I've been genuinely concerned about my hearing for some time now. I mean, I go to watch a lot of live music - certainly more than most. I've been doing it since I was fifteen or so. I don't always realise when people are talking to me these days. Twenty years of standing in the front row, right in front of the left hand speaker stack - my favoured position - watching bands that aren't renowned for their hushed performances has got to take its toll. Recently, I've started wearing ear plugs as a matter of course, but is it too little, too late? Sure, I wore plugs for Sunn O))) and Swans and the last time I saw Whitehouse, but what about the untold and irreparable damage the previous three outings did, not to mention the countless other gigs?
Turns out my hearing is just fine. I know, because I just took a home hearing test. Ok, so actually, I played the new Cyclo album. It's a wince-inducing exercise in frequency manipulation, full of bleeps and whistles that are probably off the scale to many. These ultra-high frequencies that can travel through walls without any difficulty become pretty torturous after a while, even when riven with fuzzy thudding pulses that serve the purpose of lending rhythm to the disorientating squalls of sound that pass through the speakers in extreme stereo. A mere tien minutes in and I feel as though my brain's being drilled into from both sides. At one point a low, shuddering hum makes me think my PC's crashed again, but no, it's ok, it's just the music on the CD.
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It's interesting for a while, but is a bit much after a while, and at no point could I ever describe 'ID' as being fun, enjoyable or pleasurable. I did peer out of the window to see a colony of bats getting down outside my window, though.
Cyclo Online
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