Review

“Keelhaul,” the first track on Reid Karris’ Not Only Will This Kill You, It Will Hurt the Whole Time You’re Dying (which gets points for that title alone) begins with a wordless looped voice that provides a bed for a clatter of loose instrumentation – drums, guitar, questionable sounds – which ends up obliterating the repeating vocal. This establishes the conceptual framework and collective sound(s) of this album. Evocatively titled shortish tracks are named after antiquated methods of capital punishment (most of the pieces), torture (the aforementioned “Keelhaul”), and suicide (“Seppuku”). These feature an array of instruments and other sound generators– no-input mixing, samples, circuit-bent electronic toys – all played and mixed by Karris. The non-quantized sounds resemble a freely improvising rock band.* This is a good thing. Drums clang and threaten to resolve into arrhythmic pulses. Prepared guitars, no-put mixers, and non-specific sounds resemble other instruments or unidentifiable noise. Rather than sounding layered, the tracks are pointillist, fractured formations. Sounds crash, thud, tinkle, hum and more, jostling with each other then retreating. The overall impression is of a group of musicians in a room playing together, alternately complementing, diverging, then attacking each other. Standout track is “Drawn and Quartered,” the longest at 7.05minutes, which starts off with low-grade crackles and hisses which are subsequently punctuated by drums that sound like they’re falling down multiple flights of stairs, tearing and sawing noises, and radiophonic bleeps and squiggles. Messy and addictive.

*Cf. The Dead C and Lean Left. The obvious difference is that Karris does all of this himself.