Aural Aggravation

Futura Resistenza – LP Mar 24, DL Feb 28

Christopher Nosnibor

Most blurbs which accompany releases are either factual, unspectacular in their biographical detail, or tedious in their technicality. Some are vaguely amusing or otherwise entertaining, but the words accompanying Jeugdbrand’s 3 × hullo, hullo, courtesy of  Lieven Martens are outright deranged. I mean, there’s a narrative there, but it’s more of a slab of gonzo fiction than anything. And that’s before we get to the whole mole thing….

‘Well, it went like this: I open the glass door to the garden, the early morning coming to its midday end. That everyday anxiety that overcomes late risers from time to time kicks in. “Fuck, almost half a day wasted!” But abruptly, this sentence in my head gets overdubbed by the Queen’s English: “That shit mole, that blimey shit cunt mole!” I see the expat owner of our Airbnb punching his bare fists on his green lawn. A spotless lawn, but with here and there a few molehills. His grass, like a billiard cloth in a smoked bar, serves as a contrasting pathway to the black volcanic rocks at the back of the house. Behind these rocks, the ocean foams and growls. “Luv, get the poison! I wanna finish the bugger now and for good. Bloody hell!” I watch this scene with amusement, until suddenly, when the landlord notices me, he cleans up his act. “Ooh, these are funny little creatures, eh, these furry moles. Cheeky peng. Eh, fancy a cuppa?” The landlord’s head and belly are so ridiculously red that I can almost hear a lobster scream in a pot of boiling water. He looks like a walking can of Spam, its contents cooked by countless days under the Indian Ocean’s sun. The Indian Ocean, where sharks migrate between Africa and Australia. And where the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist bravely builds new islands of trash. Yes, the very true meaning of re-creation. Someone once told me that lobsters don’t really scream.’

I once caught some shrimps and prawns in a rockpool while on holiday in Devon. I was probably about twelve. We took them back to the cottage, and my dad cooked them up, tossing them into boiling water. I understand the sound of them being boiled alive was actually the air escaping their shells, but they did sound as if they were screaming, and I have referred to them as ‘squealy prawns’ ever since.

That I have digressed in response to an epic digression seems only fitting, and all of this seems appropriate when it comes to this album. 3 × hullo, hullo definitely falls into the category of ‘weird shit’. ‘Lonely, Sure, but It Is Getting Late and My Grandmother Is Calling’ flits between blasts of noise, stuttering percussion, jolting rumbles, whistling feedback, mumbling, grumbling, and demented yelling, yodelling and ululation. It’s a lot to pack in to less than six minutes, particularly when it’s six minutes spent scratching your head, looking around and wondering what the fuck is going on.

By the end of the album’s five tracks, I’m none the wiser. It makes me think of when I see a post on social media which is both seemingly cryptic and linguistically nonsensical, and yet it’s followed by a series of responses which bewilder not only in their equally coded babble, but in the realisation that people actually understand the initial post. It isn’t that I don’t get the way language evolves and how each generation develops its own spin, but… words. They mean what the mean, no? No. It seems I am wrong.

In fairness, I do understand the words and the narrative Jeugdbrand offer, it’s just that the narrative is crackers, and it’s fitting because the album is also crackers, a collage of craziness from beginning to end. ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow? I’m Talking About Now, Forget about It!’ starts with a ticking clock and then goes haywire, making for a head-spinning eleven and a half minutes of tribal percussion, drones, discordant church organs, surges of sound add rapid depletions, hollers, yells, grunts, and yelps. Elongated notes quaver, quiver, and fade in and out, while there are twangs of guitar and the occasional, incidental thump and scrape. ‘There’s No Word for Ambient in Dutch’ is dark, haunting – at least after its strange, murky start, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s noisy, oddball experimentalism.

‘Motorcycle Oil on Canvas’ is eleven and a half minutes of spooky, spaced-out woozy, warping drones and oddity, again with snippets of chants, record scratching, clicks, pops, crackles, toots and parps and, amidst the rumble of engines and the snarl of prehistoric reptiles, one finds oneself completely adrift and perplexed. It ends with anguished wailing atop a tempest of noise. There is a lot going on. Much of it is hard to process.

I’m accustomed to all shades of avant-garde and experimentalism, and I’m even more accustomed to my friends defining my musical tastes as ‘weird’, but this is far and away some of the weirdest shit I’ve heard – period.

AA