Aural Aggravation

Drid Machine – DRM27 – 21st March 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Having looked over all of the tabs I had open on my computer I had to pause the disc three minutes into the first track. I was confused, I was convinced there were two songs playing at once – one woozy ambient piece, drifting and warping, and a whacky jazz-grunge effort. My head was beginning to spin. Jungle drumming and scrawking bass undulations collide with tearing guitars, weird synth incidentals and all kinds of other extraneous sound effects to create a sonic experience that’s quite bewildering on ‘The Approaching of the Disco Void’. It’s ten minutes of musical mayhem.

The golden oriole is a type of bird, binomially known as oriolus oriolus (which is considerably more pleasant-sounding than the ‘turdus’ genus of the thrush species). According to the go-to source for all information about everything, the call of this extremely common migratory bird ‘is a screech like a jay, but the song is a beautiful fluting weela-wee-ooo or or-iii-ole, unmistakable once heard.’ There’s nothing beautiful or fluting about this freeform chaotic din. This is not a criticism: freeform chaotic din is better than good with me.

The album’s shortest track, ‘The Chrysopoeia of the Trilithon Ass’ is also it’s wildest, a Beefheartian frenzy of discord and multiplicity (I’m recalling the traumatic experience of hearing ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first (and only) time, a record that sounds like standing in a hallway listening to seven people, all drunk, playing different tunes in seven different rooms which all open onto said hall.

The hectic percussion drives through a wall of feedback and a grinding, deliriously unpredictable, stabbing bass on the third and final track, ‘The Pyrite Wink’. It’s a nine-minute exercise in working a wonky groove with relentless and increasingly wayward energy, until it collapses in a crackle of overdrive and howling trails of feedback.

As freeform chaotic din goes, Golden Oriole stands as a cacophony of quality, but likely best absorbed in small doses.