PRONOUNCED
“SEX” - xxx
(CD,
interregnum)
What kind of music do they play in gay darkrooms? As
opposed to sado-maso-darkrooms? And what kind of bastard noises do they play
in the mixed darkrooms? My personal experience for locations like those is
restricted to scenes from Hollywood-Thrillers with a sex-theme (e.g.
“Seven”…), the musicvideo to Christina Aguilera’s “dirty” and a
friend of mine telling a story about a friend who once stumbled into a
s/m-café late at night for a last beer without knowing where he ended up
but wondering about the naked guy on a leash being led around the room on
all fours by a middle-aged women. Therefore, I have to go by my imagination.
I guess the results are a lot more progressive, offensive and obscure as the
real thing, where cooling down my fantasy I guess they play shitty new age
ambient with a little darker theme, gothic rock or techno dance music from
the Eighties. They would never go for the kind of electro-acoustic noise
drones you might find on this CD.
The overall perverted sex-theme running through some of
the sidework of this CD – songtitles and project title actually – does
spark my thoughts, but runs them into the wrong direction. Maybe on purpose.
The innersleeve flower lawn does not hint at sex and, more importantly, the
music doesn’t do so either. It makes me think of David Lynch, late summer
nights with the windows open, sleeping on an airplane or even the sound of
nano-robots working through my brain, but all of that is pretty sexless in
my mindframe. On the other hand it has made avantgarde/trash movie maker
Bruce LaBruce use some parts for his homo-erotic-zombie movie “Otto: or up
woth dead people”. Personally, the satanistic theme of “Taog eth of
rummes lanrefni” is more fitting to the music, but then I am pretty much
not interested in satanism either.
But I am very much interested in sounds and noise and
in the dynamics of sounds and noise developing. And in this respect, Zweizz
and Kim Solve, the two core members of Pronounced Sex have recorded,
manipulated and restructured a wonderful collection of single- or maximum
double-layer noise drones, that refresh the mind with the sort of ambience
found in “Eraserhead” or steel factories late at night when it has
closed down for the day. A dark, brooding, vast and frightening soundscape
of noises humming, pulsing and crackling, with faint inaudible echoes of
screams and violence and with the booming silence of night in urban
wastelands. Like the second chapter to Wolf Eyes “human animals”, to be followed by Aldea and Chiossone’s
“Narcophony”. “Graphorreah” by Critikal is the last record
in the same vein that I remember to give me a similar infusion of weird
tingling and fright.
The noise level is rather low throughout, but
constantly changing, which probably adds to the effect of discomfort. The
original material, nightly recordings from an apartment near a botanical
garden, does not give away great connotations of fear and terror, but the
artistic reprocessing has infused a high percentage of sinister ideas.
Sometimes it is like one big block of sound and then it changes and crackles
like skidding down a slope of small rocks down to a final crash. Sometimes
it is nothing but echoes and frequencies, sometimes high frequencies
threaten to burst your ears, but mostly wide open noise frequencies dominate
the aural space that rush like the blood through your ears only with better
sound effects. And sometimes the ambience is almost peaceful and beautiful.
Summing up, I think that Pronounced Sex live a lot on this clash of
opposites, which they place quite cleverly not in the aural decodification
area of the human brain but in the perception of their own expectations.
What you see is what you want to see, therefore what you get is something
completely else – the question is, if you are able to recognize what you
get for what it is? “xxx” is a beautiful, nice record.
