Namanax!

Namanax is a noise project of Bill Yurkiewicz, Exit 13 front man and co-founder of the legendary Relapse Records.

Largely active in the mid-1990s, Namanax have since developed something of a cult following -- which is not too surprising as their records have a pretty unique, mesmerizing sound, as well as some of the coolest artwork ever.


Namanax's debut came in the form of a single-track EP called Multi-Phase Electrodynamics. Recorded and released in '93, it came in a card sleeve and is quite a rare creature indeed. All the Namanax records are OOP now but this first one I've never even seen*.


The full-length follow-up, Cascading Waves of Electronic Turbulence, was released in '96. Like the earlier EP, this was Mr. Yurkiewicz working live and alone, squeezing out a couple of long power-electronics-style jams. The nuclear power plant cover and the colourful insert of a pleasant autumn Pennsylvania scene help to evoke a sort of psychedelia unusual in the noise scene at the time, and sound-wise, it's a pretty crushing release.

Namanax took a quantum leap forward with their next recording sessions - 1997's Audiotronic and 1998's Monstrous - possibly because Yurkiewicz chose to work with James Plotkin (guitar wizard, and one of my all-time faves) and Kipp Johnson (who later formed Solarus, also with Yurkiewicz & Plotkin, though it sounds nothing whatsoever like Namanax).

From an interview with Jay Smith -

Q: You've recently put together a new release under the NANAMAX moniker called "Audiotronic"? Would you care to shed some light on the NANAMAX project and this new release and what it's about?

Bill Yurkiewicz: It was the first time i did NAMANAX in a real studio. I got Jim Plotkin to help me because he is a genius in the studio. It just came together, was improvised, and to me represents a logical progression for NAMANAX. I quickly grew tired of just doing straight forward harsh noise. I wanted to give it depth and personality. When I recorded Audiotronic, I also completed 4 more (tracks) of music very similar. The follow-up Monstrous will be released by Release during March 1998.

The difference between the first two releases and Audiotronic/Monstrous is monstrous indeed, one in which fairly rudimentary, albeit textured, pounding power electronics is replaced by immense washes of noise, samples and processed guitar waves, monster movie noises and screeching seagulls, underwater bloops and gargantuan death drones. I was totally gob-smacked by these later two records at the time they were released, and a recent listen shows they've lost none of their power or beauty. First rate meditation noise.

Unfortunately, that was about all there was to Namanax. After Monstrous came out, there were a few more tracks on compilations - "Released" off the triple-CD set Release Your Mind Vol. 2 (recorded during the sessions with Plotkin, I'm told), and "The Medicined Man" off the Gummo soundtrack are two that I managed to grab at the time - but no more records.



Namanax also contributed to a 3" CDR with Bastard Noise and a Japanese cassette comp called The Artificial Nerve Pt. 2, though I've never heard either of those releases. You can check out some unreleased Namanax tracks at their MySpace page - as of this posting, the following are available:

"Astronax Decoder" (6:27) - mellower stylee, sort of a cross between "Medicined Man" and something off Audiotronic.

"Macronumidian" (9:22) - a brutal PE-style track with bubbling lawnmower sounds.

"Three Shots Chased" (4:12) - circus sound loops, reminiscent of "Medicined Man" also.


In an attempt to make this rather large amount of huge, lumbering noisescapes even bigger, I cap these Namanax beauties with a couple of long form Exit 13 noise freak-outs - "An Electronic Fugue For The Imminent Demise Of Planet Earth"** off 1994's Ethos Musick, and "Snakes And Alligators" off 1995's ...Just A Few More Hits EP.


Finally, we'll close this off with "Uncoordinated Universal Time", long form crunchy noise beatz from Pica's The Doctors Ate The Evidence record (a 1996 project of Steve O'Donnell, with Yurkiewicz again supplying power electronics).

Namanax - Multi-Phase Electrodynamics
Namanax - Cascading Waves of Electronic Turbulence
Namanax - Audiotronic
Namanax - Monstrous
Bonus Trax


*I have since been sent a copy of MPE by Mr. Namanax himself, Bill Yurkiewicz! (see comments)
**this one originally came with a warning that it might fry your speakers so beware!

