Aaron Dilloway - 2005 - Boggs Vol. Two

 

Hanson Records – HN112  369.07MB FLAC

Boggs Vol. Two is an archaeological release disguised as a regular compact disc. It gathers two earlier objects from Aaron Dilloway’s private underground, enlarging a scarce 2000 CDr and an even smaller three-inch live disc into one hour-long portrait of an artist learning how to make electronics behave like an involuntary bodily condition. The material predates the elaborately decaying tape-loop worlds of Modern Jester and The Gag File, but nearly every essential Dilloway impulse is already active: repetition that becomes physical, sound caught between terror and absurdity, machinery reacting as though it possesses nerves, and the human mouth transformed from an organ of communication into a wet controller for feedback.

The album does not resemble a retrospective assembled after the artist has safely moved beyond his early work. When Hanson issued Boggs Vol. Two in 2005, Dilloway’s music was still changing rapidly. Wolf Eyes had carried Midwestern noise into a greatly expanded public field through Burned Mind and extensive touring, but Dilloway’s solo identity remained connected to handmade cassettes, CDrs, strange live rooms and experiments that did not need to become conventional albums. Reissuing Seizure and Appalling & Alive together was therefore less an act of nostalgia than a statement about continuity. The obscure editions were not preliminary trash left behind by a successful group. They contained a personal language worth placing into wider circulation.

The mysterious “Boggs” title links the disc to Boggs Vol. 1, an earlier collection of minimal recordings made with electronics, tape, voice and a modified heart monitor built by Nate Young. The exact private meaning of the name remains unexplained, and that opacity suits Dilloway. His titles often seem simultaneously precise and unhelpful, identifying an object without giving the listener instructions for what it symbolizes. “Boggs” could be a person, nickname, imagined category or merely a word whose shape pleased him. The lack of explanation prevents the series from becoming a tidy developmental thesis. Volume one and volume two simply open different drawers in the same basement laboratory.

If Boggs Vol. 1 preserved the small pulse of early experiments, Boggs Vol. Two begins by magnifying that pulse into a seizure. The word describes a catastrophic interruption in ordinary bodily control. Electrical activity ceases to serve conscious intention and begins producing movement of its own. That is also a central drama within electronic noise. The performer connects circuits, microphones, amplifiers and processors, but the most compelling moment arrives when the system appears to exceed the gesture that initiated it. Feedback accelerates, frequencies collide and a machine that was supposedly being played begins behaving like an organism undergoing crisis.

“Seizure 1” and “Seizure 2” are less two separate compositions than paired examinations of this unstable border between control and involuntary action. Their combined length gives the sound enough time to stop feeling like a sequence of effects. The listener enters a prolonged nervous event whose internal behavior must gradually be learned. Dilloway does not offer the immediate, uniform saturation of harsh noise built around one maximized surface. Pressure forms through recurrence, imbalance and signals that seem to snag upon their own previous movements.

This is an important distinction. Maximum volume can create instant physical impact, but repetition can produce a deeper disturbance because it teaches the nervous system to expect something and then alters the expectation by a fraction. A loop returns bruised. A pulse drifts slightly out of alignment. A harsh electronic shape appears to have stabilized, then begins leaning, grinding or opening into another texture. The body reacts not only to the sound but to the failure of prediction. Dilloway’s later work would refine this into one of the most recognizable rhythmic languages in contemporary noise, but Seizure preserves the process before its vocabulary had become polished or widely identifiable.

The two pieces retain the dirty immediacy of early Hanson production. Their world is not a transparent studio space in which every source can be identified and admired separately. Sounds crowd one another, overload the recording and pass through a medium whose limitations become compositional material. MiniDisc was marketed as a convenient, modern replacement for cassette recording, yet in underground hands it became another imperfect witness. Its compression, portable size and ability to capture long performances made it ideal for preserving actions that might otherwise disappear, even when the resulting document could never claim the neutrality of a master recording.

That lack of neutrality is part of the album’s physical character. The recording does not stand outside the performance. It has been exposed to it. Levels shift, texture thickens and the apparent distance between sound and microphone changes. The MiniDisc feels like an object carried into the room, placed near unstable equipment and asked to survive. The finished CD consequently contains not only Dilloway’s actions but the behavior of the recording system under pressure.

