In my haste to double-month-post yesterday I neglected to recall two big developments that did take place within the time frame. The main reason I forgot to do so is both projects involved a lot of prior work across the preceding months and as such didn’t feel as recent as that in my brain. (TLDR; My brain does not work)
On August 3rd I was humbled to appear in the Northern Flame catalogue, a sub-label of GERÄUSCHMANUFAKTUR focusing on the apex at which black metal and noise converge into one beautifully horrific thing, with ‘Abandoned Mausoleum’ from my Roadside Dead alias – a brief double-attack of wind-whipping hissing and screeching and caustic static crunch, with even a little depressive slow buried-riffing on the B-side. Labelhead Jan Warnke took care of all the visual and presentation side to the release and he did an immaculate as ever job – Jan has very carefully constructed an exacting aesthetic when it comes to his labels and their accompanying visual style.
This is only the third edition in the Northern Flame roster and I seriously cannot wait to see which great artistic talent I get to share this stage with as time progresses – the first two releases absolutely blew me out of the water – Migis from Semănat followed by the eponymous collaborative work of Charles Razeur & Barditus. The photographs of the release below were taken by Jan.
And before that, in late July, Sven K (labelhead of Void Worship among others and artist behind such seminal noise aliases as Panic and Opaque to name very few of a plethora) dropped his inaugural issue of the dedicated HNW publication A Wall of Text. Self-described as ‘a paper publication dedicated to the appreciation of wallcraft’.
It was my extreme honour to be asked to contribute the opening page following the index, the “SHEARMAN_ WALL MANIFESTO” – many if not all of the sections in the publication are going to become ongoing, repeating ‘columns’ and the manifesto opener is no exception. I also contributed the illustration that paired with my words, a minimalist sketch not dissimilar from my visual work with Small Worm (an intentional allusion since I intend to become so much more active with this platform in particular this year).
Obviously, when I was asked to come up with my own version of a HNW manifesto, I couldn’t help but lean towards ‘anti-manifesto’ – my manifesto is incapable of cementing boundaries, formalising goals or clearly stating intentions – my manifesto is essentially to declare myself an absurdist of sorts, with my relation to existence being absurd, my relation to wall noise is thus absurd also by extension. The photographs/images below were taken/created by Sven.
S H E A R M A N 