HR002
Non Religious Sect — A Thorn in Society's Palm!! — C90
Non Religious Sect — A Thorn in Society's Palm!! — C90
instrumentation as listed on the cover, plus EBow was used, and Mike Honeycutt played harmonica
stream and download at Bandcamp:
REVIEW by Jerry Kranitz
The second Harsh Reality release is a collaboration between Phinney and fellow Memphis hometaper Mike Honeycutt. Both artists contribute, to varying degrees, acoustic and electric guitar, EBow, found sound objects, machines, metal percussion, synths and keys, and harmonica. This C90 tapes includes four tracks.
‘Nothing!!’ opens the set with noise-ambient guitar licks and clattering percussion.
Bang-on-metal percussion soon creates an aggressive rhythmic pulse that the guitar continues to explore over. It’s a cool contrasting combo. The rhythm is a bit slapdash, alternating between industrial dance floor friendly and off-kilter faltering. The guitar cranks away, ripping off noisy but by no means unpleasant licks. There’s some occasional yelling to spice things up. But it also has its quieter moments as the percussion recedes and the guitar goes into space around the 10 minute mark, with noisy edged spacey, oscillating swirls, and high pitched piercing extended whines. At one point the vocals become intelligible, screaming complaints about ‘all you do is goddamn sit around’, and ‘Nothing!! Nothing!!’, as the percussion continues to steadily bang and what may be the guitar and synth contributing a space-ambient exploratory vibe, which is part acid freakout and part noisily meditative. It’s chaotic but, again, in a fun young artists exploring their inner creative selves way.
‘Get Some Tonite’ is next and I like this one right out of the chute.
It is… dare I say…. MUSICAL!! Phinney and Honeycutt lay down a playful experimental Pop melodic and rhythmic groove, that has a tasty freeform acid-industrial and sound exploratory edge. A totally lo-fi bedroom blend of Soft Machine, Funkadelic and Kraftwerk comes to mind. Parts also made me think of a noisy synth-pop Alien Planetscapes. I know, pretty crazy analogies. Another part sounds like a chaotic acid-noise drenched, funky carnival theme. Then the vocals start to ‘sorta’ sing: “I don’t wanna sit around in that hot kitchen all night. Too hot… yeah, too hot”. But then it soars into an awesome chaotic jamming swirl of space freakout guitar, synth melody, and possibly keys that lay down the programmed sounding rhythms. I also hear what sounds like a horn. Near the end both Honeycutt and Phinney really get into the vocals, doing punk-soul James Brown meets Michael Jackson stylings and street poet rap ranting. Pretty damn cool.
The 40+ minutes ‘Trashmonger’ takes up most of Side B.
It starts off quietly, with rumbling, droney, noisy ambience and a steadily scraping percussive pattern. There’s a minimalism that steadily creeps along, and it’s easy to miss how energetically kinetic the percussion is as the scraping escalates into what sounds like high energy rock drumming, though the metal clanging from the earlier tracks is there too. A cool exploratory duo of space-ambient guitar, effects and atmospherics and clattering percussion exploration experimentation, given an injection of ranting punk attitude by the obscenity laced vocals. The tuneful harmonica around the 27 minute mark sounds so cool and strange along with the vocal rants, tripped out guitar, and banging percussion. File this one under avant-space/punk rock. For a truly mind-fucked fun experience, play this side by side with Amon Düül II’s ‘Yeti’.
The less than seven minute ‘Get Some Tonite (PT. 2)’ wraps up the tape, pretty much continuing where Part 1 left off but with healthy doses of the spaced out vibe of Trashmonger.
The second Harsh Reality release is a collaboration between Phinney and fellow Memphis hometaper Mike Honeycutt. Both artists contribute, to varying degrees, acoustic and electric guitar, EBow, found sound objects, machines, metal percussion, synths and keys, and harmonica. This C90 tapes includes four tracks.
‘Nothing!!’ opens the set with noise-ambient guitar licks and clattering percussion.
Bang-on-metal percussion soon creates an aggressive rhythmic pulse that the guitar continues to explore over. It’s a cool contrasting combo. The rhythm is a bit slapdash, alternating between industrial dance floor friendly and off-kilter faltering. The guitar cranks away, ripping off noisy but by no means unpleasant licks. There’s some occasional yelling to spice things up. But it also has its quieter moments as the percussion recedes and the guitar goes into space around the 10 minute mark, with noisy edged spacey, oscillating swirls, and high pitched piercing extended whines. At one point the vocals become intelligible, screaming complaints about ‘all you do is goddamn sit around’, and ‘Nothing!! Nothing!!’, as the percussion continues to steadily bang and what may be the guitar and synth contributing a space-ambient exploratory vibe, which is part acid freakout and part noisily meditative. It’s chaotic but, again, in a fun young artists exploring their inner creative selves way.
