Nothing You Do Will Ever Matter. Nothing. Ever. Well, I do not agree, because my review matters. …and Music (muSICK) matters.
Tearing Up Your Plans, dear reader, is not a new Slogun album, but a re-issue of a recording that originally saw the light in 1999. Slogun, which are named after a (legendary?) track by (legendary!) act SPK, is the main project of John Balistreri, and created to torture the listener’s positive state of mind in order to waste your daily happiness, to spoil your enthusiasm. Yeah, I adore the concept…
Anyway, the themes are based on low life struggles, gang wars, drug (ab)use and aggressive youth experiences (‘true crime’) at the one hand (John was born and raised in Brooklyn, area of honey and sunshine as we all know), and mass murderers / serial killers and their ‘popularity’ at the other hand. As a form of therapy, it gets canalised into one hour of purest and frenzy Power Noise Electronica outbursts. This remastered version comes in an edition of 200 copies via Ukrainian label Old Captain (run by Olegh, the guy behind First Human Ferro or Oda Relicta, amongst others).
As from Suspect Unknown, the opening ‘song’ (hehe, what’s in a word), it seems evident that Tearing Up Your Plans won’t protect your eardrums. The recording compiles purest distortion and noise blasts, leaving no room for rest. Harsh sounds of sadistically performed noise are in a permanent interaction with wretched, violent shouts and yells – consider it story telling from a mostly brutal and aggressive kind (poetry for psychopaths…). The use of many samples from so many angles is both disturbing as well as ‘enlightening’. I think that the equilibrium in between some totally freaked out and frenzy excerpts, and more minimal-nihilistic ones, cause a certain level of ‘variation’, which makes it easier to endure this one-hour sonic bombardment.
Fans of everything in between, well, let’s say, Whitehouse, Deathpile, Svartvit, Con-Dom, Survival Unit, Navicon Torture Technologies, Ramleh, Skeletal and, why not, SPK, must search for this re-release (unless you already have the original version, of course).