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Blind Date – Acting Class
It starts out, like all great tragedies, so innocent and unassuming. Just a casual little Flirt. By the end of it, 'holes utterly smoked, scorched, pulped, bleeding to massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip...well. What to say. Kids, stay in school.
If I read right, the narrative- a cautionary tale of betrayal and violent psychosis told in three parts- proceeds in reverse chronology. The disquieting opening scene of Part 1, Blood Sadist Goes To Nudist, finds warbled vocal vomit spurting red in dribbly snot-bubbles among the mangled, beached torsos of...
Hold on. Sorry, that was the sequel. Where' s my fucking... Just ah, just a moment here while I get my act together. My apologies. Let's try that again.
The disquieting opening scene of Part 1, Failed Actor Goes Psycho finds massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip lovingly arraigned among individually separated tapestries of a lush and full bodied frequency spectrum. Note to self: scratch lovingly. Replace with pathologically. Comorbid with the psychotic obsession to audial-pervi-luscious detail, a marked and possibly degenerative reluctance, or incapacity, to keep aloft the interest in a particular groove: the "method" employed by this sorry excuse for an actor is as deranged, spasmodic and ungroovy as um an exceedingly ungroovy thing. That the rather artfully rendered cover appears to depict a porn shoot only underlines the epic tragedy of this "failure to perform".
In the reverse-aftermath of Part 2, the harshly flailing and lacerating Cruel Fan Mail presents as particularly- if deliciously!- hurtful. And all that hurt, all that textural obliteration, precipitated by the oh-so-apparently sweet and innocent- but ultimately rather savage and violent- Part 3, Flirt. (In the sequel, the tragic failure, having slaked all sadistic bloodlust and rage, aural orifices utterly smoked, scorched, pulped, bleeding, goes full Nudist, washed up, on a beach, smoking dope, no longer able to get it up let alone hear, just hangin', low and to the left, stroking the chin in an affected and ill-convincing bearddrone posture. But that's another story.)
I'll confess, this was my first proper time out with Blind Date so I approached our first session together with some trepidation, keeping the volume on the low. (Well that and at the moment in question there may have been persons present who were disinclined to appreciate the harsh shit.) A good opportunity it turns out to engage in a favorite pastime, and one I'd recommend as an interesting exercise for you- yes, you!- to try: play the harsh shit back at low volume. (The disc is mastered fucking loud, so you'll have to turn it down really low.) You will, still, retain a good sense of the depth and degree of separation in play. It's almost counter-intuitive. Or counter-harshnoise-itive. Massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip, distilled and broken down into their infinite and infinitely complex component parts, growing more distorted, smudged, crunched and blown out as they accelerate along the amplitude curve, to the inevitable point, and beyond, where the massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip leave the bemused prattling of yours soddly simply not giving a fuck, in thrall to the fantastically crushing penetrations reigning in from up high, on the side, down low, infinitely deeeep, in hole.
Failed Actor Goes Psycho is a goddamn monster. Massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip, sure. But with the degrees of separation everything is so, well, I was going to say crystalline but that'd be a bit oxymoronic (not that that ever stopped me before!) It pierces, hows that? Not just all crunched up tight and saturated but sharp and tasty as fuck, teasing up a labyrinthian array of potential grooves to slam into, only to blow apart the moment you think you've locked on. The opening moments are the correct course. Half a minute of fiddling with metal scrap acoustics, abraded mic abuse and raspy whisper-hiss establish the depths that are due to get blasted a la dense frequency overbilge. At intervals heavy duty thunk of junk-scrap bashes through the cascading thunder-surge, and at others the thunder-surge mimics the junk-scrap bashing, flashing wildly about the channel pan. So things do get pretty fevered in a never-letting-up rampage of psychotic angular rip sorta way, but hardly flailing about with spastic abandon. The sheer crushing density ensures that nothing will ever completely escape the steel-trap of self-reinforcing psychosis. By the halfway or so mark, the convulsions start to crowd in on one another, ill-filtered histrionics ineffectually fighting to reign in an ultimately uncontrollable disaster of epic proportions, massed monumental crunch-walls collapsing one after the other, spiky scrap-dildos attempting to gouge their way through, failing with grand style.
Cruel Fan Mail cuts with savagely pointed viciousness through minefields of heart-ripping hurt, marked by one vicious cut after another. The cuts come fast and hard, a relentless barrage of spectrum-rupturing bewilderment, convoluted, contradictory, massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, texture rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiipping in from all sides, punching through to every extreme and back again. If the intent is to wear the recipient down, past the point of caring, to a state of numb self-debasement, then this is a rip-roaring success. Again, one has to admire the focused cruelty in play. As convoluted and contradictory as things get, this never lets itself devolve into aimless spastic flailing: plenty of time apportioned for each and every vicious laceration to cut deep, almost down to the bone, and then, slowly, to twist, with excruciating exactitude. These sadistic evil fuckers know exactly what they are doing, which is what makes it so successful, and disturbing.
If Flirt is any less vicious, it is in name only. Here the massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip flirt with some legitimately severe stretches of outright scorch. At the more blistered and scathe-lathered edges, the net effect is like a kind of fevered screeching dementia overtaking the bloodwalls, very much live and in the moment, inclined to erupt with barest hint of vocal seizure inflaming the passions. Now, this will probably tell you more about your faithful commentator than the actual stuff issuing from the speakers, but I found it impossible to sit still for the duration of this track, as though in psychosomatic sympathy with the explosive squalls of nervous energy tearing through the ozone, fists punching the air, inaudible-slash-drowned-out ejaculations of "FUCK YEAH!" issuing from the lips. Sad isn't it? But in the end, whatever we may see in the movies or in the news, all tragedy must, finally, come down to the individual. I have my private hell. Maybe someday, you too can have yours.
Digest spew
Massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip, meticulously- better, pathologically- arraigned among individually separated tapestries of a lush and full bodied frequency spectrum. As the considered distillation of infinite and infinitely complex component parts accelerates along the amplitude curve, the ever burgeoning masses grow ever more distorted, smudged, crunched, explosive, to the inevitable point, and beyond, where the massed clusters of incredibly dense, blown out, wall-to-wall, textural rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip leave the bemused prattling of yours soddly simply not giving a fuck, in thrall to the fantastically crushing penetrations reigning in from up high, on the side, down low, infinitely deeeep, in hole.