IN SNOB CASTLE (Kuhnlein recs and harsh noise reviews)

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First, the poetry book recommendations (plus one) of David Kuhnlein. For those who don’t know, Kuhnlein is the author of the well-blurbed book Die Closer to Me (Marigold) and Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate) which I’m told is sold out but I hope gets another printing. I wrote an appreciation of Kuhnelin’s writing at X-R-A-Y here. I asked David recently for his recommendations for poetry books because I admired his prose style and the linguistic refinement that he demonstrated in his writing. As a fellow writer, I was envious and wanted to learn something. David generously sent me a short list of perhaps underappreciated books along with some photos of the pages for extra detail. He added some notes but I thought I would just list the books. Some of the photos didn’t come across adequately so there are just a few.

The Cow - Ariana Reines:

The Book of Frank - CA Conrad (no image)

Povel - Geraldine Kim:

This Can't Be Life - Dana Ward:

Wired to Zone - Skip Fox (not a poetry book, Kuhnlein cautions me, but a novel by a poet):

Thank You, Steel China - Sean Kilpatrick:

The other promised feature of this long-delayed newsletter are some music reviews I jotted down after listening to some “harsh noise” tapes (and YouTube videos). On a whim I got the cassettes from Blamage/Puke Pink which is a music and book distribution website run by Scott Kindberg. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. It was a weird moment of just looking online for some music that is not on the pop charts (to say the least). Maybe some readers are aware that this type of music is not really even properly music in the strictest definition of that term. It’s more like sound sculptures and if you watch YouTube videos of harsh noise performances they sometimes look like punk ritualistic exorcisms where people in dungeon-like rooms tempt the electrocution gods by using all kinds of equipment both advanced and primitive to just make godawful noise. I listened to the three tapes in question today twice each, and then listened to some YouTube videos of recording to try to develop my very limited palate for these types of sounds, and try to put what I heard into words for you.

One note on these musical acts/performers that I will share before I start is that often times there are no discernable lyrics, and nothing human or meaningful to grasp onto besides the titles of the bands and the titles of the recordings. It shares on some level the symbolic texture found in extreme metal, where in this case you have little to go on but that the act is called Climax Denial or Malicious Xeno-Consciousness, and the cover artwork looks like a man being stomped by a woman’s stiletto heel or images of thousands of hostile alien lifeforms that would extinguish all life on Earth in about a week or so. This text (or paucity of text) allows for a great deal of imagination to fill the empty spaces as it were, as the noise triggers abstract associations in the listener’s mind; you cling to the associations and have reactions to this, at least that’s what I have done here. I am not an advanced enough Lacanian to draw the overlapping spheres of Imaginary, Symbolic or Real in this artform in its pure form, except to say that it seems to be heavy on the Imaginary and Real and extremely light on the Symbolic, whereas a genre like, say, country music, would have more Symbolic in it due to the extra attention to the lyrics and the need to convey a particular meaning. If I have shredded Lacan here, I don’t care.

LITHIUM SPIT - “Self Extraction” (Abhorrent AD)

Harsh noise to my novice ears is often pure sci-fi music, soundtracks without meaning. Shrieking electronics being torn apart, fragmented violently. Not a gentle disintegration in Lithium Spit, rippling spaceship parts being sundered. More poetic though, maybe. Squealing R2D2 disco death. Pure electronics in a volumetric space, parameters flirted with then sexually assaulted if I may use such language here, there, or anywhere. We’re in a radioactive Martian dirt storm where there are no survivors. None of this would ever be heard on Earth. My imagination asks me, with this sort of music in my beginning stages as a listener, if some spiritual risk is being suggested. Is it “evil”? This is my imagination putting things where they may not necessarily be invited. Later on, at the end of side B it sounds like crackling, frying circuitry in an oil drum caught in a hurricane, a torrential downpour, perhaps going over Niagara Falls.

FADING CONTOUR - “Soaking the Rope” (another YouTube video)

This sounds like a Euro slasher movie soundtrack. Something nefarious is happening, perhaps off-screen, but there is no screen. The theatre of the mind’s eye is very strong with some of this music. I hear perversity and crime in the faint sketches of dialogue. Is it all in your head like what you summon up from the Jungian shadow-self in the algorithm? Soaking the Rope sounds sexual, something like Mormon BDSM.

