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#29
Fricara Pacchu: Space Puppet
CS
SOLD OUT
This new tape by the space master is recorded with a four tracker built of Fricara’s nails. Before the recording of the tracker Fricara couldn’t play because his nails were so long. As a tape he used Jetson family’s tongues. But he returned the tongues after transfering the music to his ancient pentium to make CD-R for the tape press. But that’s another story, which you can loan from the Chromathron City library. In space!
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"I suppose it may be a bit irrelevant (not to mention irreverent), to mention that the band name Fricara Pacchu makes me think of a Peruvian quiche. All told, it’s probably as apt a description of things to come as any. Absurd and amazing in equal measure, "Space Puppet" wreaks chaos all over the damn place, at times reminiscent of Suicide, and at others, Richard James and his circus of madness. This is dirty, dirty music, and it has no interest in cleaning up. We should all be glad of this fact.
On a backbeat of dirty, scratchy techno, a la Casiotone, Pacchu lays down the electronic law. With more than enough manic flourish to go around, this is a frantic but compelling listen.
Lal Lal Lal, Finland’s cassette based label, is a true home for the bizarre Finnish underground, and definitely worth tracking down. I know next to nothing about Finland, but it certainly does spice up my image of that icy, distant land to imagine a country full of guys like Fricara Pacchu ambling about, collecting half-broken electronic devices (old phones, cracked toys, transistor radios, shitloads of Casiotones, etc…), and taking them back to his/her (?) hovel and turning this heap of other folks castaways and making music this intimately bizarre.
But hats off to Fricara Pacchu, because this is one fantastic tape. Now I’m no completist when it comes to the cassette underground, but if the stuff I’ve heard these past few months (Lal Lal Lal releases, Death Chants, a few others), is any indication, this is the new frontier for experimental, and undeniably fascinating music.
Here’s the deal: buy this tape (I don’t care how), wear it out, and as always, thank me later."
- John Cramer / foxy digitalis
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"New cassette album from this member of Maniacs Dream is a couple of synth bloops removed from his previous tape that blew out a whole bunch of ears with its radical re-think of brain-storming psychedelic rock. This one is a lot more about electro-rhythms and synth pulse, somewhere between the Suicide of Mr Ray and Diamonds, Fur-Coat, Champagne, Coil circa Nasa Arab and some personally-doomy real-people early 80s Kosmiche/synth record. Which makes it sound pretty great, and it kind of is."
- Volcanic Tongue
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"Fricara Pacchu is actually the solo project of a dude by the same name what plays in Maniacs Dream. So, there's some six degrees of seperation there...actually it's more like one degree...but still. The other tape I liked so much was called "Waydom" and it was a severe dose of one man gang psych-rock sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Where do you go after you've singlehandedly destroyed the entire canon of recorded psychedelic musics? Into techno, apparently. Okay that's kind of a misnomer but the best "band blender" description I can come up with for "Space Puppet" is Coil crossed with the Boredoms mixed with Aphex Twin. Playful Casio/toy-sounding looped samples, effects, brutality and sleazy electronica/techno. Lots of tape manipulation (according to Lal Lal Lal this was recorded with a four-tracker made of Pacchu's nails; don't ask). All these tracks have different names but they bleed together and there's no real point in trying to differentiate them all, but they do have great names: "Strobo Fields Forever", "Megasolar Bodyslam", "Stoneage Waydream"). These two sides of magnetic love are coated with space, the cosmos psychedelia, ur-noise, synthesizer, keyboard and sometimes a surprisingly intimidating percussion stampede. And everything up and down and in between. Heavily processed childish beats, rhythms, squelches, sound effects...it's like IDM without the so-called "intelligence" and it's all the more glorious for it. Kinda like a retarded AFX or Venetian Snares at their least solemn. Yeah. The first two tracks on the second side smacked me particularly daintily; the first one being a load of Boredoms-type swoosh that you might be inspired to tag as trip-hop if that wasn't such an absurd term in and of itself. More like: Trip. Hop. Dig? And the second one is a heavier, more rock-ish beast with all different kinds of flailing limbs attacking cymbals and strings and anything else at hand. "I will not attempt to further define pornography here today, but I know it when I hear it" -Potter Stewart. What a hep cat."
