NON
Receive The Flame

If it is necessary to acknowledge Boyd Rice the status of a pioneer in the field of noise/power electronics (let’s remember that the American prankster has been active on the scene since the mid-seventies and was one of the initiators of proletarian-derived noise electronics, at least when it comes to the exploration of a new language, regardless of the validity of the content); if Boyd Rice was among the first to work on tape manipulation and to conceive a certain perverse use of the turntable, it is equally necessary not to turn a blind eye to the obvious technical and creative limitations of an “artist” who, from the mere point of view of record production, over the years seems to have dragged himself tiredly between irreverent provocations and successful collaborations.

In short, it is fair to consider our protagonist as a clumsy alchemist who, in the dawn of time, had the flash of inventing the first cocktail in history: a crude mixture of alcohol and crap. Hence, he is credited with the original idea, but while in the meantime various mojitos, Cuba libres, Bloody Marys, and vodka oranges were being perfected, Boyd Rice remained and still remains fundamentally tied to his peculiar rum-based on crap (at most in flambé version, with a flame that burns your face).

From the origins to today, the ideas seem to be always the same, the usual few and poorly developed (drones like clouds of crazy flies and stew of sounds repeated in frenetic loops, while a hairy australopithecine hand turns the volume knob). Album after album, Rice fails to find (but it’s probably not even his goal) the squaring of the circle: his brutal and imperfect art as a slacker of the most extreme electronics retains the fascination of the extreme, but it often also carries an unbearable sense of charlatanry; and if with the previous “God & Beast” our protagonist managed to patch things up thanks to the contribution of a handful of excellent guests (Douglas P., Rose McDowall, etc.), this “Receive in Flame”, dating back to the year 2000, could instead be quietly defined as one of the lowest points of the already not so exciting NoN discography.

From “Blood & Flame” onwards, the soup is more or less the same, but it’s not just the perseverance in using the same recipe that tires the listener. In this case, it’s the soup itself, lukewarm and more insipid than usual, that makes it so after two spoonfuls, the gourmet is forced to leave the spoon in the plate and turn their palate elsewhere.

For my part, even though not particularly passionate about a musician like Rice, I have managed to accept his more solid and compact works, both from a stylistic and conceptual point of view: thematic essays on the impossibility of universal harmony, continuously denied by an organic imbalance given by the fierce struggle of irreconcilable forces. And if this vision often easily turns into a sonic cynicism that sees war as the intrinsic driver of history, human society as a faithful reflection of a terrible jungle where the strongest is destined to crush the weakest and where struggle is the inevitable axis on which the human story moves (and from this perspective “Might!” was its most vivid manifesto), what’s missing in “Receive the Flame” is precisely a stylistic and conceptual glue that holds the parts together, as if the extreme character of the platter lies more in the deconstruction of the sounds than in their assembly. And the premature and unnatural birth given by Rice (see Cesarean section at the fifth month of pregnancy with a butcher's knife) this time brings to light a tiny (thirty-five minutes) and deformed being (eight tracks that often have little to do with each other, oscillating between the most brutal noise and passages of disjointed melody). The result is such that we end up missing Rice's thundering voice and the trotting of military parade-like percussion, totally absent this time around, which so much had outraged us in the past for the shameful message they conveyed.

There are certainly some positive moments. For example, the opener “Alpha” isn’t bad at all, constituting a whirling nightmare in which the dissonant scores of a buzzing and ramshackle orchestra repeat in the most typical “nonian” pattern, generating in the listener the most typical “nonian” vision, namely: imminent end, apocalypse at the door, it’s time to receive and reciprocate blows.

Then everything, as per the script, abruptly stops at the most beautiful moment, and here we are already led to another obscenity. But the most obscene Rice is precisely the one that descends from the throne of noise (the only thing he does decently) to crawl on the ground and embrace that strange thing called melody: the modus operandi is the same, namely taking a 3-4 second sonic giblet and repeating it for 3-4 minutes. In this sense, tracks like “Spectre” and “Solitude” are quite ugly, animated by a piano played childishly and drum machines loaded in a haphazard manner. If in this case, the sense of sound exploration is in reaching the horrid, we can say that Rice hits the target fully (happy for him...).

It’s better then to focus on the useless seven minutes of “Monism”, if only because its vacuous wavering of drones, electric guitar feedback, and chanting synthesizers doesn't harm the hearing and at the same time doesn't offend the intellect.

Worth noting is the participation in the operation by Joel Haering (brass), Alex Buder (electric violin), and Bob Ferbrache of Blood Axis, who with his organ will illuminate certain passages of the work, as happens in “Medici Mass”, which tinges with the sacred a work devoted to the utmost inconclusiveness.

With “Omega,” the circle closes (usual creaking orchestra with electric violin), bringing the work back to the atmospheres that had opened the dance, but even the infamous pattern of the snake swallowing its tail fails to give organicity to a work that really amounts to little, and whose intent seems to be precisely to jar the listener's nerves.

Could this be the underlying intent of our young stag?

Good rum & crap to all!