Dead Hollywood Stars - Gone West
"The main idea was to literally 'go west'," John Sellekaers explains of his new project, Dead Hollywood Stars, "to play with the idea of a classic western atmosphere and to twist it as much as possible." Sellekaers, more known for his releases under a variety of pseudonyms on labels such as Hushush, Ant-Zen, Hymen, Sub Rosa, and Foton, teams up with several of his regular conspirators to tackle the popular conceptions of the western soundtrack. Claiming to take back country and western music from the achey-breaky "my love left me for his pick-up truck" sentimentality that it has been saddled with, Sellekaers and company craft a soundtrack for the Wild West of the nineteenth-century that isn't so much a point-to-point recreation of the past but rather a digital-reconstruction colored by the processes of the future.
After a brief fade-in with drifting static and the stretched voices of lost children, Gone West picks up a sprightly banjo melody and layers it over a click-track perfect drum beat, a glitchy, wiggly rhythm that is strictly a digital creation. Sellekaers et al continue their recreations of a period long gone with "Jigsaw Motel," crafting the sounds of an empty one-street town, the wind blowing doors and shutters back against worn wooden walls, the dust crackling against bleached steps. And their twisting of the genre continues as ghostly choral voices more at home in a dark ambient release on Cold Meat Industry flow behind the peal of an old church bell, and distant hurdy-gurdy melodies that you're sure you've heard under the garish lights of traveling carnivals weave around the pneumatic hiss of starship doors.
Their vision of the American West has a spectral spookiness to it; it is Westworld brought to life -- the cold face of Yul Brynner straight out of The Magnificent Seven with half of his robot visage showing. As the lonely ode to solitary gunslinger's perpetually roaming exile of "Amongst the Stars" fades into the pop melody of "Afterlife (see you later)," it's time to bring up a wagon and a couple of pine boxes. A Small, Good Thing's Slim Westerns and Steve Roach and Roger King's Dust to Dust have been the unstoppable gang running this town for the last ten years. But they're in trouble now. John Sellekaers has just come over the hill with Gone West and the sun is gleaming off his twin six-shooters and shiny badge.
John Sellekaers
Mad Monkey Records [2000]
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