john wiese

John Wiese - Soft Punk

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"John Wiese is no stranger to the manipulation of others' music; he's mangled his own sounds and those of others on past releases, but Soft Punk contains his most obvious reworking of found sounds to date. The disc's liner notes credit Denny Mclain, Grand Ulena, Sissy Spacek (Wiese's band, not the actress), and Die Monitor Bats as providing source material for a few of the disc's tracks, but more overt sampling is evident on a few other tracks, and, alongside the digital pyrotechnics that Wiese usually employs, it offers bit of organic counterpoint to the proceedings.The use of samples isn't a necessary addition to Wiese's arsenal (in fact, "Recorded Hologram," heavy on such use, is one of the disc's weaker tracks), but Wiese largely avoids hackneyed use of the plundered material, and the trajectory of the disc isn't put noticeably of course. Soft Punk is another "debut" by a musician whose catalog is already bursting at the seams. There's an issue of semantics at hand, but, whether or not it seems ludicrous to call an album released at this point in John Wiese's career a debut, one can safely just call this album another quality release from Mr. Wiese, the cream of Los Angeles' noisemaking crop.
Wiese likely doesn't use tools unavailable to his contemporaries in noisemaking, but listening to a track like "Spectral Hand" might make it seem that way. When at its best, Wiese's sensitivity to timbre and his logic in sandwiching sounds are top notch; there's a cleanliness and clarity in even the most decimated masses of half-digested static and the swirling tones that surround them. Wiese works in sound that, at times, is practically three-dimensional, and through stereo panning and architecture of sound, he's capable of impressively immersive sonic environments, especially considering the hectic pace that much of his work has a tendency to take. Soft Punk is the sort of album to proves that noise isn't purely the realm of the talentless hack with an ear for discord, and though it's indiscernible in any truly tangible way, there's certainly a method to Wiese's madness, and an art to his crafting and arranging of sound.
Selecting a favorite Wiese album is somewhat akin to choosing the best looking blade of grass in a yard; there are way too many to choose from, and keeping them distinct in one's mind often proves to be a challenge. Soft Punk, however, seems a fitting entry to the upper echelon of Wiese's oeuvre, and a worthy wearer of the title of his full-length debut, no matter how contentious such use of the term, in this case, might be."

sounds like: grinding teeth