Billy Bao – Bilbo’s Incinerator 7” EP (W.M.O./r)
From April 2005:
An essay on the back cover of this EP gives a few clues as to what’s at stake: Bao, a Nigerian vocalist, traveled to Bilboa, a touristy location in the Basque region of Spain. Experiencing the same feelings of oppression he felt in Lagos, Bao found an out through punk rock, quickly assembled a trio of drums and guitar, and spent three hours in a studio channeling his rage. The results are on this 7”, and it is punishingly prescient. Lyrics deal with state control of expression, a horrifying metaphor for what the third-world disenfranchised might like to do to people of privilege (“Give Them Virus”), and gentrification’s effects on those it pushes out. Ugly, atonal, and pounding, these three primitive rock songs slug their way through outbursts of power electronic noise, jackhammer rhythms, and thrashy, repetitive guitar. Vocals sound like the second coming of Kickboy Face, and this as a whole comes off as a terrifyingly real example of what human beings are capable of if pushed far enough. The real world equivalent to the Pissed Jeans 7” (also reviewed in this edition). An important record.
First review on the first edition of Still Single. I’m not cringing at this one (even with the Pissed Jeans reference), and am surprised that the record appears now to be both more and less than what I described it as. Downtuned guitar riffs alongside expanding/contracting rhythms, treated/extreme vocals and extreme treated treatments phasing over top. It’s energetic but slack as the production pulls forth and back again like the zoom lens in a giallo. It’s also not as exciting as it was to hear for the first time, for this path has been trampled on many a time in the intervening years. Definitely stood out in 2005, though, as the signifiers of noise rock were then largely absent from the climate of garage bands and electroclash lip gloss. It was still out there, to be sure, but it took politics, theory, and an old-fashioned fake I.D. to make it as relevant as it sounded here. The drummer Alberto Martin from La Secta, a long-running Spanish garage band that if I am recalling correctly were contemporaries of ‘80s American throwback bands like The Cynics, pounds it out in this session.
An outlet for Basque guitarist Mattin, who had noise guitar works releases under his own name previous to this project, Billy Bao appears to have been the name given to his voice in this project, and exists only conceptually through these recordings. You can discuss amongst yourselves where this seems exploitative. Having spent an interesting evening with him once, I’m qualified to say he is no Rachel Dolezal.
Mattin spent a good while in the States in collaboration with (or assuming control of) a number of projects, and while I can’t recall if there were any Billy Bao live dates in the US, this cell phone video sort of confirms my assumptions regarding identity: a number of backlit people churning out a wall of guitar noise. This project continued as a recording entity for at least the next ten years, with its finest moments coming via the Fuck Separation 10” on S-S, and the last two releases to date (the Lagos Sessions 2xLP on Munster, and the Communisation 12” on Insulin Addicted/Fuck Yoga).
Mattin continues to perform and release music, including a number of collaborative Songbook albums, and the test music project Regler, which took repetition in a genre/form to a thought-choking extreme. Most recently he delivered a second Suicide-esque album as Al Karpenter for Bruit Direct, entitled Musik for a Private Hell, which it most certainly is: minimalist pulses, crooning lyrics of loss, anarchy and destruction, Mattin’s semi-legendary malfunctioning laptop, and in the midst of it all a track called “Eyes Without Faces” that is cut from the same thick, filthy cloth as Billy Bao. (Doug Mosurock)
Billy Bao releases on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/artist/372492-Billy-Bao
