I've never really been in a position to find review copies dripping from my letterbox with any regularity, but it happens from time to time which, if nice in theory, is not without its problems. Of course, the obvious one is when someone you like sends you their work and it's fucking terrible, obliging you to either find something pleasant you can say about it or else stoop to well, I didn't really think I could do it justice so… The other one is when the legitimate freebie masterpiece is garnished with something by the guy who runs the label, which is why I now own one more CD by Der Blutharsch than I ever expected to own. On the other hand, there's this, which fell from the same envelope as Jenny Lives with Smell & Quim and Harsh Noise Movement, and which revealed itself to be frankly fucking amazing after just a couple of plays, which I really didn't expect. It may even be one of the best noise things I've ever heard.
Anyway, I did a bit of homework and discovered that one of this bunch, and actually the one with whom I'd been communicating on facebook, used to be in Expandobrain, one of those great lost bands who should have been enormous over whom I'd been quietly obsessing since taping Thyroid off Peel back in 1987 - not obsessing all of the time admittedly, but their legend had attained sufficient stature in my own personal mythology to at least have me yelling holy fucking shit at the screen before running into the front room to tell my wife knowing full well she wouldn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about.
Anyway, to reset to this morning, back before I realised there was a connection to anything I'd heard of, here's what's so great about this CD. As previously stated, I'm vaguely aware of the noise thing but I don't listen to a lot of it, which is probably why it's taken me so long to acclimate to the possibility of noise as anything other than just kicking your audience's head in for thirty minutes. I grew up with noise as transgressive confrontation, and only now am I beginning to appreciate that a distorted electronic racket can be at least as varied and expressive as any conventional instrument in terms of what it does - at least up to a point. I suspect we're still some way off the first noise power ballad, but, you know, it's not all an exercise in enforced bowel evacuation is what I'm trying to say here.
Die Robot seems to be, if anything, an ecologically themed concept album; or at least that's how it sounds to me. Excepting a folky acoustic guitar interlude and a location recording made in Istanbul, Die Robot mostly resembles what happens when you rummage around inside an old transistor radio with a screwdriver, sounds resembling nothing found in nature, buzz, hum, interference, distortion, grind, chug, tinnitus whistle and so on, and it's all amplified to a point bordering on, but not quite crossing over into discomfort. So it's mostly sounds your brain would filter out should they be heard in any other context, but here you're obliged to listen, and so you begin to notice effects and textures which are actually kind of absorbing, and which feel kind of good in much the same way as it does when you scratch an insect bite. Titles and half heard vocalisations hint at something, the interpretation of which may be in the ear of the beholder. Taking the term robot back to its original connotation of a creature which mindlessly repeats a task, even a stupid one, and not necessarily with mechanical overtones, Die Robot sounds like a broadside launched at human stupidity and the impulses which are presently destroying the planet; but like the very best surrealist masterpieces, this may well be nothing more than a pattern I happened to notice. The thing you should probably take from this is that for something which sounds like a power station having a fight with itself, there's a wide range of form and shade here, and a lot to be heard, even if you can't always tell what you're listening to.
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