Theath | "Fingersnapping", "Space Witch" | Tract Records

  On these times in which the CD is the one and only standard for musical diffusion, the fondness for the cassette, misunderstood format that had the ungrateful mission to be the bridge between the still venerated vinyl and the practical compact disk, is another sign of personality that identifies some of the most restless minds of American lo-fi.  Prestigious names such as The Mountain Goats or Smog chose the cassette for the first steps of their careers, and the boss of Tract Records, Thomas C.  Heath, follows the same path in his one-man project: Theath. 

The fact that in the credits of Fingersnapping, first of the two recordings released to date under the alias Theath, Thomas claims the authorship of noises is more than enough to know that we are not faced to another attempt to approach the quintessence of low-cost new country. But when we repeatedly read in the promotional info the name of the genius of abstract music, Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, we have before us the final evidence of the crime: Theath operates in an extreme dimension, plays with sound overdrives and improvisation like one may try to assemble a puzzle joining its pieces randomly with blows of a hammer. 

Thus, make no mistake, neither Fingersnapping nor its continuation, Space Witch, are easy to swallow artifacts; in them, Thomas proposes, without barely a pause, a musical continuum in which experimental interludes of pure manipulated noise live together with melodic miniatures in which the tone of Heath resembles a more nasal Beck.  Both are tense journeys, two small nightmares encapsulated in anarchic residues of protomusic, but both in the end more than compensate what (and it is a lot) they require from us as listeners throughout.  It is difficult to emphasize specific songs or to figure out which were the intentions of Thomas when he gave birth to these two putative children of the masterwork of the aforementioned Nurse With Wound, Homotopy to Marie (United Dairies; 1982), but, never mind, Theath challenges us to a duel that very few artists currently dare to attempt: to frighten us or to encourage us to frighten him with the misery and fears that, inexorably, his music awakes in each one of us.