Greater Than One: Kill the Pedagogue
Brainwashed

Kill the Pedagogue was originally released by Greater Than One (Michael Wells and the late Lee Newman, who died in 1995 from skin cancer) in 1985 on a chrome 40-minute cassette tape and included no track titles or identification of side A or B. It also, incidentally, appeared after, ahem, Lay Your Penis Down (also 1985) and before the group's first full-length record, 1987's All the Masters Licked Me. Kill the Pedagogue's opening piece is a ghastly bit of tribal business while the second sounds like the aural track to an terrifyingly harrowing snuff film. The longest piece is eleven minutes but it's actually more like a collection of brief vignettes of varying experimental character. In many ways, the release (its first appearance on CD) is reminiscent of Ike Yard's 1980-82 Collection which was also resurrected from near-oblivion, in that case by Acute Records. Both releases are raw and primal—not surprisingly, considering their emergence in the post-punk era—in their merging of guitars, drums, and primitive electronics. Like other releases in the Brainwashed Handmade series, the release is presented in a letterpress-printed sleeve and comes equipped with images, text, and bonus audio files (including the Lay Your Penis Down material).

December 2006