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Mattin and Matt Bower "A New Form of Beauty (1975)"
The title claims that Bower and company have created a new form of beauty. Instead they explore the rather conventional aim (for them) of bludgeoning the listener to submission.
This is collaboration between Bower and Basque noise artist Mattin. Its emphasis on harsh noise is similar to Sunroof!'s newest album, Spitting Gold Zebras, only more tedious. The title is homage of sorts to the Virgin Prunes, whose first release is this CD's namesake. I find it misleading because aside from the title there is little musical commonality between the two groups and none of the eclecticism and humor that the Prunes were known for. The lone track is built by a solid yet unvaried riffing buried under brittle, rumbling electronics. These components don't play off each other but continually battle for dominance, never disengaging form spot they are rutted down in. The big chords and riffs are not allowed to decay or ring out in the manner that they demand to, and any sort of modulation or timbral variation in the electronics is masked from hearing.Mattin has stated that the new goal of noise is achieving freedom, but this release sounds for like repression than anything.
He and Bower fall into the familiar conceptual trap of many harsh noise artists; that a piece must at all time maintain a maximum level of abrasiveness in order to intense or compelling. In that approach though, there is no relief that attends freedom, only sounds tensed into shapelessness.
