23Five
They, along with people like Christian Marclay, Emil
Beaulieau, and Boyd Rice, became the first to take a turntable's
archaic playback mechanism to task as an instrument, capable not only
of an easily-manipulated and virtually inexhaustible bank of noise, but
also of almost automatic syntactic headfuckery. The plunderphonic,
Negativlandian impulse had already begun to assert itself in 1987, but
Gum's purely phonographic stance brought that same brand of pop culture
commentary and exploited sound-bytes in immediate collision with things
purely visceral. The duo scratched, sanded, baked, burnt, and otherwise
mutated their thrift store finds, assembling a collection of locked
grooves and blasted sound chips that essentially gave forgotten records
new life, fodder for a kind of surreal puppet circus where strung-up
corpses grind out stunted, nervous repetitions of a living dance. Gum's
trajectory moves from something like a punkier incarnation of the
plunderphonic phenomenon, to amateur industrial klang, to wildly
successful sound collage efforts that in many ways predict the sounds
of today's turntable namedrops: Philip Jeck, Martin Tretault, Janek
Schaefer. Curtis and Samartzis put more emphasis on the process end,
that is the abrasions and mutations of the records and their precise
recombination, than on any kind of re-contextualization of recognizable
sources. The few tracks to actually show their age are in fact the ones
where the duo's intent appears too transparent, their motives too easy:
phone-sex dialogue featuring Curtis set to an effected Super Fly soundtrack or a live set where the Bee Gee's Saturday Night Fever
becomes the rhythmic template. Elsewhere, the simple and arresting
power of the duo's surface scavenges, and their queasy track titles
("Testicle Stretch," "Smooth Torture in Exile," "Arm Fuck"), become
more than adequate in communicating a hilarious, dystopian, and
ultimately beautiful worldview. Especially on the longer tracks like
"Banning" or "Melted Limp Fallout," Gum achieves mysterious and
immersive sound environments that feel perfectly suited to the present
day and help to explain Samartzis' future work as an accomplished sound
artist. Vinyl Anthology collects everything Gum released plus
several unreleased and live tracks; it is indispensable document for
fans of turntable-based music, punkers, noisers, and pop theorists
worldwide. - Andrew Culler
samples:
