PER PURPOSE

Per Purpose are from Brisbane, Queensland. They are pretty fresh, maybe going on a year or so, and a vital addition to a scene that draws from punk music but doesn’t sit well with punks. Main protagonist Glen Schenau has carried over some ideas from his former band Marl Carx, which was a more no-wave derived outfit. Where that band embraced a totally shambolic style of clumsy primitivism, Per Purpose are sharp. Their songs are tightly strung punk/funk constructions, complex but well thought-out in a way that belies concerns of over-indulgence. Harry Byrne (guitarist in Loomer) plays the bass and Joe Alexander (Bedroom Suck Records, Kitchen’s Floor, Loose Grip) drums. Several months earlier, they released a CD-R demo entitled Demonstrating.

Heil Progress 7"

Bedroom Suck Records, 2010 (300 copies)

I hear the Minutemen, Seems Twice, The Fall, Tactics, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on this record. A little bit from each of those, but the majority from the first. The three-piece lineup, elastic basslines, schizophrenic changes and scratchy guitar invite this comparison… maybe the beginning of first track ‘On Purpose’ is acknowledging this in humour by paying homage to Minutemen’s ‘Monuments’. None of this matters very much though, as Per Purpose have a tonne of good ideas of their own.

The playing has an unhinged energy that surprisingly never loses its focus through all the left-turns and choppy rhythms. The tracks are all shorter than 2 minutes but due to the hyperactive way that they assemble their songs, there’s lots of dynamics and varied sounds, though not through reliance on guitar effects. The guitar playing appears chaotic, but the way the notes harmonise weirdly with the bass shows that laboured effort went into finding these chords. Glen’s vocals are a constant warble, his skewed pop-ish melodies sitting under the collision of instruments. The bass pummels and slides about and is ridiculously fast. A comical squealing recorder appears now and then, and sounds like accelerated guitar feedback.

Harry engineered the recording to a four-track cassette machine, and it complements the band’s sound really well without use of any trickery. Dry and crisp and occasionally abrasive. This 7” has been released by Joe’s own label Bedroom Suck and is as good a documentation of Per Purpose’s early material as you could hope for. They’ve taken an unusual approach to their chosen style, and their obsession with Australia’s own varied post-punk history surely adds to their own uniqueness.

RUBBISH THROWERS

Duncan Blachford (Snawklor, ex-Witch Hats) put out the Rubbish Throwers 7” this year as the first release on his label Endless Melt. These four recordings are a few years old, and in that time he was worked on other avant/experimental projects including Drunk Hands, Actual Holes, the recently released Psychic Baggage album, and solo percussion explorations released under his own name.

Tapeworms 7"

Endless Melt, 2010 (150 copies)

This however is a damaged lo-fi noise punk record. There are hints of a no-wave influence, in the harsh stinging guitars and the occasional stubborn drum rhythm, but the staunchly anti-conventional ideals of the no-wave thought process have been refreshingly balanced out with some primitive backbeat and rock-isms.

‘Tapeworms’ is an effectively ugly start to proceedings. Its hook is a descending guitar line that sounds depressed and defeated, and really nags at you for it. Abrasive blasts of string mangling act as choruses. There’s a lot of guitar on this recording in general, but not in a gratuitous way; several of them will make contrasting but equally uncomfortable noises at the same time. Late in the song, one of my personal favourite guitar sounds appears, that whirring, hyper-strummed dissonance heard in bands like U.S. Maple, some Arab On Radar and Sonic Youth. Hard to describe in print but easily recognised aurally.

Second A-side track ‘Weak Eyelids’ is more bass driven and swaggers along, with plenty of wild guitar squalls buzzing around like annoyingly persistent insects. Bone-headed drumming stops and starts in a likeably delinquent manner, and a few chanted vocals fight their way through the mess.

These songs have a loose jam feel to them, but kept concise in average song lengths. As I assume all the instruments were played by Duncan, there must be some degree of preconceived plan of where he was going to take these jams, but if that’s the case, it isn’t really evident. If mostly improvised, the way the overdubbed guitars have filled out the random spaces is perfect. This kind of consequential, elusively-structured chaos is always an achievement to my ears.

