|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
BRD 039LP
|
"Beyond riot music from the MC5 to Sham 69, in front of Arthur Russell's Death and after Klein's Lifetime, Al Karpenter and Mattin come out from behind the mask of Lou Reed's Lulu." --Guy Mercier
In this moment of uncertainty and environmental trauma, as you recoil in the face of an emotional overload that demands retreat or even flight, a certain use of solitude in confinement has generated the possibility of taking it all on, of being with others again while still listening in solitude. Music From A Private Hell describes an understanding of sound as a habitable substance from this degree-zero of isolation. A handful of songs written in iron and dust, that allow just enough fiction or myth as to turn technology into a weapon. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us in On The Line: "run away, but when you run, bring a weapon." A remedy for mass fatalism, Hell begins with the first song, in which a tambourine of some sort plays an ostinato rhythm, punctuating each phrase with a long note that communes with the shadows. Of interest here are not the rhythms that recur throughout the record but their relationship to colors and timbres. The different harmonic openings and resonances evoke the different kinds of tension that occur when skin touches flame. "We'll burn it down before you land here," says a disembodied voice, and various noises and sound effects cut through it, indifferent to the threat, as futuristic today as they were at their inception. Al Karpenter's voice is a weapon. His inexpressive whisper is a weapon. On this record, the human voice is an excess, a surplus of the body; it is at once outside and inside. It can be listened to peacefully, but it can also generate the anguish of a voice attempting to escape from language, setting the logos free in the wilderness, scavenging in the semiotic debris.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
7"
|
|
MR 7300EP
|
A ghost walks through Bilbao: the ghost of Al Karpenter, the only wild rocker able to restore the hard core of the true rebel music. Once boss at the legendary Brutus fanzine, presents a biographical single where he bares himself. The Chosen One features key players of the Basque leftfield music scene such as Mattin and Loty Negarti. Al Karpenter doesn't disappoint and Bilbao becomes a temporary prism through which New York's no wave travels to London to pick up Alternative TV's strident side, while crossing paths with Scott Walker in a surgery where Iggy Pop mutates into a dog.
|