Angry Marbles || Autistatic || Store || Pareidolia || Zenflesh
turk knifes pope & petit mal homegrown organic purifying mad dog performance crippling data restriction amduscias a sense of closure zenflesh collective live a distance quietly removed first try dreamcycle fields of ashes
Zenflesh Records Reviews
zenflesh one turk knifes pope & petit mal
zenflesh one
this has been one of my favorite records to listen to while working on this issue of heckler. last issue I wrote about the noise festival. well, this is noise music. instrumental noise that can create different moods dependent on its volume. personally, I like it and find it rather soothing. in the liner notes this cd is referred to as a sleep therapy suite1, maybe that’s why. stylewise, this kind of reminds me of some of the early eg records stuff, like michael brook, harold budd and brian eno. it’s nice to see people making these kinds of records. if you are into this kind of thing or want to check it out, contact zenflesh at the above address.
heckler – may 96

zenflesh one and zenflesh two
the long beach, ca, based label zenflesh records started to release a series of cd’s featuring works of young sound artists currently or formally associated with the kansas city industrial music scene2. turk knifes pope and petit mal have been given the chance to appear on the first album in this series. beautiful ambient-industrial souved in themselves. the music reminds of beequeen, christoph heemann and jim o’rourke: calm dark layers of sound spread with scraps of metal. a beautiful purifying album that has been compiled very well and packaged artfully.
phosphor – aug 96

zenflesh one
this fifty-nine minute cd is split between two industrial noise bands. a grinding thunder rumbles amidst a ghostly gothic choir…a collage of instructional tapes duel among themselves on an angry field of shimmering dark noise…the purring of monstrous machines gone dancing on the moon (they echo chugga chugga)…then the machines begin spinning so fast they fly away into space…once free of the gravity well these massive machines set vibrating, slowly chewing away at the fabric of sane reality…thus ending the intriguing turk knifes pope portion of this cd. you have been sonically purged of all organic relaxation. the petit mal portion of the disc is a long twenty-eight minute excursion into atonal repetition of harsh noises and threatening surges, offset by ticking and basement guitar.
post bros – #52 Sonic Curiosity

zenflesh one
After being blown away by the new CD by Turk Knifes Pope, I couldn't have expected this release to have met its quality, being an earlier work, but it did. This CD immediately found its place onto my "frequently listened to" rack. From the beautifully designed packaging to the pleasingly disturbing audio, this release flys far beyond most others in the realm of noise/experimental music.
Turk Knifes Pope's "Sleep Therapy Suite," split into six segments, is first on the CD. "Angel Highway Rose" opens with a hissing, distorted serenade of vocals which lie above pops and cracks and muffled samples. The choral sounds drown out into ambience and metallic electronic screeches and are later brought back. This is a real mind-blower. Schloss Tegal-like drones fill the second track which achieves a much darker atmoshpere. The sample-ridden "Smile Full of Cavities" which follows may remind you of a certain segment of Derek Jarman's Film, "The Last Of England." The samples are manipulated over dark drones and scrambled signals. As this segment is brought to a close, "A Brick Molests A Stranger"'s forboding atmoshpere sets in with unidentifiable industrial sounds. The harsh sounds of "Droning Pale Hair" remind the listener of an orchestra, twisted and manipulated beyond recognition. Turk Knifes Pope's contribution to this split ends with the bass-filled drones of "Sneaking From Awake."
Petit Mal's "The Process Of Emptying An Open Window" is equally as impressive as "Sleep Therapy Suite." This track follows along the lines of quirkier noise, as opposed to the forboding and dark atmospheres created with Turk Knifes Pope's tracks. It is, however, equally as disturbing - and disturbing is good. Twistedly altered clangs fill the first segment of this song. Soon following are quick spurts of tame power noise. You won't get bored with this track, as it soon gains an almost tribal quality reminiscent of Lustmord's "A Documentation Of Early Acoustic And Tactical Experimentation." The mood of this track is continually on the move, incorporating organized acoustic guitar and organic samples later in the track. Another mind-blower.
I suppose descriptions just can't do justice to these works. I'd find it safe to say that this is not only one of the best experimental CD's I have ever heard, but one of the best CD's I have ever heard period. I urge you to check this out - you won't be disappointed. Visit www.zenflesh.com and pick one of these as well as several other releases for only $10.
Grinding into Emptiness

