Guttersnipe – Extinction Burst!

Night School

What seems like a thousand years ago — actually just a little over ten — a mate played me a strange little purple CDR demo of a band called Guttersnipe. He’d seen them play live at some event or another — Supernormal, Tusk, Supersonic — and he was convinced they were the future. He wasn’t wrong.

That record was untamed, messy, fearless and furious; you got the feeling that the recording itself was bursting at the seams. It was suffocating and obscene. It was multi-coloured, black-light metal. It was like other ‘noise’ rock bands but also strangely unlike most of them in that, even at this early stage, it felt like every note was deliberate. If it sounded like an unGodly accident then that was exactly how it was supposed to sound. These freaks could play; there might even be some kind of score.

Back then, the artists were listed on the sleevenotes as Xylocopa Violacea (guitar, vocals, electronics) and Bdallophytum Oxylepis (drums, vocals, electronics) and it seems many (dead) names have come and gone since then. In truth, it’s bewildering to follow the different pathways that Uroceras Gigas and Tipula Confusa have followed before and since their last ‘proper’ album My Mother The Vent (they’ve been part of the wildly acclaimed Tristwch Y Fenywod, Nape Neck, Petronn Sphene et al), but they’ve become an enduring presence in what no-one really calls the ‘experimental music scene’ and now they’re back and more ecstatically elemental than ever.

Opener “Alive On Tuesday” starts disconcertingly quietly, luring you to turn up the volume before, a minute or so in, erupting into their characteristic howling scrawl. The guitars and drums are being tangled together and then unwound and then tangled together again. The key to understanding Guttersnipe is to realise that there’s method in all this madness and that’s oddly more terrifying (and more reassuring) than the chaos that their music so often resembles. So it stands with the rest of the album, which is full of deep Captain Beefheart breaks with reality and the duo’s closer than close listening.

If you still need to know what this sounds like, then I suppose “Keep Honking! We’re Stuck In A Memetic Bottleneck” feels like exclamation marks forced into cloud patterns and ends like someone has sucked early Prolapse into a black hole. “Threads Of Radical Unaliveness” starts like the blackest metal and then falls apart into clusters and ebbs that could be… Oh, this is distressing; it’s not like anything, it’s its own thing.

Seeing the band live you get that these musicians are awash with each other’s consciousness but, to my ears, this is the first time you can hear this on a recording. Previous records have not lacked power or intricacy, but this one is captured like a jazz session and the extra air allows you to see the points where the artists join. We should give a massive spout-out to the engineer Ross Halden and to Rashad Becker, who mastered this storm.

I could go on with dull descriptions of what the tracks sound like to me but, really, you should just listen; this is the future, after all. Guttersnipe being back makes perfect sense in the strange world we live in now and their music acts as a timely Rorschach test, a way to head onwards into the dissolving universe. It’s coming, it’s not in the trees.

-Loki-