Big Brother & The Holding Cock
Big Brother & The Holding Cock
C20, Fuzztape, 2011
Being impressed by 梅志勇 (Méi Zhìyǒng)’s solo performance in Hong Kong – an intoxicated, quite punk microphone-driven fuzzfest just about ten minutes long – I dug in my box of yet-unexplored releases and ended up ripping this 2011 collaboration with Torturing Nurse’s Junky released by the man’s own label, Fuzztape, under the name Big Brother & The Holding Cock. Now, I have absolutely no idea of the relationship that this record has with Big Brother & The Holding Company (maybe some of their LPs were scratched by Junky during the recording session?), but the name sounds fun, if anything because of the semantic associations I make when I think of it – like, who is the Big Brother here? Probably Junky himself, while Mei Zhiyong takes the role of the Holding Cock, or just holding his own cock, or maybe Junky’s. Anyway, it is a cute name for a purportedly industrial/noise act who releases a black cassette wrapped in a sheet of “sulfuric acid waste paper” (as per their description, probably a Google-powered translation of tracing paper which does indeed sound very industrial), itself bundled in a lump of knotted tape, making the whole packaging quite hard to put back together once opened.
What’s the music like, anyway? Nothing transcendental, but way better than Zhiyong’s solo output reviewed some time ago and, despite its low-key stuttering and muffled tape mastering, the two ten-minute sides are actually capable of gaining the listener’s attention through precarious variations and glitchy passages. Side One begins with a broken sequencer tone undergoing some uneventful modulations – probably a circuit-bended drum machine through some distortion, kept from becoming a steady loop through knob fiddling and sudden halts. The piece seems to follow its own tempo, despite the absence of any regularity, as it slowly melts down into a mangled mess that sounds like downright tape manipulation, popping and sizzling like a broken speaker; halfway through the trip, it splits into two tracks, as the cuts sport a more frantic edge, hovering over the feedback hiss in the background, with the noise loops resembling gated drum blasts or overdriven radio signals. Even when the attack and release of the beats are reduced to almost zero, mired in the uncertainty of a slow cut-up style and punctuated by broken bits of silence and pulsating frequencies, while the high end breaking up in spurts and crackles, the whole thing manages to actually make sense, and stretch the original sounds into interesting variants. Side Two is more compact: similar source sounds but let loose, with swashes of white noise floating over the fizzing contacts and the bass loops, everything transported on a faulty tape reel in front of some clanking industrial machinery. Oscillating squeals pair up with the rest of the manipulations, sometimes precipitating into silence or trying to pull the whole mess in uncertain directions. By playing along the same lines of Side One, the second track sounds a little less convincing but the overall atmosphere is still enjoyable, especially when it wanders around more industrially-sounding loops or when in the second half the sound palette is opened up by straightforward turntable slowdowns and bitcrushed breakbeats throbbing under the weight of an oppressive distortion.
My rip might have aggravated the overall sound quality, but this tape does have a nice punch and, without being an exceptional release, it still manages to provide a fun, twenty-minute fix of subdued industrial noise with a definite electronic edge, a sort of messy power electronics played with no regard for post-production. Big Brother & The Holding Cock contains a lot of cables misfiring, faulty contacts and crackling pots, and it is one of the best Fuzztape cassettes released up to today. The only reservation I have with the record is that it lacks in headroom, panning and sense of space: the gnarly and overdriven cut-up drives the point home, but everything remains all too often strictly bi-dimensional and blunted. After twenty minutes of listening one feels trapped in a narrow space, struggling to focus on the development of a sound in a very small portion of the audible range, while much of what had been going on during the recording session remains to be imagined following some muddled hints buried here and there in the mix.
