I'm generally sceptical of both downloads and CDRs because there are too many arseholes out there releasing five noise albums a week by such means and treating anyone who doesn't fall over themselves to bag the lot like some corporate tool who should probably stick to BTS*. Happily, there are exceptions to most rules, and in this case Peter Hope very much continues to be one of them. This you can tell by how much care and attention goes into these things - each short run CDR edition of the new download being lovingly put together with artwork, booklets and so on by the man himself as something which will remain a pleasing object even should all the zeroes and ones eventually turn to digital mush - which is where the download comes in handy. More significantly still, prolific though he certainly is, Peter Hope is always worth a listen. Not many can issue five or six full length albums a year to this sort of standard.
Anyway, getting to the point, here's another one, and if the back catalogue is perhaps a little too eclectic to allow for anything to be meaningfully singled out as his finest work, it might be this one. At least I've been playing it a lot. There are twelve tracks rather than twenty, and none of them constitute speed metal, but the title nevertheless makes intuitive sense if you're familiar with Hope's approach to his art where ideas and sounds are bolted together with the urgency of a Schwitter's assemblage - no obvious concessions to traditional aesthetics and yet seeming entirely faithful to the kind of blues which was played on a broken guitar under circumstances of grinding poverty. It's mostly electronic, although doesn't quite feel it, revelling as it does in its own dirt, crackle and distortion. This is nothing which would comfortably accommodate a barcode - in both the aesthetic and ideological sense - being genuine outsider music - not the cute version, but the untamed stuff which resists commodification or repackaging as a consumer accessory. This is a free-range noise which probably shouldn't exist given the focus groups and how many surveys we're bombarded with on a daily basis.
The Exploding Mind seems to represent a particular focus exemplified by Hope's work under that banner, although in practical terms also typically features collaborators. Mrs. Dink and Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists both feature on this album, despite which 20 Speed Metal Death Threats maintains its pace without sounding like the latest by various artists; and Warmonger - created with Phil Jones and stealing Requiem's malevolent synth-pulse from Killing Joke - is frankly a masterpiece.
Avail thineself of this long player yonder.
*: I had to look this up for the sake of making a contemporary reference rather than just invoking Rick Astley or someone else who is probably dead by now. If you don't know who BTS are, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.
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