Cassette Review // Jo Bled "The Metallic Industrial Order" (Histamine Tapes)

https://histaminetapes.bandcamp.com/album/the-metallic-industrial-other-ht076

This cassette opens up with the deep bass sound that feels like it's just swirling around.  All the while I also feel like we're inside of a room and there is rain hitting the windows.  This has a calming, almost hypnotic effect to it, and it feels like we're meditating because we're getting lost in the looping of the sound to where we just are no longer thinking about it or anything else in the present tense.

As the sound grows louder, bursts coming through in a way which can almost become scary, it also has this growing intensity.   I'm reminded of some old, tribal, ritual sacrifice where someone is put up above something like a volcano and slowly lowered into it and this seems to grow in intensity as the person is being lowered, getting closer and closer to their fiery doom.  I might also just be watching too much Indiana Jones.

On the flip side we open with this metal rattling, like a pot is being rolled around with something in it.   Hearing metal in this way always makes me think of a thunderstorm and as I listen to this, it's dark outside like thunder could come at any moment.   But that just makes everything feel so peaceful, in that calm before the storm way.  

In a lot of ways that might be the best way to describe this cassette.  It isn't always peaceful and the sound can pick up in pace, but it does feel like the calm before the storm.  It feels like that moment where everything is all right and then something bad happens.  But the other foot doesn't drop, as they say, so much as it just feels like the build up to it.  I think that's important because it leaves you free to decide what happens after the music ends.