Jim Haynes – Scarlet

The Helen Scarsdale Agency

Ever needed to block out the world beyond the ears with the application of sound, to soak and bleach away the intrusive noises of other human beings, their transport, the built environment, the elements themselves? Try Scarlet then, up loud and/or on headphones, and let Jim Haynes reorganise the sound world in rawer form.

Tired of melody, bored to tears by tunes and in need of something a little more intense than just simply entertaining? Get Scarlet for the saloon bar, and keep those pesky customers at bay, or at least those unhardy enough for the scatter of abstraction and the sputtering bursts of electrical noise which will instantly guarantee a nagging feeling of concern for the safety of the speakers, or possibly the proper functioning of the central heating.

Feel like something to make the vacuuming pass by under a barrage of counterpoint and cross-pollinated sympathetic noise? Haynes can sort it out; just turn Scarlet up to 10 and see who wins the chore-time soundclash. Need some sound effects for the passing trill of satellites lost in a systemic representation of cyberspace? There’s some of that on Scarlet too, just like there’s the hiss and implied inherent decay which can be felt as much as heard in the subtle clacking of magnetic tape winding from spool to spool of the cassette – or is that an aspect of the recording itself?

From the piercing swell of whining electronics to the more viscerally noisy, the flagrantly vicious application of controlled feedback or the pulsating thwup of what sounds like a diesel generator running erratically (but is actually yet more applied tone generation), Haynes lets it all hang out, then slathers the results in a few more effects until the brutalist repetition gets too much. And then he does it all again (and maybe once more, just for luck, good or bad), but with a different emphasis. When his lock-step self-propelled and unsequenced rhythms have sufficiently served one purpose, he happily switches them over to another route, or pulls the noise plug completely to let it all build up once more into something altogether more hauntedly mechanistic. All good, dirty fun.

– Antron S Meister-