The Los Angeles harsh-noise act and label founder whose horror-cinema aesthetic and Troniks imprint helped hold the 2000s American scene together.
The Cherry Point is the harsh-noise project of Phil Blankenship, a Los Angeles artist the Bureau files at Tier ∅ as both a defining act of the 2000s American scene and one of its central connectors. Blankenship's sound is dense and event-filled where Vomir's is static: walls of noise broken by electronic jabs and junk crashes, compiled across a long run of cassettes and short-run vinyl.
The connector role runs through his label. Blankenship founded Troniks, and its PACrec arm, and the imprint became a hub of the American harsh-noise network across the 2000s, issuing splits and solo records by much of the scene. His own catalogue is built largely from collaborations, with Pedestrian Deposit, The Rita and John Wiese among many others; Wiese mixes and masters a good deal of the material.
The work carries a consistent frame drawn from horror and exploitation cinema. The Night of the Bloody Tapes records assemble their static walls and crashes from a private archive of Fangoria magazines, import laserdiscs, third-generation VHS bootlegs and damaged contact mics, and the long-gestating Dawn of the Bloody Tapes continued the same method into the 2020s. Blankenship is himself a well-known repertory and midnight-movie programmer, and the cinema is not decoration but the source material.
The Bureau's reading. The Cherry Point is filed at Tier ∅ as a key American harsh-noise act of its period and, through Troniks and PACrec, a connector node whose releases hold a large part of the 2000s scene together.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene