Christian Clozier - 1992 - Quasars / Markarian 205

 

Le Chant Du Monde – LDC 2781090  350.78MB FLAC

Space-themed electronic music often invites the listener to imagine a journey away from Earth. Christian Clozier’s Quasars / Markarian 205 reverses that familiar movement. It does not climb aboard a spacecraft, look through a window and provide a soundtrack for distant planets. The two suites seem to place the listener inside immense systems of radiation, rotation and unstable energy, removing the secure human viewpoint from which the universe can be admired at a comfortable distance. This is not decorative cosmic ambience. It is electroacoustic music in which matter itself appears electrically charged, continually changing shape before it can be named.

The album was issued on CD in 1992, but its two compositions belong to 1980 and 1981, a particularly rich period for the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges. Clozier had co-founded the GMEB with Françoise Barrière in 1970 and helped turn Bourges into one of the world’s essential centers for electroacoustic creation, performance, education and international exchange. His role extended beyond composing individual works. He developed studios, instruments and systems for projecting sound through space, treating diffusion as an interpretive act rather than simple amplification. That history is audible throughout these pieces. Sounds do not merely occur in succession. They seem to approach, withdraw, widen, divide and pass through one another in an imagined architecture.

Quasars unfolds across six movements lasting approximately forty-six minutes. Its title refers to objects that can appear almost star-like from Earth while releasing extraordinary quantities of energy from the centers of remote galaxies. That contradiction between tiny visible point and unimaginable force becomes the suite’s governing idea. Clozier repeatedly constructs sounds that seem compact at first, then expand into turbulent fields. A small pulse acquires a halo of vibration. A narrow electronic tone splits into several layers. A low current begins as background pressure and gradually changes the scale of everything above it.

The music was realized through the analog resources of the Bourges studio Charybde, whose interconnected equipment allowed Clozier to build evolving electronic processes rather than merely record a series of isolated gestures. Analog modulation is central to the suite’s personality. Tones bend, beat against one another and generate secondary movements that feel partly composed and partly released from the behavior of the machinery. The voltage never appears entirely domesticated. Clozier establishes conditions, opens pathways and directs the resulting energy, but he also permits the electronic material to retain its own instability.

This gives Quasars a physical vitality missing from much electronic music built around perfectly sustained tones. Its signals have surfaces. They rasp, shimmer, buckle, flare and produce interference. Even the more spacious passages remain active at the edges, where faint movements suggest that the apparent silence is densely inhabited. Clozier’s cosmos is not an empty black background dotted with picturesque stars. It is crowded with radiation and overlapping fields whose activity exceeds the listener’s ability to observe everything at once.

The first movement establishes the album’s language through accumulating layers and sudden alterations of scale. Broad tones create a sense of open distance, but sharper signals repeatedly puncture that distance, making the space feel electrical rather than peaceful. Events do not form a conventional melody, yet they possess direction. One sound presses against another until their combined tension produces a change, after which a new arrangement begins to gather. The movement behaves less like a sequence of objects than a chain reaction.

The shorter second movement concentrates that energy. Pulsation becomes more pronounced, but it never settles into a dependable mechanical rhythm. Clozier uses repetition as a source of instability. Each recurrence arrives inside a slightly changed environment, making the listener aware that the apparent pattern is being continuously altered. The movement suggests rotation without presenting a fixed orbit. Its cycles wobble, accelerate or dissolve into surrounding frequencies.

By the third and fourth movements, the suite has become increasingly theatrical. Dense eruptions are answered by wider areas of suspended sound, and the contrast creates the impression of enormous distances opening inside the composition. Clozier does not rely upon sampled rockets, astronomical narration or familiar science-fiction effects. His imagery arises from changes in sonic mass. A concentrated burst can seem like an object because it has weight and boundaries; when those boundaries disintegrate, the same material becomes atmosphere.

The fifth movement is especially revealing of Clozier’s ability to balance raw electronic power with precision. Its gestures can be abrupt, but they are never randomly placed. Each interruption changes the meaning of the texture surrounding it. A bright sound may make the lower field appear suddenly deeper; a low impact can pull a previously weightless sequence toward the ground. The composition is constantly recalibrating the listener’s imaginary sense of size.

The final movement does not resolve the suite through a comforting return or grand concluding chord. Instead, it carries the accumulated vocabulary into another region of activity, allowing sequences, flashes and deep currents to coexist before the structure closes. The ending feels less like arriving at the edge of the universe than losing contact with a transmission that continues beyond the recording. Quasars does not present a completed astronomical picture. It allows a vast process to become temporarily audible.

This relationship between sound and real space was fundamental to the composition’s public life. Quasars was presented in a major outdoor concert at the Nançay radio telescope in 1981. The setting could hardly have been more appropriate. A radio telescope receives forms of activity that human senses cannot perceive directly, translating distant radiation into information. Clozier’s studio performs a related operation, though artistically rather than scientifically. It produces an audible universe from voltages, modulation and electronic relationships, while the concert system enlarges that universe across an actual landscape.

Markarian 205 follows as a more compact three-movement suite lasting slightly over twenty-three minutes. Its title identifies a specific quasar appearing near the spiral galaxy NGC 4319 when viewed from Earth. The two objects look like neighbors in a flat astronomical image, yet they are separated by an enormous distance. Their apparent relationship is created by perspective. This phenomenon supplies a powerful model for electroacoustic composition, where sounds recorded or generated at unrelated times can be placed beside one another and perceived as inhabiting one coherent space.

The first movement of Markarian 205 feels more concentrated and purposeful than the opening of Quasars. Rather than gradually revealing a broad cosmos, it establishes a field whose elements already seem caught in a gravitational relationship. Sounds circle, overlap and briefly align before separating. Clozier’s electronic tones frequently possess a vocal or animal-like animation without becoming obvious imitations. The equipment seems to breathe, call and react, turning the studio into an ecology of artificial organisms.

The second movement deepens the work’s sense of perspective. Foreground events appear sharply defined against more distant electronic layers, but the hierarchy refuses to remain stable. A sound initially perceived as background may expand until it dominates the field, while a prominent signal can retreat into a faint residue. This continual reversal recalls the visual puzzle of Markarian 205 and NGC 4319. Apparent closeness does not establish actual relationship, and apparent distance can conceal enormous power.

The dedication to Françoise Barrière adds a more intimate current beneath the astronomical imagery. Barrière was Clozier’s creative and institutional partner throughout the life of the Bourges center, a composer whose own work developed a distinct electroacoustic language. Markarian 205 can consequently be heard as both cosmic construction and private address. The quasar is a distant source whose energy survives the journey toward another observer. A dedication operates similarly. Something created within one consciousness is projected outward in the hope that another person will receive it.

The final movement draws these scales together. Its electronic figures can feel microscopic, like electrical particles or nervous impulses, while the surrounding resonance makes them seem to inhabit an astronomical expanse. Clozier does not choose between the cellular and the cosmic because electronic sound can imply both simultaneously. A waveform has no fixed visible size. Through frequency, volume and spatial placement, the smallest circuit can produce the impression of planetary motion.

The cover art belongs to a wonderfully direct tradition of early electronic and progressive records imagining outer space. Clozier’s name is printed in monumental white lettering above a lunar landscape, a large greenish planet and one intensely shining star. A solitary figure stands near an instrument or antenna, dwarfed by the scene. The image may initially appear more literal than the music, yet it expresses the same displacement of human scale. The observer is present, but the universe occupies nearly everything.

The phrase “Chrysopée Électronique-Bourges” appears beneath the landscape. Chrysopée refers to the alchemical production of gold, an apt name for a series devoted to works made in the Bourges studios. Electroacoustic composition transforms ordinary electrical activity, recorded matter and technical procedure into another order of experience. Clozier’s alchemy does not conceal the machinery. The grain of analog synthesis, modulation and tape remains audible, just as the physical reactions of an alchemical laboratory would leave heat, residue and altered material behind.

The CD also represents an important act of preservation. Quasars had originally appeared as an LP in 1981, but the 1992 edition joined it with Markarian 205 and allowed both suites to occupy an uninterrupted seventy-minute arc. The combination reveals how quickly Clozier could reconsider the same general territory. Quasars is expansive, episodic and outward-facing, designed to radiate across a large imagined or physical space. Markarian 205 is tighter and more relational, concerned with bodies that appear connected because of the observer’s position.

Neither composition has aged into a museum display of obsolete technology. Their analog identity remains obvious, but the equipment’s limitations contribute to the music’s emotional force. The signals are not infinitely clean or effortlessly reproducible. They carry fluctuations, friction and the sense that physical circuitry is being pushed into unusually expressive behavior. The works remind us that electronic music did not begin as the selection of finished sounds from a menu. Each timbre had to be created, connected, transformed, tested and placed into motion.

Quasars / Markarian 205 is therefore not simply an album about space. It is about the ability of sound to manufacture space where none physically exists. Two loudspeakers become a field of enormous depth. A pulse becomes a moving object. Modulation becomes weather. Distance becomes a compositional instrument. Clozier takes invisible electrical relationships and gives them apparent dimension without forcing them to resemble conventional music.

