Premature Ejaculation — Part 3

Despite being just 34 when LA's Rozz Williams tragically died he had already built up a surprisingly large quantity of recordings, most infamously as the leader of the post-punk horror show Christian Death. But even before he recorded that band's seminal debut, Only Theatre of Pain, in 1979 he was experimenting with less groovy, more bleak industrial textures as Premature Ejaculation (PE), initially in collaboration with performance artist Ron Athey.

This work initially served to provide a soundtrack to their confrontational shows until one such event saw Williams crucify, then appear to eat, a dead cat (apparently roadkill), after which many venues closed their doors to the project. This kind of 'shock allegory' of contemporary society's meat-eating, nuclear-arming, population-controlling realities, all disguised by a religious and political veneer of moral superiority, had started to emerge through the similarly gory transgressions constructed by the Viennese Actionists in the sixties, through COUM's performances of the early seventies and straight into the industrial music underground that left its indelible stains on the eighties and beyond. And it is this aesthetic that is so boldly reflected in both Premature Ejaculation's sound and accompanying visuals.

Testament to the lasting value Williams fans have placed on all his outputs throughout his short life, this two disc set is Malaise Music's tenth release in two years of almost entirely unreleased archive material, all lovingly remastered and repackaged. Indeed, there's every reason to believe the music on this particular release wasn't intended to see the light of day at all, it being recently found on a C-90, unmarked apart from PE's customary 'logo' of a dollar symbol intertwined with a swastika, wrapped in a homemade sleeve using a picture of a skull pierced by a bullet hole. The music itself backs up this theory sounding like a selection of raw loops prepared, perhaps, for live accompaniment (musical or otherwise). Apparently featuring some unedited or instrumental matter from PE's 'Anesthesia' album released in 1992, Malaise Music has decided to present the cassette as it was found: without titles and in two long single tracks each comprising their respective side of the tape.

Whatever Williams was using at the time sounds primitive by today's digitally-enabled standards. The many short loops, all similar in length, are often cycled for several stark minutes, each filled with imposing, tinny rhythms made from pretty much anything. Patterns are formed out of clattering machinery, traditional song fragments, breaths, murmurs and breaking glass, occasionally joined by even tinnier speech excerpts from radio but little else in the way of accompaniment. The results are most similar to SPK's earliest outputs, Australia's leading industrialists of the time.

Sitting still and concentrating on an hour and a half of harsh, embryonic loops is made much more stimulating through the instabilities of the cassette format. The severe repetitions serve to highlight the tiny changes (and sometimes not so tiny) in playback speed, lending a wholly appropriate queasy effect. In fact, the whole release with its macabre imagery, two-sided presentation and lo-fi primitivism, romantically reminds of the way we used to listen to homemade material before the consequences of digitisation flooded an already overflowing art form.