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Meerk Puffy, "Nung"
Meerk is, if the bizarre pseudonym didn't give it away, one of the founders of Providence's Fort Thunder collective as well as a member of the most firmly-entrenched of FT musical incarnations, Forcefield. Those discouraged by the willfully obtuse nature of that group's recorded efforts could do worse than rough up this dirty gem, Puffy's first non-cassette release and one that plays off Forcefield's talents for lo-fi squelch-tronica in welcome fashion. Meerk (aka Matt Brinkman) shoulders the arsenal of bleeps, blats, and digital farts that made Roggaboggas such a throbbing fun time, but he adds a backbone of rhythmic chug and swirling, claustrophobic phase-out, owing as much to the psychedelic skronk aesthetic of early Boredoms as to the cassette noise underground.
If patrons were merely startled by Forcefield's stoic army of woolen mammoth-men at 2002's Whitney Biennale, this is the kind of audio program that might have created a legend. Puffy keeps a healthy fascination with vomit-pitch levels of neon-inspired noise sizzle, but here he has eliminated any silence in between, running serpentine loops ad nauseam through the kind of minimalism that, instead of motivating intricate sound analysis or a part-for-the-whole meditation, exists only to the numb the brain into open-mouthed submission, synapses stuck on continuous, receptor-scorching misfire. This surely has roots in early industrial and primitive electro, but the psychedelic influence should not be underestimated, for as claustrophobic, strangled, and unrelenting as Nung can get, the record seems to continually revisit sections of acid-headed clarity, spacious clearings amid the hiss, where modulated phase effects commune for brief flights into the radioactive sunset, and everything seems, for a moment, peaceful. Even some of the pulse-drowned, intensely repetitive sections contain potential for an accidental mysticism, a grainy, hypnotic charm that would find Meerk riding his desk of cracked electronics down golden country lanes in search of Barrett and Beefheart and other fellow problem children. As a bonus, Nung contains two lock grooves willing to prolong the head-cleaning bliss indefinitely for anyone well adjusted enough to tune in. Always in character, Puffy has placed the grooves strategically, helping them to slip under the needle without warning, a trick that proves a perfect resistance-shattering mechanism and had me bobbing away like a catatonic idiot for longer than is probably healthy.
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