The greatest pleasure of the album lies in hearing those dimensions continually rearrange themselves. Its universe is never reduced to one sustained drone or one fashionable image of cosmic serenity. It flashes, convulses, rotates and reorganizes. The listener is not asked to admire a static model from outside. We are placed within a system whose full scale remains inaccessible, receiving only the portions our temporary position allows us to hear.

Elliott Sharp, Fred Chalenor, Henry Franzoni - 1995 - Boodlers

Cavity Search – CSR 18  255.96MB FLAC

 Boodlers begins with three musicians entering a room, but it does not remain a document of what happened there. The basic performances were recorded live to DAT at Baby Monster in New York, after which Elliott Sharp digitally edited and remixed the material at his Studio zOaR. That combination is central to the album’s identity. Fred Chalenor’s bass and Henry Franzoni’s drums supply the unstable physical chemistry of musicians responding in real time, while Sharp’s guitar, tenor saxophone and computer work allow the performances to be cut open, rearranged and occasionally returned in altered shapes. Improvisation becomes raw material without losing the friction of the original encounter.

The trio’s name supplies the first clue to its humor. A “boodler” is an old American term for a political grafter, someone participating in bribery, patronage or the distribution of illicit money. Nearly every track title continues the language of politics, commerce or corrupt exchange: “Acid-Jazz Payback,” “Green Party,” “Buckshot,” “Boodlerama” and “Cache Cow.” The album never develops this into a literal political program, but the titles make its playful distrust of fashionable categories and respectable institutions clear. Even the music seems to operate through unauthorized transactions. Rhythms are borrowed and damaged, jazz gestures are passed through rock amplification, and live playing is fed into digital machinery that returns it carrying a different identity.
Sharp was an ideal musician to bring into Fred Chalenor and Henry Franzoni’s long-running partnership. Chalenor and Franzoni had played together in various forms since the 1970s, most notably in Face Ditch and later Caveman Shoestore. Their connection was not simply the conventional relationship of bassist supporting drummer. They had developed a shared rhythmic language built from abrupt turns, crooked meters, heavy grooves and the ability to change direction without stopping to announce the new destination. Sharp enters that language as both provocateur and engineer. His guitar can lock into the rhythm section’s momentum, cut across it with hard angular figures or abandon rock articulation for metallic scraping and electronic grain. His tenor saxophone introduces another physical register, able to behave as melody, rhythmic punctuation or a rough-edged competing voice.
“Acid-Jazz Payback” immediately tests the fashionable language of its moment. By 1995, acid jazz had become a recognizable mixture of funk rhythm, jazz reference, dance-floor polish and cosmopolitan cool. Boodlers retain the promise of groove but remove the polish that would make it useful as lifestyle music. Chalenor and Franzoni establish movement without granting the listener a smooth, dependable pocket. Sharp’s lines repeatedly roughen the surface, turning the track into a revenge fantasy against jazz reduced to tasteful atmosphere. The title’s “payback” may be humorous, but the performance does sound as though improvisation has returned to collect a debt from a style that borrowed its vocabulary while sanding away much of its danger.
Chalenor is crucial to the piece because he does not treat bass as neutral flooring. His playing is thick, active and capable of redirecting the group through a small shift of emphasis. Franzoni answers with percussion that can suggest funk for a few seconds before opening into freer motion. Sharp does not float above them as a featured soloist. He enters the mechanism, sometimes reinforcing it and sometimes throwing irregular objects into its gears. The result is recognizably rhythmic but resistant to passive consumption.
“Green Party” lasts less than two minutes and behaves like a compressed interruption. The title may suggest environmental politics, money or simply the color of American currency, but the music is too brief to establish a stable platform. It demonstrates how effectively the trio can work in miniature after the extended opening. Ideas arrive, collide and disappear before any one of them can become the piece’s official policy. The abrupt scale change also prevents the album from settling into the expectation that every improvisation must become a long-form excursion.
“Buckshot” returns to a larger field. A contemporary review observed that the three musicians sometimes appear to be improvising independently, each operating within his own terrain, while the total performance somehow remains coherent. That description identifies one of the album’s greatest strengths. Unity does not require constant agreement. Sharp, Chalenor and Franzoni can pursue separate trajectories because they are listening not only for opportunities to imitate one another but for ways their differences might create a larger structure.
The title describes the piece accurately. Buckshot disperses rather than following a single line. Individual attacks spread across the stereo field, and the listener must decide whether to follow the bass, percussion or Sharp’s rapidly changing instrumental gestures. The performance remains cohesive because the musicians share an instinct for density. When one player occupies more space, another can reduce activity or move into a different register. What sounds initially like collision gradually reveals itself as traffic managed without signs.
“Cambionics” introduces the album’s most obvious transformation through computer processing. A cambion, in folklore, is a hybrid offspring joining human and demonic parentage; “Cambionics” sounds like an invented science devoted to producing such crossings. Whatever Sharp intended by the title, the music’s method is hybridization. The trio remains audible, but live instrumental identities are stretched, layered or altered until their origins become uncertain. Drums no longer behave exclusively as percussion, guitar loses the familiar outline of plucked strings, and ensemble interaction becomes something that can occur after the musicians have finished playing.
This use of computer editing does not replace improvisation with laboratory perfection. Sharp preserves the nervous movement of the trio while making the recording itself an additional performer. The computer remembers, repeats and mutates pieces of the session. Instead of documenting one irreversible passage through time, the track permits sounds to encounter distorted versions of their own past. The result belongs equally to free improvisation and electroacoustic composition, though it carries the dirt, humor and bodily force that those terms can sometimes leave out.
The twenty-minute “Boodlerama” forms the album’s sprawling center of gravity. Its title suggests a panoramic exhibition of the group’s methods, and the performance moves through multiple territories without attempting to disguise the transitions as conventional composition. Groove, psychedelic drift, abstract texture, free-jazz agitation and computer-treated sound appear as temporary districts inside one unstable city. The length allows small ideas to become environments, but it also gives the trio room to abandon them before they harden into routines.
“Boodlerama” is where the history between Chalenor and Franzoni becomes especially valuable. Long improvisations often reveal whether a rhythm section merely accompanies adventurous playing or possesses an independent imagination. These two can support Sharp without waiting for instructions, but they can also initiate changes and force him to respond. Chalenor’s bass may provide a distorted central mass, then suddenly become wiry and mobile. Franzoni can move from propulsion toward scattered percussion without making the music sound emptied out. Sharp alternates between being the trio’s sharpest edge and another fragment inside its collective machinery.
The piece also explains why descriptions of Boodlers vary so widely. The group can be called avant-jazz, experimental rock, free improvisation, psychedelic music or computer-processed noise, and each description will be temporarily correct. The problem begins when any one label is expected to govern the entire performance. Boodlers do not fuse genres into a polished new product. They allow incompatible methods to remain visible while discovering how quickly the musicians can travel among them.
“Cache Cow” closes the album with another compressed joke. The title replaces the “cash” in cash cow with the computer memory term “cache,” joining commerce to data storage. It is an appropriate conclusion for music that began as a live event and was then stored, edited and reconfigured digitally. The spontaneous performance has become information that can be retrieved and transformed, yet the short track refuses to inflate that process into technological solemnity. The album leaves with a grin, carrying its accumulated noise away before the listener can decide whether a final grand statement is coming.
Boodlers appeared at a fertile midpoint in 1990s experimental music. Alternative rock had created a larger audience for dissonance and unconventional instrumental sound, acid jazz and electronic dance culture were reorganizing older grooves, and increasingly accessible digital tools were changing what could happen after a studio performance. Sharp, Chalenor and Franzoni occupy all of these developments without submitting fully to any of them. They can sound like a particularly damaged power trio, a free-jazz unit, a mutant funk band or a computer-composition workshop, sometimes within the same passage.
The album’s production preserves this ambiguity. Recording live to DAT captures the clarity and immediacy of the players’ reactions, while Sharp’s later intervention rejects the idea that a live improvisation must be protected as a sacred, untouched event. Editing becomes another form of improvisation performed at a different speed. In the studio, Sharp can answer a gesture days or weeks after Chalenor and Franzoni originally made it, constructing new relationships that were unavailable in the room.
There is an important generosity inside this method. Although Sharp was the most internationally recognizable name and controlled the later computer work, the album never reduces Chalenor and Franzoni to anonymous source material. Their rhythmic personalities survive every transformation. The computer does not erase the human encounter; it reveals further possibilities concealed within it. This is why the record feels less like an Elliott Sharp solo project with accompaniment than the beginning of an actual group. Boodlers would continue and release Counter Fit two years later, expanding the concept rather than treating this meeting as a disposable session.
The record’s humor should not be underestimated either. Experimental music is frequently presented as though seriousness requires solemnity, but Boodlers understand that complexity can laugh at itself. The titles puncture intellectual grandeur, while the playing repeatedly turns apparent disorder into a sudden groove or dismantles a successful pattern just when it begins sounding impressive. The musicians do not trivialize their abilities. They refuse to treat virtuosity as a formal ceremony.
Boodlers ultimately documents three different relationships to instability. Sharp approaches it through fractured instrumental language, systems, processing and the pleasure of transforming known sounds. Chalenor approaches it through bass lines that can anchor a passage while quietly moving its foundations. Franzoni approaches it through percussion that recognizes rhythm as a field of possibilities rather than a fixed grid. Their methods overlap without becoming identical.
The album is therefore not chaotic in the sense of lacking order. It contains several kinds of order competing, cooperating and occasionally bribing one another. Every track proposes a different temporary government, from the corrupted dance floor of “Acid-Jazz Payback” to the dispersed negotiations of “Buckshot,” the digital hybrid of “Cambionics” and the unruly twenty-minute municipality of “Boodlerama.” Nothing remains in power for long. That may be the boodlers’ real platform: every structure is provisional, every rhythm open to revision, and every apparently stable system already contains the material of its next mutation.

