Sissy Spacek is the long-running sound project centred around John Wiese and Charlie Mumma, but encompassing a rotating set of other members. It is more or less a conceptual act: ostensibly a “grindcore band,” it is really a study what happens when you take the grind genre and then shoot tangents off in various directions, often groping towards the outer limits of harsh noise.
These two 2022 releases are unalike, but this is par for the course for the band. As Wiese tells me via email, “Sissy Spacek has always been a project that likes to expand the perimeter of its output—not just putting out the same release over and over, but really create a dynamic in the overall.” He cites the band’s 2016 triumvirate of releases as an example: they encompassed grindcore proper (Disfathom), short blasts of chaos in the noisecore tradition (Reversed Normalization), and a single 36-minute free improv jam performed as a sextet (Duration Groups).
2022’s release bolus extends the band’s theme of creating records that are internally coherent but radically different from one another. Of these two CDs, Reslayer is more divorced from grindcore, sonically. It takes the genre’s manic energy but reduces it to flailing noise rubble. Yet, unlike most noise releases (but like many grind records), it is a concise affair, divided into short, threeish-minute spurts. Wiese tells me this was by design. “When Sissy Spacek first started it was a mix of blur-grindcore and noise, and I had a fantasy that we would only release 7-inches. Highly compact, dense, and extreme.” (Indeed, several years ago Wiese commemorated his hundredth 7-inch!) For Reslayer, the band sought to channel this 45-rpm aesthetic into “tight 3 minute tracks that move quickly and intensely from one sound to another in an engaging way,” Wiese says. “In a sense they sound similar, but I would liken it to a Ramones album or something like that. One track after another with a continuing energy.”
Though rooted in grindcore, Reslayer retains no recognizable extreme metal instruments — guitars, bass, drums, death growl vocals are all replaced by rapidly changing bursts of inorganic noise. Wiese himself describes the methodology as “the shedding of musical instruments while retaining the same energy as grindcore,” something of a reaction against avant music’s tendency towards expansiveness. “Experimental music in general has a legacy of often bloated, long, and self indulgent material, and I think this is in a sense a counter to that.”
On Threshold, we hear a very different Sissy Spacek. Instead of short fragments of abstract noise, this record’s compositions stretch out, patiently exploring the continuum between white noise and grindcore. Jagged, tuneless, and joyfully dissonant, it’s a bit like Pig Destroyer recorded through a microphone inside a turned-on blender. Though comprising a coherent whole, the release contains three tracks from 2013-2014, and two from 2022. The holdovers include a piece previously included on cassette compilation called Stray Dog, a leftover piece performed live on radio for Damion Romero’s Psychotechnics program on L.A’s KXLU, and a track originally intended to be played as a four-channel installation. The two new 2022 recordings have a similar feel, but add the talents of Agoraphobic Nosebleed vocalist Jay Randall. I find myself dumbly puzzled when Wiese tells me what makes Threshold different from Reslayer, from his perspective: “I’d say that Reslayer is more of a singular vision of dynamics, whereas threshold is a dynamic vision of singularity.”
The cover of Threshold (generally speaking, Wiese, a design artist, handles the art for all Sissy Spacek releases) was something I was curious about. Framed in black is an image of what could be a patio at a luxury resort, a far cry from traditionally graphic grindcore imagery. Drawing a distinction between their intentions versus the prototypical noisecore/grind milieu of punky gumption, he notes that the photo helps “align the sound as something ‘high’ rather than something ‘low.'” He also points out its relationship to Merzbow/Masami Akita’s “Lowest Music and Arts” concept, and its connection to the artwork on Hijokaidan’s noise landmark, Windom:
Of these two discs, Threshold is the one I prefer, and I believe this is because it more overtly captures the fringe between grindcore and noise, two genres on the extreme which differ greatly in terms of structure. Wiese tells me that he sees Sissy Spacek as “in a sense the reverse of the mid-90s Relapse boom that got people from metal/grindcore into noise. Spacek is more like grindcore FROM noise, and [Threshold] would be a good example.”
Reslayer and Threshold are both available through Helicopter.
In the future I would like to do a proper profile of Fusty Cunt, a label that has put out countless unusual releases housed in unique packaging concepts. But today I wanted to showcase a particularly unique tape put out by the label.
Compilations are fascinating, especially noise comps. The taxonomic frenzy of artist names, typically a combination of established artists, obscure side projects, and perplexing one-offs, can lead to hours of Discogs scrolling, following byzantine networks of loose associations.
But I digress. The most fascinating of the comps are the themed compilations, and this Fusty Cunt nugget is no exception. Even more fascinating is the rare breed of compilations that come housed in actual diapers. I know of only one.
Source: Discogs
“Anhedonia” refers to the inability to experience pleasure. Clinically, it is a symptom of depression as well as several other psychiatric and neurological conditions. According to an excellent interview with Fusty Cunt proprietor Jim Haras for Pure Stench zine, Anhedonia was a compilation in which artists were asked to create brief (under two minute) tracks using the concept of “denial of self gratification.” Artists were hand-selected by Haras, “chosen because each has a unique sound and I knew each would generate a different spin on the concept (social denial, monetary denial, sexual denial, intellectual denial, political denial, bowel denial, etc.)”
Featured on the tape are mid-tier noise acts like Ahlzagailzehguh, Baculum, and Custodian, plus some rarer names. There is also Exploring Jezebel, one of the many pseudonyms of Dominick Fernow (Prurient, Hospital Productions) as well as Haras’ own act, Deterge. Track titles include some real treats, like “Dutifully Overdosing On Female Footsweat,” “Holding In Your Poopy,” and “Kegel Exercises: Flex And Release.” One artist even poses a pithy question: “Did You Ever Want Something So Much That You Would Do Anything To Have It, Only To Be Told It Could Never Be Yours?”
Even the short track duration was an attempt at stymying gratification — “just as you are about to fully get into a track, it’s over, leaving you wanting more.” The release came with a booklet of artwork, each contributing artist submitting a page. But the piece de resistance was the fact that each copy came in a bona fide diaper, with “ANHEDONIA” written on it in upper-case letters with a Sharpie.
Source: Discogs
To Fusty Cunt’s owner, the diaper was a middle finger to tape collectors, “an attack on everyone’s personal record/tape collection.” Inside the nappy was a tape shell spray-painted feces brown. He originally had planned to use brown tapes, for maximum effect, but could not source them. In the end, that was perhaps for the best: “This denied me the satisfaction of having it turn out exactly the way I intended.”
—
Do you know of other tapes that come packaged in diapers? If so, please leave a comment or let me know.
First of all, I want to apologize for how quiet Anomaly Index has been over the past while. I have been hard at work on an upcoming very big project: a book, about extreme and obscure music, which will be due out in November of this year. I will post more about that later.
Today I focus on an obscure CD-R label that ran from 2000 to 2008, responsible for some truly strange relics in the noise and dark ambient space. That label was Alarming Echo Beats:
Banner from the now-defunct Alarming Echo Beats website.
The origins of AEB are a little opaque, but information can be gleaned from the archive of its website on archive.org, which includes a link to a brief interview with the founder, who is known as The Rev, which is short for the Reverend Samekh Anubis Amoun-Ra.
Prior to running AEB, The Rev was a teenager fascinated with the noisecore / shitcore / shitnoise scene: a grindcore-adjacent scene devoted to ultra-short blasts of noise. Canonical bands in these scene include Anal Cunt, Deche-Charge, and Seven Minutes of Nausea, the latter known for releases like a seven-inch record with 293 tracks on one side.
