Pollutes (Reissue, 2023)
Although Leslie Keffer started making noise music with radios and voice in 2003, she hadn't worked outside of her proverbial rural isolationist vacuum, nor had she been truly influenced by noise music until after her first tour. Once she was performing with radios live steadily for a year or two, initially opening for touring acts in Athens, Ohio, a small town where she did booking at a local bar, she found that she didn't have time to seek through all of the radio static for more nuanced sounds in real time, so she learned to work more in the moment.
As such, Pollutes represents Keffer's first release that is maybe "self-aware" as noise music with a surrounding narrative history. It might be her most harsh work up to that point, but it's also unique in that it incorporates a vintage Echoplex tape machine for an added analog feel, as well as a toy piano on the final track. Rather than recording onto minidisc, this series of excursions was recorded direct to tape, initially self-released on home-dubbed cassettes with no digital editing (and no guitar pedals!) of any kind.
-Original album description from No Part Of It
“And before me, a new release, although not really ‘new’. It’s a rerelease from 2005 where she explores the radio as a sound source from a more noisy perspective. Originally as a cassette and later as a limited CDR in support of a tour and now as pro CDE by No Part Of It packed in a so-called DVD case.
Eight tracks and almost an hour of loud experiments with radiosounds, an Echoplex tape machine and probably a mixer and cables, no chains of guitar pedals and such. The result of these experiments is, on one side, the noise, as we all know noise. A sound source, feedback loop, and control over the sound through filtering and using the equalizer. If done well a feast for the ears and the possibility to go from ultra-deep bass drones to high-pitched mechanical feedback / screaming sounds. But because the radio is as sound source, things get added to these experiments. During the track “Noble”, for example, it seems like a radio station broadcasted just the right track for Leslie to start working from. And during “The Wheels On The Bus”, a detuned station (or maybe a short sample looped into the Echoplex) breaks the massiveness of layers enough to let the whole track sparkle. Yes, sparkling noise. There. I’ve said it.”
-Vital Weekly #1375