Once again Spanish pranksters Escupemetralla emerge from larval state to bring us their latest audio missive wrapped in a hand grenade…we’ve been following Muhammad & Muhammad (as they style theirselves) since 2017 and found some solace in their remorseless noise and electronic hi-jinks, with some albums apparently informed by a sense of political protest…and most of their projects were packed with so much double-tongued irony that you had no idea where to put yourself. Is everything just a big joke to them, or do they conceal deep truths in their wacky japes?
Today’s item Cold Grey Void Electrically Operated By Mantis-Eyed Humans (NØVAK NVK155) tones down the hard-edge industrial beats by a couple of notches, but ventures to take a step or two into crazy surrealism (unsettling man-insect cover art, and a reference to Dali) while it attempts to outline its main theme – a treatise on the albums of Pink Floyd. Yes, you heard right – apparently the whole of Cold Grey Void is riddled with Floyd references. Some o’ the tunes may sample Pink Floyd records, some may be cover versions of well-known songs, or might quote from the lyrics…even the titles comprise cut-up versions of certain Floyd “hits”, calculated to induce a mirthless chuckle in the belly of even the most seasoned prog-rock fan who owns eight variant copies of Ummagumma. The best example of a détourned title here is probably ‘Careful with Eugenics, Axel’. It’s a vast array of musical and verbal puns, but Escupemetralla imply that it’s all being done by computers, by AI, some futuristic master-brain scrambling a particular corpus of work to produce this new array of confusing gibberish and meaningless juxtapositions. In their addled press note, they even liken themselves to the HAL9000 computer, the grandfather of “computer gone mad” tropes that continues to resonate today. At any rate, the music here produces a very diverse and entertaining nightmare across 12 overloaded and queasy tracks…there’s always too much to listen to, at least three or more divergent layers pulling in different directions, with nauseating combinations of sick electronic sounds, mad drum machine beats that follow no logic, voice samples intoning nonsense syllables, and several other kitchen sinks pulled out of the wreckage of a housing estate. If nothing else, Escupemetralla never short-change their listeners – assuming that you enjoy this degree of overload and absurd sensory excess.
So far so good – this leaves us with the Pink Floyd “theme” conundrum. I’d like to think I’m as familiar as most listeners with the works of this massively over-rated and depressing art-rock combo who won’t go away, but even so I couldn’t recognise a single moment of sound, music, or text on Cold Grey Void which led me back to the original records. But that might be beside the point. As indicated, Escupemetralla are witty japesters, who might be trying to make some wider point about musical history and culture, in particular the way that Pink Floyd have somehow achieved dominance over a certain sector of the record-buying public, even appealing to youngsters who don’t know who they were, and how the Dark Side Of The Moon LP has, over a long time, has gradually inserted itself near the apex of the ludicrous “greatest LP ever made” benchmark. I like the way how Escupemetralla point out that everyone “hated” Pink Floyd, including Johnny Rotten, Margaret Thatcher…and even Roger Waters himself! If you can pick out some coherent thread in amongst this churn of conflicting messages, then perhaps you’ll be in a position to approach this odd release, and maybe even enjoy it. From 20 May 2023.