Conceptual artist Richie Culver’s new alias, Quiet Husband, transmits bleak psychic distress signals on a blink ’n miss tape follow-up to his 12” excavation of early ‘00s techno productions that sold out in a flash. Inspired by the same physical and noumenal shores as the debut LP under his own name (’I was born by the sea’), Culver’s 2nd Quiet Husband release frames atonal improvisations for touch mics, tape loops, and CDJs as metaphors for value systems and a lack of options in coastal Humberside, where, he says, “Being in the Marines growing up was a higher accolade than being a footballer.” As with his visual practice, a sense of pathos also pervades Quiet Husband, yet he distinguishes it from the slow burning lucidity of work under his birth name by a far more oblique approach to tone and texture. The A-side summons an unyielding longform clench of monotone attrition perhaps modelling a blinkered perspective in its forward march into an oblivion as the track only becomes more entrenched in waves of incessant noise. The B-side to ’The Griever’ feels more bunkered in its own mind as Quiet Husband appears to take cues from Fortress Crookedjaw’s mentation electronics as much as The Conet Project for a no less uncompromising tract of submerged noise that gives nothing away. Another fascinating turn by one of the DIY underground’s most curious new voices and noise makers.
