Pimmon: Curse You, Evil Clown
Meupe

Sydney 's Paul Gough is a man of few words. There's next to no information adorning his latest Pimmon collection Curse You, Evil Clown—nothing about equipment used or recording details (aside from identifying Lubinskas Labs, Sydney as the locale), and the artist name appears on the spine only—and his output is infrequent too. The release in question supplements three remastered pieces originally issued on the limited-edition 3-inch CD-R Curse of Evil Clown in 2005 with three previously unreleased pieces from Gough's vault. What you get doesn't radically deviate from the established Pimmon sound but that's hardly a disappointing proposition, especially when his releases are so modest in number.

In the opener “Stumbling,” fluctuating organ smears oscillate like some virus-infected hurdy-gurdy, the woozy effect in keeping with the track title. “Dream Clown” presents a softly-illuminated electrical drone of clicks and pops while the Gas-like “Zero Gravity” spends eight minutes at the center of a willowy windstorm with faint hints of string and bass tones buried at its swirling center. The noisier side of things gets a workout in “Bottomless Trap-Hole [Scheme 4]” whose grinding squalls approximate the sound of a microphone placed inside a beat-up hot rod engine and the result amplified and distorted. Two long tracks in particular allow the Pimmon style ample room to maneuver. The closing “G-Stains” swims in a lightly simmering bath of static, pops, and hiss for an admittedly overlong thirteen minutes; fully justifying its extended duration by comparison, the harrowing “Stall and Burn” evokes the dying moments of battle amidst the smoldering ruins of a blasted landscape; during its eleven-minute running time, glistening streams rise from the ashes while sicklier tones drift alongside owl-like whooshes and steely reverberations. Though nightmarish, “Stall and Burn” is nevertheless a remarkable exercise in control and dramatic effect. Anyone new to the soundscaping drone genre could do a whole lot worse than start with Curse You, Evil Clown, especially when Gough's six tracks offer samplings of multiple styles instead of variations on a single theme.

February 2009