Lap Dancer - 2005 - Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion CDr

Troniks – TRO-196  264.36MB FLAC

Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion arrives wrapped in the imagery of erotic entertainment, but its atmosphere has little of the smooth choreography, controlled fantasy or reassuring distance normally associated with the strip-club transaction. Lap Dancer takes a setting built around looking and turns it into a hostile acoustic enclosure. The cover photograph offers exposed flesh, bent posture and the presence of another woman watching from behind, yet its grainy reproduction prevents the scene from becoming polished pornography. The image feels overheated, cramped and almost documentary, as though the glamour promised by the project name has already begun to decay. Jamie Grefe’s sound performs a similar operation. The fantasy remains visible, but its machinery has been dragged into the foreground.

Lap Dancer was one of those briefly prolific mid-2000s noise projects whose discography appeared across tiny labels, limited CDrs, files, cassettes and collaborations before becoming difficult to reconstruct. Grefe worked with microphones, pedals, laptop processing, shortwave radio, field recordings and ordinary objects, a flexible collection of tools that allowed harsh noise to remain attached to physical environments. Night Rituals does not feel like an exercise in generating maximum distortion from an anonymous electronic box. Its surfaces seem crowded with contact, movement and objects being pushed beyond their intended functions. Sounds scrape, smear and buckle. Feedback is not merely sustained but manipulated like resistant material.

The album’s title joins ceremony to anatomy. A ritual normally gives repetition an agreed meaning: gestures occur in a particular order, objects receive designated functions, and participants understand that the performance temporarily separates sacred time from everyday life. “Night rituals” might suggest nightlife itself, the repeated routines of dressing, entering the club, paying, watching and returning home. The addition of “gaping secretion” destroys any possibility of elegance. The human body is reduced to an opening and the fluids it involuntarily produces. Fantasy is punctured by biology. What was presented as a controlled surface becomes porous, leaking and impossible to contain.

Grefe’s noise occupies that rupture between presentation and physical reality. Dense electronic pressure can initially resemble a single continuous mass, but the surface is constantly being interrupted by smaller abrasions, high-frequency squeals, muffled impact and unstable low-end movement. The recording seems less interested in building one perfect wall than in worrying at the wall’s weak points. Layers rub against one another until they generate new textures. A signal becomes overloaded, splits apart and exposes another current beneath it. The sound feels bodily not because it clearly imitates organs or fluids, but because it behaves like matter under stress.

The name Lap Dancer adds an important tension. A lap dance is a performance of intimacy governed by rules, money and a fixed duration. Physical closeness is offered while emotional and contractual distance remain in force. Noise creates a comparable contradiction. It can feel invasive and intensely intimate, entering the ear and vibrating through the body, yet the source remains remote and impersonal. The listener receives physical sensation without reciprocal contact. Night Rituals magnifies this imbalance. Its sound presses close, sometimes almost obliterating the space between recording and listener, but it never offers the reassurance of human communication.

This makes the erotic imagery more complicated than simple provocation. The cover invites looking, while the music makes passive observation difficult. One cannot remain a detached customer comfortably consuming the scene. Harsh noise redirects attention from the photographed bodies toward the conditions of looking itself: repetition, fixation, concealment, payment, fantasy and the conversion of another person into a surface carrying private desire. Yet the recording does not provide a moral lecture about that process. It is implicated in the same fascination it disturbs. The project name and title deliberately seek the charge of sexual imagery, even as the sound corrodes its glamour.

That unresolved position belongs to much of the noise underground surrounding Troniks during this period. Sexual extremity, horror-film imagery, medical language and damaged bodies circulated as a visual vocabulary capable of signaling that a release existed beyond respectable cultural limits. Sometimes this produced little more than adolescent shock tactics. At its best, however, it created a conflict between attraction and disgust that the sound could deepen rather than merely illustrate. Night Rituals succeeds because its imagery and audio share the same unstable texture. Neither offers a clean fantasy. Everything appears worn, processed and slightly contaminated.

The album also benefits from Grefe’s sense of movement. Even at its most saturated, the noise does not become entirely motionless. Frequencies lean into one another, recede and return at altered angles. Microphone handling and object-based sound give the impression that something is physically occurring behind the electronic treatment. The source may no longer be identifiable, but effort remains audible. This is crucial. Without that sensation of action, the record’s bodily language would become empty decoration. Instead, the electronics feel touched, pressured and repeatedly forced through narrow openings.

There are moments when the density almost acquires rhythm, not through a conventional beat but through recurring surges and contractions. Pressure accumulates, briefly loosens and then closes again. This gives the music a respiratory quality, although it resembles compromised breathing more than calm inhalation. The title’s fixation upon openings and secretions returns here in abstract form. Sound enters, exits, clogs and spills. The recording becomes an imaginary body whose internal processes have been amplified until they fill the entire room.

The low fidelity of the presentation strengthens this effect. Cleaner production might separate every layer and turn the album into a display of technical control. Here the dirt joins the sounds together. Edges blur, saturation conceals origins and the recording medium becomes another layer of abrasion. This is not carelessness. The obscurity forces attention toward texture rather than equipment identification. The listener hears friction before hearing a specific device.

Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion belongs to a moment when CDr noise could appear quickly, travel through mail-order networks and vanish before a stable public history formed around it. Its physical modesty is part of the appeal. A cheaply reproduced disc and a grainy photograph contain an environment far larger and more oppressive than the object suggests. The release does not require elaborate packaging or a manifesto because its title, image and sound immediately establish a sealed internal logic.

What remains most compelling is the album’s refusal to choose between seduction and repulsion. It uses erotic display but makes the experience physically abrasive. It promises ritual but delivers instability. It invokes the body while dissolving recognizable bodily identity into electrical pressure. The dancer remains visible on the cover, yet inside the recording there is no stable performer to watch, only movement, friction and transformed matter.

Lap Dancer does not provide nightlife music, pornography in sound or a simple exercise in harshness. Night Rituals is closer to the noise left after fantasy has been dismantled: overheated circuitry, bodily residue, damaged surfaces and the uncomfortable awareness that desire is never as clean as the images created to sell it. The performance ends, the room empties and the lighting comes up, revealing every stain the darkness had temporarily made beautiful.

 

Incapacitants / Grassa Dato - 2013 - Orujo & Sake CDr

Mattoid Records – mr-008  411.38MB FLAC

 Orujo & Sake begins with an inspired act of cultural bartending. Orujo is the powerful pomace spirit associated with northern Spain, distilled from the remains of grapes after winemaking; sake carries an entirely different history of fermentation, ceremony and Japanese social life. Bringing the two together could produce refinement, poisoning or some unpredictable third condition. Incapacitants and Grassa Dato choose the third. Their release is structured like an international drinking session in three stages: one serving from Japan, one from Spain, and a final collaborative mixture whose title, “Tremendous Drunkenness,” announces that moderation has already left the building.

