MPA: Vons Serin Exchanging Frequencies With Cicadas
- Vons Serin Exchanging Frequencies With Cicadas (for Ruth White)
- Unrequited (recorded live at Immaculate Conception, Gilbertville IA 2006)
This album is available as a bonus cdr to the MYMWLY release We're A Monotonous Band and is not for sale separately. Thanks: the swamp behind the Black Hawk Rollerdrome, MYMWLY, Agent DLS, the beekeeper whose name I can't remember now (update: thanks Jerry!), Steev, Nest Of Devils, any and all bands that play Iowa, Robe., everybody reading these words.
reviews:
"Dark frequencies haunt the top-end of "Vons Serin Exchanging Frequencies With Cicadas" by Medroxy Progesterone Acetate; viral wavelengths that play tricks with those tiny, little bones in yr ears, triggering spooky eye-flicker and transient coma-states...making me anxious about things that don't even exist yet; fearful for moments still yet to come.
"Elsewhere in the mix, things are deceptively calm and bombast-free (well, relatively speaking - this isn't Whitehouse or Prurient; we're not talking Power Electronics or macho post-Metal noise here...)...this is Noise that's not noisey - the minute sounds that sit uneasily between other sounds...and this sense of mild, unanchored unease only really takes hold when you put on a pair of head-phones and hear (no, feel) those rogue waveforms skittering around back n forth in the space betwn yr eyeballs, inducing some sort of lucid daydreaming or a low-level panic attack. It's all v. subtle at first, starting with non-specific sound-flutter and what sounds like backwards-masking bees or the mating-calls of shop-window mannequins; plastic voices, tongues coated in slowly hardening candle-wax...
[Insert something here about Local Hospital Radio; it being a, I dunno, 'soundtrack' to low-key deformities or a physiotherapy work-out CD piped into the lobby of some quietly awful hotel for The Dispossessed blahblahblah...three carbon-copies please, Rachel; one sealed and date-stamped to be sent to my solicitor marked "In The Event of My Death"...]
"Hey, I'm listening now, but I'm also watching, okay? (grey plumes of steam swirl skywards from rooftop vents; grey crenulated rooves (sic) hide the horizon, slated with guano-splattered asbestos and perspex, home to a pseudo-flock of beligerent urban seagulls (they think they're clifftops, the 'rooves', I mean - so to stop them nesting there the owners have called in a professional falconer); fibreoptic cables snake their way across the flat tar-papered roof of a nearby portakabin, while thin, selfconscious sunlight glints off an aluminium duct: I'm surprised at how easily this music has sucked all the meaning out of my surroundings, making them feel hollow and incomplete, almost redundant; I'm a viewer now, not a participant)
{{IT WASN'T A FLUKE; THE NEXT TIME I PLAYED THIS IT STILL MADE ME FEEL FUNNY}}
"At about 5 minutes-in those frequencies I told you about started making me feel awkward and isolated; at 8 minutes (the piece is 38 mins long) one of my hands started shaking; but just one of them, not the other. There was an odd tightening in my lower abdomen; a sensation of inner vibration, of muscles beginning a slow spastic tango; I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, y'see, so I speak as One Enlightened To The Ways Of Peristaltic DisFunction...this isn't about resonant frequencies (this music isn't noisy, you unnerstan'; it's...); I mean, it's not like going to see Sunn o))) or OM or Digital Mystikz and growing a sonic throat-goitre or having yr diaphragm breached by sub-bass: this feels (more) like some parasympathetic response to the top-line squiggles dancing around somewhere just above my sinuses; I bet if I took these headphones off, it'd...
(Control texts from another era - discombobulated voices speaking to us from the Past. How dare these Arab Ghosts expect us to obey them!)
"It's like Coil without the vocals, without the gayness...Coil strip-mined of the avant.sauciness and the cheeky trangressional Pop.Cult-Ur-al references; lipstick wiped from an MDMA grimace. The last time music made me feel just plain weird like this was when I saw Coil 4 or 5 years ago (as documented on "And The Ambulance Died in His Arms" (them, not me)) - well, part of it was their light-show, I think, which was incredibly trippy: squares of light overlapping w/ other squares - grids dancing/endless permuations going in and in and in and out of focus, like looking at the inside of your own head, forever, and all of that low frequency rumble (which is missing here, but isn't missed)...but, no, none of that; instead, just that feeling of feeling all wrong, of being on the edge of coming-up on something; well, it made me feel like that again, this did, but different...it inverted the act of 'looking' until I wasn't sure any more exactly what I was looking at, and that's when the quiet terror begins...that sense of being at the edge of the Ominous, but unsure...
"It's that flickering eyeball thing again; something to do with 'Standing Waves' - a low frequency hum in the 19-20Hz range that can create paranormal experiences pretty much to order...the vibrating eyeball causes visual-field disturbances that are often interpreted as apparitions, while a growing sense of unease in the lower-bowel triggers a fight-or-flight reaction via a bio-feedback loop. "Vons Serin Exchanging Frequencies With Cicadas" seems to induce a similar reaction in me, despite the lack of serious low-end in the track...but only on headphones, mind, so I suspect some sort of eyeball-quivering is maybe being induced at the top end of the mix; something embedded in the treble response - I feel it mainly between the eyes...so perhaps some sort of Ajna Chakra/Third Eye/Pineal Gland stimulation thing goin' on here...
