CD REVIEWS: PANIC RESEARCH AUDIO

From the latest issue of Signal-to-Noise Magazine:

Ca$h $lave Clique
White Prop$
(Panic Research Audio)

Rape Ape
Hello My Name Is Rape Ape
(Panic Research Audio)

Hearasay in Paradox Lust
A Lusty Lay
(Panic Research Audio)

Safe
Safe
(Panic Research Audio)

Lung Mountain
Sunset on Lung Mountain
(Panic Research Audio)

Tone Ghosting
Aktion in the Ruins
(Panic Research Audio)

Matt Weston + Tone Ghosting
Live at Sonic Circuits EP
(Panic Research Audio)

Festering mere miles from the legislative arena where our great nation's politicians pocket bribes, sip expensive cocktails, and leave gobs of slime on brass handrails, Panic Audio Research is one of the Virginia/Baltimore/D.C. area's least celebrated imprints. Judging by the latest crop of releases, label head Jeff Bagato leans toward the more experimental end of underground rock in his preferences, but one can hardly paint every cdr with the same brush.

White Prop$ finds Ca$h $lave Clique mining a vein somewhere between the rhythmic noise of studio-based Yellow Swans and the psychedelic pyrotechnics of live Yellow Swans: go-go drumbeats rattling at the bottom of the mix, cruise-liner turbine whorls of guitar feedback, sped-up chipmunk vocalisms, blubbering, desperate-for-Dramamine keyboards, and Clique only knows what else. At certain moments - particularly when the backbeat up and vanishes - the experience of listening to this record is comparable to being trapped on a spinning psychic tilt-a-whirl, caught in some sort of demonic vortex, or hopelessly drunk, randomly criss-crossing city streets during rush hour, angry motorists mashing horns and leaving rubber on the asphault while swerving to avoid you. John Simler is the Clique's singing/keyb-jamming half, but for solo jawns he prefers the sobrequet Rape Ape. A nasty string of improvisations - generated using "clip mic, thunder tube, and effects" - Hello My Name Is Rape Ape offers a smorgasboard of out aesthetics: atonal high-frequency whistles slicing through afterburner wrath, post-Oh Astro wavelength bounce, oil-set-to-boil simulations, squeaky-hinge meditations that descend into topsy-turvy, anti-matter nightmares.

Safe - and, by extension, Safe - are a far more sedentary proposition. Siren-like sound flickers, autoharp brushes, and granular stretches of synth simmer in a velvet-y, pregnant silence that recalls the considered circuit-bending alchemy of GOD. Slightly less aneseptic is Bagato's Tone Ghosting solo project, an improv-based melange consisting of, according to the liners, "hacksaw, vinyl, FX, voice, mic." This is - happily - vague to the point where it can mean anything in theory; on Aktion in the Ruins that equates to vast swathes of burrowing-weevil doom, glitch-y noise bursts and vocal perversions and sonic Tourette's jerks interspired with vaacum. But the Live at Sonic Circuits EP, Bagato's collabo with percussionist/electronics wrangler Matt Weston, is a different animal altogether. It's as though the pair were piloting golt carts through some vast warehouse space full of instruments, elephants, school chairs, and other random objects - in complete darkness. So sometimes there's nothing to hear, but at other moments the squeak of metal on linoleum rings out, or a cymbal of metal file cabinet tips over, or a beaded curtain is brushed, and on; their velocity is deliciously random, becoming mouthwatering when one or the other or both collide with a cluster of things, seeming to create a domino effect writ-large. How much more delectable might this project have been, I wonder, had Bagato and Weston crashed head-on more often?

Hearasay in Paradox Lust and Lung Mountain come off as the odd-men out in this equation: the former turning in what seem to be chopped-up collages of chamber music, Ren Faire performances, fairy-tales, and so on, a themed concept that wears out its Middle Ages welcome with a swiftness that's almost breathtaking; the latter indulging in some longwinded New Weird Americana/sub-Sonic Youth chicanery involving theremins, guitars, and - honest-to-blog - a pot lid gong tree, which Lung player Sal Amoniac ought to exploit in some solo form, like, stat.