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Forcefield, "Roggaboggas"
Like their Fort Thunder brethren, Forcefield's music is usually best supplemented by their performance art, which features the band (members Patootie Lobe, Meerk Puffy, Gorgon Radeo, and Le Geef) in full-knit suits which look suspiciously like afghans lifted from grandma's couch twenty-three years ago. 'Roggaboggas' is supposedly a companion piece to the Forcefield art collective's appearance at the 2002 Whitney Biennial (they were one of the few fresh sights at the Biennial), which was itself a symptom of the art world's tardy adoption of the deceased Fort Thunder.
The sound is akin to early explorations in electronic music mixed with noise: plenty of sound processors to adjust and tweak. 'Roggaboggas' can be broken down into component sounds, not songs. The conventional idea of songs is abandoned on this album, as thirty-second blips flow seamlessly into longer fifteen-minute musings, creating a pastiche of sound particles which compose the atom that is Forcefield. Here are some exciting sounds I was able to extract: what sounded like the spastic gagging of a choking robot; percolating electronic bubbles not unlike a child's approximation of a motorcycle sound with vibrating lips processed through an oscillator; a screaming squirrel; various whirlwind sounds. Though I like the sound of this record very much, it is sometimes hard to be enveloped by it. It loses me occasionally by not offering the visual stimulation of Forcefield's live show. In some part, I need the polychromatic afghan people bustling around and I need the dancing audience about me to appreciate the project fully. The album insert provides a number of pictures, but it is no proper substitution for the real thing. Surprisingly, it was the minimalist parts in the longer numbers which really engaged me. The final track, "2nd Annual Roggaboggas," deceives you about seventeen times into thinking that it will end, as the sound gets almost imperceptibly soft, and its life recedes. But it persists for twenty minutes, and you begin to realize that what you are hearing is actually the pulse of the band Forcefield, faint but still consistently pounding.
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