There are some interesting, if unintentional, byproducts of listening to a tape where the blunt force trauma of distortion crushes everything into a murky broth; David Cross’s elegiac violin in the ‘water section’ of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part One is wreathed in a halo of reverb, whose ghostly shimmer adds a kind of haunting melancholia. It’s oddly beautiful, like a memory of a summery tune only half-recalled on a winter’s eve.
It’s an unexpectedly lovely quality that attaches itself to Exiles. Even the improv, which for the most part sounds as clear as listening to braille, becomes transformed into a series of cathartic swells in volume, something to be felt rather than listened to.
All of this, however, is to find the silver lining in some very dark rumbling clouds indeed. Preserved and presented here for completeness, it’s one that only the most die-hard Crimhead collector will want.