Hetero Skeleton

For their second official CD release (after a handful of cassettes and CD-Rs) this Helsinki quintet of horns, guitars, drums, and vocals forsake any sense of live atmosphere by mashing four years of recordings into a disorienting, rude collage of over the top takes on multiple forms of extreme music. More early 90s, Bad Vugum-damaged rock than 00s Fonal psych-folk, Hasardi is a tangent of the punk/hardcore continuum that veers wildly and often into free jazz, noise and just general weirdness. Hasardi is divided into 40 one minute tracks, but each new section starts somewhere in the middle of the previous one. Such wilful transgression of something so basic reveals the design in Hetero Skeleton's stream of chaos. It's as if Burroughs's cut-up techniques were applied to the music of Borbetomagus, Phil Minton and early Black Flag, the result a kind of musique concrete for the avant rock set sourced from primitive recordings made with primitive instruments, and edited by an obsessive, possibly psychotic personality. From these dense fragments of high volume saxophone skronk, strangulated guitar, possessed vocal exhortations, percussive thud and busted electronics, a demented whole much greater than its parts emerges. But by no means is this intellectualised jump-cutting. Judging by the group banter, irreverent goofing at the service of releasing pent-up energy, creative or otherwise, is the main goal. At turns nervous, frightening and irritating, Hasardi is not for the faint of heart, or those lacking a sense of humour.