For those who don’t know, Winters in Osaka is a now defunct project and was a gathering of several musicians, with Jim Haras from Deterge and also the owner of Fusty Cunt, and Adam Jennings from Urine Cop, among many others. “Constant Fear”, the full length album I’m about to review, is a compilation cassette with five tracks from four different CDr releases.“Shiva Gives Me A Hand Whenever I Need One” is the first track. It begins with a large crowd of people talking/making conversations, rather distorted. A faint drone or scape comes trough the mob and gets more broken and noisier each second. All kinds of noisy effects come in as well, swirling around the voices of the busy and talkative people. The sound is gritty and sharp, slicing and cutting the protagonists in this harsh play. After a while the people dissolve and disappear into the dark and chaotic noise, to come back again in a different form. It’s hard to explain, so you got to find out for yourself. This is also where a new part starts within the same track. That is a part of noisy synth layers and processed field recordings.
It’s hard to know where the second and third track, “Satyr's Birth” and “In The Form Of A Siren And Foetus” ends and begin, so I won’t bother to find out. It starts out with soothing tape gristle and very minimal sounds, that goes into nice, low rumbling noise after two minutes or so, and continues for the rest of the whole track. Almost wall-like.
The fourth track, “The Portraits Begin To Mourn”, is a twenty minute, dark noise, drone nightmare and collection of many different sounds, like delayed voices, delayed guitars, .. It’s like being in a moist cave with very less light, in hope of finding an exit. Murky, primitive rhythms come in and the sound is getting more tense and scarier after a while. The hope of finding that exit is long gone.
“Norilsk City”, the last track, begins with calm, noise electronics, almost drone-like. They soon get distorted and are joined by repetitive, dark tunes and other, minimal noise clutter. After a while the dark tunes stop and the electronics continue. They get louder and more powerful in sound and turn into solid drones.
Except for the first track, the other four are very repetitive and meditative. Although there is much more underneath the surface after listening to it a second time. A very convincing and dark release.
Maybe it’s still available, I don’t know. But you can email Jim to find out:
jimharas [at] yahoo [dot] com