- Matt / Outer Space Gamelan
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"Fricara Pacchu uit Finland maakt normaal gesproken deel uit van avantgaragerockgekkenhuis Maniacs Dream. Solo is hij niet minder gek, Space Puppet staat vol met spookachtige junkyard elektronica, die sterk in de richting van Black Dice kruipt. ‘Road Robot’ zou zo op een verloren b-kant van Black Dice’s Cone Toaster kunnen staan, een smerige cadans en volop gefreak met effectpedalen en tapeloops. Niet zo indrukwekkend als zijn band Maniacs Dream, of Black Dice als we het er toch over hebben, maar voor de echte Finlandfreak is dit wederom een ruwe diamant, die wacht op een intieme poetsbeurt."
- Joris Heemskerk / KindaMuzik
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"Across the blogosphere the debate continues to rage...in oak-panelled gentlemen's clubs, men with strange-shaped beards assemble and smoke odd-looking, twisted perspex pipes filled w/ a strange green moss, while blank-eye'd moose heads look down on them (these are not stuffed trophies, but undead zombie-moose who bray and snort their disapproval). From Hello to OK magazine, the question on everyone's lips is:
Does Fricara Pacchu actually exist?
The yay-sayers point to a fresh body of evidence that includes this release (Lal Lal Lal #29 from Turku, Finland)...a cassette album called "Space Puppet" wh/ is attributed to Fricara Pacchu. Is it real? Or is it a con; a double-bluff created to con the foolish and the gullible? Is this all just an elaborate hoax? Am I in on it? Fuck...W-who am I?
It doesn't matter whether Fricara exists or if he's just a figment of someone's ummmmmagination or a pseudonym...the fact remains that this is a remarkable collection of (mostly) electronic space-trash w/ titles like "Megasolar Bodyslam" and "Snail Territory" that exhibit the same degree of wit and enthusiasm and invention and bloodyminded sheer alienness as the best of Richard James' early 90s releases.
Oh, look! Another way out of the 'electronica'/Eye Dee Emm Post-Aphex hypervirtuosal prog-splatterbreak coul de sac that a whole raft of electronic music drove up (then couldn't find reverse).
Echoplex'd analogue electronics collide w/ their cheapskate Casio digital preset counterparts: machineswarf, bubble and swirl...drum-machines chug and huff, trying to keep up w/ Robby the Robot as he skids past on an air-sledge...someone hammers the fuck out of a synth-pad or something, while elevators plummet and air-raid sirens squawk and computers crash: this sounds mostly unsequenced, with overdubbed sounds piling up like miniature c-c-carcrashes. In places, this reminds me of a (very) early angst-free Cabaret Voltaire...elsewhere, I can hear snatches of "Zuckerzeit" era Cluster...this is a refreshingly Industrial-free zone, the other side of the TG divide from the likes of Wolf Eyes...druggy electro-psych machine jam-downs...creamy 1971 klingklang krautdelica w/ Conrad Schnitzler coming up on a fistful of pills...
Then, just when you think you've got the hang of things, someone turns up w/ a drum-kit, a guitar and a van-load of FX-pedals, then kicks out the astral motherfucking jams...metaphorically speaking.
On "Ray of Light": a microsecond-delay'd beat-box stops n starts, hiccoughing its way in betwn accoustic gtrs and something that sounds like an electronic bagpipe. It's kinda like early The Durutti Column after a bottle of cough mixture and it's fucking gorgeous.
Wouldn't it be great if Fricara Pacchu didn't exist after all and this music had just made itself up?"
- kek-w