My computer -- built from scratch four months ago from the best and fastest components I could find, and state of the art for six glorious days -- has developed an annoying new glitch. Once every day or two it will drop its external IP address without warning or obvious cause, and the next media file to be played after this happens, whether it's an alarm sound or an MP3 or an audio/video clip, will "skip" like a scratched CD until the machine is turned off. I don't lose any work, per se; it's just a nuisance, as I can't get back on the internet until I've saved all my work, closed all the apps, the machine has been rebooted and the IP address has been released and renewed. For that reason, digital skipping can raise my hackles like nobody's business.
I'm not just mentioning this in the spirit of us all getting better acquainted. I think Lesser knows that this noise not only annoys me but causes a physical response. I imagine he slipped it into Gearhound's mix for precisely that reason.
The thing is, I'm not alone. The majority of Gearhound seems to have been designed to irritate people. Intractable sound-clashing gives way to nagging familiarity, ear-piercing noise segues into pop song samples and seemingly aimless clamor gradually reveals the presence of a strict rhythmic structure. This Lesser guy -- purportedly J Dserck, a touring member of Matmos, a cohort of noise boffin Kid 606, a recording studio terrorist and much more -- seems to enjoy getting under people's skins, taking his music to the very edge of tolerance and then laughing as he shows us how traditional his compositions really are. If his music was just a little bit harder on the ears, that'd be fine; we'd turn it off. Problem solved. But Lesser's music constantly hints at a payoff, which keeps us from turning it off. If Listenability was a town, Lesser's the guy who'd build his house six inches inside the border.
If you've ever heard an Oval or Pole record, experienced Plunderphonic-style noise-wrangling or even developed an appreciation for the Aphex Twin's most minimal material, Gearhound won't give you heart palpitations. Though digital production techniques, and deconstructionist perversions thereof, have vastly increased the options available to the standard twitch-'n'-glitch-monger, the spirit of these recordings doesn't stray far from the modus operandi of first-tier noisemakers like Throbbing Gristle (whose seminal "Hamburger Lady" is logically acknowledged here by "Cheeseburger Lady"). You'll hear overmodulated sounds, hypercompressed sounds, voices and music hacked apart and reassembled and passed through a dizzying variety of digital filters. Drum 'n' bass rhythms collapse into chaos, free jazz mutates beyond the audible spectrum, hip-hop vocals and beats warp into frenetic skip-collages... Lesser squeezes a wide swath of popular music into his rattletrap blender and grinds it into a semi-organic puree, one third rock music and two thirds computerized panic attack.
"For Irritant" deploys an arsenal of nails-on-blackboard dissonance, but its annoyance level is undermined by order; there's enough structure here to get you to listen a second time, and each play reveals a greater conventionality. The four-part "Gearhound Suite" begins with a sensory overload of drums and processed riffs, then narrows its focus to a stripped-down beat and melody. As energy wanes and a piano enters the mix, a Beulah song intrudes, muffled and distant, as if it's being played at top volume by Lesser's downstairs neighbor. In its final movement, the piece begins to evolve into a hard-edged drum 'n' bass rhythm...and that's where we leave it. "Obligatory Glitch Worship" hints at the humor behind Lesser's work; as the title implies, the piece begins as little more than digital "static", a sustained sequence of pop-and-click artefacts clubbed into rhythmic alignment and dragged through a palpable spatial field under a variety of effects settings. More interesting material -- disjointed music and voices -- drifts in and out of perception.
I've heard a lot of recordings that could be described as sounding like Gearhound, but few of them seem to share Lesser's goals. For one thing, he's no minimalist; while his individual elements might be rendered in their digitally absolute form, Lesser doesn't hesitate to add additional layers to his compositions. He has more in common with Negativland than Markus Popp, though he shows more interest in confusing, poking and prodding his listeners than in offering any kind of subversive cultural commentary. I suspect he'd rather dismantle and reassemble the zeitgeist than tweak it.
In the end, Gearhound reduces itself to a delicious piece of circular thought: Lesser's perceived efforts to annoy the listener have created an album that's almost irritatingly entertaining. The more you try not to accept Gearhound as pleasurable listening, the more you notice all the conventional entertainment secreted within its abrasive compositions. People who find it easy to dismiss Gearhound as unlistenable probably don't like music at all.
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