Darker With The Day

This morning's show is a double header of experimental music, featuring interviews with Ben Duvall of Ex-Easter Island Head and Tara Pattenden, aka Phantom Chips. 

Liverpool's Ex-Easter Island Head utilise prepared guitar and bass, struck with mallets and other objects, to create their uniquely beautiful music. Norther, their incredible new record was recently released by Rocket Recordings.

Tara Pattenden/Phantom Chips is a Brisbane native who creates music and custom electronic devices and synthesisers. Phantom Chips are performing as part of Mono50, alongside Speaker Music, at The Institute of Modern Art on Thursday 29th August.

Plus the following review, featured just prior to Permanent Embrace by Uniform.

Uniform: American Standard (Sacred Bones)

Released August 23rd, 2024

American Standard, the title of Uniform’s fifth album, conjures images of white picket fences, yellow school buses, diners and other stereotypical visions of an idealised America. Its truth is anything but. American Standard is, at its core, an individual’s account of suffering and mental illness, detailing the harsh and brutal reality of singer Michael Berdan’s struggle with bulimia. 

Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, the album feels like a purge. The desperate actions of one man voicing and venting everything he views as ugly and unsavoury about himself. In a pre-release article for The Quietus, Berdan reflected on the duality of his creative compulsions, stating, “When I make art, I feel better. When I don’t I get dark. I don’t particularly want to talk about the subjects raised throughout American Standard. I do it because I have to.”

Formed in New York City in 2013, by Berdan and Ben Greenberg, Uniform have released five albums under their own name, plus two collaborations with The Body and another with Boris. Their sound could loosely be described as industrial —or industrial-metal— but also incorporates more experimental elements such as noise and power-electronics. Highly referential to other forms of both high and low-brow culture, the band routinely namechecks a mix of well-known and obscure authors, albums, musicians and films within the body of their work. 

When composing the album’s lyrics, Berdan sought assistance from B. R. Yeager and Maggie Siebert, two authors well known within the field of outsider literature. Not to edit his work as one may think, but to push him to ensure that his writing remains uncensored, unencumbered and as raw as an exposed nerve. This desire to expose the reality of his sickness creates an album unrelenting in its portrayal of mental illness, that manages to remain hopeful through the transcendent power of artistic expression. 

Comprising only four songs, American Standard’s first —and title— track is almost twenty-two minutes in length; longer than the album’s other three tracks combined. It’s an epic and ambitious way to open an album, especially in this modern streaming era fuelled by short attention spans. Opening with Berdan screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t” it soon descends into the chaos one expects from Uniform. From here until the album’s end, forty-minutes later, there is no reprieve. This Is Not A Prayer is reminiscent of early Skinny Puppy, only faster and more brutal, whilst album closer Permanent Embrace builds to a crescendo —complete with keys— that apes the atmospheric black-metal of Emperor or Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.

Ugly, distasteful and —at times— unlistenable. These are all apt descriptors for American Standard and for this reason many will fail to understand it. Music, however, is not just the territory of the sweet and the saccharine, it is also the bastion of the unwell, the ostracised and the unhinged. To be human is to dwell in the muck and the mire of our shared existence, to create art is to aspire to something beyond our disgusting, physical realm. American Standard is a shot in the dark, a voice from the abyss and a reminder that, no matter how bleak the outlook, there is still hope for recovery.

Nick Stephan