Artist
City Of Worms
City Of Worms is an experimental music artist from the United States, known for their intense 19 cassette releases that explore dissonance and abstraction.
About
City Of Worms emerged from the United States in the late 1980s, crafting a visceral auditory experience that embraced the harshness of sound as both a medium and message. Their existence was a brief but intense burst of creativity, encapsulated in 19 cassette releases — each a testament to the era's fervent tape culture. This was a group whose aesthetic was sculptural, building dense sonic landscapes with a fractal mindset that reveled in dissonance and abstraction. From the outset with "Crumnants" (1987), released on Sound of Pig Music, City Of Worms demonstrated a commitment to the cassette format, no doubt driven by the liminal possibilities inherent in tape manipulation. Their work found a home across a network of influential labels like Big Body Parts and Harsh Reality Music, each release an exploratory dive into the raw and the unrefined, from the disorienting textures of "Ashent" (1988) to the unsettling atmospheres of "Metabolic" (1990). The process-driven compositions of City Of Worms were marked by their use of found sounds and tape manipulation, creating soundscapes that were as much about the interplay of texture as they were about melody or rhythm. Releases like "Quester" (1989) on IRRE Tapes distilled this ethos, presenting a form of auditory scarification that invited listeners to confront the materiality of sound itself. In a time when the underground scene thrived on the exchange of cassettes, City Of Worms stood out for their ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary, making each listening experience a journey through a landscape of sonic debris and fragmented echoes.