At around 9 minutes, sheets of flanged sound scrape up against each other, decaying down into overlapping layers of hummmmm n hisssssssss n warble...I get a glimpse of some 3-dimensional machine, pulsing and pushing against the limits of its own skin. A little later, something attempts to land...
"14 minutes and we're deep within the hardened arteries of some vast machine, tracking our way through channels of sound and light and activity; frequency-swarms erupt low in the mix, revealing new levels of detail, almost fractal, as new sub-structures emerge, manifesting themselves as tiny nubs of texture...above, something large and triangular unfolds its deltoid wings, covering our position with the accoustic equivalent of a shadow, like some monstrous alien stealth-bomber passing overhead, partially visible in the gaps between the buildings/columns/towers of sound...something awful starts to happen at around 18 minutes, some new infiltration arrives from Outside, n the background texture starts to seeeeeeath and strain against itself....sound-objects slowly fold in on themselves; the monoliths descend into the ground, like the buildings in Marineville; quasi-organic warbles and squeaks push against something that sounds muffled, like a flapping cloth...a tea-towel that settles on a baby-demon hungry for some unspeakable milk...liquid-machines wriggle in and out of enormous turbines...granular rattle and high-end squawk; malignant, darkly phosphorescent photographs come to life, their surfaces swimming with sentient moisture; rivulets of noise running together, combining into some terrible hive-machine.
"This is the sound-track to Grant Morrison's Outer-Church, a world magnificent in its sheer awfulness. It's Throbbing Gristle, but without that itchy-scratchy Death Guitar sound of theirs; without the sermonising, without the Art and the artifice. Pioneers, perhaps, but TG weren't the start of something, they were the death of something else: the Death of the Guitar (we're living in its After-life); it's final spasms, its moans and whinges...a long, drawn-out death-scene, hammily over-acted by Gen P-O to the very last. TG as Rock's last, unwanted extended encore: "Boo! Hiss! Gerroff, you wallies!"
"But who'd thought that we'd end up here, eh: cast adrift w/ something that is vaguely recognisable as some distant descendant of SPK (but w/out the reportage and the refried schlock) or an implausibly long analogue of an early Hafler Trio track, except it's not: this is unashamably psychedelic, yet also Gothicised in places and somehow also mechanoidal; it's cinematic in some unfathomable way; far too fucking interesting to be Ambient and faa-a-a-rrrr too detached from any recognisable Post-Rave 90s synthbubblebabble like Space-Time Continuum or Reflective Records; shiney and metallic, yet also dark, w/ constantly morphing analogue style sound-structures grafted onto the grainy granularity of digital media...
"But, he-e-y, who woulda thought we'd end up here, eh?
"So, yeah, if "Vons Serin Exchanging Frequencies With Cicadas" artificially induced some odd sub-species of biological tension in me, then "Unrequited" (a live track!) seems almost relaxing by comparison - full of queasy, low-end tilt and languid sea-sickness, its peculiar sine-waves emulating a ship that's rocking in slow-motion as it slides out to sea on a muddy tide. This is Dubstep hoovered of its beats and dancehall/dancefloor inflections, its subterranean throb stripmined of physicality and replaced by a sluggish bipolar lurch, back and forth, to and fro, on and on, across a green, algae-stained osciliscope screen...
There's a roughness, an abrasive quality to these otherwise glacial frequencies as they see-saw and occasionally spike up into the red, quietly shredding themselves...I was strangely reminded of an old man's beard glistening with frost: what was once a proud symbol of vigour and authority now seems stately, but sad; a surreal reminder of the diminished stature of its owner.
{{I THINK I ONCE DREAMT THAT I WROTE THIS REVIEW; YES, I'M NOW SURE I DID}}
"The track is airless and hermetic, like being sealed inside a huge bell-jar. An emotional vacuum. "Unrequited" is a good title for this: the flow of sound 'sounds' one-way, a pale signal coming out of something or perhaps even being recieved by some passive receptor (it's hard to tell which, but we'll settle for the later for the sake of a metophor)...as the track progresses the illusion slowly builds that the sonics are being mutely absorbed somehow, or else they're falling over the edge of a minute event-horizon, out past the listener's point-of-view; the sound is blankly accepted, dampened as if it's been soaked up by an old curtain; accoustically flattened, it gives nothing back, no echo or reflection of itself: it sounds like an old married couple, one half-dead or no longer bothered by much in particular, glumly sat waiting for the end of something, but what?
This spectral dark-star matter; this negative albedo; this artificial metal that mutes light from the stars. I'm thinking of urns: receptacles for dead people, a dead sound sitting somewhere on the other side of this piece of music... not Stars of The Lid, but A Lid on The Stars. John Cale's playing an organ in the next room. Terry Riley on horse tranqs. "No Pussyfooting" stripped of its creamy opulence and frippery." -Kid Shirt