It's not every day that a release comes with a list of the samples used in its construction, especially when they're mostly drawn from a few free sites. But then it's not every day you'll hear something like the 'Sweetness and Light EP.' The other day I was getting excited by the new Bearsuit Records compilation, and this release suggests the quality of that release ('Captain Woof Woofs' Guitar') was no fluke.
'Forsake,' which appears on the aforementioned compilation is the first track here, and sets the tone for the rest of the EP in its assimilation of diverse sounds to create a shifting, alien soundscape. It's followed by 'Cataract,' which begins like 'Keep Your Dreams' by Suicide updated for the new millennium, before swirling off in a mist of sonic haze and fuzzy analogue synth sounds with spoken vocals on top.
The centrepiece of the EP, 'Bearskins,' comes on like 90s Whitehouse (the band, not the magazine or presidential seat) in a sea of pink noise or a fragment from an early Test Department album at the start, before electronic piano sounds chime in, sitting most incongruously with the distorted techno / EBM vocal and crackling incidentals. Over the course of the eight and a half minute running time, there are several movements, which sees the form switch unexpectedly to bleepy electronica and taper out in a crackling ambient smog.
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After this, the title track's electronic piano motif is both gentler and more conventional-sounding, although the heavily processed vocals - a recurrent feature across the five songs here - and curious lyrical content prevent it from being anything even approximating ordinary.
Initial bursts of feedback give way to squelchiness and mellow tones cut through with sharp-edged incidentals for the final track, 'My Drive,' winding up an EP that's bursting with experimentalism and yet remains on the right side of listenable.
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