A celebration of Mr Burroughs’ Western Lands, for the The Acid Lands, the Prague-based Opening Performance Orchestra spike the punch with their choice of narrator, and I’ve got to say the choice is a solid one. Iggy Pop’s husky bloom coherently curls into Burroughs’ talismanic trails, romances the roll of those words with a lived-in authenticity (and a touch of roomy reverb).
The music that surrounds him sucks on a suitably darkened aperture, morbidly bound up like the mummy wrapping of the cover, all dirge-dragging drone, woozy and taper-torn, full of curdling theremin and phased phantoms that’s constantly reactive to that bleach-splashed narrative. Certainly lots to love, then broken glass and splintering crockery add an anarchic push to proceedings as “Seven Souls” are scribed and the quest for immortality is voiced as a ruinous one.
It’s a captivating concoction that, after the bark of a gunshot, Billy Boy’s own voice picks up the baton from, his shamanic dryness force-fed into a Brion Gysin-esque blur, a detachment you could easily slip between as the ghost of chance glistens to rot away in a rioting rupture of grainy noise. The flow cascading, then kinetically licking its own bitter-sweet reflection as the electronics (that sound eerily like guitars) getting all viscerally vexed as the scraped larynx of Burroughs returns, digitally scarred in atonal hail and waving exit. Iggy later grabs back the text to declaim the “Town Of Last Chance”, a place where a “lack of a special courage” will literally wipe the floor with your Western Land hopes. There’s a hopelessness that’s sonically voiced on Bill Laswell’s ambient redux that follows on from the main feast in a Zoviet France-like cremation of buzzing feedback and crowing colour. A porously pawed experience that shadow-chases its vaporous tail, its mummified glow leading to a four-minute finale of William S Burroughs centipeding his very own creation that, even if previously voiced by Iggy, here leaps into your ear with a renewed vitality as he drives a sharpened ankh straight into your afterlife aspirations.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