The second side opens with the only genuinely pleasant reprieve on the record… a hypnotic floor tom and bass pulse backing watery guitars drifting in reverb and chiming surf-tones. It could almost appear on a much more palatable album, and does a good job of segueing sharply into the most obnoxious track, ‘Willworker’. With only one drumstick-click’s warning, a huge wall of screeching guitars pound through the speakers, setting your frontal lobe shuddering. It’s almost funny how overblown this racket is, at times drowning out the thump of the drums.

Being a 33rpm 7”, the sound quality has gone awry, and whether this was a conscious decision or just not a concern, it works out well. You might find elements of Hex Enduction Hour period Fall, Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth, the aforementioned U.S. Maple, as well as the experimental side of Swell Maps shown on Jane From Occupied Europe. This record has a more belligerent vibe to those albums, as it’s less calculated than SY and more malicious than Swell Maps. The amazing guitar playing is of note, successfully reaching painfully screeching peaks while suitably simple bass and drums provide the rolling drunk momentum.

ZOND

ZOND are an enigmatic entity. It’s likely that most people who don’t live in Melbourne or Sydney haven’t had the benefit of seeing them, and are probably less aware of their existence than they should be. There is little information about them at the moment; whether their low-profile is a conscious move or not, it does add an air of mystery that complements their aesthetics quite suitably.

The band seems to have surfaced around 2006, after On released a self-titled album on Saucerlike Recordings and dissolved. As Zond, three of the On members (Marney Macleod, Justin K Fuller, Tym Krasevac) and Mark Nelson of The Stabs recorded a split 12” with Hi-God People on Spanish Magic. That record sounds vastly different from their current phase, but until now was the only available documentation. Subsequently, Stephen J Thomas replaced Nelson on bass, and a self-titled full length was recorded and mixed with Jack Farley over 2008-09.

The CD was released a year later on R.I.P. Society in May 2010 and the LP a few months later The band’s lineup changed at least twice over that time, with the addition of Harriet K Morgan playing 80's Casio synths and guitar. Earlier this year, Thomas left the band, Morgan took up bass, and Matthew Brown joined with a Korg MS-20.

Zond

R.I.P Society Records, 2010

The Zond LP was something I had been waiting to hear since seeing them for the first time last year. They have created a truly unique conglomerate of noisy, aggressive experimental rock that still manages to allow space for deeply resonant and affecting melodic ideas. The first trace of familiarity that I encountered here was shoegaze, but the undercurrent of darkness and emphasis on unbridled power in their music makes this label seem like a discredit to them. I could waste a lot of words trying to describe their sound via other reference points, but reducing them to one genre is unjust and seemingly impossible to do so accurately. There is a foreign, slightly frightening otherworldliness to this album that defies easy classification.

These tracks travel between the extremes of far-out instrumental excursions and (more) conventional songs, which are kept vaguely elusive due to buried vocals that creep in and out of the noise in a weird, ghostlike way. Words drift by, existing only momentarily before they disappear again, messing with the listener’s perceptiveness. The thick swarm of noise that surrounds you is the combined discharge of several guitars, synthesizers and bass, blurred together through absurd volume. This onslaught causes fleeting lapses in the ability to distinguish what’s actually happening, and this is a good thing: its surreally disorienting.

Best experienced on headphones turned way up, the songs have this enormous sense of depth. Layers of noise are unleashed gradually and intelligently, so an already thunderous portion of a song can escalate into new heights of crushing intensity. Despite this, listening to it while on the verge of sleep is actually relaxing, and being awoken after an intervallic lull can be alarming, confusing… fun.

The dense, screaming mess of guitars and restless drumming create a precarious looseness that seems to warp their collective rhythm, but in an oddly unified way… a mutual idiosyncrasy developed naturally over time. While the awesome production definitely contributes to the album’s colossal power, it doesn’t misrepresent their live experience.

There’s something happening here that transcends the normal ‘loud + noisy’ band aesthetic, its a little cerebral and more organic. Sure they’re heavy, but they don’t make a contrived fuss about it that smacks of transparency, or a cringe-inducing, over-inflated self-assuredness seen too often in pseudo-doom bands that take themselves too seriously. Instead, Zond wield all this immense volume and violence yet look and sound like they’re on the brink of being swallowed up by their own chaos. Bands this good only exist through an uncompromising commitment to their sound, and a heightened understanding of both their instruments and the music that influences how they play them. This band is undeniably distinctive, exciting, and vital.

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