The first thing you hear on the Excepter side of this split is not a song beginning so much as a session already in progress, the group caught mid-thought during an extended stretch of shows in Chicago.
By 2023, Excepter had shrunk to a duo, its personnel and geography both unrecognisable from the sextet that recorded in Brooklyn lofts a decade earlier. The seven tracks here — including "Come Over", "On Hold" and a two-part "Displacer" — are billed as a supercut, stitched from that residency's performances rather than a single studio pass. The effect is closer to a tape run through a projector than a record: loops start, decay, and get abandoned mid-phrase, the duo's synthesisers and processed vocals never quite settling into a fixed shape.
That restlessness has been the constant across Excepter's history, whatever the lineup. What began as an unsynchronised sextet, built on the idea that no instrument should defer to any other, survives here as an unsynchronised duo instead.
Microwaves take the other eleven tracks, and the contrast does the split's real work. The Pittsburgh trio play something closer to conventional noise rock — riff-driven, physically loud, structured around actual choruses even when those choruses are buried under distortion. Where Excepter dissolve form, Microwaves batter it; tracks such as "Hammerspace" and "Stench of Earth" hit with the blunt, repeated force of a band that rehearses.
Their side comes from a Philadelphia gig during a short 2023 tour the band itself has described as anxiety-inducing.
It shows. The recording has the compressed, slightly frantic quality of a band playing a room it doesn't fully trust, which suits Microwaves' whole aesthetic: something the group has called no-wave prog-thrash, a phrase that admits the music owes as much to riffing metal bands as it does to downtown dissonance.
Put together, the two sides read less like a pairing of similar acts than like a label making an argument: that Excepter's free-form disintegration and Microwaves' tightly wound aggression are working the same nerve from opposite directions. No Sides Records, releasing out of Chicago, has built its split series around exactly that kind of friction, and this one is blunter than most — two live documents, unpolished on purpose, sharing a single object because the label heard something worth setting side by side.
