The recipe appears simple: write or find some straightforward guitar-led tunes then smother them in fuzz, distortion and feedback as if it were chocolate. The results are heavenly and for some reason, I cannot stop listening. This has been the gnarled and perverted sonic wallpaper to my working week… I haven’t been very productive. It’s not at all jazzy, not – as far as I know – improvised, but it is noisy! Good, fuzzed-out, fucked-up, screwdrivers-through-the-speaker-cones garage swagger pulsing through slabs of saturated, disfigured sound.
Blurred instrumentals flirt with tunefulness, obscured by a flabby, reverberating caul. Walls of feedback howl in your face. Songs line up in an amplified abbatoir. Simple refrains, roughed up with sandpaper, exfoliate your eardrums. Agitated drums push at the yielding, spongy envelope of form. Cracked-bell basslines and anxious guitars wobble and howl (growl?) into the void.
Buried in the middle (track #4) is a version of Elvis’ I Was the One, almost submerged by amplified treacle – a ghost of a cover, subverted, barely yet distinctly recognisable, it returns to briefly haunt the final moments of the album and I’ve been humming it in the shower. It’s beautifully insidious.
Now, if someone could just explain the track titles to me…
Speech Copy 1
Speech Copy 2
Speech Copy 3
Speech Copy 4
Speech Copy 5
Rap Master 1
Rap Master 2
Rap Master 3
Rap Master 4
(46:09)
Fort Evil Fruit
Richard G Chamberlain
Sam A Mcloughlin
Bridget S Hayden
(…exact allocation of instruments and roles uncertain…)
Speech Copy Rap Master is available for download and on cassette from Fort Evil Fruit’s Bandcamp page.