In Matthew Barney's high-art art-film "Cremaster
2," there's a sequence where he juxtaposes the
similarities in sound between a hive of buzzing
bees and Dave Lombardo's legendary double-kick
drumming. As far as virtuoso percussion goes, the
twin-drummer get-down of Nervous Cop comes closer
to approximating a beehive than it does a Slayer
record, and its willful, wicked, wacky, wanky
avant-garde artsiness could appeal to those who
like their record collection to consist of discs
that aurally equate to masturbatory art-films.
The twin-drumming dudes of Nervous Cop are Greg
Saunier, from San Fran damaged-pop daisy-kids
Deerhoof, and Zach Hill, from mighty-uptighty
head-to-head Hella. They originally got together
to record some sessions where they sat down and
flexed percussionary muscles in a musical
man-on-man arm-wrestle that quickly digressed
into a dueling fight-club of drumming chops; the
pair dismissed this initial bit as being "a Hot
for Teacher tribute gone horribly wrong."
Treating such sound with disdain, the duo took a
scalpel to their tapes with eager hatchet-job
glee, chopping their drummerly opus over and over
until it was but a bunch of splintered fragments,
virtuoso solos now truncated to short, sharp,
shrill spurts of sound (and short is the key
word, with this disc's first four cuts totaling
under three minutes, combined). Across such a
process of fine-tooth'd editing, Saunier and Hill
also accrued a bunch of distressed digital tone,
which became as much a part of Nervous Cop's
sound as the drums themselves. The percussive
sounds of glitch/hiss/cough are intermittently
utilized to approximate rhythms; and, even more
vividly, the pair have kept that Slits mantra
that silence is a rhythm, too, in mind, as bursts
of buzzing noise often quickly leap out of, then
descend back into, an abyss of nothingness. To
top things off, the Cop hooked up with Joanna
Newsom of snazzy epic-rock rhythmists The
Pleased, who spends her solo time as
Will-Oldham-approved gothic songstress and
avant-gardist harpist. Here, her torrents of
cascading concert harp have been cut up, cut
together, layered on, and fucked with just as the
skins have, and the intermittent appearance of
such pretty string-plucking is like an angelic
vision descending amidst the hellish spasms of
high-speed drums and sputtered digitalia.
|
