Skin Crime

****Regarded by Dominik Fernow as the "best US noise project in terms of texture and composition", SKIN CRIME return to Hospital Productions with an immanent inversion of noise convention exploring ideas of tense, slow-burn patience instead of aggressive intensity. Brutally active between the early '90s and mid '00s, Skin Crime took a 12-year hiatus until 2016 and the bloodshed of their instantly sold-out, 20xCD boxset of archival material. That same year they also issued Ghosts I Have Been, a crushingly bleak album inspired by Japanese mythology and ghost stories which have paved the way for this new one, where the band's PATRICK O'NEIL and MARK JAMESON continue to refine their instincts into the dankest brand of organic ambient noise. In key with their ghostly Japanese muse, specifically the Bakaneko (1968) or Ghost Cat movies of the '50s and '60s, as well as the writing of Lafcadio Hearn, aka Koizumi Yakumo, the author of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)—Skin Crime's music in Traveller on the Road is all about presence and the suggestibility of hypnagogic and half-awake states. Their cold-fingered sleight of hand is applied to exceedingly fine layers of textural enigma in long, unbroken tracts that hold the listener's gaze with frightening power. Pressed on clear vinyl.