Shelter Press

PETE SWANSON/RENE HELL – ’WAITING FOR THE LADIES’ split LP
Vinyl reissue of the massively limited split LP from Yellow Swans’ Pete Swanson and darkened Kosmische operator Rene Hell, who each supply a side of new music.  On Swanson‘s side, rhythmic electronic signals clear the debris after a few introductory minutes of his signature noise-wash, cycling through nervous patterns of hum before the detritus starts to very incrementally build up again. It’s in these more methodical moments that you get to hear a side of the Yellow Swan that’s seldom made this explicit. Largely devoid of the fiery plumes of feedback that constitute so much of his discography, for some stretches, ‘Self Help’ captures Swanson in nurturing mode, coaxing the rhythmic qualities of his music to the forefront, eventually developing a kind of noisy, metronomic snare sound before the whole thing comes crashing down once again, this time under the weight of a flood of scourging drones. Finally, Swanson’s fizzy, electric pulse returns to usher out the side-long piece.  On the flipside we find Rene Hell following up on the cosmic analogue excursions of his Porcelain Opera LP with a side full of hardware-driven synthetic vistas. Right up there with contemporaries like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Hell (real name Jeff Witscher) spends his side constructing the kind of intense, pastoral sci-fi sound worlds that could have been plucked from forty years in the past, or for that matter, forty years in the future.

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