The Rev started putting out tapes under the name Fecel-Cide, a “semi-political noise band” whose primary orientation appears to have been anti-authority. Very little Fecel-Cide content remains easily available today, but here’s a brief track from the Audio Terrorism tape compilation:
In 1991 The Rev started his first label, Fecal-Matter Discorporated, an imprint and distro dedicated to unleashing tapes and CD-Rs by Fecel-Cide and other artists who fit under the rubric of “harsh sick sexual deviant style noise.” His first tape was a split cassette between the band Flush (a one-off Rev project) and Palagi (another one-off of unclear provenance), its cover a crass and grainy Xerox job like many of the era:
This first incarnation of Fecal-Matter Discorporated lasted until 1994, releasing 21 cassettes including two compilations named Bored-Core which remain incredibly obscure at this point:
Fecal-Matter Discorporated then lay dormant for six years, re-emerging in 2001 with more colourful imagery, striking out with the album Suitcase Of Mutilated Entrapment by the Japanese grindcore band Basket of Death. It is at this point that the aesthetic becomes less crass and more graphic. The label’s website, which has been preserved in archive form, is lacquered with images of extreme porn, mainly of the coprophagic variety, and there are very few releases whose cover art I could reproduce here without violating my agreement with my hosting service. The front page of the label’s website lists two slogans: “Cum see the shit we have for you!!” and “Where we force the shit in your face,” which should give you a flavour for the aesthetic. Bands with names like Complete Rectal Shutdown, Imbibing Bile, and Anal Gorecum Pissflap Slap are featured. Here is the charming cover to one of the label’s compilations, Now That’s What I Call Shit!:
Source: Discogs
Alarming Echo Beats, the much less puerile sister label to Fecal-Matter Discorporated, was started in 2000 to release music under The Rev’s new project, Absynth (To His Macabre Angel), a more subdued approach inspired by the occultist Aleister Crowley. His first release was the album Twilight Mind, by The DSA Working, the side project of prog-rock band Yeti’s bassist, Tommy Atkins.
The Alarming Echo Beats focus was on “occult and magick type genres of musick,” and the discography is a bizarre one. An especially peculiar release is the 2003 compilation He Came to Set the Captives Free, a concept release based around a controversial 1986 Christian book of the same name. That book was published by Dr. Rebecca Brown, and was billed as an exposé of an underground Satanic cult network. In it, Dr. Brown tells the story of her roommate, Elaine, who was recruited as a child to a Satanic cult called “The Brotherhood,” only to eventually ascend to the rank of high priestess. Dr. Brown, while starting her career as a doctor, rescues Elaine and sets up an “underground railroad” for escapees from the cult. According to reporting, in reality, Dr. Brown — whose real name was Dr. Ruth Bailey — had lost her license for misdiagnosing patients with actual diseases as having demonic possession and treating her patient, Edna Elaine Moses (the “Elaine” from her book), with massive quantities of opioids and sedatives, such that she had to undergo inpatient detoxification for withdrawal. She had also been self-administering opioids to herself regularly. From an Indianapolis News article:
“Testimony for 19 witnesses revealed that Dr. Bailey, a former registered nurse, began an impressive medical career in 1979 after excelling in medical school. Over the last three years she deteriorated into a woman plagued by drug addiction, religious extremism and a belief that patients and colleagues were possessed by devils, witnesses said. Several witnesses declined to reveal their current addresses saying they feared retaliation from Dr. Bailey. The physician carries a handgun and has threatened to harm people she claims are possessed, they said. ‘Her diagnosis was that I was possessed by many demons, including one like an octopus with long tentacles…’”
Despite this, Dr. Brown’s book has found a niche in the evangelical Christian universe. Alarming Echo Beats’ compilation includes music by several experimental artists, most notably plunderphonics act The Bran Flakes and DJ Spooky collaborator Totemplow, overlaid with excerpts of an audiotape version of the controversial Christian book.
Source: Discogs
Even more bizarre is the album Necro Audio Forensics: 13 Stairs Palo, Iowa, which bills itself as a series of recordings of EVP, or the electronic voice phenomenon: a belief that disembodied voices can be heard amid the buzz and hum of electrical interference. (There is a key compilation on the Touch label, named The Ghost Orchid, which collects EVP recordings).
According to the label copy, Necro Audio Forensics was created from tapes that were recorded at the supposedly haunted Pleasant Ridge cemetery just north of Palo, Iowa, which is nicknamed “13 Stairs” due to the distinctive staircase leading up to its hilltop locale. According to local lore, this cemetery is a prime location for supernatural phenomena: it is supposedly a hotbed of ghoulish EVP voices, and is also home to a red-eyed ghost dog that materializes occasionally.
The Necro Audio Forensics CD-R is attributed to Ichabod Crane, the alter ego of Kristian Day, who now is a successful film and TV producer who has also composed scores for horror films. The CD-R features recordings made at the cemetery, purportedly of EVP, augmented with samplers and sequencers to create the creepy final product.
Source: Discogs
Day, who corresponded with me briefly via email, explains that he was sixteen when he created Necro Audio Forensics. He is now 35. “Palo is probably the first haunted space I have encountered,” he tells me. “I remember taking the tape recorder out there and it kept stopping. When I finally got it home the sounds were not super audible but there was definitely something there.”
The rest of Alarming Echo Beats’ respectably sprawling discography spans drone, extreme metal, and power electronics. There is a split release (Cththonic Cat Cult, AEB-022) dedicated to an H.P. Lovecraft short story in which a cat killer is eaten by a swarm of felines. By 2007, the label’s discography becomes even more fringe: Qlippothic Kommandos was a bizarre compilation dedicated to the theme of “Satanic psyops,” featuring a number of controversial contributors.
Source: Discogs
The exact origins of the person behind Alarming Echo Beats — The Rev, as it were — are quite obscure, seemingly deliberately so. I found numerous email addresses associated with The Rev and his various projects, but multiple queries sent to all of them yielded no response. Based on some sleuthing involving caches of the websites for Alarming Echo Beats and the Absynth music project, I suspect that the person responsible is from Texas and is named Sean; at one point he appears to have been an avid collector of Godzilla memorabilia. (The power of the internet, right?) Digging deep online, there is also a possible association with a briefly-existent racist CD-R label, which I will not name here, but I cannot confirm overlap in the absence of concrete evidence. I will also note that the He Came To Set The Captives Free compilation and one other AEB release also seem to have been reissued by another label (not the racist one named above), which also released two albums by groups associated with racist themes.
At any rate, around 2008 the trail goes dead. Copies of AEB releases appear to be exquisitely scant, with only a small handful available on the secondary marketplace, and digital uploads also seem to be absent. One wonders how many of each release were produced, and whether a full archive exists somewhere.
As a whole, Alarming Echo Beats is emblematic of the many productive but briefly active experimental music CD-R labels that existed in the 2000s. By and large, this body of music remains under-documented and under-collected, with incomplete Discogs listings representing the best quality information about many of these small labels. Many mysteries remain, but as time passes, the details fade further and further into obscurity…
Do you know more about the Alarming Echo Beats story? If so, please leave a comment or get in touch! I’d love to fill out this story.
Listed for over one hundred Euros apiece, this 10-CD set comes in a custom wooden box, and is one of the most preposterous releases in the Gerogerigegege catalogue — which is saying a lot.
