Taint - 2004 - Misogynist Lust

 

Freak Animal Records – Freak-CD-021  309.63MB FLAC

Misogynist Lust begins with no gradual descent into its subject. “Undeserving” immediately establishes a compact, frontal sound built from rough analogue pressure, needling feedback and a voice fighting to remain intelligible inside the electronics. The album contains ten pieces in approximately forty minutes, and almost all of them stay between three and six minutes. That economy distinguishes it from power electronics records that depend upon extended drones or twenty-minute displays of endurance. Keith Brewer attacks, develops one diseased combination of frequencies and stops before it can settle into background noise. The 2004 Freak Animal CD is consequently severe but highly active: a sequence of individual wounds rather than one long grey wall.
The material originated in the late 1990s, first appearing through the Italian Slaughter Productions Listen and Die! cassette box and then as a self-released Taint Entertainment tape limited to twenty-eight copies. Freak Animal’s CD edition expanded its circulation to 300 copies and gave the recordings a permanence that their original cassette existence could not guarantee. The label did not polish Taint into a cleaner European power-electronics product. Tape grain, overloaded signals and abrupt edits remain fundamental to the sound. The CD makes those surfaces more immediate, exposing numerous small movements that could disappear behind hiss on a heavily played cassette.
“Undeserving,” “Dirty Blonde Whore,” “Streetmeat” and “Whoremonger” form a brutally concentrated opening run. Brewer’s electronics do not resemble industrial machinery operating with regular efficiency. They feel unstable, as though every device has been pushed beyond its intended range. Low tones buckle beneath high feedback, distortion splits into several competing bands, and voices repeatedly emerge only to be crushed back into the mix. There are pulses, but rarely anything as orderly as a beat. Momentum comes from escalation: a frequency thickens, another sharpens, and the available space contracts until something must be removed.
This is what separates Brewer from performers who treat aggression as a matter of shouting over static. Taint’s sound has architecture. Even at its harshest, one can hear foreground, depth and movement between layers. “Dirty Blonde Whore” drives a coarse vocal attack through a narrow channel of scraping electronics, while “Streetmeat” places greater weight on the low end, giving its abrasion a heavier physical body. “Whoremonger” stretches its material into a crawling, hostile churn. The pieces share a vocabulary, but they do not merely duplicate one another. Each finds a different balance between vocal presence, bass pressure and upper-frequency pain.
Contributions associated with Thomas Garrison of Control, Jonathan Canady of Deathpile and the obscure Ultra connect the album to a broader American network of late-1990s noise. Their presence does not turn Misogynist Lust into a series of obvious collaborations. Instead, additional source sounds seem to have been incorporated into Brewer’s compositional method, cut apart and made to serve Taint’s atmosphere. This was common in the cassette underground: artists exchanged recordings through the mail, processed one another’s material and created collaborations without sharing a studio. The sound passed from machine to machine, accumulating damage and losing any clean point of origin.
“Every Little Girl” is one of the album’s most sustained and disturbing constructions. It develops slowly enough for its component sounds to become individually recognizable before they are forced together. A low industrial foundation supplies weight, thin feedback hangs above it, and a processed voice enters with the detached quality of recorded testimony or institutional speech. The track does not produce horror through a sudden blast. It creates an environment in which implication grows more oppressive as the listener waits. Brewer understood that anticipation can be more effective than continuous attack, especially when the title has already contaminated how every sound will be interpreted.
The naming throughout Misogynist Lust is deliberately degrading. Women are reduced to commodities, physical types, sexual functions or locations attached to violent stories. The album does not provide a stable critical distance from that language. It inhabits an offender’s vocabulary so completely that documentation, role-playing, exposure and endorsement become difficult to separate. Such uncertainty was central to a strain of power electronics influenced by true-crime writing, extreme pornography and the confrontational methods of Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jügend and Peter Sotos. Taint’s work pushes that ambiguity further by refusing explanatory liner notes that might offer the listener an approved interpretation.
That refusal remains the album’s central ethical problem. The music convincingly represents obsession as ugly, repetitive and isolating, but the titles still transform violence against women and girls into material for an overwhelmingly male underground audience. One cannot assume that extremity automatically equals criticism. At the same time, the record never makes its fantasies sound liberating, glamorous or triumphant. Brewer’s world is cramped and spiritually dead. Desire has curdled into compulsion; the voice issuing commands sounds imprisoned inside the same electrical enclosure it attempts to control. The album’s most persuasive interpretation lies in that contradiction rather than in any claim that its provocations are harmless.
