New Glitchy Cultural Detournements You Can Dance To From B'O'K

 

POPCHOP SHITWAVE - BUTTRESS O'KNEEL

 "Buttress O'Kneel has been chopping up pop since 1998, so, on one level, it seems almost strange that it would take until 2021's PopChop Shitwave release before she officially uses the words in an album title.  Then again, on another level, it's hard to be surprised by Buttress O'Kneel, or at this stage to really find anything she does 'strange'.  Because let's face it, in her 23 years so far, she's chopped, stretched, mashed, randomised, pummelled, breakcored, recycled, remixed, rejiggered, distorted, and broken pop music in so many different ways that really nothing seems off the cards at this point.

So, what does this, the THIRTY-FIFTH release (!) in her infamous 'compop' series, bring us?  Well, there's the usual assortment.  There's mashups - popular folk like Lil Nas X and Doja Cat being squished into each other in all sorts of illegal and inappropriate ways.  There's breakcore - amenbreaks rudely smashed onto fragments of pop music that really doesn't deserve it.   There's disrepectful humour - when poor Trent Reznor is forced to sing "I... shit myself today" on the album opener, or when Korean pop sensation Black Pink find themselves unceremoniously dumped on top of the ubiquitous Youtube background music known as 'Monkeys Spinning Monkeys'.   There's inappropriate death-metal drumming - this time rammed over the unsuspecting erotic pop groove of Doja Cat's 'I Need To Know' (last time we encountered this, it was Enya's new age surprise hit 'Orinoco Flow' that was the target).

There's automation - many pieces on the album are composed (if that's not too strong a word) by shoving raw songs into an Audiomulch set-up she calls the 'PopChopper', and pressing 'go', while other pieces are randomised using an online music tool called the 'BeatMachine', with no human involvement whatsoever. There are also the usual anagrams, references, invented genres and miscellaneous samples that we now expect from her decades-spanning modus operandi.  But there are new tricks too: in particular, the two pieces where she has, through some kind of culture-vandalistic cyber-alchemy, transformed popular singers into backwards pianos.  Why?  Well, why not.

Buttress O'Kneel makes albums that don't need to happen.  There is no hole for instance, no particular void in any imaginary parallel universe, that is shaped like a popular singer sounding like a backwards piano. This release, like the entirety of Buttress' enormous canon, scratches no itch, heals no wound, represents no generation's angst, sums up no generational zeitgeist, stands for nothing but play.

But play, simple play for the sake of play, might be what we need most right now."

Department of Opinionated Press Releases, IWML, 2021

 

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