I've been listening to a lot of blackhumour in the last six months. His work has gotten a bit harder to find in the last few years, especially the tapes. Back in the '90s, you couldn't give his stuff away. Steve, you're right to think of him as part of "those guys," i.e. AMK and GX and the like. He's a Banned Prod. staple, going all the way back to the "Radical Positive" double-tape.
Here's a few thoughts on his works that I've heard:
The earliest stuff (which I've only heard on youtube and places like that) utliized a wider spectrum of processing tools, effects and backmasking and more conventional "industrial" era techniques. By the mid '80s, he had pared it all down intentionally to only sounds of the voice and only processed using analogue and digital sampling -- he was very early on the digital sampling route, already working with digital rack-mount samplers in the mid-'80s. He doesn't reverse the tapes or process them in any way, but his varied approach to sampling and editing can make it sound otherwise. For example, one of his most common trick is to sample a very tiny piece of the voice and loop it through a digital sampler at such a high speed that it just becomes a blurry drone. The "Stutter" 7" on Kubitsuri Tapes and the first track on the "Romance" LP use that style. But it's not the only tool in his box.
"Regeneration" cs (Nihilistic/Bloedvagprodukt): blackhumour released tapes on the long side (c60s and c90s), and often just created a situation and let it loop -- the "Prolixity" tapes being an extreme example of this -- but it's already apparent here. Tapes from this time period will take a section of speech, cut the ends off, and create weird rhythms out of the choppiness of inflected speech -- voices of people who say a lot of "ah"s and "um"s get used to good effect, creating jumpy loops that gnaw at your brain. Because of his extreme love of repetition, some of these tracks start in one place, and don't change at all for five, ten, even 30 minutes at a time. This tape is an excellent example of the archetypal blackhumour style.
blackhumour/Gregory Whitehead: "Text One" cs (Banned Prod.) An excellent introduction to two great artists who use voices in very different ways. This split tape by Banned Prod. comes in a nifty box with a transparent window, a obi-type strip, and a big booklet, and presents previous works by both artists as an attempt to get you acquainted with their works. blackhumour's side leans toward his earlier works, tracks that formerly appeared on tapes that you'll likely never find again. They're excellent. Whitehead's side is fabulous -- if you haven't checked out "Dead Letters" or "The Pleasure of Ruins," do yourself a favor. Whitehead mixes serious quasi-academic talk -- think Hafler Trio's "Three Ways of Saying Two" -- with interjections of random vocal noises, a la Luc Ferrari's "Unheimlisch Schoen." Whitehead's finest moment is the "Principia Schitzophonica" 7" on RRR (under the pseudonym of Gregor Vicekopf), and the A-side of that record is reproduced here. Gen Ken's Generator label re-released a 2CDr version of "Text One" in a reel to reel box with booklet. An excellent alternative for a crucial sound document if you can't find a copy of the original.
"Peace In Our Time" cs/cs/CD (self-released/Vis-a-Vis Audio Arts/We Never Sleep): I've not been able to get a hard confirmation, but I think the first re-issue of this self-released tape came out on Juntaro of the Gerogerigegege's Vis-A-Vis Audio Arts label. And it makes sense. bh used self-submitted tapes of several of his friends, who recorded themselves having sex. blackhumour is sensitive but abstract with how he treats the material -- it's lurid only in the sense that it's sex noises, but that's clearly not the point. Since most of the sounds are a series of grunts and gasps, his method of layering these exclamatory notes almost resembles the punch-silence dynamics of R&G. There's a little build-up, but it really is admirable for its ability to maintain interest without going straight for orgasm or climax for at least the first 40 minutes. You might say it can really keep it up, har har. Clearly either an economically feasible release or one that's personal to Frazer Hall's heart, the material was released four times -- once as a self-released tape, then as half of the "Radical Positive" double-tape on Banned, then again (possibly) on Juntaro's label, and finally, as a CD on Colorado's We Never Sleep label, which is probably your best bet for finding the material these days.
