Cut Hands — Afro Noise I
William Bennett was first turned on to African and Haitian percussion in the mid-nineties and first incorporated aspects of it into Whitehouse’s abrasions on 2002’s ‘Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel’ (although Bennett had released the rhythmic ‘Extreme Music from Africa’ as a compilation on his own label in 1997). Since then this percussive prescence grew culminating in Whitehouse last album, 2007’s Racket, sporting rhythms on most tracks albeit somewhat buried under warped noise and vocalist Philip Best’s distorted invective. Then at the end of the same year, with Whitehouse on hold as Best left to pursue his own project, Bennett experimented with DJ sets of vaudou and Santería music he’d been collecting from its homelands of Haiti, Ghana and the Congo. The results he observed were strong enough to direct his energies much further into the mesmerising polyrhythms of African ritual, forming Cut Hands along the way.
So the theory goes, by incorporating too many rhythms for the physical body to mimic in dance the brain is saturated to the point of trance, taking the complex movements inside to the unconscious. ‘Stabbers Conspiracy’, the second track on Cut Hands’ debut, is perhaps the most direct example of this. While its title originally referred to a 19th Century kniving spree in Italy whose Masonic mastermind was never brought to justice, here it serves well to simply describe the pace and properties of Bennett’s drumming. The track is a pure polyrhythm work out hitting the listener with several independent patterns to create an initially alarming tension that evolves imperceptibly into an immersive shower of infectious beating. Later, ‘Who No Know Go Knows’ follows a similar ascetic route (and not that of Fela Kuti’s track of the same name from 1975), seeming staccato at first as its kicking and crashing hits fire past each other independently, yet by the time the horns float eerily around the track’s exit, the rhythm has once again insinuated itself into your psyche.
As the album took shape over a four year period, Cut Hands started presenting its afro noise prototypes, many of which were subsequently picked up by Vice TV to accompany their uncompromising documentaries, most notably, The Vice Guide to Liberia that provides Western audiences with rare and harrowing glimpses of the effects of the region’s “civil war on steroids” as they put it, appropriately. ‘Rain Washes Over Chaff’, an ugly phrase first used to describe the execution of 20,000 Zimbabwean citizens by one of Mugabe’s brigades in the eighties, is one of many tracks presented here that was also selected for the documentary. Through a unique fusion of electronics and rhythms it evokes a night storm with showers of deep droning tones streaked by bowed wails as the layered rhythms pummel like rain drops to present a suitably bleak and stealthy soundtrack.
Perhaps to highlight the slow fade from Whitehouse to Cut Hands, three previously released Whitehouse tracks are scattered throughout the new compositions, helping to assure us that this is far from a new whim. ‘Nzambi Ia Lufua’ from Whitehouse’s 2006 album, Ascetisists, stops the dance early on to briefly raise the Angolan God of Death with painfully piercing shards of glassy tones rubbing each other up the wrong way. Later, the charming ‘Munkisi Munkondi’ from their 2003 album, Bird Seed, returns here to remind us of where the blueprint came from. Its stubbornly repeating fanfare of wrenched brass is pepper-sprayed by unstable drum hits that stretch and gurn as the heat and pitch gradually rise upwards to intense levels interrupted briefly by indecipherable African speech. ‘Bia Mintau’ from Racket also appears following a similar strategy of devilish horns wailing purposely throughout as the natural, off-grid patterns of the deep drums carry us unwittingly along on a funereal procession increasingly interfered by elemental climaxing.
Cut Hands presents a new direction for Bennett, albeit one that has been brewing for some time. While the threatening and disturbing electronics haven’t departed in favour of djembe and doundoun drumming, they have become more refined with a much greater dynamic range that makes the album both more accessible and more affecting. And, when these alien tones are allied with the layers of exotic hand drumming they create a truly potent and beguiling set of propositions for the listener that truly inspire trepidation before sending you into the unknown of the unconscious.