Ah, how to describe? Maybe if Eugene Chadbourne had gone into tape collage instead of shockabilly, he might have been Gus Coma. There's a similar kitchen sink aesthetic at work here as well as an over-infatuation with fish-in-a-barrel socio-political targets that gets extremely tiresome after a while, much less after two CDs worth.
These tracks, all 56 of them (mostly quite short, with lengthier "bonus cuts" appended to the tail of each disc), were cobbled together from cassette recordings originally issued in the early 80s. They're a mélange of free jazz squalls that sound like they could have sprung from the Mascara Snake's distant cousin, random noises of the impolite variety and, most gratingly, snippets of instructional tapes and other arch cultural detritus that's painfully intended to remind the listener of the cultural shallowness in which he/she wallows, as though that wasn't apparent to anyone with an IQ greater than a bowl of potato soup. It's that implied condescension that makes the set tough to abide, much as mid-80s Chadbourne's assaults on religious wackos, Dan Quayle, corrupt police, etc. were yawn-inducing in their obviousness. Perhaps it could be better described as Negativland without the wit.
Were the pure sonics more interesting, there still might be something to salvage, but they tend toward the routine, with otherwise intriguing pieces like "The Infiltrators" marred by overuse of those omnipresent early-80s drum machines; not Coma's fault, I suppose, but still difficult to bear. An over-dubbed chorus of male voices dreamily singing, "infiltration", threads its way through the tracks on the first disc in a manner that almost sounds proto-Lynchian but, again, without the same kind of resonance so essential for this type of endeavor.
Post-Chabourneites, rejoice! Others, beware.
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