Album of the Day: Richard Ramirez – Amplified Tactics

 

Noise’s capacity to make itself known through its own violent radical alterity allows for it often to reshape its own contexts. Accordingly, a series of live recordings reissued on vinyl, twenty years after their initial performance, and eighteen after their original 2xCDr release, neither commands nor is commanded by the same engine of cultural nostalgia that drives most such artifacts. The vibrancy and dynamic queer energy of Amplified Tactics, however, elevates these recordings to a dominating affective immediacy that fully realises the corporeal dimension of the genre. Contrasted to the greater degree of punishing consistency in Ramirez’ best known projects, Amplified Tactics oscillates at times wildly between ranges , timbres and sources – moving from high-EQ hissing to pseudo-melodious low-end rumbles from what sound like an electric drill, reminiscent of Sunn O))). By halfway through the final track, that effectively collapses space and time, creating an almost seamless blend between a performance in Monterrey and a performance in Reynosa, we begin to have intrusions of clear vocal records from gay porn, and eventually a genuinely funny gay radio talk show, listening ten overtly lascivious reasons “to go to the rodeo,” the celebration of Southern queer disregard for decorum feels entirely consistent with everything else we have heard for the past hour. An essential document of the North American queer underground, toying with conventions of masculinity

Hospital Fest 2019

Skin Crime

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Richard Ramirez

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Moonbeam Terror

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Ninos Du Brasil

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Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement

Album of the Day: [Richard Ramirez] – The Machines Will React

A predominantly subdued collection of tracks from various Richard Ramirez outfits (almost entirely duo / solo efforts), The Machines Will React is, despite the multicephalous variance of the album, the closest I have thus far heard Ramirez reach drone. Favouring reverb in a lot of these tracks, listening to Machines, I am transported back to London, and the various churches, temporarily converted into noise/drone venues in Hackney and Bethnal Green. Perhaps due to this live-performance association, there is a greater sense of the deliberate, even the human, in Machines than so much of Ramirez’ work. Though never as forlorn as Yellow Swans’ Going Places, there is a pensive presence that feels particularly reminiscent of Dominick Fernow’s work as Prurient and even some of the crunchier sides of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. There are of course, exceptions to be found – most notably in the tracks performed as Werewolf Jerusalem (regular readers of my blog will be less than surprised to hear this is my favourite) and 12 Yr Old Proud Parent, both of which blast violently through the profound and thunderous fog.

Album of the Day: Werewolf Jerusalem – Black Chapel

Undoubtedly a personal favourite, Black Chapel was my introduction to Werewolf Jerusalem, and Richard Ramirez’ output generally, in anticipation for his UK tour with Skullflower – at the time, I was drawn to the show predominantly out of my genuine consideration of these being perhaps the two best band names of all time. I recall creating a “noise, no Merzbow” playlist for a zine around this time of year in 2015, the climax of which was indeed “The Last Witch,” which I described at the time as reaching “apocalyptic levels of pure damnation.” This is certainly true, though I believe Black Chapel carries considerably more introspection than for which I had credited it, half a decade ago. Recurrent low-end rumbles, akin to the foghorn introduction to Demdike Stare’s “Hashshashin Chant,” re-anchor the event to a mortal, sublunary phusis – or at least origin – even though it is an ontological point of stability from which the subject may feel frantically and brutally decoupled. Through the Black Chapel, we enter a new world, though the old one is not quite forgotten. In this light – or rather, darkness – the “damnation” is classically Dantean. In the layered distortion, I can almost make out harsh vocals reminiscent of Grief frontman Jeff Hayward. In the swirling confusion, I imagine for a moment I can hear the struck keys of Cecil Taylor, or even Thelonious Monk. The illusion breaks, and I am alone. Alone with the multiplicity of the demonic, howling wind.

I came to a place where no light shone at all,
bellowing like the sea racked by a tempest,
when warring winds attack it from both sides.

The infernal storm, eternal in its rage,
sweeps and drives the spirits with its blast:
it whirls them, lashing them with punishment.

When they are swept back past their place of judgement,
then come the shrikes, laments, and anguished cries;
there they blaspheme God’s almighty power.

And as the wings of starlings in the winter
bear them along in wide-spread, crowded flocks,
so does that wind propel the evil spirits;

Now here, then there, and up and down, it drives them,
with never any hope to comfort them –
hope not of rest but even of suffering less.

 

(Dante, Inferno, Canto V)

 

Album of the Day: Werewolf Jerusalem + The Rita + Vomir – Threesome Slitting

Although, with such a record, there is an urge to be such an expert in the nuances of harsh noise wall, that one could pick out a specific frequency and specify the individual source, I cannot help but feel that would rather defeat the intention of Threesome Slitting as a collaborative piece. Rather, approaches and aesthetics form an assemblage as constant as it is fractured: a battle in which all sides achieve ultimately the same ends.

Richard Ramirez and Romain Perrot, under their respective monikers of Werewolf Jerusalem and Vomir, emphasize notions of immobility in their work: the former labeling his output specifically as “static noise,” whilst Vomir’s various drives to categorize proudly the (or at least his) HNW aesthetic have included the pithy statement “no change, no development, no remorse.” Sam McKinlay as The Rita, especially in his more recent work, tied as often as it is to the topic of ballet, naturally conjures images of motion, even if these images appear in their own way frozen, as photographs of a whirling dervish, limbs appearing at once viscous and effervescent. An ectoplasmic multiplicity. Certainly, the influence cinema has had, at least on Ramirez and McKinlay, by virtue of their recurrent acknowledgement, if not use as a source, of giallo invokes certain questions of tensions between meanings located in horizontal vs vertical modes of temporality.

Accordingly, the violence of this record – and it is, most assuredly, a violent record – is the polar clash of a frenzied paralysis. Slamming against a door, locked from the other side, or struggling and failing to free oneself from bondage. A heart pounding against a chest. A body convulsing on the floor, bleeding out from the jugular vein. Threesome Slitting‘s invariable privileging of the lower end of the sonic register only furthers the affect of suppression, a sense of muffling, gagging, even when played at the appropriate, wall-shaking volume. And yet, there is not the air of introspection I have come to expect from each individual artist, in their own idiosyncratic modes. Rather, the sound forever retains a closeness, but one still of the most thinly bridged distance. The proximal, coercive alignment of a victim, and the killer, slitting their throat.

Harsh Truths Podcast: Episode 11 – Richard Ramirez

 

My introduction to the Harsh Truths Podcast – an eye-opening, funny, and at times profoundly moving account of the career of one of noise music’s most crucial figures. The levels of courtesy and generosity I  have received from the noise scene – especially that of North America – has been at times breathtaking, and this interview is a quite perfect example of the sensitivity that can be found the other side of the noise wall.

Album of the Day: Last Rape – Total Terror!