"Poetry" cs/CDr (Korm Plastics): If you know blackhumour for his more linear voice cut-ups, this one will feel a little different. A lot of the tracks feature loops and samples operating at high speeds, reducing the texts to little more than garbled mishmash. Some of it sounds like old CD players doing the manual fast-forward through a spoken-word CD. There's also more repetition in the compositions -- this album sounds more like classical
musique concrete than any of his others that I've heard. There are little motifs and recurring figures, and though it's always obvious that he's using text, there's nothing really to hold on with regards to words. Some of the tapes tell stories, or at least drill down with repetition of key phrases. This is mostly just HRRRRPRRRRBBB, but it's really exciting in that style. The original tape is hard to find, but the CDr reissue on Korm Plastics still pops up for not a lot of money. An excellent, if anomalous, starting place.
"Romance" LP (Korm Plastics): Absurdly limited to 163 copies, this is a bit more expensive and rare than you'd like, but seems to hover around the $40 price range, if you can handle that. Four tracks, each in a different bh style -- "Melt Into Sleep" is one of the first to do that thing where the voice is looped so viciously, it just turns into a hummmmmmm. "Ed. See Monkey Do This Too" takes a phrase and repeats it endlessly, until whatever words you can discern just turn into mental noise. "Don't Shake No Leg" and "Beautiful Accident" are a little more musical in their cadence, though I can't remember details -- it's been a while since I took that one out. Like a lot of bh from around this time, the varied styles seem to be aiming to re-introduce people to blackhumour's approach, a good natured grab-bag of approaches. Later tapes won't be so generous.
"Prolixity" 2 x cs (Banned Prod.): In his excellent annotated discography (which you can find by looking up the Banned Prod site through
web.archive.org), AMK notes that he'd gotten sick of the noise scene around this time, and that releases like "Text One (see above) and this were his attempt to move Banned Production into a more "academic" experimental sphere. No matter how sympathetic you are to blackhumour's work, the Prolixity series is the one that will test your resolve. Originally intended to be a series of sixteen pieces over seven releases (one double tape with four pieces and six single tapes with two pieces each, each in a heavy/gloss paper sleeve with a small booklet -- blackhumour is all about the text booklets), the idea was that you'd collect them all, send in your rebate coupons, and you'd get a handsome storage box to put them all in and a bonus tape in which bh collaged all the previous pieces. Needless to say, the series ended far before this could happen, and AMK noted that this was his worst-selling and most hated series by far. To say it's not for everybody is an understatement. In each "voice factor" as he calls the side-long pieces, a very small snippet of text is taken (sometimes just a few words or even a vocal interject), a loop is made, and....that's it. For 30 minutes, you'll hear something like "uhhh...what? uh.....what? uh.......what? uh.......what?" The grain and texture of the pieces comes from the primitive sampling as well as the obvious hand-held tape recorder fidelity, which feathers and distorts the edges of the loops in intriguing ways. It's only slightly more active than leaving a lock-groove running for 30 minutes. Sometimes, bh will add a second loop or change things around a little bit once in a while, but for the most part, the place you end is the same as the place you started. This volume contains four male voices -- "Ken," "Michael," "Bryce," and "BH," which I'm assuming is Frazer/blackhumour himself. Still, it's a bit more active than...
"Prolixity: Two New Factors" cs (Banned Prod, bp-062): This tape, featuring "Joanna" and "Smelly" voice factors, will test even the hardiest of repetition fans. Each track is 30 minutes, and features no modifications from the original loop. Joanna spends 30 minutes saying something about liking to look at sexy women's bodies, and "Smelly" giggles and says "heh heh, fuuuuck that, man" for the same amount of time. At this point, the small pool of goodwill bh had built up had been thoroughly drained, and people were staying away in droves. I think it's great. You feel a little ill at the end, but you can say the same thing about a lot of the finer things in life. (If anyone has a copy of the other Prolixity Voice Factors [BP-50], featuring "Edwige" and "Tiffany," get in touch and name your price!)
"Stutter" 7" (Kubitsuri Tapes): This is the epitome of bh's voice-that-doesn't-sound-like-voice approach. The loop is so short and so fast, it just sounds like a drone. You only know it's voice-based because you're told so. It could just as easily have been made by a synth or a noise box of some kind. Might be enjoyable to others, but I don't play this one often.
