Stone Glass Steel - Dismembering Artists
This record, released in 1999, is nearly a decade older. Completed in 1991 and "lost" for many years, Dismembering Artists is a record that exists outside of time. To call this record "dated" is to miss the point of its realization and, frankly, there isn't anyone else in the field -- now or then -- who can match Phil Easter's recontextualization ability. The basic premise of this record is that every sound you hear has been stolen from something else. The only originality you hear on these ten tracks is the fact that every sample has been raped, mangled, marred, and otherwise fucked up from its original context.
Phil now does mastering work for Malignant Sound Technologies and the chances are good if you listen to anything in the dark ambient, cinematic isolationism, noise, power electronics, apocalyptic folk, or neu-industrial experimentalism genres you've been exposed to his handiwork. In the old days, before his master hand tweaked the knobs behind the scenes, he applied his razored attention to the material surrounding him, cutting and slicing with perfect precision. Like an organ-legger with an empty van at the back gate of a body farm, Phil would load up on parts before scampering off to his secret underground lair to recontextualize the pieces. Not "reconstruct." Oh no, nothing so mundane for this mad scientist. The true magic of Stone Glass Steel lies in how the music scrambles your head, in the way in which your brain will try to attach itself to tiny pieces of music that it recognizes.
Your brain will fail. Stone Glass Steel (under his Iron Halo Device moniker) contributed a track to Ad Noiseam's initial compilation, Krach Test, called "Between the Fragile Cracks (Distillation Remix)." The context for this track was the entirety of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, and even armed with this knowledge, I had a hard time lining up each sample with a track from that sprawling monstrosity. You can imagine the near impossibility of identifying all the sources when the playing field is Phil's entire CD collection. What happens when you hear Dismembering Artists is that elements will sound familiar, but you can't quite place them. Your brain hits a disconnect when it recognizes a tiny bit of material because, while the beat or the tone or the rhythm is familiar, the surrounding context is all wrong.
This isn't sampledelia or cut-up; this is refabrication -- the building of something new out of the old. This is recycling at a highly creative level. The heavy weather patterns of sound which Phil creates are mental tsunamis which roar through your memory seas, tearing up the surface and scooping out dark hollows you've long forgotten. Listening to Stone Glass Steel is to be reminded that listening is a subjective experience. What you consciously remember from a piece of music is a small part of the whole. The rest is stored away in your brain, waiting for the liberating maelstrom of Stone Glass Steel.
Dismembering Artists is a masterpiece of sonic construction. It is part power electronics, part technoid rhythms, part isolationist soundscape, part old-school machine shop industrial. It is a compressed summation of all the work done in these genres as well as being a landmark example of the fluidity of sound. Nothing is permament. All art can be transformed, put beneath the blade or the torch and made into something new. What Will Be comes out of What Is and What Was. This record is the vibrant, eruptive expression of William Burroughs' claim that "everything is possible."
Stone Glass Steel
Malignant Records [1999]
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