Whiteness & Pinkness

Ex-Crown - 646 592 3423
Cassette. C10. Whiteness & Pinkness #1
70 Copies.

Three Resurrected Drunkards - The Dagger in the Flesh
Cassette. C72. Whiteness & Pinkness #2
100 Copies.

Various - Whiteness and Pinkness
Single sided flexi. Whiteness & Pinkness #10
250 Copies.

Moffarfarrah - Primo
Cassette. C45. Whiteness & Pinkness #19
20 Copies.

PVA in Hair - Sumptuary Law
Cassette. C5. Whiteness & Pinkness #62

Whiteness & Pinkness
A4 Zine + Badge.



There are weird labels and there’s Whiteness & Pinkness. A label so far out there in Weirdsville Australia they put YOL and Filthy Turd in the definite mainstream. Try that one on for size.

I like Whiteness & Pinkness because they don’t try very hard. I don’t like labels that try too hard, are too earnest, that flood my inbox everyday with entreaties to follow the link and download the press release and if you could spare but five minutes of your time ... I like labels that just get on with it, small numbered runs and that great feeling of being detached from whatever it is that passes for normal in your kitchen. Whiteness & Pinkness do that and thats what I like.

I like this Tom Smith/Pit Noack tape I’ve been playing for the last hour. Thats them in the Three Resurrected Drunkards disguise a-warbling and a-singing their way through two sides of Las Vegas crooner meets the muck inside a forty year old flip top school cassette recorder thats playing a recording of a 1940’s pinball machine doing Hugo Ball impersonations. This is thick loam. You can grow weighty taters in this shit.

What Whiteness & Pinkness have done is send me a smattering of their back catalogue for my perusal. Its a direction I encourage all other labels to follow as its a good way of getting a feel for the label over a short period of time, plus its a good way of getting rid of those releases that have failed to sell out.  Its also a jiffy bag from Australia rammed with goodies and not a link in an email. Its my favourite kind of communication.

Whiteness & Pinkness released the YOL/Filthy Turd double cassette extravaganza cassette back in 2013, I got one of the 20 measly copies that were made available [no download or Bandchump for you] all on recycled cassette, all glorious, ground down to magical noise dust. Twenty copies. The madness of it all. And it is mad. I’m still in Smith/Noack territory here so bear with me and then the thundering of subway trains and electronica that could be the ultra-distorted sound of electric guitar strings being twanged.

Lets start at the very beginning with a pink cassette in a white box and ten minutes of Ex-Crown [Miles Pflaz] ringing various pay phones in and around the New York City area and getting not much in reply but answer machine messages, number not in service robot responses and the scream of fax data for his trouble. What makes it work is Pflaz’s flat monotone vocal delivery and his actual shock when someone does answer, which I think was once. On the flip he tries to bamboozle the telephone companies voice recognition software by giving it ridiculous commands such as ‘bring me oysters in a half shell’ and ‘I have a gun, empty the register’ all of which illicit the response, ‘sorry no match found please try again’. As one sided conversations with robots go its all rather wonderful.

On a sickly yellow cassette we have Moffarfarrah and the abuse of vocal chords as spat out through the speeding and slowing capstans of various cassette players. Dictaphones maybe? The voice a ah-ahing and growling, dog like and then holding the note. The full Minton. Mouth held close to condenser mic gobcore with just the added soupcon of treatments giving it the ghostly feel of an unmade horror flick as recorded on a new school Nokia 3310. When the voice is slowed to absolute sludge is where it works best.

The shorter the tape the bigger the box hence the PVA in Hair release appears in a 7x7 box with a blob of hardened green PVA  on it [I’m guessing]. Side one is two males having a conversation about a TV actress and a straight cut from an American comedy/TV commercial replete with gales of canned laughter. The flip continues the conversation interspersed with cuts from Australian TV chat shows. This could be something deep. This could be something shallow. It could be the kernel from which an Australian author finds the urge to write the greatest Australian novel, the Australian Ulysses, The Ozzie Moby Dick. We will never know. One side is titled Shabby Chic Mania, the other Hydrogen Peroxide.

Which leaves the flexi and the zine and the outsized button badge which I will never wear.
The zine is a shiny cut and paste typewriter job, maybe laser printed and double stapled on the flat thus making the folding out of the pages a difficult task. Its a catalogue of sorts with info on the first 13 W&P releases including a review of the zine and the flexi which is weird. There’s an interview with Miles Pflaz and Always and reviews of suitably outre material tucked in at the back. Due to the nature of the stapling, the shiny surface and the numerous crossings out it makes it hard to read which is what comes with zine territory and seems fitting in Whiteness & Pinkness world. The flexi contains tracks by Always, Sneak and Mackle Jackle and is prime weirdo material with a musical box accompaniment to a recital as to what someone is going to do to someone else [Always], the Australian Smegma meets Butte County in a homemade ethnic instrument kind of way [Sneak] and life in Stoke as seen through night vision goggles [Mackle Jackle].

For those of you of a digital bent there exists a Whiteness & Pinkness Soundcloud page. It consists of a 14 minute track by Mother’s Breast which is a conversation between two young girls and one side of the Ex-Crown release. I’d be much happier with the flexi or any of these releases to be fair, they seem to reflect the world as it is. The mere sight of a flexi in a world of downloads and links, made me go all weak at the knees. Its a mad world for sure. A mad, mad, mad, mad world and like the film of the same name it makes this spinning orb of crud a much better place to stand on.
 
 
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