- Joined
- Feb 22, 2000
- Messages
- 1,344
those shysters have had their chips now
cop an earful of the righteous stuff .. this is even better than rory's review
Chokchai 3K Battery - Cyclone Bones
i've had to leave out the introduction which says that the guy works in a hospital and deals with horrible stuff...
..........
On this particular day, I'm listening to The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat when a clearly agitated nurse, with whom I had had an earlier argument vis a vis the cultural import of Elton John, burst through the door and screamed: "That's not music! That's just...fucking...fucking NOISE!"
Now for those of you who don't work in a hospital, nurses are a particularly ignorant breed. Suffice to say that when news of a Neil Diamond concert was announced recently, the flutter of excitement on the various wards was palpable to even the most sedated of cancerous geriatrics.
At the time I think I replied with some really brilliant line like "Ah but all music is noise Genevieve [not her real name], it just depends how you interpret it."
Now aside from the fact that my reply was patronising gibberish, this got me thinking. Where does music end and noise begin? And what's the difference between the two anyway?
Which brings us, without even the smallest degree of neatness, to the debut release by Chokchai 3K Battery (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?), 'Cyclone Bones.' "Chokchai 3K Battery seeks to plumb the void at the heart of the universe and in the heart of every human being, trying to find a key to unlock the secret's of Mother Nature's violence and of her chaotic beauty," announces the press release.
Well I guess you can't fault them for lack of ambition can you? I suppose at least they're trying. I don't claim to know what Louis Walsh's thoughts were while choosing the members of the poptastic 'Six' but I'm guessing that "finding a key to unlock the secrets of mother nature's violence and of her chaotic beauty" was not foremost among them.
"Chokchai 3K Battery is a disconnected limb of a fragmentary worldwide anarchist society of individuals, blindly seeking the ur-language that will re-unite the tribes of humanity."
Que?
I mean come on, that's just rubbish now, isn't it. There's pretension and there's pretension. And then there's a press-release by Chokchai 3K Battery, a document so reeking with ill-informed, profound-sounding, meaningless shit, that it makes A Party Political Broadcast On Behalf Of Fianna Fail look like an outtake from The Battleship Potemkin. And then to add hypocrisy to gibberish, they announce that their drummer is a member of David Kitt's Band. It's a bit fucking rich now to declare yourself "a disconnected limb of a fragmentary worldwide anarchist society of individuals" and then to advertise the fact that you also play with David Kitt, a man whose songs are so bloated with unimaginative, derivative blandness that his guitar can be heard gently weeping every time he tunes it up at the start of a gig. "I never wanted this," it sobs, "I just wanted to be owned by a wizened old bluesman on the banks of the missippi delta. It's not my fault! I never asked for this!"
(Anyway)
So none of this bodes well. Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for the noise. I think Lou reed's Metal machine Music is great, I regularly listen to Arc by Neil Young.
I'm all for art and experimenation and all that jazz (NPI) but I do draw a line at smugness. For instance, there is no more annoying, pretentious or utterly contemptible group of people on this planet than Sonic Youth fans and it's my deep suspicion that anyone who claims to be a fan of this will fall into the same category. And C3KB are a fucking smug bunch. Too cool for tunes, too brilliant for thythm, their artistic development has come so far that there's nothing left to do except produce walls of noise, music is dead, art is history, vive the post-rock revolution!
Bollocks.
There is no reason for this record's existence, it does and says nothing, what it attempts to do has been done before and better, it's a small insignificant and self-indulgent pile of shite, a record made by people whose only audience is themslves, the only applause that matters, that of their own egos, a self-indulgent, self-serving lump of artistic lilliputians who richly deserve the sad obscurity they endure.
"The only certainty is uncertainty" they trumpet, "They only constant is change." How fitting that such a nonsensical cliche is what they choose to sum themselves up, C3KB are nothing more than a bunch of angsty teens with beards, big amps and am ill-deserved 70 odd quid a week courtesy of the indulgent taxpayer. {Legal disclaimer: This may not be true.}
Alienation is not an achievement. Just ask any homeless wino. Obscurity is not a mark of integrity. And constant noise says nothing other than that those involved have neither the skill nor the craft to fashion together anything that even vaguely resembles a tune. Shit, shit, fucking contempible sad kiddy shit.
