Theme, Jean-Hervè Peron, Zsolt Sőrés

The third entry in the 12"/MLP subs series. In early September 2011, Theme, the Poland/UK-based group centered around Lumberton Trading Company's very own Richard Johnson (ex-Splintered, Husk, etc.) and Stuart Carter (ex-Splintered, The Fields Of Hay, ex-Heroin, etc.), went into a Budapest studio with their good friends Zsolt Sörés and Jean-Hervé Péron (aka Art-Errorist of influential German group, Faust) for two whole days. The main piece, entitled "Poison Is (Not) The Word," pays witness to Theme branching into territory probably closer to their work as Splintered (i.e., their Moraine LP from 1996, which featured Jim O'Rourke source material on one side). Stretching over 24 minutes in length, it remains anchored to Theme's tendency for psychedelic drones and textures while Zsolt applies improvised electronics and viola to them and words are either chanted or spat out over the melée. A saxophone, added by Zsolt Varga, then completes the sprawling "brink-of-chaos" feel perfectly. On the other side, are two pieces also spanning over 20 minutes between them. The first, "Baszd Meg Az Apád!" (trans. "Fuck Your Father!" in Hungarian), begins misleadingly as a mass of atmospheric swirls, cavaquinho plucking, textures, psalterion, and sax until Jean-Hervé cuts in with some shouted vocals as effective as they are brief. The second, "Puszta Psycho," is built around a tempered refrain of cavaquinho string picking led by Jean-Hervé then welded to subtle touches of hissing electronics, psalterion, space clatter, sax blasts (courtesy of Varga), subtle textural plumes, indiscernible knocking and scrunching sounds, Jean-Hervé's vocals and buried chanting by Richard Johnson.