The Tenets of Balthazar’s Castle
Terror in Twelve Parts

A. Star Recordings
Street: 12.05
The Tenets of Balthazar’s Castle = Prurient + Wolf Eyes + Merzbow

Ah noise. It is all around us, and for most people it becomes a hindrance of day-to-day existence. Occupational therapists make great effort to help employees reduce the amount of noise in their environment so they can be more “productive.” During the industrial music years, people gathered noise and arranged it in such a way to show that they had some kind of control over an increasingly industrial society. The idea of terror has become a quaint, formulaic way of describing certain genres of music or film; the use of digital editing and effects has overloaded our senses of what is frightening or disturbing. Audio and video compression has eliminated the dynamic range of film and audio and keeps audiences on a steady hum of mediocre entertainment. TTOBC have decided to not follow the norm in producing noise or terror. Terror In Twelve Parts truly is terrifying, and the noise is overpowering. It is beautiful terror, the kind that consumes you and makes you pay attention. There is no attempt in their music to let the audience have any kind of say or personality. It is pure terror and pure noise. This is the best local release of the year and yet very few will hear it. If those few do happen to hear it, very few of them will listen.