Fat Legs

Based in Alberta, Dan and Tiffany Milanese have been making noise for the past year or so. The four-track EP demonstrates a consistently successful tension between harmony and dissonance. For me, this is the mark of a good noisician: to be able to control what they’re doing in order to achieve harmony, if only to abandon it later on. That creates a far more unsettling listening experience than a wall of mushy, unfocused sound. "Sickle Cell” sees moderate length delay settings smearing metallic scraping and electrical hum. A solitary electric bass note is at the foundation of the song, providing a centre from which everything else plays off. "White Fields” features a circular motif that sounds like an arpeggio on an amplified dentist’s drill put through a ring modulator, but even then a sustained chord in the background makes it almost beautiful. "The Bungalow Mystery” is perhaps the most seasick of all tracks, with a repeating two-note figure setting up expectations of minimalism, only to have microtonal variations push the sound world off its expected axis. "Stencils” contains a wall of smeared verbs, with garbled, huge voices. If anything sounds like "typical” noise, it’s this. There are some very effective compositions here, though they have a tendency to rely on similar delay settings.