Royal Hungarian Noisemakers

Royal Hungarian Noisemakers - Don’Trump / Chillary. The Remixes
Unsigned Label. USO35. Cassette/DL. 48 Copies.

Royal Hungarian Noisemakers - Overdoes
Poor Little Music. PLM150. Cassette/DL. C48. 26 copies.



My memories of Budapest are of walking across the Charles Bridge early one summers evening only to hear the the doleful wail of Bonnie Tyler singing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ from atop Buda castle across the Danube. A festival of 80’s rock pop in full throng, the locals swilling beer and singing along with gusto. Oh what fun. This also explains the flyers for Jethro Tull and if it’d have been that pile of shite atop the hill I’d have walked back to my hotel room, jammed a toilet rolls worth of tissue in each ear and gone to bed for the night. Its not nice having your night ruined like that. They should warn you.

Filthy Turd once played a gig in Hungary but apart from that I know of no noisemaking activity from the country itself. There must be some. Everybody’s at it. Anywhere where there’s a plug socket there’s bound to be a noise merchant plugging things in, making noises, banging things together or seeing if their cheaply bought and long forgotten Spanish guitar can be adulterated in some way so as to get an interesting sound out of it.

I also lost 10,000 forints in Budapest. Well, not exactly lost, more gave it to a barman thinking it was a 1000 forint note. Mistook it for a 10,000 forint note and probably told the barman to keep the change. The pain will leave me someday.

The rather grandly named Royal Hungarian Noisemakers are therefore by default, my first exposure to Hungarian noise and very good it is too. I don’t know what I was expecting, perhaps an hours worth of full on rattle, some Merzbow wannabee chancing their arm with a couple of cassettes to the UK for online dissection by gnarled old noise hack but these two releases are far, far more nuanced than what I was expecting. Shame on me. Maybe what I was expecting was the result of too much plum brandy and cheap cigarettes? Instead I have the results of active minds with discerning tastes. ‘Overdose’ lives, for the most part, in noise/drone territory and kicks off with a six minute example of their sound as recorded live at Karolyi’s Crypt, perhaps too short for those who like to go for the full on head down amp melt but the way those cycling drones take off is well worth hearing. ‘National Women’s D Day’ evolves through its thirteen minutes gaining volume and added nuance with Clanger like vocals appearing amid its churning, roaring finale. But this is merely the entree.

Some of these tracks are then remixed on an American election themed release, one side Republican, the other Democrat. Track titles like ‘Golden Showers’ and ‘Trumpillary’ give you some idea of what’s going on here. Who the remixers are I have no idea but they have names: Pol Mod Pol, RHN, Noisesculptor and the more prosaic Chris Sidgell who all get two tracks each, one on each side. If anything there’s more space on Remixes, more clarity, more going for it, thus the empty spaces of Zoviet France [or Soviet France if you must] are to be found amongst the drone roar of ‘Atom for Korea’ while Unit Moebius like panned and disorientating rhythms are applied to the chopped up noises of ‘Trumpet of Deafening Truth’. ‘Time Machine’ has that ambient Aphex Twin feel complete with psychedelic swirls and dying beats as beaten from a rotting, termite infested log. This time around ‘Chillary’ has even more drone, more noise with only the lo-fi nature of the cassette robbing me of the high fidelity my body so eagerly craves at this time of day. I’m sure the downloaders and streamers will hear improvements.

According to Discogs the Royal Hungarian Noisemakers are Attila Vlad and Kálmán Pongrácz. With these two releases they’ve put Hungary on the noise map [for me at least] and that can only be a good thing. All together now ‘Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit lonely ….’

Unsigned

Poor Little Music







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