Perversion In Art!

I don't agree with a whole lot of what Donald Kuspit has to say in this rather Freudian essay on Perversion in Art -- excrement is "kitsch"? shaved vaginas have "no emotional edge"? Marcel Duchamp is the only "genuine terrorist in modern art"? -- but it is food for thought if the two subjects interest you at all.

I found the last line particularly intriguing.

Treasure Trove 3

Screwed!

Of all the pornographers in the world you might care to name - one, more than any other, stereotypically looked and acted the part: fat, angry, sleazy, rude, leering, disgusting.

That man? Al Goldstein, founder of Screw magazine. He is hated by many.


Nothing if not defiant, stubborn in the face of adversity, tenacious when dealt a blow, Al Goldstein is a true inspiration. Though endlessly crude, his quick tongue and ready wit seem to be there for him in every situation, coating his endless kvetching with a balm of cheap laughs; self-deprecating to the last, the funny sad man is funniest when describing his lows, and is able to make even something as hot as 1970s deep throat from Linda Lovelace sound pitiful and sordid (which, in fairness, it almost certainly was).

Mission Statement (Screw No. 1, 1968)

WHAT WE STAND FOR: Screw welcomes you to the first issue of the most exciting new publication in the history of the West,. You are on the virgin trip of the first magazine-newspaper that gives sex a break and makes no bones about it. People f*** and do other things to each to other — whatever it is, we won’t knock it. In the ear or up the nostril — it’s your bag and it’s your business. We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ. We apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We’ll be the Consumer Reports of sex. We will lay it on the line, and on the bed, floor, the beachheads of the world and then lay it on the line until the whole world gets the message — SEX IS FUN.

With Jim Buckley, he started Screw magazine in 1968 - a publication which probably couldn't have been financially viable before that time, a sort of consumer advocate for anyone spending money on sex: critiques of porn films, sex aids, prostitutes, S/M dungeons, and so on. In many ways, Screw was a forerunner to the large city weeklies seen in recent decades; not only in its willingness to advertise the sex trade, but its propensity for somewhat riskier interview subjects, innovative design, and of course its strong editorial stances.


In this department, Al Goldstein was difficult to match: his anger seemed endless, its targets everywhere. Goldstein was only too happy to spout off in an editorial voice, regularly venting his spleen both in print (Screw was only one of Goldstein's magazines) and on television (his late-night show Midnight Blue seems perversely prescient in retrospect, providing a blueprint for endless cable shows to come). Even this guy's backyard gave you the finger.



For a time, things were pretty rosey. If Al had been killed by falling space junk in the 1990s, how differently his story would read today! But that didn't happen of course, and Al lived on to see his Screw empire dealt a death blow instead, courtesy of the free porn ubiquitous on the Internet, a business flux which - combined with several expensive alimonies - saw him reduced to bankruptcy and ruin by 2004. He served a few nerve-wracked days at Riker's Island. At one point, Goldstein (now considerably lighter after stomach stapling) was famously homeless and then working at an NYC bagel joint.


Since then, Al has pulled through with impressive panache, writing an auto-biography with Josh Alan Friedman, maintaining a blog (albeit infrequently), even running for President. He's no longer a rich man, or even a healthy man, but Al Goldstein lives on and his sleaze can only be marveled at.



Al's most recent blog post (June 25 2009):

Fuck you scumbags who thought that Al Goldstein was stuck in the fucking VA with a straight jacket and a ball stuffed in his mouth. Fuck you syphillitic pukes who thought that I would merely lay down and die like an old jew in a rusty wheelchair. I am alive, my brain still functions, my dick is soft but I have a rigid tongue, and I am ready as ever to suck on pussy and give the world’s assholes a tongue lashing.

