BLACK PUS
The Exchange, Bristol | September 20th
Those of you who’ve had the distinct pleasure of experiencing Rhode Island’s greatest noise mongers Lightning Bolt live will understand the jaw-dropping qualities of its members’ musicality. Lynchpin drummer/vocalist Brian Chippendale is the one-man band, Black Pus; a project born from a joke amongst the fledging artist group known as Hilarious Attic. Black Pus has now been a reality for eight years, with the prolific Chippendale – or ‘Hundred Arms’, as he’s also known – performing and recording an impressive catalogue.
For a night on which we’ve prepared for anything, the first surprise about tonight’s show is how poorly attended it is. The place seems cavernous compared to when The Melvins played to a packed room a few months back. Nonetheless, to an extent this makes the show feel that much more special. Brooklyn’s Dan Friel appears onstage with what appears to be a homemade keyboard embellished with effects units and twinkly lights. The music squeezed out of it is mesmerising and fairly extreme. This is pop channeled through a fucked-with circuit board and eked out of the most busted of blown speakers. He manages to mangle Linda Ronstandt’s When Will I Be Loved, mutating its pure pop aesthetic into a Sega Megadrive soundtrack, and the crowd lap it up with mouths agape.
Then the masked marauder appears. Surrounded by his drum kit, multiple effects units and oscillators, the crowd form a semi-circle around him; smiling, bobbing heads anticipating the assault like sonic masochists in a tripped out Japanese endurance show. Black Pus immediately becomes a mass of windmilling limbs, kicking the shit out of his kit with a terrifying, unhinged ferocity. The ecstatic noise he emanates gradually forms warped structures, a sense of rhythm from the madness. He performs tracks from his many albums, yet it all melds into one long stream of unconsciousness. His pneumatic pummels are fleshed out by electronic dabblings; no words are garnered from the sound emerging from the mic hidden beneath his crude mask, merely yelps and growls.
Chippendale’s commitment to keeping his expression pure and uncompromising leaves the audience feeling very much a part of the experiment. Witnessing this force at first hand leaves an indelible mark, as we venture into the night with rhythmic pummels and unholy screams failing to decay within besotted minds. The underground music scene simply needs figures like this; these are the people who consistently take music’s boundaries to broader and more vital extremes.
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Words: Philip James Allen
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