(09.02.05) A sense of humor is required when you have a record with songs titled
“Hello, My Cock is an Aardvark” and “Kiss the Spanner and Call Me
Charlie” by bands named Bong-Ra and Shitmat (respectively). Failure
to comply will result in a failure of imagination and all the
break-beats, whacked out samples and cataclysmic drum ‘n’ bass fury in
the world won’t get your ass shaking on the dance floor. In the
beginning there was one drum and it could be banged on by one monkey
at a time. As the future compresses and shoots us towards the event
horizon, technology allows for a multiplicity of monkeys and drums.
Someone will always figure out a way to add one more sample, one more
percussion loop, one more gabba rhythm to any given song. This is
progress. This is the electronic community’s version of showing off
their dicks. Monsters of Mashup is a three-way warehouse cock
fight, a trouser-free Grand Guignol that savages the arena with
vocalists whacked out on methamphetamines and helium, speedcore drum
programming, manic rave anthems fired from souped-up samplers like
razored flechetes, police sirens torn from the burned out vehicles
crashed behind the building, and the full 10 Hz power of
military-grade subwoofers. Their Kung-Fu is the Eight Trigram Fists of
Broken Beats, Shaolin Subwoofer, Tai Chi DSP and the Chi Kung Sample.
You can admit it to me. You’ve always wanted to go to one of these
illicit fights: an abandoned warehouse filled with sweat and smoke and
blood, a makeshift ring made from sandbags and rusty razor wire.
Three contestants enter; one leaves. You know the rules. Money
changing hands like flickers of lightning as the fighters strut around
the ring, showing off their moves and catching the eyes of the
violence-hungry ladies in the audience. You know someone is going to
get hurt; you just hope you can get the blood out of your shirt before
you go home. Oh yes, you know.
There are no clear winners following the thirty minute blowout of
Monsters of Mashup; there are only survivors. Though Enduser’s
hazy downtempo “End of a Beginning (Sludge Mix)” sounds like a
(self-attributed, at least) victory lap around the ring, reminding us
that he’s a beat-blaster with an entire deck of aces up his sleeves.
Shitmat (who wins style points for even coming out on stage with that
name) compresses a television season worth of samples through his
splatter beam of gabba destruction while Bong-Ra fires up the
Apocalypse Pipe and takes a large hit while civilization crashes to a
noisy end around him with sirens shrieking, drums flailing, crazy
chorus of End Times fanatics wailing and sludge erupting from all the
open vents. On any given night, one of these guys can take the
others. It is just a matter of who catches the audiences’ fancy
first. Listening to Monsters of Mashup, you can tell there was
a long string of bodies lying in the wake of their rampage across
European dancehalls during the summer of ’05.
Monsters of Mashup is out now on Ad Noiseam. Hide your
tender-hearted children.
