A brand new release from Pax Recordings in California is always an event per se; never have they disappointed me, the music connoisseur, but each and every time surprising me with utter and sheer ingenuity and on-the-fly creativity, dispersed with the ease of a soaring Swift in dazzling kamikaze dives between the rooftops of the tenement buildings of summer!
Also, when the name Ernesto Diaz-Infante appears on the record jacket, the guarantee of a serious experience is rock bottom certain! This guy, in my mind, is positioned, by virtue of his musical significance, side by side with oracles like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley and Conlon Nancarrow! I’ve experienced Diaz-Infante on numerous CDs, by himself as well as in a wide assortment of collaborations; one even with a sound artist from remote Eskilstuna of Sweden, not so far from this here reviewer’s rural hometown (on a CD which is about to be reviewed here at Sonoloco Record Reviews in a short while).

Lx Rudis is presented in the label info as an interdisciplinary media artist in San Francisco. He has flipped between commercial and underground activities, and sold his soul for money to the video games market… He has in fact – oh child of our day! – taken part in the shaping of no less than forty video games… He has, however, also worked with the likes of Negativland and earlier with for example Tuxedomoon.

André Custodio is a native, down-home Bay Area multi-instrumentalist and sound designer. He has done collaborations with, to name but a few, The Splatter Trio, Tom Nunn and Ernesto Diaz-Infante. Currently Custodio is working with his most recent project, called “Nihil Communication”, which deals with recombined and reconfigured samples, digital processing, one-off “instruments” and also analog synthesis.

No need to say anything extra about Diaz-Infante. He has been amply introduced in various reviews on this site!

The CD begins with something these guys call “Three College Radio-Ready Edits”… The rest of the CD carries the title “Overthruster”, and I’ll leave you with that, as I cross over into the more hands on reflective listening management…

It’s a plucking, wheezing, steaming predicament, to start with. You are being attacked with showers of fragmented cut-ups, molded back together in haphazard guises of hazy moments, flickering by in the heat of summer like hallucinatory shadows moving across blind walls beyond the parking lots, bruising the horizon of contemporeana in jagged sawtooth audio… and ah… it’s like scraping a magpie (Pica pica) along the façade of a yellowish 1950s tenement building in small-town Scandinavia; that rough sense of battered bird in a tight grip against that uneven surface… the beak-streaks left on the wall after the quick, feathery maltreatment along the house…

A gasping sensation of being strangled or garroted overwhelms you, as you get entangled in guitar strings, which apparently are being used to sharpen knives… and there is something the matter with the delivery of electric current, Con Edison having fucked up seriously again, or is it just a lot of static inside your head, left and right brain-halves desperately trying to communicate, to get on terms, to arrange some kind of treaty, to finally dump this migraine in some unison action of the bicameral mind, huh? Anyhow, the crackling electric stuttering gives of ejaculative sparks of unintelligible morphemes, seeping out like atmospheric disturbances through your speakers.

The musicians are getting inside of the inside, throwing their findings back at you without even looking, like badgers digging their tunnels…

The jingling motions of track 3 open up mysterious factory halls - perhaps inside a Borg-like cube in space – glimpsing rattling chains and heavy machinery at work in unknown processes. The halls are vast, disappearing below distant horizons, in metal dust and alien sunlight, which seeps in diagonally, revealing dark, ominous shadows of unexplained structures.
The screeching metal faintly resembles forlorn human-like voices, echoing distorted out of a singular despair where the shadowy shapes are eternally lost in an immense world of giant tools and metallic weights. It’s lonely and forgotten, far away in space, far away in time, but there is suffering… and suffering is real.

Tracks 4 – 30 are all entitled “Overthruster”.
Spiders are crawling across their webs in the moonlight of silent islands in Scandinavian lakes. The treading of the spiders is amplified, rising out of the music like the plucking of guitar strings (Diaz-Infante!), vibrating with moonlight and little-known forest forces. Moonlight is spraying off of the trembling spider webs, falling like minuscule drops of silvery precipitation in softly arching trajectories through the dark nocturnal shadows of coniferous trees, and through the sanctuary of our perceptive minds.

A timbral softness behind the roughing-up of the circumstances leaves me honey-suckled and backlashed, the guitar wobbling like a glow-worm through its space-time protrusion.
We get lucky inside these murmuring interference homages, soil below mist, sky above crisscrossing auditory landmasses; continents moving in the dark…

The ever-changing stubbornness of these gleaming ingenuities of Rudis-Custodio-Infante makes this CD a welcome visitor in my laser box at any time and beyond!