Art Muscle / No orgaNs — Split

The place I work regularly has art exhibitions for amateur artists, of which about one per year is half-decent and pretty much all the rest half-assed – and then there’s the special ones, the type that comes by only every five years or so that is downright disturbingly awful. Right now there’s a collection of portraits which in themselves, from a distance, pretty much seem of the half-assed category, with the (oh! how John Wayne Gacy) clowns and the ten-year old twins and the pretty blonde. But one good look and you’re scared shitless. Whoever painted the abominations seems to have confused texture with burnt skin, and consequently every portrait seems of some horribly scarred burn victim – the painting of the ten-year olds, with their smiles and blindingly white teeth and their disfigurements, especially haunts my dreams.

The a-side of this tape split pretty much is the musical equivalent of these paintings, except for portraits put jazz or art rock. At a glance, it’s a drum and guitar thing, but on closer inspection it’s more like some guy fondling his guitar in bad ways and being overall quite indecent with it (“Phallic, yes, we get it, now put that thing down!”), and someone’s three-year old nephew banging the shit out of his uncle’s drum kit out of sheer frustration over being forced to sit through The Complete Machine Gun Sessions, or something alike. Art Muscle, the band or ‘band’ at work here, is actually just Tavis Walker, formerly of self-described jazz-rock-freak trio Auntie Dada, who, as a band, released one cassette through Midori, but who has now gone at it solo. It works quite alright, really – the two tracks are an entertaining bunch, sounding quite foul and shitty like they should. I miss a sense of direction, though – rumble, stumble, grumble, and after a few minutes you kind of see where it’s going, and you know it’s going nowhere. Sort of tied with that is the slight absence of any real drive and energy – with the haphazard banging on drums and the tired riffs – though that sort of (feigned?) disinterest also has something charming to it.

 

On the b-side we find No orgaNs, which is another project of Tavis Walker, who here presents a slab of more straight-forward noise, as opposed to the filthy noise rock of side a. The material is basically comprised of outtakes of Art Muscle material processed to sound like noisy goodness, and like noisy goodness it sure does sound. The tracks here – some six of them, with appropriately filthy song titles – are mostly of the scraping, screeching variety, with lots of sand-paper textures and rumbles and far-away sounds you can’t identify bursting through here and there. The textures are lovely, with enough grit and crackle to please. The weakness here, though, are the compositions – or rather, the lack thereof; the short tracks are in themselves fairly uneventful, and stop as abruptly as they start, lacking any real climax or tension. That said, however, I must reiterate how great the textures are – several of them could have filled the entire b-side rather than have formed smaller portions of it, and it may have been the better tape-side for it. In fact, I would really like to hear Walker try his hand at a longer composition of this kind of subdued, grungy noise.

While the material here is far from perfect, the diversity Walker shows, combined with an ear for excellent sounds, seems promising enough. There’s a lot of potential in both Art Muscle and No orgaNs, and I’ll be very interested to hear what Walker has to offer next. A final compliment must be paid to the fine guys of Prairie Fire who put this tape out, as it looks, simply, top notch – the clearest sense in art direction I’ve seen in a good while. A fine, fine product.