Andrea Pensado – As Within So Without
8.16.18 by Ryan Masteller

Andrea Pensado chops some junk all up. She’s not like the normal cut-and-paste producers, mind you – Pensado’s style is all tension and little release, no easy way out of this. Static and voice are surgically scalpeled together, then apart, then together, then FUCKING IN THE RED, then jabbed repeatedly in your eye sockets till you get one of those sharp headaches in your frontal lobe. I mean, not LITERALLY stabbed by a scalpel in your eye sockets. Where would the fun be in that? You’d lose your vision after listening to this tape, and plus, Pensado would have to put a warning label on j-card, and she’d have to recall all the tapes to do that, and that’s just too much of a hassle. The jabbing is metaphorical.

Trust me, I’ve just listened to “As Within So Without,” and I can still see.

Andrea Pensado chops some junk all up, but she uses the fragments as architectural building blocks. She creates distinct sonic sculptures with all those dangerously sharp slivers, as terrifying as they are fascinating, barely recognizable as human creations. The seethe, they vibrate with conflict, they stretch until they’re bound to snap, like cables holding a bridge in place until an alien spacecraft blasts the shit out of a load-bearing column. Then, almost in slow motion, the bridge collapses upon itself, and the sound is simply fascinating. Such is “As Within So Without.” So, the architecture is crafted to be destroyed, ever replayable through the magic of rewinding, never less than dangerously volatile in the presence of human ears.

Look but don’t touch “As Within So Without” at FTAM Productions’s Bandcamp page. Or, uh, I mean, look and then buy. Finger wounds be damned.