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Breakcore Noise synesthetic collage from the hyperactive CDR. Demonic breaks ad infinitum and eccentric hardcore bangers fused together, swirling in and out of aggression and elation like surging serotonin deficiency, catastrophic sampling mutated and cut to ribbons, stacked into a canon and blasted across inky vacuum Bass burbling into bleeding-red audial overload, stream of consciousness divides clattering break-sodden eclecticism and audacious bubbling ambience, super stepper staircases up and down like MC Escher looney tunes, expressions of old breaks Hardcore enmeshed within, everything sealed in Harsh Noise production potentialities. A whole cavalcade of weirdo, sweaty, aggy fun. I was first made aware of CDR from his Harsh Noise heavy ‘Public Sick’ release (GK#169), and he’s still cranking out noise contaminated breakcore with Ritalin devotion. A real one. Also, scope out a killer CDR longsleeve with this release and peacock your superior tastes and styles to those inferior devotees of the algorithm.

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Filthy necrotic Black Noise from the obscure Eerie Silence Productions, shadowrealm of projects such as Ärid, Virulent Specter, Astral Tomb of Yearning, and a few others. Groaning minimal noise loops render a Black Ambient shade, spooky crepuscular tones hover above pulsing spectral presences, daring those mortal to provoke their malignant powers! Rueful, broken dirge synth tones appear from the black mists tape and dire throbbing amplifier sounds, the sombre insanity, black mood of the mourner driven mad in hateful despair, glaring pulses and loops build and mount in sweat dripping nightmare tension and insect hate, rhythmic passages thrum and boil, tapes rolling over into the void, aggravating and haunting, eyes rolling back in the head, capillaries bursting with clotted black blood… suffocating Black Noise, bad vibes from beyond life’s domain.

Eerie Silence Productions

A portentous cosmic collision between Dope Purple’s spaced out throwback Psychedelic Rock and Beserk’s fulminate alien Harsh Noise, released by the mercurial WV Sorcerer Productions label. Dope Purple ramps, stages and launches 5 tracks of motorik, tumbling Psychedelic Rock, crystalline brittle Guitars and longwinding louche Bass lines summit and plummet both gently and desperately, glistening with delay and reverb, beats treading a dusty caravan path of fulsome, feeling groove, echo-drenched dude vocal appears like the aural Sherpa up the mountain of the omnistoned. Bersek looms without like awesome cumulus cloud formation, allowing for Dope Purple’s spacious interplay and sonic oxygenations, gathering momentum and power before ejaculating his roiling, combustible Harsh Noise asunder, exploding in star destroying Guitar solo mimicry cascade of brutally loud audial magma, smothering the florid instrumentation beneath and sealing it’s essence within like the petrified humans of Pompeii. When Berserk truly lets rip to maul and malign Dope Purple’s intense, generative psychedelia their collaborative power is orgasmically revealed, rupturing the prone instrumentations at their seams and bursting their sweet juices and potent fluids all over the innerspace. This is an addictively harsh tapestry of delirious voluminous psychedelia. Heads & Hearts only.

WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片

Meet Mr. Garg, the elusive creature behind monikers like Kwashiorkor, Pizza Burrito, and the grandiose Cloak of Displacement. Under the alias Takeshita, he unleashes wrestling-flavored cacophonies on the unsuspecting masses. The album ‘Dummy Noise’ is a bizarre dedication to Yoshihiko, an inflatable sex doll turned wrestling sensation for the Dramatic Dream Team in Japan. Yes, you read that right – an inflatable sex doll in the wrestling ring. Move over, Hulk Hogan.

Further, this record boldly proposes that ‘Harsh noise is Free Jazz’ and tries to prove this daring hypothesis with about an hour’s worth of material. True to form, this high-concept album is a chaotic wrestling match – ‘Yoshihiko vs. Kota Ibushi‘ features crowd noises colliding with spastic drum fills, creating an atmosphere that’s like stumbling upon a band’s wild soundcheck. This opening track is genuinely cool but overstays its welcome at seven minutes. Think of it as the musical equivalent of a wrestler flexing for way too long.

