Joe Colley – Solo for Chair and Feedback Circuit (Meeuw, 2019)

I love a good art single. I understand they are a hard sell these days (what isn’t?), but I do think it is a shame that almost no one makes them anymore. Joe Colley has long been a proponent of the format, and he’s holding the line here, along with the always reliable Meeuw Muzak label out of Belgium. There is not much to go off based on the packaging (in fact the person lounging on the cover is not even an illustration of Colley, but a generic clip art graphic found by Meeuw boss Jos Moers), but we are told that “Solo for Chair and Feedback Circuit” was recorded at SFEMF on October 12, 2006. Although Joe’s work, both under his own name as well as the Crawl Unit moniker, always has a certain sense of instability and jocular dread to it, for the sake of discussion it can be divided into 3-4 subcategories based on compositional methods, this one fitting into the installation/performance activated sonic phenomena realm. As the title suggests, it seems that there is an amalgam of microphones or some type of extremely sensitive sensor device attached to a chair that responds to its movements. This results in not so much continuous or circular harsh feedback patterns but rather short bursts of different tonal frequencies that Joe (or whoever is sitting in the chair I guess) manipulates to his liking. A pretty simple idea as far as these things go, but it does have legs. It is similar in concept to a swinging bench that was also mic’d in a Tony Conrad retrospective I saw last year, though the way that was set up created much more sustained, monolithic sounds, whereas Joe’s piece is very spastic. “Solo for Chair and Feedback Circuit” also made me reach for Ross Manning’s self-released “LED” 10″ from a few years back, and while there I doubled down with the Asmus Tietchens “Leuchtidioten” on Die Stadt, so I am indebted to Joe for that. Another great Colley 7″ to add to the pile, what more can you ask for?

Meat Thump – Under the Bridge (Eternal Soundcheck, 2020)

Meat Thump was a deconstructed rock/folk band of sorts hailing from Brisbane, Australia, headed by Brendon Annesley. I believe they had a rotating membership, but on this tape, which was recorded live July 2nd 2011, he was joined by Matt Kennedy (Bitter Defeat, Kitchen’s Floor etc.) on bass and Bobby Bot on drums. I had first been in contact with Brendon, over the Internet, probably a few months before this was recorded. I was doing my own zine called ‘Put The Music In Its Coffin’ for about a year by then, and he reached out for a trade and asked me to contribute to his much more prolific (also named after a 1994 Siltbreeze release), ‘Negative Guest List’ zine. For around the next year and a half I gladly did so, and although I never got to know him well, like many others I was sad to hear of his untimely death in 2012. Sad, but not shocked, as Brendon was never shy about sharing intimate details of his heavy, hard drug use in his writing. The manic energy of his output always reminded me of Fassbinder, the kind of guy who did speed more as a means of staying up all night in order to ardently scrawl about some random, unobtainable Lost Domain CDr or a new Doug Stanhope special than for personal pleasure. Truly a unique, fucked up mind cut off way too short. As for the contents of this tape, according to the label write-up, many of the songs were taught to Matt and Bobby that day, resulting in a rather loose stagger thru Brendon’s already shambolic, threadbare compositions. “Feel Good” and “Box of Wine”, two titles I know from a single released during the band’s brief tenure, are rendered nearly unrecognizable, a mess of plodding basslines, ‘Telegraph Melts’-style percussion and, fronting it all, what I imagine Dave Bixby sounded like before seeing The Light. The reference points are predictable enough for this lot: Columbus, Country Teasers, Royal Trux, waking up in strange places with no recollection of how you got there, but they are delivered in a broken vernacular all their own. It seems both Eternal Soundcheck and Coward Punch are keeping the ‘NGL’ flame alive in recent years, picking through the wreckage (with a stick of course) for all kinds of interesting documents, a move I wholeheartedly endorse. To paraphrase my friend Richie Charles (who is handling U.S. distro of this very cassette): “I often wonder what Brendon’s reaction to everything going on in this shit world today would be.” And how!

