front line assembly

Senses

Intermission: A Fire On The Beach

SuperCoolNothing

Happy Pill

Live Wired

Vigilante

Resist

Plasticity

Plasticity (Zero Mix)

Mortal

Bio-Mechanic

Hard Wired

Infra Red Combat

Circuitry

Night Riders

REPEAT - DELETE: “TDK ULTRA”.

Sound Is A Disease.

Repeat – Delete is the collision Marc Plastic and I make occasionally when we’re not making “other”. It void of maps or fence posts and claims no allegiance to anything. 

Recorded at Marc’s Plastic Studio last week. Completed in about two hours between working on last Prude shreds, possible Machine God ideas and a track for Plastic’s solo record (It will be utterly stellar. He’ll be in NYC in September to finish it off with Daniel Ray and some of the NY Dolls, the fucker.)

TDK ULTRA is an atavistic offshoot from the cancerous pus-filled sac of “Leichenschrei” via TG’s “Violencia (the bullet)”. There’s a semiotic semi-nod to Towers Open Fire and Break Through In Grey Room as well. It’s inspired by a piece I wrote that’s a textual collision of MK Ultra history and a treatise on Brian Eno’s pioneering use of tape loops in the early 1970’s. The texts side-by-side just naturally seemed to want to coalesce, blur themselves together into a re-imagined chimeric muscle-twinge that spreads to the cortex. 

We recorded the text four different ways, from shouting to intimate whispers. Marc then layered and tweaked them aggressively, panning some parts in utterly unpredictable ways. The resultant smear tasted succulent yet reached for more. We’d spent the morning listening to Mother Head Bug’s “Zambodia”, the genius creation of Dave Ouimet who started Cop Shoot Cop then went on to play with Foetus, Swans, Railroad Jerk and countless others. “Zambodia” is classic Lower East Side music from the late 80’s/90’s yet moves further afield than most of the bands they were associated with. They engulfed gypsy music long before it was post-MTV mass pop’d as hep courtesy of the comical Gogol-verse. They absorbed and mutated klezmer, rock, carnival music for the freak shows and children’s rhymes for young lepers. So, as I was standing in the bathroom with Ouimet’s demented creating cycling as smoke in my head, I heard someone in the yards outside using their phone. Old-style, the beeps of the numbers as they were keyed floating a tone and rhythm up to me through the open window. I scuttled insectile back into the studio mumbling some shit to Marc about the melody and rhythm from my fevered imagination and he did what he does so well which is to translate my bizarre creative wrestlings into flesh, strange and bruise-colored flesh. Thus reared the scratchy, gritty oscillating tone that slurs through the second half.

This excision may seem like a desultory and not cognate, but there’s so much material that urges for egress from us both, and so much that’s germane in some way or another, that it just feels necessary to uncork it.

......use sub-aural frequency blasts erase memory while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements simple patients repetitive statements simple repetitive.....

TDK ULTRA

This version of ‘Neurozone’ is an early cassette demo of tracks that emerged as we were writing Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar. It’s from a collection of random cassette demos of varying quality I’ve unearthed and finally transferred to CD. I’m loosely calling it “Burnt Out (talkin’ shit and shootin’ smack)” ‘cause I’m such a fuckin’ intellectual and that’s really much more of what we ever did than actually write enough music to fill an album. 

Dylan was living in a ground floor apartment on 4th street sometime in the summer of ‘92 when we wrote this jagged little shard. The place was owned by a motorcycle freak whose real name I can’t remember for the life of me, but I used to call him Gear, so Gear he remains. Hidden behind a dented and grumpily resistant steel door that complained when opened, the joint was shockingly miniscule. Its size wasn’t helped by the fact that it was jacked full of strange heaps of machine parts, stacks of tires in corners and drums of oil against the back wall. Its two windows were perpetually curtained leaving the place cast in murky dark. We called it Dog Solitude in tribute. (We had an insane fabricated two-deck card game hybrid of poker, cheating and drinking we played in those days for which we applied the same sobriquet). Husks of motorcycles in different stages of either collapse or reanimation stood on blocks next to the hacked-short insult of a cigarette-burn halo’d couch in what was the main room, skeletal shapes casting skyline shadows across the greasy wooden floor boards. Dylan’s studio was his room, and his room was sweeping enough to accommodate bed and gear but nothing more. I spent a lot of time scrunched up beside the desk knotted in pensweatnotebookinkfever while D scribbled threads of 1’s and 0’s, the two of us passing headphones back and forth as the threads began to knit into something coherent. I dropped rough vocals standing on his bed and trying not to bounce....hehehe. The feel and sound of ‘Neurozone’ was very much infected and inflected by 4th street’s furiously active life. Originally a bay windowed room, the construction of Detox’s space meant that bed and studio essentially elbowed themselves out into the sidewalk, the world outside bleeding into it in a constant stream of street sounds, conversation shards excerpted through the window, sirens keening, radios blaring ballgames and gunshots barking in warm nights, an indecipherable omniverse pouring in in mangled, neon-sputtering spliced configurations. “There’s something moving on the other side, but what it is is not too clear”.

There will be more, but this is for now. This is for fallen friends and those who simply couldn’t go on any more, friends from then and friends from now, the ghosts who haunt my days, your days, our days. 
This is for Jamie Duffy and Craig Albertson and Bobby Ross and for Critter, just to start the list rolling.

Yes, you can download it.




Neurozone - demo

‘But Never Quite Making It’ 
Django and Marc Plastic with some input from me. 
The music’s played mostly by Django with the occasional riff from Marc and some moans and static clicks from me and Plastic. They experimented with Marc’s recently repaired Moog Opus 3, Marc showing him different ways of creating sounds, various approaches to getting the best noises from the Moog. They played and recorded and built up dynamic layers until they had the basis of the sound piece, Marc masterfully snipping and clipping, arranging and modulating, massaging and effecting each of the strands until he’d woven a distinctly disturbing piece. Django was utterly absorbed by the whole process if a little speechless at the complexity and sheer scale of what’s possible. We were thinking that it’d be cool to have D sing on it, but he wasn’t convinced deciding instead that he’d like to recite a poem he’d written about a month ago inspired by the book he was reading called ‘Varjak Paw’. He remembered most of it but we had to improvise the second verse a touch. His delivery’s just stunning, patient and dynamic. Overall a killer post-Halloween piece.


But Never Quite Making It

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