within tolerances of perfection: new from bbblood

July 22, 2014 at 1:06 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 Comments
Tags: angurosakuson, bbblood, improv, new music, no audience underground, noise, pascal ansell, paul watson

BBBlood – No Religion at the Salad Bar (CD-r, Angurosakuson, AS#006, edition of 35 or download)

Cast a net over the whole no-audience underground and haul it in. Amongst the mess of patch leads, broken equipment and writhing bodies (all secretly delighted to be in physical contact with other human beings despite the inconvenience) you would be hard pressed to find a project so unanimously loved as Paul Watson’s BBBlood.

The chap is charm personified. An illustration: at the last Crater Lake Festival, I was gently chided by an heroically drunk Paul who insisted that RFM should be more positive. Now, in nearly 400 posts over nearly five years you can count the number of unfavourable reviews I have published on the fingers of one hand without even dropping your phone. However, Paul’s opinion was so heartfelt and expressed with such earnest goodwill that all I could do was nod ruefully and promise not to be such a nasty cynic in future…

His music is proper noise of the highest order: racket torn from a selection of table-top electronics and homemade devices (loose contact mic taped into tobacco tin being a live favourite). He has a wire-walker’s sense of balance – the balls-out noise is gonzo enough for nostrils flaring, meathead catharsis, the calmer moments clever and detailed enough to reward serious contemplation. Snatches of field and domestic recordings are dropped into the mix adding a very exciting sense of location. Thus, Paul does not present a free-floating, atemporal harsh noise wall. Instead this is very definitely happening Here and Now.

So: No Religion at the Salad Bar, released as a limited run CD-r and download on Pascal Ansell’s Angurosakuson label. Dunno what the title refers to but I initially misread it as ‘Bad Religion at…’ and chuckled at the idea of veteran punkers queuing for the healthy option at Pizza Hut.

Anyway: the music. Imagine a gleaming rally car, engine tuned to within tolerances of perfection, navigator and driver linked with a near-psychic understanding of the course ahead. Looking at them you’d think the race was won before the ignition key was even turned. Then picture the slack-jawed, disbelieving horror on the navigator’s face as the driver gleefully and deliberately sideswipes a hundred metres of park railings, ploughs through a crowd of spectators (Nuns. A busload of motor sport loving nuns), parks nose-first in a ditch then gets out to slam dance to bird song in the forest and the ‘tik, tik’ of the hazard lights.

Nearly there. Now picture weary synapses firing in the fevered brain that came up with that metaphor and separated it out from the roaring white noise of kitchen sink thinking that surrounded it. Map the neurochemical process onto the perverted psychological meandering, convert the lot into noise and…

This.

—ooOoo—

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