Severed Heads - Ear Bitten (1980)

Here's one those reissues of something which didn't quite exist first time around, at least not in this form. Ear Bitten, the Severed Heads debut album was one side of a split release, with someone called the Rhythmyx Chymyx providing the music on the flip. The two bands shared costs, then a substantial number of those copies pressed were destroyed in a house fire further limiting the potential audience for this material. The Severed Heads also issued a cassette called Side 2 purportedly of music you would have heard on the reverse of Ear Bitten had there been no Rhythmyx Chymyx; and now the ever wonderful Dark Entries label have reissued this album, or these albums, pairing Side 2 with its notional other half for the first time and throwing in a second disc of unreleased material from the same era. It's honestly one fuck of a lot to digest in a single sitting, not least due to this being the Severed Heads at their earliest, arguably weirdest and most awkward - a good few years before the technopop. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about reissues with newly excavated material, because there's usually a fairly good reason for your not having heard those other tracks, and I've never been keen on director's cuts or remixes. Just give me whatever you think is the best version and I'll listen to that, okay?

Still, considering that I was otherwise never going to get to hear this one, I have no grounds for complaint, not least because the quality remains consistent across all four discs. Much of this music was recorded, or at least started off, on cassette recorders and the  sound is endearingly basic, so what I mean by quality is that it's all good stuff, more or less, with nothing sounding like material which should have been left in the cupboard.

Ear Bitten is mostly loops, sound collages, and distorted primitive electronics with an occasional heavily processed rhythm or melody derived from something which was probably bright pink with cartoon animals printed on the casing. Yet somehow, it's immediately recognisable as the Severed Heads in larval form; and whatever it is they did that made their music so addictive, they were already doing it here with this racket. Both the original single side of Ear Bitten and the material from Side 2 work very well as short albums in their own right, or played sequentially as halves of the same concept with each track complementing its predecessor much (or at least a tiny bit) like Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, albeit with weird fucking pictures made from torn photocopies vandalised by magic marker. In fact, all four sides work as a continuous piece if you want them to.

Having been recorded more than forty years ago, it's inevitable that I've heard many things - mostly through the weirdy music tape network - which remind me of this, even though Ear Bitten was earlier and, I would imagine, more startling at the time; but although the tape hiss and the boom of television sets recorded on a condensing microphone are familiar, the record still sounds fresh, benefiting from that elusive Severed Heads sparkle which no-one else quite managed to capture.