If I could leave Brooklyn and find a decent job, or give up on working, I would gladly move to Brattleboro. They have a great record store, In The Moment Records, not to mention tons of thrift stores with weird cheap instruments; a great bakery, food co-ops and a huge old multiscreen theater that shows Rocky Horror at midnight. It feels small and nice while having everything you would ever want without the scene of Bedford Ave. When I saw that Blanche Blanche Blanche Blanche and their label OSR Records are from that area, it reminded me of my small town in upstate and getting a scene together the only way that made sense: tell every friend to be in your band and have a show in someone’s garage, copy a bunch of cassettes and hand them out on Main Street. On one hand I think it’s no wonder Blanche Blanche Blanche is creating bizarre music in this perfect bubble but it also should be impossible. It’s a perfect combination of cool post everything and some kind of crazy future. I don’t know how they got here, but I’m glad that German label Adiago 830 (a story for another time) is championing them.
I cannot stress enough how A-Side’s "Scam" is some god damn original shit. Is this what happens because of those intense Vermont winters? I would imagine some kind of sunny, paisley psych out of this area though, not the Robocop Detroit sounds they’re coming up with. Mechanical loops, off kilter drums - like an Ariel Pink demo - if that’s even a thing. It’s an alien discovery, weird and exciting as hell. They hit on this minimal sparse punk, like The Urinals, blasting in extra vocals with feedback; guitars rolling up to break the speakers. There’s a battle between massive restraint and going completely wild. The timing isn’t like anything, crap electronics, the liberal use of the human voice in weird ways, windy, bizarre sounds, all related to the brutish Prinzhorn Dance School. Thin vocals all different distances from the mic, no effects, break all the rules to get this combination that couldn’t happen live. The punching in of the track to feedback, the repetition and emotionless vocal - this should devolve into complete chaos, but instead, holds back compressing in on itself. Super impressed by these guys and the two singles I’ve heard. Feeding tube put out a few full lengths? They WOULD be the ones to put this out. Junk crap perfection. Don’t ever change a thing guys, I love your Tascam 4-track.
B-Side’s “Press Dumps" here's this jagged bizarre minimal underwater mess. Impossible to decipher, it’s a Ducktails cracked math spike of looping tribal, not tropical, plinky guitar jam, with the kind of insanity that makes you jealous, literally a loop played at different speeds.
(ed - unknown source says:
There's no "loops" -- probably the articulation on odd time signatures suggests a mechanism or something. That 7" was recorded using a strange method I came up with -- in the case of a more high-octave input (say guitar) hardware EQs (a couple Ashlys) pumped >~30dB of highs , bass completely sapped , then once it's going into the Tascam the EQ is switched (drain the highs , keep the bass , repeat for bounces ) -- vice versa for recording the bass , bass drum etc. No digital chopping , just manual gating with the faders on the bounce.)
They’re writhing around in this repeating chord mess, up and down the scale, with chopped up live drums. I’m begging labels and listeners to keep funding this stuff; they know exactly what they're doing. Rent them a house with a hundred blank tapes, this planet needs some new music… not Earth, the planet that’s far away from here. I think Zack's actually talking about taking a shit? The rhythm is completely chopped up like they had to punch in this loop each time it came around and it increasingly gets slightly off each time. Clanging metal collage, odd kettledrums and bleepy electronics with surprising density and insanity. It’s perfectly crazy and warbled, like Centipede Hz, it’s so mind blowingly bizarre it's hard to step back and appreciate just how over the edge they’ve gone since they’ve already got me with how technically its so off the radar. This single has made me realize I’m in the camp that is always seeking out boundary pushing, completely weirdo stuff and BBB collected it all from every square inch of Brattleboro and consistently presses it up.
Get this from Adiago 830 or email OSR directly, I bet they have some copies.
