Over 20 years ago my first introduction to the Canadian project Funerary Call was a tape, “A Comselh De Ors” (1994). In that time it was a normal thing to do, to release your demos on tapes. These tapes could be copied (“dubbed”) by the person who released it, but more professional was to use blank tapes (rather than preprinted by the manufacturer such as TDK), print stickers to put on the tape (like with “A Comselh De Ors”) or have the tape printed (which was expensive, so rare). The sleeves were often photocopied, printed a bit more professionally (like with “A Comselh De Ors”) or very professional with two-sided print on glossy paper. Small demos of beginning bands and projects could be easily recognised. See here to see some of those covers of these days.
Nowadays tapes seem to be hip again. Labels like Beläten, Aufnahme und Wiedergabe and Fall of Nature throw tapes on the market again. The first two labels offers download links (from Bandcamp) for the people who cannot play tapes anymore. Fall of Nature just releases tapes. The sleeve and the tape are nicely printed and the tape is one of those black “normal” (contrary to “chrome” or “metal”) tapes that were only made available by more professional labels in times past.
The music then. Funerary Call created two very dark, noisy ambient tracks. They are too noisy to be called “soundscapes” or “dark ambient”, but not noisy enough to be “noise” or even “ambient noise”. The tracks are good, but not the best material that Harlow MacFarlane released during his career.
The Funerary Call tracks are a lot better than the tracks on side B from Crown Of Bone. This active noise outfit created two tracks of noise mayhem, unstructured, chaotic; not my kind of noise.
Also I got myself a few other Fall of Nature tapes, but all are so far behind Funerary Call in quality, that I decided to not write reviews, but just to mention them in the ‘blog‘ part.
Links: Funerary Call, Fall of Nature Records
The rating is 3 for FC, 1 for CoB