Regular TSP fave, absurdist genius, man of mystery and noise-wreaker supremo Hari Hardman blasts forth with another CDR called A White Horse Shakes Its Main (HARI HARDMAN PRODUKTS HH0032). For years this frantic loon from Reading has been confounding common sense and scrambling normality with his audio hi-jinks, a strategy compounded by his strange collage artworks, made using photocopiers and typewriters.
If you can get past the shrill barking voice on ‘Pasqua Uno’, a slew of ugly audio delights will reward your jaded tongue; jumbled urban street recordings with a slowed-down spoken message fighting it out with manic percussion samples; a busking duo recorded through the wrong end of a traffic cone; full-on metallic harsh noise in a painful motorway pile-up that would cause hardened 1990s noise-fanatics to blanch; demented home-made electronic attacks that can instantly curdle the Battenberg cakes of sedate Delia Derbyshire fans; and many more horrifying vistas that would require the descriptive powers of Dante to express them properly. As to the visuals this time around, one is both touched and mystified by the ghostly apparitions of faces that materialise out of a blob of grey photocopy toner, likewise the terrified white visage of a haunted youth who seems to have travelled time from around the date of the first Joy Division LP, only to find that the real world has turned out much worse than Ian Curtis predicted.
I am very susceptible to the implanted suggestions in the track titles, such as ‘We Will All Meet in the Same Place’, the 8:20 epic prog-rock blaster which closes the set, and piles on distorted electronic organs with layers of ectoplasm, spectral apparitions, and other supernatural effusions. You may like the title ‘Esoteric Totem Pole’, with its suggestions of Renaissance Magick colliding with primitive non-Western ritual, but you won’t be able to endure hearing the entire track. Throughout the album, that uneasy street murmur and that glorpy varispeeded voice keeps returning like a bad dream, confirming the general sense of unease and displacement that, I assume, follows our man wherever he goes, much like a revenant from the pages of M.R. James.
I’m well aware that non-initiates will find the music of Hari Hardman too raw, crude, unfinished, even amateurish, but it’s genuine and honest, each track laced with a jolt of energy as palpable as one hundred electric eels. He seems compelled to keep producing this strange, alien spew, almost in spite of himself, as if possessed by a demon. 100 copies exist of this monster. From 2nd January 2024.