Sudden Infant — My Life’s A Gunshot- Retrospective 1989- 2009 Vol
First off it’s worth giving a mention to the great, very sturdy and eye catching gatefold that the two 12 inch’s come in. It features on all, but one side of the gatefold(which is taken up by the track listing/ details) an side filling original oil painting by Joke Lanz of three different, quite disturbing yet child like pictures of human faces. Also in the gatefold is essay by GX Jupiter-Larsen which talks about Lanz origins, how Sudden Infant was formed and when he first saw sudden Infant perform live.
Moving onto the two sides of vinyl inside the gatefold and it’s a great, creative, unhinged and very rewarding collection of tracks that go from: deranged and off –kilter noise attacks, onto dada and unhinged sound collage and cut-up work, through to field recordings. Side A opens with the juddering Germanic robot talk and drilling/ bore noise textures of 1992’s ‘Abreaktion / Abreaction’. Then later we have the strange jarring sound collage of noise cable jerks, foreign children chatter and drilling and creaking of ‘Nihil Pampers / Höh’. Onto the chaotic and dada feel of ‘Urlila 1’ which cuts together burst of broken and wonk horn work, clunking metal, human whistles , and vocal coughs and moans.
Side B opens with ‘US Tour 1996/ Sounds of New York’ which is a wonderful mixture of answer phone recordings, someone signing a snippet of the old Elvis song “Wooden Heart”, street sounds from New York, a recurring piercing drone and general fooling around. The rest of the side is taken up by shorter tracks that nicely and creatively move between collage work and more noise based composition. The side finishers off with another lengthy track in the form of ‘Broken Glass’ which is splendid mixture of filing cabinet like bangs and shakes, and almost structured and musical glass/ glass bottle smashing
Onto Side C and this side opens with the track ’Pipipopo’ which is an insane, sudden cutting back and forth mixture of male and female Swedish or German talking, laugher, backwards tones, seared sudden noise attack and high pitched piercing elements. Later on the disc we have the first unreleased and exclusive track of the set in the form of ‘Hallo Musikgerät’ which is a very unsettling mixture of slowed record textures, skips ‘n’ jumps and layers of robot vocal noise singers- the track to start with makes you think something has gone terrible wrong with your record deck. And lastly on side C we have the track ‘Sperm Children’ which starts out with a sinister and quite perverse male voice feed through echo and delay peddles talking about sex and not likening contraceptives. Then in the second half is built around this weird mechanical and almost percussive element that’s suddenly bombarded with noise sears, feed-back squeals and thick sonic mats of muffled radio like voices.
Onto side D and the last side of vinyl for this first volume. This side features a few collaborative tracks and the first one is entitled ‘Elisabeth Kopp’ and it features Lanz teaming up with fellow unhinged Swedish sound smith Rudolf Eb.er- the track is built around a rolling and dash board juddering mixture of deep boring tone and smaller widdling almost reduced and dada tinged guitar solo textures. Another unreleased track appears too in the form of ‘Sag Doch Öppis’, which features rough and droning noise tones that are ranted over by distorted and peddle effected vocals- it feels like sludge out power electronics with violent dada undercurrents.
So in summing-up this two vinyl set offers up a great, varied, but always slightly unhinged collection of tracks that focuses in on one of the more distinctive, crazed and creative projects working in the noise scene today. You can only buy this with the second volume “My Life’s A Gunshot- Retrospective” (which I’ll be reviewing with-in the next few weeks)- but really it’s worth it’s weight in gold, as I suspect you wont get another such wide ranging and quality bound noise release put out this year.