From Maxi Bacon, we have the nauseating pleasures afforded by Maci Bacon (ADAADAT ADA0033), a fairly indescribable racket that borders on the indigestible…the “charismatic” half of this strange duo is undoubtedly Scott Sinclair, an Australian performance artist who also appears as Company Fuck, a riotous karaoke / table-noise hybrid act that has been embarrassing audiences around the world for the last eight years. Clearly unafraid of the “bad taste” label, Sinclair’s act is one that mercilessly takes the mick out of “serious” music, and gleefully mixes music and sound from all manner of sources, carrying on the high-art low-art dialectic on his own dumbed-down terms. From the one video I’ve managed to find of his Company Fuck hi-jinks, the word “irrepressible” springs to mind when faced with this hyped-up cheesy-grinning court jester. He’s also associated with Borborg, The Superusers, Stick In Your Eye, and Kottbusserdamm Terror Corpse. A wonder to me that this phenomenon hasn’t yet been signed to Dual Plover Records.
Could be that Sinclair, currently based in Berlin, has found a suitable sparring partner in the form of Freeka Tet, aka Sgure, a Parisian loon who’s been assaulting the civilised world with his extreme take on electronica-noise-gabba-glitchcore (whatever…) since 2005 and his Surr Grr CDR album, which distinguished itself with the catalogue number DUMB001. My hunch is that Freeka is the one who’s nimble with his fingers and may be supplying the “customised music software” which Maxi Bacon use to cut up and rearrange the materials, in order to advance their mind-shattering outbursts. On the evidence here, the project aim is to achieve total meltdown of multiple music sources (this goes far beyond the humble “mash-up”), transform them into hideous, unrecognisable shapes, and combine everything with shocking explosions of obnoxious noise, deliberately ignoring any precepts of compositional order – “thrown together” is the order of the day. When this strategy is used as backdrop for the intense and stinky vocalese of Sinclair, you can be sure the sparks will fly. If you’ve played your 1990s Boredoms collection to death and still clamour for more insanity in like vein, I suppose this is your next stop.
Not every single track is a one-way ticket to the Bughouse, though. I’m struck by ‘Analchemy’ which doesn’t fit any of the profile outlined above, and emerges as an interesting sample-jigsaw piece that makes effective use of exploding cymbals and slow, treated noise. In this context, it’s practically Bernard Parmegiani. And the long track ‘Careless Sniffle’ feels uncharacteristic somehow; it’s as though the duo left the tape running in the studio to capture aimless humming and random noise, and published the half-baked results just to annoy the listener. But it’s a strangely compelling episode, for all its tawdry banality. For the most part, though, be prepared for shocking noise assaults, fun, silliness, and just plain weirdness. The “outrageous” cartoony collage cover art is an exact visual analogue to the music herein. From 25 July 2014.