First thing’s first: I love the name Me, Claudius for a
musical project. I actually went to YouTube
to find the Sesame Street skit from which the enigmatic English tape sorceress
pinched the moniker, and it brought back a wave of nostalgia. Now take the name of this tape: Good Diz, Bad Bird. As far as I can tell, this isn’t bebop, and
there aren’t any horns or saxes to be found.
There’s certainly a sense of virtuosity at play, as the artist is a wiz
with the ferrous loops – slicing, dicing, and mangling her samples until they fold
in on themselves in a repetitive haze of maximalist minimalism. There is genius here, and it becomes apparent
when one navigates deep into the crevices of this evocative cassette.
The first side of the tape is one lengthy beast of a piece,
eponymous and difficult to pin down. Piano
chords stagger, stutter, and turn on themselves until they become a pool of
undifferentiated timbre and tone. Disembodied
voices and a percussive rhythm eventually overtake the piano maelstrom, along with
shards of white noise that are smeared into the sonic equivalent of
extracellular fluid. This is musical DNA
being replicated, mutated, carved up and manipulated by an expert pair of
hands.
On the flip is the diptych called “Lifestyle”. Both pieces feature damaged drum machine
loops in some regard, and both travel in an orbit where dubbed out Foley
effects and an ever-present beeping noise are commonplace. The second half is where strange becomes
bizarre: the beats become subterranean and barely existent while the noises (including
what sounds like a pneumatic nail gun being discharged repeatedly) are at the forefront
and ring clearly. Imagine going clubbing
in a busy construction site and you get the picture.
