Iron Bitchface / Chaos Through Programming - "WE ARE TROLLS / GRAVE RAVE" - CD - Slut Factory Records - 2009
Broken down into what seems to be the jaunty, skewered movements of twin muddled minds, and split into two separate halves of a whole disc, Iron Bitchface's WE ARE TROLLS and Chaos Through Programming's GRAVE RAVE both certainly know how to busy the old bones and fresh flesh alike into a frenetic fury of massive stomach-lining and brain fragment expulsion therapy.
Packaged in a wonderfully illustrated full colour slidecard, sitting within a clear plastique sleeve, this album is as beautiful visually as it is aurally.
We start off with my favourite current act in dark, hard-hitting electronic based music right now, IRON BITCHFACE, shredding through a dystrophic haze of zany, almost death-metalish riffs run through a sacrificed NES processor's sound card, playing none too cautiously over dubstep and industrial inflected beats that hold no sympathy and take no prisoners.
It is almost as if Sir Rot of Iron Bitchface was drafted to write the film score for hundreds of B and Z horror films that never got made, and when it came upon the time for him to submit them, the creators of these soon to be 'cult classics' (see: turgid garbage) were so horrified that they were instantly rejected, leaving Sir Rot in a fuming rage, fueling only more of his daemonic dance party anthems, perfect for any given bloody Saturday night.
With appearances from Japanese noise master Kenji Siratori and fellow Slut Factory compatriot Milkbagbrother, and black metal, punk, 8bit electronica, seething noise, and countless other now useless genre tags being turned on their heads in this sickly homage to the grind of life, death, and… kittens?, this appearance from IB is one of my favourite pieces of his to date.
After IB bids us farewell in a haunting, pulsating overture of breathy vocals and white waves of noise, we are thrown quickly and succinctly into CHAOS THROUGH PROGRAMMING's portion, greeted by a hectic, footstomping mash-up of what appears to be hardcore guitar riffs, 80s pop and electronica vocals, fizzling sinewaves, and tactile 90s Hip Hop, inter-looped throughout by classical dirges and snotty punk noise walls. Though this is my introduction to CTP, I can safely say that I already feel comfortably at home within the searing, familiar sounds that make up his repertoire. This may very well be the definitive classic Jazz album of industrial noise music.
Never before have I encountred a mash-up artist who has the ability to match sounds that should NEVER work together so well, dropping pounding bass drums and breakcore dissolution alongside America's favourite themes for sports games and childhood cartoon ephemera in the blink of an eye (or the flutter of an ear) without any respect for rhythm, time-signatures, or tempo; and yet, it works so very well. The end result is a heart-stopping, pulse-raping spew of Hellishly recycled electroglitch bastard-pop vomitus, easily falling in alongside the likes of soundboard genii such as Nero's Day at Disneyland, Venetian Snares, Aphex Twin, Shitmat, Frank Zappa, and Negativland.
As strangely as we began, we come to our end with a frenzied and melodic disco-punk retrospect, spearheaded by what I can only describe as one gorgeous ambient drone.
Haunted houses will crumble, possessed children will whimper, and ghoulish creatures unbeknownst to human minds save for in only the most grueling of nightmares will cower in the aural face that is the psychotic & electromental pairing of Iron Bitchface and Chaos Through Programming.
