Grotesque cover art on The Gate’s cassette release Almost Live (IMPLODING SOUNDS #901) …and for some reason it’s not released on the usual Dan Peck label Tubapede but has ended up on Imploding Sounds in Washington State, a self-professed home for “harsh blasting filth” and a huge number of menacing noise releases from its shark-infested web page.
Well, if you think that cover is horrendous, try reaming out your eyeballs with the colour xerox booklet which destroys the brain with an array of violent and ghastly collages, ugly faces and animal insect invasions plus fires explosions skulls melted faces etc. These collages – at first we couldn’t find any credit for the dementio genius whose scissors and PC skills were roped in to the unholy project, but turns out it’s Peck himself – also subvert normality through warping cinema, TV series, adverts, magazine layouts and such like, presenting a hideous dystopia that rips the mask off the respectable face of modern media to show the true horrors that lie beneath. As is well known, this writer likes to reference the “Presence” LP cover as the benchmark of this sort of thing, but this disgusto-zine is certainly in the same game-park, what with unsettling pictures of aliens sitting down at the well-manicured dinner table, smiling vacuous Americans seemingly unaware of the menace that is in their midst.
Oh, and we almost forgot the Deutsche Grammophon label parody. This trope shows up every so often, like on the 1989 LP One Hell Soundwich credited to Gary Panter and Jay Cotton – I think there’s a more recent European manifestation of it too, but it slips my memory. Well, music fans are also in for a mind-blasting picnic with this limited edition monsteroo, assuming they can get a copy in time…this band are the trio of Dan Peck, Tom Blancarte and Brian Osborne, who normally perform with upright bass, tuba, and drums to produce their powerful and vomit-inducing melange of free improvisation with doom metal – it’s that sweet spot of low frequencies and lurching sounds that is probably incredibly hard to reach, and may sound easy as a proposition put down on paper but is the result of musical imagination, hard work, and grunting sweat. If I understand correctly – and I rarely do – these live recordings from the band’s 2023 tour of the United States are supplemented by additional noise, tapes, electronic bursts and whipping strokes from Cecilia Lopez, Sam Pluta, Aki Onda, Jeff Snyder, and Zach Rowden.
100 bonus points awarded instantly for roping in the great Sam Pluta, that polymath mad-scientist composer of incredible complexity (he can build volcanoes on the moon through remote control), but Aki Onda too? This New Yorker-dwelling Japanese creator has done things with a cassette recorder that defy the laws of physical science, often leading to speculation from many astronomers that he uses unknown telekinetic forces rather than outmoded Walkmans for his effects. Argentinan Lopez is new to me but she is also from New York (pattern beginning to emerge; I assume Peck’s address book is bulging with the names of important NYC geniuses) and this composer has featured on XI Records and Relative Pitch with her work. Jeff Snyder’s Carrier Records label has always been welcome in these pages with its challenging abstractions of coarse and absurd noise. Bass player Rowden is a prolific improviser who we’ve been lucky to hear on one of those radical Soundholes tapes. And so if they are all appearing on this incredibly audio marathoone – the tape is presented as a non-stop 35-minute extravagance, much like Zappa used to segue together live recordings on LP – then it’s no wonder that the finished result is so rich in ideas, sonic boldness, incredible textures, and journeys into the deep mysteries of jazz-improv-noise.
So confident are the musicians about the wisdom of this strategy – by which I mean offer the listener a wodge of seamless music in a Farouk-size package so large that even a supermarket warehouse cannot contain it – that they’ve arranged for a “remix” of the whole thing made by Colin Marston, who also mastered the whole magoo. This “Marston Mix” occupies whole of B side and offers an even wilder, more chaotic and dangerous rebake of the music, putting one in mind of the wild mutations seen in the John Carpenter movie The Thing, only ten times more disturbing. Even dance and club culture has seeped into the making of this B-side, resulting in terrifying beats sourced from claustrophobic dives at 4AM in the Bowery. The music of The Gate is powerful enough to begin with, but the crew deserve extra plaudits for this startling experiment in tape editing and remixing; just think what could have resulted in 1964 New York if the ESP-Disk label had taken a similar approach to their catalogue (although admittedly they did come close to it with their bizarre Sampler LP, ESP 1051 from 1967). Certain free improvisers insist on the “purity” of capturing and reproducing their hallowed performances on tape in a strict no-edit no-overdub policy, but evidently Dan Peck is from the generation of people raised on certain record albums that made full use of the recording studio, and hence is happy to unleash this sewn-together Frankenstein on the unsuspecting world.
I’m aghast at the audacity and effrontery of this incredible musical statement! Tremendous package too – should have been at least a double LP on blue vinyl with a thick booklet twice the current length. Highly recommended, as always. (09/09/2025)