The Circle is Red by White Noise Sound–Album Review
The Circle is Red by White Noise Sound–Album Review
The year is 2011. White Noise Sound (WNS) performs live in the late-night club circuits of Gdańsk, Bordeaux, and Paris. If you were there to witness one of their live performances, am I right in assuming that you probably atomized into a billion buzzing, electrifying sonic particles?
On March 20th, WNS will release recordings of these live performances on their latest LP, The Circle is Red. If you play the album at high volume, as you are advised to do by vocalist/guitarist/bassist/synth player/programmer Adam Tovey, you too will likely atomize! Tovey elaborates, “Our shows always felt like a transmission from somewhere outside ourselves. We were never fully in control. Play this record loud.” Sounds like they actually were in control of creating optimal sonic conditions for listener atomization!
White Noise Sound is Dan Henley on vocals and synthesizers, our volume advocate Tovey, Paul Griffiths on guitar and percussion, Ric Lolla on guitar and sitar, Chris O’Keefe on bass, and Phil Stanton on drums and percussion. They joined forces in Swansea, Wales, in 2006. The band had become so seasoned and locked in by these 2011 recordings that, when you hear the audience at the end, you are flummoxed that the recordings weren’t made in some nebulous studio somewhere! Seriously, is it live? Or is it Memorex?!?
There are endless textural and visceral elements throughout The Circle is Red. The first track, “Sunset,” is redolent of Alan Vega/Suicide, with a buzzing Farfisa winding throughout and the clicking of what sounds like an electric sprinkler, palpitating steadily as if Moe Tucker were in charge. The song feels wrapped in patinated post-punk black leather, and your TV eyes will flicker with the same magnetic glitches of the earliest VHS tapes (which made their debut in 1977, incidentally)! Guitars with perfect trashcan cadence make an appearance later in the song. But at the end, you hear the applause. Where did people even come from? You’ve been in a transfixed, effervescent state this whole time!
“Blood” starts us off in what sounds like a giant fireplace with soot and concrete below our feet and the sound of a giant ash shovel scraping along the bottom. Then the hook is bestowed upon us! It’s a grindy, garage-y three-chord vamp, and it just snarls! Off in the distance, the same one-note piano from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” perforates the song.
There are come-downs on the album as well. You don’t have to be “on” the whole time. “Nowhere to Hide” allows you to take a moment. It is calming, with lulling, layered sirens that you might have heard in Eno’s “Music For Films”. But it does slowly march you up to a slow inclining hypnotic path…then you float off the cliff launched by similar reverberating peels you may have heard in Spiritualized‘s “Run Run Run”. There you continue weightlessly off into the distance.
The Circle is Red caps off a trilogy of albums released via Rocket Girl Records this past year–the first being a reissue of WNS’s highly acclaimed self-titled debut album from 2010. The second, Fold in Time, features remixes of their tracks by heavy hitters Pete Kember a.k.a. Sonic Boom, Cian Ciaran from Super Furry Animals, techno producer/DJ Phil Kieran, Sean Johnson from Hardway Bros, and Timothy J Fairplay of Andrew Weatherall’s Scrutton Street Circle.
A fine gateway into this triptych, The Circle is Red is a deep dive into the remixes and a path worth pursuing. Circle has texture, detail, sitars, electronic pulses, euphoric blinding light, and sensuality. And it is all live! Hats off to the meticulous handiwork of the musicians and their talented sound engineer(s). If you aren’t privy to the work of WNS, their upcoming release is most definitely for fans of 80’s psychedelia: The Cult, Echo and The Bunnymen, fuzz, garage, post-punk, and electronica. If you’re reading this article (and we know you are) and enjoy other albums written up on Psychedelic Scene, then we know you’ll dig The Circle is Red and other White Noise Sound releases.
Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch, and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out of the other end, dusted off, and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer, back in the Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem, or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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