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The Rhythm And Noise project is the work of Naut Humon, who, along with two other experimenters, Rex Probe and Nick Fault, frequented the San Francisco venues with chilling multimedia performances. These three madmen formed an electronic music ensemble built mainly around noise, fully exploiting all its cacophonic capabilities.
We are around the early 80s and this album, along with "Contents Under Notice," a year younger (also contained in the CD), represents a mythical testimony to their daring work (under the Ralph label, just for a change...). The record includes spine-chilling live performances with threatening and terrifying noises coming from everywhere, waves of creepy synth often devoid of any melodic solution. On the rare occasions when the melody appears, it offers moments of high suggestion, halfway between the most apocalyptic Klaus Shulze and the most subliminal Autechre.
The atmosphere is damnably claustrophobic, a close relative of Foetus's psycho-industrial visions, with some vocal incursions by the enchantress of evil par excellence, Diamanda Galas, who contributes with her abyssal vocalizations to the sonic catastrophe of the album. Techno-tribal rhythms, spine-chilling samples, plenty of concrete noises, and violent synth waves form a picture of exceptional psychic tension, where the avant-garde marries the most unsettling landscapes that electronic music has perhaps ever chiseled. The "end of the world" atmosphere accumulates minute by minute into a spasmodic tension, summed up in a suspense that makes you hold your breath, genuinely instilling fear at times.
The mental imbalance represented by these three unknowns of rock finds perfect stylistic equilibrium in a work of great historical testimony, experimental as few, suggestive as almost none.
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