Betty – Power acoustics – CDr

Frankly I had given up hope receiving something back from BT Recordings [website] – Sometimes trades just fail for whatever reason, but there’s more important stuff to worry about than lost packages. “Power acoustics“, a CDr from the uk-based noiseproject Betty [myspace], holds 3 quite lengthy tracks (named power acoustics pt 1 to 3 and recorded in the autumn of 2006). Total running time of the CDr is 50 minutes, you do the calculations. The title of the release kinda fits the material – The 3 tracks sport the same homegeneous, repetitive drive that’s so typical for power electronics, but yet it’s quite clear that the main soundsource is probably something (contact/pickup-)miked, hence acoustic in noise-terms. The sound is utterly saturated and rambling in what I’d call the warmer part of the soundspectrum (I love the sound of fire and collapsing stuff), and the 3 tracks sport their own distinct drive, from fluent straight-forward to a more stop-start-style. By moments I thought hearing something that came close to a beat, but that are most probably some drones overlapping, or something going in a closed loop. It’s consequent harsh-noise, evolving in a pretty static way – much like the sounds in factories – so you know what you’re embarking on. Excellent stuff to cheer up braindead work, to get yourself in trance-mode during a long ride in the car, or to finally get that chick out of the house. Betty was one of the bands that caught my attention on “Pass the doughnout-shaped Cushion, Alice” – a tapecomp released on BT-Recordings [review]. This CDr-release -though very different than the (one minute) track on the mentioned comptape- is no dissapointment either.