I’m well into my thirties, and as such am finally growing used to being victim/rare beneficiary of cyclical underground fashion. While I’ve adjusted to some of life’s disappointments in the face of fashion and “progress”, there are still some things I can’t not mourn: videlicet, the dearth of solid noise comps in the post-internet era, let alone anything approaching the scattershot weirdo brilliance of, say, Hanson’s Labyrinths and Jokes or something from the Bananafish extended family (I glance over at my old copy of the Patchouli and Echoes double CDR and shed a tear for times past.. has it really been over a decade?). Ever since micro-genre codifying became something other than a joke (or at least, other than an intentional one), it’s been really hard to get freak stragglers together in a way that might resonate outside of one dude’s basement, and the popular adoption of the cassette format amongst pizza punx and twee-ners has made it even harder to separate wheat from chaff. As such, I feel that we need solid comps more than ever.
Bless, then, Minneapolis and the Fuck Mountain label, who have assembled a triple cassette (!) compendium of fucked moves from their own backyard (probably literally, in some cases, as I understand that Fuck Mountain was a house venue until recently). I was honestly expecting a largely harsh/wall noise affair (I’ve had some… experiences), which I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit through, but F.M. have cast the net significantly further afield, deigning to include everything from the rainbow-blanket drones of HACK to the unpredictable idiosyncrasy of (personal long-time fave) Growth Spert, making room along the way for the “heterophobic” power electronics of Straight Panic and some classic-style industrial anxiety from Dead Actress, among a couple dozen more. In what might be a nod to the medium’s last golden age, once-ubiquitous veteran gnarlers/comp-contributors Cock E.S.P. even make a brief appearance.
The sequencing is A+ here, never giving you enough time to get bored with one version of brain-wiping electronic goop. It goes every which way but bland, and while it doesn’t reinvent the noise comp wheel, it rolls it admirably. Maybe noise isn’t over, after all.
More about: Various Suspects
