“Excepter” (Used 4 times)

If I say so myself, and I do, last week's MCoQ broadcast, woven as it was around a 72-minute performance by SSPS (aka Porkchop Central, aka Jon Nicholson, Excepter operative) was a Kosmische continuum, a final transmission from a marooned crew, forced by dire circumstances to stay behind and foster a new civilization on a new globe. The civilization was built, flourished, the inevitable unrest then brought changes, babies were born, and paintings expressed the heart of the people. Yes, I am still talking about a radio show.

Any and all labels being reductive, though just to give you an idea, I can say that Jon's sound brings together primordial techno, with its electronic drumbeat Danceteria-in-the-80s vibe, while also pulling in all that has come since and before, cleansing noise washes and Krautrock pulsations to name only a few.

How gratifying it was for myself to invite the man down to WFMU's studio B, and just say, "go!" This is an audio artifact of something Jon does perhaps as often as once a week in nightclubs, and I'm proud to present it to you here, as one continuous mp3. Please note that the many song titles incorporate in the set are noted in the comments field of the mp3 tags (Windows users only.)

Tremendous thanks to Diane Kamikaze Farris, for once again engineering a Castle session with aplomb. Thanks also to Sarah Z. for production assistance. Tracy Widdess spit-shines my artist photo, as per usual.

They came on like a Hoodootronic mind-melt, with analog bubbles, rips and tears. The Queen Witch Hecate guides and commands. One would be ill advised not to listen. They brought joy and prosperity to My Castle of Quiet and to WFMU.

The twin destinies of Telecult Powers and the My Castle of Quiet radio program seem quite naturally intertwined. I met Witchbeam at No Fun Fest in May 2009, and, after a brief but very interesting conversation, he presented me with my first Telecult Powers recording, the Double Action Reversible cassette. I had the tape rolling nice and loud a few days later, and had one of those "What the fuck is this I'm listening to? This is GREAT!" epiphanies. Roughly a month later, I returned to weekly broadcasting on WFMU after a 10+-year hiatus.

In July, Telecult Powers became the first band to play live on the Castle, and through Mister Matthews and Witchbeam, I've connected with many of the other great artists who've played on the show over the months, including Grasshopper, Slasher Risk and Todd Pendu. I was also thrilled to learn that by way of their appearance on WFMU, Telecult Powers have a feature article coming up in the next issue of Signal to Noise.

Witchbeam's wonderfully hybridacious rituals of Hoodoo and good old-fashioned LSD cosmiscity at their gigs have unquestionably benefited me personally, and I have no doubt that many other listeners, spectators and fans have been helped as well. The so-called Law of Attraction is not bullshit! In WFMU's time of need, our 2010 fundraising marathon (where things were going well, but not as super-amazingly well as we needed them to be), Telecult Powers returned to the show to work a little more magic. This time, they brought along a real-live rock star, Lala Harrison Ryan of Excepter.

Candle set-up for Initiation Ritual.

Few musical outfits navigate the borderlands of spacetime as nimbly as EXCEPTER does; fewer still are those whose means of producing music (electronic improvisation--that heady universe of conceptual exercise) comment so groovily on that music's end. It's real simple: Excepter uses their futurist setup--the vast majority of which comprises synthesized sound, artificial-like--to get at something real primal, real natural. All well and good--shouldn't all music work on a primal level?--except these folks take it a little further: their synthwash grooves propel the listener, y-yes indeed, to realms animalistic, realms kind of, w-well, savage.

We all know and can recite by heart, for example, their simple ode from 2008's Debt Dept. entitled, even more simply, "Kill People" (there's a video too). We can thrill to fistpump remixtrax from industry juggernauts Carter Tutti and J.G. Thirlwell. We can access their backcatalog of tropical coverart and free podcast archives. Obviously these guys are no slouches on the tech end of things, and yet despite or perhaps by dint of this obstinate propensity for mechanized means, the group's rawness sticks out, wild and unadulterated--enhanced, in fact--by all the electronic spookiness. An Excepter show (for instance) means being confronted not with a clean, standardized exercise of technological prowess, but a rabid and insatiable one; a shaggy, wild-eyed (and wild-hatted) critter, all the more dangerous for those thunderous beats and synthattacks it seems so prone to pounding and howling into unholy existence. Unlike any other electroacoustic progenitors I can think of, Excepter takes hold of that staid improvised form, wrestling it from its button-down gallery atmosphere and installation hoitytoitiness, and it makes the thing scary.

Hours of this stuff is available on the band's FMA page, as well as via their own internet presence (go to their website, click around). They've a new album a scant two weeks away from release, and in a universe wherein noise-improv-ers stubbornly barrage the market with release after release after drab release, theirs is a prolificacy you can trust. So go for it, mirror Excepter's brave savagery-through-tech model, and take a computer ride into the wilderness.