The title Seizure also complicates the usual fantasy of the commanding noise performer. Much power electronics and industrial music is organized around declarations of control: the artist appears as interrogator, dictator, criminal, executioner or technician operating an overwhelming apparatus. Dilloway’s performance image has always been stranger and less secure. The mouth contact microphone, visible in the cover portrait, places equipment inside one of the body’s most vulnerable openings. Wires hang from the lips. Saliva, breathing, teeth, tongue and jaw enter the signal chain. The performer controls feedback partly by allowing the feedback system access to him.

Dilloway originally used a contact microphone in his mouth to produce amplified grunts and groans, later discovering that it could also control feedback and clicking sounds while leaving his hands available for other instruments. The explanation is practical, but the resulting image is loaded with contradiction. He appears gagged and technologically extended at once. The wire resembles drool, medical tubing, a parasite or some crude communications apparatus. The mouth is occupied, yet it becomes louder than ordinary speech could ever be.

This method prevents voice from remaining an external commentary placed above electronics. The body becomes one of the electronics. Tiny internal movements can trigger disproportionate amplification. A click of the tongue, shift of pressure or involuntary breath may be enlarged until it ceases to resemble its human origin. The machine does not merely distort a voice after the fact. Human tissue participates in generating the distortion.

That relationship is fundamental to the emotional force of Seizure. Its sound can appear mechanical, but the machinery never feels cleanly separated from physical vulnerability. Something inside the electronic mass continues gasping, twitching and attempting to reorganize itself. The distinction between a person operating equipment and a person caught inside equipment becomes difficult to maintain.

The word “seizure” has another meaning: the act of taking possession. Property is seized, contraband confiscated, power captured. Dilloway’s recording performs its own seizures. It grabs unstable sound before it disappears, forces bodily noise into electronic circulation and takes possession of accidental interactions long enough to place them on a disc. Yet the relationship remains reciprocal. The sound seizes the performer as thoroughly as the performer seizes the sound.

These two meanings, neurological crisis and forced possession, make Seizure an unusually exact title. The compositions concern ownership of action. Who or what is causing the sound at any particular instant? Is Dilloway directing the feedback, reacting to it, or being directed by the conditions he constructed? Noise becomes compelling when the answer continually changes.

The original Seizure CDr appeared as one part of a Wolf Eyes solo series, which makes it possible to hear the album as a component study. Wolf Eyes was never merely the sum of three interchangeable sources of abrasion. Nate Young, John Olson and Aaron Dilloway brought sharply different instincts into the group. A solo disc could isolate one nervous system from the collective organism and reveal what happened when it no longer had to negotiate space with the others.

Dilloway’s isolated contribution is notable for its patience. The two long pieces do not hurry to prove extremity. They permit ugly electronic behavior to develop, decay and become rhythmically suggestive without turning into songs. This patience would later distinguish his solo work from noise whose identity depends primarily upon relentless attack. Dilloway can make force more disturbing by allowing it to hesitate. A signal that appears to listen to itself is often more threatening than one that simply shouts.

His relationship with loops also predates any mature album statement. As a child, he used pause-button editing to assemble favorite fragments from pop songs, repeatedly rewinding tape and attempting to make sections align. Later, an eight-track recorder offered thicker tape, multiple channels and the possibility of feeding short cycles through mixers and delays. The important discovery was not only that a sound could repeat. It was that repetition could be performed live: channels introduced or removed, speeds changed, delays added and several cycles allowed to rub against one another.

Seizure belongs near this eureka period, even when its sound is more amorphous than the recognizable eight-track pulse of later Dilloway recordings. The central intuition is present. A repeated sound does not become less alive because it returns. Mechanical recurrence gives the performer something equivalent to another musician, an entity with dependable behavior whose dependability can be manipulated. The loop remembers what the human body has just done and presents it back as material for confrontation.

Memory in this system is extremely short. A tape loop may preserve only a second or two, yet that second becomes an environment when repeated hundreds of times. The human mind quickly stops hearing it as an individual event and begins perceiving internal rhythm, tiny defects and relations with surrounding sounds. Dilloway’s work repeatedly exploits this perceptual transformation. What first appears to be one disgusting noise becomes a community of smaller events after sustained exposure.