“Laura Smithers, Friendswood TX” gives the sequence a specific geographical wound. The title refers to the 1997 disappearance and murder of a twelve-year-old girl from Friendswood, Texas, south of Houston. Brewer lived in Waco, and this use of a nearby Texas case removes the distancing effect common to records built around famous European atrocities or legendary serial killers. The track is notably concise. Feedback flashes across a murky background while voices and source material pass through without forming a conventional narrative. It supplies no biography or explanation. A name and location are placed inside noise, leaving the listener to confront how real suffering has been converted into an aesthetic object.
The title track follows with one of the album’s fullest combinations of voice and electronics. “Misogynist Lust” does not move toward a recognizable climax; it tightens. Brewer stacks rough, dragging frequencies until the vocal performance seems physically pinned beneath them. High tones cut through the mass, but they offer no release. The piece is less a declaration than a demonstration of fixation consuming itself. Its sound circles repeatedly around the same psychic blockage, gaining power through small adjustments in density rather than large changes of direction.
“Sluttish” provides another variation on that method, with a more agitated surface and a voice that arrives in broken bursts. It is followed by “Show Me,” whose command-like title prepares the listener for a more direct confrontation. Yet the track’s electronics remain more interesting than its verbal aggression. Brewer creates an unstable middle register that seems to wobble between feedback and damaged amplification. A thick lower signal periodically enters and alters the scale of the entire mix. These shifts make the piece feel larger than the limited equipment likely used to create it. Taint’s production is crude, but never careless.
“Wackelpeter” closes the CD in only ninety-one seconds. Associated with Ultra, it feels less like a grand conclusion than an ugly fragment left moving after the main sequence has exhausted itself. Its brevity is perfectly judged. After forty minutes of tightly constructed hostility, an extended finale would risk making the record feel ceremonious. Instead, Misogynist Lust ends abruptly, denying the listener a cleansing fade or dramatic resolution. The final sound disappears, but the language printed across the track list remains.
The 2004 CD sequence differs somewhat from surviving descriptions of the original cassette, which included additional or separately indexed material and arranged the pieces in another order. Freak Animal’s edition makes the album feel more deliberate by beginning with “Undeserving,” placing the title track deep into the second half and using “Wackelpeter” as a brief exit. That structure creates a clear progression from frontal attacks through increasingly psychological pieces. The forty-minute running time is another strength. Brewer maintains intensity without stretching every idea beyond its useful life.
Production is the album’s greatest accomplishment. Its high frequencies are painful without becoming a uniform digital screech, and its bass remains dirty rather than inflated into modern subsonic spectacle. The voice changes function from track to track: sometimes an attacker, sometimes a documentary fragment and sometimes another piece of material being ground down. Tape noise supplies atmosphere without concealing the construction. Even moments that initially resemble formless distortion reveal cycles, edits and deliberate shifts when heard closely. Brewer’s control over abrasive sound explains why the record endured beyond its microscopic original edition.
Misogynist Lust also captures Taint at a transition point. Earlier recordings frequently carried the instability of cassette experimentation, while later works such as Vice, Sex Sick and Brewer’s Mania material would develop heavier structures and more intricate editing. These recordings retain the rawness of the former while anticipating the compositional discipline of the latter. The result is not Taint’s most varied album, but it may be one of the clearest demonstrations of Brewer’s ability to turn a few primitive electronic sources into distinct physical spaces.
Its reputation as a power-electronics classic is therefore understandable, though the word “classic” should not neutralize what the record asks an audience to consume. The album’s language is intentionally hateful, its use of real victims is ethically unresolved, and its conceptual ambiguity can provide convenient cover for listeners interested only in degradation. None of those objections erases the precision of the sound. Brewer constructs feedback with exceptional patience, knows when to let a vocal dominate and recognizes when a piece has reached its endpoint. Misogynist Lust remains powerful because those contradictions cannot be comfortably separated. It is a technically focused, physically punishing record built around fantasies and realities that should resist comfortable appreciation. The sound does not absolve the concept, and the concept does not exhaust the sound.