The premise has humor, but it also describes the physical behavior of the music. Intoxication changes balance, distance, coordination and confidence. Familiar spaces begin leaning at irrational angles. A person may become extraordinarily expressive while losing the ability to regulate expression. Harsh noise can operate through the same contradiction. Its performers manipulate sound with intense concentration while producing a surface that appears to be collapsing beyond anyone’s control. Orujo & Sake thrives inside this uncertainty. Every surge feels deliberate and unstable at once.
Incapacitants open with “Sake For Sake’s Sake,” nearly twenty minutes of the kind of densely mobile noise that made Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai one of Japan’s defining harsh-noise duos. Incapacitants began as Mikawa’s solo project in Osaka in 1981, later becoming the familiar duo after Kosakai joined him in Tokyo. Their stated pursuit of “pure noise” never resulted in cold abstraction. The electronics remain inseparable from bodily effort, comic exaggeration and the sensation of two personalities wrestling with their equipment and one another.
That human presence is crucial to “Sake For Sake’s Sake.” The piece does not resemble a machine left running unattended. Its feedback masses twitch, buckle and rush forward with the responsiveness of live improvisation. Layers do not simply accumulate into a fixed wall. They crowd, interrupt and redirect one another. High frequencies streak across heavier electronic turbulence; sudden contractions expose deeper textures before the full pressure returns. Even without conventional rhythm, the duo generates momentum through repeated changes in density.
The title is characteristic Incapacitants wordplay, both circular and absolutely sincere. Sake exists here for its own sake, just as noise needs no narrative justification outside the experience of producing and receiving it. The phrase rejects the need to translate harsh noise into a respectable concept. The sound is not pretending to represent industrial collapse, psychological trauma or cosmic annihilation, though listeners may imagine all three. Noise is enough. Sake is poured because sake is there.
This apparent simplicity conceals decades of shared technique. Mikawa and Kosakai know how to let frequencies collide without reducing the result to uniform saturation. Their work can feel almost slapstick in its excess, yet it requires acute sensitivity to timing. One performer increases pressure while the other introduces a destabilizing signal; a texture begins to settle and is immediately shoved sideways. The physical comedy visible in their performances survives in the audio. The sound lurches, overreaches and somehow remains standing.
Grassa Dato’s “Orujo Traidor” answers with a different strain of intoxication. Grassa Dato was a prolific Madrid-based project working across noise, industrial sound and power electronics, and the piece has the concentrated character of a smaller operation confronting an internationally established duo without attempting to imitate it. Rather than copying the frantic conversational movement of Incapacitants, Grassa Dato builds its own contaminated environment.
“Orujo Traidor” translates as “treacherous orujo,” an excellent description of alcohol that appears manageable before revealing its real strength. The track behaves similarly. Its textures invite close attention, but the pressure gradually changes the listener’s sense of proportion. What initially seems like background grain may swell into the dominant force; narrower frequencies emerge from the surrounding abrasion and begin cutting across it. The piece is not simply quieter or more restrained than Incapacitants. Its hostility is organized differently.
Where the Japanese duo often give the impression of sound being created through continuous physical argument, Grassa Dato suggests an enclosure becoming progressively less safe. The electronics feel environmental, as though the air in the room has acquired texture. Distortion spreads across the available space rather than arriving only as a sequence of attacks. This makes “Orujo Traidor” an effective central track. It does not try to defeat the opening piece through greater loudness. It changes the drinking conditions.
The difference also demonstrates why international split releases have been so important to noise culture. They do more than place two names on one object. They allow scenes with different histories, resources and local pressures to touch. Incapacitants carried more than thirty years of Japanese noise practice into the release, while Grassa Dato represented an active Spanish DIY network centered on small editions, performances and independent labels. The pairing creates a correspondence between generations without requiring either participant to surrender identity.
The final “Orujo & Sake: Tremendous Drunkenness” joins all three performers for more than twenty-six minutes. It is the release’s destination and its controlled accident. Collaboration in harsh noise can easily become a matter of addition, with each participant contributing another layer until individuality disappears inside indiscriminate volume. This piece works because the combined material continues to move. The sounds do not merely occupy the same frequency field; they compete for space, forcing the total mass to mutate.
At times the collaboration suggests the hyperactive feedback language associated with Incapacitants. Elsewhere, broader and dirtier textures pull the piece toward Grassa Dato’s heavier atmospheric pressure. Neither tendency remains dominant for long. The track staggers between them, occasionally appearing to stabilize before another electronic eruption knocks the arrangement out of alignment. Its drunkenness is not decorative. The composition repeatedly loses and recovers its center of gravity.
Yet the word “tremendous” also carries celebration. This is not a grim depiction of addiction or collapse. The noise possesses exuberance, the pleasure of artists discovering that their separate methods can produce a fourth personality when combined. Harsh noise is often described through punishment, violence and endurance, but Orujo & Sake makes a strong case for noise as social pleasure. It is loud because the encounter is exciting. It overflows because nobody wishes to be the first person to stop pouring.
The handmade A5 package extends this sense of exchange. Mattoid Records was a Madrid DIY operation devoted to extreme noise and power electronics, and its limited edition of 200 copies turned the recording into something closer to a mailed art object than an ordinary commercial release. The large handmade format suits music built around contact between distant participants. It gives the collaboration a physical table around which the drinks, cables and overloaded signals can be arranged.
The cover’s collision of Japanese and Spanish drinking references presents the album with far more humor than the forbidding monochrome severity common to harsh-noise packaging. That humor should not be mistaken for a lack of seriousness. Incapacitants have always demonstrated that complete commitment to noise can coexist with absurdity, and Grassa Dato meets them on that terrain. The ridiculous title frees the sound from performing permanent menace. Listeners can experience its intensity without pretending that every blast of feedback is a manifesto announcing the death of civilization.
Orujo & Sake therefore succeeds as a split, a collaboration and a small document of noise’s international social network. Its three tracks form a clear progression: Incapacitants introduce their wildly reactive electronic language, Grassa Dato answers with a treacherous Spanish concentration, and the collaboration combines them into a prolonged loss of balance. The artists do not dissolve cultural differences into an imaginary universal style. They place those differences in contact and amplify the friction.
Anyone who attended Grassa Dato performances, followed the Madrid scene surrounding Mattoid Records or knows how the collaborative recording was assembled is encouraged to add those details. The surviving release gives us the sound and the handmade object, but the people, rooms, equipment and exchanges surrounding it remain another layer of the history.
By the end, orujo and sake have ceased to be separate drinks. They have become one unstable current passing through three bodies and an impossible quantity of electronics. The room spins, feedback pours over the rim, and the distinction between mastery and collapse becomes wonderfully irrelevant. This is noise for noise’s sake, but also company for company’s sake: an hour of international hospitality conducted at a volume capable of rearranging the furniture.

Hymenal Opening - 2019 - Red Hymen

Filth And Violence – none  165.58MB FLAC

Red Hymen begins its assault before the disc is played. Hymenal Opening is one of those project names that seems designed to make language itself wince: clinical but pornographic, anatomical but actively invasive, describing both a part of the body and the act of crossing it. The album title tightens that mechanism further. Red Hymen does not merely suggest sex, blood or virginity. It gathers them into a compact fetish-symbol that carries centuries of cultural superstition about purity, proof, possession and female sexual value. The real hymen is variable, elastic tissue whose appearance cannot establish whether somebody has had intercourse, but the myth surrounding it has always been more socially powerful than the anatomy. The project knowingly enters that mythology’s most overheated chamber, where blood becomes supposed evidence, penetration becomes conquest and a woman’s body becomes a document that men imagine themselves qualified to inspect, certify or destroy.

That is already more disturbing than ordinary pornographic shock. A title invoking breasts, genitals or intercourse can remain within the familiar vocabulary of appetite. Red Hymen invokes a threshold. It imagines the instant at which one condition is supposedly converted into another: innocence into experience, closure into entry, ownership into transfer, intactness into damage. None of those transformations is medically dependable, yet they remain deeply embedded in sexual storytelling. Hymenal Opening exploits the false idea precisely because false ideas can govern desire more powerfully than facts. The album does not correct the myth. It crawls inside it and begins amplifying.

The cover avoids the obvious route of an anatomical close-up. Instead, it presents a red-saturated collage of commercial sexuality and urban nocturnal debris. Women stand outside adult entertainment venues; cowboy and nightclub signs glow through the artificial color; a cartoon cowgirl occupies one torn section; a man poses beside an inflatable adult doll; another face appears under harsh negative processing; and near the center sits a painted clown face with the disturbing sweetness of damaged carnival imagery. The entire composition resembles a stack of photographs collected during a feverish walk through red-light districts, tourist traps, sex shops and amusement spaces, then torn apart and reassembled after the distinction between adult fantasy and childish spectacle has become dangerously unstable.

Red unifies everything without truly making it coherent. It is neon, blood, cosmetics, warning light, darkroom illumination and the color used to sell danger safely. Under this monochromatic wash, unrelated bodies and commodities begin to inhabit one circulatory system. The dancers, doll, cartoon figure, customer, clown and storefronts become pieces of one organism devoted to looking, purchasing and being looked at. Nothing retains an ordinary private life. Every figure has become display.

That is the visual economy the music enters. Hymenal Opening works in raw harsh noise and power electronics, a vocabulary of overloaded signals, abrasive feedback, buried vocal material and industrial pressure. The sound does not offer the polished fantasy suggested by commercial sexual imagery. It supplies the electricity behind the sign, the failing ventilation system, the grime beneath the flooring and the psychic residue left after the customers have gone home. The record’s obscenity is not luxurious. It is cheap, repetitive, cramped and overheated.

This distinction matters because sexual transgression in underground music can easily become another decorative genre marker. A provocative photograph, a few explicit titles and anonymous distortion are enough to signal forbidden territory without actually exploring anything. Red Hymen is more effective when its noise makes the language feel physically unpleasant rather than merely naughty. Distortion does not eroticize the scenarios into glamorous taboo. It removes personal detail, collapses voices into matter and makes each fantasy sound like machinery grinding against the person expected to sustain it.

The five titles are central to the album’s architecture. They do not resemble concise thematic labels such as “Submission,” “Lust” or “Pain.” They are grotesque miniature narratives, the sort of sentences that might be heard as boast, gossip, pornographic anecdote or malicious rumor. “On The Way To The Hospital, I Showed The Guy In The Ambulance Her Asshole And Asked If He Wanted To Fuck It” runs for more than nine minutes. “Toxic Cock On Your Red Wig” compresses contamination, costume and sexual threat into six words. “A Pimp Had Her Teeth Removed So She Could Give Better Blowjobs” presents mutilation as commercial improvement. “Licking Sweaty Balls And Taking It Up The Ass At The Bus Station” relocates sex into an exposed transit space. “Rebound Fuck Whore And Her Happy Relationship” closes with an insult aimed not only at a sexual act but at the possibility of emotional recovery afterward.

