Autotistika – Absurd Flesh

Liquid Library

This is, if memory serves, the second time I’ll have reviewed something featuring Autotistika — the previous being his duo Non Ferric Memories, a shocking twelve years ago. I’m afraid I won’t be able to top the description “It sounds like someone flushing a magical toilet over and over” in this (or arguably any) review and they weren’t even my words. But let’s look on the bright side.

And speaking of bright side, I’m not sure this record has one; it’s like a sticky crawl through some hypnogogic desert-cum-abandoned-shipyard. It’s not lacking in wit, or at least the uncanny oddness of a kid laughing, but it’s consistently weird.

I can certainly say what it is to a degree — samples, loops, mixed-fidelity recordings, keys, dubby reverb tails on certain instruments. Where that places it in generic terms I’m not sure — something like lo-fi musique concrète or a less po-faced Nurse With Wound. It’s distinctly lo-fi but don’t let that fool you — the mixed-fidelity stuff means that some of the samples are nice and clean, others messy, many bent to ungodly shapes, sometimes static parts just leave a morse code-like anchor.

There’s a degree of confidence too — two forty-five(ish) minute pieces and lots of Autotistika giving himself space. The first track starts busy, turns into some dreamy drift for a few minutes, then moves to just a sample of hurried breath. It’s easy to throw everything in and move around quickly — anyone who’s been to a noise all-dayer will tell you that — but this unhurried, considered approach works well. I suspect these pieces are improvisatory, but I also get the impression Autotistika is sitting there for a bit going “yeah, that’ll scare the bejesus out of ’em”.

There’s also an interesting effect here in that I usually like to think about a piece of music in musical terms — rhythm, harmony, melody, structure etc. This record very much resists that way of thinking — it’s more like an acidic radio play from alien dimensions — it moves at its own pace, with its own logic. Not sample manipulation but not musical narrative.

I ended up reaching for some quite heroic metaphors while making my notes: “There’s a guitar or something which sounds like an advert for snuff films while a ghost has the sniffles”; “those vocals are distinctly séancey”; “sample fuckry and … yes definitely haunted”; “Sellotape sound? But evil somehow?”. It’s definitely arguable that this is a side-effect of my own imagination, but I think also the record elicits a narrative that’s certainly cogent — insofar as its self-consistent — but nevertheless entirely mad.

I don’t listen to a lot of this stuff and mostly it’s because a kind of basic ‘spooky’, and basic esoteric magick markers start looking like cliché at some point, but this has the sort of consideration and attention-to-weirdness that elevates it into the beleaguered clouds of ‘uncanny’. Absurd Flesh certainly sounds like some stuff I know, but it’s by no means familiar. It is absolutely haunted and if you’re a fan of shit that sounds like the exact moment you slip into a coma in a submarine then this surely is the record for you.

-Kev Nickells-