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Review: 'Corduroy Institute'
'Eight/Chance/Meetings'   

-  Album: 'Eight/Chance/Meetings'
-  Genre: 'Punk/New Wave'

Our Rating:
What caught my eye about the pitch from Corduroy Institute, a duo from San Diego wasn’t their citation of Cathal Coughlan’s ‘Song of Co-Aklan’ as their album of the year so far, but the prominent mention of cut-ups as a feature of their new album, Eight/Chance/Meetings – a title that which by tangential word association and mental intertext called to mind Nurse With Wound’s seminal 1979 debut, ‘Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella’. This association isn’t entirely random, at least in my own mind: that tile, with its conglomeration of seemingly random objects is quintessentially surreal in its nature, and it was out of the lineage Dada and Surrealism that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs evolved the cut-up technique, which found favour with many artists, poets, writers, and musicians over the years, perhaps most famously David Bowie.

And so the lyrics for this album were composed using the method, and what’s more, they’ve done it conventionally – that is to say, by cutting up newspapers and the like and cobbling together the fragments of text at random – or some approximation of random – to create intriguing juxtapositions and unusual images amidst non-linear word sequences. These words are accompanied by music ‘created through pure improvisation’ but ‘unified by a unique concept’ whereby, ‘before each improvisation… [they] used a random number generator to select two albums which informed the spirit of the new piece. It’s a bit John cage, although Cage’s application of the ransom clearly sits within the same domain as the cut-ups, as well as Burroughs and Gysin’s tape experiments of the late 50s and early 60s.

Adding a further dimension to the process, each track necessitated the inclusion of two albums as a source of influence, and while it’s not always entirely clear how this aspect of the creative process necessarily manifested itself on each individual track, there’s a list of the sixteen albums that shaped the songs on the album. It’s inevitable that in drawing on albums as points of influence / reference in the creative process, elements of these will filter through. And so, as they explain, ‘While not subscribing to the tenets of any exact genre, the experimental pop music on this record implies post-punk, noise pop, dream pop, goth, and the exploratory sounds of early industrial music’. Seeing Foetus’ groundbreaking ‘Hole’ alongside Simple Minds’ ‘Empires and dance’ in the pile makes perfect sense, although there’s more of David Bowies ‘Hunky Dory’ (also on the list) in evidence, particularly in the vocal delivery. Then again, how much do we accept this as pure truth, with The Wedding Present and Eric Clapton on display as influences for an album that seemingly owes more to Cabaret Voltaire and Xiu Xiu (it took me a while to place the vocals, but the style is very much Jamie Stewart)? Well, with their catalogue including two volumes if ‘The Gedge Journal of Dalliance Studies’, it seems they really are big pans of The Wedding Present, or they’ve taken irony to a special level. As a teenage Weddoes fan, it makes sense, although any kitchen sink dramas on ‘Eight/Chance/Meetings’ can be found draining down a plughole filled with reverb.

Sometimes, experimentalism – especially when formalised in structural /methodological terms – can detract from the quality and listenability of the end product. On ‘Eight/Chance/Meetings’, Corduroy Institute keep one sidelong-gazing eye on their surroundings while focusing on the tunes.

‘Eight/Chance/Meetings’ is both whimsical and intense, veering between brooding minimal electronic post-punk, with vintage drum machines and their distinctive synthetic whipcrack snare cutting through murky, off-kilter synthscapes.

‘An Interpretation of Our Own Story’ goes even weirder, and gets a bit Scot walker, while also throwing in some jazz flavours alongside the post-punk vibes, and ‘These Variations of Grey’ sounds like Marc Almond circa 1983 bastardizing The Cure’s ‘The Lovecats’. It’s great, but it is overtly weird and difficult – and there is nothing wrong with that.

With so much music being little more than aural wallpaper and acts wanting to get songs on ads just to make payola, ‘Eight/Chance/Meetings’ is refreshing in that it embraces its own strangeness and promotes it from within. The best kind of weird shit.

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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