La Bas: 1987-1992 is a retrospective, but it does not feel like nostalgia. It feels like excavation with the lights kept low. JFK, the project of Anthony DiFranco, sits in that British underground zone where post-industrial sound, noise rock, heavy psych, power electronics, and grim repetitive rhythm all blur into one damaged working method. The music does not ask to be admired from a clean historical distance. It still sounds like it might stain the sleeve.
The title is perfect: La Bas, “down there.” Not here, not above, not out in the open. Down there. Basement, understructure, unconscious, cellar, underworld, bad district, hidden room. A retrospective called La Bas is not presenting a polished career summary. It is pointing underneath the visible map and saying the real machinery was operating below.
The 2013 release gathers rare and unreleased JFK material from the late 1980s and early 1990s, with tracks such as “Big Fat Sin,” “Omen,” “Aktion In A 10/6,” “Will To Love,” “Avernus,” “Black Tower,” “Sexodus,” “Teenage Fantasy,” and “Temple Of Set.” Retail and Discogs listings identify it as a Fourth Dimension release, while the JFK Bandcamp page frames the vinyl version as a limited double-LP retrospective of rare and unreleased tracks. That matters because the record is not just one album from one year. It is a recovered weather pattern from a period when underground heaviness was mutating in several directions at once.
Anthony DiFranco’s presence gives the release a useful gravity. He is well known through Skullflower, Ramleh, Ethnic Acid, and other related projects, and JFK belongs to the same extended ecosystem where guitar noise, industrial hostility, psychedelia, and power electronics were never fully separate languages. The Quietus described La Bas as ten punchy, aggressive tracks that distill the murky malevolence of Throbbing Gristle and SPK, Whitehouse’s faster assaults, and a touch of Cabaret Voltaire’s mutant swing. That is a very good map, because JFK’s strength lies exactly in that refusal to settle into only one lineage.
What separates JFK from simple industrial imitation is the sense of dirty momentum. The music has attack, but it also has grind. It does not merely shock, shriek, or collapse. It moves forward with a heavy, unglamorous pulse, as though post-punk rhythm has been dragged through noise electronics and left with a limp that somehow makes it stronger. The tracks feel like machines with human habits: repetition, lust, threat, boredom, compulsion, little eruptions of bad spirit.
The title “Sexodus” gives one of the clearest windows into the project’s mood. It sounds like a pun, a biblical departure rewritten through desire, sleaze, and industrial humor. Discogs notes that tracks 9 and 10 were originally released on the Sexodus 7-inch on Fourth Dimension in 1992, which anchors at least part of this material in the small-format circulation of the period: single, catalog item, scene object, later recovered inside a broader retrospective.
That kind of circulation is essential to hearing La Bas properly. These tracks were not born into today’s instant availability. They belonged to a world of mail-order lists, cassettes, vinyl singles, small labels, rumor, trading, and slow discovery. A retrospective like this does not simply gather music. It reconstructs access. It gives shape to material that might otherwise remain scattered across want-lists, old boxes, and partial memories.
The sound itself feels wonderfully pre-digital in its dirt. Not primitive, not limited, but materially grim. It carries the charge of electronics, guitars, voice, distortion, and rhythm being handled as physical substances. Even when it becomes abstract or aggressive, it does not float away into pure texture. There is always a body somewhere in the muck: sweating, pacing, muttering, pushing the same ugly motion forward.
Inside Private Release, this post works because it connects several routes already active in the archive. It touches the industrial past without returning to Cold Meat Industry’s ceremonial dread. It connects to JK Flesh through British heaviness and post-industrial rhythm, but JFK feels less engineered and more feral. It connects to noise culture without becoming total overload like Incapacitants. It sits in the in-between: heavy, hostile, rhythmic, psychedelic, basement-lit.
That in-between status may be why the retrospective feels alive. Records that fit too neatly into a genre can become easy to file away. La Bas resists that. It keeps moving between categories: industrial, experimental, noise, post-punk, heavy psych, power electronics, ugly groove. The result is not confusion. It is cross-contamination.
As an archive object, La Bas: 1987-1992 is valuable because it preserves a particular underground condition: not the famous center of industrial history, but the charged side passage where musicians were taking the remains of TG, SPK, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, noise rock, and psych heaviness and building something rougher than theory. The music does not sound like a thesis. It sounds like a problem left running in a locked room.
Down there, indeed.
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