artist: December 23rd/ Bloody Letter title: Scato Split Part 5 format: CDR label: Final Scato (Japan) http://sound.jp/fsr/ December 23rd: http://www.enmity-records.com Bloody Letter: http://www.geocities.jp/bloodyletter_noise/ review: J. Hamilton

What we have here is noise, from December 23rd (USA) and Bloody Letter (Japan), and nothing but. December 23rd opens with a typical collage of 'shocking' samples (which are really just tiresome - this stuff stopped being shocking in about 1983 or thereabouts), followed by an 18 minute slab of what seems to be pedal noise. I was ready to dismiss this, seeing as there's a lot of this sort of thing about and there are a few people who do it very well indeed, but after a long, fairly featureless warmup, this piece begins to engage at around the 8 minute mark. Sounds become a little richer and more diverse, there are some little breakdowns (which should have gone on longer), and the last few minutes introduces masses of harmonic feedback that would have been better introduced earlier. So, fairly typical harsh noise, well enough executed, but devoid of any distinct character traits.
Bloody Letter do more or less the same thing, in two parts, with much less movement and/or progression, and less finesse. The disc mastering is of the terrible, remove-all-dynamics, digital brickwall limiting variety, which means there's this distracting digital clipping hiding whatever little nuance there may have been to begin with. All of this, despite some enjoyable moments, means that this disc doesn't really add up to much, though people who are less finicky about their noise may enjoy it.