Older cervix havers and bepenised beings may recall Onomatopoeia as the musical wing of Steve Fricker's Cheeses International distribution service and occasional collaborator with Smell & Quim, notably on the formidable Fanny Batter album. I myself specifically recall Onomatopoeia from Anal Almond which I reviewed in The Sound Projector magazine about a million years ago. Apparently I may even have been the only person to review it, which is depressing. Anal Almond was notable for combining hard, aggressive electronics with the misery of food allergies, thematically speaking, which certainly made a change from the usual stuff about Hitler. Irrelevant dates from approximately the same era but, having been initially issued as a cassette with a fairly limited run, has since been granted a second crack of the whip by means of this beautifully hand-crafted vinyl edition, just three-hundred and each one adorned with a different national flag for reasons which feel as though they make sense even if it's hard to say why.
Onomatopoeia sits loosely within that whole weirdy noise thing but can be distinguished from the herd by its reluctance to tick boxes or tread any particularly well worn path. It's not exactly power electronics, harsh noise, dark ambient, certainly nothing industrial, and to call it sound art might possibly be a bit wanky. Each of these peculiarly titled five tracks seem to comprise sounds derived from a single instrument - hunting horn, piccolo, cymbal and so on - slowed down, sped up, treated, looped, multitracked and the rest to the point of the source being abstracted more or less into oblivion - arguably excepting the bass on Chafed Cervix Coleslaw Cum Chutney Cesspit which goes all Richie Blackmore towards the end. This distortion of the source works exceptionally well, limiting what may have been distracting to yield something which manages to be alternately abrasive, meditative, and - above all - haunting. In fact, the first thing it brought to mind when I slapped the record on was Vernon Elliott's sombre incidental music for Noggin the Nog - so factor that in with a loosely Surrealist aesthetic and whatever inspired all those not quite ambient albums by Nigel Ayers, and that probably amounts to a description. Of all the weird shit I've listened to so far this year, Irrelevant has been one of the most pleasurable.
No comments:
Post a Comment