And yet.
And yet?
And yet what if I'm wrong? Maybe I am. Maybe it's a great record. Maybe I just don't get it. I'm not trying to make a rhetorical point here folks, I'm being honest. The quote at the top of the page is not there without reason. My own fallacies have recently exposed themselves and nothing can ever be certain any more.
I'll be honest, the first time I listened to the second track on this EP, I was pretty fucked on things of varying degrees of legality.
And I mean fucked.
So I vegged out in the garage in my house, and it's like 3 or 4 a.m., J in my hand, JD at my side and I really, really fucking enjoyed this track. It's called Winter, Sugar, Bones. It's just noise with a feedbacking guitar wafting in and out at various pitches like electronic birdsong. What I thought of then, the picture that formed in my mind was that kid, Ralph I think was his name, from Lord of The Flies, finding himself alone and washed up on that desert island and picking up the conch shell and blowing into it, desperately blowing to see if there were any other survivors out there, (Jesus, I can't believe I'm admitting this) and I thought it was lovely.
But I was fucked. I'm listening to it now in a state of relative sobriety and I hear nothing to recommend it.
Maybe I liked the rest of it too, I really don't remember. But that's just the point isn't it? You just can't definitively make a judgement on something like this. It's noise. And who the fuck can make a value judgement on noise? God maybe, nonexistence notwithstanding, him or Steve Hayes.
I really don't know what to say any more, I could say buy it if you want but you won't anyway, I could give it the thumbs up or down but I broke both my thumbs recently in a freak motorbike accident and anyway, I was never one for classical imagery. If this record has done nothing else then at least it has stirred me to question my own perceptions and to challenged my self-given right to tell you whether a record is good or bad. So what if they're just making music for themselves, who else is there?
I'm starting to think that there's really no such thing as music, just sound and noise, and maybe if there is a void at the heart of the universe then fuck it, it may as well sound like this as well as anything else.
Music is dead, there never was any art, give in but don't give out, everything you have ever done or said has been wrong.
fuck it
cop an earful of the righteous stuff .. this is even better than rory's review
Chokchai 3K Battery - Cyclone Bones
i've had to leave out the introduction which says that the guy works in a hospital and deals with horrible stuff...
..........
On this particular day, I'm listening to The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat when a clearly agitated nurse, with whom I had had an earlier argument vis a vis the cultural import of Elton John, burst through the door and screamed: "That's not music! That's just...fucking...fucking NOISE!"
Now for those of you who don't work in a hospital, nurses are a particularly ignorant breed. Suffice to say that when news of a Neil Diamond concert was announced recently, the flutter of excitement on the various wards was palpable to even the most sedated of cancerous geriatrics.
At the time I think I replied with some really brilliant line like "Ah but all music is noise Genevieve [not her real name], it just depends how you interpret it."
Now aside from the fact that my reply was patronising gibberish, this got me thinking. Where does music end and noise begin? And what's the difference between the two anyway?
Which brings us, without even the smallest degree of neatness, to the debut release by Chokchai 3K Battery (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?), 'Cyclone Bones.' "Chokchai 3K Battery seeks to plumb the void at the heart of the universe and in the heart of every human being, trying to find a key to unlock the secret's of Mother Nature's violence and of her chaotic beauty," announces the press release.
Well I guess you can't fault them for lack of ambition can you? I suppose at least they're trying. I don't claim to know what Louis Walsh's thoughts were while choosing the members of the poptastic 'Six' but I'm guessing that "finding a key to unlock the secrets of mother nature's violence and of her chaotic beauty" was not foremost among them.
"Chokchai 3K Battery is a disconnected limb of a fragmentary worldwide anarchist society of individuals, blindly seeking the ur-language that will re-unite the tribes of humanity."
Que?