"Prefix," "You, Remain," and "Pink Pillows" 3" CDrs (Banned Prod): Over the course of five years (2003-2008), AMK cleared the vaults of some storied bh pieces and put them on these tidy little mini-discs. "Prefix" was mentioned for years as "coming soon" via bh's long-running zine, "tab to block bicuspid," and the audio material seems to date from the early '90s, but it finally saw the light of day in the '00s. Containing interviews with GX and others, "Prefix" features much more story-telling and long dialogue pieces. The material is still pretty strange and incomprehensible, but there are identifiable words and sentences here. The companion piece, "Unspeakable," is less lurid than one might think with subtitles like "I can't help being an oral slut," and again aims for maximum absurdity. "You, Remain" and "Pink Pillows" usher in what I think of as the modern bh sound: a cascade of looped samples that crash against each other kind of like waves on a shore. It's repetitive, but more conventionally satisfying in a
musique concrete sort of way. These also show up pretty regularly for not much money, and are all recommended.
"Monolouge" cs (Banned Prod): Part of Banned's never-ending cascade of tapes, this is a short but fun title. Reading some of his own best-known "catch phrases," bh turns his lens back on himself. Many of the previous tapes read like documentaries -- you can imagine Frazer pushing a mic into a friend's face and asking a question. Here, he seems to be sitting alone, reading some of the phrases he uses and reuses in his work, such as "I enjoy being happy. I enjoy being satisfied," and gives them the modern bh treatment. The funniest moment comes on side two, in which a barrage of Frazers solemnly declare, "here's where we separate the plywood from the dinosaurs...line forms to the left."
"I Say/You Say" cs [collab with Tanner Garza] (Banned Prod.): Also in the Banned tape-storm is this collab (or interlaced split) between Frazer and Garza. It jumps rather incongruously between bh's usual thing and short ambient synth washes. Decent, but suffering from neither-fish-nor-fowl syndrome.
"Clones of Megan" FLAC/MP3 (Nostalgie de la Boue): You don't get cheaper than free! Available for download on the Nostalgie de la Boue site. This is another one of those endless repetition pieces -- set it and forget it -- though there is a bit of progression and change along the way. Frazer's text on this piece is actually pretty illuminating, both in its method and his mindset, so I'll quote it:
"clones of megan is a blackhumour response to unwanted repetition. folks familiar with bh work will understand this to be an oxymoron:
bh work is built on recapitulation, redaction, reiteration, repetition. megan and her variants bested me though, to the point where i simply abandoned certain loci to avoid her. that abandonment was progressive. megan or megan's successors would cloud entire neighborhoods with their omnidirectional data-free monologue, making restful sojourn most unlikely. for me, the climate never really did improve. i stopped visiting entirely." [emphasis mine] Along with the "Pink Pillows" 3", in which Frazer discusses the work as an attempt to purge himself from certain toxic forms of sexual desire (aimed at a specific person, possibly), one imagines that some of these voice captures and reworks as a sort of ritualistic purging of his connection to other people or times in his life.
"Selected Pieces" CD (Noise Below): After years of short tapes and 3" CDrs, this is the first full-length blackhumour in quite some time, and it does not disappoint. Featuring unheard work from the '80s onward, the pieces are all in the 6 to 20 minute range, many of them using the bh trademark phrase "I enjoy being happy...I enjoy being satisfied" spoken by friends, strippers, and assorted people on the street. I'm still working my brain around this one, but an initial listen or three in, I'd say if you're at all interested in what blackhumour is all about, you really ought to start here. It's joyous and ugly and strange and maddening and goes on and on. If none of those descriptors sound perjorative to you, you'll love this. Just don't expect much of the packaging/artwork. It's no one's idea of sumptuous.
If you can dig up any back issues, Frazer's created long-running quarterly newsletter called "tab to block bicuspid." It's a fun, absurd little read, including an advice column and letters to the editor, as well as longer, sometimes semi-autobiographical (?) stories about his interactions with folks in the noise scene. You can see an examples in this style at his blog:
http://tabtoblockbicuspid.com/
