Hive Records wants to fuck your standards because they aren’t worth a
shit anyway. Hive wants you to be elated, disgusted, thrilled — they
want you to feel something, to form your own opinion and not swallow it
in your secret shame at discovering a revolutionary bone in your body.
Hive wants you to find a crack in the shell and let something new in.
Like any good Mephistophelian pusher, Hive has something to offer you,
something to help you slip the grip of conformity and mince a little
dance step along the edge of the other side. Hive’s eleventh release is
a compilation entitled, simply enough, Fuck, and it is a little taste of
the fringe, the edge and the underground.
Fuck cuts a wide swath across the rhythmic noise and exotic electronic
genres, darting just far enough into the morass of discord and static to
thrill you with its illicitness. There isn’t any psyche-shattering wail
of Merzbow-ian noise here nor is there any heart-shattering splatter of
thousand-folded digital beat splicery. Fuck wants you to consider the
possibility of being daring, of getting that tattoo or piercing that
you’ve been dreaming about, of actually listening to — and enjoying —
something outside your comfort zone. Fuck wants your expectations to be
questioned, and gives you several opportunities to be pleasantly
surprised. Mago’s “Hide,” for example, is a jazz club riff, a lone
trumpet playing against a bed of bleep bloop tones, a surprisingly
be-bop end note from a band that isn’t known for their jazz predilections.
Muted Logic’s contribution, “Abort,” stomps along at a sedate pace, its
fuzzed percussion a resolute jack-hammer rhythm against which a clarion
call of electronic trumpets sound an anthemic melody. Larvae’s
“Staesis” floats along on the surface, their dark water dub sound raised
up from the depths in a glittering envelope of bubbles. 32nd Kalpa +
Leaf offer “Paperdress,” a gorgeous and mysterious piece of drifting
water tones, slippery-finger guitar and solo cello (with, of course,
just a tiny pop-crackle of static and the gentle propulsion of shuffling
drums). Iszoloscope’s “Suffocating Simoniacs (remix)” bounces along
like a deranged muppet attached to a live electrical feed (an image
which, if you’ve seen Yann getting his groove on behind his rack of
equipment, isn’t that hard to imagine) — a rhythmic noise track which
is a classic example of how chaos and feedback can actually be extremely
groovy.
Converter, one of the better rhythmic noise acts practicing today, has
his “Stand Beside Him” reeled back from the vale of noise by Manufactura
and given a dance-floor friendly techno beat, tempering the blasts of
white noise with a rolling four on the floor groove. Terrorfakt’s
“Noise Mix” of Unter Null’s “The Clock is Ticking” meets you halfway in
the same fashion, though in this case, noise is being added instead of
being subtracted. It all comes out in the thumpa-thumpa bumpa-bumpa of
the wash anyway. Railgun, whom I’ve not heard from in awhile, returns
with “The Trouble with Progress,” a glitched and splintered piece of
atmospheric noise. The Flint Glass remix of Hiv+’s “Havoc 2027” takes
its sweet time getting started (which is a bit problematic as it comes
right on the heels of the Iszoloscope’s righteous noise stomper),
swirling a church choir with delicate splatters of analog beats and
whispering radio static, but it does finally find a higher gear and puts
down a solid dance-floor friendly groove.
As a mission statement — as a manifesto — Fuck doesn’t quite live up
the revolutionary ideal that it espouses. As an introduction to Hive’s
aesthetic — both visual and auditory — the compilation does a very
nice job. If this had been the first release instead of the eleventh,
it would have been an exciting debut. As it stands, the record is a
solid release with a number of standout tracks; however, I was just
hoping to be fucked a little harder.
Fuck is out now on Hive Records.
