Regosphere – Gutter Swarm C60

DumpsterScore Home Recordings

Regosphere is a name which is quickly making it’s way to one of my current favorite active noise projects. If you’re not in the loop quite yet, Regosphere is Andrew Quitter the man behind the rising label DumpsterScore Home Recordings. Regosphere takes queues from such epic acts as Megaptera, …Today I’m Dead, and Atrax Morgue to form intensely layered washes of industrial noise.

Gutter Swarm is the first solo album I’ve heard from the project and let me say it is jam packed with #1 top charted hits galore. What I have here is apparently the “2010 Summer Tour Edition” so it may not be too late to get your grimy ‘lil mits on this one. Take the opener which is also the title track and be lulled by it’s brutal electrical zapping tones combined with glassy drones. “Kidnapped” then takes us into the seedy underworld of vacant hvac units, humming street ambience and spooky back alleys. Finally “Place to Go?” brings out the rhythmic industrial with a throbbing burst of what could be amplified 60 cycle hums and low vocals. After a short field recorded intro “Monochrome Existence” mixes synth stabs with heavily distorted tortured vocals and blasts of thick noise lurking in the distance.

Side B presents “Social Restraint” which is a buzzing, shuffling collage of fuzzed out synth hiss, snapping noise tendrils and underrated drones. “Overwhelmed” is a long track of slowly morphing delayed feedback that – on the surface feels like standard fair – but it’s an exercise in minimalism that lulls me into a hypnotic state and prepares me for the more detailed industrial noise and floating ambient piano layers of “Grey Winter”.

The great thing about Gutter Swarm isn’t really in any one track, but in the variety of different tones and sounds presented in each and every one. They are obviously all parts of the same story and fit together well as an album, but they are separated enough by sound and vision to enable them to bring the listener into each little detail that makes them unique, and depraved. In Gutter Swarm Regosphere adeptly shows us how many shades of gray there really are.

Overall a sick release taking influences from some of my favorite acts but also adding something new and improving on a classic death industrial sound. This is American death industrial rising, and with the quality that both Regosphere and DumpsterScore Recordings have to offer I’m thankful it’s coming from Quitter’s careful hands.

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