Trapdoor Fucking Exit

A cassette release of curious provenance, Trapdoor Fucking Exit is one of The Dead C’s signal recordings for many, simply as it seems to sum up much of what made their early-to-mid nineties phase so compelling – songs that teeter, unpredictably, on the edge of chaos; great, delirious, sea-sick washes of collectively improvised rock abstraction; a sound that’s muffled and baffling, as though you’re hearing the songs broadcast through a speaker set-up built into a cardboard box. It’s not low fidelity, though, so much as a true representation of the group’s approach to jerry-rigged, home-blasted psychoacoustics. And the version of “Sky” here is a monstrous, scrambling anti-anthem.