Jarrod Fowler — Percussion’ as percussion

‘Percussion’ as percussion presents it self as a fairly high brow and scholarly project and is supposable a reading/ performance of John Mowitt’s book Percussion: Drumming, Beating, striking; but in reality it’s an attack on the sonic sensors using wall noise, deeply layered and bewildering spoken word elements and overload sonic collages that take in TV chatter, crowd  sounds, all manner of music and other sonic matter.

It literal overwhelms and engulfs you completely and utterly for most of it’s running time; think of been in a room with hundreds of people, multiple TVs and radios on and you get the idea of what you get here. But it’s somehow intriguing, rewarding and bizarrely enjoyable in it’s self and not just well noise for noise sake. The overloading of it all is rather invigorating and of course ever so often you get snippets of sense coming out of the cacophony or completely unswamped source material like the live Rolling Stones song that appears at one point out of the clashing sonic wall of interlinked sound. Quite how much if any of it has anything to do with the book is doubtful, but really it doesn’t matter as Fowler twists and turns you through his overloaded sound world with such vigour & wonder. This isn't about angry or rage; it’s a clever statement on how overloaded the world around us can be sometimes.

This is an album you experience and let overload you instead of listening to it in a conventional way; certainly of interest to those who like their noise thick and media based and with flecks of humour and clever sonic asides.