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Gum's music consisted entirely of locked grooves, vinyl surface noise derived from the duo's destruction of thrift store acquisitions. You could say that Gum were early "turntablists" before there was a scene or a school for such a thing, before the instrumentalists' concern for technique spoiled it, before the community of practice turned it into "an artform". They presaged serious turntablists and noisicians like Philip Jeck, Otomo Yoshihde, Martin Tretault, Merzbow, Janek Schaefer. At their best, Gum rendered absolute minimal abstractions into foreground role, musically, playing off the residual, vestigial remains of sounds that threaten contextualization but routinely fail to deliver. Exquisite sound poems like "Smooth Torture in Exile" hold all of the manufactured memory that old vinyl carries, mangled just enough so the sounds don't divulge their sources and muddy the waters with 'reference'. The sounds come to represent only themselves and, as this collection demonstrates, these stand up to time. The results of decomposition, trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.
With the Gum releases largely out of print, "Vinyl Anthology" collects most of the recorded output, rarities and several live performances on a two-disc set that is as important to the history of plunderphonia and turntablism as it is an exhausting and frustrating listen. The ten cuts on Disc One comprise the “Vinyl” LP and include two outtakes and a 20-minute 1987 live performance.
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Disc Two includes several pieces done for compilations originally pressed by RRRecords, Korm Plastics, and some never having seen the lights of day (including a complete dismantling of TV Eye, their failed submission for a Stooges tribute record that sounds like a prototype for Wolf Eyes' Dread). Also included are the recordings of Gum’s second album, “20 Years in Blue Movies and Yet to Fake an Orgasm”. Some of it is of only passing interest, boring and montonous in hindsight. But if occasionally marred by tiresome stretches of incidental moodiness ("Melted Limp Fallout"), the best moments outrun the arch-conceptualism of similar practictioners like Christian Marclay with an exhuberant recklessness and an inability to strike a detached posture -- a saving grace. In contrast to respected art-world turntablists like Marclay (working at the same time as Gum) or Schaefer, whose works exist primarily in phenomenological explorations of process and medium, most of the tracks on the Gum set are unfocused, messy, exhiliratingly amateur, rippling with enthusiastic damage, frenzied and visceral manipulations of sound that are occasionally allowed to be fragile and lithe, even pretty (for a moment). There is no unified theory, a lot of missteps. There is also no shortage of gold. As with the cassette tape-based recordings of Aki Onda, the strongest pieces (like "Okefenokee", "Banning", and "Smooth Torture in Exile") make poetic and musical the residue of the medium itself in addition to the underlying recordings (which in the case of Gum are almost always obscured beyond recognition).
Gum were at their least interesting when attempting to be clever or blatantly conceptual. The few willfully transgressive pieces with a 'point' (god save us from music with punchlines), like 1-800-GUM (a phone sex recording served on a severed bed of Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" soundtrack) or bits of the "Live at Hard Times" track (beginning by pitting the BeeGees' "Staying Alive" against shards of locked groove noise) that take easy targets, slings simpleminded arrows, generally age less well than those pieces unmarred by the missteps of young artists concerned more with heavy-handed 'saying' than listening.
Still, if some of the titles, samples and sonic colors (e.g. "Outfits for Agony") betray a misanthropic, uncritical youthful fascination with darkness and violence (of the horror movie cliché variety) the bravery and meticulousness of much of this material suggest that the punk experiment went slightly awry: if the seeds of Gum germinated in a fascination with destructive action, these 'authors of error' were clearly not content with the mere process and fell in love with the sounds themselves. By the second record it is clear that they had lost themselves in curisosity, in sculpture, in honoring and ornamenting their dis-constructions as legitimate standalone work.
Curtis is now a photographer. Samartzis records stoic, immersive musique concrete-inspired records on Staalplat, Dorobo and his own Microphonics label, and is also a lecturer at RMIT university. If Samartzis' current work is solid and defensible, smarter, leaner, I can't shake the feeling that his juvenilia is simply more inspired (even when it was bad). This collection is an essential document of abstract turntablism and noise for that small community who feel such things to be essential. At high volumes it will also piss off your parents more effectively than the last nordic black metal record you just bought. I promise.
William S. Fields - Stylus Magazine
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