FRIDAY APR 21, 2017
529 Presents:
Chunklet & Irrelevant Music Present:
Cellular Chaos
Bataille | Fever Hands | Ian Deaton | Waterfall Wash
Cellular Chaos
Of all the bands that litter this tired planet, you might be forgiven for assuming that Cellular Chaos are one of the last who could be flagged up as posters boys and girls for what it is to play rock music. Maybe you’d be right, not least because they were listed under the suitably militant category of “anti-rock” on ugEXPLODE’s now dormant store, and not least because every sound they’ve wrung out of their instruments since their inception in 2011 has been stubbornly discordant and obstreperous, a probably willful attempt to negate everything that the puppeteered archaism of “rock” now foists on the mainstream of its audience. Given a cursory listen to their debut album, you’d possibly continue in this view, what with all the superficial corroboration you’d receive from the album’s scattershot cacophony of electrocuted guitars, belligerent drumwork, and strangled vocals, all thrown together into asymmetrical songs that spurn melody for staccato dissonance, and then jilt pentatonic leads for volatile riffage. And yet, having said all this, from a certain perspective, Cellular Chaos unfolds as rock music in its purest and most essential form. It may sound nothing like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Nirvana, but at its turbulent core, it distills all of the sublimated energy and frustration, the disaffected rancor and idealism, that throughout the years has induced countless people into picking up an instrument and throwing themselves around a stage in the symbolic rejection of everything that’s been pissing them off recently. In fact, the album is little else besides “core,” and its inversions or often wholesale stripping away of rock platitudes only heightens its assault on what remains, which in this case is as good an album of noise rock or no wave as you’re likely to hear in the next 12 months. Much of the Weasel Walter canon has been similarly fascinated with this cavalier dismantling/reconstruction of once radical but now caricatured genres, and if Cellular Chaos bears an occasional resemblance to any one previous Walter band it’s Lake of Dracula, which also featured the normally stool-bound Brooklynite on guitar and which positioned itself as a kind of furiously squalid mirror-image or alter-ego to the tragedies of co-opted rock and punk. But even though there are noticeable parallels in the semi-industrial textures he cajoles from his amp and the general contempt for bloated inefficiency and ornamentation, Cellular Chaos are arguably a much more dynamic and interesting band than the unapologetically primitive Lake of Dracula ever were. Not only is there more going on during the average Cellular Chaos cut, but tracks like opener “Smothering Instinct” and its successor “Barely Regal” are conspicuously more frenetic and intense than most of the LoD back catalogue. The former employs a pounding, almost mechanized rhythm as it hammers itself out of some figurative cage, chopping from an obstinate 14/8 to an elusive 4/4 meter as frontwoman “Admiral Grey” — in a vocal timbre and register that is itself somewhere close to being perversely childlike — keens about how she may or may not have committed infanticide, more or less in parallel to how the whole band would like to kill off the malnourished, underdeveloped baby of rock itself.
At the end of “Smothering Instinct,” she whelps, “It was all that I could do/ For controlling it,” and it’s this theme of control, or rather the lack of it, that recurs at various intersections throughout the record, not just in its lyrics but also in the sometimes erratic and anti-confluential composition of its songs. Indeed, if anything, Cellular Chaos is music of and for a certain kind of neurotic, someone who’s lost power over their lives and therefore pursues a semblance or token of control in both impulsive and compulsive acts. For the bulk of its songs, the M.O. is a division between antsy, agitated repetition and flights of unbridled violence, of a catharsis that splinters eardrums and yet doesn’t ever purge its host of the future need for its reproduction. Accordingly, the emetic “Our War” veers between narrow corridors of staccato chord-play and torrents of highly disgruntled thrashing, while the mercurial “Adviser” pillows lower-end charges of distortion on top of each other before ratcheting itself into a headlong flurry of higher-end guitar notes. If this doesn’t sound too impressive in writing, it should be added that everything is made vastly more persuasive by the potent yet unshowy musicianship through which these splenetic gushes of sound are filtered, with Marc Edwards’ drumming in particular adding the sinewy drive and momentum that continues to fling the songs forward whenever Walter’s radioactive guitar would threaten to dissolve them in their tracks. -Tiny Mixtapes
