BESTIARY

 

After a week of rain dampening my recovery, I treated myself a cup of coffee and a collection of outsider music and damaged Americana from the new (to me) folks at Hairy Spider Legs. VILLAGE OF SPACES, ORA COGAN, ARRINGTON de DIONYSO'S MALAIKAT DAN SINGA, LAUGHING EYE WEEPING EYE and a host of other truly special sound dealers make appearances....I just want to sink into this release and feel the cold disappear. Even though it's still cold inside.

BESTIARY

FOLLETO

 

Feels like you're walking past the entrance to an alley that's just a little too dark for comfort, and you hear something pulsing at the end of the block coming out of the shadows. It sounds dangerous, and you want more....but you aren't comfortable enough in your own skin to investigate so you keep walking, head down, punks walking the other direction side eyeing you as you pretend you didn't see or hear anything. Steal a glance over your shoulder and you see those punks lumbering down the alley towards a different kind of night and you're gonna think about this decision for the rest of your life. 

FOLLETO

LIQUID ASSETS

 

Wipe the snot from your upper lip (use your sleeve, dummy) and feast your earholes on LIQUID ASSETS. Not sure if they're referring to their sweat or your blood, but this marble mouthed garage hardcore is as precious as fluid commodities come these days. Or those days. "You ready to rock, everybody?" someone in the studio asks before they launch into "Europhile" and it's like "I'm Guilty"-era CURRENT and Floyd's Texas DICKS are sucking each other off in front of me while I'm drinking my morning coffee and the liquid assets are just...everywhere. I feel rich. And wet. 

LIQUID ASSETS

DRIED UP CORPSE

 

Monotonous distorted crackles from BLUE SABBATH BLACK CHEER offshoot DRIED UP CORPSE. Perhaps this is what it sounds like when you simply can't make a complete connection anywhere, no matter how hard you try. Fourteen minutes of frustration that just dissolves into nothingness. 

DRIED UP CORPSE

TOTAL KEPEP

 

The only complaint here (if you could dare to be bold enough to complain) is that Medan's TOTAL KEPEP are not as noisy as the title of their sole release might suggest. But these sounds are rough and direct form the same streets where I met a pre-teen with "FUCK COPS" tattooed on his neck just a few years after Make Noise Not Music dropped. Enough said, I hope.

MAKE NOISE NOT MUSIC

COOL MUTANTS

 

I've been laid up sick for the better part of a week and still feel like a pile of moldy socks stuffed in a skin suit - headed to the Billion Dollar "Healthcare" Corporation this afternoon to get a chest x-ray to see if I have pneumonia, feeling pretty damn privileged that I can just get that shit looked into instead of stressing about the money or access or whatever. Who knows what the world of health care in this lost country looks like in a few years, but we're already the worst of all of the so-called "first world" nations (and most of the second and third) and I don't really feel any institutional motivation to move the collective US (get it?) in a positive direction, so I'm gonna really savor this x-ray, just in case. Normally when I'm feeling under the weather, I plow through cassettes - ripping and uploading and scanning and pontificating and whatnot, assuming someone will eventually read my missives, but sleeping bathed in sweat for 16hrs a day doesn't really lend itself to many extracurriculars...I did manage to handle this COOL MUTANTS slab for 2012 and honestly it's putting a smile on my face this afternoon. Think REATARDS, M.O.T.O., SONICS SPITS and you aren't going to be surprised, but there's a lot to be said for some hi energy comfort food for your earholes when you feel like shit. 

COOL MUTANTS

SWANS

 

I have a complicated relationship with SWANS. I get it - I truly get it. Pushing envelopes and provoking thought in realms of sound and humanity is itself an art form, and few artists were doing either with as much verve as SWANS in the 1980s. The sounds....? There was Glenn Branca and of course SONIC YOUTH so the casual deep diver would be intrigued but not shocked. Challenging traditional concepts of music is one thing, but sitting down with "Time Is Money (Bastard)" when I was in high school was something entirely different. Hearing Gira mumble "You should be violated. You should be raped. Don't fight back: I need you." as a fourteen year old will stick with you, you know? I truly wonder if you can push boundaries artistically without pushing them in in reality, and later encounters with people in and around Gira's circle would give credence to what was once simply a wonder. Does it negate the art....? I don't think so. But it makes my relationship with the art more complicated. The whole point was to make the consumer uncomfortable, so....success?

TIME IS MONEY (BASTARD) • A SCREW