Source: Discogs
The Gerogerigegege is the project of Toyko residents Juntaro Yamanouchi and Gero 30 (a.k.a. Tetsuya Endoh), who have been performing together since 1985. In the past, they were famous for their live performances, in which Endoh, who is an exhibitionist, would masturbate and perform other indecent acts on stage — a spectacle all the more noteworthy given that, when they met, Yamanouchi was apparently just 18 years old, whereas Endoh was in his forties. Fittingly, these first performances took place largely in BDSM clubs.
After releasing a very lo-fi debut tape on Merzbow’s ZSF Produkt label — a collage of guitar noise narrowly ranging from feedback to squall — Yamanouchi started up his own Vis à Vis Audio Arts label, which released the Senzuri Champion LP. That release captured the core Gerogerigegege aesthetic: there is feedback noise, sure, but also a rhythm section, which allows them newly to pound out noisy punk assaults. The release ends with a final jam, in which Endoh is heard moaning in onanistic pleasure over a funky beat.
Source: Discogs
That aesthetic would be amplified with further exploits, with many critics encapsulating the Gerogerigegege concept with one word: obscene. Indeed, the band’s name is reportedly an onomatopoeia for the sound of someone vomiting and discharging diarrhea at the same time. And yet Gerogerigegege’s approach to obscenity is just as much about subversion as it is perversion. Showa, the follow up to Senzuri Champion, starts with a fuzzy recording of the Japanese anthem before transitioning into 30 minutes of porn audio; the cover image is a profile photo of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. Ai-Jin, a 1988 flexi disc, is a recording of Yamanouchi “singing” over a pop song song by one of Taiwan’s most famous singers, Teresa Teng. (Notably, though 2000 copies were reportedly pressed, almost all of them were burned in a performance at Enoshima Beach, meaning surviving discs sell for hundreds of dollars to collectors.) And 1993’s 0 (Zero) Song EP was a clear flexi disc with no grooves on it: its liner notes insist that “silence is the best music” and instruct the listener to play at “75 rpm or any speed.”
To contextualize this combination of perversion and subversion, look to Yamanouchi’s 1992 interview in RRRecords’ RRReport magazine, which has been transcribed online. There he identifies as a gay man who is in support of gay rights, but not prone to political action. He reflects on the absence of a pride movement in Japan, and argues that “If they try to hide who they are and to avoid associating with straight people, it is kind of natural that they are discriminated and looked down.” Elsewhere, after describing Gerogerigegege performances in which the two of them them consumed one another’s feces as middle-aged onlookers masturbated along, he boils the band’s ethic down to two ideas: “Do not copy others” and “Human feelings.” Aware of Japan’s stigma around queerness, but seemingly comfortable with his own sexuality, Yamanouchi’s goal for The Gerogerigegege appears to involve both iconoclasm and unfiltered self-expression.
Source: Discogs
The band’s most famous record, Tokyo Anal Dynamite, came out in 1990. Despite its name, it is among the more conventional of Gerogerigegege’s records, albeit perhaps that isn’t saying much: in approximately 40 minutes, the band fits in seventy-five songs. Each track starts with a “1-2-3-4!” count-off and then descends into a chaotic blast of noise-punk. The sound was inspired, as Yamanouchi says in a 2001 interview, by the noisecore scene, an obscure international genre devoted to short blasts of guitar/drum/vocal noise. Specifically, he describes being enamoured with a rare 1986 demo tape by Australian band Seven Minutes of Nausea, which crams in 102 tracks.
Seven Minutes of Nausea’s Karen’s Edge demo from 1986. (Source: Discogs)
Mysteriously, The Gerogerigegege disappeared in 2001, not to reappear until 2016, when a flurry of releases followed. It is unclear if Endoh is still contributing to the project (in a 2001 interview, he was reportedly ill in hospital), though Yamanouchi has issued a characteristic stream of noise assaults and concept records.
Enter, then, the behemoth 不安な演奏 set, whose title translates to Anxious Performance. This is ten CDs’ worth of audio culled from dusty old “ero-tapes”: pornographic audio recordings of men and women engaged in explicit activities. These cassettes were reportedly sold primarily in the sixties through the eighties in the back corners of adult bookstores. According to an essay written by Eiji Yaginuma for a related Gerogerigegege release, these “dark tapes” often featured hand-written labels and were frequently advertised as having been recorded surreptitiously in private locations. In some cases, they were referred to as “eavesdropping” tapes for this purpose.
Here, The Gerogerigegege presents 10 CDs worth of these tapes, seemingly unaltered. The audio is just tape hiss and people’s voices, which are often indistinct due either to the poor recording conditions or the age of the source material.
The box set’s name is borrowed from the title of a book by Seicho Matsumoto, a Japanese detective fiction author very popular in the sixties and seventies. (It appears that the book’s title is more commonly translated as Uneasy Performance and has yet to be translated to English.) The novel itself tells the story of a magazine editor who is investigating several “eavesdropping” tapes recorded at a “love hotel,” only to discover that one of the recordings seems to capture a murder being planned.
As a result of the degraded audio and disembodied voices, there is little about these recordings that is erotic. (I will concede that I have only listened to parts of two tracks.) Instead, they feel dirty and more than a little eerie. Yaginuma, writing about another similar release in the Gerogerigegege discography, observes that the original ero-tapes were not designed to be art; in fact they were deliberately artless. “…there is no such thing as ‘sophistication’ in the existence of the ero cassette,” he writes. “It is simply a vulgar, disreputable, and indecent project that attracts viewers and listeners alike. It is an act of creation that is not pursued, improved, or aimed at in any way, but simply made because it was thought that customers might bite, because it would sell.” For Yaginuma, it was this directness — or, as he puts it, “barbaric”-ness — that makes it such a pure form of expression.
Indeed, the barbaric candidness of these obscure source cassettes is what makes this such a disquieting listen, what Yaginuma refers to as “the creepiness and stench that can appear only because there is no artifice, intentional design, manipulation of information, or any unnaturalness at all.”
The Gerogerigegege would follow this box set up with a vinyl “reissue” entitled “Naomi’s Masturbation and Wakakusa Dormitory Guide,” which was yet another untouched dub of an old “ero-tape,” this one featuring the sounds of women masturbating. Reportedly, he had obtained this tape decades ago, and, upon returning to an erotic bookshop in search for cover artwork, was shocked to find an advertisement in an old pornographic magazine for the exact same (deeply esoteric) tape.
Only 300 copies of the 不安な演奏 box were produced, and they are already sold out from the source. Surely, many have fallen into the hands of collectors who are conscious that other limited edition Gerogerigegege releases now sell for hundreds of dollars. Yet, this is an undeniably true realization of the band’s vision. It is obscene, discomforting, and virtually impossible to take in.
This release was originally available on the Urashima website.
“Creating HNW in itself can easily get very obsessive, perhaps always is.”
Sven Kay has been interested in extreme music for a long time. Having arrived to the party as an early teenager via hyper-paced electronic genres like gabber and terrorcore, he then cycled through intense forms of rap and extreme metal, before discovering a short article about Merzbow in a music encyclopedia owned by his father. That was a key fork in the road.
