Wolf Eyes
Dead Hills

1996, Detroit, Nate Young represents Wolf Eyes.

Noises, sound deconstruction through synths, beatbox, transistors, and old video game consoles, this is the starting point that makes the wolf eyes phenomenon bloom together with Aaron Dilloway, who, owning a tiny label called Hanson (Hanson records PO Box 7496 Ann Arbor, MI 48107 USA), had already begun to express his obscure forms of art in demos dense with chaos, enhanced by guitars that consume industrial suggestions electronically.
Hanson Records astonishingly regularly churns out a series of CDs, CDRs, cassettes, and demo tapes that are not easy to find, but strike for their intensity and violence.

Cassettes, CD-Rs, and seven-inch in strict limited editions are the means of communication for this duo who, following a brief New York period as a trio with Andrew Wilkes-Krier (better known as Andrew W.K.), relocate to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and meet John Olson, also responsible for a label, American Tapes.
The American Tapes label, which has about 300 titles, ranges from the collaboration between Black Dice & Wolf Eyes "Chimes in Black Water," to formidable solo works by Aaron Dilloway himself entitled “Insect voice.” John Olson further enriches the works linked to this label by also publishing a series of curious flyers, posters that reveal an almost expressionist art (if we want to use this word), in which for Halloween parties, concerts, or New Year's Eve parties, one finds an interesting style that approaches the images produced by the music.

Strict black and white refers directly to the images evoked by the music, images of formless agglomerates or undecipherable monsters that provide a harrowing touch, and through collages or figures sketched with markers, they try to convey to the audience a vision of what the concert or party might hold, almost to ward off time-wasters and intruders.
The results of the new trio's friendship soon turn into frequent record releases: as early as 2001, over twenty (!) titles under the name Wolf Eyes were counted, according to the classic modus operandi of a hardcore-noise collective, inevitably destined for the margins of the music market.
Remember the split with Black Dice from 2001 and “Dread,” the first LP produced that year by Olson and Dilloway’s labels in tandem, in addition to participating in the fundamental 2002 compilation called “If the Twenty First Century Didn't Exist It Would Be Necessary To Invent It” (with the track “Cut The Dog”).

In 2002, Wolf Eyes release “Dead Hills” thanks to Troubleman and, shortly thereafter, the signing of an unexpected contract with Sub Pop opens doors to a much larger market and visibility.
The Troubleman Unlimited label (16 Willow Street Bayonne, NJ, USA), moved in a few years from the creative post-punk of Shotmaker to diverse groups in terms of intent and extraction (like the avant-rockers ABCS or the neo-new wave heroines Erase Errata), starting as a fanzine titled: “Wanna communicate?” by the founder Mike Simonetti. The name of the publication comes from a poster Simonetti received for Christmas from his aunt representing a monkey hanging from a branch with one hand about to fall, and below that image was precisely the writing “Wanna communicate?”.

With courage, this label publishes "Dead Hills" in June 2002 in Adrian (MI), United States, and night immediately falls.
A condensed brutality and violent chaos that remains unmatched in the U.S. free noise scene after several years.
A putrid cloaca inhabited by an extraterrestrial ant's nest is the best definition I've found to describe the initial moments, where in the first track of over 11 minutes lies a noisy hatred, ready to explode, it feels like being at the bedside of a giant sleeping monster that, at the moment of awakening, transforms into sonic violence.
It’s a track that already encapsulates much of Wolf Eyes' poetry, instruments are manipulated, microphones destroyed with piercing screams, the growing unease that populates the black and red landscapes of this album and the group's career. A sidereal abyss characterized by increasing cosmic intensity: judgment day has arrived and the verdict is eternal damnation.
It's as if the crows flying in Van Gogh's famous wheat fields could scream, croak, and serve as a soundtrack for psychic disturbances. Van Gogh’s works paradoxically have too much color compared to Wolf Eyes' tracks which, without a doubt, are the blackest the current music scene can offer.
A black torn apart by blood-red fissures, I've read they are often likened to the universe of painter Bosch, but it’s an image I don’t agree with, if Wolf Eyes have to find a parallel in painting, they are those crows flying in Van Gogh’s fields, black and stylized.

The second track resumes the path of the monster just awakened by the first, and with more defined rhythmic bases, becomes populated with Young’s voice culminating in apathetic sentences and piercing screams, screams performed bent over the microphone, in a stance ready to spit hatred at the world.
The lacerations are modified, altered, repeated in the span of just over 3 minutes and the guitar almost dares the listener to turn up the volume. Obsession and brutality torn by electronics, graceless and maladjusted screams that regurgitate the fear and violence of today’s society, indeed everything sounds so current and contemporary and that's what frightens.
No one feels alien to Wolf Eyes’ violence, there is no division between listener and music, it feels like this desperation has already been heard in daily life, already seen in news images, it’s a desperation that each of us hides within.
There is no alienation as, for example, in a grindcore piece, but the violence stems from within us, it is inherent in contemporary humans.
The climax, played on the syncopations of analog basses stolen from the ghetto and Young's unspeakable screams, is a sabbath of rising tension that, instead of exploding, dissipates as in some frightful ritual. There is nothing satanic or esoteric, but an industrial vision of illness.

“Rotten tropics” is nothing more than the ideal conclusion of the illness, it’s based on about five minutes of escalating screams that engulf the listener and the musical background made of industrial moans and murmurs, mechanical percussive repetitions. The fear of colliding with a rusty and malevolent world of growls.

Enough now, I get up and turn off the stereo with a strange tingling in my body, subcutaneous diseases pour into me like sand and blood on oceans of iron.

01.Dead Hills
02.Dead Hills 2  
03.Rotten Tropics

Label: Troubleman