Fuck Buttons : Street Horrrsing
Noise—as opposed to sound—disrupts everyday perception. It can point to disjunctions ignored in the assumption of a whole, but also to hidden unities and false discrepancies. Fuck Buttons, the Bristol, UK duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, for the most part take up the second function. They aim to blow minds and collapse boundaries, toward a movement beyond. This is a precarious mission to assign oneself. Failure will immediately reveal itself—the impotence of what was conceived as grandeur. By channeling a proclivity for drone and distortion in a melodic direction, Fuck Buttons are able to avoid such a sad fate and truly draw the revelatory out of apparent discord.
The seven songs that make up the 49 and a half minutes of their debut, Street Horrrsing, overwhelm but do not alienate. That is not to say that plenty of people won’t immediately turn away from its cavernous distortion, or the squelching subterranean voices imbedded within. Amid the seeming chaos, however, a sense of calm emerges. The disparate parts are forged into a grudging harmony, an alchemical transfiguration. Raw aggression—incomprehensible growls, howls and chimpanzee shrieks; a vast ether of static-soaked drones—is part of Street Horrrsing‘s profound calm, a calm stretching from beginning to end which persists in the face of violence, of one’s own capacity for violence and of the violence perceived in the world pressing in from without.
The opening track, “Sweet Love for Planet Earth,” moves from the gentle chiming of bells into waves of droning melody and transmissions mouthed in primeval human tongues, finally settling into a spacious sonic plateau. From the juncture of the constituent elements arises a sense of tranquility enmeshed in disorder. Not of either being subjugated to the other, but existing together in a dialectic relationship which sustains them both. A magic trick. The collapsing of an assumed duality.
Maybe this is all to say that I am the kind of guy that likes to be enveloped in a cloud of benevolent distortion. This would be a bad thing if I were looking to that kind of overwhelming experience as a respite from, rather than a replenishing of, reality. A room to the side with only one door leading back, rather than a chamber opening out into a labyrinth of other rooms, large and small. The physical center of Street Horrrsing is composed of two tracks, “Okay, Let’s Talk about Magic” and “Race You to the Bedroom—Spirit Rise,” which embody nearly 20 minutes of bracing sheets of distortion held together by drawn out organ-tone melodies. One must make a passage through them, through the unstable images that they draw to the surface. Memories of dreams, things that may have happened or did happen, of films, of people, of landscapes, of futures.
On the other side there is a steady beat, “Bright Tomorrow,” semblance of arriving somewhere more static, sunlight and the slow motion of an early morning hour. The rupture comes suddenly, an explosion droning on and on, magnifying the mesmeric beauty of the track. “Bright Tomorrow” was understandably the first single from the album, the first taste, but to hear it in the context of the album is to hear it anew. The same goes for the entirety of Street Horrrsing. Each track transitions coherently to the next and adds context to what surrounds it. Nihilism gives over to euphoria, anticipation to satisfaction.
There are a lot of people out there fascinated by noise, but not so many that are able to do with it what the Fuck Buttons do. I look forward to the day when the expression “Who pushed the fuck button?” slips into the parlance of our times.
Similar Albums:
Boredoms – Super æ
Black Dice – Beaches and Canyons
White Rainbow – Prism of Eternal Now
MP3: “Bright Tomorrow”
Download at 