Wold - Working Together for Our Privacy

What you hear is what you get. In 2010 the new Wold comes packaged in black white hex vomit, a cultish aviary of indifference. Goddamn record title is something worth “blogging” about: Working Together for Our Privacy. Step on my cock and tell me I’m dreamin. That’s some Thom Yorke dicta right there. Three tunes tuneless, sprawling eye-socket-fucks of introspection. Titles as Bernhard’s short fiction, “The Secret,” “Death Spiral,” “Lovey Dovey.” Last more Harry Pussy than Harry Matthews. Instrumentals, even. ‘Cept it sounds like mollusks fucking fuse boxes. Which brings me to:

Believe it was 1996. Could be wrong. But there’s the stage and a hundred or so sweaty drunken people surrounding it watching sweaty drunken guy clad in ill-fitting thrift-store clothes, weighed down with Whitman beard, rubbing contact microphones together and alternately screaming unintelligible blah into house mic and shaking plastic milk cartons full of what appeared to be broken glass. Crowd loves it. Me? Not so much. Crowd hoops and hollers and fist pumps as if at “rock ‘n’ roll” show. I had performed minutes earlier with like-minded gaggle of losers that spent 15 minutes working through a terribly disinterested set of “Free Metal” (in all possible horrific senses of those words). Share space at the bar with To Live & Shave in L.A.’s hombre ultimo, Tom Smith, and we take turns massaging witty bullshit from our hypothalamuses. Smith, a hyper-intelligent well-heeled dude, notices immediately I’m annoyed. This is novel now, he says, smiling, pointing to sweaty drunken Whitman musician person. Ten years from now, brother, this is going to be norm. Imitation butter spread over gentrified hood toast.

Toast Tom. Bartender, uno mas, and whatever he’s drinking. Fast-forward ten years later. I’m on mile seven of 10 mile snowshoe hike through Rogue River National Forest. Wife is at least 50 yards ahead of me. Thinking of Masami Akita and Masonna and all those cassette tapes I bought from Midheaven Mailorder when the Internet was still shitting its diapers. The conflation of “noise” and “sex”—especially S&M—hilariously unavoidable. So many squalling feed-back rains connected to Videodrome MO, sleaze hounds prodding and pricking until their memory cards erase.

Stop to catch my breath and try to read tracks. Wonder if they belong to wolves and my wife goes on and I fight to remove internal sound gone external from ears. Deafening silence always one of those gag guns with the flag: BANG! And with the entire “noise” genre I hear as signs without referents, spinning wheels in empty parking lots until gas tanks go empty. Here, with Wold, I’m hearing the same, imposing form or formlessness, wondering – as always – what I “do” with “music” such as the wonderfully entitled, Working Together for Our Privacy. Listen, right? As I did, yes, in the snow choked nothing, Rogue River National Forest, some years bygone.

[Stewart Voegtlin]

type: reviews    keywords: noise, lhp034, silence,   

• 5 comments

  

  stupidd

  7:46 AM on Jan 29, 2010 // reply »
  
  in 1996 i was 9 years old. i read this review whilst listening to an atrax morgue tape i downloaded off the internet. i go to a liberal arts college.
  wold is my favorite band ^_^
  love their approach to noise/whatever. singular and totally captivating.
  also love this write up, would probably apply similar qualifiers to your approach.
  stew, i totally sweat your junk. keep writing. ^_^
  
  now i'm going to go work on my tape delay unit.
  
• 13 comments

  

  Dennis Dread

  9:28 PM on Jan 29, 2010 // reply »
  
  All I got from this was that you and your wife visited Oregon recently- even snow-shoed through Rogue River National Park- and I STILL didn't get my motherfucking package!!!!
• 296 comments

  

  VOEGTLIN

  11:39 AM on Jan 31, 2010 // reply »
  
  Stupidd,
  
  I am older than you and also went to a liberal arts college. Did you once haunt Stylus Mag as "Meatbreak?"
  
  Dennis,
  
  K and I stayed in Ashland/Medford in 2004. The cabin was up in the mountains and had no phone, TV, computer or central heat. It was great. I didn't even know who you were then, so that's why you didn't get that package.
• 5 comments

  

  meatstupid

  7:38 PM on Feb 01, 2010 // reply »
  
  did not.
• 3 comments

  

  Tanner

  12:49 AM on Feb 05, 2010 // reply »
  
  As always, interesting review. Never thought I would see a Thomas Bernhard allusion in a Wold review or, frankly, any review outside some free improv Evan Parker/Brotzmann hullabaloo. What next? What metal would Barthelme fall under? Or Barth? Alright, back to watching Bruce Dern get ready for a long distance race.
• 3 comments

  

  Tanner

  12:54 AM on Feb 05, 2010 // reply »
  
  Oh by the way, it's only gotten more...eh:
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm2CqAGQ3Uw
• 296 comments

  

  VOEGTLIN

  7:01 AM on Feb 05, 2010 // reply »
  
  Let me think about Barth/Bartheleme... But here's a few to tide you over:
  
  Meads of Asphodel = Umberto Eco
  Brown Jenkins = Gordon Lish
  Abruptum = Yukio Mishima
  Isis = Dave Eggers
  Wolves in the Throne Room = Stephenie Meyer
  Benighted Leams = Comte de Lautreamont
  Pelican = Jonathan Safran Foer
  
  
  
• 1 comment

  

  meatbreak

  2:16 PM on Mar 02, 2010 // reply »
  
  Hey Voegtlin. You remember me. I'm touched. No, that dude up there is not me. I still haunt you, but with my mouth shut these days.
  
  I am still not kvlt.
  
  Congrats on keeping metal writing up off the floor of shlocky hammer horror metaphor.
  
  bye, for now.
  
  MxBx
  

 

Leave Feedback

Name

Email

Email will not be displayed. The LeftHandPath.com uses Gravatars which are the pictures that you see next to each comment. If you haven't already, register your email address and picture with Gravatar.com

Website

( Optional )

Feedback

Post your feedback, HTML will not be rendered, only plain text.

Subscribe

Receive emails when others submit comments

 

Leave this field empty