The paired Seizure tracks occupy almost three quarters of Boggs Vol. Two, giving the CD a deceptive architecture. At first it seems that the album will remain inside an extended private electronics session. The two final tracks abruptly open the walls and admit rooms, audiences and the social pressure of public performance. “Live at C-Pop” and “Live at Buddha Bar” are shorter, but their compression makes them feel more violently concentrated.

C-Pop was a Detroit gallery associated with rock posters, comics, Lowbrow art and artists whose work collapsed the division between fine-art display and popular grotesquerie. A Dilloway performance there makes intuitive sense. His electronics occupy a related border. They can be approached as formally sophisticated sound art, but they retain the ridiculous bodily excess, horror imagery and handmade immediacy of punk flyers and underground comics. The work refuses the idea that experimentation becomes legitimate only after its dirt has been removed.

The live recording does not turn Dilloway into an academic performer presenting controlled electroacoustic phenomena to a seated audience. The public room increases danger. Feedback that might be manageable through headphones becomes air pressure moving through bodies and architecture. Contact-microphone sound leaves the mouth, passes through amplification, enters the room and returns to the performer carrying the room’s acoustic identity. The circuit has expanded to include walls and spectators.

This is where his method becomes theatrical without requiring a conventional stage persona. The sight of a wire hanging from the mouth gives the audience an image through which otherwise abstract sound can be understood physically. Electronics are no longer invisible signals emerging from a table. They have an apparent origin inside the performer’s face. Every harsh click and animal-like vocal texture seems connected to a small bodily action that the audience may be unable to see clearly.

The resulting uncertainty makes performance more intense. A guitarist’s gesture is legible: the hand strikes a string and sound follows. Dilloway’s mouth microphone breaks this visible contract. A tiny facial movement can create a massive electronic event, while larger physical gestures may produce almost nothing. Cause and effect become disproportionate. The performer resembles somebody connected to medical equipment whose readings have begun controlling the hospital.

“Live at Buddha Bar,” recorded in Detroit at the end of December 2002, carries a different architectural mythology. A bar is neither a protected gallery nor a dedicated concert hall. It is a social machine built from conversation, alcohol, background sound and temporary gatherings. Noise introduced into such a space must either take control of the room or become another layer within its disorder. The track’s eight-minute duration suggests concentrated action, an event forced to establish its world before the existing room can absorb it.

The name “Buddha Bar” also creates a wonderfully accidental contradiction around Dilloway’s performance. Buddha imagery suggests meditation, emptiness, attention and release from attachment; the bar suggests intoxication, appetite and social repetition. Dilloway’s noise can belong to either side. It demands concentrated listening but generates sensation strong enough to overwhelm reflective distance. The audience may enter something resembling trance, although the path runs through abrasion rather than tranquility.

The Buddha Bar performance was also part of the first Cotton Museum show, followed by a collaborative set between Dilloway and that project. This locates the recording inside the unusually fertile Michigan noise network of the period. Artists did not exist as isolated names delivering finished products to consumers. They appeared on one another’s bills, formed temporary collaborations, traded releases and transformed galleries, houses, record stores and bars into laboratories. A tiny three-inch CDr could later become the surviving record of an entire evening.

Appalling & Alive is therefore a magnificent title for the live pair. “Live” already means both occurring before an audience and possessing life; the phrase exaggerates the biological implication. The sound is appalling because it refuses refinement, but its ugliness is proof of animation. It moves, reacts and remains impossible to reduce to one stable surface. The electronic creature may be sick, but it is unmistakably living.

The original three-inch disc was limited to eighty numbered copies, an edition almost comically small beside the amount of physical energy preserved upon it. Tiny optical media became common currency in early-2000s noise because they offered a relatively inexpensive way to transform an ephemeral performance into a collectible object. The format’s limited playing time encouraged compression. Instead of presenting the complete history of a project, the disc could preserve two attacks and disappear back into mail-order circulation.

Boggs Vol. Two reverses that miniaturization. The standard compact disc joins the miniature live object to the much longer Seizure material, allowing private experimentation and public action to illuminate one another. The live tracks demonstrate how Dilloway’s method behaves under immediate pressure, while Seizure reveals the duration and concentration supporting the stage violence. One half supplies the laboratory; the other opens its door during an electrical failure.

