Hank & Slim
The World Turned Gingham

THE REVIEW

"File under avant-garde country western"

The opening is entrusted to a floating sample, the melody is bright, serene like a summer sky, the voice of a meteorologist from an American radio station warns of an incoming hurricane, but nothing seems to disturb that anesthetizing serenity;

naturally, the sonic material changes form, thoughtful acoustic guitar arpeggios electronically treated, accompanied by frightening excursions of deep bass levels, absence of rhythm, stasis, an electronics now menacing, now strangely enveloping, dense and volatile like a smoke blanket, "Dark Cloud Lightning" in the opening, flows like this, through slow and inexorable changes of perspective, gigantic, yet elusive and dreamlike.

Hank and Slim is the pseudonym behind which two post-industrial legends hid in that distant year 2000, Robin Storey (Zoviet France - Rapoon) and Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions) "The World Turned Gingham" the only proof of existence of the ingenious project aimed at experimenting with electronic sound collages combined with certain music and country atmospheres.

You have the right impression of being in front of an album curated in every detail, the sound finds its dimension in a sort of limbo between physicality and narcotic daze in a semi-awake state, a rarefied and breathtaking psychedelia.

In "The Ballad Of Marky Martin" you can breathe heavy atmospheres, the guitar arpeggio is inexorably slow, the voice drags hoarsely in the dust, while disorienting synthetic reverberations numb the senses, a wonderful melody with a Morricone-like flavor is whistled without any interruption, while in the kilometer-long "Campfire Catfish" the psychic and psychedelic element is elevated to a law board, continuous but slow changes of atmosphere, abstractions, noise, the usual acoustic arpeggios and vocal sample loops overflow in a slow-motion chaos.

One of the masterpieces of the disc is certainly "Where Dust Settles", a sonic collage between the astonishing and the frightening, melody and voices continually swallowed by something else, as if engulfed, immersed in unknown depths, they resurface, almost to admire their sparkling and corrupted beauty, only to be swallowed again, resurfacing each time dirtier, more alive.

"strange lights on the prairie".