Review: Andrew Reddy - Spitting Broken Teeth And Mistranslations

If Andrew Reddy’s musical craft were to be transposed into the physical realm, he’d doubtless be working with gravel, grit and rock. Sounds crumble and collide, mimicking avalanche tremors and tectonic restlessness.  Steam bursts through the cracks like hot springs. There’s the implication of military transport – chopping helicopter blades, the buzz and crackle of walkie-talkie and the patient beep of radar – sweeping over the scorched earth in search of survivors, or undiscovered fauna, or new material for industry. The record bubbles and flames with hidden hostility; a geothermal tension brewing beneath the surface, leaking into audibility in the form of stifled fissures and preparatory rumbles of bass frequency.

Reddy makes himself invisible. His soundscapes feel deserted to the extent that even he doesn’t inhabit them, as though the record is the long-awaited, natural consequence of some triggers that Reddy put in place many centuries ago. On “The Earth Will Once Again Bear Fruit” – a seemingly hopeless promise that soon becomes devoured by the omnipresent decay – birdsong and screams twirl within a cyclone of static, while a computer hard drive contorts itself into spurts of stuttering noise and faltering mechanism. Every sound that enters Reddy’s sphere of decline soon starts to dismantle itself, succumbing to the bleak, degradative inevitability that haunts the landscape as a whole. The latter half of the record is a single 32-minute track titled “Oubliette”, which swirls like the ash of everything that the album has laid to waste over the tracks prior. Reddy choreographs a ballet for particles of dead matter, injecting an eerie phantom energy into winds of stale residue. They move, but it’s been aeons since they were actually alive.