Now, let’s talk about ‘Spinning Head Scissors,‘ where Takeshita generously throws in a bunch of bleeps and bloops, like a digital rendition of a toddler playing with a shiny new toy. It’s not exactly a spectacle – more like the auditory equivalent of finding spare change in your couch cushions. Not groundbreaking, but hey, it doesn’t make you cringe either. A solid “meh.”

And then we dive headfirst into the abyss of ‘Untranspressive Transpression.’ This track features various chopped-up vocals narrating absurdities about a gig in ‘CHICK-A-GO’. It’s like listening to the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist who stumbled upon a thesaurus. Cool concept, but spoiler alert: it’s about as drawn-out as a lecture on the history of lint.

Now we come to the heart of the album, a noise jam called ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey’ that lasts a whopping 16 minutes. Imagine a hypnotic blend of synth flickering, a symphony of beeps and boops, and various noise movements that’ll make your eardrums do somersaults. It’s like Takeshita decided to throw a carnival for your senses, and you’re not just a spectator – you’re getting body slammed by a sex doll.  ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey‘ boldly steps into the ring with the heavyweights, earning a spot up there with the best of Merzbow. Yes, you heard it right – Takeshita is flexing those noise muscles, proudly claiming a throne next to the maestro of cacophony himself

Now the album is running on full steroid infused stream! “Sax Doll” emerges as a standout, with electronic chops, echo-laden saxophone riffs, and a disorienting atmosphere. The sax solo is sliced, delayed, and layered, creating walls of sound that feel both surreal and captivating. Another banger! Takeshita is on the juice!

But beware of ‘Inflatable Sticks & Stones,‘ a track that’s pure filler, a gluttonous addition to the buffet. This is followed by ‘Not a Sex Doll‘ featuring iwkok$10 – a LightningBolt-esque freakout set to noise. The tragedy lies in the sporadic moments of brilliance, drowned out by long passages that sound like simultaneous clashes of disparate tracks that mix like oil and water. It’s like trying to appreciate a Picasso painting while someone’s aggressively playing hopscotch on the canvas. Someone get the editing scissors – trim the fat, trim it now!

Yoshihiko vs. Minora Suzuki Dream Match,‘ unfortunately, follows suit as another filler track, lacking substance. It acts as a palate cleanser after the dense freakout before it.

And now, drumroll, please! We reach the grand finale – ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call.’ A sparse and ominous soundscape into the abyss of creaking noise and infernal Japanese moaning. It’s like stumbling into a haunted kabuki theater, where the ghostly performers traded their traditional instruments for an arsenal of dissonant noise.  This track is a journey where the lack of a clear rhythm wraps you in a tense atmosphere, gripping your attention like a suspenseful thriller. It’s like Takeshita handed the director’s baton to Hitchcock and said, “Make it weird, but make it captivating.” 

And so the curtains close on this avant-garde spectacle, ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call‘ manages to conclude the album on a high note – a note so high, even Mariah Carey would give it a nod of approval. It’s the musical equivalent of the wrestling sex doll deflating in the ring, bidding farewell after a decade of brawling. Picture an entire card of wrestlers solemnly putting the inflatable warrior to rest, as if it were the end of an era. Takeshita, you’ve managed to give a wrestling sex doll a fitting send-off, and for that, we salute you in the most avant-garde way possible.

Overall, ‘Dummy Noise‘ deserves a solid 7.5/10. Cut out the filler tracks, and you’ve got yourself a noise record that’s not just a banger – it’s a sonic knockout waiting to happen.

