Christopher Riggs - Smoked Poetry (Middle James Co. CS)

Riggs is all over the place here, I know, but this one got handed off to me at that Graveyards show I mentioned a bit ago and, it being my sonic introduction to (though certainly not cerebral intro...) the Middle James Co. experience, I figured I'd slap it on here for posterity's sake. In the usual Riggs vein this one is, although perhaps even more restless and uneasy, but all under the MJC banner of ultra crude aesthetics and dead to the world production runs. Totally indecipherable cover, as it seems to be with most of these releases, but you do have to appreciate the dude, who happens to be the man behind Fossils, and his apparently devout dedication to his (un)aesthetic.

As for the tunes, these are even more buried and swampy then the usual Riggs fare, with all sorts of shards spewing out from blown out amp rumblings, amounting in a kind of homegrown freak fry that jilts along. Parts of it even remind me, oddly enough, of some Muslimgauze number, sounding more like the hacked up, static induced transmissions from some Arab underground radio outfit spitting its signal out across the Dead Sea. Burned to the ground material that goes on and on, moving between approaches in a second or none, all high-pitch hum here, total bass burnout bumble there. Truly smoked poetry. Slips into a real minimal mode to at one point, bowed notes whispering sweet hostilities through the electric fence, volting its recipient good on the other side but in a pleasant, tingly kind of way. The soothing sounds of stutter worship--they should play this stuff to promote proper head spaces in the work place for sure, especially when the strums start coming in and gliding around each other, like some massively detuned harp plugged into a can opener and played through the metal refractions of the sound waves. Run a saw over it and you get the idea. Second side is much, much shorter, and equally unhurried and wonderous if you let yourself slip in. So let yourself. Killer again, seek it out if you can land a copy--maybe Riggs has a few left over?