Mlehst - More Punishment

Mlehst - More Punishment
Oxidation. CDROT060
Cassette/DL


Welcome to the Outrageous Packaging Programme where today we’ll talk about whats on the outside of a release in far more detail than whats inside it. In a feature packed, special hour long episode, we’ll take you back in time to a pre-Internet world where record labels tried to outdo each other in the outrageous packaging department by releasing musics in ever more bizarre and unwieldy fashions. We’ll be talking to the man who sealed a permanently playing Merzbow CD inside a Mercedes Benz motor car, Phil Todd and his sponges and from beyond the grave, Nigel Joseph who proposed sewing a hundred Noise cassettes into the insides of an eviscerated dog.

But wait, whats this? Mlehst? Surely not? Thee Mlehst? All Brentall’s Mlehst? The very same Mlehst that soundtracked the 1990’s with a continuous supply of eerie experimental noise cum dark ambient electronics? Can it be? Could it be? Lawksamussy, if my eyes don’t deceive me it is indeed. Like a Whitehouse album that you play for the first time in donkey’s years the memories immediately come flooding back; all those Japanese noise CD’s, the poorly attended noise gigs in parts of London that you’d never otherwise visit, the one sided LP’s that came out on Brentall’s Bandaged Hand Produce label, the many beers, the camaraderie and above all, the outrageous packaging.

So Santa brought me some Mlehst. I couldn’t have been happier. Oh, hang on, its a rather large jiffy bag. Inside it there’s a seven inch square wooden plaque with a cassette and a miniature leather whip nailed to it. The craftsmanship and skill involved has to be admired for it could not have been easy to knock those nails in without cracking the cassette case. Or maybe a jig was made and the cassette inserted afterwards? The leather whip is held in place by nails that have been bent over. The plaque itself appears to be made from a light, softish wood thats had a decorative chamfer applied to all four edges before being stained a light coffee brown. It is rough hewn and it is as daft, and as pointless a piece of outrageous packaging that you will see, and the likes of which I haven’t set eyes on since the Hungarian label Unsigned sent me something similar last year. Apparently 44 of them exist. In a hour that will be 43 for I have anywhere to put the such things, so I will de-nail it, keep the cassette, burn the wood for fuel and leave the whip in the gents toilet of The Duncan in Leeds with a suggestive note and the phone number of my ex-gaffer. If you think this is excessive, imagine you are the owner of one of the fourty-three left. Yours have just become that bit rarer.

I could have got the download of course or the stand alone cassette version and then all of this could have been avoided, but All sent me the the Big Kahoona, the mothership, the Mount Rushmore version so whats a man to do? Ignore it? I’m more than happy with the sounds that lie buried within and the fact that the dust-sheets have been taken off Mlehst, which when you get down to is the crux of the matter.

More Punishment is two, fourty-five minutes sides of unsettling vibes, buried voices, all out noise and looped rhythms formed from grisly electronics, reversed tape muck and butchered gadgets that are kept from falling apart with solder and Sellotape. Some tracks unfold from their dark, minimalist beginnings and gain depth as they progress, others are just plain noisy. Voices appear through the grime, the speaking clock maybe, the business end of a powerful suction pump. One sprawling noise fest is the attack of the killer electronic termites. A serious amount of tape wobble on one outing had me wondering whether it was intentional or whether the tape was actually stretching, either way I enjoyed the experience. There are soaring drones and rattled steel pipes and the judder of jackhammers and always the feeling that this is the mid 90’s. Its no bad place to be.

Those rusty old nails. The black and white imagery. Illinois label Oxidation is home to such things. If you missed the Experimental Industrial Noise 1990’s and have room in your home for such as this, here is where you need to be.  


Oxidation