Chad VanGaalen has an undeniable knack for sound craft. He has built his own instruments from various scrap materials, reaffirming the old adage, ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’, and it is with these instrumental creations that VanGaalen has developed his trademark style, with lo-fi experimentalism at its core.

But as his Black Mold alter-ego, VanGaalen’s experimental juices surely have gone sour. Snow Blindness Is Crystal Antz is VanGaalen’s first installment as Black Mold, and quite honestly, he May as well call it a wrap at one LP. Snow Blindness- is chaotic, messy and frustrating, perhaps what VanGaalen was going for, but a pain in the ass to listen to nonetheless. While there are a few saving graces among the nineteen tracks on the Snow Blindness-, they are vastly eclipsed by the nightmarish 8-bit Atari-sounds-gone-wrong that pollute the majority of the LP. With exceptions granted to ‘Metal Spider Webs,’ ‘Uke Puke’ and ‘Wet Ferns,’ Snow Blindness- is an indecipherable mess of spastic glitches and fuzz. If it weren’t for the fact that the average track length is just about two minutes, with out such frequent intervals, Snow Blindness Is Crstyal Antz might launch listeners into extreme convulsions.

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