One Trick Pony feels like a title daring the listener to underestimate it. The phrase usually means limitation: a performer with only one move, one gimmick, one little routine trotted out until the applause dies. Barn Sour turns that insult inside out. What if the “one trick” is not a weakness, but a portal? What if the pony only needs one trick because the trick keeps changing shape every time the room looks at it?
Released in 2022 on Staighre, One Trick Pony continues the unstable animal logic suggested by Belgian Gelding, but this one feels sharper and more feverish. The titles alone make the tape feel half-rural, half-possessed: “Bowl Cut Part 5,” “False Witness At Hollow Tree,” “Steamboat Salve,” “Peace, Be Still (Mane Mix),” “Wellington Horse Search,” and “Gowanus Encounter.” The horse imagery remains, but it is no longer just farm matter. It becomes a moving system of jokes, hauntings, sermons, bad dreams, and private mythology.
Tobira describes the tape, in translation, as the latest work by sound artist Barn Sour, previously associated with Careful Catalog and Penultimate Press, and mentions its discomforting atmosphere, likening it to a live broadcast of an exorcism. That phrase is useful because the music does feel broadcast rather than performed in the ordinary sense. It has the quality of something intercepted: voices, fragments, room tone, electronic scrape, ritual mutter, damaged domestic space, little spasms of theater, and sounds that seem to have arrived already overheard.
The Staighre connection matters too. The label was started by Matthew Sullivan, known for Ekhein, one of those underground imprints from the late-2000s American ambient/noise cassette ecosystem where small editions, strange packaging, and highly specific sound worlds carried real cultural weight. One Trick Pony does not feel detached from that history. It belongs to the lineage of tapes that treat sound less as a polished statement than as a contaminated object: something handled, dubbed, mailed, played, misunderstood, and then remembered wrong.
Pat Klassen’s Barn Sour project has been described by Noisenotmusic as “radically bizarre” and “subversive,” with One Trick Pony noted as the last release of entirely new material before the project’s final performances and general end. That gives the tape another charge. It is not only another strange entry. It is a late-stage summation, maybe even a last convulsion of the project’s private grammar before the barn door closes.
What makes Barn Sour interesting is that the work resists the dignity usually demanded by experimental music. It does not sit in the clean gallery and explain its method. It drools on the floorboards, changes voices, makes animal reference, stumbles into religious cadence, then veers into something that might be comedy if it were less unnerving. The project understands that absurdity is not the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes absurdity is what seriousness looks like after it has been left alone too long.
Compared with Belgian Gelding, this feels less massive and more animated. The previous tape had weight, body, awkward animal scale. One Trick Pony has twitch. It feels verbal even when words are unclear, theatrical even when no scene fully forms, rural even when the setting becomes urban or psychic. “Gowanus Encounter” alone suggests that the pony has wandered far from the field and into polluted city-water folklore. The map is unstable, which is exactly the appeal.
Inside the archive, this is valuable because it proves difficulty does not have to wear black robes. Difficulty can be silly, itchy, possessed, handmade, and impossible to summarize without sounding slightly deranged. After the Cold Meat Industry material, where symbols often arrive with military, occult, religious, or institutional weight, Barn Sour lets weirdness become local again. Not less intense, just less monumental. A chair scrapes. A voice cracks. A phrase repeats until it stops being funny and starts being law.
One Trick Pony is not a record that asks to be decoded cleanly. Its pleasure lies in the wobble between performance and breakdown, joke and omen, animal and human, tape object and psychic spill. The “one trick” may simply be this: Barn Sour can make the listener feel that meaning is standing just outside the stall, breathing heavily, refusing to come into the light.
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