Wednesday, November 21, 2007

GARY KAIL/ZURICH 1916-CREATIVE NIHILISM, 2xLP, 1984, USA













By turns obtuse, aimless and occasionally striking, this peculiar double album's appearance here is solely due to the approximately 10 minutes of tape collage contributions that future Steaming Coils mastermind Brad Laner brings to the proceedings on the tracks "Victim Of Affluence", "Looking For A Home", "Anti-Descriptive Titles" and "Confusion At The Intersection", which successfully nudge things into the fruitful territory Laner was concurrently exploring via his improv unit Debt Of Nature (soon to be posted here). The remainder comes courtesy of a rather unlikely candidate for an avant garde-ist: the guitarist for L.A. dumbo hardcore vets Anti. Yes, it seems Messr. Kail had a hankering for the esoteric under the harebrained hardcore posturings and manifested it with the help (at least on LP 2 of this set, where Kail + whoever else participated went under the moniker Zurich 1916) of both Laner and future Ethyl Meatplow/Geraldine Fibbers vocalist Carla Bozulich, along with a few folks unknown to me. Minus the support of more inspired outside parties, Kail's solo endeavors on LP 1 of the set vacillate between indiscriminate tape collage work, amp hum, sine wave skree, aimless gurgle and random field recordings, all reasonably desultory. That aside, Laner-philes have every reason to direct their attention here, as this is some of the more obscure and hard to find work in his discography and well worth a listen. Thanks to Brad for supplying the content of this post...

***************NEW LINK POSTED SEPTEMBER 2012***************

Get it here 

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great to see this album get some appreciation. This far I've known only one person (besides me) who knows/likes it!
Thanks!

frostymug said...

Mass Mirror is now playing videos with sound on their download page. Yuck!

bruitiste said...

Yes! I requested this ages ago... much thanks!

Anonymous said...

great album, despite the caveats listed in the description - remember that one person's desultory "amp hum" is another's nirvana.

d/d

danny said...

one of my roommates in college (then of an LA punk band who shall remain unnamed) called this "alarm clock music".

Richard White said...

My God! It took next to forever to find this album on E-Bay. I was afraid I wouldn't find it in the blogosphere. Fortunately I was wrong. Thanks for posting this album. BTW, is there any word on Kail's whereabouts?

whiteflag said...

To add to the history of this lp, record "label" Michael Shepherd's Iridescence released this and threw 99% of the pressing into a Hollywood dumpster, so good luck finding one. I have a sealed copy if anyone is really looking hard for this.