33 rebellions per minute
"The hieroglyphics that filled in the spaces"
1995
Non Credo, HAPPY WRETCHED FAMILY
Some bands want to rock and roll all night and party every day. Bands like Non Credo, fortunately,
understand that the proper role of night time is to scare the fuck out of you (I didn't mean that literally,
although lyrics like "His body conceded his yield; there's a good boy... He turns away feeling sick for
tasting all forbidden fruit dropped along his way" suggest less than full respect for whatever fuck remains in
you). And the daytime? Well, that's for voice lessons and the most neurotically inventive production
re-takes you could ask for.
Kira Vollman, in addition to playing clarinet, bass guitar, lead guitar, and keyboards here, is probably the
single most impressive vocalist in my music collection. Not necessarily my favorite, but the most controlled,
every word, pitch, choice of octave (from deep contralto to glass-smashing soprano to kneecap-smashing
alto hiss), nuance, minor roll of the tongue. She writes and vocalizes the opening track as a Latin mass, the
first of many tricks, all of them by her as sole vocalist--- her other styles include pop song, writhing
speech-in-tounges, soft tongues-in-cheek, sprechstimme, and wordlessly melodic oratorio, switched among
at a moment's notice for appropriate dramatic effect. Add in a bit of processing and radio sampling, and
"Miliza Three Flights Down", over its warped drumming, sounds like as a one-act play featuring a choking
opera soprano, a hapless Nazi officer from a tasteless sitcom who rescues her and restores her to operatc
normality, an English-speaking mouse, a choir of Valkyries, an annoyed neighbor, and John Belushi as
Samurai Florist, plus two computer-generated voices calling in their parts over defective phone lines. I
suppose you could ask why--- but I'd answer "cuz it's really cool". As for the playing, she and Joseph
Berardi (drums, percussion, marimba, keyboards, cello, viola) are great examples of why avant-garde bad
notes and weird timings are different from junior high orchestras doing the same: just a continual and clear
sense that everything here has been carefully selected as the single aptest option, and that playing a
_different_ wrong note, or maybe a right one (which happens when necessary), has been considered and
rejected for plain old ineffectiveness.
Does it sound like anything? The melodies recall the Slapp Happy/ Henry Cow collaboration
DESPERATE STRAIGHTS. The strange layered rhythmic textures are like Laika when calmest and
somewhat Miranda Sex Garden-ish at densest. The ambience is much like Portishead, in the soundtrack noir
and the cynical female-voiced words, but far busier. The strings suggest alternate opening themes for Jaws.
If you don't know those names, well, keep the adjectives surrounding them and assume Non Credo sound
weird, okay? Even if you do follow the comparisons, they don't account for the keyboards. Now, industrial
music is pretty gloomy, but it does seem built around the notion that machines work: clang, 2, 3, 4, clang,
2, 3, 4. What Non Credo make, as decoration not main content, is industrial music for a world where record
of your credit payments gets eaten, where your computer "has commited an illegal operation" and _it_
punishes _you_, where your TV gets static and your electrical connections get erratic, where those power
brakes you never asked GM and Ford to invent require a few seconds to get the power going. The irony, of
course, is that sounds like that are far harder to make than a programmed Energizer loop, especially when
you care about making it sound good. Truth ain't just stranger than fiction, it's more work. Aren't you glad
Non Credo did some of it for you?
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