Here’s the inimitable Vomir (French noise genius Romain Perrot) who sent us a package which arrived 20 March 2014. Performing on as Romprat Etron, he’s made a short CD of his “songs” called Montpellier Anal Parasite. In some ways this isn’t too far apart from the ghastly guitar-vocal record Musique Vaurienne which we noted in July 2014, although here the songs are ridiculously short, with only one of them exceeding the 30-second limit, and some of them erupting into being in less than ten seconds. At which point you might be interested in checking this out as something to file alongside your Napalm Death records, but think again – Perrot’s unique combination of reverbed guitar, frenetic drum machine and excessively screamed / barked vocals remains far odder than anything a million speedcore bands could achieve, with their off-the-peg identikit “ugliness”. There’s also the faint whiff of Black Metal detectable in the general stench of brimstone around Vomir’s shack, but here too he makes a mockery of that entire genre and very soon exposes its formulaic limitations. Lastly, there’s the lyrical “content”, which amounts to incoherent, scrawled slogans full of images of futility, hatred, revulsion and despair. Horrified yet? Even the Rumpsti Pumsti shop in Berlin, home to some of the most grotesque noise records currently available, describes this record as “unbearable”, and if you’re thinking of purchasing it I might warn you that there’s a very nasty concentration-camp cartoon on the back cover which is in appalling taste, and may well be the deal-breaker. However, I still regard Romain as an Outsider genius of the first water; whatever he turns his hand to, the results sound like totally unlike anything else, and you can be sure you are always receiving a raw, uncut, sluice of emotional outpouring, untrammelled by any concerns such as commercial success, fame, or even making new friends. “Unbearable” it may be – although I’ve heard worse things personally – but there is no denying the honesty of Perrot’s heartfelt noise.
Last noted dsic in May 2013 with his aggressive smashup punchathon Public Benefits, Private Vices, so good to see him back in action with Infinite Dream (LF RECORDS LF038), one of his more enigmatic releases as far as cover art goes – a forlorn highway is threatened by a big black cloud or cliff face which has somehow seized a car and turned it upside down. As to track titles, he simply uses Roman numerals in an effort to escape any glib associative interpretations of his grumbly, mangled noise which is produced using “computer and effects”. He’s always been pretty strong with dynamics and swift changes, but Infinite Dream seems to be raising the bar with its inexplicable movements, where bent circuits and tortured tone generators follow a logic which the brain of mortal man cannot follow. Astonishing abstracted noises and sounds pass by and reconstruct themselves, almost acting at the speed of thought. Track III uses voice elements and short repeated patterns, and emerges as a warped remake of a paranoid science-fiction movie replayed on an old black-and-white telly with very poor reception. Throughout, it feels like dsic is always on the verge of unleashing powers he cannot quite control, prodding digital demons and electronic goblins that appear to do his bidding, but are in fact following their own mischievous and destructive paths when the master’s back is turned. As ever dsic presents a bleak, but honest, view of the modern world, using instruments of distortion to reveal hidden truths. Arrived 7th March 2014.
As We Took a Power Nap (SPEZIALMATERIAL SM042CD024) is the debut LP by God Loves Fags, a band I assume are European (most likely Swiss) but who apparently took their name from an American source, namely a sign they saw outside a baptist church in New York State. They play a form of music they call “future boogie” but which is in fact competent-enough guitar-based rock and beat music with a very heavy Krautrock slant (they cite Neu! and Can as major influences, like so many have done), plenty of mindless rhythms, and enhanced with tapes, and plenty of synthesizers, including the mighty Arp. Enjoyable, but it’s lacking a vital edge somewhere and often comes across as just a shade too polite. The vocals are nondescript and the lyrics convey very little; the guitarists’ attempts to play discordant harmonics end up too smoothened and pre-digested to do any real damage. At certain points, such as on ‘Glen Wild’, they do make quite effective use of chugging rock repetitions, and studied “I don’t care” vocalising to create a fairly convincing monotonous head-trip along the lines of Spacemen 3 or Wooden Shjips, decorating the surface with a few joyous synth squawks. But even here the lugubrious foursome fail to “cut loose” or “freak out” as much as one would hope, and it emerges as a control-freak’s idea of what psychedelic rock should sound like. After four tracks of varied rocking-out attempts, the album ends with a long track ‘Zuffallkomposition #6’, an electronic drone hymn which shows the band dabbling in the sacred grounds mapped out by Eno and Cluster in 1977. An uneven release, though not wholly without its charms…from March 2014.