In 2003, he started his own noise project named All Collapsed, and he hasn’t slowed down since. Over the years, he has established a name for his hyper-specific sound projects. The most obvious example is Opaque, a solo sound project based around a fetish for down jackets; most of the artwork featured women dressed in brand-name puffy jackets, with album titles like Short Pink Down Jacket With Fur Collar and Two Girls In Nickelson Moena And Jolina Down Jackets. The music consisted of unchanging blocks of harsh noise, a.k.a. harsh noise wall (HNW). There are at least sixty-nine Opaque releases, each a slight variation on the central theme.
Opaque is not his only such endeavor. His Immaculate Affection project has produced three volumes of HNW, each release dedicated to the Glee character Quinn Fabray. And his Unbelievable Black Magic label puts out noise inspired by old mondo films like Faces of Death — documentary-style video compilations that were popular in the seventies and depicted graphic footage, including clips of accidents and injuries. All of Kay’s Unbelievable Black Magic releases feature artwork inspired by the format:
Kay’s biggest fixation may be the subgenre of noise music called harsh noise wall. His Absent Erratum net label specializes in the style, along with the related genre ambient noise wall. (Stylistically, it’s less harsh, but just as monolithic.)
Absent Erratum captures two of Kay’ tendencies. For one, it showcases his tendency to cross-pollinate HNW with other ideas; in this case, HNW is imbued with a colourful and post-modern vaporwave aesthetic. Secondly, it is highly obsessional. Since 2018, Absent Erratum has put out a constant stream of new releases, each one carefully designed and often titled using baroque linguistic chicanery — album titles include ⌺⌺⌺⌺⌺ and 𝕯𝕴𝕾𝕽𝖀𝕻𝕿𝕺𝕽 𝕴𝕴.
Kay, a high school teacher from just outside Rotterdam, is a disarmingly nice guy. Via email, he told me about Absent Erratum and his unique aesthetic, enthusiastically sharing the many details behind the operation.
Kay started Absent Erratum in the summer 2008. Before that, he had been collecting images in a computer folder called “vaporhnwave,” as a process of refining the vaporwave-cum-HNW direction he was moving towards. As he developed the modus operandi for the label, he started to invite artists to contribute. “I sent them a list of core ideas/requirements,” Kay explains. “Each project was to have a new and unique project name; the release should thematically and/or sonically be ‘non-traditional’ — somewhat vague, perhaps by design, as many things have become fairly commonplace in (H)NW — but none of the typical gore or sex. They could work anonymously, if they wanted. And they were to submit an image that, for them, was a suitable visual companion to their track, which I would use in the artwork.”
Kay mainly works in his living room, though he keeps his pedals, cassette decks, and contact mics at his dad’s place, a vestige from the days when his kids were young and he was too busy to create music. He tends to work on Absent Erratum at night. He tells me he has a tendency to hyper-focus, staying up to 3AM engrossed in his work. “When I get into it I forget time, I forget to eat and drink, I am completely immersed in the creative process. I usually notice I am entirely parched and hungry by the time I stop,” he says.
Sven Kay’s Absent Erratum workstation. (Source: Sven Kay)
“I’ve been doing noise and experimental music for a long time and while my girlfriend and family are always supportive, none of them really understand noise in the end,” he explains. “My girlfriend, for instance, has literally said time and again that she doesn’t understand it, but she is always super supportive and always speaks positively of my projects to her family and friends. My sister probably gets closest to really getting it. (I dragged her along to a The Rita show some 10 years ago and we share a lot of musical interests, generally). I’d say she understands it, as she likes plenty of weird music herself, but even for her noise is not something she listens to of her own accord. Everyone will take a passing interest in it, find the effort commendable, but that’s where it ends, pretty much. Apart from the odd friend who I share some musical interests with, I don’t even share my creative projects with my friends. If anything, I feel it’s way too alienating, most people in my experience just find noise/HNW ‘weird’ and see little artistic merit or even any redeeming qualities to it.”
Absent Erratum’s discography is a mixture of work by Kay and by other artists, most of whom have chosen to remain anonymous. Each album is attributed to a one-of-a-kind noise project, so you won’t find Absent Erratum artists anywhere else. There is one exception: an artist named Liz Clark has put out two releases on the label. “[This] of course goes against the idea of Absent Erratum; I can enjoy this particular case of rule-breaking though, as it seems to fit with the spirit of AE — it wants to do things differently, so when, within that framework, things are done still differently, when it plays with the restrictions imposed in a somewhat rebellious manner, I enjoy that, too. Of course, it’s been done now — Liz Clark was the original rule breaker. Other rule breakers would have to find new ways to be inventive enough to break some more rules.”
I was struck by the myriad concept releases Absent Erratum has put out, many of which are conveyed using cryptic images and symbology. Kay was ready to tell me the story behind a number curious releases, even rooting out the perspectives of the original artists when possible:
𝑭𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆+𝑵𝒆𝒐𝒏⁹⁹ – TIME WARP
TIME WARP is a collection of brief noise walls by 𝑭𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆+𝑵𝒆𝒐𝒏⁹⁹, one of countless pseudonyms of Sven Kay himself. This one is noteworthy because Kay created the walls by sampling ASMR videos from the internet. “I am not entirely sure how many videos I used, but it was quite a few as I was looking for very specific sounds,” he tells me.”For each track of five minutes I used about an hour of ASMR videos. The videos themselves came from various channels off YouTube. I’m not very familiar with ASMR, so I had to search around aplenty to find proper material. The sounds from the videos themselves were not altered significantly, mostly just cut and trimmed to remove all extraneous materials and volume-adjusted where necessary.”
Kay combined the ASMR sounds with distorted white noise to produce the final product. He sees a parallel between ASMR and HNW, pointing out that both areas of sound production involve obsessive, detail-oriented approaches to audio, especially when it comes to the “texture” of sound. He tells me about the recent emergence of non-amplified, or acoustic, walls, as well as the idea of field-recorded walls — for example recordings of waterfalls or humming machines.
“I remember a remark by Evan of Ritual Stance on one incarnation of a HNW message board where he had noticed how the sound of his suitcase’s wheels on gravel had made a great wall,” Kay laughs. “ASMR works with a similar ear for texture, and thus is a great potential source for materials. I wanted TIME WARP to work with this type of ‘field recorded’ sound while also further using ASMR to add to the intertextuality and pop culture references in the release’s theme and titles. Many of the textures [used on TIME WARP] are of the handling and opening of playing card booster packs.”
Interestingly, this is the second time Kay has used ASMR samples in his music. His super mario record release, produced under the name Wow War Techno, combines ASMR with sine waves.
[no title]
This record may be a Bandcamp first: it has no name and no artist. “The intention was to have the artist anonymous and the record untitled,” Kay explains. “I did some work to find out how to generate entirely empty fields in Bandcamp, which made it come out excellently. It is definitely one of the most unique things on AE.”
Curious about the ASCII trickery responsible for gaming the system, I asked him to tell me how he subverted Bandcamp’s algorithms to create a nameless release. “There’s a lot of different whitespace characters besides the plain ‘space’ we tend to use most (by hitting the spacebar). These include figure spaces (for monospace digits), em and en spaces, tabs, and so on, each with their own function. While Bandcamp does not technically allow spaces to be submitted as characters in the submission fields, at the time of release this was not true for all possible spaces. The space that it ultimately did recognize as a character and not as a space was the Mongolian Vowel Separator. Thus the submission fields are technically not actually empty, but for all intents and purposes, they are.”