These are not descriptions of mutual intimacy. Even where consent might theoretically exist, the language destroys its visibility. The people being described are reduced to openings, services, wigs, mouths and humiliating stories. The first track apparently places an incapacitated or injured woman inside an ambulance while another person offers access to her body. The third imagines a pimp permanently modifying a woman’s mouth to improve her commercial sexual usefulness. These scenarios move beyond consensual extremity into exploitation, bodily control and the erasure of personhood. The obscenity is not simply that sex is described explicitly. It is that another human being’s interiority has been edited out.

The long first title is especially revealing because its horror comes from casualness. It does not read like ceremonial power-electronics rhetoric. It sounds conversational, almost comic in its construction, as though somebody were recounting an outrageous incident to friends. The ambulance should represent emergency care, privacy and the protection of a vulnerable body. Instead, it becomes another stage for sexual display. The speaker does not merely violate a boundary; he turns the violation into social entertainment by inviting a second man to participate. The body is passed around first as an image, then as a proposition.

Hymenal Opening’s noise is well suited to this collapse because harsh electronics can erase the comforting distance between story and sensation. A conventional song can place terrible words inside melody, rhythm and vocal personality. Those structures may create sympathy, irony, critique or narrative context. Here language is swallowed by pressure. Any processed voice becomes less a storyteller than a damaged component trapped inside the signal. The listener is denied the protection of a clear narrator whose morality can be evaluated. There is only an environment saturated with appetite.

The opening piece’s length permits that environment to establish itself as the album’s governing enclosure. Rather than functioning as a short provocation, its title continues contaminating the music for over nine minutes. Every burst of feedback can be heard as emergency equipment malfunctioning; low-frequency pressure becomes the interior movement of a vehicle; obscured vocal sound suggests communication rendered useless by distortion. These are interpretations rather than a literal program, but the title makes neutral hearing almost impossible. Once attached to an image of medical vulnerability and sexual entitlement, the noise inherits the scene’s ethical pressure.

This is one of the enduring powers and dangers of titles in noise. Abstract sound has no fixed subject, but a few words can direct its entire imaginative field. The same feedback could suggest weather, industry, cosmic radiation or damaged broadcasting under another name. Hymenal Opening chooses exploitation. The artist is therefore responsible not only for producing sound but for deliberately narrowing the listener’s associations toward sexualized degradation. The title does not accidentally accompany the noise. It weaponizes ambiguity.

“Toxic Cock On Your Red Wig” shifts from narrative sentence to compact emblem. The red wig connects directly with the album’s color scheme and its world of disguise, nightlife and manufactured sexual identity. A wig can be self-expression, professional costume, erotic play or camouflage. The adjective “toxic” contaminates that performance. Masculine sexuality enters not as reciprocal pleasure but as poisonous substance imposed upon a constructed persona. The woman’s appearance is artificial, but the threat to it is bodily.

The phrase also creates a collision between comedy and menace. “Toxic cock” is ridiculous enough to sound like grindcore parody, yet toxicity implies infection, corrosion and irreversible exposure. This unstable tone runs throughout the album. The listener may laugh at the titles’ grotesque excess, then become uncomfortable upon recognizing the real forms of coercion beneath the cartoon vulgarity. Humor does not cancel violence. It may be one of the mechanisms through which violent ideas become socially portable.

The noise underground has always understood that laughter can increase rather than reduce extremity. An utterly solemn presentation tells the listener how to behave: confront the horror, endure the ritual, recognize the artist’s seriousness. A ridiculous title removes that guidance. One laughs, then wonders what the laughter has joined. Hymenal Opening repeatedly sets this trap. The project’s obscenity is so exaggerated that it can initially resemble parody, but the exaggeration remains attached to real structures of sexual exploitation.

“A Pimp Had Her Teeth Removed So She Could Give Better Blowjobs” is the album’s ugliest title because it turns permanent bodily damage into workplace optimization. It imagines the mouth not as part of a person but as equipment owned by management. Teeth are obstacles to efficiency, so they are removed. The pimp becomes employer, surgeon and owner at once. The sentence contains an entire political economy of domination.

This is where Red Hymen’s fixation upon sexual degradation connects with industrial noise at a deeper level. Industrial music has often treated the modern body as a component inserted into systems of labor, surveillance, war, medicine and production. Hymenal Opening relocates that logic into sexual commerce. The body is modified to improve output. Pain is not an unfortunate byproduct but an acceptable production cost paid by someone other than the person who profits.

The track’s six-minute scale gives the image a compact, brutal efficiency. It need not become the album’s longest statement because the title has already completed the mutilation in one sentence. The music’s abrasiveness can be understood as the sound of utility overriding personhood: no romance, no negotiation, no symbolic mystery, only flesh redesigned according to demand.

Yet the ethical question remains: does representing such a fantasy expose it or simply reproduce it? Red Hymen supplies no answer. There is no victim’s perspective, no visible critique and no contextual framing that converts the title into an obvious indictment. The listener is left with the artist’s choice to display the scenario and the label’s choice to circulate it. That absence is not automatically proof of endorsement, but neither is ambiguity an ethical disinfectant. Underground art does not become innocent merely because its audience is small or because its materials are fictional.

The distinction between representation and advocacy cannot be resolved through subject matter alone. Artists can depict cruelty to condemn it, understand it, exploit it, become aroused by it, or combine all four motives in proportions even they may not fully recognize. Noise frequently refuses the moral signposts through which mainstream narrative clarifies intention. That refusal can force useful confrontation, but it can also offer convenient deniability. When challenged, provocation can retreat into “just art”; when celebrated, it can return to the excitement of apparent sincerity.

The strongest way to encounter Red Hymen is therefore not to assign the artist a moral identity that the surviving documentation cannot prove. It is to examine what the object actually asks the listener to inhabit. The record creates a world in which women’s bodies are traded as stories, sexual access becomes public currency, humiliation is comedy and bodily damage is described from the viewpoint of the consumer or controller. Whether this world is documentary, fantasy, satire or confession, the listener spends forty-three minutes inside its language.

“Licking Sweaty Balls And Taking It Up The Ass At The Bus Station” introduces public space differently. The bus station is a place of waiting, transit and anonymity, filled with strangers temporarily occupying the same architecture. Sex there may be furtive, desperate, transactional, exhibitionistic or imaginary. Unlike the private bedroom, the station belongs to nobody. Bodies pass through it according to schedules established elsewhere.

This title also changes the gendered arrangement. The acts described position the speaker or subject in a receptive role, at least partly, and the language of degradation no longer points exclusively toward a woman. That does not make the album egalitarian, but it complicates any simple reading of Hymenal Opening as only projecting male dominance outward. Submission, exposure and bodily service circulate. The project name may be anatomically gendered, yet the album’s appetite can engulf any body reduced to an opening.

The public location matters sonically. Harsh noise is frequently experienced privately through headphones or home equipment, but its language implies exposure. It exceeds normal domestic volume, leaks through walls and turns listening into an event visible to others. The bus-station title imagines sexual extremity under similar conditions: privacy collapsing within an indifferent infrastructure. Nobody has to care. People arrive, depart, look away or watch.

The almost comic specificity of “sweaty balls” also pulls the album away from sanitized pornography. Sweat restores labor, odor, temperature and embarrassment. It destroys the frictionless visual body offered by commercial imagery. Hymenal Opening’s distortion performs the same task upon sound. Nothing is cleanly separated. Frequencies rub together, signals soil one another and the recording seems to sweat through its own surface.

The final “Rebound Fuck Whore And Her Happy Relationship” is the longest piece, nearly fourteen minutes, and its title contains the album’s most revealing emotional contradiction. A “rebound” is normally treated as temporary, misguided or compensatory, a relationship entered before previous emotional damage has healed. “Fuck whore” converts that person into contemptuous sexual function. Yet the sentence ends with “her happy relationship,” introducing an outcome the insult cannot control.

Perhaps the speaker resents that happiness. Perhaps the woman who had been reduced to a sexual category has formed a durable attachment anyway. The phrase can be read as mockery, jealousy, disbelief or hostile gossip. It is the only title on the album that explicitly allows one of its degraded figures a life extending beyond the sexual incident. She has a relationship, and it is happy. The contempt belongs to whoever names her, not necessarily to her actual condition.

That small grammatical opening gives the closing track unusual weight. After an album devoted to bodies turned into anecdotes and services, another person’s independent happiness becomes the final irritation. The speaker can still insult her, but he cannot prevent her life from continuing outside his description. The longest piece may therefore be heard as fixation: fourteen minutes of noise generated by the inability to own the meaning of somebody else’s sexuality.

This does not suddenly transform Red Hymen into feminist critique. The woman remains unnamed, and the insult remains the dominant language printed on the release. Yet the title contains a crack through which another reality can be glimpsed. A person can be called a whore and still be happy. Sexual history does not prevent love. The categories imposed by wounded observers may reveal more about the observer than the person being judged.