TINNITUSTIMULUS - “Omnipresence” (Begin Hostilities) (cassette)

This was probably the most interesting one and I would listen to it again. I could see some adventurous soul meditating to this or cleaning their house. And yet it is also upsetting. Imagine the final seconds of the movie Eraserhead: the embrace with the longed-for Lady of the Radiator, the union with the madness and the disavowal of normal family life that Henry enacts. Now imagine those last few seconds stretched out for an hour. No real recognizable rhythms or loops, drums, nada. Drones and boilers in an engine room, not totally malicious, just loud. I want to say ambient but that is just a dumb shortcut word that partake not in the dream, the “Imaginary” of listening to difficult demanding music you surrender to. Something benevolent like a sea creature in the noise. David Lynch/Alan Splet drones that they worked on so much but you can’t really notice them until the end when they cut out and the credits roll. The glow inside the motor chimes, just a suggestion of chimes layered underneath the static. The point is, this is a soundtrack conducive to working, not wholly distracting, no voices. Details emerge from the noise then recede, subtle details. Or I’m just crazy and hearing things. Gears meshing at a high rate of speed, a motor in a building in “another place.” The municipality depends on this motor never dying. The undying motor. It never gets shut off to be repaired. The sound changes you, your molecular structure, or at least your makeup of adrenaline and other hormones, your brain chemistry. I wouldn’t doubt it. This is where the feeling of risk or possibly torture comes in. They play these tapes on a loop in CIA black sites to keep people on edge and awake, I’m sure of it. But this tape feels benign somehow, have I said that? Maybe because the title Tinnitusstimulus, “Omnipresence” is not aggressively hostile like some of the other music, again with the symbols. This is still an endurance test. Machinery grinding on you. There is no palate in me to differentiate noise from noise. To “taste” the variety of musicians and what they’re driving at.

VIOLET FISTULA - “Mirror Translation” (cassette)

This act has more of a human face, as it were, as it’s made up of authors Meghan Lamb and Robert Kloss from Chicago I guess. This is probably how Puke Pink got on my radar, from social media where I saw Violet Fistula referenced, saw the promo for this cassette which goes along with Lamb’s very limited press book of the same name. The music has a lot of vocals, you can understand the words because they are often repeated by Lamb at a growing level of volume until there is essentially screaming. Much of it sounds like ethereal goth industrial feelings, some loops, until the performance art shrieking happens. This has pluses and minuses. Remember I’m new to all this shit. There’s a really interesting “song” called “Natural Beauty.” My honest reaction to some of these tracks, with a woman moaning and then yelling “I am afraid…I need you” over and over, repeatedly, chillingly, biting at the listener like a dentist’s drill in the hands of someone totally unqualified and psychotically needy, made me feel like “get me out of here.” An unhappy, dissatisfied emotional woman’s voice just attacking you. Or confronting you. I don’t know. It’s the symbolic. And we don’t want it. So I felt like, as a “square” music reviewer, I would have said that there needed to be more variation in the vocals, or lyrical content that I would have liked to latch onto. But maybe that’s not part of the artistic experience that was intended.

CIRCUIT WOUND - “Data Mining” (Abhorrent AD) (cassette)

Klaxons on a factory floor, screaming devices. Popcorn, rain on roofs. Found sound of gathering at terminals, no nationality or language of origin discernable. The sides of the cassette were very short. I don’t know what more to say.

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I have gotten other tapes from Puke Pink and elsewhere, and I’m sure these reviews are utterly riveting to you so I may continue to listen and take down notes and try to understand it all.

I’ve had poetry, fiction, and cartoons accepted recently so I await all that coming out and I will alert you. For the moment, poems will come out at Sinkhole Quarterly and Blood+Honey sometime this summer. A section of my novel I See Prism Threads (which I’m on hiatus from in favor of Mt. Parnassus) has been accepted at a new venue apparently run by Kim Vodicka and Morgenrede called CUM PUNK. That’ll happen sometime this summer, and I’ve seen a list of other contributors that maybe I’ll share next newsletter after I ask if it’s okay. Just so you know, Karina Bush, Charlene Elsby, and Jack Skelley are on the list, which I’m pleased at, just as I am with all the rest, but, you know, rubbing elbows with stars. The cartoons will be part of a feature at Farewell Transmission called “Saturday Morning Cartoons” or something like that. I’ll let you know when things develop. Here’s a glimpse at what I’m writing lately.

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