HARMONY KORINE SUN CITY GIRLS DYLAN NYOUKIS SUGAR LP

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26

ALVARIUS B and DYLAN NYOUKIS (& Harmony Korine!): Sugar: The Other White Meat LP. vinyl and record jacket and insert are all in mint condition. also i'm including in this auction Prick Decay & Jeph Jerman "The Mechanics of Belief" LP, and Prick Decay "Mudsounds For Car Stereos" CD. 

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Reviews:

Sugar: the Other White Meat brings together two of the central figures of underground sound-whatzit and general audio curiosities: Alvarius B (of Sun City Girls fame) and Dylan Nyoukis (one-half of the UK’s Decaer Pinga/Prick Decay). Side A of the LP features each of the two in solo mode: Alvarius with five songs of varying length and Dylan with one twelve minute piece. The B side of the LP is a side-long collaborative track. Sugar was originally conceived by Harmony Korine to be a four-way split between Alvarius, Nyoukis, Will Oldham, and Absalom (Korine’s “White Metal” band). But Korine went MIA and Oldham hadn’t heard of the project when Dylan asked him about it later. By this point, Alvarius and Dylan had already finished their respective contributions and, rather than scrap the project altogether, decided to create a collaborative piece to take up the missing second side of the LP. Dylan sent over source material, which Alvarius cut, spliced and mixed in with his own sound sources (including some drunken answering machine messages from Mr. Korine). So what’s the listener to expect from this stew? Those familiar with Alvarius B will find much of his range represented in his five songs: quasi-ethnic ramblings, wordless vocal ramblings (w/the TV on in the background), Django-esque guitar runs, and the absolutely amazing and unclassifiable “DJ South Bitch,” which is sort of all of the above. Dylan’s solo contribution continues in the vein of his Shield That Pierces the Earth album, with a simple sanshin (I didn't know what it was either. Check here for more info.) underpinning that eventually gives way to subtle tape manipulation, musique concrete, and generally engaging, but head scratching sounds of all sorts. The collaborative piece runs the gamut over its 24+ minute duration: broken electronics, field recordings near a gas ‘n’ sip (or some such), shortwave radio, actual songs (!), the aforementioned answering machine rant, ambient cafeteria noise, thunderstorms — you know, pretty much everything. Edition of 500 copies. Hand silkscreened sleeves with two-color silkscreened insert

Issued in an edition of 500 copies, with a hand silkscreened cover and a two-color silkscreened insert printed by Parallel Lines Press. Sugar: The Other White Meat brings together Alvarius B and Dylan Nyoukis (one-half of Decaer Pinga/Prick Decay). Side A of the LP features each of the two in solo mode: Alvarius with five songs of varying length and Dylan with one twelve minute piece. The B side of the LP is a side-long collaborative track. Sugar was originally conceived by Harmony Korine to be a four-way split between Alvarius, Nyoukis, Will Oldham, and Absalom (Korine's "White Metal" band). But Korine went MIA and Oldham hadn’t heard of the project when Dylan asked him about it later. By this point, Alvarius and Dylan had already finished their respective contributions and, rather than scrap the project altogether, decided to create a collaborative piece to take up the missing second side of the LP. Dylan sent over source material, which Alvarius cut, spliced and mixed in with his own sound sources (including some drunken answering machine messages from Mr. Korine).

ALVARIUS B and DYLAN NYOUKIS: Sugar: The Other White Meat LP (CATSUP PLATE)

