"I need to do what I'm doing, or I'd probably suffocate in my own mind."
Lee M. Bartow, "Leech"

Navicon Torture Technologies is an American noise project started in 1997 by the above-quoted Leech. Genre-wise, his music has elements of many industrial-noise sub-genres for which there really aren't any universally agreed-upon definitions, such as power electronics, death industrial, harsh noise, and powernoise. There seems to be a current of dark ambience running under the chaos, uniting the abrasive noises with a layered richness, an emotional feeling and direction that is absent from many industrial-noise acts, many of which give a more clinical, emotionless vibe. Vocally, Leech incorporates many approaches (most of them extreme in some way), and can sound like a tortured soul echoing in and out of the very edges of the mix, or a bellowing voice heralding some very, very unfortunate event. The content of his tracks is often very personal. Leech refers to the music he has created as "power romance".

However, this could very well be ironic, as there's really nothing too romantic about his music, unless you're the kind of woman who likes guys who write odes to extreme misogyny, suicidal despair, self-hatred, nihilism, apocalyptic visions of the future, and utter misanthropy. He indeed seems to have some emotional and existential issues, and he doesn't hold back at all in expressing them. To say that this man is depressed would be like saying that William S. Burroughs had a slight drug problem at one point in his life. Pretension on his part is minimal, and his tracks are very visceral, focused, and hypnotic. He can be very blunt, as evidenced by album titles like I fucking hate you all and I hope you all fucking die., or he can be more abstract, as with Dripping With the Power of Her Flesh. His albums sound like their titles, generally. In interviews, he's painfully honest, self-loathing, and basically points out all his flaws and derides himself, as if he's trying to point out his perceived short-comings before anyone else can. It can be pretty painful to read actually, seeing someone hate himself for everything from his multi-racial heritage to his inability to not hate himself. From a visual standpoint, the artwork created for NTT on his website seems to focus on intriguing, vaguely threatening patterns, as well as things like faceless figures being killed. NTT's tagline seems to be "Man is a monstrosity, morality is a mythology."

If one is interested in obtaining his music, it's a "little" hard to find, despite a small-but-dedicated world-wide fanbase, often being released on tiny, obscure labels and sometimes as limited CD-Rs on his own micro-label Annihilvs. NTT's website (bottom link) has more than a few MP3s.



http://noiseweb.com/compilation/rator/ntt.shtml
http://www.leechnest.net/ntt/2004/main/

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