Ramleh - A Return To Slavery LP

Label: Harbinger Sound

Our review:

Harbinger Sound revisits two classic recordings from the early power electronic facet to Ramleh, the heavy-as-fuck British outfit spearheaded by Gary Mundy. A Return To Slavery was originally a split LP released in 1983 on Mundy's seminal Broken Flag imprint with the one-off Phillip Best alter-ego Libertarian Recordings on the flip. The sound is a murky wall of gravel throated noise pocked with distant yelps from Mundy in sonic fisticuffs with variety of cassette sampled political speeches, whose content and context are garbled through the noise. Grim. Devastating. Utterly compelling. In lieu of the Best material, the flip side contains all of the material from the equally impressive The Hand Of Glory single also from that same year, though those recordings were later reissued as 12" through a Hospital Productions / Harbinger Sound venture. It too is a tangled clog of aggressive noise, voice and throttled distortion with Mundy's existential shrieks and moans posited within the morass of noise. Through recordings such as this, Ramleh established a template for noise art that embraced the corrosive aspects of sound only touched upon at the time by contemporaries such as Merzbow and Whitehouse (though both later employed the full-frequency noise assault within a few years).