Of all the bands that litter this tired planet, you might be forgiven for assuming that Cellular Chaos are one of the last who could be flagged up as posters boys and girls for what it is to play rock music. Maybe you’d be right, not least because they were listed under the suitably militant category of “anti-rock” on ugEXPLODE’s now dormant store, and not least because every sound they’ve wrung out of their instruments since their inception in 2011 has been stubbornly discordant and obstreperous, a probably willful attempt to negate everything that the puppeteered archaism of “rock” now foists on the mainstream of its audience. Given a cursory listen to their debut album, you’d possibly continue in this view, what with all the superficial corroboration you’d receive from the album’s scattershot cacophony of electrocuted guitars, belligerent drumwork, and strangled vocals, all thrown together into asymmetrical songs that spurn melody for staccato dissonance, and then jilt pentatonic leads for volatile riffage. And yet, having said all this, from a certain perspective, Cellular Chaos unfolds as rock music in its purest and most essential form. It may sound nothing like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Nirvana, but at its turbulent core, it distills all of the sublimated energy and frustration, the disaffected rancor and idealism, that throughout the years has induced countless people into picking up an instrument and throwing themselves around a stage in the symbolic rejection of everything that’s been pissing them off recently. In fact, the album is little else besides “core,” and its inversions or often wholesale stripping away of rock platitudes only heightens its assault on what remains, which in this case is as good an album of noise rock or no wave as you’re likely to hear in the next 12 months. Much of the Weasel Walter canon has been similarly fascinated with this cavalier dismantling/reconstruction of once radical but now caricatured genres, and if Cellular Chaos bears an occasional resemblance to any one previous Walter band it’s Lake of Dracula, which also featured the normally stool-bound Brooklynite on guitar and which positioned itself as a kind of furiously squalid mirror-image or alter-ego to the tragedies of co-opted rock and punk. But even though there are noticeable parallels in the semi-industrial textures he cajoles from his amp and the general contempt for bloated inefficiency and ornamentation, Cellular Chaos are arguably a much more dynamic and interesting band than the unapologetically primitive Lake of Dracula ever were. Not only is there more going on during the average Cellular Chaos cut, but tracks like opener “Smothering Instinct” and its successor “Barely Regal” are conspicuously more frenetic and intense than most of the LoD back catalogue. The former employs a pounding, almost mechanized rhythm as it hammers itself out of some figurative cage, chopping from an obstinate 14/8 to an elusive 4/4 meter as frontwoman “Admiral Grey” — in a vocal timbre and register that is itself somewhere close to being perversely childlike — keens about how she may or may not have committed infanticide, more or less in parallel to how the whole band would like to kill off the malnourished, underdeveloped baby of rock itself.
At the end of “Smothering Instinct,” she whelps, “It was all that I could do/ For controlling it,” and it’s this theme of control, or rather the lack of it, that recurs at various intersections throughout the record, not just in its lyrics but also in the sometimes erratic and anti-confluential composition of its songs. Indeed, if anything, Cellular Chaos is music of and for a certain kind of neurotic, someone who’s lost power over their lives and therefore pursues a semblance or token of control in both impulsive and compulsive acts. For the bulk of its songs, the M.O. is a division between antsy, agitated repetition and flights of unbridled violence, of a catharsis that splinters eardrums and yet doesn’t ever purge its host of the future need for its reproduction. Accordingly, the emetic “Our War” veers between narrow corridors of staccato chord-play and torrents of highly disgruntled thrashing, while the mercurial “Adviser” pillows lower-end charges of distortion on top of each other before ratcheting itself into a headlong flurry of higher-end guitar notes. If this doesn’t sound too impressive in writing, it should be added that everything is made vastly more persuasive by the potent yet unshowy musicianship through which these splenetic gushes of sound are filtered, with Marc Edwards’ drumming in particular adding the sinewy drive and momentum that continues to fling the songs forward whenever Walter’s radioactive guitar would threaten to dissolve them in their tracks. -Tiny Mixtapes
Bataille
The Wolves Amongst the Flower, the new EP from noise/post-punk group Bataille, channels the philosophy of Georges Bataille, the French intellectual for whom the band is named. The writer, who was influenced by such figures as Nietzche, Hegel and Marquis de Sade, is known today for his works on mysticism, eroticism, nihilism and transgression. On Wolves, these themes exist in the strictly nonconformist aesthetic that Bataille presents – eccentric, rebellious and just rude.
