It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.
Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.
I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.
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