Forces Spéciales – Leviathan
This record is listed as the first release on Absent Erratum’s Bandcamp page; like many others, it is based on a complex web of ideas nestled deep inside Kay’s mind, which he has attempted to externalize via harsh noise wall. Kay traces its influence to Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, which he read 15 years ago. “Beloved, the character, served as the inspiration for a series of scenes I devised for a ghost story set in Central Africa that I intended to write but ultimately never did. The story disappeared somewhere in the recesses of my brain until I hit upon the image from which the picture on the cover was cropped. It’s a picture of a trio of Fulani women. Something about this image had the same mood as my conceptual ghost story had. I then combined it with various different influences that all share this powerful, mysterious, ominous sense.”
The title, Leviathan, is meant to conjure both Paul Auster’s novel of the same name, and the idea of a sea monster. He sees this double-association as a parallel to the Beloved and the scary ghost story he planned to write.
The name Forces Spéciales reflects his fascination with the Democratic Republic of Congo, another one of Kay’s obsessions. “Forces Spéciales refers to no particular military force, but is instead a semi-fictional one that is based upon a lot of reading that I have done on the DRC, the conflicts plaguing this country and the various militias involved. The French clearly has its origin there. It evokes militias, army groups, all huddled and hidden in jungles – Forces Armeés, Forces Démocratiques, and the Mai Mai of course – ghosts themselves almost, men sprinkling themselves with water to protect themselves from bullets, unseen and lurking in the dark, threatening and intimidating.”
Photos of Osho – Osho speaks on Meditation
Photos of Osho is not Sven Kay, but instead an anonymous artist; fortunately, Kay passed my questions on to that producer, allowing some insight into this mysterious release. It’s another bizarre post-modern noise wall excursion.
“Photos of Osho came about after reading material regarding the Rajneeshpuhram community in Wasco County, Oregon,” explains the anonymous producer. “During the 70s and 80s there was a surge of Indian godmen/gurus within the United States, such as Bikram Choudhury’s hot yoga, Swami Muktananda’s appearance in Woodstock, and Osho’s first persona, Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh. What attracted me to Rajneesh’s story was the idea of this mental barrier (i.e. wall) separating the previous persona from the current one. Many people that know about Osho haven’t heard of Rajneesh and the debacle that ensued, which included a bioterror attack using Salmonella that prompted the US government to shut him down. While all of this was happening, Rajneesh remained silent and isolated, having taken a meditation vow. Since my entire research took place after googling ‘photos of Osho’ it seemed natural to construct a release around these layers of silence and separation.”
The audio on this release has an interesting story itself. “There are some extracts of interviews that took place during [Rajneesh’s] incarceration and trial, in which you can hear this soft hiss in the background, especially in between words — or was it, perhaps, that the soft hiss was being interrupted by his words? The silent throb under it, that is mysticism channeled through.”
TRIBUTE – COMO UN MAR ETERNO
Another release by an anonymous artist, this one starts off as saturated dance music before fading into noise. Its producer explains that it is a tribute to La Favi, a contemporary singer who is considered part of the experimental fringe of reggaeton music known as neoperro. “I discovered her thanks to Sven, so it was a pretty obvious choice for a release on Absent Erratum,” says the person behind TRIBUTE. “On another level, that turned the album into a tribute to Sven — or a gift, or something he’d like — because his work is an inspiration on so many levels. Then, as with most side projects, it was also a way to go against a lot of my habits: the tracks are short, the post-editing was the biggest part of the work (at the time, I had more experience with single line, live walls) and finally it was an occasion to blend a wall with a melodic synth line.”
🐬 Ecco 🐬 イルカ 🐬 – The Marks On Your Head Look Like Stars In The Sky
This highly specific release has yet another exquisitely post-modern origin story. “The idea behind this release was my love for the game Ecco the Dolphin and other classic video games and the hidden themes of sadness and sorrow behind them,” says the anonymous producer. “A lot of classic games like this always had a happy and cheerful vibe to them, with the visuals, the soundtrack, etc., so for the artwork I wanted Sven to match it up to that look and theme, so listening to the release would catch some people off guard when hearing it for the first time after seeing the art.
“With Ecco the Dolphin you play as Ecco, who is on a quest to save his family and friends who were kidnapped by aliens. It has a cartoony and weird vibe to it, but the whole time you think of how sad, scared, and lonely Ecco must feel. He was just living a simple and happy life, just for everything to be taken from him. And he is forced to go on a quest to save everyone, and even though he probably isn’t ready for this, he takes it head on and is willing to do everything he can to save the ones he loves. When recording this album I tried to match those themes as closely as I could, with the title giving off that hopefully and cheerful vibe, while the tracks fit more with the underlying themes of loneliness and sorrow that Ecco feels during the game.”
The music, indeed, is a quiet and ominous breed of textbook ambient noise wall — like a massive boulder, all alone, rolling endlessly over a desert plain:
Stories & Themes
I return to Kay, curious about how he has taken such an abstract genre and used it to explore these very overt themes. “For me personally, harsh noise generally and harsh noise wall in particular, are very narrative, writerly media,” Kay says, explaining that his approach has almost always been to use the sound to tell a narrative. “My first ‘proper’ release ever, a harsh noise/free jazz disc by my project horsing, was called Chanzhengand its track titles were taken from the various chapters of a book called On The Long Road With Chairman Mao. At that time, I think, that ‘narrative’ was something very literal, and of course through the years that has changed. Absent Erratum is a good example of a journey ever further into the abstract. But at its core, this is still what it is to me. As a waller, you are a storyteller, a writer, giving shape to ideas, relating them. In the end, every project is a story – and every release for this particular project adds a chapter to the story, or a new perspective, or a footnote – it can do many things, but it will never be a new story.”
Front cover of horsing’s Changzheng CDR, as reissued on Cantankerous Records in 2009. (Source: Discogs)
He recognizes that there is something unusual about blocks of unchanging harsh noise being a paradigm for storytelling. “Since the sound is so abstract, how can it truly ‘tell’ anything? I think that for many people ‘narrative’ music probably sooner conjures up images of story-telling classic rock concept albums, Ziggy Stardust or Tommy or things like extravagant Ayreon albums or that Scrooge McDuck album by Tuomas Holopainen. Music that in the most straightforward way imaginable actually tells a story and has the means to do so by employing dynamics, melodies, lyrics, instruments to convey settings, scenes, moods.
“HNW is pretty much the exact opposite, especially the monolithic kind that is entirely void of dynamics, melody, lyrics, instruments. Of course, this allows a certain freedom. It is actually extremely non-restrictive. HNW is a blank canvas that, in its purest form, in itself has no inherent ‘mood’ – that mood is imposed by the artist.”
He proposes an experiment: Take two HNW tracks, one by the producer Love Katy, whose releases are all glittery tributes to Katy Perry, and another by the very nihilistic French HNW project Vomir. Without the artwork and context, he suggests it will be impossible to distinguish them. “Try to decide what inherent characteristics within them make them, respectively, a glamorous, glittery pink pop tribute and a nihilistic void. It is only imposed by the themes, the language and the imagery that the artist provides.
“What also makes HNW ideal to engage with obsessions, passions, and fetishes is the fact that creating HNW in itself can easily get very obsessive, perhaps always is. I think for many creators, their engagement with their obsessions and passions and fetishes focuses on minutiae, super fine details – it’s micro-focal,” he says, citing my recent article about The Rita’s Thousands of Dead Gods, in which Sam McKinlay discusses his passion for great white sharks.
