Damion Romero – “Monde Brutal”

I’ve heard a sampling of Romero’s records through the years, both under his own name and as Speculum Fight, and more often than not, they seemed more linear and drifty than this…more in tune with common noise structures and orthodoxy. The process-oriented ones work their equation out for a specific duration while luxuriating in the alien texture of it all.

Here, it’s almost like a reverse Turing Test – you can’t quite tell that it’s a constructed work; it could just as easily be an unprocessed field recording from the basement of a local power plant. In your mind’s eye, you can’t really see Damion in front of his mixer, starting and stopping sounds according to what sounds good or moves the piece along. It feels more inevitable – I keep coming back to the word “inevitable” to describe this record. You can hear machines switching on and off according to their own internal timers. It’s all controlled, but to the outside observer, it seems completely arbitrary.

It’s not until the last few minutes that the cycles of the machines start to move in a manner that suggests a vague industrial rhythm, or like the drums in Hair Police’s “Mortuary Servants.” Or no, more like the rhythm in the Butthole Surfers’ “U.S.S.A.” At this point, you can hear Damion directing the sounds, and the laissez-faire illusion is broken. It sounds like omniscient Romero has thrown a spanner in the works, and for the last third of the side, we can hear everything valiantly trying to hold together as more and more cogs lose their teeth and more belts snap off and land in a dark corner. Then you hear someone come in and shut all the power off…we’ll deal with this in the morning. Click.

As with Spastic Colon, the thick vinyl and the loving mastering really do this track a lot of favors – since the canvas here is primarily silence rather than din, the moments when the machines really LUNGE have the power to make you jump.

The title of his tape on Banned, “Electronic Air Purifiers,” keeps coming back to me. This track sounds like the desire to become (or emulate) machinery, and not even teen-cool machinery like a steel press or a conveyor belt, but rather self-contained and anonymous (in the sense that you can’t see the mechanisms inside) machinery like a power converter. I haven’t heard any of the “ambient” era Monde Bruits (I’m assuming the title is a reference to the recently-departed Shoei Iwasaki), so I can’t tell if this compares in structure or sound, but surely, Iwasaki-san would have to be proud to have these 20 minutes of hard industrial clank laid atop his headstone.