POOCHLATZ – victims of self preservation
(CD, Maor
Appelbaum)
In the last month I heard to talks on neurology and how
the brain works and the most interesting thing I learned about why the brain
is such a powerful thinking machine is, that it allows errors and mistakes.
In easy words, or as I understood it, the brain tries to make sense of
everything it receives for the first time, makes up rules as it goes and
can’t be bothered to change those rules as long as following these rules
doesn’t cause any major mistakes or threats. Within these rules a certain
degree of paradoxes and contradictions is also okay. The brain just
doesn’t mind and goes on as if nothing happened. A computer on the other
hand needs a clearcut and precise set of rules to work. That’s why the
brain is so fast and powerful. Without this unfunctionality any simple task,
like grabbing a glass to drink or pressing a key on your computerpad would
become extremely complicated and strenuous. Exciting, isn’t it? This also
works together with the way prejudices are an important part of our daily
lives, without which we wouldn’t be able to get on. Imagine what would
happen, if the brain would have to make up all these rules everyday from
scratch when waking up? Impossible, that is. So to expect evil-looking men
dressed in black to be dangerous or falling down a cliff as painful is
basically the same thing as expecting gravity to still work from up to down
or the sun to go up in almost the same place as it did yesterday. This again
leads to our tendency to prefer things we know to things that we don’t
know and to regard unknown things as potentially harmfull. Which in turn
makes up the basis of humanities tendency to preserve the status quo and
themselves in general. (Now you see where this is getting at.) Of course,
this way of functioning not only has its bright sides, such as speed of
thought, the downside is a lack in flexibility. Ironically, it is not those
things coming at us fast and big, that will hurt us the most, because the
brain does turn its attention to fast moving big things and will react
instantly. We fall victim to our tendency for self preservation mainly when
things change slowly and therefore happen outside our attention, because the
brain turns blind to what it seems to already know. In other words, we might
be able to duck a Ninja attack, but you won’t get away if history swings
at you.
Which, miraculously, brings me to Israel and the fact
that there might be a thriving and flourishing scene of avant-garde and
noise musicians, that I know nothing about. Somehow it seems that at the
moment the most interesting noise music seems to come from places that are
dramatically challenged in regards to politics or society and their changes.
(e.g. the Ukraine and the music by Kotra, Alexei Borisov and other fellows at Nexsound) I
view Poochlatz “victims of self preservation” in this regard. I was
unable to track down lyrics to the extensive vocals embedded in this melee
of raging noise and flowing feedback, so a track like the opener “Black
Milk” might be about a pangoric epidemic of some medieval sickness, a
metaphor of the evil powers at work in Israel’s daily politics, about a
dream Rani Zager – who is responsible for all the lyrics on this CD –
has had as a kid, or plainly about black milk. Want me to go on with the
remaining nine tracks on here?
The titles themselves don’t give away too much,
except that they make me wonder why they would be in English and the lyrics
themselves in Hebrew. I guess it is Hebrew, but your guess is as good as
mine. Anyway, I’ll have to judge the tracks from their atmosphere alone,
which is kind of hard. The preaching kind of vocals of said “Black Milk”
in connection with the bursts of white noise and raging feedback could hint
as well at some extreme-wing politicising as it could to the opposite, when
spreading an ironic message in that manner. The way Whitehouse or Boyd Rice
do on a daily basis. Musically these two and Poochlatz are kindred spirits,
and though I have my opinions about some of the extremism the offer, I do
respect them for the consequence and focus that they have used for their
recordings in the last decades. On the other hand, I never could have been
wronger than here. Noise from Israel is a new land for me. How exciting.
During the course of the album, the music and noise
change a lot as does the vocalic styles. Maor Appelbaum is responsible for
the noises, with the help of some friends stepping in on clarinet and with a
bunch of samples. The range goes from ritualistic, almost shamanistic noise
concoctions to percussive stompers of more noise and then some slowly
burning noise drones. I find the mixture of Yamatsuka Eye-style multilayered
screaming with feedback frenzy and clarinet on “I will not survive this
ravage” most remarkable. At other times the vocals turn more towards
screamed metalcore, as on the ravagingly wild and brutal “imitate –
meditate” (which might be English, I am not sure, though the reasons are
somewhat different than before). And “note to myself” is more akin to an
industrial nightmare of a grown up man dreaming of talkshows, demons and
burning to death in an airplane at night.
