Void Puppet - Fruity Delights
Bent Window Records
Released on August 28th, 2023
Lauren, the woman behind the Victoria-based solo noise project Void Puppet, loves playing with toys. In conversation, her passion for circuit-bending is evident, and her electronic weapons of choice happen to be children’s toys. It’s a practice which she fell into at the start of the pandemic in 2020, and she is always on the hunt for new toys to take apart, rewire, and run through guitar pedals. In her live shows (often in collaboration with her partner Max), her table is strewn with her vivisected creations, webbed with wires.
Void Puppet’s excellent and searing 2022 debut Hits from the Abyss was a blackened, haunted thing, at times drifting into a syrupy torpor, then puking itself awake with churning bass tones and intestinal squeals. Like her earlier singles “swarm of harpies” and “Dissolve above,” the production envelops the sounds in darkness, like a cursed tape cassette drowning at the bottom of a well. Her latest work, Fruity Delights, opts for a brighter color palette, though the sonics are no less punishing.
The release is split into two halves, “Orange Splash” and “Strawberry Kiwi Surprise,” although the order shifts depending on which streaming service you find it on. On “Orange Splash,” a mulchy sample plays, and a pitch-warped voice welcomes you to the album before being abruptly run over by the proverbial Noise Bus, and inside, a pack of screaming frequencies are burning alive. The following fifteen minutes pass through walls of ever-evolving static and rumbling bass, and near the midpoint the track is cut through with what seem to beglitched-out video game sounds, like some retro arcade game shoved panel by panel into a meat grinder.
“Strawberry Kiwi Surprise” presents a new side to the Void Puppet canon, as its ten minute runtime is entirely anchored by a constant, driving rhythm. The tone of this pulse at times recalls Chris Carter’s famed Gristleizer, and it is a nauseating and addicting sound. The track squelches and drips like a plastic toy liquidizing into bubbling goo in a sparking microwave, and it is without a doubt a standout track in Void Puppet’s stellar catalog.
Fruity Delights is an auditory pleasure, and the fact that it was lovingly crafted by someone who takes great joy in the pure collision of sound is obvious. Somehow, it is not a brooding or even particularly harsh listen, despite its aggressive sonic palette; as I listen to it, I find that I experience a kind of vicarious child-like wonder: the undiluted ecstasy of seeing what happens if you plug this into that. As with all solo projects, the hand of the artist is indelibly cast into the sculpture, and Void Puppet’s aesthetics are as infectious as they are gruesome. I look forward to seeing what will arrive from them next.
- Harman Burns