That possibility connects back to the title Red Hymen. The mythology of virginity attempts to assign permanent social meaning to anatomy and sexual history. It divides women into before and after, pure and used, marriageable and contaminated. The closing title inadvertently defeats that system. Whatever sexual activity preceded the relationship, happiness remains possible. The supposed boundary did not determine the future.

The album’s red collage similarly refuses one stable hierarchy between customer and spectacle. Some figures pose confidently; others are caught awkwardly; the adult doll imitates a body while openly revealing its manufactured nature; the clown image converts human expression into painted surface; nightclub photographs make public sexuality look simultaneously exciting and exhausted. Everyone becomes an image, including the presumed consumers. The men are not sovereign observers standing outside the spectacle. They too are absorbed into the collage’s cheap red bloodstream.

Filth and Violence is an entirely appropriate publisher for such an object. The label’s catalog has long treated sexual transgression, humiliation, bodily extremity and uncompromising electronics not as occasional decoration but as a sustained aesthetic domain. Its terse description, “Vile USA noise,” refuses explanatory distance. There is no attempt to rehabilitate Hymenal Opening through academic terminology or to promise that the material contains a respectable social message. Vileness is the commodity and the recommendation.

That honesty is preferable to false refinement, but it does not end the conversation. Calling art vile can be a candid description, a shield against criticism and a marketing device at once. It tells potential listeners that offense is intentional, allowing every objection to be reframed as proof of success. Yet offense by itself is easy. What matters is whether the object produces sustained disturbance after the initial taboo has been recognized.

Red Hymen does. Its titles linger because they are structured as social language rather than abstract obscenity. They resemble things that could be said, repeated, laughed at and passed onward. The record is not merely about private fantasy. It is about the circulation of fantasy through stories, insults, commercial images and male group speech. Each title turns another person into a tale whose teller controls the camera.

The music’s harshness interrupts that control. Noise overloads communication until the teller can no longer remain cleanly separate from his material. Voice, if present, is buried or damaged; intention becomes difficult to distinguish from malfunction. The speaker who wanted to display other bodies is swallowed by the same electronic filth. This is one route through which the record may exceed its own imagery. Sound does not guarantee the narrator’s authority. It degrades everyone equally.

At the same time, sonic obliteration cannot restore the people erased by the titles. Noise can make domination feel unstable, but it cannot retroactively supply consent, biography or agency. This limitation should remain visible. There is a seductive critical habit of claiming that extreme art automatically critiques whatever it depicts because its ugliness makes the viewer uncomfortable. Sometimes ugliness simply intensifies consumption. Discomfort is not moral proof.

The album is most valuable when held inside that unresolved pressure. It should neither be dismissed as meaningless misogynistic filth without hearing its formal force nor elevated into courageous social criticism the artist never articulated. It is an object made from hostile sound, commercial-sex imagery, misogynistic and sexually submissive language, anatomical mythology, grotesque humor and genuine aesthetic control. Those elements do not cancel one another. They remain active simultaneously.

Consent becomes the invisible central subject precisely because it is so rarely named. Some scenarios could involve consensual humiliation or public sex. Others imply exploitation, incapacity or coercion. The album collapses those distinctions into one vocabulary of obscenity. That collapse may reproduce the worldview of pornography in which every image is available and every act exists for an observer, but it also exposes how much ethical information must be removed before all sexual extremity can be consumed as equivalent spectacle.

In real life, the difference between consensual degradation and abuse is not a minor interpretive detail. It is the difference between a jointly constructed erotic experience and the violation of a person’s autonomy. Extreme art often gains voltage by blurring that boundary, but listeners should not confuse aesthetic ambiguity with practical ambiguity. Consent can be complex, negotiated and imperfect, yet its absence is not merely a darker style of sex.

Red Hymen enters the dangerous territory where an image of nonconsent may excite, disgust and provoke thought at the same time. A mature response does not require pretending that only one reaction is possible. Human sexuality contains fantasies that many people would never wish to enact, and art has long provided symbolic structures in which dangerous impulses can be encountered without direct harm. The ethical value of that symbolic encounter depends partly upon whether the fantasy remains distinguishable from permission to harm actual people.

Noise offers an unusually stark container for this encounter because it denies the sensual reassurance of conventional erotic media. There are no flattering bodies in motion, no narrative of mutual pleasure, no climax organized for release. The sound remains abrasive and unresolved. It can frustrate easy arousal, but it can also eroticize frustration itself. The listener is pushed toward examining why degradation, danger and forbidden access possess cultural magnetism.

The project’s name is the key. An opening is both anatomy and invitation, wound and passage, possibility and vulnerability. Every opening can receive, release or be crossed. Noise itself is an opening in conventional musical organization, allowing electricity, malfunction and unwanted sound to enter as primary material. Hymenal Opening binds that formal breach to a sexualized body whose meaning has historically been controlled by myth.

Red Hymen is therefore not simply an album about sex. It is about entry and the stories used to justify entry. Money opens access. Injury opens vulnerability. Gossip opens privacy. A camera opens private acts to spectators. A title opens abstract sound into narrative. A record collection opens an underground culture to later listeners. Each opening can be voluntary, accidental, purchased or forced.

The album never supplies the moral instrument needed to distinguish among them. That is both its artistic power and its ethical insufficiency. It leaves the listener alone with forty-three minutes of contamination and asks attention to do the work that explanation refuses. Some will experience that refusal as cowardice, others as honesty. Both responses are defensible.

As noise, Red Hymen belongs to the raw American tradition of electronics that values pressure, dirt and obsession over polished technical spectacle. Its identity is sustained across five substantial pieces rather than scattered into dozens of disposable blasts. The changing durations create a real arc: the long opening establishes the world, three shorter central tracks examine separate forms of contamination and degradation, and the extended closing piece allows resentment and fixation to outlast the individual sexual image.

As an object, it is unusually coherent. The title, project name, track language, red-light collage and Filth and Violence imprint all point toward the same diseased marketplace of looking. Nothing has been added to make the release friendlier or more intellectually respectable. Even the occasional absurdity remains part of its ugliness rather than relief from it.

As a moral experience, it is deliberately unreliable. It does not tell us whether to laugh, recoil, become aroused, condemn the speaker or suspect that the speaker is the artist. The absence of instruction forces the listener to notice personal reactions normally hidden behind genre loyalty. Why is one title funny and another intolerable? When does invented degradation begin recalling actual exploitation? Does knowing that something is fantasy remove responsibility, or merely change the kind of responsibility involved? Can an artwork occupy a hateful voice without becoming an extension of it?

These questions are not obstacles surrounding the music. They are part of what the music does. Red Hymen is successful because it cannot be reduced to “good harsh noise with offensive titles,” but neither can its sound be ignored in favor of a seminar about representation. The physical force of the electronics is what prevents the subject matter from remaining an abstract argument. Ideas are made abrasive. Language becomes pressure against the skin.

The album ends without cleansing the space it has entered. There is no apology, victim testimony or elegant reversal waiting to make the preceding material safe. The final happy relationship survives only as a phrase embedded inside an insult. The neon remains lit; the doll continues smiling; the dancers remain frozen in the collage; the painted clown mouth hangs open at the center. The listener is left to decide whether the record exposed a marketplace of sexual contempt or simply erected another stall inside it.

Perhaps it did both. Underground art rarely remains outside the impulses it examines. Red Hymen is fascinated by the degradation it may also reveal, repelled by the filth it carefully packages, and dependent upon the same commerce of extreme images that it turns into noise. Its contradictions are not signs that the work has failed. They are the most truthful things it contains.

Anyone with the physical CD, direct knowledge of the project’s personnel, recording equipment, Providence context or the source of the packaging photographs is encouraged to fill in the missing history. Hymenal Opening remains poorly documented, and the uncertainty matters. A release this committed to turning people into anonymous bodies should not itself be allowed to drift into a history made entirely from assumptions.

Red Hymen is a filthy, ethically unstable and formally convincing artifact. It does not ask to be forgiven, but it should not be granted automatic profundity merely for refusing forgiveness. Its real accomplishment is narrower and more difficult: it makes the listener remain conscious while entering material designed to overwhelm thought. Beneath the feedback, insults and red commercial glow lies a question with no comfortable answer. When a body, image or sound is declared open, who decided that it was available?

 

Wonderland Club - 2018 - Pageant CS

 Institute Of Paraphilia Studies ‎– 185.63MB FLAC

The physical copy preserved here already contains the album’s argument before a second of sound is heard. A magenta prize ribbon has been constructed from loops of satin and attached to a sheet of pink paper. At its center sits a button identifying the Institute of Paraphilia Studies, Wonderland Club, the title Pageant and the year 2018. The cassette itself is completely transparent, decorated with tiny glitter hearts that could have come from a child’s craft box, a school valentine or a pageant contestant’s dressing table. The lyrics are printed on folded magenta construction paper, the kind of material associated with elementary classrooms, homemade cards and children’s projects. Everything is sweet, inexpensive, celebratory and wrong. The package does not place disturbing imagery outside childhood and attack it from a safe adult distance. It enters the visual language of childhood achievement, touches the ribbon, the hearts and the handmade paper, then reveals the adult systems of looking, judgment and appetite hiding behind them.

