Perhaps the entire project was corrupt from the very beginning.
There is the matter of Billy’s sensational back story, of course, which
threatens constantly to subsume the band’s music, almost as if by
design. Or, what’s more troubling, the deliberate scarcity of the
band’s records. Odd, isn’t it, that while Mattin and Xabier throw
thousands of euros into making lavishly packaged, do-it-yourself
releases from their various projects, Billy Bao records are always
(just barely) bankrolled by various hip labels, mostly in America, and
released in miniscule, vinyl-only pressings calculated to stoke the
fetishism and paranoia of the collector’s market. And now, this,
a cynical repackaging of the band’s three 2007 recordings, which in a
move copped from the Steve Albini playbook, all but dares the consumer
to purchase the CD you now hold in your hands: “Hey, asshole,
seeing as you were too lame to buy the vinyl when you had the chance,
why not finish yourself off with this ephemeral, bastardized version of
the real thing.” Who buys CD’s nowadays, anyway?
Each of the records collected here was conceived with a specific format
in mind. The twenty cross-faded minutes of Fuck Separation could
only have been a two-sided 10” EP; “Accumulation” is obviously
tailor-made for the 7” format; and the Dialectics of Shit LP is of
course crammed w=++ith jokes and references to the peculiar instability
of vinyl which only make sense if you play the record on a
turntable. To listen to these recordings in digital form is a
gesture as corny and pointless as listening, conversely, to the Mille
Plateaux catalog on vinyl. Or as Billy puts it, in typically
histrionic fashion, it is sacrilege. Together those recordings
add up to precisely 60 minutes of music and not a second more, a
gesture calculated, no doubt, to remind the listener of the hourly wage
he has squandered in listening to the CD instead of working. It
represents a strictly regimented hour of leisure, if you can call
listening to Billy Bao a form of leisure. In this respect, too,
the digital format proved unforgiving, as the mastering program the
band used to assemble the compilation stubbornly added two seconds to
the disc. The only solution was to amputate those two seconds
from one of the cuts on Dialectics of Shit.
Perhaps the moment one seizes the permanence of exile and embraces it,
represents the decisive au revoir to authenticity. Here I sit,
after all, jabbing at an inadequate Olivetti “personal computer” (a
rental, no less), dried palm fronds shielding my eyes from the obscene
pineapple sunlight of this West Indian backwater, all the while picking
distractedly at my plate of enchinalgas and mamatxiles al nogal, caring
not a whit that this sad simulacrum of Home, erected by some misguided
gusano as a tax writeoff (or more likely, a front for who-knows-what),
is barely even a restaurant; that this slop I’m eating, which exists
nowhere but here and anywhere else that impoverished expats haunt, is
an undifferentiated loaf of deep fried plantains and mandioca in boar’s
fat, seasoned with paprika and parrot shit.
Well, a profound sense of calm takes over the moment one realizes, once
and for all, that exile is permanent, that one shall nevermore kiss the
fertile shores of the fatherland, that the hearth is but a figment of
febrile imagination shielding one from the Real.
Billy Bao, himself an exile, is no stranger to inauthenticity. In
fact, his band reminds me quite a bit of the meals I take at O Parador,
this wretched little outpost where, frankly, neither English nor
Spanish is spoken. There is one crucial difference, however,
between these counterfeit pork chops and Billy Bao, the band, and that
is that I can take comfort in knowing that my doleful supper will soon
dissolve into the sewers of this tropical wasteland, such as they are,
whereas the Frankenstein monster that is Billy Bao will persist as long
as there is recorded sound and zeros and ones.
You see, recordings are ultimately all that there is to Billy
Bao. The band is a purely generative project, an entity that
exists only in its recordings. They never “rehearse”:
Everything that happens between these four musicians “happens” on tape
– or, rather, in the virtual reality of Mattin’s hard drive – and is
released sooner or later. Occasionally there is an audience, but
mostly recordings are all there is. In 2007, the year which,
according to the mercenary rock & roll press, marked the thirtieth
anniversary of punk rock’s anarchic explosion into the popular
consciousness, Billy Bao existed for precisely one hour – 60 minutes,
and not a second more nor less, a meticulously crafted and controlled
hour, as precise as a digital clock. All that fuss, the
improbable back story, et cetera. All for one lousy hour of
music.Billy and his band may be evasive, willfully ambiguous, even
exploitative, but they are ultimately not dishonest. Just as the
slippage in the band’s press bio (For instance, how is it that the
two-year-old boy holding Vulpes’s 1983 single on the cover of
Dialectics, appears to be a man in his mid-thirties on the cover of
this CD?) invites the listener to question the construction of public
image and its role in her perception of the band’s music – to confront,
in other words, the fallacy of unmediated expression; so the
self-referential quality of their records, Mattin and Xabier’s blatant
digital manipulation and post-production of ostensibly “live”
recordings, and the perverse decision to create purely digital music
only to present it as a vinyl-only release (and then, of course reissue
it on CD with the title Sacrilege), are testaments to the translucency
of Billy’s discourse. They serve as reminders that there are no
more bananas here, no coca leaf, and no Billy – just simulacra,
spectacle and dream.
