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Survival Research Laboratories
The idea of a play-it-in-your-home soundtrack to the massiverobot-destruction performances of Mark Pauline's Survival ResearchLaboratories is ultimately a ridiculous and excessive one. But that maybe the idea. As the uncredited writer of the liner notes explains, "Thewhole point behind the SRL soundtrack is not so much to accompany thesounds of the machines, but to fill in any lulls in the noise level asthe machines start breaking down and falling apart." The performancesare frequently deal with the idea of excess and violent extremes, withgiant mechanical robotic things sent shuddering toward each other andtoward various objects (houses, ugly metal structures of all sorts)with missile launchers, blades, various weapons, any damn thing. Theperformances, typically held in empty parking lots or any large areassome distance from people's homes, are chaotic and seemingly dangerous.The sound is part of the intended perception of a loss of control,though one must trust that the robots' operators know what they'redoing or else they wouldn't knowingly endanger the lives of theiraudience. Or perhaps they would. Who really can say. The soundtracks on this CD, then, are not about dynamics or subtlety,but brute din. They are done by G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, whose work as theHaters celebrates entropy by creating noise out the sounds of things(like tires, calculaters, paper) falling apart. The music here isn't somuch different from his Haters albums, though a slightly differentconceptual element entwines them into the SRL performances. Forexample, a performance at a race track used the sounds of car crashesand motor-racing to "fill in any lulls" in the machine demolitionderby. In order to highlight the humor of the SRL productions (what isa display of absurdly grandiose self-directed violence but essentiallyfunny?), Larsen used the sounds of children's cartoons. And on and on.These concepts are secondary to the unchanging grey wash of high-volumenoise, punctuated by clanging metal, presumably coming from the machineperformances themselves. Yes, it's ridiculous. But it couldn't havebeen anything else! www.subrosa.net
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