Panther Modern - Salem
June 12 2008 at 06:51:18 AM
Noise, make it loud, irritating. NOISE. How do you fuck that up? Don’t bother with that monotone black-box on canvas shit, that dead in the wrapper, never changing the frequency, Sunn Oh felatting, MOMA bullshit. You might as well be fussing around with 20-minute samples of fly farts, humming something less musical and more painfully dull than a ceiling fan. Nah, show me how you fuck the fan. You auto-sexual, deviant circuit pluggers rear-ending your tabletops; you skinny, switch-flicking, grease boarding, arched-back, micro-surgical sadists with a strong-arm examining amp guts. It’s great so long as you don’t have to look at it. Just feel it. Let the sound waves scramble your insides. Feedback sweating from the stacks. Id incarnate, materializing as ungloved hands force-feeding the GHz enema.
New Jersey’s Panther Modern doesn’t fuck with the formula, following up with anti-music that feels pretty fine three sheets in (not talking about the environmentally conscious cardboard packaging). They don’t use a fan, but I’m pretty sure someone brought their hair-dryer into the studio and let it scream out blindly on the speaker tops like a newborn first brought to rest outside of the womb. After that, things get a bit more sinister.
At times,
Salem’s three tracks of voodoo magic articulate little more than the crude power of iron and steel, a 40-minute evocation of an iron horse skidding off the rails. The machine's roar begins to harmonize with groaning bottom-lip dripping spittle - two voices screaming out within rhythms forming in the absence of proper music or measure. Left alone, they come together. Levers bent and brakes grinding below the cabin. Sparks are flaring as rust peels onto the gravel while fingers tap out a frantic and completely futile S.O.S.
The Satanic / witch-burning overtones are vaguely sensed, but kept consistently in view with a concept purportedly based on “three types of Satanic ritual.” Mainly, this leads to some brief, yet bizarre synthesizer tones worming their way out from
Salem’s granular shadow net while a kind of muffled black mass is orated below heavy cloak and veil. The cover art, taken from Austin Osman Spare, further links these tracks to some occult purpose.
It would be interesting to see these themes fleshed out more in the future, but for now, take it as more of a bonus; a little pacifier to chew on while your brain slowly solidifies. Although just as likely that that’s been reduced, along with the rest, down to an acrid pile of black clothe and smoldering ash on the pyre.
The best “nonsense” this side of the water gap. Mmhmm.
[Todd DePalma]
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