Thursday, February 11, 2010

My Band's Review. Wire Magazine.


The Revolution Everyday Life


Taking their title from the Situationist text by Raoul Vaneigem, and marshaling the forces of alchemy, magic and the words of Giles Deleuze and William S. Burroughs, this large ensemble explodes in a mess of 'signifying' to match any evangelist, vowing to raise your consciousness to a higher plane.
Their chaotic music theatre noise, propelled by HipHop beats, is supplemented by NYC experimentalists from Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt from the Minutemen and guests including DJ Low and Nels Cline. The recording is a multi-layered nightmare; a sense of paranoia prevails, and shock tactic samples disrupt the smooth flow; the notion of 'the city as a jungle' never felt more resonant. The BPLF collective enschews the cult of personality and star systems; a strategy embodied in their colorful alternative names (my personal favourite is Kosimar The Magneticist). However it seems Denis Mahoney alias Tariq Zayid is the main ideas guy. A prolific poet and writer(and man behind Ring Tariq press), he declaims his inventive poetry against the heavy beats. The Black Pig is a mythical figure of rebellion, borrowed from Celtic religion by WB Yeats, although Zayid claims to have found parallels to the image across Europe and the Middle East. BPLF wear their terrifying pig masks at their ecstatic, shamanistic performances to promulgate the image of destruction. Like the semi-obliterated texts on the cover, Zayid's meanings are obfuscated by layers of additional sound collage from the Torres brothers and treated distorted vocal noises and the ubiquitous TV samples which overload tracks with information.
Each recording is a soundtrack map, filled with foreign hieroglyphs; as with Burroughs, hidden meanings will leak out through the gaps in this contrived chaos.

Ed Pinsent (Wire)

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