Available on CD and as digital download here:
https://ruralisolationproject.bandcamp.com/album/takeshita-dummy-noise

Collaborative CD release from post Metal barbarians Legion of Andromeda and the high lord wallmaster Vomir, a co-release between At War With False Noise, Decimation Sociale and Turgid Animal Italian Division. Total obstinate truculence made audial in incorrigable torpor. Each unit presents a track each of their own material, which is exclusive to the CD release, and contributes to 4 collaborative tracks, each just a hair over 18 minutes in length, which are available to stream and download. Noise Metal singularity, the brutalist monocrush doom-mongering of LOA’s unremitting cyclone 1 dimensional Industrial Death barrage beat anvil strike pattern and repeat roaring vocal invocation, alloyed in heresy with Vomir’s non-entity static wall noise perma-surge, exacting and entirely non-negotiable. Repetitious punishment, warping volume endurance, zealous flagellation meted out by faceless, indifferent inquisitors. Each project’s individual contributions sit comfortably within their respective discographies in a qualitative sense, with LOA’s ‘Hatebeat’ providing a particularly cruel, brusque, lengthy dismantling experience, but the collaborative tracks here truly strike a hammerblow to the collective artistic ego and objective prejudice, non-art annihilation stretched across timeless minimalist millennia, metronomicon Noise Metal from beyond myopia. A cudgel of perfect repetitious obstinance.

Decimation Sociale Releases

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B L A C K I E’s latest release, a short and ear-battering trip continuing the Houston artist’s edgesmashing sound into basically pure Power Electronics territories. The man stands far outside and further beyond Hip Hop’s dogmatic scriptures than most, manifestly evident in the artist’s latent if quiet influence on the mainstream of the genre. Short harsh blasts of ephemeral beatwork kicked and mauled by malign synthesis process to cumulate Power Electronics bitter screen/wall of howling crackling bass frequencies and snowblind white noise, lo-fi bleeding-red productions of surging Industrial textures colliding with contaminated sampling and thumping sub bass kicks, light on easy beats and heavy on dense avalanching noise and awkward loops, over which B L A C K I E screams, yells and cries in brutal minimal sloganeering like a soul possessed. Head crushing banger beats surface at key moments on the record, steaming and hulking, appearing all the more monstrous and bludgeoning for their scarcity, like on ‘mean nothing’ and closer ‘stay elevated’, and B L A C K I E’s furiously introverted self-denigrations and blood drenched personal/political roaring raving vocal hits like a fucking teargas cannister to the dome in this context. Crucial.

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Thirdorgan’s ‘Space Cadilac’, released on Akihiro-san’s own Alienation digital label. Science Fiction radiowave signal hi-jack and abuse, experimental prototypical technology, surging modulated waves of sound slapped silly, punched and probed wickedly. Wiggling waving sample exploration mangling and fomentation of frothing digi sound process creates waves of electronics seasickness, swollen volume pitch spikes, building migraine sweats and ominous salivary response – I’m going to fucking hurl! Howling blown out alarms crest and eat their tails, panning left and right to bewilder and irritate the objective mind.  An interesting detour from purely Harsh sound from Thirdorgan into something more akin to soundscape work or Musique Concrete, albeit shot through a malign, bruised, psychedelic slow rolling cut up lens, cockeyed and bizarre, broiling harsh digital tones rising from the sampling like the surges of eye peeling nausea and vertiginous terror. Excellently difficult.

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Ruhail Qaisar expands and transmutes his work as previous Harsh Noise entity SISTER into a rumbling, fearsome, semiotic Dark Ambient noise engine on ‘Fatima’, applying an alchemical aesthetic with supremely impressive results. The album yawns open with ephemeral, disturbing spoken word poetry (a drugged voice from Thee End Commune…?) atop lingering Bass pulses like gently threatening Power Electronics in menacing audial feedback. Tension mounts through layering synthesis and a vast array of inert earthy sampling, spatially muddled to obfuscate, bucolic and bubonic, adorned with futuristic science fiction drones and sparse geysers of sulfuric Harsh Noise burst, restrained ambient textures grow and envelop in calming exhalation, mellifluous expanses of abandoned melody… an expression of restless human landscapes draped in fear and violence, at once confrontational and powerful, yet soft and yielding, like a predatory animal purring in an urban darkness, fire reflected in it’s azure feline eyes. Mesmeric and frightening Ambient beyond convenient classification.

