His Teeth Were High

A nice old one from Xedh and Imbernon which only just came out in 2022 yet was recorded in 2010. Matter of fact I wonder if it’s from the same session which gave us the memorable Anekkyy CD from around 2011. That monster just served up a single insufferable track of noise from these two scaly demons, whereas today’s (Ei) Ei Aalto (TREPANATION RECORDINGS TREPREC085) gives us six hefty whacks, each more painful than the last one – if you line them up that way. Xedh, i.e. Miguel A. Garcia, plays electronics and manipulations of the guitar in real time, said guitar probably owned and mangled by the crocodile paws of Jon Imbernon. It’s chaotic and evil, passing on the feeling that if you stayed too long in the room while they were doing it that you’d start to vomit blue blood from your eyeballs. Plus the track titles are elegant little bullets of nonsense and illogical utterances, such as “We Have To Keep Building” – only it’s expressed in the Spanish tongue, making it yet more poignant. I certainly appreciate the dynamics and boldness of this kind of statement, despite its obvious life-threatening tendencies. Given Garcia has more recently given up table-noise as a bad pony and elected to hone his skills as a composer, this kind of thing already seems nostalgic to me. If your bag is for over-amped horror and feral cruelty, my advice would be to “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”. (09/06/2022)

We don’t seem to have heard the word “glitch” for a while in our field of interest, not as much as it was bandied around in the 1990s; it occurs to me that old friend Miguel A. Garcia never exhibited any interest in the technique, preferred to emit evil humming drones from his mixing desk without benefit of digital monkeyshines. I don’t say that Flavia Massimo’s Glitch (AUDIOBULB AB123) album has anything to do with the genre, either. She treats her cello with lots of live effects, such as loops and distortions, and throws voice samples into the equation too, along with a dollop of prepared recordings. The record works well as a document of what she can achieve during her live set, and it’s the strength of her performances that carry us through here. That said, her audio transformations aren’t especially profound, and serve mainly to decorate and augment her playing; she doesn’t go as far as violinist Mia Zabelka has gone with her radical ideas, nor does she have anything like the zest and energy of that performer. Massimo comes to us from a background in soundtracking, sound design, exhibitions, dance, theatre and audio-visual. (10/06/2022)