Everyone Loves Werneck-Wretchmond

"This is Not For You."

Or

"Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."

Where to go with this slice of slurr?

It makes no human sense; the machine sense is there and cows are just food is right: these aren't angry machines, not machines wanting to destroy or Merzbow the place into submission...



Instead, this is the sound of bored, neglected machines playing, the humchatter of unrecyclable machine-fuzz, miniDisc mutterings, the machine equivalent of jump-rope songs, pitter pattercakes, handclapping games...

If there's moaning, it's soft moaning. It's a machine's irritation at it's own limitations. It's the sound of an old wordprocesser chip, laughing at it's own green screen.

There's nothing human which isn't unusual, I guess - remember Stakker? - but this lack of humanity comes with a different slant; there's the intervention of listening in these manipulations and this brings it closer to these ears to the chargings of ElPH, a cross-reference with Ice Bird Spiral that I heard way back at The Croft...



Kek's trying to hear these little machines, they are calling to him. He doesn't want to control them, he wants to help; you can hear the love and attention in every little wave of sound, it's ridiculously personal, almost intrusive... this is how he hears the world... and this makes this a different kind of thing to other stuff that's on the surface similar; you'll find manipulated field recordings all over the place but they won't have this attention to detail, this attention-surplus disorder...

They won't understand the tyranny of attenuation that means many of these sounds are sucked out of the world or bypassed with mp3 players or uneccessary phone conversations

...

Dig deeper and you'll find some excellent field recordings out there but they won't mean the same thing at all and they won't come packed with little postcards of Butterflies or Jean Dubuffetish Art Brut crayon covers or blotter paper CDs...

They won't come with the meaning or the feeling for the plight of these abandoned, forgotten twitchings...

You probably need to spend a little time over here before any of these songs make sense. The Open University is the visual equivalent to these catechism-calls; there's a sadness to both projects that makes you wish you hadn't pulped all those broken-backed machines, all those hiccuppertronical potentialities.

A final image: imagine Europe After The Rain with the fluid earthshapes replaced by old Atari boxes, Burroughs adding machines and Dragon computer piles...

This is Not For You.