Stefan Jaworzyn
The Annihilating Light LP
Kye Records KYE 28
2014
Mostly in-situ synth affair from Ascension/Descension/Skullflower and [recently reheated] Shock label figurehead Stefan Jaworzyn. My relation to the man began when I was a middle school outlier, unwrappin' a copy of Sauter/Dietrich/Moore's Barefoot In the Head on his aforementioned label and puzzlin' bout (in the way we use-ta in the pre-Internet era) why it was so hard to find anythang else on that imprint (read: as a 13-year-old pro-loner in a know-nuthin' town). Apparently, I wasn't alone in my wonderings and disappoint, cuz Shock releases ran cold as the streams offa Blood Mountain but moments after hittin' pavement for most of the label's salad days. Later on, a crew of leather'd longhairs with manually-enlarged earlobes chucked Form Destroyer by Skullflower in my general direction and lo a whole scope of scuzzy possibilities appeared--not the least of which was the wealth that is the Broken Flag imprint. And then I learnt he was all up in Whitehouse, too. (Hell, Stefan even "gave away" the bride at the Lambkin-Hoyos wedding, according to a recent interview I read offa my scribblin' screen.)
Then time passed and somehow I got him confused with Stephan Mathieu from Main et al. for a minute, which'll, to all y'all, either make a weird kinda sense or cast light on how much my brain resembles the moth-bitten basement with a French drain (i.e. a channel for the ass-end runoff of a river kept alive cuz some Confederate general watered his horse in it--long enough ago that there was such a beast as a Confederate general ta begin with and, yeah, in that part of These United...) that once propped up an ol' "house" of mine.
I disambiguated alla that when I found out Mathieu had released a record of e-Bow'd autoharps or some such wad of keech years back and realized it couldn't be the same dude. So...
"Oasis of Filth" (aka Side A) is a squalid onsen of looped 1/4" adapter bumps and roof drizzle. Much as I am reminded of Moon's Milk-era Coil (speakin-on the Shock label...) throughout this record, there is something of the latter-day tendency [in longform noise-lineage musics] toward cycle/repetition w/o rhythm in this spring-reverb'd bongwater spill that puts me at least a lil in mind of the Richard Youngs aesthetic. The humidity and all-'round menace to the simmers herein continue to steam my living room on repeated listens.
Side B, on the other hand, I'm at odds with. Much as I think it would pair well with Tietchens's "Teilmenge 33A" in its manic itchiness, I don't think it holds its own without, as ol William Carlos Williams woulda said, another track lighting it.
Still, an intriguing chapter in Jaworzyn's career. If'n you need a refresher course in the depth and breadth of the music of his youth, the Kino series of heretofor-unreleased Skullflower on his Shock label shit'll get ya right and sorted.
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