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While renowned for his work as bassist for Agalloch and Sculptured, Jason Walton has also frequently ventured into other, stranger and more experimental regions over the past two decades, offering a range of baffling and captivatingly weird sounds with bands like Self Spiller, Especially Likely Sloth, and Nothing. And it's in that latter territory that we find the debut EP from Snares Of Sixes, his latest creation. On the band's debut EP Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass, Snares Of Sixes makes a bold and confounding introduction, tangling the listener in confusional, highly aggressive avant-prog. The genre-shredding sound taps into a warped confluence of frenzied King Crimson-esque progressive rock, faint traces of frayed, heavily mutated black metal, haunting atmospheric touches, and abrasive electronics, and the result leaves us deliriously disoriented.
With tracks like "Urine Hive", "Lions To Leeches", "The Mother's Throat", Walton and company lurch through an escalating, ever-shifting frenzy of creepy, labyrinthine melody and pummeling percussive chaos, over-modulated riffage and schizophrenic time signatures, where android mutterings give way to hideous blackened shrieks and bouts of bizarre crooning, the sound stitched with veins of crushing metallic heaviosity, fractured electronica, and surreal atmopsherics as it reaches towards the menacing glitched-out tech-metal hallucination of "Retroperistalsis" that closes the EP.
Often difficult, frequently nightmarish, this stuff easily ranks as one of Walton's more challenging and oblique offerings. And for us, one of his most fascinating. Features Marius Sjøli and Robert Hunter (Hollow Branches), Andy Winter (Winds), Pete Lee (Lawnmower Deth), Nathanaël Larochette (Musk Ox), and Don Anderson (Agalloch, Sculptured), among others.
The EP is released on digital and CD in a six-panel digipak.
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