1st May 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Once again, I’m late on this one, but also, once again, not nearly as late as the artist. This album has been a long, long, long time in coming. And that’s an understatement. As the bio details, ‘Janet Feder plays mostly baritone guitars and analogue, hand-made sounds; Colin Bricker (aka Brokerclinic) is an electronic musician and record producer known for his cutting-edge computer music, characterized by beautiful, twisted, broken soundscapes and skittering rhythms. This is their first new album in 19 years.’
19 years! Consider that for a moment. Almost two decades: there will be people who have been born, gone through school, got married and have started families of their own in this time. After such a protracted time out, it feels perhaps likes less of a return and more like starting afresh. Not that Janet has been creatively dormant during this time by any stretch (I recently covered the reissue of See It Alone by Sorry For Laughing, on which she features, and there have been numerous other releases in recent years, but collaborating with different people inspires different approaches and Break it Like This sounds and feels fresh, inspired and invigorated.
Break it Like This is brimming with ideas and range. The first composition, the appropriately-titled ‘Opening’ introduces the album’s manifold varied elements – scratchy guitar scraped and manipulated more often than picked or strummed intersect with extraneous noise and stuttering electronic beats. The volume see-saws and things suddenly break down at the most unexpected moments, disrupting any emerging flow.
Then again, there are some folksy runs of picked notes, and some heavily treated vocals, as on ‘Angles & Exits’, a crackling collision of disparate elements. Gentle guitar and clattering percussion joust it out as if two songs are overlaid in a sonic palimpsest, and what could be a beautiful pastoral tune is rendered as wreckage.
There are tangles of notes and serpentine rhythms which clamour, clatter, and crack from every whichway, and the mix is such that details spring from left and right, from the back of the room, from above your head and around your ankles, adding to the extreme disorientation of jarring pieces like ‘Blue State’. There are so many hints of songs and melodies which exist in a potential state; there are moments where something threatens to take shape, but simply never emerges. ‘Plan to Live’ offers haunting echoes of something atmospheric, splintered by rapid-fire beats which seem completely at odds with it. ‘Banjo’ reconfigures hillbilly wanderings into a postmodern, post-apocalyptic, post-everything soundscape which evokes visions of broken down cars and broken down society, a fatigued scraping out of making music after there’s nothing left but desolation, the notes ringing out into ruins and rubble, a theme which continues through the desolate flamenco-tinged ‘Heater’, before it swings into a psychopathic dance groove. It feels like the soundtrack to a bleak, Ballardian tale set amongst drifting sands, rusting vehicles, and dilapidated buildings, while the only survivors are the deranged.
A deep-running sense of ‘otherness’ runs through Break it Like This. Familiar elements, twisted and misshapen to a point that they no longer feel so familiar, and instead take on a more curious and uncomfortable form, abound. So many moments feel so close, and yet so far, in their proximity to the things we know and are comfortable with. But twisted, distorted, mangled, they take on more sinister forms, shadowy, strange.
Break it Like This is testing, nudging at the senses, piling up the discord and the irregularities of the structures and stoking a sense of bewilderment. This is experimentalism and collaboration at its best, excavating new terrain and forging something unexpected and challenging – while retaining a musicality which keeps it within the realms of listenability.
AA
Aural Aggravation 