‘Get Some Tonite’ is next and I like this one right out of the chute.
It is… dare I say…. MUSICAL!! Phinney and Honeycutt lay down a playful experimental Pop melodic and rhythmic groove, that has a tasty freeform acid-industrial and sound exploratory edge. A totally lo-fi bedroom blend of Soft Machine, Funkadelic and Kraftwerk comes to mind. Parts also made me think of a noisy synth-pop Alien Planetscapes. I know, pretty crazy analogies. Another part sounds like a chaotic acid-noise drenched, funky carnival theme. Then the vocals start to ‘sorta’ sing: “I don’t wanna sit around in that hot kitchen all night. Too hot… yeah, too hot”. But then it soars into an awesome chaotic jamming swirl of space freakout guitar, synth melody, and possibly keys that lay down the programmed sounding rhythms. I also hear what sounds like a horn. Near the end both Honeycutt and Phinney really get into the vocals, doing punk-soul James Brown meets Michael Jackson stylings and street poet rap ranting. Pretty damn cool.
The 40+ minutes ‘Trashmonger’ takes up most of Side B.
It starts off quietly, with rumbling, droney, noisy ambience and a steadily scraping percussive pattern. There’s a minimalism that steadily creeps along, and it’s easy to miss how energetically kinetic the percussion is as the scraping escalates into what sounds like high energy rock drumming, though the metal clanging from the earlier tracks is there too. A cool exploratory duo of space-ambient guitar, effects and atmospherics and clattering percussion exploration experimentation, given an injection of ranting punk attitude by the obscenity laced vocals. The tuneful harmonica around the 27 minute mark sounds so cool and strange along with the vocal rants, tripped out guitar, and banging percussion. File this one under avant-space/punk rock. For a truly mind-fucked fun experience, play this side by side with Amon Düül II’s ‘Yeti’.
The less than seven minute ‘Get Some Tonite (PT. 2)’ wraps up the tape, pretty much continuing where Part 1 left off but with healthy doses of the spaced out vibe of Trashmonger.
Jerry Kranitz interviews Chris Phinney
JK: The next tape was Non Religious Sect, and that was you and Mike Honeycutt.
CP: He’d done a little bit of Mystery Hearsay by then. Not a whole lot. He pretty much started doing his music about the same time I started doing mine. Cause he got burned out on Malice as well. And he was also doing WEVL. And he was getting a lot of records sent to him for free for doing that. Just like we got all kinds of stuff, like I’m sure you did when you were doing Aural Innovations. I got into trouble with Glenn Danzig… I didn’t get into trouble per se, but I was questioned about it… when the original Misfits broke up and he came here, we booked a show with Samhain. And they came here and played. And the crowd was sparse. Because basically like I told you before, the club owner was more interested in selling beer than letting in underage punk. If he would have there would have been a lot more money. We finally got him to do that with wristbands, but it took an arm and a leg to get him to do that. But Danzig says, ‘Why with Malice is everything a positive review?” And I basically told him why are we gonna waste money, ink, print, and write negative reviews of stuff we don’t like? What is the point of even reviewing it? That was our opinion at the time. If you can’t get into it and don’t care for it, don’t say a word about it.
JK: So Non Religious Sect was the first recording you did with Mike Honeycutt. Was it the same freeform improv you did on your own?
CP: It was [recorded with] the Akai 4-track reel-to-reel. And it was more just basically us kind of wanking around. He had a few more instruments than I had. But he wanted to do some recording so we did a tape for the label. Because he was starting his little label that he did a bit of. And I was doing mine, we got together and jammed. And later on as we got further into it you will hear him on Eternal Concessions (HR017), and then me and him also did another one-off called Misfeasance. We had a lot better instruments by then.
JK: In my Non Religious Sect description at one point I say I believe I heard guitar and synth goes all space-ambient exploratory… what synth was on this tape?
CP: It was a Casio PT-80. I had bought it pretty cheap. It had one of those damn ROM things in it where you could actually program some recordings in it, get some drum sounds, or supposed drum sounds. They’re not really drums per se, but they’re like rhythms.
JK: The next tape was Non Religious Sect, and that was you and Mike Honeycutt.
