Ongoing: Fleshlicker – S/T
INDEX:
1: 13 September 2018
2: 19 September 2018
3: 04 October 2018
4: 30 October 2018
Offloading machine gun fire into a manhole cover. Microphone damaged by bullet deflection. Screams from adjacent cells, echoing in through the air vent grill. Three minutes and I blackout.
2:05. A feedback tone spills outward to encompass the frame. Like liquid gold poured upon fractured concrete – the only smooth and colourful presence amidst this three minutes of judder and grey. A painful relief of sorts, just as a needle injection brings a salvational pain to a body that has been pummelled numb. 25 seconds later, it’s gone. The jackhammer rhythms return.
All of the tracks are merged into one file. It’s impossible to tell where one track ends and another begins, and the release makes a mockery of the idea that an experience can be internally demarcated as separate tracks. Instead of using explicit silences to denote the transition from one atmosphere to another, Fleshlicker has hairline gaps between explosions of energy – not pauses, but fleeting absences of action – while the onslaught undergoes a marginal change in hue. Are these “separate tracks”, or just moments of falter or recharge? The only transitions that truly matter here are those that carry me in and out of the experience: the relative quiet that I always neglect to cherish before I press play, and the onset of relief as the noise finally ceases.
Each burst has its own colour. Its own texture. The noise stops, reconstitutes itself, returns anew. A rusted iron plate. STOP. A bullet-punctured manhole cover. STOP. A bloody copper gauze. STOP. An eroded factory cog. STOP. Always coarse, always metallic and dulled, yet forever wretchedly re-alloyed and hammered into a sorry new form, pulling from the same mound of junk materials each time.