Bladder Flask
One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling

"One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling" (1981) is one of those records often described as abstract: a totally uncategorizable, dadaist, free work, outside any existing prefabricated genre, contextless, alien to labels, currents, movements. It is the sound of experimentation beyond all limits. Creativity turned into music, the complete rejection of the shabby canons of Western music, of song form, harmonies, scales, metrics, notations, tunes, structures, and all those brake-rules still far too accepted and followed, even by those who, like experimentalists, put themselves there, quite pretentiously. It is good to underline, however, how concepts such as total experimentation - very different from the basic one - and abstraction in music, have rarely found such a worthy manifesto as happens with this album.

Behind the Bladder Flask project, we find two minds not at all new to gigantic experiments, the brothers Philip and Richard Rupenus, already active, among other projects and name changes, as Dada Duo (an aka as appropriate as ever), Funeral Danceparty, Metgumbnerbone (under which the ritualistic cult disc "Ligeiahorn" was released), Masstishaddhu (notable appearance on the United Dairies of His Majesty Steven 'Nurse With Wound' Stapleton, who wants them with him right after adoring the review) and the unforgettable collective Mixed Band Philanthropist (the last two with only Richard involved - aided by other madmen like the never-too-celebrated Stan 'Broken Penis Orchestra' Reed, producing another of the most experimental albums of all time, the monumental "The Impossible Humane"), but above all the headsof one of the most radical industrial acts history has ever welcomed, The New Blockaders, with whom they philosophized creating what they would later call 'anti-music' or 'anti-composition'.

However, this project, while keeping this school of thought alive, distances itself from the noisy industrialisms of works like the famous "Changez Les Blockeurs": describing this work, in fact, from the height of its very high abstraction, is quite arduous if not impossible; however, we can associate it with certain key masterpieces that see the absence of any type of barriers or square-ups: the most extreme and free forms of concrete music, records like "Klopfzeichen", "Trout Mask Replica", "Eskimo", "Bitches Brew", "Dogs Blood Rising", "UAISCM4:Tlaloc", "Untilted" and "Pigs for Lepers", the freest jazz free and less jazz, the '60s collages of Stockhausen, the abstractions of Curran, Tazartès, and Lucier, much of the surrealist '80s work of people like Nurse With Wound, Hafler Trio, Un Drame Musical Instantané, the most adventurous digital experiments of the 2000s, or perhaps the most fitting, the legendary piece by Frank Zappa "Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula", the latter among the very first examples of a certain approach to the manic manipulation of tapes, which represents here the bulk of the work. Let's now think of the sum of these monuments of experimentation and raise them more or less by a hundred times. This is "One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling", a record for those who love to push beyond, a record probably not for everyone and, it is right to repeat, one of the most experimental that has ever been conceived (the very fact that an ace of experimentation, a living encyclopedia of the 'different', and author of the historic and revered "NWW List" as Stapleton has praised it several times should make one reflect!).

If indeed it is to the overused guitar-bass-drums triptych, the accompanying keyboard, the beat marking time (or more simply the very fact that an 'organized' instrumentation/formation exists) to which you are devoted, then the risk of labeling this work as unlistenable exists. In fact, here we do not speak of realities far removed from these concepts, but in any case with a precise dimension and reason for being, such as noise, digital minimalism, drone, the most disconnected industrialisms, etc., but of a blender that blends everything possible, not even remotely approaching, not ever, something that remotely reminds what is usually indicated as a "musical genre", in fact, it destroys it already at the start, reducing to absolute nothingness the concept of genre as we know it. Someone calls it sonic nihilism. It invites imaginary people to play, tries various line-ups, various instruments, listens with disdain and puts them too into the lethal steamroller; it is a real concert of complex ultra-elaborated collages for tapes, a sort of preview to what, in more recent days, Cassetteboy will do with the great debut, or the first crazy magniloquent records of Otto Von Schirach and the same colleague Broken Penis Orchestra.