Acapulco Rodríguez O Parador, San Juan de Spinoza, January 1,
2009
BILLY BAOSacrilege(Afterburn) cd 15.98
A killer cd compilation from Spain-via-New-York noise rocker and
audio experimentalist Billy Bao, whose May 08 lp we made Record Of The
Week, and whose Dialectics Of Shit we reviewed recently as well. This
cd collects that Dialectics lp, as well as a handful of earlier
releases. The whole thing is packaged in a jewel case, then wrapped in
sandpaper and sealed shut with duct tape. Here's a review of the
Dialectics lp, now cd, and after that we'll give a quick rundown of the
other stuff compiled here. So
first up is the wonderfully titled Dialectics Of Shit, and we're happy
to report, that while the horns that were all ovr May 08 seem to be
M.I.A here, everything else is present and accounted for, BIG TIME. A
gloriously filthy, in-the-red, sludge fueled noise drenched monster.
Weirdly produced, super chaotic, rife with sharp angular skree,
pounding Neanderthal drums and a growled phlegmy vocal that seethes
maniacally. All that stuff is locked around single, KILLER riffs, each
track, a looped hypnotic crush, that riff pounded out over and over and
over and over, while the various other elements swirl and careen all
around it. Insane
bursts of grinding crunch, thick sheets of Merzbowian hiss, long
stretches of brittle jangle and thump that will suddenly get swallowed
up by a blown out wave of sub sonic low end, or a cloud of white noise
will well up obliterating everything in its path, all the while the
bass and drums 'groove' churns away, often emerging from one of those
disruptions a whole different beats, a sort of muted murky bit of surf
guitar, some weird twang, everything off kilter and woozy and noisy and
INTENSE. The guitars are sharp and jagged and rough edged, slippery and
warped, the riffs seem to be melting, or crumbling to pieces before
your ears, the whole record a stumbling, lurching, blackened dirge
noise behemoth. All the while, little hooks, and insanely catchy
flourishes surface here and there, keeping the record weirdly catchy,
and almost poppy occasionally, the sound is schizophrenic, about faces
all over the place, sudden edits, overlapping sounds that don't seem to
fit (but somehow do), voices all tangled up in guitar melodies tripping
over struggling drum pound, everything on the very edge of total
collapse, somehow held together in one massive speaker destroying chunk
of tweaked and twisted heaviness. The
weird thing when you finally see these tracks in your cd player, is
that all the songs are of an exact length, almost all the songs on
Dialectics are 3:00 long, the two songs from the ep are exactly 10:00
each, and all ten of the tracks from the 7" are exactly 1:00 long.
Weird. ANyway,
the Fuck Separation ep from 2007 is two ten minute long jams, the whole
thing, all twenty minutes made up of the same riff, a killer for sure,
looped and locked and pounded out over and over and over, while the
vocals howl, the sound shifts from sharp and jagged to murky and muddy,
only near the end, does it begin to unravel and fall apart in a
glorious pile of broken beats shrieking feedback, the riff never
letting up until the very very end. The
Accumulation 7", also from 2007, follows a similar pattern, locking
into a single sludgey garage-y Brainbombs style groove, while the
vocals howl and mewl, and the sound gets more and more brittle and
noise and fucked up until it devolves into a blonw out nearly white
noise damaged psych free-for-all. Incredible
stuff. Heavy and heady, fucked up and freaked out and damaged and
demented, and some of the best shit we've heard in forEVER. MPEG Stream: "I Am
Billy Bao, Right Here Right Now!" MPEG Stream: "Tight
Ass Bleeds" MPEG Stream: "I Am A
Mirror / Putrefied Egos" MPEG Stream: "Borders
Of Mass Deception" MPEG Stream: "1" MPEG Stream: "2"
Mattin is a name I’d heard of over the past few years which never
made much of an impression and it was only after I read the interview
with him The Wire that I thought ‘d seek some of his stuff out.
Surprisingly, my local rip-off indie store had this little nugget
sitting all but itself for supercheap money. I was expecting something
a little stranger than the art/noise punk that Mattin’s band churn out
here. I was kind of expecting something a little more Mouthus like,
given the number of paragraphs written about his love of improv and
AMM. This is sub-Stooges garage punk for the art set with some nice
noise underground bits and it really works for me in ways I wasn’t
expecting. Sacrilege is actually a compilation of the
vinyl releases that Billy Bao put out in 2007. It contains the
Accumulation 7 inch, Fuck Separation 10 inch and the Dialectics of Shit
LP. Hats off to Scotti from Missing Link whose Afterburn label has
again rescued some never heard obscurities from oblivion. The packaging
is great and the booklet is a cracker. Just don’t get sucked into the
label description – they almost make this sound like something between
Whitehouse and Cherry Point. It’s not – it’s better. Lord I enjoyed
this and if you like the clip below go throw Scotti some of your cash
over here.
BILLY BAO