“Noise can be your saviour. Noise can set you free.”
— Boys Road, on His Bum’s Like A Dungeon
Is it a treatise? A thesis? A manifesto? Whatever it is, one thing is certain: it involved dressing up Andrew as Gwen Stefani from the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards — blue hair, blue plush bra, red lips, bejewelled around the eyes — and administering some kind of intravenous intoxicant they knew only as The Philosophy of Joy and Truth before pushing him to the mic and pressing record. What follows is a curated chaos, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of focused disassociation and lateral reasoning, like Don Van Vliet standing on the lip of a caldera, a prolapsed volcanic sphincter before him, tossing in laxatives for shits and giggles. For the pure joy of it.
And there is a lot of joy. A warped, mayhem-ic joy. But joy nonetheless!
For instance, picture the following, if you will:
A big-titted goth sucking off Bill Gates as he waits for Windows 95 to load in safe mode.
A flesh-eating cowboy being waterboarded with lasagna.
A pantless Steven (who I egotistically understand to be a reference to myself) serves shaved ice to Hunter S. Thompson as he arm wrestles Tucker Carlson at a credit union. One of my testicles peeks out from beneath the folds of my underwear.
Candles made out of the rendered fat of eyes and feces.
A horde of starved stick figures descending on Andrew as if it were the battle of Minas Tirith — the field littered with soliduses and chevrons and guillemets and pipes and tildes.
The complete history of Vietnam as told by a man with seasonal allergies.
A briefcase full of pigeons, a pocket full of butter, and a mouth full of Rice Krispies. (He runs out of Cheerios, so he buys trademark-infringing Joy Circles.)
• • •
To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
• • •
Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
