“Surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps from Yorkshire-based notorious all-caps tweet terrorist Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group now operating as A LARGE SHEET OF MUSCLE for Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes
Operating on that sweeping, glorified piss-taking/genius spectrum, DRACULA COMPLETO congeals 26 individual morsels of spur-of-the-moment sound-art executed with a genuine economy of means, namely just a phone. I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and admit I’ve actively avoided twitter since the start so Wanda’s cult-like aura on the now-disgraced platform is lost on me, but that’s probably a good thing. Musically, it’s an impulsive, tangent-taking, and mildly unsettling trip into the inner-mind of the regional weird. Once fully-submitted, it really gets under your skin and suffuses the surroundings with a captivating sense of unease. Each piece of the rubble-like sound fragments shift into genuinely galvanising spacial tones/textures where the sub-reality is punctured by Johnstones’ garbled rantings. There’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces, both offering their own hallucinogenic takes on the absolute mundane, whilst Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumni Russell Walker also feel closely aligned. Similarly, MUSCLES’ key attribute lies in the way in which reality can suddenly shift, the long-distance stare of warbled tape loops suddenly fractured by drunken sing-along in an elderly care home. Is this the sound of our Broken Britain? No brainer.”
Thank you, All Night Flight!
