(Noise, Harsh Noise) [CD] Knurl (Alan Bloor) - Scyamine - 2006, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Thanks to Tim Oliveira, Bob Scott Sato, Sickness, and Slogun for a great time at the 2005 San Francisco Harsh Noise Festival
Special thanks to Phil Blankenship.
Alan Bloor is a living Toronto legend; a harsh noise warrior who’s been storming the battlegrounds of what human ears can mentally and physically endure for roughly 20 years now. He has earned the undying respect of open-minded listeners who appreciate determined innovation and unrelenting non-conformism, and scared off damned well everyone else. Scyamine, Bloor’s first release for the highly respected Hollywood noise label PACrec, finds the man with the titanium ears at the top of his bludgeoning game, scraping all hell out of his personally constructed stainless steel instrument of choice. Bloor runs his burning metal mayhem through a plethora of intense effects to create a dense, pummelling onslaught of harsh noise that ebbs with an engaging current. Recorded and produced by Bloor in a single-day marathon session late last year, Scyamine consists of seven epic tracks that will keep your fists pumping and mind reeling (not to mention that chattering in your teeth and vertebrae) for future lives to come. The album comes appropriately sleeved in a photo of an enormous turbine engine — a fitting visual representation of (or homage to) the huge, crushing, churning sound captured on this career-defining masterpiece.
Are there ever certain feelings or emotions you’re trying to convey to your audience? No, not really trying to prove anything, no big emotions going through my head or anything like that. It’s more just like, “This is what I do,” and I’m not making any sacrifices, or I’m not making any apologies for what I do, I’m just gonna go up there and tear it apart and that’s it. It’s not like I’m going through any kind of big spiritual thing. It’s just this gut feeling of some kind of emotion, to go up and do it. It’s not really trying to prove anything, not trying to win any fans or anything like that.
How did you get interested in making noise music? Since 1979 I worked in welding shops and I used to love the sound of the grinders and the cutting of the steel. It was this loud, fast, abrasive sound. In the early ’80s I was in a hardcore punk band in Windsor and at that point I used to think if you could contain this somehow and have a band that could make music this fast and this loud and this aggressive, it would be great. So the band I was in fell apart, and I kind of went solo after that and started experimenting with steel. - Exclaim magazine
My friend Grant's dad has boxes of early '80s punk rock 7-inches from European bands too obscure to even have a bio floating around on the internet. I live in a town full of old dudes whose garages are slammed wall-to-wall with rare regional soul, mod, and garage 45s. And I like being around people who can share a great minute-and-a-half of crust punk or Philly funk with me. Hearing the best (and probably) only song that a gangly bunch of 19-year-olds from Detroit recorded can be downright inspiring: for two-and-a-half minutes, those kids are as good as The Byrds. Nevermind that B-side is a cowpoke misadventure, or that all of them went on to become accountants and Will Ackerman listeners. Those dusty records transmit as vital a message as any of Rolling Stones' top 500 albums: they remind us that creativity isn't the playground of a handful of geniuses and icons, but a stream that any of us can tap into, even if just for a moment.
Noise rock short-runs like this one give me that same tingle. Nothing too mind-blowing here: like all Knurl albums, Scyamine bellows with the sounds of scraping homemade metal instruments, and like any good Merzbow release (or any of the zillions of records that sound like Merzbow), all this damaged, distorted treble rips into a mesmeric groove befitting a shoegaze instrumental. It's brutal, but not that brutal, as a sense of purposiveness that defies conventional musical sense is definitely at work. If you're at all concerned with buying only "essential" records, if you're retabulating your year-end Top 10 every two weeks, then this album won't mean very much to you, although you'll have no reason to find it disagreeable. But if you need every shot of inspiration you can get, dive in. - P FUNK, tinymixtapes.com

Recorded & produced by Alan Bloor, October 29, 2005
Sounds were produced from an instrument created from found stainless steel.