This is abrasive stuff, as one may expect, but it’s too bleak to be truly confrontational. Rather, it’s disconcerting. “How Innocent,” the EP’s first proper track, may be the most accessible song here, but that’s not saying much — it starts from a typical noise rock/hardcore structure, but then extrapolates with layers of harsh noise. The vocals, like on much of the record, are incomprehensible, and vocalist John Hannah regurgitates them in a detached, sardonic manner. “Grave of Vampires” squeals out of the gate in harsh “anti-punk” fashion (as Bataille themselves describe their sound), before the band interjects with some odd feedback in the foreground. It is — and I mean this in the best way possible — vomit-inducing. Music that produces such visceral reactions in the listener should be celebrated. The 7-minute noise track which closes the record, “I Live Because I Am Free to Die,” exemplifies the concept of limit-experience, which Michel Foucault described as “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” It is, as Bataille suggested, the experience from which the subject can tear away from itself, and this is clear in the masochistic art on display here. Indeed, the cover of the Wolves cassette features two images, both of a young woman: in the first, it appears as if she has been stabbed (and is missing a leg, to boot), and in the second, it now appears as if she did the stabbing herself – or is, at the very least, pulling the knife out.
It should be noted that the band recently underwent a name shortening, from Georges Bataille Battle Cry to simply Bataille. Not being overly familiar with Mr. Bataille’s works, I can only assume that the battle cry of which the band speaks is tied to their slogan of “Loudly ring out revolt and despair.” Even now, the band explains their aesthetic as the following: “This is not punk rock. This is theology.” Pretentious? Perhaps. But only if you’re not on their wavelength. On Wolves, Bataille’s house is in disarray, and they’ve subjected to us to their madness and self-loathing.
The Wolves Amongst the Flower, the new EP from noise/post-punk group Bataille, channels the philosophy of Georges Bataille, the French intellectual for whom the band is named. The writer, who was influenced by such figures as Nietzche, Hegel and Marquis de Sade, is known today for his works on mysticism, eroticism, nihilism and transgression. On Wolves, these themes exist in the strictly nonconformist aesthetic that Bataille presents – eccentric, rebellious and just rude.
This is abrasive stuff, as one may expect, but it’s too bleak to be truly confrontational. Rather, it’s disconcerting. “How Innocent,” the EP’s first proper track, may be the most accessible song here, but that’s not saying much — it starts from a typical noise rock/hardcore structure, but then extrapolates with layers of harsh noise. The vocals, like on much of the record, are incomprehensible, and vocalist John Hannah regurgitates them in a detached, sardonic manner. “Grave of Vampires” squeals out of the gate in harsh “anti-punk” fashion (as Bataille themselves describe their sound), before the band interjects with some odd feedback in the foreground. It is — and I mean this in the best way possible — vomit-inducing. Music that produces such visceral reactions in the listener should be celebrated. The 7-minute noise track which closes the record, “I Live Because I Am Free to Die,” exemplifies the concept of limit-experience, which Michel Foucault described as “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” It is, as Bataille suggested, the experience from which the subject can tear away from itself, and this is clear in the masochistic art on display here. Indeed, the cover of the Wolves cassette features two images, both of a young woman: in the first, it appears as if she has been stabbed (and is missing a leg, to boot), and in the second, it now appears as if she did the stabbing herself – or is, at the very least, pulling the knife out.
It should be noted that the band recently underwent a name shortening, from Georges Bataille Battle Cry to simply Bataille. Not being overly familiar with Mr. Bataille’s works, I can only assume that the battle cry of which the band speaks is tied to their slogan of “Loudly ring out revolt and despair.” Even now, the band explains their aesthetic as the following: “This is not punk rock. This is theology.” Pretentious? Perhaps. But only if you’re not on their wavelength. On Wolves, Bataille’s house is in disarray, and they’ve subjected to us to their madness and self-loathing.