That complete object is one reason Pageant can remain lodged in memory long after hundreds of harsher or louder tapes have blurred together. The cassette is not merely a carrier for two power-electronics tracks. Sound, writing, color, texture and construction form one inseparable mechanism. The listener must handle the award ribbon to reach the recording. The cute heart stickers rotate with the reels while the music plays. The contestant profiles and long textual passages remain physically present beside the tape, waiting to be reread after the electronics have changed their meaning. It is an album designed not only to be heard but possessed, unfolded, turned over and contemplated. Even its apparent fragility matters. The ribbon can bend, the paper can crease and the stickers can loosen. Like the children described inside, the object has been made to perform attractiveness while remaining vulnerable to every hand that handles it.

This particular copy carries another level of history. The FLAC archive attached to the post was made from the physical cassette shown in the photographs, not downloaded from somebody else’s collection years afterward. It was uploaded within weeks of the original release. The transfer therefore preserves one real encounter between a duplicated cassette, a playback machine, an audio chain and the person who cared enough about the tape to archive it. Cassette culture is full of small variations that disappear when a digital file is treated as an abstract master: duplication level, head alignment, shell friction, tape formulation and the faint tonal personality of the deck all participate. This rip is not merely Pageant in a general sense. It is this copy of Pageant, the one that entered a collection, became a favorite and was carried forward.

Wonderland Club had already established itself as an American power-electronics project concerned with sexual exploitation, predation, institutional concealment and the ways abuse becomes organized through ordinary systems. The project name is not an innocent reference to fantasy literature. Other Wonderland Club titles include “Operation Cathedral,” directly invoking the international investigation that dismantled the notorious online abuse network from which the project takes its name. Pageant moves away from hidden computer networks and toward a form of spectacle conducted in public, under lights, with families, judges, applause and awards. Its subject is not a secret room inaccessible to respectable society. It is the moment respectable society creates conditions in which a predatory gaze can hide in plain sight.

That distinction gives Pageant more complexity than a noise release that simply selects an atrocious crime and uses it as transgressive decoration. The album examines an activity regarded by participants as wholesome, confidence-building and family-oriented, then isolates the language and gestures through which children are made to imitate adult femininity for evaluation. The danger does not arrive as a masked stranger invading from outside. It is woven through the competition’s ordinary structure: clothing, choreography, makeup, bodily presentation, scoring, rankings, applause and parental ambition. The unsettling observer is already seated among the audience, watching the same stage as everyone else.

The label described Pageant as Wonderland Club’s strongest material, developed from advance sketches that were later revisited after initially being considered finished. That act of returning is crucial. Earlier power electronics can sometimes rely upon one overwhelming sound, one screamed text and one emotional temperature. Pageant is noticeably more composed across its two long sides. The pieces have enough duration to establish environments, fracture them and rebuild them. Electronics are permitted to recede before returning with altered pressure. Vocals do not merely sit on top of static as an additional violent element. They puncture, describe and reorganize the surrounding sound.

This is still recognizably American power electronics: damaged amplification, sustained electronic abrasion, sharpened feedback and vocals delivered at a high, cutting pitch rather than the deep authoritarian bark common to much of the genre. The comparison made at the time to Final Solution is useful. The voice does not sound like a distant lecturer presiding calmly over material. It sounds exposed and physically committed, pushed toward a register where language threatens to split into pure alarm. Yet enough articulation survives for the writing to matter. Pageant depends upon hearing not only rage but observation.

That balance between intelligibility and destruction is difficult to maintain. Completely burying the lyrics would turn the subject into atmosphere. Presenting them too clearly would reduce the electronics to accompaniment for spoken commentary. Wonderland Club places the words in a threshold state, sometimes graspable as sentences, sometimes reduced to sharp human shapes inside the machinery. This creates an unstable narrator. The voice can resemble an accuser, announcer, spectator, parent, judge or predator without settling permanently into any one position. The listener cannot stand comfortably beside a morally pure commentator because the performance keeps pulling every voice into the same contaminated auditorium.

“Captured Memory” opens the cassette with a title that carries several meanings at once. A memory may be preserved in a photograph or recording, but “captured” also suggests confinement and ownership. Pageants produce enormous quantities of captured memory: stage photographs, family videos, posed portraits, trophies and stories repeated years later. Adults describe these materials as evidence of pride, confidence and achievement. Yet every preserved image can move beyond its intended audience. The camera freezes a child’s performance, detaches it from the moment and makes it available for forms of viewing the subject cannot control.

The title also describes the cassette itself. The track is a captured performance, transferred from tape into FLAC and held in an archive long after the original object became scarce. Preservation is not morally equivalent to predation, of course, but both involve taking something fleeting and making it repeatable. Pageant repeatedly asks what happens when repetition changes the relationship between viewer and subject. A child crosses a stage once; the image can be watched indefinitely. The performance ends; the gaze does not.

The “1st Place” and “Runner Up” subdivisions turn the side into a contest without making the divisions behave like ordinary separate songs. Ranking becomes an organizing principle imposed upon one continuous field. Pageant culture depends upon declaring tiny differences meaningful enough to reward one child and disappoint another. Hair, costume, smile, posture, movement and apparent confidence are converted into scores. Wonderland Club’s electronics refuse that clean distinction. Noise bleeds, overlaps and resists neat borders. The two sections remain related, just as winner and runner-up remain children subjected to the same evaluative apparatus.

The lyrics on “Captured Memory” move through several perspectives surrounding the competition. They examine the pageant audience, the parents, the judges and the possibility of a predatory spectator concealed among people whose behavior appears socially acceptable. The writing is disturbing because it does not imagine exploitation as something visually obvious. The predatory watcher can applaud at the same moments, recognize the same contestants and occupy the same kind of chair as every other adult. Nothing in the physical organization of the room announces the difference between supportive attention and sexualized consumption.

This creates one of the album’s most severe insights: looking does not reveal its own intention. Two people may watch the same performance while constructing completely different internal realities. The child cannot determine how her image is being used inside either person’s mind. The parents may believe that presentation strengthens confidence; the judge may think in terms of poise and marketability; the predator may convert the same choreography into private gratification. The stage supplies one image while the audience manufactures multiple meanings.

The electronics give this hidden multiplicity physical form. Rather than presenting one monolithic block, the sound carries competing currents. A central mass may hold the piece together while sharper frequencies move across it, arriving like camera flashes, alarms or nervous impulses. Pressure changes without offering a complete release. The recording seems to contain several rooms at once: the brightly illuminated stage, the backstage preparation area, the audience darkness and the private mental chamber inside each observer.

Noise often receives descriptions involving concealment because distortion makes sources difficult to identify. On Pageant, concealment becomes part of the subject. The same cheerful exterior can hide radically different motives. A glitter heart sticker covers an otherwise blank cassette shell. A prize ribbon turns comparison into celebration. A slogan about confidence may coexist with relentless bodily judgment. The album does not argue that every parent, judge or spectator shares predatory intent. Its more uncomfortable claim is that the structure makes predatory attention difficult to distinguish from normal participation because both are directed toward the same carefully displayed body.

The pageant itself becomes a machine for producing attention. Music cues movement; costumes direct the eye; introductions compress a life into a few appealing facts; judges transform observation into ranking; awards convert rankings into permanent objects. The child is encouraged to believe that being watched is evidence of value. The better she performs visibility, the more approval she receives. Wonderland Club attacks this machinery not through detached sociological explanation but by exaggerating its emotional pressure until the stage begins to resemble an interrogation room decorated with bows.

The title “Captured Memory” also points toward the parents’ relationship with time. Childhood passes quickly, and families naturally want photographs and records of it. That desire is not inherently corrupt. The album becomes painful because it shows how easily love, nostalgia, ambition and possession can become entangled. A parent may genuinely wish to preserve a daughter’s happiness while also requiring her to repeat an adult-designed performance. The image becomes a memory of the parent’s project as much as the child’s experience.

The lyrics refuse to let the pageant mother remain a simple monster. Ambition can be rationalized as opportunity, discipline, confidence or future success. Money, travel and emotional energy have been invested, which makes withdrawal feel like failure. The child’s winning smile reassures the parent that everything has been worthwhile. Yet the smile is also part of the scored performance. The very evidence used to prove enjoyment may have been trained, practiced and rewarded.

That circular structure resembles feedback. A microphone receives amplified sound from a speaker and sends it back through the system, producing a signal that rapidly becomes independent of the original source. Pageant approval works similarly. The child performs confidence because adults reward confidence; the adults interpret the successful performance as proof that competition builds confidence; the resulting praise encourages further performance. Eventually the loop becomes louder than the child’s unperformed self.

“Cherry Tomatoes” is an extraordinary title for the second side because it appears almost aggressively harmless. Cherry tomatoes are small, colorful, sweet and commonly placed in descriptions of children’s favorite foods. The phrase belongs to the soft language of contestant biographies, where individual lives are compressed into hobbies, favorite colors, foods, television programs, future careers and charming personality traits. Such details promise uniqueness while following an intensely standardized format.

