Pink Sexdeath - Origa [Narcolepsia - 2010]Pink Sexdeath is one of many names and groups from which Russia’s Paul Ryazanov (aka Paul Von Aphid) rapidly hurls vast quantities of releases into the world like an unstoppable human gatling gun. Recently he’s been drumming in tribal goth band The Nextmal while working on his seemingly ever-expanding list of solo and collaborative projects including the so-called “fetish electronics” of Redstockings and the black metal-influenced Poison Tongue and Zaaku. But as Pink Sexdeath he practices a form of power electronics as catharsis. Unusually for a style with such a stubbornly tight grip of the most limited and primitive of electrical sound sources (tone generators, radios, distortion pedals etc.) ‘Origa’ centres on Ryazanov’s voice as the main sonic ingredient, delivered like an extended primal scream therapy session. The voice is pitched somewhere between Gibby Haynes echo-laden gabber during Butthole Surfer’s psychedelic wig-outs and David Tibet’s oratory-style as heard across Current 93’s earliest experiments with tape. Although the specific language, let alone individual words, is concealed behind an extreme combination of delay and distortion, at times coming across a bit like a bootleg of a very windy open air rock festival that used a recording level so high as to merge and drown the elemental and rehearsed sounds into an extended cacophony. Occasionally there’s a brief period where Ryazanov stops his monotonous incantations and comes up for air, revealing the rotating rumble and scribble of prepared tapes more typical of the PE sound. But apart from a mere handful of these thirty-second diversions, Pink Sexdeath manages to keep up the deranged moaning across the cassette’s 38 minutes, often sounding like a giant alien overlord stating his demands in a native tongue over every public address system available. Despite being recorded “in the state of the light depression, with the help of bad alcohol and weed”, it provides an entertaining, if limited, excursion away from PE’s now commonplace playgrounds of torture and fetish into cult science fiction’s climactic territories. Russell Cuzner
|