The cover portrait completes the bridge. A long-haired performer in an ordinary blue shirt faces the camera with a wire hanging from his mouth. Reflected light turns the eyes red, producing the visual vocabulary of demonic possession through the most mundane photographic accident. The image is horrifying and funny at once. The person resembles a vampire, an injured patient, a child caught performing a stunt and an electronics technician who has inserted the wrong cable into himself.

That tension between horror and absurdity became one of Dilloway’s defining qualities. He has spoken about loving works that can operate both ways, frightening and comic simultaneously. Horror films frequently depend upon this unstable proximity: the grotesque object is terrifying because it is almost ridiculous, while the joke becomes disturbing because something genuinely threatening remains beneath it. Dilloway does not use humor to reassure the listener that the noise is harmless. Humor makes the threat stranger.

The portrait refuses the heroic industrial image of a performer dressed entirely in black, hiding behind severe typography and militarized symbols. The blue shirt is almost cheerful. The background looks domestic or casually social. Nothing prepares the viewer for the bloodlike strand hanging from the mouth except the strand itself. Extremity has entered ordinary life without changing clothes.

Boggs Vol. Two appeared during the same year Dilloway’s original period with Wolf Eyes ended. It would be tempting to describe the CD as a farewell to that era, but its earlier source dates make it more accurately a preserved foundation. The recordings show that his later solo direction did not begin only after leaving the group. The language was already alive inside the Wolf Eyes years: loops, body contact, damaged repetition, live improvisation, field-like density and the refusal to separate disgust from play.

What changed afterward was not the basic philosophy but the scale of arrangement. Later works could place field recordings, found voices, slower decay and intricate rhythmic loops inside broader compositional structures. Boggs Vol. Two remains closer to exposed wiring. Its ideas have not yet been enclosed inside elaborate architecture. One can hear the current before the walls are built around it.

That rawness makes the disc more than a historical curiosity for listeners who discovered Dilloway through Modern Jester. It reveals that his mature subtlety did not emerge from rejecting harsh noise. It came from listening more closely to what harsh noise was already doing. Saturation contained rhythm. Feedback contained melody-like contour. Bodily noise contained characterization. Equipment failure contained narrative. The later albums did not tame these materials; they allowed their concealed information more space to become audible.

The album also demonstrates the importance of self-archiving in underground music. Dilloway ran Hanson while producing and performing the material, allowing him to preserve work that a conventional label might have treated as too marginal, too long, too poorly documented or too closely related to other obscure editions. By gathering the recordings himself, he retained the authority to decide that an eighty-copy three-inch disc and a solo-series CDr belonged together.

Such decisions eventually create history. Scenes appear chaotic while they are happening because nobody knows which objects future listeners will consider central. A cassette duplicated for thirty people may contain the first clear appearance of an artist’s lifelong method. A badly recorded bar performance may explain how a studio language functioned physically. An apparently minor reissue can connect those fragments before the original owners, venues and equipment disappear.

Boggs Vol. Two performs that connection with no scholarly apparatus and no attempt to clean the material into respectability. The title remains unexplained. The cover remains grotesquely casual. The MiniDisc recordings retain their roughness. The music is not presented as a missing masterpiece requiring museum restoration. It is simply placed back into circulation with enough physical permanence to outlive the earlier editions.

That modesty is appropriate because Dilloway’s work has always understood that the smallest mechanism can generate a disproportionately large psychological space. A few inches of tape can hold a repeating world. A contact microphone can turn one mouth into an entire damaged population. Four live recordings can show a musician moving between private experiment, group identity and public physical performance.

The album closes without resolving whether the system was mastered or merely survived. That uncertainty is its real continuity with Dilloway’s later work. His machines never become obedient servants, and the human being never disappears completely into abstraction. Each side threatens the other. Electronics magnify the body until it becomes monstrous; bodily irregularity prevents electronics from becoming sterile.

Boggs Vol. Two is therefore not a collection of early scraps placed beside two bonus live tracks. It is a portrait of artistic possession. Dilloway seizes sound, records it and sends it through machines, but the machines return the action altered enough to seize him in response. The listener enters somewhere downstream, receiving the accumulated disturbance through another set of speakers, another room and another nervous system.

The seizure continues because it was recorded. The mouth remains connected. The red eyes remain lit by the camera. A tiny Detroit performance survives inside a compact disc, then inside a FLAC archive, waiting for another room in which to become appalling and alive again.