Carnage - Untitled CS

Carnage is a trio comprising Maher, Annette Messenger and Martin Day. They released this hour-long cassette back in 1982 via the infinitely influential Terse Tapes, ran by Severed Heads’ Tom Ellard.

On hearing Carnage’s Untitled, I had no idea what to expect as the tape is not available online and the project has no other releases to its credit. 

Based on the bleak imagery of the original cover and the project name, I was perhaps expecting something much closer to Lechenscrei / Information Overload Unit era SPK. Instead, I was beautifully confounded by the wild variety across Untitled’s 60 minute running time. The first, self-titled track is the kind of pulsing industrial murk I had been expecting, but I could not anticipate the stripped-down minimal-wave, subdued dark ambient and left-of-centre dubisms that followed.