He's pushed the envelope of improvisation and electronic music actualization on a smattering of outsider CDR mini-labels (Toast and Jam Recordings, Animist, Fargone Records), but that shouldn't deter more adventurous sorts from seeking out Doug Theriault's transmutative gesticulations. His chief soundmaker is nicked the Sensor Guitar, the trigger for a battery of live electronics and effects (much like a MIDI controller) that virtually succeeds in wiping out the guitar's understood syntax in one fell swoop. His partner is Bryan Eubanks, formerly of Portland, Oregon but now based in New York, who is fascinated by the "psycho-acoustics" of sound, realized quite emphatically through his own panoply of open circuit electronics. Together, these two carve out a mighty mass of voltage-generated impulses that stretch the elastic bands binding structure and noise, from which can be gleaned the finest drops of Stockhausen to Oliveros, Merzbow to Günter Müller, Charles Cohen to Elliott Sharp.
Of the two extant tracks, it's relatively easy to get lost in this recording's opening 21-minute workout, paying heed to the advice of "Don't Worry About the Future." If Theriault and Eubanks are making any kind of statement here, it's that not only will events inevitably unfold, but that such upcoming sequences will be played out in the maw of some heretofore great electric beast. Circuits bent to breaking points, the duo seem to deeply probe, then promptly eviscerate and savage, our planet's cosmic electrical skeleton, redirecting energies outward so that the very protons become visible. Mind you, this isn't merely an exercise in onanism through noise-mongering, nor is it anywhere near the realms of ambient; rather, Theriault and Eubanks take their equipment to task, forging scruffy drones, pulsating hums, and carefully orchestrated distortions pulled tautly across aural cavities like rubberized silicon. It's electronic music subverted from within, circuit-vented and pulled apart with obvious relish.
The disc's concluding piece, "A Majestic," unfurls and sprawls across a gargantuan 40-plus minutes. It's erratic outbursts instantly establishing time, place and space. More distortions explode like miniature atomic blasts, sounds surge and seethe in encroaching tsunamis of raw power, yet the duo appear to take great pains/pleasure in creating an expansive, if geologically wrecked, landscape. Many of these chaotic, tensile sounds conjure all manners of literary analogs: by way of sheets of frazzled metal, ticking contours, and myriad unidentifiable squeaks and waveforms, I instantly flash on Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, or perhaps some of Philip K. Dick's various apocalyptic scenarios, so absolutely mechanistic these tableau become. Unlike typical genre music, this stuff is frightening in scope, defiantly in-your-face: blitzkrieg electro-punk-improv, short-circuiting genre and sensibilities alike.
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