Contagious Orgasm :: Desert Addicts Will Return To This (Ant-Zen, 2CD)

Contagious Orgasm’s work has always been a wild mélange of styles, recordings that are summary examinations of a thousand different styles all wound through a single pair of speakers. Ambience flows into beats flows into field recordings and lost voices. Experimental electronics snap and bubble beneath radio signals and overheard conversations. Contagious Orgasm wants to sever the connections to your terribly staid traditional expectations and let you lose in a wild world of cross-pollinated sounds. With their latest release, Desert Addicts Will Return To This, label Ant-Zen has taken the excess one step further by offering a companion disc with the same track listing but each song is heavily remixed.

On the first disc, Contagious Orgasm plays a hurdy-gurgy organ grinder against whizzing electronic squeaks and squawks in a surreal tug-of-war beneath the pier where the incoming tide lashes waves against the barnacle covered pier stanchions (“Unstable Parade”). “In the Dim Light” employs bells and violins in eerie loops that speak of air raids and midnight curfews in cities where the drift of noise and static implies creatures with thousands of teeth. “Industrial Swamp” shrieks with the Hollywood-style sound effect chime of a slasher film knife, clatters with the industrial terror of co-eds trapped in the basement boiler room of an abandoned school building and pings with the repetitive sound of neglected hospital equipment that monitors the spectral vital signs of long dead patients. “Lounge” is a Barry Adamson-esque nod to 1960’s spy movie soundtracks with a hint of squelchy guitar and out-of-control jukeboxes in the next room.

Foreign voices (Contagious Orgasm’s mastermind Hiroshi Hashimoto doesn’t speak many of the languages you hear on this record) are used solely as instruments — cadence and timbre are more important than the words being spoken in “Point 24 to Point 29” and “Peek and Poke.” “When the Empire Which Shines Sink and Dies” uses guitar (both an untamed endless thrum off the strings and a delicately picked melody) and the female voice to craft a lengthy exposition into the demise of the last empire. The woman’s voices is fraught with decay, static eating into her gliding voice, and the tape loop of the guitar is troubled by glitches and hiccups. The end comes to everything eventually and it all breaks down into disconnected bits of sound. All sound is music and Contagious Orgasm seeks to unhinge reality into an alternate universe where music supersedes the need for any language.

On the companion disc, Ultra Milkmaids turn “New Rem” into an acoustic piece for guitar and static-box while Daniel Menche extends the dub echo of “Livewire Voodoo” past its elastic limit and, as it fragments, he transforms the pieces into a multitude of cacophonous voices and bursts of hot noise. Telepherique layers even more menace on the terrified string quartet that loops through “In The Dim Light” with a lumbering bass line and a haunted house piano and, in an extended outro, let loose the drums for a lengthy march of piston-driven machines. Xabec transforms “Point 24 to Point 29” into a wash of ambient noise, damaged by stabs of heavy feedback and a scattering of microtonal clicks. The hurdy-gurdy organ of “Unstable Parade” is stapled to a techno beat as Roger Rotor turns the surreal soundtrack into a swift march around the village square. Donna Summer takes the spy soundtrack of “Lounge” and turns it inside out to reveal its inherent disco underpinning, and The [law-rah] Collective subsume the metallic menace of “Industrial Swamp” beneath a long drone. Imminent delivers a rhythmic remix of “A Drop Story” that never ventures anywhere near his traditionally rhythmic noise territory while Orphx and Ontayso offer two ambient tracks that veer through dark fields of sizzling cables and grumbling machinery in the bowels of the earth (Orphx’s version of “Wrapped in the White Rose”) to Ontayso’s distillation of “When the Empire Which Shines Sink and Dies” to a subterranean rumble of slow magma and compressed steam.

Desert Addicts Will Return To This doesn’t have the same seamless flow of earlier works (the effortless movement of style and place in 2001’s The Flow of Sound Without Parameter and 2002’s The Cause of the Flow) as the tracks are shorter expositions and have distinct (and often abrupt) separation between each other. While Contagious Orgasm’s deft compression and cross-pollination of wildly diverse sounds is marvelous, the aural submersion of previous records isn’t there on Desert Addicts Will Return to This due to the distinct delineation of between tracks and ideas. The artwork for the this record (always impressive “artwar” from Ant-Zen label head, Stefan Alt) is nine perfectly arranged pieces of candy, a mouth-watering array of nuts and pastels and swirls of chocolate. On the back, the candies have been devoured and all that is left is chocolate scraps. Yes, this isn’t one slab of divinely swirled chocolate, it’s a series of finely crafted bon-bons that vary wildly in flavor.

Desert Addicts Will Return To This is out now on Ant-Zen.