Chromosome Damage

CHROME - Blood on the Moon

San Franciscan duo Damon Edge and Helios Creed, anxious to reproduce the music they heard when listening to Sabbath or Hawkwind on headphones under the influence of LSD, ended up becoming proto-industrial icons instead. Their utilization of every variety of octave divider, phaser and flanger to color their creations makes for a head-swirling experience-- with disembodied voices straight from Philip K. Dick's most nightmarish visions. Creed's commanding guitar leads, as inspired by warped psychedelia as by the then-burgeoning punk movement are sped up, slowed down-- mutated at will. They essentially took the sonic debris left in the wake of krautrock, Metal Machine Music and Beefheart and pushed the envelope as far as it could go with the primitive analog equipment they had at their disposal.

"Blood on the Moon," released in 1981, is as close as they would ever come to a conventional rock album, however tenuously. Although the arrangements are far more linear than on previous releases, this is still a prime example of what happens when you allow artists whose brains are heavily saturated with illicit substances into a recording studio: simple household sounds are fed through tape loops, transforming into extraterrestrial metal scrapings and buzzing locusts chewing on your medulla. What is most astounding is that the digital age has never produced anything as alien or disorienting as these sounds. Mebbe the technological advances have made it far too easy for modern musicians-- the superior equipment stunting their creativity? Whatever the case, I'll continue to feed my head with Chrome's Acid Punk long after the raver kids currently stomping to a feverish beat have 2.4 children and a white picket fence.

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MONTE CAZAZZA - The Worst of

Don't cry to me if you're not the same "well-adjusted" little person you once were before being exposed to this recording. You are warned from the very beginning by a certain Dr. Alberti, that Monte Cazazza displays symptoms of "an unresolved Oedipal complex," that he is a hopeless pervert, a trafficker in cheap thrills and that his music is little more than "a sonic mess." How in the world would he come up with such a diagnosis? Monte, after all, indulged in only wholesome, All-American activities such as setting dead, maggot-infested cats on fire and building 15-foot high swastikas in his Arts & Crafts class. Somehow, he managed to also find the time to pioneer Industrial music-- coining the term as a matter of fact.

This collection of the self-styled cultural terrorist's "sonic messes" was compiled by none other than Brian "Lustmord" Williams, widely regarded as the godfather of the dark ambient genre, who has done his homework here: Cazazza is accompanied by members of Throbbing Gristle on "To Mom on Mother's Day," providing jarring blasts of synthesized hiss while he works through his "Oedipal complex" (?). Cosey Fanni Tutti contributes the nursery rhyme-like chant of "Mary Bell," a paean to the fabled British abused-child-turned-murderer (at the age of 11); "Rabid Rats" tells of the American Army releasing said creatures on the Vietcong (They'd stand up to be shot as rabies is a far more horrible way to die) with an unmistakable glee in his voice. The most powerful track is "A Snitch is a Snitch," an examination of the moral codes and value systems imposed upon us by religion & The Law, obviously heavily influenced by the writings of Crowley and Nietzsche-- which, as even the casual observer of early industrial culture knows, have become part & parcel of its philosophy (much as the "Übermensch" and the "Will to Power" have become components of Satanism-- particularly Lavey's Hollywood version).

The Industrial Culture Handbook once described his work as "insanity-outbreaks thinly disguised as art events," and even though I've eagerly allowed my ears and psyche to become susceptible to some of the most depraved exhibits of "creativity" known to our species, I can't say I disagree.

Look in the comments.