Limbs Bin – Compassion And Vision

Fourth Dimension

This is not fun, nor is it meant to be. Compassion And Vision sounds vile, nasty, deliberately difficult to listen to — and all the better for it.

On this occasion, Limbs Bin consists of founder Josh Landes alongside Wyatt Howland, and drummers Erik Brown and David Russell, though biographical details don’t really come into it. Perhaps the recording location of a “miserable warehouse in Cleveland” is relevant to the ire and anguish that emanates from the two tracks on what is dubbed an album, but at just under half an hour might equally be termed an EP. Terminology aside, the unstinting rafts of spluttering digital noise and bristling screams shunted through as much spiky distortion as the mixing desk (if there was one) could possibly stand, and then some, that splinters out of the dangerously overloaded speakers (headphones seems like an adventurously dangerous way to listen to this sort of intensity) make for a queasy insight into venomous anger expressed through the medium of Merzbow-grade distended rumblings.

“War jazz for the emotionally underdeveloped. Terror grind for cowards”, they say, and that’s as good a self-description as any, the discordant drumstick clatter and occasional skin hits to the kits of “Compassion” (here in its appropriately titled “Splatter” mix) insinuating their hesitantly vicious way into the relentless digital grind that rumbles unpleasantly in the background. “Vision” is presented in a “Blown To Bits” mix (and let’s assume there’s no ambient yoga versions of Limbs Bin music available, or not yet, at least) and some of the four players can be heard discussing matters briefly as they ramp up the percussive brittleness into something more energetic while retaining the core principles of noise, noise and some more noise, ad noiseam.

It’s a little bit like being stuffed into a Lightning Bolt jam session where any pretence at groove has been abandon as a false byway, instead settling on jagged atonality, impure but simple. They let rip bursts of cymbal crash-heavy rhythmic battering as the single-mindedly nihilistic vocal utterances continue being sprayed out with all due disregard for the niceties of anything much in particular, but of musical form especially.

Limbs Bin don’t sound like they are happy at all, but then again these days, who truly is? And who in such disheartening and divided times as these wouldn’t occasionally get out there and aurally fuck shit up in a primal scream of rage and anguish if they had the means and a warehouse space in which to do so, in Cleveland or elsewhere?

-Linus Tossio-