Porest's fourth long-player, Modern Journal of Popular Savagery is a damning collection of parallel realities told in song and sound. Following 2006's masterful Tourrorists, MJoPS pits post-globalized hate pop, cabalistic text-to-speech drama and violent tape music against soapbox anthems and swirling barbed-wire psychedelia - sometimes within the same track.
The result: a terrifying and ridiculous audio shakedown that both avoids and completely indulges the inherent trappings of art and politics. Fuzzed out guitars and keyboards, epic modulated grooves, 'samples' and far-out fucking field recordings index the colonization of our consciousness. You're already dead - and none of your intellectual friends can save you.
Guests include Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Peter Conheim (Negativland), and Jake Rodriguez (Bran - ¦Pos). Recorded between California, Syria, Vietnam and points in between. Across decades, Porest (aka Mark Gergis) has issued a trail of confounding agitprop sound art, tilted pop, diabolical radio dramas and carefully rearranged realities on the Abduction, Seeland and Resipiscent labels. Porest's blatant embezzlement of human syntax and cultural misunderstanding broadcasts vital mixed messages.
Collaborations have included: Aavikko (Finland) Sun City Girls (USA), and Negativland (USA) among others. Gergis was a co-founder of the long-running experimental Bay Area music and performance collective Mono Pause - as well as its offshoot Neung Phak, performing inspired renditions of southeast Asian musics.
Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, an ethnographic music and film collective out of Seattle, Washington - and more recently, with his own record label - Sham Palace, Gergis has shared decades of research and scores of archived international music, film footage and sound recordings acquired during extensive travels in the Middle East, South East Asia and elsewhere.
Tracklisting: Side A: 1.:Passport Please 2.:Worm Sum 3.:Emerging Global Consciousness 4.:Soapbox Cutter 5.:Diplomat Smile 6.:A Rosy Bath 7.:Schakled
Side B: 1.:Terminal Suite 2.:Your Vertebrae 3.:Some Law 4.:The Field Recording 5.:Au Revoirs of Blood 6.:Seeded Subterfuge
Debut LP by the new creepy and romantic basement organ project of Romain Perrot (VOMIR, FREE AS DEAD, FALOT, RORO PERROT).
'The other night I dreamt about a parallel universe in which Klaus Schulze had some sort of government-paid job installing contact mics and analog synths (which I suspect was mainly to annoy Tangerine Dream) in all the big European cathedrals to "modernize" the pipe organs.
I told him how they used to make cobwebs in the early Dracula movies; you punch a small hole in a yogurt pot full of liquid latex attached to an electric drill, point roughly where you want the cobwebs to go, shut your eyes and hit the trigger. This got ol' Klaus drooling, and pretty soon every church (not to mention cemetery) ceiling in France was dripping with stringy latex goo.
He also decided to add more gargoyles (inside, on the altar) and impose a black metal warpaint dress code for Sunday mass. Roro worked part-time as the Hunchback (every church had their own, so as well as Notre Dame there was The Hunchback of The Sistine Chapel, The Hunchback of Unarius, and even, controversially, The Hunchback of Scientology) and also hung out in front of Pere Lachaise trying to get people to sign a petition to change the name of the cemetery to "The Dario Argento Museum".
Reclusiveness aside, Romain and I sometimes like to meet up near Notre Dame at a Japanese restaurant run by one of the members of Les Legions Noire, serving "necro-sushi" and so on... One sunny afternoon, sighing as he removed the fake Quasimodo teeth and the cushion stuffed into the back of his shirt, he handed me the new Trou Au Rats LP, cursing the backache which was the result of his job. "Give this to Klaus" he said, in a deep voice a few octaves lower than usual.
Now, dear reader, let me assure you, I don't know and I don't want to know what kind of entities he'd done deals with in his basement catacomb, but a few days after Klaus heard that album, Roro got to lay down his hunch for the last time, and scored his dream job as full-time organist. Mind you, dream job or not, he does still have to wear the plastic vampire fangs, somehow managing to remain the perfect gentleman, even if they do make him talk funny.
Now, if you are aware of his other projects (Vomir being one), chez Roro there's no such thing as a coincidence, and there's always a lot more going on that meets the eye...
