Enregistreur by Exhaust

Recorded at a cabin in the country, all the original Exhaust elements – ultra-low-end bass moan, loping breakbeat trapkit, live reel-to-reel tape scratch – remain at the core of this album. Spliced and diced at the original Hotel2Tango during mixing, the record is an excellent slab of punk-minimalist collage. Bassist Gordon Krieger adds bass clarinet on several tracks, while Mike Zabinski (tapes) and Aidan Girt (drums) deploy loops, signal processing, machine noise and live beats around slow, stripped-down, see-saw bass guitar. The result is a paranoid late-night roam through the proverbial deserted city, picking up the occasional sinister, garbled transmission along the way. Refreshingly absent are the endlessly self-replicating strains and sounds of electronica; Exhaust focused squarely on its own organic playing (and broken gear) to craft these electronically-processed tracks, without facile recourse to the ‘add-some-blips’ strategy that plagued so much so-called post-rock. Aidan’s 1-Speed Bike DJ alter-ego is integrated back into Exhaust’s live trio context. Rather than re-mixing stand-alone tracks as he did on the Exhaust debut, he cuts, pastes and filters his rhythms all over the record. Combined with Gordon and Mike’s forays into sound art and sound environment recordings, all three members put their heads and ears together to execute a series of controlled experiments sourced from their distinct and deliberate palette of riffs and melodic passages.