Danse Noire

Collaborative LP from Suppression and Bastard Noise, a transmutation of Powerviolence mayhem in just under 20 minutes delivered by the hands and minds of the genre’s inceptors and early peripheral experimenters, some of the underground’s most blessed operators. Swelling, roiling bursts of psionic harsh electronics, steaming hissing freak Bass riff bodyblows augured with molten wailing electronics hell, matched beat for pace with rumbling mutant fusion jazz hardcore drumming, Hodges’ and Parrish’s unmistakable firebreathing raged-out mad man vocal, Wood’s synthbanks overloading and exploding with hostility and wyrd energy, harnessing powers that could depopulate the planet of Mancruel’s shitstained ‘civilisations’. Canon slow bass grooves churn in a mid paced lumber of pachyderm torment, slamming from deathsiren electronic disarray to furious fast, detailed, grinding Hardcore insanity with aplomb. Suppression’s masterly assimilation of early progged-out MITB and BN 4 steel girder era power Fusion elements, which comes off like their own overlooked mid-era ‘Release The Piranha’ material honed and dialed to unbearable intensity, and Wood’s sublimation into this fearsome sound imperceivably perfects a cacophonous, anti-human Powerviolence ordeal. Entirely crucial shit. Get one from Anthems of the Undesirable or Grindfather.

Undesirable-027

Barstool Mountain is a project of Mattias Gustafsson, they of the astonishingly consistent Harsh Noise unit Altar Of Flies.  ‘III’ represents a high water mark of uniquely textured psychedelic sound design, auditorily exotic Harsh Noise, ramped up to 11 and blown to fucking shit. Known for a meticulous working process, ‘III’ finds Gustafson in a seriously drunken, bad barbarian mood. Purest electronics abuse, audial shapes in unbearably bright migraine-inducing constellation, chunky ruptured analogue frequencies thrown and hurled from the source, juddering and spitting sonic shrapnel and effluence as new forms emerge through force of will, signal choking pedals and caveman divination – fissures in frequencies torn asunder with tumbling sonics pouring out, standing backflips of rotating/retarding Harsh audio. To be honest, even ‘reviewing’ this record at all is laughably redundant – one need only to read Soddy’s word-perfect summation of their Harsh Noise bacchanal in the bandcamp liner notes to understand ‘III’s maximal essence. The man nails it to the post in a way only he can. “Texture. A nice word, wouldn’t you say, settling into the audible dis-course with whiffs of sophistication, complexity, depth…”

Absurd Exposition

Altar Of Flies

Split from 2012, both bands hammer through a stack of short-order blasters with merciless impunity. First Water Torture crush 7 tracks of lead-lined Bass and Drum violence, ushered into a steaming hissing crunch of Noise introduction we are then kicked into the pugilistic dirge of knuckle dragging Power Violence bedlam, obtuse dissonant Bass chords fizz and crackle in amp-destroying/tooth chipping potency, sparse doom mongering arrangements augured with hammer handed drum brutality a manifest flurry of blasts, and desolate punchy bellowing vocal. A thing of brutalist excellence. thedowngoing then further confuse and irritate with a swarm of Noisegrinding bangers that go and go and go, bleeding into one another in a froth of blasting haste. Linked at the sides with short screwturns of Noise hazard, skronking, spikey, plummeting riffs ride blown out blasting drums carving slobbering stomps, thrasher mayhap and fleetfooted blasts, screeching bile wretch vocal trades top off a sound of coalescent terrifying chaos. Crucially short, misunderstood lividity.

GK#329

Nerve Altar

Slacking is a newer Harsh Noise project from the States, whose name I’ve heard mentioned on social media and podcasts as an up and comer to keep an eye on – this was the first of their releases I checked out, and it is immense. ‘Roundhouse a Bootlicker’ (what a fucking title that is) presents two tracks of crude, yet considered, befuddling sample Harsh Noise psychedelerium. Rolling brownout crush of roiling electronics and crumpled squashed sampling, frequency manipulation and sample mangling clutter and crash, battering frequencies rising and falling in drunken hypnosis, harsh and crisp as fukk, with apparent vocalisation samples appearing within the sound confusion. It’s dirty and massive, a take on the classic Americanoise sound, loops and layers shift in and out of focus in suffocating array, pinball sampling stitched within a tapestry of filth, low frequency rumble foundation with smeared, obfuscated sample loops. Track two is a cutting from a live session with Mallard Theory, junky pedal electronics pasting and pulping less-than-visible samples to mulch, overwhelmingly saturated and blown out waves of sound effluence wax and don’t wane, that ends on a total dead stop. Fucking exceptional.

