I listen to noise made by people I have never met and I construct, with peals of feedback and swathes of static as my building blocks, exaggerated profiles of the creators. I know that they probably live something like “normal lives” when they’re not conjuring chaos from a table of pedals and contact mics, but I try to forget this. In that moment of recording, or in that live performance, the creators wanted to confuse you, chase oblivion, maybe even obfuscate their own role in their process of creation — so I allow them to do this. Divorced from considerations of true demeanor, day job, socio-economic reality, any version of reality at all, really, I allow my imagination to shape these strangers into best-case-scenario monoliths: colossi seen from across a field, cobbled together from a mess of magnetic tape and scrap metal, all but indiscernible from this distance, but gnarled in improbable detail up close.
I listen to Reversus and I find there’s no need to construct such a monolith — or that, despite the presence of peals of feedback and swathes of static, it would be impossible to do so in the same fashion. As guitar chord shrapnel swirls through her in-the-red mixes, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Amanda Salane (1/3 of Advaeta) directly testifies to the conditions of her existence by way of screams, ‘verbed out vocal melodies, and trance-like sing-song monologues. On gloriously clipped opener “BIRTH,” as her voice rings out in disarming juxtaposition with her six-string savagery, she shouts, “I fucked confusion and I came out clarity.” However exaggerated this persona may be, Salane applies her noise-based practice to a end more nuanced than self-abstraction: self-elucidation; a congress with and acceptance of one’s darker half. The Reversus monolith, glimpsed from across the field, appears as a giant incarnation of Amanda Salane, unmodulated, clawing at the fretboard, howling into the fog.
You can buy 01, Reversus’s debut 10”, from her Bandcamp page, or catch her ON TOUR THIS SUMMER with Silent Land Time Machine.
• Reversus: http://reversus.bandcamp.com
More about: Reversus
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