I’ve been dousing my head with a particularly turgid brand of harsh noise for the past few weeks, and the wear on my psyche is showing. The closest damn thing to something you might call a rhythm is enough to get me nodding my head with pleasure. That isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed enveloping myself with such extreme sounds (I won’t call it music, because none of it was). It would be a sad day when the likes of John Wiese and his related projects no longer appeal to me. No, I simply needed a little variation in my diet. A man can’t rely on rusted nails for sustenance for long.
It came as a surprise that something like Federal Bureau of Mind Control (which I will kindly refer to as FBMC from here on) would appeal to me so much, but maybe that’s what being beaten to submission by the L.A. Noisescape compilation does to a listener. Maybe I’ll stay away from the California 10xLP set.
The majority of FBMC’s Lord of the Wastes disc could be created on a handful of nice drum machines. Drum machines! I have no specific distaste for the form, but I’m used to hearing such sounds reduced to redlining wrecks, not the clean synth tones that make up the first few tracks on Wastes. These are the sounds of a club – a very hip club, mind you, not the sort I would find anywhere near my home – and here I am, nodding my head as though I’m ready to put on an ironic Hot Topic shirt and spin glow sticks in front of the faces of people I might want to mate with.
Okay, the glow stick crowd wouldn’t be into this.
Each successive track takes the sound into territory I’m more comfortable with; that is to say, territory I’m uncomfortable with. As if to grab an unsuspecting audience before moving ahead to esoteric ground, Wastes moves from rhythmic drum machine tom-foolery into white noise territory, eventually pulling the beat so far from the sound that it isn’t there anymore. And suddenly, I’m listening to a noise release again. Not harsh noise, not inaccessible skronk, not avant-garde wankery, just plain, pleasant ambient noise. Basically, FBMC smoothly transitions from IDM with inappropriate song titles (Carrion, Skull Peeler) to not-exactly-harsh ambient affronts with slightly more appropriate, if laughable, song titles (Vengeance Is Mine!, Afterbirth Lagoon). Not bad for just over 25 minutes.