“You see that same kind of micro-focus all throughout [the HNW scene]. Runway releases are each dedicated to a single specific runway look; Oyasumi Punpun has a separate release for each chapter within each of the volumes of the manga of the same name; the h POKÉDEX project has a separate wall for each Pokémon (so far, at least, the first and second generations, about 250 in all); Cory Strand has done tapes for separate issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics…”
A sample from the 151-release h POKÉDEX discography, which is entirely on Bandcamp. Each release is devoted to a different Pokémon.
“That micro-focus on these details of the objects of obsession also comes into play when creating walls. It’s concerned with these minutiae: the pops and crackles, the spaces between them. In that sense, the engagement with walls parallels the engagement with the object of obsession.
“In the end, there is also a very simple reason for the abundance of project names that is seen throughout the experimental music scene but perhaps especially in HNW, which was also addressed recently by Richard and Sean in their interview for Noisextra: it is a very direct way to deal with or respond to an obsession, which can come from the most insignificant thing. In the interview, they talk about how a certain turn of phrase or a title of a movie could be enough, for instance where they talk about the origin of the project name Gourmet Shit Scene [which references a particular bit of dialogue in the movie Pulp Fiction]. I think that is very recognizable.”
Language
Many Absent Erratum releases tend to experiment with language and typography, either by utilizing unusual characters or by toying with loose association. Kay, in addition to being a schoolteacher, also has training in linguistics, and when I ask him about his fondness for wordplay, he has much to say.
He first points to the Leviathan album, which makes direct references to a book. Yet other releases can get a lot more abstract. “I find a lot of pleasure in juxtaposing language from very different sources within a title or release; to me, this is a great source of tension, invoking erratic, odd mental imagery,” he says. “It’s one area where the vaporwave element comes in, of course. Vaporwave is all reference, extremely intertextual. A lot of the appreciation of it comes from the appreciation of its referents, whether we are familiar with them specifically or just with their time frame and associated atmosphere and feeling.”
Absent Erratum follows a similar method, he explains, taking me through one exemplary release: “[The album] TIME WARP is a fairly complex — or muddled — amalgam of influences and referents. TIME WARP refers to a Super Famicom Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Turtles In Time, which is also reflected in the artwork, which uses a Shredder sprite from that game. In that sense, it plays pretty directly with this nostalgic idea of a callback to the feeling of carefree summers in the 1990’s — I was born in 1984.” He points out that this is also reflected in the “99” in the project’s name, 𝑭𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆+𝑵𝒆𝒐𝒏⁹⁹.
“At the same time, many of the other elements [of the artwork] are distinctly not 90’s but do intend to evoke that similar vibe of a carefreeness and youthfulness, except in a more contemporary way: the abundance of emojis, the picture of neoperreo singer Tomasa Del Real (saturation boosted quite a bit). The track titles again are structured after the way the levels in the same Super Famicom game are structured, except now they reference Latin American beach destinations and nightlife districts, a series of visits to them unfolding in a single night.”
1. Playa Hermosa, San Juan Del Sur, 2:00 p.m. 04:00 2. Gazcue, Santo Domingo, 7:00 p.m. 04:00 3. Miraflores, Lima, 11:00 p.m. 04:00 4. Galerias, Bogotá, 3:00 a.m. 04:00 5. La Reina, Santiago, 6:00 a.m. 04:00
TIME WARP‘s track listing
“It’s like a glimpse into the decadence of this unspecified jet set, time warping for all intents and purposes from the one place to the next. The future and neon of the title further shape this overall atmosphere: A 90s aesthetics of neon, the neon of nightlife districts, conceptions of future from the perspective of the 90’s and the actuality of that future that is this release.
“A lot of credit should also go to my contributors. There is some truly fantastic language that they use. Some personal favourite examples of the wonderful language in others’ contributions are I Swim In Prismatic Light, Unhiltered, The Marks On Your Head Look Like Stars In The Sky, Unbridled and Household.”
Xruelty And The Xeast’s release, L E G I O N, which came out on Absent Erratum in 2020.
“Many other things are more or less abstracted amalgamates or derivatives from their sources of inspiration. S U D D E N L I G H T S U D D E N D E A T H was inspired by (though not taken verbatim from) a passage from Helen Winternitz’ travelogue East Of The Equator. The surface of the water reflecting the sky is a play on a Naoki Zushi composition. Xruelty And The Xeast is named after Cruelty And The Beast, in a way. Yet other things are inspired by the naming conventions for action movie sequels and J-pop singles. Yet others distort their sources even more.”
When I ask Kay to describe himself, he balks at the question, conceding principally that he is “compulsively productive.” I suggest the word generosity, given that Kay devotes so much time and energy to producing music for others to listen to, and to providing a forum for others to release their music.
“I think ‘generous’ is a very braggy term to use for oneself, but it’s funny that you mention generosity,” he says. “I release a tape batch about every half year and try to sell these tapes for as low as I can without bleeding money profusely on it — but bleeding it aplenty anyway, which I am absolutely fine with, as it only seems natural that you spend money on your hobby. Which, I guess, my projects are in the end. They’re not my day job.”
He shows me the math, explaining that he used to sell his tapes internationally for €5,50 apiece. At €4 in shipping fees alone, it was a losing proposition. And now that shipping outside the EU has ballooned to €11 per tape, he’s had to abandon the practice — though orders of multiple tapes can be more cost-effective.
Kay is tight-lipped about the future of Absent Erratum, saying he has releases in the pipeline, but wants to wait until they coalesce before announcing them. He does have a plan to bring the label into the physical realm, however. “Brief forays into the physical sphere have been made,” he points out. “A label patch and a tape (for Hair Like Water, Wavy Like The Sea).”
Source: Discogs
“The idea is to give more physical shape to the label, but to do so in a way that reflects its digital character appropriately. I have been compiling a list of the formats I would like to release on, some more suitable to audio (CD, LP, minidisc, VHS, etc) but some also decidedly not (perfume, candle, tote bag, sticker, pin). The idea is that they each constitute the true physical release for the album. The non-audio formats would include QR codes to refer people to the album. I have done some design work for some of these, but amidst all my other projects they have yet to take shape.”
Thanks to Sven Kay for the interview. The Absent Erratum Bandcamp page is here.
“We’re being spiritually sliced up by modern life? How about literally slice up the samples?”
Consider two musical extremes.
First, consider the extreme of hardcore punk, particularly where it meets the extreme of heavy metal. That absurdly loud, fast, and technical fringe where you might find a grindcore band like Pig Destroyer, or metalcore bands like Botch and Converge.
Then consider breakcore, an underground scene that took the hectic speeds and manic complexity of drum & bass, but kicked both elements up to impossible proportions.
So what happens when you combine those two musical extremes? When you take two genres noted for being fast, loud, and impossibly intricate, and merge them?
That question was answered in 2006, when a producer named Drumcorps produced an album named Grist. If you’re wondering what I mean by “answered,” take a listen to a track from that record:
On that track, you’re hearing samples taken from the 1999 song “To Our Friends in the Great White North” by Botch, a band known for its contribution to metalcore. Botch’s music is also sometimes filed under mathcore, a genre that weds extreme metal to the complexity of math rock. On this track, Drumcorps has taken snippets of Botch’s loud and precise sounds and has set them to mutant Amen breaks.
