Another reissue of a Genetic Transmissions record…the label Zoharum are evidently proud of the achievements of this solo creator Tomasz Twardawa and do their level best to keep the “flame” burning. It’s been seven years since we received the first instalment in the “GT Archive” series, and now we’re up to the eleventh – Offals of Emotions (ZOHARUM ZOHAR305-2 / GT11).
It’s evident that in 2004 (the original year of release) GT’s method had departed quite some way from the intense gloom and industrial-influenced writhing noise of his 1990s work, and you can see more subtlety in the methods and the arrangements, adding weight to the label’s claim that he should be regarded as a serious electro-acoustic composer. It just so happens he also loves noise, and freely mixes unpleasant and harsh elements in with the more exploratory themes. If this Polish genius were a map-maker – and many composers of tape music have been likened to foresters drawing charts of unknown territories – Twardawa would make sure he included symbols for all the natural hazards, traps, and potentially fatal areas that stand between you and your destination. Pretty soon the entire map would be covered in skulls, snakes, whirlpools, and quicksand; a dragon in every woodland, ugly gnomes emerging from underground tunnels, and all points of the ocean would be labelled “here be monsters”.
As ever with Genetic Transmissions, I’m really feeling the fundamentally “twisted” nature of his music on today’s spin of Offals; not a single sound is allowed to stand or roam free for itself, until he has grabbed it in both hands (with insulated gloves) and manhandled it as though it were a living block of plasticine, nearly choking it in the process. The remorseless arrangement of these audio freaks – mangled tapes, feedback sounds, unrecognisable source recordings – assembled in a deathly sequence of near-absurd proportions, are what gives this music its special qualities. But it’s also nauseating; there’s only so much unnatural distortion the human system can take, before our very intestines start to reject it. Even the title refers directly to this process; the artist proposes that our emotional responses are comparable to a bucket of entrails, and about as reliable in truly perceiving the nature of the world around us. Here on these recordings, originally released on his own label Die Schöne Blumen Musik Werk (with a much gorier cover), Tomasz Tawrdawa lays bare that unwholesome mechanism. And if any of this talk of entrails reminds you of the performance pieces of Hermann Nitsch, then it so happens there’s another 2004 GT record which precedes this one called Music For Vienna Aktionists, which this label reissued in 2020. (13/12/2023)