Further update from the American label No Part Of It. From 6th Feb 2024.
On Watching The Void, Arvo Zylo has joined up with Michael Krause to survey the output of Panic Records & Tapes, a label active in Chicago from 1984 to 1990. Scott Marshall was the founder of this label – he was also a member of the noise band Burden Of Friendship, a pioneer of noise in Chicago – and there’s 16 releases that we know of listed in Discogs, mostly on cassette, although there were also three vinyl releases in the series What Is Truth? This CD collects seven instances of Panic material from Unit 731, Little Dougie, Research Defense Squad, The News Sensations, as well as two cuts by Burden Of Friendship and Scott Marshall solo.
These are all glimpses into a style of music that’s all but vanished now – hard-edged, ugly, confrontational, illogical, and expressly designed to upset the listener. A few of them use voice samples, cut-up and detourned announcements from the media, to make their barbed and sarcastic points; that’s regarded as kind of a gaffe nowadays, but in the 1980s it wasn’t quite as familiar, and some of this oppositional material arguably carries on the angry voices of American hardcore rock bands, such as MDC, Black Flag, or D.O.A. But the artistes here were also going for edgy, outlier weirdness, unafraid of presenting strange horrors and twisted forms to curdle the milk of unsuspecting listeners. Two supreme examples of this horror-show mode are Marshall’s ‘Nearer to Thee My Void, Am I’, a collage piece he unleashed in 1984, combining fragmented voice samples with vicious, lacerating noise; over 15 mins of merciless assault that makes a mockery of everything society holds dear, besides coming very close to unhinging your mental faculties. The second example is ‘Gilgamesh In Berchtesgaden’ by Research Defense Squad, here excerpted from a much longer 1986 release which appeared on Boleskine Und Berchtesgaden. Troublingly, this cassette originally appeared with a triumphalist Nazi photo on the cover, but thankfully the creators haven’t seen fit to go all the way down the same route as Douglas P. All the same, it might help position this dark work in the context of a time when many underground and industrial types saw fit to use provocative imagery on their cassette covers. Bob St. Clair and Paul Rosen might be the authors of this impressive and intense noise barrage, which I enjoy up until the closing moments when harsh voices bark out invective and bile in the style of Consumer Electronics.
The “fun” doesn’t end here. The CD closes out with six edited highlights from the “Voidwatch” radio shows, which is where Scott Marshall and others in the Chicago collectives truly spread their wings through their partnership with WZRD-Chicago, described as a “freeform radio station”. The short excerpts provided on this CD can only hint at the mayhem that took place at these Voidwatch events…all manner of creative freaks entered the performance space, two studios were brought into play simultaneously, resulting either in demented sound-collages or out-of-control happenings involving power tools and fireworks. Sometimes, even local campus broadcasts were also dragged into the general free-for-all malarkey, and the sense of adventure and risk (everything happening live in real time) must have been exhilarating to those who were there. Even now these 1984-86 snippets continue to make sparks fly and pulses race. Unlike some independent radio enterprises, it’s clear the Voidwatch crew had no thought of responsibility to the community, or of paying lip service to worthy ideologies; crazy happenings were the order of the day. A list of artists directly involved with this sprawling madness is provided in the CD, but guests, passers-by and radio staff were also brought in, simply by the power of the microphone, to be included in the mixes. Grand stuff.
Powerful collage artworks by James Koehnline complete this package, a snapshot from a time and place when creative spirits flourished.