CP: He’d done a little bit of Mystery Hearsay by then. Not a whole lot. He pretty much started doing his music about the same time I started doing mine. Cause he got burned out on Malice as well. And he was also doing WEVL. And he was getting a lot of records sent to him for free for doing that. Just like we got all kinds of stuff, like I’m sure you did when you were doing Aural Innovations. I got into trouble with Glenn Danzig… I didn’t get into trouble per se, but I was questioned about it… when the original Misfits broke up and he came here, we booked a show with Samhain. And they came here and played. And the crowd was sparse. Because basically like I told you before, the club owner was more interested in selling beer than letting in underage punk. If he would have there would have been a lot more money. We finally got him to do that with wristbands, but it took an arm and a leg to get him to do that. But Danzig says, ‘Why with Malice is everything a positive review?” And I basically told him why are we gonna waste money, ink, print, and write negative reviews of stuff we don’t like? What is the point of even reviewing it? That was our opinion at the time. If you can’t get into it and don’t care for it, don’t say a word about it.
JK: So Non Religious Sect was the first recording you did with Mike Honeycutt. Was it the same freeform improv you did on your own?
CP: It was [recorded with] the Akai 4-track reel-to-reel. And it was more just basically us kind of wanking around. He had a few more instruments than I had. But he wanted to do some recording so we did a tape for the label. Because he was starting his little label that he did a bit of. And I was doing mine, we got together and jammed. And later on as we got further into it you will hear him on Eternal Concessions (HR017), and then me and him also did another one-off called Misfeasance. We had a lot better instruments by then.
JK: In my Non Religious Sect description at one point I say I believe I heard guitar and synth goes all space-ambient exploratory… what synth was on this tape?
CP: It was a Casio PT-80. I had bought it pretty cheap. It had one of those damn ROM things in it where you could actually program some recordings in it, get some drum sounds, or supposed drum sounds. They’re not really drums per se, but they’re like rhythms.
JK: So going back to you and Honeycutt. I hear you really letting go with a lot of what many would consider negative racial terms. But it’s interesting because there were tapes released in the 80s by genuine racists.
CP: But you know the thing about all that Jerry is that we never caught any shit for any of it. Nobody said a word. Now that might be why I got a lot of Psychodrama tapes from Brett Kerby later on. And then you got AWB Recording. They were a Chicago based label. But they sent me a bunch of tapes, and they were true racists. They meant what they were talking about. And I don’t know if that was just because they wanted to trade, or trying to branch it all out and knew that we had said some of the same types of things. But these guys, like AWB, they were serious. You could tell they were serious. But if you really listen to what we’re doing, we’re just giggling and laughing about it. It was more like let’s shock somebody and make ‘em laugh at the same time kind of thing.
JK: So you never got wrapped up in any controversy over it.
CP: None whatsoever. What’s funny is I had Louis Boone [Editor's Note: Boone was African-American] wanting to move down to my house to live, and go to work with me. And Doug Walker [head honcho of Alien Planetscapes] came to my house. He thought I was black and I thought he was black, cause we had talked on the phone. His accent was like a New Yorker, and my accent was like a [JK: I laughed and blocked out what you said]. So nobody had any idea what was going on. He pulls up and here he is big tall black dude, and here comes this skinny white dude out the door. And he says, ‘is there a problem?’. And I said no man, bring your stuff in. He had all these tapes with him.
JK: I know you said you didn’t start getting more known until HR004 but I’ll ask anyway if you got any reviews or publicity of any kind with Non Religious Sect?
CP: You know I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure we only got a review in Factsheet Five. Mike Gunderloy was very good to me.
CP: But you know the thing about all that Jerry is that we never caught any shit for any of it. Nobody said a word. Now that might be why I got a lot of Psychodrama tapes from Brett Kerby later on. And then you got AWB Recording. They were a Chicago based label. But they sent me a bunch of tapes, and they were true racists. They meant what they were talking about. And I don’t know if that was just because they wanted to trade, or trying to branch it all out and knew that we had said some of the same types of things. But these guys, like AWB, they were serious. You could tell they were serious. But if you really listen to what we’re doing, we’re just giggling and laughing about it. It was more like let’s shock somebody and make ‘em laugh at the same time kind of thing.
JK: So you never got wrapped up in any controversy over it.
CP: None whatsoever. What’s funny is I had Louis Boone [Editor's Note: Boone was African-American] wanting to move down to my house to live, and go to work with me. And Doug Walker [head honcho of Alien Planetscapes] came to my house. He thought I was black and I thought he was black, cause we had talked on the phone. His accent was like a New Yorker, and my accent was like a [JK: I laughed and blocked out what you said]. So nobody had any idea what was going on. He pulls up and here he is big tall black dude, and here comes this skinny white dude out the door. And he says, ‘is there a problem?’. And I said no man, bring your stuff in. He had all these tapes with him.
JK: I know you said you didn’t start getting more known until HR004 but I’ll ask anyway if you got any reviews or publicity of any kind with Non Religious Sect?
CP: You know I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure we only got a review in Factsheet Five. Mike Gunderloy was very good to me.
Scan of cover of Chris Phinney's personal copy of "the History of The Devil and the Idea of Evil" by Paul Carus