For the record (and to those morons who actually CALLED the VA and asked for Al Goldstein), there are LAWS in this fucking country called “HIIPA” which protect patient’s confidentiality. This is not 1953 when you could call a hospital and ask if your grandmother’s anal fistula was successfully removed! You fucking MORONS!

ok - back to reality. The point is that I am out of the VA and live in an apartment 2 blocks from the ocean in Far Rockaway. It is a clean place, not too shabby. I have no money to buy food, but I went to COSTCO and bought a three month supply of ALPO.

I will wite a full BLOWN blog in a week or two.

FUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK YOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU

al

We concern ourselves now with two by-products of Screw, one a film and the other a film soundtrack record.




1973's It Happened In Hollywood was an unlikely Deep Throat cash-in financed by Screw magazine, a "Laugh-In-inspired skitcom" - the story of a starlet (Felicity Split) seeking fame in the movie industry, featuring, "more sex acts per minute than any such feature to date".

Made right out of the gate at the start of Porno Chic, created with some unlikely connections (Wes Craven worked on it, for one), straddled with some unlikely hyperbole (Goldstein reviewed it as, "truly revolutionary and without doubt THE GREATEST SEXUAL FILM EVER MADE! It is such a giant step forward for the sexploitation field that it is more like the jump from still pictures to motion pictures rather than merely an improvement"), and viewed by some unlikely people.

As this marked the introduction to porn for a lot of folks, many remember it with fondness. The French-language version making the rounds nowadays is funny enough, but this is no lost classic, to be sure.


Screwed is a documentary, shot in the mid-90s while Goldstein was still rich, fat, and in full-on rant mode (by Alexander Crawford, who also served as cinematographer on the considerably-better-looking Hated). Having said that, Screwed isn't a great film either: it's more than a bit rudderless, looks cheap, and sort of wallows in its own crapulence without offering much in the way of insights (one noteable exception here, a porn fan called Big Bob, whose tiny apartment is filled with porn floor-to-ceiling, opines that, "to see the truth, you have to look a girl right in the asshole").

If Screwed the film is disappointing though, its soundtrack is... well, to be honest, it's a bit disappointing too. I mean, really, a film soundtrack on Amphetamine Reptile, based around sex and sleaze (the documentary was originally to be called simply Porn)? How could it lose? Tracks by The Melvins, Hammerhead, Mudhoney, Guv'Ner, Boss Hog, Gear Jammer, Halo of Flies... It's pretty good, sure, but there's nothing quite as face-melting as one might hope from such an amazing record label; the Cows take the prize for "Pictorial" here IMHO.

Terminal Boredom: How did you end up doing the soundtrack for 'Screwed'?

Haze: Another convoluted nightmare. Originally the producer said it was gonna be called “Porn” and would be a documentary on such. They had just done the amazing “Hated” GG Allin documentary so I knew they did quality stuff. Besides it was about porn...fuck, sign me up. So I pulled it together, did a series of 7” releases (that had the “Porn” title on ‘em) and in the last week they pulled the rug out, changed the title to "Screwed" and decided it was gonna be a documentary on Al Goldstein. I would have never done it had I known that, as I couldn’t give two fucks about Al Goldstein. Man, I wanted to see somebody do an interview with Ginger Lynn or Gregory Dark! By then I was committed. The funniest part is the producer of it went on to be a Hollywood director that’s done such movies as 'Old School'. I wonder why he hasn’t hit me up to get the Cows onto the soundtrack of a movie like that?"

v/a - Screwed OST

Sonics Everywhere!

We've featured a Mick Harris-related release that Invisible failed to issue here before, now how about a Mick Harris-related release that Invisible did put out?

To wit, this double CD of stuff originally released as 12"s on Harris' Possible Records label. Call it what you will - breakbeat or whatever - it stands up just fine after almost 13 years.

Includes PCM (Neil Harvey and Nik Wells), Scorn (Mick Harris), SIMM (Eraldo Bernocchi), Jupiter Crew (James Plotkin), Ambush (Glen Eswall), Quoit (Harris again), and Interceptor (Bernocchi again).

Sonics Everywhere

Treasure Trove 2