Year: 2025
Label: Steinklang Industries

Italian Whiterat don’t muck about on their newest tape release. From the very first second, the listener is bombarded with an unrelenting barrage of harsh, violent and extremely abrasive noise. And for the next 22 minutes, there won’t be much in the way of respite.

Ah yes, it’s another Steinklang tape. In our review of another fairly recent Steinklang tape, Vologne’s Total Purge For The Living (here) we remarked that usually an industrial noise release by the label tends to lean towards a more focused, tempered and atmospherically vicious style.

Not so this time around.

In terms of the industrial noise spectrum, Conglomerate Malaction is firmly in the chaotic, violent and disarrayed part of the spectrum. This means a near constant onslaught of crackling, distorted white noise, rumbling lower frequencies and shrill, piercing high frequencies. There’s not much point in speaking of structure and composition; Whiterat’s approach to extreme electronics is more about motion than structure, direction more than structure.

By which I mean that the blaring harsh noise of Conglomerate Malaction is not a complete decay of control, but more like a chaotic stream guided in a general direction, as if down a wide funnel. I admit the metaphor is clumsy, so let me try to approach it from a different direction. Conglomerate Malaction is utterly chaotic – as I hope I’ve managed to impress upon you already – and whilst it certainly lacks any kind of conventional structure, Whiterat still keep a direction to the music, preventing it from descending into pure uncontrolled, improvised audial disarray.

Fans of harsh noise will probably get what I’m aiming at, and add that it sounds just like yer average harsh noise tape. Which is, in fact, true. In the rumbling, distorted, crackling and roaring maelstrom of Conglomerate Malaction, there’s nothing particularly original or hitherto unheard of.

Quite the opposite: if one were to name a flaw on the tape, it would most likely be that it is a tad faceless. Especially since there are no vocals, no speech samples, nothing to anchor the noise to some thematical or conceptual framework, it becomes reduced to slight facelessness. But, to be honest, I’m not much bothered by this at all. Sure, there are plenty of releases out there offering the very same kind of sound, but Whiterat do what Whiterat does more than adequately.

This is a recurring topic when it comes to harsh noise: how to separate this release from that, when they essentially sound very similar? I don’t have the answer to that. What I do know is this: when I’m listening to Conglomerate Malaction, I’m not thinking “Oh, I wish I was listening to something else instead!” – and that means Conglomerate Malaction is a success.

Whiterat don’t seem to have an online presence, but check out Steinklang’s webshop for more info.