Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Stilluppstypa - s/t
Stilluppstypa s/t 7" flexi (Gallery Krunk, 1992)
Now here's a 90s obscuro that exists wrapped in a fog of the band's own creation. These experimental chubs from Iceland released a small pile of records thru the mid-late 90s on a variety of labels, and those are the records you are likely to run across in bins or online; they are a resolutely noise-first concern, lots of biff-bang-thud-type randomness and clatter. S'kay, 'spose, but not of interest to us here. This, their debut disc, is a strange hybrid flexi made out of sterner stuff than the usual flexi but yet not quite as sturdy as a mid-90s United Records pressing (which is one step up from a flexi). Anyway, this thing was fished out of the legendary MRR-rejects dump of 1996 (when Tim Yo excised all the "non-punk" from the collection, a purge that targeted mostly grind and noise and emo more than anything else), most of which landed at the ol' Epicenter Zone collective store in Frisco-town.
So, this isn't like Stilluppstypa's other records at all, this is a pure post-Amrep riff churn with a real bite to it the likes of which wouldn't resurface at this potent a level until the A Frames began walking the Earth years later. In fact, that one track sounds like an outtake from that band's first LP, ya think? World Music Brain at work, since there is no way the men of the A Frames ever heard this thing, and since I never saw release info for this anywhere at the time it came out, I would wager a copy got sent to MRR for review and then...that was their defacto total USA 'distro'. In any case, a great slice of 90s aggro art-punk that I would liken to an updated modernist take on the Amon Duul aesthetic. Grows hair outcher ears. -Ryan W.
// posted by W/S @ 8:23 AM 
