The tape rolls, the spools drag, and suddenly you’re locked into the motorized hum of Hightower’s “I am the wallride.” It doesn’t just start; it leaks into the room like a localized gas emission, a slow-burning electronic pulse that works its way straight into the nervous system. There is a hypnotic, cyclical weight to this track, a heavy rhythmic drag that feels less like a traditional arrangement and more like an automated assembly line operating deep in the sub-basement of an abandoned municipal building. It’s the sound of machinery breathing—cool, deliberate, and entirely detached from the frantic, desperate hyper-velocity of modern airwaves.
Sonically, the track operates in a sort of gray-market twilight zone. The instrumentation doesn’t plead or shout; it is transmitted, filtered through layers of copper wire and cold iron, drifting over a rhythm section that hits with the precise, repetitive thud of a hydraulic piston. It’s got that specific kind of under-the-radar grit—the type of music that feels like it was tracked at 3:00 AM on a bleeding reel-to-reel while the rest of the city was under a mandatory curfew. There’s no commercial compromise here, no glossy finish to smooth out the edges. It’s just a steady, unrelenting groove that locks you into its pocket and refuses to let go until the tape runs out of room.
Hightower managed to capture something genuinely atmospheric on this cut, a mood that isn’t easily manufactured in a high-dollar studio. Emerging as a subterranean blip. the band operated on a frequency that most people completely tuned out, leaving behind a brief, enigmatic blueprint of localized sonic history before dissolving back into the ether. It’s a ghost-in-the-machine legacy that refuses to fully evaporate, surviving in quiet pockets and parallel timelines.
I know this because the fragments keep bleeding into my own reality. I, Ellis Jones, keep running into Shane, the drummer from Hightower, trapped in the same recurring loop of random situations. We collide in the dim, red-lit smoke of a booth at Delirium in San Francisco, or we exchange nods when I’m working late shifts behind the counter at a liquor store in Brooklyn, surrounded by neon glare and bulletproof glass. We always seem to find each other in our own separate, drifting orbits, bound by some unwritten cosmic law of the underground. If you’re looking for a clean, predictable radio hook, you’re knocking on the wrong bunker door. But if you want something that crawls into your skull and sets up a permanent, low-frequency vibration, flip the switch and let the wallride take over.
Chainsaw Magazine 