John Wiese - "Diamond Harmony"

Wiese’s discographical output mirrors his compositional style in a lot of ways. On record, he has taken the jump-cut to the nth degree, tamping 5-minute improvisations down to 2.1 seconds of essential gunpowder, and mating it with opposites, matter and anti-matter, texture and crunch, digital squeak and analogue crash, silence and tempest, catch and release, until hundreds of hours of pedal-jockeying has been simmered down into a small rubbery solid, and then minced into a string of high-speed moments, windows from various locations thrashing open from half a minute to 1/8th of a second at a time and then slaming shut in your face, like the TV channel-changing aesthetic of a coffee-holic with strong thumbs.

When it comes to releasing his recordings to the world, Wiese’s aesthetic is similar. Full-length LPs and collaborations punctuate the endless stream of single- and double-sided 7”s like the tics in an irregular heartbeat. Many are birthed through his long-running Helicopter label, while others pop up like whack-a-moles for what seems like an hour or two after their initial announcement on some noise-related bulletin board that you don’t check often enough (does anybody actually HAVE that Troubleman 7” that was in an edition of 500? I mean, FIVE HUNDRED COPIES, and nobody I know that collects Wiese records seemed to get one. Where did they go?).

A Wiese “fan” automatically gets to add the suffix “-atic” to his title, because to keep up with the man’s output (not only solo, but with Sissy Spacek, LHD, collabs with SUNN 0))), Merzbow, and others) is to devote your entire life to one man with wandering on his mind. Kind of like being married to George Jones, but with a few less alcoholic riding-mower rampages through your hometown.

Listening to his records takes focus too. If you decide to be blasé, it’ll all just sound like the Chipmunks in a garbage disposal…look at them go, around and around. Faster! Faster you damn chipmunks! No, you’re more likely to “get there” if you do like I did and sit down in front of the speakers and clear your mind of all distracting hangovers, idle thoughts, or half-finished to-do lists. John’s been stiching 600 edits per second for minutes at a time for so many years now, he had a great handle on the breathing and the pulse of a track of this duration. After 200 hours of editing, you might get tempted to just contrast ones and zeros, noise and silence, like Tony Conrad’s “The Flicker,” but it never gets that simple here. Everything’s at an angle, like Dr. Caligari’s summer-home, and you never quite get to anticipate where anything’s going to start and stop.

So it is with his discography. Sure, you may have all the full-lengths, some of the singles, but if you look away for a few hours and miss that one particular 1-sided 7” that was in print for about the span of an episode of “Robot Chicken,” you might well miss the one that could have killed and rebirthed you, the one that could have zipped up all this noise stuff into a neat series of columns and rows – in short, your own persona Wiese-brand Rosetta Stone! Damn!!

We’ve seen tracks edited slow (Spastic Colon, Moth Drakula) and not at all (GX), and of course, the primary reason for CALIFORNIA is to showcase different extremes, so we have to have at least one good case of whiplash. Keep checking back to see if anyone can break Wiese’s 1.5 minute mile!