J.Peterson – Recent Works (no label, 2020)

No, not a Kermit the Frog-voiced audio self-help book on the importance of always making your Serbian hospital bed and never agreeing to publicly debate Slavoj Žižek if you don’t know anything about Communism, but rather a quick shot C30 from one Joshua Peterson, who also keeps himself busy recording under the pseudonyms Missing, Neurotic Force, New Policies, etc., as well as writing under his own name. This, and another tape under the Missing moniker from 2018, have served as an introduction to his work for me, and a nice one at that. While I really enjoyed Missing ‘Untitled II’, I have to say these two side-long pieces recorded just a few months ago (apparently the artist’s “final tape works”) get the leg up. The formula is a familiar one, collaged field recordings and other non-musical sources/situations, with occasional analog tape editing, and while I have heard plenty of music made this way over the past few years, ‘Recent Works’ is among the better organized and dynamic examples I can recall. “Trespass (Urban Version)” takes up side A and is composed mainly of an incessant sonar-type ringing, percussive metal banging recorded straight to condenser mic, a few loops and other unidentifiable clusters of sound. Has a bit of a sinister, yet airy G*Park/Kapotte Muziek vibe, which obviously counts for fine company around these parts. The untitled B-side track starts off with the same looping sound the flip ended on, along with lo-fi water dripping, electronics of some sort and monosyllabic piano/guitar plucking. I’m not quite as fond of this track, as there are a few tape music cliches, like backmasking and obvious warbling manipulations towards the end, but thankfully they do not distract too much. There is a really great stretch about halfway thru with the water sounds, single guitar notes and very odd inhuman squawking that is particularly excellent, and calls for repeat listening. This is among the best unsolicited material I’ve received for this column thus far; if you’ve got the goods like this, please get at me.

Vertical Slit – Live at Browns (Siltbreeze, 2020)

I imagine most reading this are already familiar with the work of Jim Shepard, but if not he was a cult/outsider musician who made a lot of weird, downer rock-ish music for about two decades, before committing suicide in 1998. Vertical Slit was his first band, also featuring Dan Juranko and David Mikula, who were active from the late 70s to about the mid-80s. ‘Live at Browns’ was a set recorded in their hometown of Columbus, OH in 1979, a tape of which was given to Tom Lax by Shepard shortly before his death. Among the many peaks/valleys in Jim’s prolific output, Vertical Slit were always the hardest to pin down for me. More post-prog than punk, I cannot think of much, even amid the most bottomed-out reaches of the U.S. underground of the day, that sounds quite like them. Their homemade recordings are filled with aimless jams, tape/studio experiments, and occasionally great songs, but ‘Live at Browns’ is on a much different trip, with Jim & co. in full-on power trio mode. He always seemed like the guy in a small town who had the best record collection, knew about the most esoteric shit pre-internet etc., and here it sounds as if he’d been wearing out the grooves on his copies of ‘Nadir’s Big Chance’,  ‘Argus’ and ‘The Visitation’ prior to heading to the gig. The result is a surprisingly muscular performance somewhat in line with the sci-fi proto-punk of Simply Saucer or Debris, but again, these are loose reference points to a pretty singular sound. Shepard-related reissues have been the source of much contention in recent years, with a few slipshod boots floating around and numerous rumors/delays for a legit multi-release closet clearing, so while we’re waiting for that to happen here is one to buy with confidence.

Witcyst – Sobibiast Anti-Culler (Planam, 2016)

I don’t plan to do this often, as I intend for this column to focus primarily on recent experimental music releases/reissues that do not receive much attention elsewhere, but every so often I come across something not exactly new, but new to me, easily obtainable and seemingly ignored, that I think others would likely enjoy if made aware. This LP, one of many releases by the New Zealand artist Witcyst, is one such example. The details are (likely intentionally) fuzzy but it would seem Witcyst is the long-running solo project of Michael Veet Ruiliude, who has been recording these ultra homespun, hermetic experiments off in the wilds of NZ since at least the early 90s, with tons of tapes, CDRs and lathes to his name, though only three LPs, this being the most recent, issued on a sporadically functioning sub-label of Alga Marghen (which makes as much sense as anything, I suppose). The bulk of ‘Sobibiast Anti-Culler’ rests pretty squarely in the “throw everything against the wall” camp of DIY junk noise, at home among, say, Evil Moisture, Fossils and Stefan Jaworzyn, with the detritus of mangled rock records, half-broken thrift equipment and a restless eccentricity serving as guiding principles. The sources tend to blend together into ebbing brown note masses, but every so often something nearly recognizable as guitar, voice, radio etc. bubbles to the top, only to be immediately subsumed into the thick layers of analog grime. Side B is often little more than low end feedback and heavily effected vocals, and it still manages to be a thoroughly disorienting listening experience. If No Basement Is Deep Enough appeals to you not only as a label, but a life mantra, I’d advise familiarizing yourself with the extensive Witcyst back catalog post haste.

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Do you record marginal music to keep yourself from going insane? Would you like for it to be reviewed? If so, e-mail crisisoftaste [AT] gmail.com. Only physical releases will be considered, and reviewer reserves the right to discard upon unsatisfactory listening experience, but if what you send is good then that shouldn’t be a problem.

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