orators/astroboy digital gristle and analogue filth (split c90 from yuffie's sub quest and ennui tapes)
orators provide the digital gristle on this split, doing more musical stuff than i am used to [although most of the orators stuff is more to the music end i guess] but still with plenty of noisiness. i had the same problem i always do with tapes, which is i got lost a lot, although i was kind of familiar with some of the songs from the manifestations and mp3.com pages [find em yourself, i'm too lazy to hold your hand and take you there]. but anyway,  this is noisey music, and musical music, and noisey noise, and some stuff between. opens with a kind of simple techno-ish track ['its a knockout!'] and then goes to more textural noise. i still can't figure out how long 'zippith' and 'autoexec' [the second and third tracks] are, apperently one of them is longer and changes a bit or something. 'spooky sex,' however, is definitely recognizable, with crazy distorted moans and gasps and whatnot, maybe lifted from porn movies, although they could very well be homemade [even noise guys get laid! yes they do!]. actually now that i'm listening to it again there seems to be less beat driven stuff, and more just rhythmic noise. i get lost again during 'journey to the center of the smurf,' a more atmospheric track, but 'limited by style' puts me right again, for a while. the rest is a weird blur cos now i'm not even keeping track of the names. one track seems to have live bass plunking, and another has what sounds like someone whispering something, and another more tense beat track, but i'm just letting andy go where he wants to go. and then its over. flip the tape to the analogue filth, presented by astroboy. this side opens with a dense, fuzzy keyboard piece [plus an echoey tv/radio sample and what i think is a slow backwards beat] called 'charlotte's prayer pt 2.' kind of floating and ethereal. 'meek' is a shorter, noisier track, followed by 'zohar 2' which sounds like the name of a 70s scifi movie, and this would be the opening song as zohar the fearless alien warrior trudges across the desert [or something], except towards the end someone cut the soundtrack into pieces and glued it back together wrong and looped parts. 'blue-eye' is my favorite track though [and i think the longest one too], a kind of menacing track in parts, anyways very dramatic sounding. opens with a cool bassline that for whatever reason made me think of masters of the universe [not the movie, the group made up of gordon deathswamp and street pole skinner]. next is 'zot.foq.pik,' which seems kind of like the coda to 'blue-eye' or something, i don't really know why though. 'repentance' has a weird guitar sounding thing, but i don't think astroboy uses guitars [i could be wrong, i have been before], kind of a driving sounding song. 'zona' closes out the tape, backwards vocal samples and a low pulsing synth sound. this was my first astroboy experience, and overall a pleasing one. on the whole a good tape as well.