Ultra Milkmaids - Pop Pressing
As Pop Pressing opens, I wonder if my CD player is damaged. "1...2...4...6" lurches and disappears, and I have to struggle to find the lyrical thread in the damaged melodies which stutter and burp from my speakers. Then, suddenly, "1...2...4...6" is gone, and I'm dropped into a field recording of birds. When the guitar melody surfaces once more -- several minutes into "My Electric Ladddy Land" -- the digitized breakdown of its sound is still there, filled with hollows and excised chunks that leave empty spaces within the body of the melody. My ambience is disturbed by digital artifacting: this is the effect the Ultra Milkmaids have on records.
During interviews over the last year or so, the Ultra Milkmaids have threatened to do a pop record. Those familiar with the Milkmaids -- brothers Jan and Rodolphe, who operate without a number of safety nets including the security of a familial name -- know that their method of glitching minimalism hardly encompasses the idea of a pop record. Those familiar with the Milkmaids have waited for Pop Pressing with a hint of apprehension and glimmer of caution. As it turns out, Pop Pressing is music that has been bleached into near silence before being randomly sliced into a thousand splintered bits. The Ultra Milkmaids recorded a "pop" record and then disassembled it -- leaving pieces out, destroying whole phrases and instrumentation, performing cut-up operations with the precision and arbitrariness of a skilled surgeon whacked out of his mind on speedballs.
"Nenver" is a tone and drone piece fabricated from the extranenous tape of the brothers tuning their instruments. All sound has purpose and possibility for the Milkmaids, and the broad drones and particular finger-picking of a slightly tuned guitar become a wash of ambient sound, a coalescing of the musical atmosphere prior to a more refined recording session. The first minute of "Pop Star" is nothing more than the hum of an amplifier, waiting for input. The Milkmaids channel Kevin Shields into the studio and the guitar unleashes a storm of sound, the thick layers of sound colliding and echoing like the endlessly multiplying brooms of Disney's Fantasia. The acoustic "Balade" starts in the country with its single guitar and bird song. But they are invaded by the echoes of "Pop Star" as the shimmering wall of guitar noise wanders into the pastoral landscape. "My Personal TV System" is a bit of surf music buried beneath a shivering buzz of static energy as if the surf were included, transcribed as digital noise.
The final track, "New Wmind," is a nod to Sonic Youth and Scenic and Dick Dale even, a coherent instrumental landscape which would one could find on any of their records. It is only in the final minutes that the Ultra Milkmaids apply their stuttering, slicing methodology again, reminding us of their intent: Pop Pressing is all about breaking songs down, breaking songs apart, and discovering how much can be removed before the melody loses its cohesion. Here lies fractured listening.
Ultra Milkmaids
Ant-Zen [2003]
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