Tribe Tapes

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More death dynamic from Germany’s Cannibal Ritual, originally released in 2018 on Meat Hook Butchery, with tracks dating all the way back to 2013. Harsh Noise Wall obelisk of unmoving un-death. Sweltering cannibal mutilations and flesh consumption, butchery in the flaming jungle, human rights abuses in the pursuit of high grade cocaine… 4 tracks of the signature pure Wall Noise, thick & thin transmissions static torrent and maximum stasis blast, mids turn and churn with very low frequency Bass ominously grinding, with some variety between tracks but not within. Anti musical rumble and dead atmosphere, maximal and constant, grating and eventually numbing and deadening. Endurance baiting, paranoiac and remorselessly singular. Tread carefully.

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Recent missive from the outside ordinary Sissy Spacek, in the Mumma/Randall/Weise configuration. Abstract topographic Noise maps of madness and fugue Noisecore simulation – oblique immense cut up harsh noise from samples appearing to resemble Noisecore, forced through hyper pressure furnace electronics process unknown, resultant each track consists of several Noisecore/Cut Up Harsh Noise style movements, variably mutated and maligned cut up superfast harsh noise with myriad molten scorching textures, scraping high end pressure release and turbine leg-chopping low end, shapes resembling brute low vocal howl and even spectral percussive blast within miniature maelstrom, terminus register whipcracks, punctuations of deep breath oxygenation preceding a new blast of dense chestplate shattering harsh in repeating motions. Hypercritical, myopic, abstruse Harsh Noise alignment from beyond sonic empiricism. Rellik.

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Eric Wood and Masami Akita collaborate again following 1996’s ‘Voice Pie / Bastard Noise’ split, an early transmutative release in the Man is the Bastard Noise canon, and a few other tracks, notably ‘Killing Friends’ from the intimidating and frankly amazing ‘Our Earth’s Blood IV’. ‘Retribution By All Other Creatures’ finds the two creating an audially and spiritually cohesive statement of Animal Rights, summoning the collective survival will of non-human life on earth to deliver 4 litanies of humble misanthrope outrage, delivered in HI Def surround sound and heavy high grade card stock courtesy of Relapse Records. Harsh Noise, Power Electronics, Death Industrial, Black Ambient… each a flinty arrowhead in the arsenal, sharpened with singular intent – savage reprisals against mancruel, a total ear-bleeding tirade against HIM. TROG Prog ambient Kosmische overdriven arrangements, ambient slow burn punctuated with harrowing bursts of temporal shift Harsh Noise, volume accent pitch spikes unbearable, sub-Bass frequencies hulking and steaming beneath. Tracks one and two carry Woods’ unbelievably impassioned vocal emanations bursting from seething electronic squall and rhythmic dynamic synthesis, whispering and bellowing the furrow plough of man’s ruin. Pitiless and poignant haywire signals and looping feedback of hazard alarms, brute half melodic passages of alien synth weapon discharge, arranged to mete violence to the spiritually blind and stoke internal awakening in those who care to see. Merzbow’s hand(wing/claw/hoof…) is felt more distinctly in the second half of the collaboration, bubbling mimicry of avian and ungulate cries channeled through imperious Harsh Noise, slithering frequencies emerging from loops and escaping, furthering blackly psychedelic events within the mind’s eye guided by chittering, skittering, mimetic audial event, machines become animals borne of terror and beauty,- a disquieting barrage, a mayhap of natural un-intended art and a clarion call of wakefulness in a world of dead minds and calcifying hearts. A vital collaboration.

