Labels: Housecore
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Tristan Shone does both the authoring and punishing in A&P, and is familiar with metal as an engineering material and as a musical genre. He constructs his own sound controllers, hooking them up to a laptop and physically manipulating them in ways that nods as much towards performance art as to blackened industrial noise metal. The attack is threefold; treated vocals lie atop atom-bomb beats delivered from a weighty piston operated by Shone’s right hand. Harsh drones that carry the melody (such as it is) are controlled by abacus-like oversized sliders, and this seemingly rudimentary sonic palette is further shaped and sculpted with giant banks of knobs, more conventional instrumentation and a whole host of other insane contraptionery. So it’s literally man versus machine here, with something physically massaging about those drones and repeated beatings. It’s basically industrial influenced doom metal, but it crushes in an engulfingly satisfying manner that is otherworldly and apocalyptic.
A&P