The dada manifesto of anti-music is consumed here also, and above all, using various fragments - both musical and non-musical - external, which are sampled, subjected to the special collag-istic treatment and ruthlessly devoured by the serial killer that is the experimentation of the two Englishmen, here in the guise of hungry vultures and prophets of anti-music, in a delirium of electronics, noise, and experiments of all kinds, in which these scraps intervene, making up the tasty meal, suggesting new paths, new music, ridiculing its contents. Through these techniques, the Rupenus brothers, having made Russolo's theories their own, were, in fact, among the first artists to rewrite noise in a certain way: from a form of chaos to a form of new expressive languages, or better yet, the search for new hidden expressive languages (having already been anticipated), no more nor less than a practice for those who move in today's noise forms, whether part of electronic scenarios, rooted in rock, grind, improvisation, glitch environments, etc. It is taken for granted for example to immediately think of the much more famous Prurient, author a few years ago of a poetic and touching record, but composed of only walls of noise (and among the most shocking walls ever heard, surpassing even people like Merzbow and Masonna).

Curious then is the fact of finding more ideas and experimentation in this semi-forgotten work than in all the testament of all the valued things that for experimental are passed off, even though they are not at all or at most being copies of what has already been done (I throw out a name, Royal Trux), and it is truly incredible to think how such a gem has been lost among the underground circuits of industrial avant-gardes, in the depths of abstraction, in electronic surrealism, when its status should and could be quite different (that of 'masterpiece'). In sixty minutes practically everything happens, we witness a kind of film projected into the ears, a film with a brilliant script and full of twists, a classic; we witness an abstract canvas at the moment of its conception, and then, realization. Expecting how and where it will evolve is not humanly possible. "Fuck Beatles!" said dear Stapleton... a citation that comes to our aid; we can, in fact, compare a Beatles record to a painter intending to draw a face, while refining the eyes: observing the work it will soon be easy to guess that it is indeed the eyes that he is now working on, just as it will be easy to guess a silly refrain (cit.) at that point, a little guitar here, an innocent verse there. For records like this, it is the exact opposite, representing listening that is not only enjoyable or involved, but above all 'new', stimulating and multi-directional. It is more or less the equivalent of listening - simultaneously - to fifty worn-out, damaged, played-out - tapes on fifty different systems!

Let's try to cite some passages of this canvas: "It Takes A Bliss" lasts twenty-five minutes, neglecting the frightening mass of unidentifiable sounds, and considering how all this is manipulated in the anti-musical collage roller, more or less in order follow: jar solos, chains and assorted metallurgy, trombones and toy pianos, concrete noises and the first effects of the 'special' treatment undergone by the tapes (which produces schizoid sounds and continuous tonal up-and-downs), cacophonous harmonicas, 'found' sounds, whistles, laughter, guttural noises, vomiting fits, entertained children, clucking chickens, breaths distorted into the shape of the most classic white noise, a conga rhythm, a noir sax, cough, random vocalisms, a detuned electric guitar, completely violated Hawaiian slides, an unrecognizable piano, German advertisements, the cymbal of a drum and a military trumpet, a tenor - who through anti-conversion takes on the guise of a madman in delirium -, modular noises, spitting, crash hits, cries, Gypsy ensembles, drone guitar feedback, cyclical electronic drones in guitar form, barking dog, even more random vocalisms, toilet noises, a free jazz solo, banjo, a dry blues sample first played and then mercilessly decomposed, the same thing happens for a drum rhythm, a music box, motor starting, helicopter, fragments of 'musak' orchestras, people murmuring, bells, violins, and trumpets freer than ever, laughing child, deviant gargling, phone conversations.

Side B, "Musical Behind Head" is even more ruthless: one just recognizes a sax solo (already cacophonous in itself and as usual completely devastated), a double bass (even more forced), 'prepared' piano, medieval motive, random acoustic guitarisms, disco breaks, free-jazz-noise crisis like Borbetomagus, ringing phone, documentary, concretisms in abundance, frightening drones, a meowing cat, accordion... impossible to continue deciphering.

Dada means nothing. Dada is the armpit of Boyd Rice. Dada is Debaser.it. Dada is "One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling", a masterpiece of experimentation even before a totally I.N.C.A.T.A.L.O.G.A.B.L.E. record

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