Review by Daniel for Phyllomedusa - Desiccation in Progress (Version II) (2011)

Some of you may be aware that I’ve recently been taking it upon myself to investigate some of the rarer & more niche subgenres of metal so as to both expand my metal knowledge & to help make Metal Academy the most helpful & all-encompassing metal-related website on the internet. Well, if you could look inside my mind when I read about the niche subgenre of metal known as “gorenoise” recently you would likely have seen me uttering something similar to “Gorenoise?? What the fuck is that?”. And I’d have had every right to in all honesty. The gorenoise subgenre is more of a sub-subgenre with only a handful of bands of any note moving around in this space with any regularity. For the sake of this review though, I’ve chosen one of the more highly regarded releases in gorenoise circles & it comes from an artist that has released literally hundreds of albums over the space of the last decade or so. 

So, what is gorenoise exactly? Well it’s essentially a combination of two widely varying subgenres of music that are both fairly niche in their respective fields it has to be said. Most extreme metal fans worth their salt would at least have some sort of knowledge of the existence of the goregrind subgenre which was first created by Carcass back in the late 1980’s. But many probably aren’t terribly familiar with the “harsh noise” movement that sprouted out of the Japanese experimental music scene a couple of years earlier. Harsh noise (as its name suggests) is all about the creation of huge walls of abrasive noise & it’s really got very little to do with metal but it does share a common element with goregrind in that they may just be the least accessible styles of “music” on the planet (& I use the term music fairly loosely when it comes to harsh noise). So one of my missions when I decided to undertake a review of a well respected gorenoise release was to determine whether it actually had any right to being associated with metal music at all &, as you’ll soon find out, the answer was not as straight forward as I’d hoped. 

Phyllomedusa is essentially the work of one man in Maryland producer Matt Mansfield who has released a huge body of work under a whole slew of different monikers over more than a decade now. He’s been releasing music under this particular guise on his own Hypyractyv Larynx Frogquencies label almost every other week since 2007 & has also been involved with a number of collaborations over that time with his sound being cross-pollinated with several different subgenres of metal on the various releases. Interestingly, Matt seems to have an unusual fascination with frogs & the word “Phyllomedusa” is actually the name given to a family of tree frogs. So, given that knowledge, you probably won’t be too surprised when I tell you that the Phyllomedusa project is entirely based around amphibian themes. In fact, in his every day life Matt is actually a frog photographer & herpetologist for National Geographic & usually goes by the name ”Big Frog” when conducting his various “musical” endeavours. Ooooookkkkaaaayyyyyy….. so we’re definitely dealing with a unique individual here & one that certainly doesn’t take himself all that seriously which I would imagine is probably a prerequisite for all fans of gorenoise to tell you the truth. 

Naturally, the cover artwork for 2011’s “Desiccation in Progress (Version II)” features an image of one of our amphibian friends along with a completely illegible & fairly cheap looking logo made up of what looks like various frog-related bits & pieces so there’s been no attempt to hide the fact that Big Frog has his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek. Further reinforcement can be found by taking one look at the tracklisting which is both biologically & comically flavoured i.e. two characteristics that are very much in line with your typical goregrind model. Nineteen tracks initially seemed like a particularly arduous task to sit through however my fears were quickly alleviated when I noticed that the total duration of the “album” was a meer ten & a half minutes! Yes, you read that correctly ladies & gentlemen. This may just be the shortest album I’ve ever come across. I mean most singles & EPs are longer than that these days. But I think there’s a good reason for that so bare with me. 

Upon first listen I was immediately pushed onto the back foot in no uncertain terms. I had recently been listening to a release that must have had a fairly low volume level because no sooner had I pressed play than I received an involuntary physical direction to throw my headphones off in self-defence. I actually can’t describe just how loud the wall of noise that came bursting out of those speakers was however let’s just say that I’ll be lucky if I don’t experience any long-term effects. After drastically reducing the volume I was ready to give it another shot though & on my second attempt I was presented with a slightly less voluminous but only marginally less confronting audio assault. My first impression was that the production job is actually very bright & electronic sounding which is not something I would usually relate to metal music. It’s much closer to something you’d hear in electronica. Particularly on the more industrial end of the spectrum. The high end electronic noises have an ear-catching vibrancy about them however you won’t get much time to take them in as everything flies past in a matter of seconds before moving onto something entirely similar. The artificially produced snare sounds aren’t to my taste much which is a real concern given that there’s about twenty zillion of them in the ten minutes. They just sound really cheap. Kinda like one of those wind-up monkeys banging away on their little drum. They’re very much in the style of your entry level midi-keyboard sound but in all honesty, most of the nuances are completely irrelevant because everything is dwarfed by the huge, bulbous, throbbing mass of noise that engulfs everything throughout pretty much the entire ten minutes. The levels have very clearly been thrust up to eleven to make sure that there is as much distortion as possible & that everything is as loud as humanly imaginable. I’d imagine that the wave file for each track would simply be a solid bar from top to bottom. 

It’s actually really hard to look at “Desiccation in Progress (Version II)” from a musical point of view because I’m not sure it actually qualifies under that term. I can see where the grindcore association is loosely drawn from in the continual use of hyper-speed blast-beats, sudden & seriously brutal changes & ultra-deep death metal vocals however this release is much further over towards the harsh noise side of the equation than the metal one. Perhaps in a similar way to some of Darkspace’s later material being more ambient than black metal. I mean you can’t hear anything like a riff here. Is there any guitar at play here? I dunno. It’s simply not possible to identify anything from the wall of noise with even the continuous snare hits being hard to pick up on occasion. The very idea of melodic composition seems almost irrelevant with gorenoise & for that reason it’s very hard for any of these tracks to identify themselves from one another. In fact, ten minutes almost seems too long for the minimal quantity of ideas going on here. I find myself losing interest fairly quickly after the initial novelty wears off so I can’t see myself giving one of these releases multiple listens without a considerable break in between & perhaps it wouldn’t be advisable for your health anyway all things considered. 

The vocals are an interesting topic because it sounds like Big Frog has gone to great effort to actually SOUND like a frog & the amphibian-related effects that are included on many of the tracks would support that theory. I have no idea as to whether there are actual lyrics for these tracks but it’s highly doubtful because it would have taken much longer to write them than to compose & record the entire album. I can’t see anyone sparing the time to read them anyway as these tracks fly past in a heartbeat. I’m not too sure if the vocal delivery employs the use of pitch-shifting technology or not because it’s fucking deep but I find it much more easily palatable than some of your more obviously artificial goregrind exponents & I actually think it’s done pretty effectively. 

At the end of the day, “Desiccation in Progress (Version II)” is a novelty release. Nothing more, nothing less. So if you’re looking for substance here you’ll be seriously disappointed. The sheer abrasiveness of the wall of sound is all that matters & I’d be surprised if most fans of the gorenoise subgenre aren’t really more obsessed with shocking their friends & family than becoming emotionally engaged with the music. But in saying that, I do enjoy the sheer brutality of it all in some way. I can’t say that I’ve ever come across a more brutal style of music & that appeals to me from a purely conceptual point of view. It’s therefore possible that I’ll never be as harsh as I probably should be on an album like this & my score is based on the fact that, even though it may not be my cup of tea, I’d still much rather listen to this than Heavy Load, Helloween or Warlord. 

For fans of: Vomitoma, Anal Birth, Menometrorrhagia