Drumcorps is the moniker of Aaron Spectre, who graciously entertained my questions about Grist via email for this piece. According to a previous interview he did for Japan’s Breakcore Guidebook, Spectre grew up in Massachusetts. Despite his maximalist music, his youth sounds tranquil:
“I was a quiet kid, and always pretty content to play alone and use my imagination. A stick can be a spaceship, an entire story can emerge from a caterpillar on a leaf. Later my brother came along and we’d play ball or frisbee or video games. But that ability to be still and alone for long amounts of time gives a kind of peace that I carry with me.”
After getting a portable tape player from his parents, he sated himself on Michael Jackson and Don McLean records, before being struck dumb by grunge. He still considers Alice in Chains’ Dirt the heaviest record in existence.
The heaviest album in existence? (Source: Discogs)
After awhile someone played him some thrash, and he ended up discovering Sepultura, teaching himself to drum by playing along to those records. (What a way to learn!)
There was no scene in his hometown, but in high school he became engrossed in the hardcore shows happening in nearby towns, attending all-ages shows and buying records at merch tables. Those small concerts were important in his growing affinity for underground music:
“To me, hardcore is a vital form of folk music, people’s music. It’s just a natural reaction to life in the USA, it’s something that you just have to do and you don’t necessarily realize why. It made sense right away, and seeing it in its natural habitat was a great gift. You go to the show, bounce around and go a bit berserk, and when it’s all over you go home feeling physically exhausted but also re-energized in a spiritual way.”
In parallel, Spectre was developing an interest in electronic music. The first instrument he learned to play was the piano, and he used these skills while toying with a MIDI sequencer on his father’s computer. His high school music teacher allowed him to use the school’s MIDI lab on his lunch hour, offering him brief opportunities to experiment with full equipment:
“I’d spend all day imagining what I was going to do, planning it out. Then the moment would arrive, I’d inhale a sandwich in 2 minutes and use the remaining 18 minutes to write music. I did this every day, for the whole year, using notation software on the black & white Mac Classic and a Yamaha DX7 & TG33. At that rate I’d have a few songs done every year.”
His true immersion into the electronic music scene would come later, while living in San Francisco. It was there, in 2001, that he discovered breakcore at an “outlaw warehouse party.”
Spectre tells me about the magic of that SF scene. “It was the first time I’d been fortunate to see a homegrown electronic music culture existing in the United States, in its natural habitat, on a bigger scale. I’d seen smaller scenes before, but this was another thing – something beyond a few dedicated folks – an actual community forming in a place, a world unto itself. By ‘natural habitat,’ I mean that all sorts of socioeconomic factors combine, and something just emerges. It has to happen, there’s a real need driving it …
“And so in SF, we had a bunch of absolute weirdos living in communal warehouses, building sound systems, forming crews, buying up old diesel school buses and converting them to veggie oil, making mixtapes for each other, bopping around the Bay Area in ancient cars, fishing through a pile of tapes in the glove compartment while crossing the bridge, building their own little self-contained scene, and finding wild stuff like ‘breakcore.’ Huh? What is this? Well, once you hear it, you KNOW. It was a spirit, a freedom of the time, and everyone in contact with it knew it was a special thing. Some folks were loosely basing a lot of their ethos on the UK’s Spiral Tribe, but making it their own. Music is the anchor, but the roots of this thing have to do with many other pieces of life.”
Aaron Spectre performing live in San Francisco. (Source: Aaron Spectre)
He talks about the anything-goes mentality of that San Francisco scene, which put young people together who were in it for the experience, not any financial incentive. “In reality it was a bunch of kids in a warehouse who neither knew better not cared to know, the wisdom and idealism of youth, the drive to actually do something with whatever you have on hand. This meant Christmas lights everywhere, homemade decorations, a righteous booming soundsystem, freeform and great music. There was absolutely no financial gain possible, so you get none of the icky stuff which appears later, just a bunch of people who are in it for the vibe, and perhaps something greater, perhaps the only thing there ever really is.
“The events happen when folks become a little more punky ravey and get some turntables, and oh was it special. Still is. The first was run by the S.P.A.Z. (semi-permanent autonomous zone) and 5lowershop crews, and there have been several more over the years, in different warehouses. Outdoor locations too. The feeling is like when you’re a little kid and it’s your birthday – everything is special – and you get that sense of wonderment and fun in your life, when things are at their best.”
Spectre moved to Berlin with his girlfriend in 2003, an experience that changed him significantly. In his Breakcore Guidebook interview, he describes the strange feeling of being in Berlin in Winter, not yet knowing how to speak German, how this “destroys every image you have of yourself which isn’t built in reality, and was instead a product of culture / advertising / other peoples’ thoughts.” He also mentioned arriving at a “truth about the world,” a “moment of shining clarity.” It was from that truth that Grist emerged.
The view from Berlin. (c) Aaron Spectre, All Rights Reserved. https://drumcorps.co
I wanted to know what he meant when he spoke about uncovering this great truth. He indulged me: “As concisely as possible, industrial capitalism is a death march, we’re all playing our part in it, and no one is in charge. We follow the path of previous generations like lemmings to the abyss, the edges of which we are already starting to see, and which will become increasingly visible for the rest of our lives, the next generation, and anyone who may be left after that.
“Most people are good, and they want to help! But this isn’t good for the thing. To get us to cooperate with mass extinction, we must be forced, coerced, and propagandized. And so we are all sitting in our separate bubbles. We wake up each morning in half-truths, put our shoulders to the wheel, and advance a suicidal system which benefits the few, to the eventual destruction of all. It’s bonkers! It’s way beyond ideology. It’s not just labor versus capital… It’s capitalism versus all life on earth. I’m sorry, but that’s it. Obvious to most, but if there’s anyone left who doesn’t know this yet, they will know soon. “
These revelations came to Spectre during a period of relentless touring. When he describes those experiences, they almost sounds like a process of depersonalization. “You step into lots of different peoples’ bubbles, and you really feel what it’s like to be them, for a day. You eat their food, ride the bus together, watch their TV, sleep on their couch and feel what their blankets are like. You hear what they value and what they dream about doing. You meet their families and see where they grew up.
The view from a Drumcorps tour: A couch to sleep on, complete with bottle of ketchup. (Source: Aaron SpectrE)
“I must clarify that this style of touring was very, very grassroots, and only barely possible. Super low budget, maximum grueling hours, every method of transport, every ridiculously long ride, sleeping everywhere you can, hauling lots of heavy gear, because I’m ridiculous and insist on playing guitar and using lots of MIDI controllers. There’s lots of half-sleepy daydreaming out the window, gazing at the woods and rolling fields and smokestacks out there, loading docks, cement factories, suburban stores, city centers. And then you arrive, and there are a host of people and things to learn and then, the show. It’s on. A flurry of activity, and then maybe a little sleep and then back into the moving tube / on the road again. I went absolutely everywhere. Each city contains many memories and a host of people whose lives we shared for a day or so. I used to keep all the flyers up at home, but I took them all down, because it started driving me crazy, everything reminds me of people and I wonder how they are doing.
“One day your mind integrates all this experience you’ve had into these words that make sense. At the time, it’s a mess.”
