Smegma and L’Autopsie A Révélé Que La Mort Etait Due A L’Autopsie
Transmissions Des Fluides
FRANCE L’EAU DES FLEURS eaudesfleurs005 LP (2024)
Truly demented artefact of unlistenable anti-music here, from a collaborative team-up between two “groups” which seems both incredibly unlikely and a real match made in Hell…
We’ve been following the releases of the French group L’Autopsie for some time now, as well as related eruptions such as micro_penis and Sun Plexus, and regular readers will know we’ve reacted with a certain amount of nausea and repulsion mixed in with the musical appreciation. Sebastien Borgo is one of the prime movers and shakers in this rotomontade, and it seems there are no lengths to which he won’t go in terms of breaking taboos, unsettling the listener with queasy sounds and shocking imagery, and doing his level best to unbalance normality in his quest to disrupt the “straight” world. In terms of apt collaborations, today’s item is matched only by the time Sun Plexus made a double-LP with Canada’s finest anti-good taste merchants, The Nihilist Spasm Band – not only do they produce horrible music, but also bellow out rude words at the audience.
As to Smegma, despite owning not-a-few records by this unclassifiable Californian band of monstrous weirdos, I still find I can’t say anything remotely useful about their work or their music. They’ve been active since 1973, tangentially associated with the LA Free Music Society, and it’s well-nigh impossible to say who the members are – because people keep coming and going, they often go by absurd alias names, and even long-serving players may not be the same people they started out as. Like the French group, they too have flirted with outré imagery and nasty-ish album titles, and have successfully transitioned into the 21st century via noise collaborations with Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Carlos Giffoni and other prominent weirdos. For those who want to know which “incarnation” of Smegma appears on today’s record, forget your rock-family-trees and check the Bandcamp page; I will mention that John Wiese, one of the more prolific and abrasive West Coast noisers, is present on the grooves.
The record starts out menacing and broody on side one, then grows hysterical and shocking on side two, ending in a flurry of diabolical shrieks and incessant pandemonium that’s enough to send anyone crazy. It’s all the more troubling for the lack of context, somehow; nothing explained or framed, much like the extreme close-up details of the collage artworks, which make no sense at all yet contain just enough recognisable imagery to confound the poor human brain. You can’t call this free improvisation, or free noise; it’s just some monstrous presence that insists on itself, squatting in your mind like an unwelcome supernatural apparition. The release also includes a witty self-referential self-sabotaging insert, a text written by the French-Japanese artist Samon Takahashi, which does everything it can to undermine the music, the audience, and the framework of music journalism / criticism too; while demonstrating how futile it is for anyone to write about music, it also manages to pull the rug out from the listener’s expectations, especially that segment of the audience who know anything about Smegma and think they know what to expect. Ogrob has played a similar sardonic prank before, on the Musica Acouscousmatica LP, mercilessly poking fun at anyone foolish enough to take art seriously.
Today it has the effect of pre-empting just about any response to Transmissions Des Fluides; maybe that’s the point, to insist that we go in with no preconceptions, and take our medicine without complaining. Either that, or these madmen have jointly decided that modern culture has run out of road long ago, and all that’s left to do is trade bodily fluids, as the title suggests. This record isn’t a friendly jam session at all, but a free-for-all orgy of far-out perversion among consenting freaks. Equally unsettling is the poster insert with an impossible photo of a ruined bridge, with two tiny figures walking across the top of it at an absurdly dizzying height. An indigestible, but unforgettable, melange of extreme sounds and ideas, executed with reckless abandon and flashes of pathological insanity, another nail in the coffin of modern music. (12/11/2024)