Moth Cock – Twofer Tuesday

MCTT

Across a sprawling infinity of basement sessions and dozens of limited-run releases since 2009 (including Bremmy [2012] on your’s-very-truly HausMo), Moth Cock have honed their fractured jams into a maximized assault on [normalcy] [“good taste”] [all that is holy]. The Kent, OH-based duo’s symbiotic live performance tactics congeal into slabs of grab-bag noise mayhem, intent on further addling the minds of a growing demographic of droopy-eyed heads from the US midwest underground and across the free world. Doug Gent pours out a stream of atonal clarinet exploration, cycling through alien arpeggio runs and phrases of open-mawed skronk to trace a fragmented incarnation of “jazz” that wanders well past the “free” distinction into untold depths of nonsensical oblivion. As Doug airs his woodwind fodder for the sculpting, Pat Modugno processes it through his barebones rig of loop- and effect-pedals, splintering live tones into a kaleidoscopic clusterfuck of corrupted blips, squeals, and digital death knells. The extended recursion of all of these elements, glued together into irregular loops and plastered across our faces in intensifying bursts of generatively interlocked arrhythmia, can propel listeners into a state of sheer mental overload, or send them back to Sheetz for some emergency chicken nuggets (“What do you mean they’re sold out?”).

The two sidelong sessions offered on Twofer Tuesday expand in unexpected new directions while upholding the tradition of extreme fuckery we’ve come to demand from the Cock boys. “Gatorboi” drops a series of skewed beats and sampled squiggles into the already busy mix, conjuring touches of outsider techno production from the looped content saved onto Pat’s Boss RC20. The duo constructs and demolishes each segment of their damaged suite, speeding through conflicting queasy atmospheres and ecstatic horn blasts on the way to the bass-drum bursts and corroded clarinet “laughter” of the climax. On the B-side, “Lee” slithers even deeper into musique concrète zones, twisting clipped snippets of classical fanfares into a loping string mantra that decays across a grid of stretched samples and truncated woodwind melodies. The introduction of Doug’s contact-mic vocalizations elevates the warped proceedings into something of a personalized ritual, complete with requests to “get out of my brain / get out of my brain,” likely addressed to Scanners or particularly intrusive lizard people. Do not fret, dear listener: it has been clinically proven that forty minutes of new Moth Cock will do wonders for your mental health, improve your hand/eye coordination, and finally transform you into the successful human being you have always dreamed of becoming. Why, you ask? How, uh, I mean, who are you referring to here? I, hmm… What. What was I talking about … ? Who is this again??

Available in April on limited-edition cassette (C40).

Design by Max.