The lyrics assemble fragments resembling pageant introductions and contestant profiles. One child likes a particular snack, another loves dancing or ice cream, another hopes to enter a caring profession. Hair and eye color are repeatedly praised. Favorite songs, television characters, sisters, mothers and ambitions pass by in cheerful succession. On paper these details appear affectionate. In accumulation they become terrifyingly interchangeable. Each biography insists that the child is special while feeding her through the same descriptive template.

Wonderland Club recognizes that dehumanization does not always sound cruel. It may sound enthusiastic, encouraging and relentlessly positive. Every contestant is beautiful, talented, sweet, confident and destined for something wonderful. Because the language permits no uncertainty, boredom, anger, awkwardness or refusal, the child becomes less human with every compliment. A complete person is converted into an inspirational advertisement for herself.

The repeated movement instructions make the process still more uncomfortable. Twirls, kisses, waves, smiles and dance gestures are presented as recognizable components of a successful routine. They may be innocent actions in another context, but the pageant organizes them for adult evaluation. Wonderland Club places the gestures beside contestant ages and childish biographical details, causing the listener to experience the dissonance that the show’s cheerful presentation is designed to suppress. Childhood vocabulary and adult-coded performance occupy the same sentence.

“Cherry Tomatoes” consequently becomes a catalog of small identities being processed by one large apparatus. The title suggests individual sweetness, but also uniform objects arranged for selection. Each tomato may differ slightly in shape or color, yet all can be placed in the same bowl and consumed. The metaphor is never stated outright, which makes it more effective. The phrase remains innocent enough to have plausibly come directly from a contestant’s profile, but after fourteen minutes it begins to sound like a product category.

The side’s “1st Place” and “Runner Up” structure repeats the ranking device from “Captured Memory,” but the emotional effect changes. On the first side, competition helps expose the audience’s gaze. On the second, it exposes interchangeability. The winner and runner-up receive different titles, yet the descriptive machinery treats them similarly. Both are praised, displayed and reduced. The award does not free the winner from the system; it confirms that she has performed its requirements most successfully.

The high vocals are especially effective here because they can resemble several things without impersonating a child’s voice. They carry the shrill intensity of an announcer whose enthusiasm has become coercive, a parent demanding perfection, an observer overwhelmed by what he sees and an accuser trying to tear through the ceremony’s cheerful surface. The vocal register denies the masculine grandeur often pursued by power electronics. There is little sense of a commanding figure standing heroically above the noise. The voice sounds trapped within the same feedback system it condemns.

This weakness is a strength. Pageant is not most powerful when it sounds omnipotent. It is powerful when the electronics and vocals suggest a mind unable to reconcile the smiling public spectacle with the meanings hiding beneath it. Rage repeatedly approaches hysteria because calm analysis would grant the system too much distance. The recording feels less like a manifesto delivered after conclusions have been reached than a prolonged confrontation with material that refuses to become emotionally manageable.

The label’s statement that the finished tracks developed from earlier sketches helps explain this control. Reworking the material allowed Wonderland Club to move beyond the first instinctive response of simply blasting the subject with hatred. The long sides contain deliberate pacing, recurrence and structural development. The noise can remain hostile while acquiring enough shape to carry the text’s changes of perspective. The result is not polished in a conventional sense, but it is edited by thought.

That makes Pageant stand apart from releases whose extremity exists almost entirely in their subject matter. The cassette does not depend upon the theme to disguise interchangeable electronics. Remove the lyrics and packaging and the recordings would still possess physical force, changing density and a recognizable relationship between voice and signal. Restore the complete object and those formal strengths become part of a much larger inquiry into spectatorship.

The question of spectatorship also applies to the listener. Pageant criticizes people who consume images of children, but it packages that criticism as an attractive limited noise artifact. The buyer is invited by the prize ribbon, glitter hearts and forbidden label identity. We purchase or download the object, inspect its details and voluntarily enter the same thematic territory. The cassette therefore cannot claim a position of absolute innocence outside the appetite it examines.

This does not mean critique and exploitation are identical. The lyrics appear far more accusatory toward pageant culture and predatory viewing than celebratory of either. The album repeatedly exposes mechanisms that respectable language tries to conceal. Yet the listener should remain aware that transgressive art gains value, rarity and attention from the very material it condemns. Pageant circulates because its subject is disturbing. The ribbon is both critique and sales object.

The Institute of Paraphilia Studies is the perfect label for this contradiction. Its releases frequently treat unusual sexual fixations, exploitative imagery and private compulsions as material for sound and handmade objects. The label name mimics the authority of an academic institution while replacing clinical distance with obsessive collecting. Pageant enters this catalog not as a neutral study but as a contaminated exhibit. The researcher, collector and voyeur are never fully separated.

The packaging’s beauty is essential. Had the cassette arrived in a black envelope bearing a grim photocopied crime photograph, the listener would immediately know how to behave. Darkness would announce danger, and moral distance could be maintained. The magenta ribbon is more treacherous because it is genuinely appealing. Somebody took time to fold the satin, position the tails and attach the button. The heart stickers are charming. The object can be loved, which forces the listener to ask what exactly that love contains.

For a collector of noise cassettes, such an object creates a relationship very different from a file encountered through a screen. It sits among other tapes while remaining visually unmistakable. Taking it from the shelf repeats part of the pageant ritual: selecting, viewing, handling and returning the contestant to her place. The physical edition creates memory through repeated contact. Years later, the owner may recall not only the electronics but the feel of the ribbon and the startling transparency of the shell.

That tactile integration helps explain why Pageant could become a favorite. It does not offer only “good noise,” which is plentiful and difficult to remember in isolation. It offers a complete encounter with a subject, an object and two carefully developed sides. The sounds cannot be detached from the magenta paper; the paper cannot be detached from the lyrics; the lyrics cannot be detached from the social ritual they dissect. Every component deepens the others.

The cassette also arrived at an interesting point in noise culture. By 2018, limited tapes were no longer the only practical way to distribute this music. Digital files could travel instantly, and full cassette rips would eventually allow listeners to experience the audio without ever seeing the edition. IOPS responded by making an object whose physical identity could not be duplicated by an audio upload. The FLAC preserves the sound beautifully, and the photographs preserve the appearance, but the ribbon’s dimensional presence remains exclusive to the cassette.

Your own rip does something valuable within that limitation. It does not pretend the file can replace the physical edition. Instead, the post documents the relationship among them. The photographs show the artifact; the FLAC carries the tape’s sound; the upload date records when the transfer entered circulation. A cassette produced in an undisclosed quantity can disappear into private shelves, but this copy left a trace large enough for future listeners to find.

That archival act is especially meaningful for an album about captured memory. The project uses capture as a source of anxiety, examining how images and performances can be preserved for exploitative viewing. The rip demonstrates a different ethical use of capture: preservation performed with attachment to the object, clear provenance and a desire to share music that might otherwise vanish. Technology itself is not the moral agent. The question is what relationship the person doing the capturing establishes with the captured material.

Pageant never offers an easy distinction between innocent and corrupted attention. It understands that care, pride, ambition, commerce, nostalgia and desire may gather around one stage simultaneously. The tape’s power comes from refusing to reduce that complexity to a slogan. It does not need to claim that every pageant is a criminal enterprise. It shows how a structure devoted to evaluating children’s appearance can become usable by appetites its participants would publicly condemn.

Nor does the album allow the children to become abstract symbols. The contestant biographies, however repetitive, continually return small human details to the foreground: foods, siblings, favorite songs, imagined professions and ordinary pleasures. These details are what make the ranking system feel obscene. Each child possesses a life far larger than the few seconds allotted for her introduction, but the pageant must condense that life into material the audience can absorb before the next contestant appears.

Noise expands those lost seconds. Two cassette sides take the clipped language of introductions and force the listener to remain with its implications for nearly half an hour. The pageant hurries forward toward a winner; Wonderland Club slows the machinery down until every smiling phrase begins revealing its hidden gears. What is designed as disposable entertainment becomes almost unbearable under prolonged attention.

There is no triumphant resolution. “Runner Up” follows “1st Place,” but neither position escapes. The winner receives the ribbon and is asked to continue performing. The runner-up learns that affection and approval can be measured, compared and withheld. The parents retain their photographs. The audience goes home. The recordings keep turning.

When the transparent reels stop, the glitter hearts remain exactly where they began. That may be the cassette’s final and most disturbing image. The cute surface has not been destroyed by the noise or peeled away to reveal one simple truth beneath it. It survives. Beauty, affection, exploitation and memory continue sharing the same object.

Pageant is exceptional power electronics because it does not merely shout at a taboo. It constructs a complete social room around it. The album hears the stage music, the rehearsed confidence, the adult applause, the private gaze, the parent’s hope, the child’s biography and the electronic violence required to make their contradictions audible. Its noise is not an escape from meaning. It is the pressure created when too many incompatible meanings occupy the same image.

The ribbon declares a winner, but the cassette knows better. Nobody inside this pageant is simply victorious. The child has been awarded for becoming visible, the parent has been rewarded for producing the performance, the audience has been given permission to look and the collector has received a beautiful artifact made from the exposure of that entire system. Pageant leaves each participant holding something desirable and asks what had to be surrendered for the prize to exist.