fire island AK — Extravagantes

New name to me but fire island AK is one Thomas Boettner who is responsible for both the music and the artwork on this 3” CDr.  Boettner has released over 40 albums as fire island AK. Though the releases all tend to be very limited runs. This album is limited to 33 copies. Limiting things to that amount seems rather pointless to me. How many people are actually going to hear this by the time you’ve kept a couple for yourself, given some to friends and sent some for review. If you’re going to do something limited at least make a respectable couple of hundred.

It’s all very DIY. The CDR is not professionally made, the cover is photocopied and it all comes in a small plastic wallet. I guess if you’re producing something in such a small amount it’s not economically viable to pay for these things to be done for you commercially.

But on to the contents. The CDr contains two tracks one 11 minutes and one 6 minutes. The first track Beatific Vision is old school industrial. Sound wise Throbbing Gristle have obviously been an influence here (or for something more recent then Wolf Eyes). The sounds are generated by a vibrator, contact mics, amps, tapes and vox. I’m assuming it’s the vibrator that is contact miced and you do get a constant roar through the track sounding rather like a guitar having it’s whammy bar used after a power chord or a low revving motorbike engine.  The beginning and end of the track have a couple of minutes where there are speech samples but there’s more than one sample going at a time and one has been slowed down so it’s actually impossible to work out what is being said.

The second track Ghettoes of Nightclubs takes its title from The Screwball Asses by Guy Hocquenghem who was the founder of and leader of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire in France. I’m not sure if there is big gay noise scene or not but having looked at a number of websites with articles about Thomas Boettner it does sometimes seem to make a point of his sexuality. What difference it makes I’m not sure you either like the music or you don’t you’re not going to buy it just because he happens to be gay. But anyway this second track is made up of what sounds like guitar feedback basically and lots of delay plus towards the end a few moments with some percussion (cymbal crashes). Not as entertaining as the first piece and probably works better live than on CDr. 

It’s a fairly reasonable release, I’m not a big fan of the DIY thing but I guess in hard times people can’t always afford to produce a more professional looking product. My main gripe is still the pointlessly small run of this. (One of his other releases has only 12 copies!) Worth a listen if you can find one of the remaining 32.