Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.