I mean come on, that's just rubbish now, isn't it. There's pretension and there's pretension. And then there's a press-release by Chokchai 3K Battery, a document so reeking with ill-informed, profound-sounding, meaningless shit, that it makes A Party Political Broadcast On Behalf Of Fianna Fail look like an outtake from The Battleship Potemkin. And then to add hypocrisy to gibberish, they announce that their drummer is a member of David Kitt's Band. It's a bit fucking rich now to declare yourself "a disconnected limb of a fragmentary worldwide anarchist society of individuals" and then to advertise the fact that you also play with David Kitt, a man whose songs are so bloated with unimaginative, derivative blandness that his guitar can be heard gently weeping every time he tunes it up at the start of a gig. "I never wanted this," it sobs, "I just wanted to be owned by a wizened old bluesman on the banks of the missippi delta. It's not my fault! I never asked for this!"
(Anyway)
So none of this bodes well. Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for the noise. I think Lou reed's Metal machine Music is great, I regularly listen to Arc by Neil Young.
I'm all for art and experimenation and all that jazz (NPI) but I do draw a line at smugness. For instance, there is no more annoying, pretentious or utterly contemptible group of people on this planet than Sonic Youth fans and it's my deep suspicion that anyone who claims to be a fan of this will fall into the same category. And C3KB are a fucking smug bunch. Too cool for tunes, too brilliant for thythm, their artistic development has come so far that there's nothing left to do except produce walls of noise, music is dead, art is history, vive the post-rock revolution!
Bollocks.
There is no reason for this record's existence, it does and says nothing, what it attempts to do has been done before and better, it's a small insignificant and self-indulgent pile of shite, a record made by people whose only audience is themslves, the only applause that matters, that of their own egos, a self-indulgent, self-serving lump of artistic lilliputians who richly deserve the sad obscurity they endure.
"The only certainty is uncertainty" they trumpet, "They only constant is change." How fitting that such a nonsensical cliche is what they choose to sum themselves up, C3KB are nothing more than a bunch of angsty teens with beards, big amps and am ill-deserved 70 odd quid a week courtesy of the indulgent taxpayer. {Legal disclaimer: This may not be true.}
Alienation is not an achievement. Just ask any homeless wino. Obscurity is not a mark of integrity. And constant noise says nothing other than that those involved have neither the skill nor the craft to fashion together anything that even vaguely resembles a tune. Shit, shit, fucking contempible sad kiddy shit.
And yet.
And yet?
And yet what if I'm wrong? Maybe I am. Maybe it's a great record. Maybe I just don't get it. I'm not trying to make a rhetorical point here folks, I'm being honest. The quote at the top of the page is not there without reason. My own fallacies have recently exposed themselves and nothing can ever be certain any more.
I'll be honest, the first time I listened to the second track on this EP, I was pretty fucked on things of varying degrees of legality.
And I mean fucked.
So I vegged out in the garage in my house, and it's like 3 or 4 a.m., J in my hand, JD at my side and I really, really fucking enjoyed this track. It's called Winter, Sugar, Bones. It's just noise with a feedbacking guitar wafting in and out at various pitches like electronic birdsong. What I thought of then, the picture that formed in my mind was that kid, Ralph I think was his name, from Lord of The Flies, finding himself alone and washed up on that desert island and picking up the conch shell and blowing into it, desperately blowing to see if there were any other survivors out there, (Jesus, I can't believe I'm admitting this) and I thought it was lovely.
But I was fucked. I'm listening to it now in a state of relative sobriety and I hear nothing to recommend it.
Maybe I liked the rest of it too, I really don't remember. But that's just the point isn't it? You just can't definitively make a judgement on something like this. It's noise. And who the fuck can make a value judgement on noise? God maybe, nonexistence notwithstanding, him or Steve Hayes.
I really don't know what to say any more, I could say buy it if you want but you won't anyway, I could give it the thumbs up or down but I broke both my thumbs recently in a freak motorbike accident and anyway, I was never one for classical imagery. If this record has done nothing else then at least it has stirred me to question my own perceptions and to challenged my self-given right to tell you whether a record is good or bad. So what if they're just making music for themselves, who else is there?
I'm starting to think that there's really no such thing as music, just sound and noise, and maybe if there is a void at the heart of the universe then fuck it, it may as well sound like this as well as anything else.
Music is dead, there never was any art, give in but don't give out, everything you have ever done or said has been wrong.
fuck it
