last year or so, its main use has been as counterpoint to the inevitably dense full-on destructo assault on the senses certain to follow (maybe a byproduct of my own geographical location?) - as moments of creepy anticipation and nervous foreboding. Here, these signs are reversed, as the gradual build-up to dense layers of sound becomes the excuse to return to its native simplicity. Spastic Colon have made sparseness and quiet here achieve a function more meditative and sublime, as the unmoved mover behind the particular waves and swells of occasional frantic interruptions.