Prins & Simonis — Mothers of Exit
Prins & Simonis is the collaboration of veteran Dutch avant garde musicians Gert-Jan Prins and Lukas Simonis, on electronics and guitar, respectively. Mothers of Exit, released this year in 2021, is their first collaboration. The result is a dadaist cut-up noise rock album somewhere between Black Dice and Nurse With Wound's Sylvie and Babs.
We are immediately introduced to blown out, sloppily improvised drum circle-esque beats from a drumset, sounding like a group of teenagers recording themselves banging on trash cans through a cellphone microphone, with reckless enthusiasm and bottom of the barrel sound quality to match. Rather than attempting clean production, Prins & Simonis cheekily indulge in clipping audio whenever possible, reveling in the harshness of the hiss as each heavy drum hit falls. Like a lot of mid 2000's noise rock music (like Boris or Lightning Bolt),
the overloaded audio is part of the character of the project.
After the aggression of the initial track "Numb Lesson Stomp" we veer away from distorted rhythms into a kind of esoteric spaciness, with chirps and interference textures one might hear from an untuned radio, and a faint motorik pulse. In a similar way as Nurse With Wound, the music here could be seen as a very abstract form of krautrock, taken to the furthest extent of its far-out potential. This is the space reached during the headiest of deconstructed breakdowns on experimental 70's LPs. Elements are arranged in an intuitive, tempo-less collage comparable to musique concrete or free jazz, with hints here and there of a drumset or a guitar solo. There are definite echoes of Can in the lurching, sluggish riff of closer "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your End of the World".
The jaded, bitter shred of Simonis' noisy solos is the closest thing to traditional musical satisfaction to be found on this album, with achingly cathartic bluesy bends and wails in dissonant churning clusters, sounding a bit like the busy bumblebee tones of Mick Barr's atonal Orthrelm project. He only appears in short bursts before abandoning us again to the noise, cementing the discontinuous, unanchored feeling of the whole album.
Rhythmic tracks like the titular "Mothers of Exit" or "Twilight Out of Control" are balanced with the sputtering modulated static of "Shadows and Tall Seconds", which is not unlike something you could find on the Merzbox. This prevents the distorted drumset material from becoming too fatiguing, as it invariably would have. Some, of course, will find the presence of distorted cymbal crashes unbearably bright as it is, and the general absence of substance or structure disconcerting or annoying. The drumset playing, while perhaps executed to some sort of hypnotic internal cadence, does not demonstrate much coordination or skill.
However, I sense a strange sort of magick charge to the idea-less non-structure they have conjured. The point, as it were, seems to be to sketch around a sort of hollowness or emptiness, so that one might see that is in fact there. The overbearing, vivid whiteness of ice or fluorescent lighting permeates the bright, sharp texture of the recording. The immediacy and enthusiasm that come with improvisation surely benefit the results here. There is a palpable sense of whimsicality and playfulness. It has the feeling of a sudden vision, witnessed and recorded all within a single day.
Like early Zoviet France material, Prins & Simonis' Mothers of Exit straddles the line between esoteric ritual space and idle hedonistic self-amusement. What it lacks in rhythmic cohesion and conventional timbral beauty, it makes up in sheer psychic disruptive force, the erratic thrashing and mad scribbling of its movements serving to stir the neurons into manic awareness. Recommended to fans of "bands" like Black Dice or Caroliner Rainbow.