Jute Gyte / Venowl

For those who prefer their Jute Gyte in half-hour dollops or less, this split with fellow American noise-maker Venowl might be just the ideal serving. Each act has a side of the release (my copy of the split is on cassette) all to itself. The one thing Jute Gyte and Venowl have in common is their use of microtonal scales in their music: Jute Gyte uses a Fender Squire guitar retro-fitted by Sword Guitars to play 24-tone scales on two tracks and Venowl employ guest musician Troy Schafer on a microtonal/extended violin on their one-track contribution.

On Jute Gyte's side, the music can be dizzying and demented in sound, seemingly out of tune and slopping all over the place. There are definite melodies and riffs though and after you have listened to this cassette a few times, you'll realise they're perfect as they are and can't be played in any other scale. After a brief quiet introduction, the jagged metal proper begins and JG man Adam Kalmbach takes us on a trip into some very heavy, black near-industrial soundscapes, all chunky with riffs being churned out in solid, hard-edged slabs and with lead guitar tones coming off as large flat shards of metal.

The first track can be surprisingly regular with looping riffs. and there are sections in the music where the apparent chaos quietens down considerably. The second track is more relaxed and while the tones can still be weird, the music is not difficult to follow. Kalmbach's vocals are the sickest, most hellish thing here: never did a denizen of the underworld sound as raspy and bad-tempered as Kalmbach's voice does. There's a violin in the music somewhere (or it could be that microtonal guitar in disguise). Plenty of hard loopy (and looping) metallic rifferama abounds as well, much of the time barely keeping together but all grinding and cranking away under that crabby vocal to the end. A highlight of Track 2 is a relaxed section in which watery choirs sing in the background and the atmosphere is pleasant and very balmy.

Venowl's contribution is a burner of grinding feedback guitar, seesaw violin and some of the most insane pig-squealing vocals you'll ever hear. The track is structureless and seems an odd mix of super-low industrial doom metal, improv and 21st-century avant-garde formal classical (because of that violin) all rolled together. It's more lumbering than lethargic in pace and threatens to collapse into large slabs of doomy metal tombstone slabs. The texture of the music is rough and gravelly, pitted with lots of holes and sharp edges in-between. Halfway through the music starts to froth and clouds of noise and foghorn bass feedback pass through the speakers in almost pulse-like waves. Voices scream for their life. The music's single-minded, obsessive intensity increases unrelentingly - compared to this band, Khanate might as well be soft rock.

While Venowl's track "Snowbed" features some undeniably doooomier-than-doom metal - note the extra o's I added to emphasise how super-doomy the track is - the 27-minute running time can be a hard road to travel, especially with such incredibly heavy and unstructured music. There's not really a point in the track where you can pause the music for a brief smoking or coffee break. Still this is really frightening stuff.

I hesitate to compare Jute Gyte and Venowl as each band's particular brand of hellish scariness derives from very different musical approaches - Venowl going for super-low, super-heavy and super-long, and Jute Gyte preferring a deranged, layered and chaotic sound - so it's a matter of personal preference as to which of the two you'd least want to meet late at night before the witching hour. Should these guys meet again for another recording, they should play together instead of separately - now that would be a match made in the deepest of hells!