Releases by The New Blockaders continue to bedevil me. Once played, I inevitably find my whole day is ruined and I wander about blighted, sat under a cloud of unhappiness. If you’ve read about this brutal edge-case industrial band and been deterred by the whole “noise assault” thing, you might find today’s item more approachable, which isn’t to say it won’t curdle your mind by other, stranger methods – using both tentacle and flipper to invade your brain-pan in sinister ways. Title is Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang (NIHILIST RECORDINGS Nihil 07) (and there are plenty more German tongue-twisters to unpack in the track titles), and it’s a collaborative remake-refashion-rebake collage and hammer-and-tongs thing involving old friends and comrades of the maestro himself, Richard Rupenus.
Ice Yacht is one trading name for the affable Philip Sanderson, and he and Rupenus were briefly associated with Alien Brains in the early 1980s (along with Nigel Jacklin, the Zarbi of rock and roll noise). His track here, titled with a sentence that invokes Tristan Tzara, god of Dada mischief, almost has a limpid beauty of the sort you’d rarely associate with “Mr Rusty Lawnmower”, and you can see why commentators and pundits are reaching for their “musique concrète” comparisons to account for this delicate music. Well, I say delicate. Though fragile, there’s still a core of iron fencing wrapped around it, and a core of molten steel surrounding its icy heart. I seem to be describing a giant robot lost in a wasteland, lamenting its fate. In this “dreaming of Dada” epic, Sanderson exhibits a dedication to the task which few modernists can muster, and refuses even the slightest hint of sentimentality, like a teetotaller at a beer party.
In the following piece, I think it’s Sanderson again, this time linking antlers with Guido Huebner who is Das Synthetische Mischgewebe. At any rate there’s a third strain of poison vapour in the lining which is just about detectable, providing all your receptive instruments are set at maximum sweep. The gaps keep alternating with the music, and we don’t know if they’re “sound windows” of the sort beloved of Stockhausen, or actual rips in the fabric of reality. The borderless, featureless chug continues ineffably, until we can’t see our way or even trust our own senses. Huebner is a fellow who I associate with physical objects, old pieces of household junk which he repurposes to make his sounds, even when he always does something wicked to disguise the results and sap the true nature out of everything. Here, he seems to have completely departed from the physical world, to the extent that he no longer believes in the vacuum cleaner or the pop-up toaster; all that’s left is our fading memory of them.
If that notion seems attractive to you, well, don’t touch that dial; there’s more of the Huebster on the closing track called ‘Morceau De Cire’, whose name departs from the all-German scheme. Of the four this one seems to take us closer to the more familiar old-world of old-school New Blockaders, when men were men and all of society was perceived as trapped inside Brutalist architecture and decaying inner cities. I mean we come within an ace of tasting the rust and eating the metal junk that was once the portion of all TNB collectors, but it’s been fed through an all-purpose mincing machine and passed through eighteen blenders, leaving us with a hollowed-out core of nothingness. Whatever glimmer of hope Ice Yacht offered us with his bleached melodies has now been effaced by the heavy fist of nihilism, which might be the point of exile where Rupenus would wish all of us to fetch up, the entire human race banished to live forever inside the dented copper kettle of Doom.
Well, so much for the purely “musical” portions of this difficult long-player. Old-fashioned listeners who like the sound of the human voice speaking words may enjoy the opening track, on which I have so far avoided adding any comment, and I hope I will continue to maintain my silence. It’s credited to srmeixner who is also Contrastate, and is based on a much earlier performance he made from around 2004-5. The spoken word element has been lifted partially from the notorious TNB “manifesto”, the slogan-filled text which is both a statement of intent for the band and a long list of “things we hate” issued by Rupenus and company, and TNB presumably still adhere doggedly to its precepts. I normally enjoy a good collage of overlapping voices, but here the speakers appear to be stranded in some hideous dimension of blindness, their voices expressing a total disconnect, their minds clutching desperately at whatever rags of memory may surface.
In summary, this is a strong and at times very original release, and although the extent and methods of the collaborations are far from clear, I suppose it’s the end result that counts, a result that can only be measured by psychologists with callipers and whisk brooms, sweeping up your damaged brain cells to be poured into a phial. Rupenus continues to insist his New Blockaders “heritage” is honoured, by whatever means possible; but at least on this occasion, he’s not obstinately staying in the same place, the contributors are given ample space to follow their own direction, and there’s a glimmer of light in the overall pallor. It’s also odd that the original manifesto makes plain his “anti-art” stance, yet he’s happy to accept the inevitable comparisons with Dada. These days, nary a TNB review passes by on the internet without the word “absurdist” or “Dadaist” buried somewhere in its textual effusions, and I’m just as guilty of doing it myself. Admittedly, Tzara and Hugo Ball didn’t really intend to have their madcap antics codified into the status of high art by the curators, so perhaps it’s fitting at some level that Tristan Tzara’s name does surface on this record, regardless of how many contextualising clouds may surround it. From 2nd October 2023.