Turk Knifes Pope and Petit Mal -- ZENFLESH ONE
This is disc -- the sliver of aluminum -- that begat the Zenflesh dynasty. (It's also the one you've seen in the CD stores in the brown folded-cardboard package with a tongue-happy Colonel Sanders on the cover. Two artists are represented on the disc; can you, uh, guess who they are? [THS-CG: Uhhhhhh, the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys?] Turk Knifes Pope (a great name, by the way) clocks in with the long, fuzzed-ambient "sleep therapy suite" (further divided into six songlets with brilliant titles like "angel highway rose," "the brick molests a stranger," and "droning pale hair"); Petit Mal offers up "the process of emptying an open window." TKP's aesthetic is firmly established here -- the creation of subatomic noise and feedback that's then converted and smoothed out into drones whose ripples and waves form the construction of songs. Unlike most bands, TKP has absolutely nothing to do with standard musical idioms like harmony, dissonance, chord changes, structure, or anything of that spoo; rather, the entire point is to sculpt an audio slice of movement through processed sound. This is something TKP does extremely well (although i personally favor MAD DOG over this, actually). Vox make a rare appearance (albeit in grotesquely altered/processed form) on "a smile full of cavities" and are gradually enveloped in waves of bass feedback and desert-like drones; otherwise, the entire suite is nothing more (and nothing less) than a series of different attacks on the fortress of sleep-inducing drone. Petit Mal's approach is considerably less drone-intensive (and hence not quite as swank to me), but still plenty peculiar and definitely well outside the bounds of conventional songwriting. Lots of heavily repeated sounds and clattering that turn into the extended sound of a running motor and little else before eventually turning into another rhythm and finally a drillpress tone that rises and falls for several minutes before disappearing into the sound of the motor again. Toward the end there's an actual guitar figure that fades up, hovers for a bit, then fades back down again; it comes and goes for a good while before turning into a hollowed-out pong noise, which in turns mutates back into another drillpress tone before the song finally ends around the thirty-minute mark. Two extended styles of organic semi-ambient frippery; which one pushes your buttons, bwana?
dead angel 35

zenflesh one
This very nice item (a CD in a recycled brown cardboard package) was the first release of the North Californian Zenflesh label and, as far as I know, the first appearance of both featured bands.
Turk Knifes Pope play here 6 songs of noisy drones and majestic ambiences. Slow but intense and grave, these tracks work from the first listen, and are nice examples of well done dark industrial / drone music. In a way, this reminds me a bit of Stillstand's works on "Ordnung", as well as of some Cold Meat Industry releases. "Angel highway rose "and "Droning pale hair" sounds to me to be the strongest pieces here, with some good choirs samples and low frequencies. This material as a somewhat ambient and dark feeling, and Turk Knifes Pope never let the noise take over the mood of these recordings.
Petit Mal's "The process of opening an empty window" is 29 minutes long, and contains several well defined parts. Not really noisy either, this band's material contains some accoustic guitars, as well as stuff that sounds like accoustically recorded clicks and glitches. Noisy drones are also thrown into the mix, as are some pretty deep sounds. Due to its length and diversity, this track sounds a bit like a collage of various, shorter, pieces. Nice sounding, this sounds also more experimental than Turk Knifes Pope, and not as moody. Very different from the usual atmosphere of the industrial or noise scenes, this has a little something that reminds me of the lo-fi emotional tracks of Godspeed you black emperor!, althought with a very different instrumentation.
This split CD was my first exposure to this two bands, and I wouldn't mind listening to more of their compositions. Turk Knifes Pope, however its weird name, plays competent dark drones, and Petit Mal seems to be competent at boundaries-free, calm experimental music.
Nicolas, December 14, 2000 recycleyourears

footnotes:
1 the turk knifes pope portion of zenflesh one is titled "sleep therapy suite." the petit mal section is titled "the process of emptying an open window."

2 an explanation of all references to "the kansas city industrial music scene": in the original letter sent with promo copies of zenflesh one and two, we made a mention of this. this was a joke from several years before, when early zenflesh tapes were circulating among (occupational) friends we had in the music industry. one of them called us up and said she understood that kansas city had quite a burgeoning industrial music scene. to the best of our knowledge, kansas city’s industrial music scene has consisted of: trust obey/john bergin, chris connelly, schloss teagal, the zenflesh crowd, and a handful of others (anonymous, satan is my lord and master, …. umm, I can’t think of any others). this became a sort of in-joke we decided to use in our press kit. all of the zenflesh group of people have split kc, and we really have no idea what is going on there now.
we would like to take this opportunity to distance ourselves from not only kansas city (although our roots lay there, future records will feature personnel living in san francisco, los angeles, new orleans, minneapolis, new mexico, and elsewhere, including kansas city), but also industrial music (which doesn’t really mean anything, really) and "the scene" (zenflesh does not consider itself part of any "scene" – quite the contrary we are quite happy putting out whatever music we want for whoever wants to listen to it.)
[PS - *2003* this is a complete and total lie from a few years ago. Missouri (Kansas City-St. Louis-Columbia axis) had an incredible music scene from 1987-93, and I've yet to come across it's equal in my geographical wanderings...]

 
© 2007 Angry Marbles Media