How does something excruciating become pleasurable? Damn, good question, but my guess is that it takes many, many years to find beauty in sheer, deliberate ugliness. You have to become steeped in refined loveliness, so much so that things once serene in your eyes become boring. You have to obsessively explore a cavern so deeply that to spelunk its outer regions is just too easy; you need to go balls-deep or not go at all.
That’s really the only explanation I can think of for my slow descent into — and appreciation of — abstract noise recordings. It’s not like I woke up one day and decided that chewing on tinfoil with a fillings-heavy mouth would be a good idea; it’s not like my ears suddenly set out to find the highest, tinniest, screechiest sounds available. It happened over the course of many moons, and now that I’ve marched deep into the woods I’m not sure I remember the way back.
Happily, there are entire music scenes dedicated to people just like me, folks who probably listened to Korn or something in junior high and then noticed that their mom’s sewing machine would make a pretty cool racket if it were mic’d and run through an ass-load of filters, modulators and flangers. And, strangely enough, being able to enjoy such dissonance doesn’t sand down my love of sugary soda pop; just the opposite, in fact: now that I love the lepers of audio I’m even more grateful to hear a snappy, clap-happy chorus vaulting from my speakers when the time is right.
Hetero Skeleton are, in my mind, one of the more interesting of the avant-gardesmen making waves today because they never rely on just one element to carry their vision of tumult to fruition. They plunge into a pool of battery-acid effects and shriek, toot on a molten saxophone and stutter and ride a cloud of sticky sludge to cymbal heaven, all within the same track. Akin to the dirt-caked bastard child of Racebannon’s incredible — and, in retrospect, visionary — ‘Ookie’ seven-inch, early Butthole Surfers, and any number of Wolf Eyes CD-Rs, En La Sombra Del Pajaro Velludo never chisels your brain the same way twice, and if you’re in pain the least you could do is thank them for keeping things fresh.
And when’s the last time your heard a sax (which sounds like the same ‘phone from ‘Let Me Clear My Throat’, no less) honk with such abandon? When’s the last time you heard a fast-forward guitar solo, water drips, tribal drums and random drilling form a concrete nucleus of dissonance? When’s the last time you shit your pants? If you answered “well, it _has been a while”_ to any of the preceding questions then you should probably let Hetero Skeleton chill your bones for a spell. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger, right?
8Grant Purdum's Score