Borbetomagus

Reissue of classic and long hard to find Purge/Sound League album from 1987 by Borbetomagus. Quartet session with the power-bass addition of Adam Nodelman. 1993 CD release “Seven Reasons for Tears beautifully documents the most simultaneously fierce and accessible periods of the band’s history. Converts and heathens can both bathe luxuriously in the radioactive improv-beauty-stream that lights up a room when the record is played at ‘special’ volume. Tears is the living spirit of Borbetomagus’ numbered days as a quartet with bassist Adam Nodelman. Days to be cherished. The brobdignagian wall-motion of Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich’s free-roving horns and Donald Miller’s evil-minded guitar-abuse have always had a tendency to hit me above the belt. The textured furrows their howl historically carved into my flesh began at the navel and trailed bloodily up into the aether. Nodelman’s terricolous presence gave them full access to listener’s aesthetic genitals for the first time and Tears proves they can wreak remarkable damage in this area. It would be the height of irresponsibility for me to suggest that any of this disk’s spontaneous outpourings might encourage some sorta social action.

Not even the most extreme hippie-style derv-jerk includes a language of gestures explosive enough to coexist with the same incredible buckling of sonic structures here. Still, something like the intro to ‘7b’ has the same semblance-of-approachability that makes even ‘outside’ rock music a relatively populist proposition. And you could certainly splice chunks of ‘3’ and ‘6’ onto a live tape of MC5 doing a Sun Ra cover without making John Sinclair roll over in his bathtub. So ‘mere’ rock fans have nothing to fear. Which isn’t to say that Tears doesn’t have spurts of unprecedented density. I thought they had closed the book once and for all on overtones and ‘found’ feedback harmonics with their previous record, New York Performances (Agaric 1986), but there are sections here that sound like a dozen distinct and angry zebra trying to burst out of Ed Koch’s lower bowel.

But it’s only the four of them. And they’re humans. They’re just so goddam intent on what they’re doing and so capable of transporting themselves through their hands and brains and lungs that their one beats yr three. It’s a simple matter of shamanism — a quality sadly lacking in most everything you hear today. Imagine this record as a log that’s been sharpened by magic, hardened by fire and is just aching to drive itself through yr chest.” —Byron Coley, Forced Exposure,