That might explain why, shortly after his promotion to organist, as if by majic(k), weird record shops called things like "Bimbo Tower 2" started opening up all over Europe in the tiny streets round the backs of cathedrals or near to old cemeteries (and even inside pyramids, or so I was told), right next to where the crazy old witches sell gory upside-down crucifixion dioramas and Free As Dead t-shirts in the most happenin' European cities. Which must be why you are reading this right now' Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture, Royal Sperm) Paris January 2018
Since 2004, èlg has drawn concentric sound spirals made of musical pipes and entrails. He uses an arsenal of instruments and methods, constantly renewed while building improbable bridges between musique concrete and french song-writing, cartoon-like radiophonic creations and cosmic pop as well as lo-fi dada-esque experimentation with electronic tentacles.
èlg is half of the electronic botanic duo opera mort, and a third of big band trios orgue agnes (with the members of kaumwald) and reines d'angleterre (with jo tanz and ghédalia tazartes). He's had albums released by kraak, ss-records, lexi disques, fonal, hundebiss records, and alter, among others.
I dig cosmic music with rocks off - ¦anathema to top 40, èlg is the holy ghost of the new sound. His music deals with the altered state with muscle primed on transcendence like naked hug, the fire music of his previous duos or the zap force of his earlier Nashazphone jam "Capitaine present 5", it feels hip to stay forever eternal in the house of mirrors & emerge on the cyclone. Coney island baby bataille. There's a dimensionality of miracles herein, we were born on earth...As humans.
Then there's èlg, laurent gérard he's a love lodge, a sonic native. This is immersion music climb upward, go down and deep. My fave cosmic strip here is in cool color - ¦the rare moment on this lp when the guitar solo explodes from the narrative ripping a hole in "Song". Through the planet of one voice, we hear the inimitable dylan nyoukis and the one and only og alan bishop.
These heads are perfect jam vehicles to hang with laurent. Then there's the paramour lady catherine hershey, forever muse - ¦roast tongue. Brand new language, brave nu world. This grabs the tusk of francois tusques and rides mother gong, all glissando and kobaïan. Learned from shandar and transporting with a freer range lard free, organic music that slays all inner city mountains, outer realm gotham. Bluer than noon. Contempo lone gunman exploratory moderne with the controls set to the heart of love. We're in the "Mauve zone", where is bananafish? Hearing is believing. A transport to future analog and digital dialup. Call this dude, he's beyond rap. What a crazy fucking life.
"Costes has caused me so much trouble. Even today, 25 years after the last time I performed with him, I still have a hard time booking shows because he has not mellowed as I have and the venues are afraid, because of my past association with him, that there will be piss, shit, violence, genitalia, racial tension, cops, etc. Costes has caused himself so much trouble. He's been taken to court five times over his art, received countless death threats. When's the last time you can think of that ART has been taken so seriously - ¦ as a life and death matter? And he perseveres. I think Costes is extraordinary. He ostentatiously thumbs not only his nose, but every single body part external AND internal, at any authority there is. Pas Encore Mort, a re-release of a 1997 CD, is uncharacteristically introspective, pretty, and sad. It is unsettling to see the man behind the gross warrior exposed, vulnerable, alone. I love and hate this album." Lisa Carver - Maine, U.S. 2 April 2016.
Born in 1954, Jean-Louis Costes is possibly France's most transgressive and independent artist. He is a musician, singer/songwriter, performance artist, painter, writer, actor and director. His highly expressionist trash style is instantly recognizable no matter which mode of expression he adopts. A unique and uncompromising artist, Costes has released over 70 albums since 1986.
His songs are mostly recorded in his home studio and display very raw explicit lyrics, with music alternating between rock, pop and noise. He is renowned for his infamous 'Porno-Social' Operas, which can be described as an explosive mix of live music, theater, violent actions, sex, noise, chansons, romanticism, mysticism and social issues.
He has toured Europe, North America and Japan. In the late 1990s, he began publishing his own texts, and since 2003, has authored four novels.
Tracklisting: Side A: 1. Pas Encore Mort 2. La Drogue, La Mort, La Nuit 3. Mourons Ensemble 4. La Seule Solution
Side B: 1. Crever Tout Seul 2. Amour Eternel 3. Rien à Ajouter 4. La Dernière Chanson
Trans-Atlantic collaboration LP between Smegma and Blood Stereo: It sounds like what happens when Blood Stereo's re-imagined, 1,000 year old Druid Chants, are invaded by Smegma's looped, psychedelic-folk-stomps Circa Early 2009 (Ju Suk Reet Meate).
Recorded in Brighton, Pasadena and Portland. On this recording Smegma isJu Suk Reet Meate, Rock N Roll Jackie, Dennis Duck, Ace Farren Ford, Victor Sparks, Nour Mobarak.