Custodian - Toil And Waste
Following a series of limited Cd-rs and cassettes on Syzmic and a couple of other underground harsh noise imprints, Jon Engman's solo noise project Custodian lumbers back out of the junkyard for a half-hour album of pure electronic savagery for it's first full-blown cd release. The nine tracks featured here combine elements of ultra-chaotic Japanese noise a la Incapacitants and Pain Jerk, the static monolith roar of HNW, and some skillfully employed rhythmic touches that take Toil And Waste through apocalyptic, flesh-rending fields of grinding metal abuse and over-modulated feedback and into fearsome clots of undulating tentacles of black distortion, monstrous jaws grinding heaps of scrap metal and live power cables, and machine-like pneumatic rhythms that rise up out of the debris and filth like some kind of bestial flame-and-barbed-wire flinging techno-monstrosity seeking to disassemble any flesh -based organism it manages to get it's hooks into. Truly fearsome shit that sometimes locks into a skull-crushing doomed heaviness that takes this way beyond mere HNW territory...one of the heaviest and most nightmarish slabs of industrial that Syzemic has hurtled at my skull so far. There's a familiarity with space and tension that you can hear at work on this album as well that attacks your nervous system from the very beginning and never relents, as Custodian warps and shape shifts across the nine relatively short and compact blasts of hellish, grinding machine-death. An excellent harsh industrial/noise album that is packaged in the same manner as the other recent offerings from the label, the disc bound to the illustrated folder on a plastic hub and slipped inside of a plastic sleeve, and issued in a limited run of 250 copies.
-Crucial Blast

...An excellent example of HNW’s purest aesthetic of reality as what is given and not refereed to.
-Vital Weekly