condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (two price tags on front)
It’s been 40 years since this album was first unleashed upon unwary listeners by the Australian industrial band SPK and in spite of the long passage of time, and all the changes the world and in particular the commercial music world, and also the non-commercial / alternative / underground music world, have undergone, “Information Overload Unit” still retains its bite and ferocity as a recording of what we’d now call pure noise and industrial. At the time of its original recording in 1981, original founder Neil Hill had already left the band and SPK had relocated to London as a four-piece band. The original front cover artwork would scare away most people for a start. The music, composed from feedback guitar, distorted synthesiser and drum machine programming, plays like a soundtrack to an underground film made specifically to break down people’s minds and sense of reality with its deliberately confrontational stance and use of chilling spoken-word samples. (SPK co-founder Revell was to find his eventual niche scoring music for Hollywood films: talk about, er, selling out!) Tracks like “Emanation Machine R. Gie’ “, “Suture Obsession” and “Ground Zero: Infinity Dose” probably predate Merzbow’s use of noise as a continuous high-pressure hose of sound immersion; the last-mentioned track also features distorted vocals and a continuous shrill drone of the kind Whitehouse would make their own. The most song-like track on the album turns out to be the stuttery mind destroyer “Stammheim Torturkammer”, an experiment in using chopped-up drum rhythms overlaid with guitar feedback and distortion to create an actual tune; at the other extreme is the track immediately following, “Retard”, a quiet yet busy piece of machine rhythm loops and found “voices” both human and computer. The album closes with the sinister, coldly ambient industrial “Kaltbruchig Acideath” through which a spoken-word recording is threaded.