#dead c

Editing, and adjusting speed and volume were the only steps taken between the nine performances recording and pressing. Demonstration Record (more on that title in a minute) eschews inessentials; there’s no polishing, no tunes, no singing to draw you in. But that doesn’t mean that it lacks hooks. A hook is anything that makes you listen twice, and Russell , who is also a member of the Dead C, knows a good noise when he hears (or makes) one. This record’s full of them. There’s the slowed-down water cistern on “Climate Study #1” and the layered pot lids and water jugs on “Climate Study #3,” which wobble out of the speakers like a projection of The Prisoner’s Rover bulbously bouncing across your wall. There’s the sputtering, billowing waves of fuzz on “Reduced Listening,” which combine the visceral pleasures of applying an electric razor to your cheek and a chainsaw to a tree stump.

And there’s the irresistible gravity exerted by the complex wobble that introduces “Holly Springs #2,” a piece that also demonstrates (aha!) Russell’s links to known music. While he has often represented himself as unburdened by chops, he sure knows how to get a blues sound by setting slide to guitar. Hook you it will, like barbed wire snagging your coat as you try to get over the top of some wall. He also manages to simultaneously reference the band Suicide and make them seem ostentatious by comparison with alternating buzzes and sizzles that he obtains from the Dirtbox Modulator (a device invented by Omit aka Clinton Williams, a recurrent associate of Russell’s over the years) on “Metal Petal.”

Russell uses nothing extra, but he also uses just enough to get his point across. The minimal dedications appended to the technical notes for each song transform them into simple signal sequences that make lucid statements of influence and apprehension. When your message is clear and your tools are sturdy, a little is all it takes. 

So, what does all this talk of old records from New Zealand have to do with Stefan Christensen, a New Englander who was probably in grade school when the Xpressway sound went down? There’s no denying that those records have marked him. The aggrieved, distorted voice and far-off, mechanical clank of “Like Factories” sounds like 1990s-vintage Gate; “Unkempt Power” staggers and thrashes like a Dead C single; “Time Elapse” radiates downer desolation quite like Alastair Galbraith’s. And each side of the LP ends with an unhurried, spot-on tribute to the isolationist bluesman Guitar Roberts (aka Loren Connors), who may have lived in Connecticut, but whose music expresses a remove from all that is known similar to the Xpressway crew’s.  

But Christensen doesn’t just make music that sounds like the records he likes. He draws into his sources’ strengths and molds songs that are just as misshapen, stubborn, and undeniable. He plugs his jack into their ungrounded outlets and noises just as jagged and acrid smoke out of his amp. He sounds just as dismayed with the world around him as his inspirations did, and as the music spools it becomes apparent that he, like his sources, is standing on the outside of human industry, wishing he could escape and knowing that he can’t because he’s human, too. The Upcoming Flame mines a still-rich vein of ore. It could be that as long as the world of humans doesn’t make sense, music like this will.