Relapse Records

Striation’s most recent cassette release on the marvelous, mellifluent No Rent Records. This one is GNARLY, even by Striations’ sensory-affronting standards – total US style Harsh Noise domination, Skin Crime/Macronympha influenced to the extreme, with little of the Industrial or Power Electronics elements present elsewhere in Striations releases. Brutal walls of dense signal torrent and annihilated sampling swell and crash, overloaded synth tones bubbling up from the effluvia, mangled completely and enmeshed within various other maligned sound sources, dead signals bleeding out, impossible to locate audial North within the maelstrom. A sound and presence of live recording direct to tape. I would assume this cassette explores Finklea’s fascination and obsession with post-mortem pathology and body farming – this sounds like the breakdown of human tissues stretched across a millennia, extracting audial confusion and the terror of academic observation and impending corpse gas explosion from every passing moment of its run time. Blackly psychedelic, voluminously hypnotising, confusing and serrated, reeking of the diesel fumes of generators and human gore, drenched in bleaching florescent lighting. Fucking horrid.

No Rent Records

Brash, fun, toothless Harsh Noise Guitar carnage from Schakalens Bror. Blood-drenched guitar strings wound into booming psychedelic feedback live improv, a mad axe man swings his terrible weapon in front of a huge steaming amp stack, notes bending and warping in rote primitivism, searing blasting unmixed (?) abandon, simple pedal effects stomped in and out, strangling high end spikes choked from the axe neck – little moments of fleet fucked flubbed fingered runs appear in the third track from within the haze, conjuring an abused, demented, inept virtuoso feel. Cheap, nasty and lo-fi. Total Guitar butchery. Grab some of their shit from Team Boro Tapes.

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Archival release from Pain Jerk, featuring both tracks that would make up their abortive first 7″ release, and the track ‘Rocketry’ from the ‘ペイン・ジャーク’ cassette release of the same year, an early 90’s work of out-and-out Harsh Noise. These tracks are some of the few that feature Pain Jerk as a two piece operation. A fascinating fulminated electronic howl, catastrophic conveyorbelt channel-switch mayhems of early-ish so-called Japanoise, featuring abstruse cut up technique and volume immersion/endurance testing, battering extreme temperature maligned signal electronics to sear and confuse, dotted liberally with mangled, half audible bludgeoned sampling. Extremely hazardous and ego-killing. Archaic, difficult and perfect. Even as early as ’93 Pain Jerk was already setting new standards in the Noise of coldly implacable cut up electronics, removing new perceptions of objectivity and furthering the genre into furtive plateaus of electronics enmity and extremity. Pain Jerk’s Bandcamp page is a Noise fan’s nirvana, be sure to check through the various other releases hosted within.

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Exceptionally stoned offering from Jah Excretion, a meditative solo mission into mesmeric Ambient Dub Techno territory, very Rhythm&Sound/Basic Channel influenced. Shimmering aqueous field recordings manipulated over blip radar Dub percussion motions and subsonic Earth’s crust Bass frequencies, with detail only truly revealed though the smoked-out haze at pealing volumes, using the voluminous excesses of his Harsh Noise influence to carve a sonic form of minimalist sound at maximal volume – This is as far from Harsh Noise as Iwasaki San has ventured, with sumptuous, smothering results. I found myself wanting longer songs here, as the entrancing sounds would possibly benefit from more play time room to breathe (smoke) – however, this is still an exceptional little recording,  Dub heads & Techno listeners would do well to explore this one. Play it unbearably loud.

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Methlab Explosion’s most recent offering ploughs a furrow into Synthesizer soundscape dynamics, Industrial wall of glass and swirling vortex electronics Noise, eschewing the blast beats and Grindcore elements of their sound and diving headfirst in this Power Electronics/Industrial direction with bloodyminded aplomb – appropriately ruinous walls of synthesized ephemera, pulsing rhythms of Industrialised din, well placed samples and serrated synth drones, piercing harsh high spikes shearing eardrums to bleeding shit, extremely damaging, moments of clean(er) Synth tones drenched in bleach, movie dialogue sample loops used to hate-accentuating result. Cataclysmic and dramatic, lo-fi scary shit, bedroom of the gunman vibes. Midwestern horrors. Images of outsider compounds and weapon caches, busy at the work of war – Will’s projects are fucking awesome. Buy a copy from Tin Standard. “NOT ART IN THE LEAST”.

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