This is the album art for Album Di Merda, by Olelé Brut. I... don't even. But, it's basically a cow with a little girls face standing at pasture while being stroked by a giantess' hand with a tail pinned on it and having a snake rubbed in it's face by some other giant humanoid covered in little pink barnacles. That's the gist of it, anyway.
Artist: Olelé Brut
Title: Album Di Merda
Label: Noise-Joy
Cat#: NJCDR-0002
Keywords: Folk Rock, Surf, Abstract, Noise, Chiptune
Reviewer: Alex Spalding
This was the third CD-R release that I put out at Noise-Joy. It came out in a glossy cardboard sleeve and looked very nice! It’s no longer available though, and hasn’t been for a long time now, but finally you can check it out on archive.org! Once I started doing discs I was sure I had to get this artists’ music on one as soon as possible. I had first fallen in love with his work when he sent in an EP from a group he was in called Tango Mango, which was a very lofi and experimental synth-driven DaDa industrial thing with collage art. He continued submitting pieces to me under the alias Heavy Metal thoughout the run of my net-label, each with amazingly bizarre collages. This was a newer project of his, another group I think, and was a bit different from his previous work. It took me forever, being broke, to fund it’s limited release, and after it was finished I was never able to send any copies to the artist even though I had put them together in a box along with my copy of the Principia Discordia which I felt he might appreciate. When I tried to mail it off I was told I had to provide a “real” address. Apparently, according to fed-ex and UPS, people in Spain don’t have “real” addresses. I’m still bitter over this, but like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, I’m going into the past now to right this wrong… and will hope Olelé Brut will appreciate it being available after all this time!
It begins with ‘Cristo On The On’. There is tape hiss and then acoustic guitar… then the vocals come in with a touch of echo. It’s very folky and DaDa, and sounds like it was recorded live. It’s very nice!
Next is ‘Marinero Blanco’, featuring some syntoms for a bit, then a rapid chip arpeggio comes in along with some subtle noise. The arps are flying up and down at light speed, like an Atari on dope.
There are some really nice electronic sounds on ‘Laptop Remix’, a shimmering electro thing, some deep sawtooth waves reverberating, another chip arpeggio, strange vocal samples, electro splashes. It turns into a noisy carnival of sound, lots of fun!
‘Gaston Modot’ begins in a whirl of lofi sound, even more of a carnivalesque feel, like being on a sickly merry-go-round in a nightmare. A distorted electro march begins… fart-in-a-pillow drums, plonking electro snare / xylophone sounds, fuzz-flute and synth bass combine in a dizzy tango of strange noises.
There’s a spinning electronic sound at the beginning of ‘I’m Waitin For Tomorrow’, which then turns into a morose low-fidelity ballad of some kind, with echoing vocals, cheap piano-timbre synthesizers. There are some really nice avantgarde electro bits later on! One of my favourite pieces from this album.
‘Puzzle Fatal’ starts with some static and then this really deep, low bass comes in along with chip arpeggios and various nice synth melodies! It’s very chiptune and messy / lofi. It just seems to get wilder as it goes. This is also one of my favourite bits of music on the album, haha! Ends in a pile of synthnoises.
‘Raimon Nana’ begins with a very short clip of sampled vocals before scrapping that and adding a minimal synthetic bell tone sequence. Little flourishes of arpeggiated tones come in, making it really abstract and pretty for the length of the track… or at least until the end, when the tones morph into these buzzing noises with filtering, causing them to flit in and out, up and down in the mix briefly.
‘Hawaii Ventolin’ is another one of my favourites from this album, if not my number one! It’s like a hard surf track, but lofi and sort of experimental! It totally thrashes, very fucking nice.
‘Xpressway To Yr Skull’ comes in with a bit more folk sound, with acoustic guitar and vocals. It’s a very pretty song with fun lyrics.
The final track is ‘Vomitando’. There are echoey lasers, we’re covered in a blanket of ice cold pads like stars in the night sky, which shatter and fall like so much glass. Every so often all the sounds get hot in the mix and together become this really distorted bass sound. Toward the end, short-decay synth stabs with a lot of delay just kind of sparkle around in an abstract fashion.
This is a highly varied and eclectic work, worth hearing in it’s entirety. You can find it at the link below… as always, music and love!
Yeah I Know It Sucks 