Consumer Electronics – Public Attack 3

I wonder what Philip Best was like at age 14. Would they describe him like they do every single school shooter? Quiet, kept to himself, dressed odd, read a lot of books? Was he an asshole? Did he push other kids down the stairs? Your brain isn’t even halfway finished growing at age 14. Maybe it’s all in his biography (does Philip Best have a biography?). Then there’s this cassette, which sounds like it was recorded inside of a Pringles can in someone’s aunt’s kitchen while she’s away on holiday getting drunk with sailors (is that what English aunts did for fun in 1982?). It’s so compressed due to age and format that individual sounds pulp together like overcooked stew. There’s slide whistles, I think. There’s plaintive jolts of feedback. There’s a sussurus, a commotion, like a disgruntled but captive crowd. Muttering, screaming. I think the B-side is him running a lawnmower engine in a college gym. I have no clue what Philip Best (who, for a living, still screams at people who paid money to be screamed at) was like as a 14-year-old, but this is what he sounded like. It’s a filthy mirror that won’t come clean.

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