Indignant Senility: Plays Wagner
Type Recordings

Under the Indignant Senility name, Portland-based Pat Maherr (who also issues material of varying genre types under the monikers DJ Yo-Yo Dieting, Sisprum Vish, and Moms Who Chop) might ‘play' Wagner but don't expect the familiar strains of the Siegfried Idyll or Prelude and Liebestod to emerge anytime soon once Maherr's finished twisting the original material into its new form. In the CD's eleven tracks (the release combines the limited vinyl editions, parts one and two, onto a single disc), Wagner's music is dragged through a murky swamp until it sounds like drowned music dredged up from a watery grave—the kind of music the small band might have played as the Titanic plunged beneath the ocean's freezing surface. That the project initially appeared as a limited cassette release on Maherr's own label last year is borne out by a lo-fi production style that presents the music as a decomposing corpse (having mastered the material from cassette tape, Type purposefully retained the grime coating the original version in order to capture the original's ‘broken' spirit). Teeming with woozy distortion and soaked in hiss, the tracks crawl through creaky, nightmarish zones where strings melt into liquid sewage and horns become rippling storm clouds. There's little point in discussing individual pieces, as it's the cumulative impression that matters most (a point reinforced by Maherr's decision to leave the tracks untitled), not the minor differences that distinguish one mutation from another. Maherr's Indignant Senility sound inhabits an underworld similar in design to Leyland Kirby's Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was , but if anything Plays Wagner plummets even deeper into the abyss. Imagine a roomful of decrepit gramophones playing decades-old classical recordings out of sync with one another and you're on your way to conjuring the entombed world of Plays Wagner.

May 2010