Label: Time Stereo Format: CD
Both of these recordings feature Warn Defever (of His Name Is Alive), Davin Brainard and Ronald Cornelissen; as well as a lot of reverbed noise and scratchy contact-mike work. As Princess Dragon Mom, the trio take the time and dedication required to make four long pieces of almost continuous splurges of distortion and dirtily-feeding back pickup-noise, amplifier hum, scuzz, detritus and the like – even rocking out at points (in the loosest sense), before returning into spattered waves of the kind of guitar work which gives harmony nightmares. Which may not be that difficult in practice, but not always too easy to make listenable. That Fear Of Evil is an unconventional recording could probably go without saying, but just to be on the safe side; suffice to say this is the kind of grinding delve into the bywaters of gunge your parents probably never even considered warning you about, because they were too concerned about all those more popularly frightening genres to even consider the possibility that someone would want to stick their head in the speaker cones just as they were overloading to the point of breaking.
Noise Camp was started by Brainard and friends to bring the joys of American camp life to the kids of Detroit’s decrepit urban wasteland – set up speakers, tents, entertainments, light campfires, cook food, have fun in the woods, sing songs, mike up everything in sight while passing round the oak-clad bottle… At their recent manifestation at London’s Scratch Club, chaos ensued and penguins were tossed, while the musical saw man made his best efforts to hack apart a man dressed as a cardboard bush, watched by a bemused crowd considering the viability of beer as a suitable subsitute for toothpaste and/or shaving foam. Clearly, Noise Camp is a recipe for dangerous anarchy and the breakdown of the rules of civilisation into the unconventionalities of such disreputable activities as unregulated fun – so the cops close in on the open-air version on many occasions, as is their wont from time to time.
Super Noise Camp is a record of these events from 1994-1998, and as such contains the aural tremors of the effects of seeing wooden penguins set up as targets for their assault with equally two-dimensional coconuts, the passing of UFO doctors and the surface noise possibilites of whatever might fall to hand. As an event and as a record, Noise Camp is primarily about having a huge amount of enjoyment, letting loose the wild spirit(s) of the woods, even if the physical location might be a carpark in Michigan or a wine bar in Shoreditch. As an antidote to the po-faced tendencies of art, music and poetry in motion, it’s so much more cathartic than jogging, and further evidence of the beneficial properties of self-aware musical anarchy. Action time, campers!
-Linus Tossio
