Hardcore Punk Dissasters (HAZI ESPORAK! 00.23) realised by label boss Enrike Hurtado himself…I think it’s mostly just laptop and mixing desk type music…with title that comes out swinging in that way, listeners might expect a ferocious wallop of old-school noise delivered right to the chops, but instead it’s all rather cerebral. Hurtado has created his work by repurposing various punk and metal records, and feeding them into his devices – the first long tracks ‘My Parents Just Think I’m Weird’, is a long-form cloud of digital feedback, I think deployed using some sort of generative system of his own making…the colour photos in the wrapper depict a tabletop setup which may have some connection to the set, including two microphones pointing at us like machine guns. Not a bad noise actually, but for me he kinda ruins the whole thing by including these taped segments from interviews where we can hear snotty American teens whining about their alienation and disaffection. No doubt these are powerful forces in the whole area that might be loosely defined as punk rock – the records, and the alienation – but just playing back distorted and reworked samples of same doesn’t quite convey the truth of it completely. I kept waiting for the wild guitars to break out and leap to the surface of this rather sedate drone, but no such luck. A lifeless academic assemblage, in fine.
The follow-up ‘Get Rid Of It’ works over similar territory, using the same sources of sampled punk records, but this time his computer program is more of a “randomiser” thing – short edits, thrown together in a chaotic manner, and spewed out any which way. “A structure that wanders with no direction…but…gets nowhere,” is how he himself describes the piece, and indeed he draws the same pessimistic conclusion about punk music itself – all popular youth culture in fact – suggesting quite strongly that, for all that rebellion and angst and restless spirit, nothing ever really changed and the world is still the same. ‘Get Rid Of It’ is a depressing listen, not just because of the conclusions Hurtado draws, but also because it’s wholly unsatisfying structurally and aurally. None of the passion or power of the original punk records has survived the mangling of his computer, and what we have instead is a charmless exercise in pre-programmed chaos.
In his favour, it’s good to see Hurtado devising his own software and programs for these experiments, and also attempting a composition which has a conceptual unity. As to the former, it’s in the tradition of fellow Basque experimenter Mattin who, between 2007 and 2010, released a number of CDRs in his Free Software series devoted to making music with open-source and homebrew apps.