"Electricity is your Friend"

This compilation is meant to be an audio and visual experience. As well as 16 audio tracks there are four videos for the computer. They could have saved themselves the bother of including the videos as they are awful examples of video art. That being said, none of the music inspires much confidence either.

 

3 Pin Recordings

Focusing on the audio first, there is little here to make me want to listen to this CD again. The first three tracks range from the poor industrial music-lite of DisinVectant to the absolute bollocks of CJ Pizarro’s “Dark Black Semen.” It took me a few goes to get past the second track, the urge to just press stop proved too strong at first. Even the normally excellent Daniel Padden can’t save the day; his “Cornelius” is lacklustre in comparison to his other work. Only very briefly does the disc ever verge on interesting; John Cake’s “Dawson Has Left Part 2” features a nice selection of sounds like bubbling, kitchen machinery and distorted poetry. This less than two minute piece is the best of what’s on offer here.

The problem with Electricity is your Friend is that so much of the music is derivative twaddle. I may be harsh about this, no doubt most of the artists here have put in a lot of work to sound so mediocre but I really don’t want to have to listen to this. Sampling is used to death on most of the pieces; at times it’s impossible to move without being smothered by uninspiring samples. There also seems to be a competition to see who can be the most eccentric, with all entrants sounding forced and artificial.

In addition to the one piece of audio (a dull deconstruction of The Beatles “Strawberry Fields”) provided by Jliat are two videos. The videos are completely superfluous, one is a ten second shot of what I assume is Jliat on a train and the other is a shaky, blurry video of a merry-go-round. Neither of them is interesting at all. This is a problem that runs through all the video content of the compilation. Frank Cougar’s “Peaceful Bus” is a poem set to video in response to the London bombings of 2005. In it he says: “For as weird as all that it is, it would make one heck of a good movie.” The events that unfolded in an act of terrorism might make a good movie but Cougar’s dismal poetry does not.

In all fairness, videos included on audio albums is a concept that I have little time for, there is little joy in watching a low resolution video the size of a postcard with a scratchy audio track.Even when it’s something I’m interested in I’m unlikely to load up the multimedia part of a CD more than once. When it’s something as bad as this I’m sorry I even went through the bother of opening it once.

samples:

• Dragon or Emperor, "Never Know What to Say"
• Jliat, "Strawberry Fields"
• CJ Pizarro, "Cousin of Bambi"