Live Music Review //
Rear Window / Cryptwarbler / winj
June 29th, 2023
at Redscroll Records, Wallingford CT
More photos can be found in a Facebook album here :::
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1274187286644823&type=3
Summer time really seems to be heating up things in the Connecticut music scene and this was the second appearance of Rear Window at Redscroll Records. After missing the first one, this show was just something I was not going to miss and as a bonus for people like me who missed the first show a cassette of it was available and this was the release show for that cassette.
I have to admit that as someone who tried to document these shows through words, photos and videos, there are rare times when I get distracted by the music itself but this was the case I found with the music of winj. Through various electronics the sound came out through the speakers from a table but then there was also a boombox underneath the table which had cassettes removed from and substituted to play various audio clips.
It took me longer into the set than I care to admit to realize that boombox was under there, though I saw the cassettes on the table and nowhere else for them to really go, but that just made this all the more interesting. It was a collage of sounds, but the way that winj shifted from parts of the table to even underneath the table which made the sound feel like the work of more than one person. At one point, for one moment, you could also hear a dog bark.
Cryptwarbler was up second and I really enjoyed that this sound played between the electronic side of noise and the harsh side of it. There were moments where I checked on Quentin to see how he was handling it. With a Casio keyboard, many of these tones were pleasant and just felt like fun. It was electronic noise, but in that way where you can get lost in it because you're not thinking about how it's made.
Then every so often this distorted blast would just rip through, wiping out everything else you heard and felt. The way I felt like this wasn't harsh noise all of the time, but really could feel the loudness of it still is what made it so cool. There exists this strange feeling of going from the loudest, harshest sound you can hear to silence and in a similar sense going from sounds which my ears enjoyed to which my ears were like "Too loud!" was the type of audio drug I like to be on.
Rear Window is a trio comprised of perhaps three of the busiest artists out there today. Rex Morris is an established tattoo artist who just released an album as EXCAVATOR. Max Hamel, who has released split cassettes with Zach Rowden, performs as HSFB and most recently is out there in duos like Dreamcast and Chicken Flag. Along with Tongue Depressor, Zach Rowden appears with Joe Moffett as Windscour, so to think of this as a noise supergroup would be right on.
When I lived in Houston, Texas I had never lived somewhere so hot before. The heat, along with the humidity, would just sit on your shoulders. As soon as you walked outside, you just felt it like an invisible backpack you now forced to take around with you. In many ways, the sound of Rear Window feels like that. It's not heavy like heavy metal, but it's heavy like it just rests on your shoulders and back.
I'm excited to hear the cassette from the previous set by Rear Window because it felt like there were a lot of small pieces going into one to form a larger scale sound. This was almost like a harsh noise wall, but if it was made by electronics more than the static you're used to with that. It definitely set a dark mood, like a blanket of darkness wiping out the entire earth, and it's something I'm really looking forward to hearing again.
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