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By: Mark Gomes
Date: 6th Dec 07
Release: Album
To Cure: A predictable playlist
What:
F.I.S.T. (Friends in Shit Together)
Who:
Always
On:
Nervous Jerk / Remote Control
MySpace:
Here
Where:
Available at TITLE
Launching:
Thurs Dec 13 at Utopian Slumps with Hi God People and Bell-Towers (debut)
Related links:
Always on Chapter / Nervous Jerk blog
Always makes a future kind of phonic music exclusively composed of vocal sounds. Like Brion Gysin's Dream Machine, his spinning tracks seem to affect the alpha rhythms of the human brain, allowing listeners new access to hidden imaginative capacities. Throughout F.I.S.T., segmented pieces of voice are slowly run through endless, looping possibilities of order, creating layer upon layer of hypnotic, implied meanings. Wholly improvised using two delay pedals and a vocal microphone, these sounds are intricately woven together in geometrical progression, slowly building like a Rave wind-up toward climaxes of near psychotic intensity.
All the themes of the Sydney-via Melbourne artist's recent work are here - states of infantilist un-thought, heavy-camp come-on, throwaway junk magick and consuming ethno-trance - but the way they've come together is truly enchanting. The genius of the whole thing is that, while Alex Vivian in person is a highly recognisable, irrepressible figure of the underground, these new tracks permutate him beyond recognition, somehow and startlingly into the ether. It's a bold and dextrous artistic coup pulled off with all the cool humour of a Monte Cazazza or Paul McCarthy.