Russell Haswell – “Acid nO!se”

[Album: Value + Bonus]

You think this is funny, Russell? Noise as humor is a certain sort of head-sick. Maybe he’s just playing around and doesn’t really mean to trick anyone – but I think he’s in that camp of noise artists who are truly divorced from trying to contextualize their sound and simply do it because it’s harsh, meaningless – and people crave meaning. This means nothing, and the title isn’t even clever. What it is, and I love what this is, is, is, is hearing techno be ruthlessly mutilated into noise. You can hear in real-time an acid-house track get chopped with a cleaver from a live genre into a dead pile of static, then walks scot-free out of the grave as if nothing had happened. Russell is equal parts techno producer as he is noisician, as evidenced by his work with Powell and other club artists, but his work is always like this. Always this nihilistic spit-on-the-pant-cuff stuff that doesn’t try to be clever. He’s just fucking around, but it’s dead serious. That’s comedy for you.

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