https://auxiliaryout.blogspot.com/2020/11/november-2020.html
Remember how Emily Dickinson had that poem about a poem being so good that it takes the top of your head clean off? That’s kind of the situation with Ballast, a collaborative effort between long running collage-core duo Sissy Spacek and even longer running “out there” outfit Smegma. It all started with six people (Smegma and Sissy Spacek members naturally) making rackets in Portland, LA and Cleveland, then John Wiese (who is a member of both groups) took charge of the recordings molding them into the maddening, impossibly precise slab of whizbang collage that it is today. In short, the LP issued by Phoenix’s Gilgongo (following last year’s CD release on Wiese’s Helicopter label) is a wild, heady ride like being on board a rollercoaster barreling through a modern art museum.
My favorite work from Wiese, at least up to this LP, is the record on PAN where he mangled Evan Parker’s saxophone. Much to my delight there’s some saxophone mangling on Ballast, but that’s not all. Far from it. Wiese is editing from a wide variety of source audio: percussion, horns, slack strings, synthetic sounds, processed audio, field recordings, vocal scree, sampled music, and so much more I’ve forgotten or haven’t picked out yet. In the span of a few seconds you’ll hear an avant-garde jazz excursion, a harsh noise tape, and a dub record crashing headlong into one another inside Wiese’s super collider. I’m definitely reminded of the junk-scrape collage works of personal hero Brian Ruryk, but the range of source audio is so much broader here. Furthermore, the play within the stereo field is fantastic, a joy in a good pair of headphones and certainly worth rejiggering your home stereo to have the speakers positioned as far away as possible on opposing ends of the room
There is so much fine detail, delivered at such a breakneck pace that it’s truly mind boggling. An endless well of pleasures. This rules!
Gilgongo Records 