Miserable Absence Of Harmony/An​al — split tape
MxAxOxH present fifty-six untitled tracks, plus ten untitled bonus tracks for our pleasure. (Its shit-core.) The murkily xerox-ed inlay has lots of pictures of sexy ladies excreting, and this theme is carried on into the tape itself. Thus the sounds are overlaid and entwined with a constant stream of porn samples, along with the sounds of waste material being removed from the body. At one point, theres a marvellous section where several of these sounds are placed in the gaps after noise barrages: its utterly infantile humour, but that seems like a pointless complaint… Its practically impossible to suggest where and when a track might begin or end, so instead we are left with a barrage of no-fi noise; some of which might involve a guitar or a drum machine. Much of MxAxOxH’s side is dominated by rapid-fire machine gun “riffing”, which really just means a rhythmic battering - albeit one with any power removed by the quality of the sound and dubbing. But, again, this is barely a valid concern - all of the usual criticisms go out the window here, and flaws become virtues. The sixty-six tracks start with a whispery section, before panning into life; and indeed, in the latter stages of the tape, there’s lots of processing going on. The tape ends, after a period of silence, with a quick burst from “Gaîté parisienne“ - a 1938 piece based on music by Offenbach.
The Anal Colic/To Die side is accompanied by a less “colourful” inlay; pretty much your common garden handwritten-collaged-type artwork. From this we learn that Anal Colic “love drunken anal sex”, and that To Die have more conventionally “punk” thematic concerns of selling out and anti-commercialism. The Anal Colic tracks are a lower-mid frequency splurge of feedback, shouting and possible guitars. Every once in a while a riff sneaks out into legibility; but, for most of the time, any notion of structure is denoted by vocalisation or a sense of greater intensity. This half of the side ends with a short section of, surprisingly clear, tremeloed guitar. The To Die tracks are punctuated by silence: the first time on the tape that we get any conventional sense of structure. The songs themselves are short blasts of fairly straight grindcore; possibly… Its hard to tell, since the recordings are pushed way past the red and into some new colour. The ten tracks are over before you realise they’ve started; and there isn’t even any Offenbach to end with.
The strange thing is, that for all the overt anti-intellectualism and anti-“craft” of these releases, I can’t help but feel that they are of real interest to people involved in more cerebral sound creation. The cumulative interplay between performance, recording process and playback medium, here, is fascinating. Instruments are played with little care or attention (on the whole), the result is recorded seemingly as badly as possible and then the finished release is dubbed poorly onto a recycled tape - and it sounds amazing. Sounds become so faded, decayed and stretched that they become interesting in themselves - at points, the MxAxOxH tracks almost (almost) take on the forms of incredibly unorthodox Harsh Noise Walls. (I think this is stretching a point somewhat, but it gives you a sense of the overload and saturation going on, and their reduction of separate elements into one decrepit sound.)
The Anal Colic and To Die tracks both exhibit the same upside-down approach to production: where conventional, modern productions separate instruments and allow each space to be heard; here, all elements are forced together; so that they interfere with each other and combine to create something else. Thus there are times where To Die’s vocalist sounds like a metallic duck, or even just metallic clanging; and, as previously mentioned, much of Anal Colic is reduced/elevated to a muddy blur. The slightly greater clarity of the To Die recording makes it a harsher take on the classic “bootleg” sound, and raises the notion of production as “field recording”. Certainly, in my experience, there are situations where one mic can provide a better (or more interesting) sound, than hours in a recording studio. This is all food for thought.
You can ignore the above, if you want, and simply know that the MxAxOxH side is just a burst of invigorating energy. Saying that, makes me feel a bit like a Yes fan hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time in 1977 - but so be it.