According to the write up for Resonance, the latest offering from Omaha’s Cast Off Form, the album “seeks to find out whether or not an acoustic guitar can produce harsh noise.” On its surface, the question seems like a fairly silly one to ask: anything that makes sound can make harsh noise if you amplify and distort it enough. And considering the wealth of guitar-based harsh noise albums that already exist, Vomir (who has worked with acoustic guitars, no less) and Bill Nace immediately come to mind), the already silly question seems to already has an answer.
But Cast Off Form abandons that question as soon as they ask it, stating that “Months of trial and error revealed this aspiration was too narrow. The breadth of sound an old Takamine can generate is awe-inspiring.” To this end, the recordings that make up Resonance respond to an entirely different prompt: not whether an acoustic guitar can produce harsh noise, but how many different kinds of harsh noise the instrument can cover. And the five tracks on this album replies with a simple but powerful answer: “a lot.”
In the opening moments of “resonance i,” the artist sets the stage with a moment of discernable, vaguely classic rock inspired riffage. But it’s merely a taste of how we normally understand the instrument, ending within the first 40 seconds before a wave of feedback takes over but just long enough to prove to the listener that this session was indeed created with a guitar. The rest of the album then drifts between every possible texture one could hope to get out of an extremely distorted acoustic guitar, as layers of piercing feedback waft in and out of foundation shaking scrapes and crudely banged out rhythms. Over and over, these sonic elements become subsumed by the static, oppressive walls of distortion, which gives Cast Off Form just enough cover to keep the surprises coming (the elastic tonality near the start of “resonance v” is a particularly wonderful moment).
While the sonic exploration at the core of this album is expansive and well composed, I’m left wanting for a recording with a bit more clarity. I don’t know exactly how Resonances was recorded, but it sounds like the artist grabbed whatever microphone they had available in a practice space and rolled with the results. And if the point of the album is to push an acoustic guitar to reach the sonic peaks that harsh noise can attain, the recording process shouldn’t cut off the instruments at the knees like this. But the lofi, DIY approach to making the album still has its benefits, adding a layer of gnarly grit to an already gnarly performance. (Also, it really makes me want to see what this act sounds like live, which a pristine recording might not.)
Despite my personal gripes about the recording, Cast Off Form till successfully answers the explicit and implicit questions at the heart of the album: yes, acoustic guitars can be harsh and, yes, they can be all kinds of harsh. And through a wide range of tonal, dynamic, and textural shifts, Resonance declares these answers in an engrossing and definitive way. In just over 32 minutes, the album covers a lot of ground in a ride wroth revisiting to catch all of the minute details along the way.
Peter Woods
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