PEDALPHILE “Rather Ripped” (Wagon)

Really disgusting C30 of bubbling mud from Ryan of Emeralds’ solo world. The cover is a hideous color portrait of a child with a terrible skin disease and his/her eyes covered up and the spine is stolen straight from Sonic Youth’s Geffen-copyrighted “Rather Ripped” font, so this thing’s agenda is pretty clearly to fart in the face of whoever’s got their ear to the ground (to drive the point home the tape opens and closes with someone/Ryan reading an “Adult” personals ad). Musically, the A side is indistinguishable low-end ooze that just rumbles numbly and drips into the cracks in yr ears in a weird motion, but the B is a way more “heard this before” man-with-a-mixer style jam. It really just sounds exactly like a Behringer plugged into itself and casually fucked around with…that aimless putt-putt-putting noise everybody who owns a mixer is familiar with. At the end it gets a little louder and loopier (like when you turn the ‘high’ knob up and the ‘low’ knob down) but the overall vibe is more ‘technological demonstration’ than ‘aesthetic creation.’ For whatever the freak that distinction is worth to anybody.