Pearly is a fizzing, hallucinatory noise release from Tom Betteridge, consisting of two oleaginous sound poems, entirely improvised with minimal stitching and post-processing. Phantasmatic vocal improvisations are mulched into something oblique to speech, becoming sharded utterances part-lost in swathes of noise. Working with cassette tape recorders & close miking techniques, Betteridge upends the standard listening hierarchy of aural objects; tipping the scales, the human voice brushes against the pure visceral textures of its own feedback before being subsumed by them.

In opener ‘tissue’, voice and feedback warble, pop and weave across a cavernous sonic palette as a volary of sound flutters and dives - like being on mushrooms in an aviary. The second side of the cassette, ‘stiffened cheesecloth’, falls out of the botanical haze into breathy, incantatory lament. In a world of harmonic feedback, modulated by the slightest movements of microphones, voices cloak themselves around the listener, swallowing them in a groaning utterance that decays and dissolves in helical, clagging refraction.

Taking its titles from Kathleen Fraser’s poem Wing, pearly is an exercise in playful noise improvisation in which speech is indelibly smeared and contorted by the process of its vocalisation.