Shop : Biffplex - Noun / Ams Win

2CDR from Half/theory (HALF03)

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NOUN recorded 18 August & 10 November 2001 @ The Stand
AMS WIN recorded 2002-2003 @ The Funfair & Small Black Box
Remastered by Scott Sinclair - 2005

Biffplex is Andrew Thomson & Joe Musgrove

Long out of print and available only through filesharing, these two albums stand as two of the heaviest and headiest releases of the Australian experimental underground to date. Half/theory is very happy to make them properly available again, in newly remastered glory!

Described at the time by Frans de Waard in Vital Weekly as "fascinating to hear", Noun is a massive four part psychedelic drone workout aimed squarely at the obliteration of time and space in the mind of the user. It is by turns beautiful, terrifying and overwhelming and at all times hypnotic and intensely visionary. Starting with a soft lulling pulse, Noun draws the listener through a hall of mirrors of shifting scale and perspective, where the rushing noise of a city if transformed into an intimate whisper in one's ear, and forgotten songs of decades past become a choir of angels. Biffplex: "Noun was intended for moments when people are between states of consciousness, when they have their guards down, so to speak. Moments like coming up on hallucinogenic drugs, or coming off them, meditation, sleeping, being feverishly ill, fucking - stuff like that. We recorded the album in very automatic, ritualistic fashion. We still couldn't tell you how a lot of it was done. The flow was very much gone with, if you like. The sessions were mostly conducted at about 3AM and are among the most intense experiences of both of our lives. We experienced, at times, what can only be called contact with something totally 'other' - a similar experience, in many respects, to reports of alien abductions and religious ecstasies. As I said, I'm unsure how these states were attained, but something of the experience was definitely captured in the recordings that make up Noun".

Ams Win is a slightly different beast. Both more musical and more abstract than Noun, Ams Win is a far more fragmented and unsettling journey than its predecessor. Like a flickering sonic shadowplay shifting according to its own inexorable logic, Ams Win is a fragile transmission of another's dream caught between two stations on late night AM radio. As with any dream, it is by turns beautiful and a little disturbing. Things are unsettled here - sounds fray at the edges and threaten to dissipate into silence or meaningless static. At the halfway point, things reach a terrifying peak, and then abruptly shift, into an interlude which could almost be called a 'single'. An almost identifiable song drifts against a single, simple loop through a soft bed of detailed noise into an entirely different headspace. From here the listener is propelled upwards into a glorious white light noise, all the brighter for the proceeding darkness. The final track of Ams Win was recorded at Brisbane's famed Small Black Box performance space. Biffplex's performance at Small Black Box was one of the finest in the 4 years during which it ran, and the portion captured here was delivered at a volume that can only be termed 'obliterating' (one member of the audience used the term "god music" in an attempt to describe it). Biffplex: "We are very interested in the use of volume to produce physical and psychological effects in our audiences. We find that a very dense wall of sound, composed of many interacting pulses, drone harmonics and chaotic white noise, at very high volume create an effect which is simultaneously calming and disorienting. Confusion is the key, by inducing the right kinds of confusion, you put people in a state where they don't know the 'rules' governing how they're supposed to react, or behave, or think, and thus open them up to very 'real', joyous and unconditioned responses to the situation they're presented with."

Added by jpeatt on 27 March 2006