Diacritical Mark – Lozenges (Regular Strength) EP

Courier Sound

Suffolk micro-label Courier Sound have released another of their beautifully presented cassettes. Coming in a lime green hand-made box and lime green cassette, with Quality Street wrappers and lovely little card inserts, it looks a treat, but it totally belies the aural contents. The fact that the wrappers are salvaged from “several years of reluctant Christmas obligation” should warn the listener, but with such titles as “The Punishing Reminder Of Anniversaries”, “Families Endure The Most Grief” and “Abandoned By Friends”, you know this isn’t going to be an easy ride.

The six pieces were all improvised using a sample app and various electronic noise-makers, and it is the sound of disillusionment, despair and disgust succinctly translated into a worrying scree of drilling, scraping and screeching, interspersed with split seconds of silence. These tiny pauses act as a kind of focus to drive the noise further into the brain. Clearly, Diacritical Mark has had a lot to endure over the years and this is his sonic catharsis that, willingly or not, drags us along for the discomfiting and jarring ride. The distorted machine gun sounds and incessant burrowing are like poisons leaching out of his system, redolent of low-level warfare across the kitchen table.

I have to say, Mark does try to lighten things a little on the final track “Lozenge”, where 8-bit chirpiness chitters and skips about, making a racket far more akin to children let loose with his equipment, a certain sense of fun pervading the gloom; but the whole thing is still a challenge. As he himself admits, it is “far from soothing”, but sometimes this kind of existential scream is just what is needed — and hopefully Mark feels better for it.

-Mr Olivetti-