I don’t know, guys. There’s just something about women making abstract noise music that I find to be incredibly attractive. Sure, Mira Calix and Lili Novi (Frl. Tost) are cute…but then you hear their ridiculously cool sonic experiments and the arousal is turned up 1000%. Of course, this isn’t an across-the-board thing, you can’t just be a woman and make endless feedback loops sprinkled with static and pulsating rhythms and make turn us on, you know?
So we have “Extreme Music From Women,” a twelve-year-old compilation original released by Susan Lawly, the record label for Whitehouse since Come Organization is no more. There probably isn’t a better way to describe its contents than to say, “Read the title of the disc,” as that sums it up quite nicely. Eric Hoffman of Ground Fault Recordings wrote, “There are some highlights, and a few unexpected and pleasant surprises here. Had Maria Moran and Diane Nelson done stuff like there is on this comp live, the EMFW tour would have been one of the standouts of the year. The major improvement of Nelson’s tracks over her live performance are their brevity (one just over two minutes, one weighing in at all of eighteen seconds). Moran, on the other hand, treats us to something well outside the scope of her main project, Zipperspy; a beatless, shifting mass of sonics that just gets louder over time. I mean, this is good stuff. A whole lot better than forty-five minutes of beatboxes, anyway. Aside from those, the real highlights of the disc are Cat Hope, offering up more of her dark ambient bass guitar musings; Karen Thomas with a thick, murky stew of low-end electronics that’s markedly different from Lockweld’s material; Lisa and Naomi Tocatly and Betty Cannery, each of whom provides a short, blistering track that’s obviously informed by the work of Whitehouse and other acts along those lines (high-pitched screaming and all).”
Enjoy, fellas. And maybe some of you ladies, too?
Various Artists
Extreme Music From Women
(Susan Lawly, 2000)
MediaFire DL Link
01. Rosemary Malign – No You Listen [MP3]
02. Lisa & Naomi Tocatly – Stiletto Nights
03. Dolores Dewberry – Paragraph 64
04. Candi Nook – Schizephrenesis II
05. Annabel (Lee) – Lycanthropy
06. Mira Calix – Too Slim For Suicide
07. Clara Clamp – September
08. Debra Petrovich – Dislocated
09. Karen Thomas – Puritan
10. Betty Cannery – Closeted
11. Gaya Donadio – Indiscretion
12. Miria Moran – Tattoo
13. Frl. Tost – I Hate You, Laura
14. Wendy Van Dusen – Dog
15. Cat Hope – Mindimi Trek
16. Diane Nelson – Mounted Insect
17. Diane Nelson – Dissected Insect
