The Answer Is In The Beat

Pepper Mill Rondo: E.D.M. tape (Hausu Mountain, 2018)

November 23, 2018 at 8:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Where to even start with this one. This is 100 minutes of Good Willsmith’s Doug and Max collating the entire contents of the internet and spewing it out in jagged, irregularly shaped chunks. A long time ago, there was this website someone told me about that I posted a link to in the Secret Stash section of Foxy Digitalis, that was called something like “Neverending Glitch,” and was something along those lines, somehow harnessing all the websites and live streams and feeds and everything else online and producing a mutated ever-shifting audio-visual glob of everything. I assume it’s long gone, I had it bookmarked once but I assume I got rid of it when the site wasn’t active anymore, but it would make a perfect accompaniment to listening to this tape. It’s an overwhelmingly intense barrage of media soundbites, shreds of everything on the radio or on TV, and lots of drunken karaoke sessions, all supremely glitched and splattered. It’s not entirely random, however. “I’m Sitting In A Room” reconstructs the text of Alvin Lucier’s legendary avant-garde piece using lyrics from pop songs. Some collages focus on specific genres (“I’m A Guy That Makes Classical Music Collages” is self-explanatory, “Pepperoni Stick Is Bout 2 Breakup” regurgitates nu-metal). “Lesser Artists Borrow, Great Artists Vape” is a painstaking, mind-numbing montage of rapidfire references to all things aesthetic, Eccojams, Floral Shoppe, and vape pens. “NO MORE FAN MAIL” steamrollers over the Beatles, and “Subscribe or Die” mines videos from Patreon pages, boiling the internet down to a bunch of loud voices begging for your money. Describing something as “everything” is such an over-used cliche, but in this case, not doing so would be selling it short. Doug’s glorious solo effort These Magical Numbers, consisting entirely of YouTubed renditions of the national anthem played at the same time, was American patriotism at its most purely obnoxious blown up into a harsh noise wall. E.D.M. (here standing for “Ecstatic Dissonant Mashup”) is another logic-obliterating reflection of our current times. Totally essential.