DI29
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Cat#: DI29 Artist: Telecult Powers Title: Orgone Freakout: a Happening with the Telecult Powers Date of Release: 2/4/2010 Edition Size: 150 (hand numbered w/gold decocolor) Materials: C40 (BASF chrome stock in imprinted translucent purple shell), white gloss enamel screen print on white acid-free cardstock, photocopy on gray 100# French paper, ph-neutral PVA adhesive, soft polybox. Availability: Sold out at source. |
Description:
Like a forgotten Sonic Arts Union-era session heard from the business end of an opiated rabbithole, Orgone Freakout is an album-length synthesis of all the most fucked transcendent peaks on the releases (e.g. Amazing Laws and A Beginner’s Guide to Hoodotronix) that have formed the apex of the Telecult Powers catalog to date, boiled down to their strangely arching bones. It’s a phenomenal codex of resinous creaks, empty cisterns, reflected moonlight, phantom choirs, and tendril-like percussive afterimages from a duo of Cleveland-to-Brooklyn transplants that’s spent the past three years becoming one of the best and strangest live acts in the world, establishing a well-deserved reputation as a cornerstone of the contemporary New York underground, issuing a viscous drip of bizarre missives through their unerringly curated Temple of Pei imprint, and cultivating the masterfully honed feedback between their live and studio incarnations that reaches critical velocity with this release.
As ever, Mister Matthews’ handcrafted electronics are at the center of the proceedings and measured expansion of a shared timbral vocabulary continues to be a huge part of his and Witchbeam’s raison d’etre, while the paranoid opacity and sheer idiosyncracy of their improvising grammar hasn’t yielded an inch. This productive tension is at once an indicator of the rewards that await the devoted acolyte and the audible stamp of their rust belt origins. Writing about Telecult Powers back in 2008, I said that “Witchbeam and Mister Matthews lock into their particular skewed orbit, which has something of the unhinged forelornness of Nik Pascal Raicevic’s work, only even more fucked and disturbing, because there’s actually two people giggling at each other out on that ledge. …one could revisit it a thousand times without ever really getting a handle on it or parsing it successfully. In short, it’s necessary, rewarding, and fantastically heavy work.” That still pretty much sums it up, I believe, and it’s only gotten more true with time.
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