Edition of 500 on this one, so by the time anyone reads this, they might already be sold out. It's a real nice record, with a deeply lovely silk screen cover photo of Dora Doll that takes on Renoirian, Man Rayvian, and Pagian/Klawian proportions. Insert is on lovely paper, record itself nice and thick. (My only quibble is that the layout uses so much of the Helvetica typeface, but that's obviously a personal preference and really more for students of typography and I have no room to talk because I'm using Helvetica right now.) As for the MUSIC, side one is Mssrs. B and then Nyoukis taking approx. 12 minutes solo each, and then side two is 24 minutes of them collaborating. I was really anticipating this baby, and you might've been too, in part perhaps because you read their conversation in ish #15. (You can still read it.) However, first spin of side one left me only just whelmed. Al B.'s 12 minutes of music seem to have taken approx. 12 minutes to conceive, compose, record, mix, and master! (14 at the most.) Second listen: First track is just like Al kind of singing words but mostly sorta giggling while he tosses off a modal riff. It clocks in at 1:03 and it's called "Always Now, Fuckface!" which means that it is great. Now track two "Eldorado" is starting, but some fuckface outside has his motorcycle so loud that I simply can't hear it whatsoever. There now, drive off, you obnoxious slum-dweller . . . . Okay, he's gone, but I still can't really hear what's going on, because it's such a quiet song, now my goddamn TYPING is too loud. Okay, stop typing for a second . . .  right, this is Al just kind of muttering while he sort of hits the body of the guitar and sounds the E string. One-note song with an insistent rhythm and muttering. Okay, I turned it up really loud, and the muttering, though still hard to make out, sounds like an overheard argument in the style of Raymond & Peter. Oh man, I think I hear a woman sobbing. Now a macho Italian gangster accent, fairly melodramatic . . . is this a movie? . . . he recorded it while watching TV! Awesome. And, that one-note-with-insistent-rhythm thing is kind of intense when you turn it up. Track three is some wacky improv between Al's voice and what sounds like a lone cymbal and drum, and it's kind of energized, and he does that high-pitched muezzin thing, like he's trying to recreate the SCG Cloaven Theatre style all by himself, but the twist is that he still sounds like he's whispering, like it's 2AM and he's trying not to wake up the family. "Palatine Flip," on the other hand, is really LOUD and scary, and almost 100% guaranteed to make you get up and turn down your stereo if it's 11:44 PM and your six-month-old is sleeping, just ask me. But if you're gutsy, just stay in your chair and leave the volume where it's at, because it only lasts 48 seconds. That's really the end of Al's portion, except for an encore / intermission / cool-down called "DJ South Bitch" (my favorite Alvarius alias since "Uncle Tompa"), five minutes of downtempo melancholy booty-rap, probably taped right off the radio. It's a little jarring but it won't surprise anyone who listened to all two hours of the Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection #11 radio show, which aired exactly once, on WFMU in November of 2002. Then Dylan Nyoukis offers his 12 minutes, a single track called "The Galloping Fingers Of Biscuit Meek." On first listen this good but nowhere NEAR the movement of Nyoukis's insect folk masterpiece LP The Shield That Pierces The Earth (issued in 2002, also on Catsup Plate, in an already long-gone edition of 300), nor the Decaer Pinga side of the Tubular Bells LP (split release with Glands of External Secretion, released by the Starlight Furniture Co.). On second listen I'm still not quite whelmed by the "sanshin" intro -- banjo ostinatos I have heard before, and even 3 or 4 Jandek imitators is a couple too many. But sit tight and the repetition starts to sound like a record skipping and then other murky loops start bending it into something altogether different and I'm sold with six more minutes of fine brain salad to go. Ah, and then comes side two, a nearly 25-minute piece called "Interested in Fashion, Harmonica?" Shit, I've anticipated this so much that I almost can't help but be underwhelmed. So far it's too hushed and lo-fi to play quiet, but too piercing to turn up. Still close to the beginning, and I think I hear Harmony Korine leaving what is credited as a "fuck song" on the "answerphone." SSAB SONGS, anyone?? Is that Brian Degraw in the background? Humdy, hum, more slow-massage tape spunge, and believe it or not I'm still not quite whelmed . . . oh, here comes Alvarius B, doing another folk song with creepy quiet falsetto . . . pretty good, pretty good . . . .ah, and here comes a pretty fucking nice mangled small wall of noise, and it literally OVERwhelms the song . . . alright, I'm committed, now I have no choice, because this is a gorgeous wall of noise! Thanks dudes, I was startin' to wonder . . . oh yeah, I'm into it now, even after the noise is gone, because Al's folk song is still going and becoming more creepy and intense and . . . WHOAH, more noise! Except this time it's different noise. Still only halfway through the piece . . . and now just a couple minutes to go. I lost my way a few times in those ellipses, believe me. The last couple minutes are flat-out gorgeous. I'll be coming back. And, to finally close this dumb review, I'll quote the ENTIRE story of how this LP came about, from the Catsup Plate website, because everybody loves a little Harmony Korine content: "Sugar was originally conceived by Harmony Korine to be a four-way split between Alvarius, Nyoukis, Will Oldham, and Absalom (Korine’s ‘White Metal’ band). But Korine went MIA and Oldham hadn’t heard of the project when Dylan asked him about it later. By this point, Alvarius and Dylan had already finished their respective contributions and, rather than scrap the project altogether, decided to create a collaborative piece to take up the missing second side of the LP. Dylan sent over source material, which Alvarius cut, spliced and mixed in with his own sound sources (including some drunken answering machine messages from Mr. Korine)."