The Rmx or Die 10″ (Source: Aaron Spectre)
Shortly before Grist came out, Spectre released a handful of EPs. One was 2005’s Rmx or Die 10-inch, which included several extreme metal samples, including a breakcore reworking of a track by metalcore band Botch. Spectre considers this record a proof of Grist‘s concept. “I wanted to see if it could work,” he says. “The fastest way was to sample entire tunes and rework them, as you do in DJ culture, for the dancefloor or the geek enthusiast. You rework what you love, present it to people in a different way. So as the folk troubadour sings someone else’s song…. the producer makes a mashup. I’ve also always wanted to make hardcore punk electronic music since forever, so it was good time try both things and see what’s possible.”
“Human Shields” is a breakcore reworking of Botch’s “Happy Worker Bees.”
That single was the second record out on Kriss Records, an imprint dedicated to “big fat mash-up madness.” Spectre explains that Kriss was seemingly the only label interested in this idea of combining heavy guitar music with breakneck electronic production, so he sent them a demo. But that record didn’t sell well at the time. “I actually ended up buying the backstock from the label guy after a few months, because he wanted to get rid of it,” Spectre tells me.
Around then Spectre also put out the “Amen, Punk” single, credited to his full name, not Drumcorps. This record includes a jungle remix of Bad Brains’ seminal hardcore anthem, “Pay to Cum.” Bad Brains were a band that started off playing hardcore, but shifted to reggae over the course of their career, many records combining both sounds.
This track reworks Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum”
Spectre sees Bad Brains as connected with electronic music, conceptually. “Bad Brains is the bridge, the key, spiritually, between the hardcore punk and the reggae worlds, rock & roll, and by extension jungle and drum & bass,” Spectre says. “It’s the Rosetta Stone of the vibe, if you will. These scenes we work in, we’re all branches from the same tree. [The “Amen, Punk” single] came from a desire to let people in our little subculture know about roots and originators, lest we forget.”
Show flyer from Spectre’s Berlin days. (Source: Aaron Spectre)
Though these mashups started off using samples exclusively, they paved the way for Spectre to add his own instrumentation to the mix. “On the technical side, I discovered that when you do mashups of something incredibly dense and fast, and you add amen drums into the mix… things get unbalanced. To get back to the good sound, you need to add other things as well. Some bass here, some more guitar there… and pretty soon you’re playing most of it yourself! So… oddly this remix mashup work started me on the path of learning how to make everything 100%, which is what I’m doing nowadays.”
Grist, a maximalist, numbingly complex work, was a feat of sound engineering. It involved Spectre rummaging through his CD collection to search out little samples from here and there. I ask Spectre just how many samples went into it, but he isn’t sure. “Oh, I have no idea. There’s a gigantic folder. I would say WhoSampled has got about 50% of the sources. When you sample little pieces of feedback, drum hits, etc., that becomes impossible to find, and for me too. It’s lost to time, it’s on a backup somewhere far away. Maybe the algorithms will improve drastically in the next few years, and they will be able to provide a complete list! The extended list goes deep, but the sources are confined to a relatively small number of bands. After doing this stuff a while, I realized that whatever you sample, you are promoting, so I keep it to my favorites mostly.”
I wondered to Spectre what it was like embarking on a project of this scope. “The first few days were like any other,” he recalls. “There’s rarely a plan. On the best days, I just go for what I’m feeling, and see what happens. Later after you’ve done a few tunes, you figure out that a theme is emerging, and it might be good to collect everything into a full album, a.k.a. a definitive statement. At that point, you follow the general plan and finish it, while still being open to unexpected new developments.”
Grist was made possible by Jason Forrest, who ran the Cock Rock Disco label, which co-released the album with Ad Noiseam. Forrest encouraged Spectre to convert his project into a full album.
From a technical standpoint, it was meticulous work. “It was just a lot of time sampling things, slicing it all up in Ableton. Not much external gear, just sampling. From vinyl as well. My computer didn’t like it one bit. Grist was really labor intensive, many tracks, many edits. It was the first Macintosh tower G5, the cheese grater, the one that sounds like a jumbo jet taking off under your desk!”
The entirety of Grist was produced in an apartment Spectre shared with his girlfriend. Spectre would work in the bedroom while his girlfriend did her work in a designated area in the kitchen. To optimize the experience, he fashioned his workspace to be as pleasant as possible. “When the music is heavy, everything else has gotta be cozy, is my general way. Heavy music is exhausting, and you need a place of peace and rest, to focus and do what needs to be done.” He surrounded himself with plants, stuffed animals, blankets, and items collected from travel.
Spectre’s home studio in Berlin. (Source: Aaron Spectre)
Their apartment was located in the hip Friedrichshain district of Berlin, on what Spectre suspects must be “one of the most crazy streets in existence.” As he worked with his noisy music, their apartment was surrounded by noise on all sides. “Sometimes our downstairs neighbor would be screaming every obscenity in German, at full volume, watching football,” he recollects. “This could strike at absolutely any hour of the day or night, 4 am or 9 am or 5 pm. There’s always a game happening somewhere. The sound of clinking glass bottles rolling in the streets. The pool table ‘break!’ sound from a bar nearby. Barking dogs. Punks and Nazis fighting each other. Police patrols and that diesel van in low gear slowly creeping sound.” All this noise, combined with the outrageous whir of his computer fan, necessitated Grist‘s maximalist bombast. This was no environment for ambient music.
As he composed his blistering breakcore inside, the sights outside would sometimes synchronize with the audio. Just outside his bedroom window, there was “an armada of trash and discarded mattresses, chairs, couches,” some of which would end up on fire in the middle of the night.
And yet: “The other side of the house, the courtyard, was the polar opposite,” he says. “Bunny rabbits and cats free roaming, catching sunbeams in harmony, kids playing in the sandbox, flowers growing, barbecues and laughter. Nearby, good friends and epic nights of DJing and good tunes. Oh dear lord. I simultaneously miss the place dearly, and never want to go back again. Anyone who has lived there will understand this.”
The view from Spectre’s apartment in Berlin. (Source: Aaron Spectre)
Listening to Grist‘s dense tracks, it’s obvious that it was the product of serious time and energy. And yet even that understates the case. Grist‘s production process was so grueling that Spectre earned a repetitive strain injury from mouse-clicking so much. It took so long that it was sequentially released in two vinyl EP editions (the Live and Regret EP and the Grist EP). When combined, those two EPs became the Grist album.
Spectre’s copy of the the Grist EP (Source: Aaron Spectre)
Spectre sees Grist as grounded in a central idea. “Grist is a concept record, to give an actual soundtrack to this feeling of fractured humanity by technology. Make it actually sound that way! We’re being spiritually sliced up by modern life? How about literally slice up the samples? Take the screaming sounds from 1,384,892 different bands and splice them all together, play one person’s sound against another’s — maybe this would be a good way to hear it, and understand.
“You see, my favorite punky music at its core is a reaction to this techno-dehumanizing society, a way back to goodness, a critical eye, and at its best, hope for the future. Let’s see what happens. Dark versus light is actually a bit too simplistic for my liking. I think of it more functional. We got all this crazy tech now, but are still carrying values from pre-tech times, and millions of years of instinct. What are we gonna do? What do we want? What’s a good thing to keep, what’s good to discard? Toss all these broken up pieces in the air, let them fall to the ground, and see what we can build. We’d better sort it out, right now. Certain ones like true love and curiosity are worth saving, certain other ones like tribal division can go, in my opinion.
“Maybe it’s not all that different from the past, and the big questions just rage on, in slightly different forms.”
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Thanks to Aaron Spectre for the interview. His latest release is The Quickening, released under his own name, and available on Bandcamp.
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