HerelDeduke: Country Bumpin
Rife Records RIFEALB01
www.myspace.com/HerelDeduke
[email protected]
In my book, there are 2 types of music….
1) Music for people who don’t really like music – this includes 95% of the stuff you’ll hear on any radio station any day of the week. Then there’s…
2) Proper music.
This album, which, Praise The Borg, I discovered in a charity shop this morning, falls firmly into the second category. I’ll be brief.
It’s as if it fell through a crack in the space-time continuum, not really being meant for Humankind at all – rather for some species of being with different arrangements of ears and brains than we simple bipeds possess.
It takes me back to the Sixties when I first heard The Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, or the Seventies when I first experienced The Ethiopians vs The Aggrovators, or the 80s when Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV burst into the confused jumble which is my consciousness. All these great acts had one thing in common – that was they were totally uncommon. They exploited rhythms which fell outside most people’s understanding of organised musical patterns, they would start and stop at regular and irregular intervals and always do a different unexpected thing next – in fact they were the very opposite of category 1) Music - that is, they were anything but Easy Listening.
Country Bumpin is just one such listening experience – it’s not exactly Difficult Music in the same way as, say, John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen can be on a good day. But it has many of the ingredients which would make many Category 1) listeners throw up their tiny hands in despair and declaim, ‘Turn it off – it’s giving me a headache!’
I’m not even going to try to describe the actual ‘tunes’ we have on this gem of a record – it’d spoil the fun for the adventurous among you. But believe me – if you like your music to make you sit up and listen, asking ‘Hey – what’s this?’ If you don’t like being exposed to a musical or chemical cosh which lulls you into a state that means you can go about the daily grind without having to think too much, then this could be just what you’ve been looking for. It’ll make you wonder what you’ve been exposing your grey cells to lately, it will make you feel really uncomfortable for a moment then you’ll say to yourself, ‘Wow, this is really kool.’ Because, believe me, it is.
Sorry I wasn’t really all that brief. But I guess you’ll know by now whether you want to spend time combing the charity shops in the hope of discovering the other copy of this album or whether you’d rather take the lazy way out and go straight to the web-site and order it direct from the makers.
Happy Daze.
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