"Q: “Did Boyd Rice and Douglas Pearce really steal Mussolini’s brain?”
A: No. They almost did, but then they thought about it, and decided against it, because the Italians love it so much."
Q&A section of Boyd Rice's website.
Well, what else do you want to know? I can’t tell you the truth because I don't know what you mean by truth. All I can hint at is that the edges of Boyd Rice's life and art swim like bubbles of oil in a small white bowl of aromatic vinegar – promising, but never serving up, the goat's head salad that would allow us to judge.
Brief investigations find the myths – Boyd Rice as Cultural Nazi and Manson Family Satanist, chortling with the Partridge Family Temple (yes, that Partridge Family) and contemplating the possibility of his own blood lineage from Jesus Christ. A list of works stretches back through 25 years as a genre pioneer and champion of the terminally mindless in all media ("Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks as meisterwerk?). The more I grapple, the less settling is the music.
These are 13 (no other number would do) epic tracks of ambient loops and overlays produced over a quarter of a century. "Grow up, Space Cadet …" they whisper to 2004's experimentalists. " …this stuff is archaeologically old, and Thom Yorke is a Musical Innocent Marked Out for Justifiable Slaughter". The sequences of noise are lascivious, mind warping and dangerous invitations to float free of any ties of sanity, reason or comforting pattern. Repetitive elements are messed up to induce vertigo as layers and tempos jerk out of phase like a world slipping imperceptibly into chaos.
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Half remembered aural glimpses into the world of grown ups, carried from childhood, unresolved and anxious into adulthood are held up for the listener to tremble with once more. Only to be dashed away, still unresolved, still unexplained and perennially disquieting. The range covers mellifluous warmth ("Solitude"); Silence of the Lambs theme manqué ("A Taste of Blood") and manic automatonic insistence ("Untitled"). Mechanical, organic, geological, oceanic, mutated humanoid and the totally random are amassed as an army of nanonrobotic possibilities that go straight from the speakers direct to you subcutaneous membrane. It's very beguiling.
I found a web reviewer who thought this CD was boring. She loved the Libertines new album. And, tragically, I know in my bones that Boyd Rice would see her as his biggest fan, and despise this review with a vengeance.
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