Heathen Harvest
01 Fordell Research Unit - The Bleeding Nun
02 Bjerga / Iversen - Buzzfield
03 Horse Palace - Laxativitalitude
04 Textured Bird Transmission - Carousel
05 Manchurian Fog - The Distanced Creature / Thunder Of Love
06 King Razor - Chronology Of Chance (Part 2)
07 Dead Wood - Untitled
08 Cel - Vilolin
09 Another Enough Chairs - Slow Speak
10 Nackt Insecten - Finest Strand, Dying Sun
11 r.s.r. - Red Circle
12 Strap The Button - Mystery Song

This compilation came packaged with a page out of what appears to be a children's book on pirates. This was initially a turn off for me because I'm sick of the current fad of obsessing over pirates. Luckily the music is far from cute and trendy. Instead, the majority of the tracks are what I'd probably call experimental dark ambient or drone.
The first track is a slowly changing track, not much happens, it gets louder and then more distorted as time progresses, while the second track starts out as minimal darkness, but soon introduces squealing noises, poundings, and other unpleasant things. The third track, which I think would be my favourite, is a hideous racket of god knows what. It sounds like a factory from a world where everything s constantly rusty and in danger of falling apart. The fourth song is similar to the first, slowly changing sounds that eventually grower rougher in texture.
In tie for the best track is the fifth song. Echoing bangs and far off feedback, minimal in sound really but remain fairly unsettling. The sixth and seventh tracks contrast nicely, the sixth being a lot of variation in the types of sounds and timbres, while the seventh is drone starting out highpitched, hitting on lows in the middle, and ending with both frequencies. The eighth track I honestly can not see the purpose of putting it on here. It's four and a half minutes of someone fiddling with a violin and making squeaky noises on it, at one point there seems to be two but their still isn't anything interesting going on. After that, the compilation goes back to form with a track that is a mixture of dark ambient and drone, with a steady growl as the backing to what sounds similar to old representations of ghosts, complete with moaning and rattling chains (although it's not anywhere near as cheesy as that description sounds). That is followed by probably the harshest track on the compilation, which remains very dark in its atmosphere but also ventures close to harsh noise at points.
The last two tracks seem to be a very odd addition to this compilation. Up until here, it's been mostly dark sounding, but the eleventh track is a fairly light and almost happy ambient piece. There is some, what I think is, singing that is kind of eerie, but overall definitely not a dark ambient track. That's not to say it isn't good, it is. It just doesn't fit very well. The last track doesn't either, but it doesn't have the quality that the previous one did. Instead, it's a live recording of a pretty horrible acoustic song. It really sounds like everyone is playing a different song for most of the time and wore thin on my patience.
I think the compilation definitely has more positive qualities than negative, but you may end up never listening to a couple tracks.

Foxy Digitalis
Drone compilations are such a thing. They´re usually at least 70 minutes long. You have a lot of different artists that all sound fairly similar and after 20 minutes I usually already have heard enough. Even though there are exceptions of course, the Dead Sea Liner compilation is a good example of why drone compilations can be such a dull affair. There are a lot of Tony Conrad influences on the CD-R, there´s a lot of noisy buzzing, a lot of aimless improvisation and of course also some good moments. For example, there are atmospheric tracks by King Razor and r.s.r. Also, the packaging is top class and really beautiful. But for the most part, the music on “The Dead Sea Liner Sports Day” is simply too boring to grasp me. Despite counting as an “experimental” genre, drone music often seems too simple. It´s definitely easier to drone around for 20 minutes than to make a good 3 minute pop song. Even though I highly support DIY labels like Dead Sea Liner and others who give unknown musicians the chance to put out their tracks and dedicate a lot of their time in making compilations like “Sports Day”, designing the covers, printing labels, burning CD-Rs, etc., please don´t expect me to always like the music contained on such compilations. Yet, for fans of drone music, there will probably be some new names to discover on “Sports Day”. 4/10