Divine Shell/Buildings & Mountains – Of Mine Own Brood C30

Blood Dirt Cassettes

Here’s a split cassette between two newer artists. Divine Shell creates loud and aggressive harsh noise and power electronics while Buildings & Mountains is a more eclectic project spanning the genres of noise, experimental, and electronica. I enjoy each of the projects on their own, but I have to admit I went into this one with an eyebrow raised on how they would mesh together on a split.

Divine Shell presents a mix of tracks with the first a scathing attack of power electronics. The second is a longer flowing track kicking off with harsh death industrial much reminding me of Atrax Morgue. It’s not long before we are floating through passages of ambience with warm subtle overdriven washes of noise, sub-bass thuds, and echoing bells. A great mix of styles and a cohesive track that shows evolution and an ear for editing in one fell swoop.

Buildings & Mountains delivers something quite different than what I’ve heard from him in the past. This time it’s more of a distorted synthesizer outing, raw and lo-fi. It seems to mainly be only one layer throughout, slowly alternating pitches and harmonies, almost like a drone track that is just thrown through distortion. It doesn’t quite grab my interest, and certainly nowhere near the caliber of his work in the past.

So it is that this split offers two sides to the story. Divine Shell does what he does best and expands on it a bit with some great evolution in the project. As for Building & Mountains it seems like he may have stepped out of his comfort zone and tried something different which didn’t quite work out too well. Worth mentioning is the extremely crude packaging for the release which is just a fold of cardboard around the tape. Very odd, but following the strange packaging efforts of the previous Blood Dirt Cassettes releases.

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