conscience, virginity, potato is a concept-album about twenty-first century capitalism. [Reviewers: don`t bury that lede!] It was made in the Winter of 2021 by names_of_music, who is Olias Nil (ex-The Fire Show and Number One Cup) who is Seth Kim-Cohen, an artist whose work has been presented in London, Ljubljana, Auckland, Melbourne, Denver, New York, and his hometown of Chicago. He`s also a writer with three books about sound and music to his credit (and another one on the way).
Look, would you rather elves and dragons? interplanetary schooners? We gotta ask ourselves, even when listening to music: how and why did we find ourselves here: subject to massive, and completely unnecessary, wealth inequality? Why do corporations write the laws to which citizens are subject? When will we realize that plundering the earth to the point of its expiration ain`t good for anybody`s bottom line? Life is not a zero-sum game. I don`t need to take yours to get mine.
So if you`re gonna write some songs, why not speak to your time & place? Exploitation must be recognized as the crime it is. Class war is real and it`s wringing the life out of nearly everything and everyone: a blood-soaked rag.
conscience, virginity, potato speaks to, and of, these crises in a language we might call the prog-blues, postpunk verity, kosmische reportage,“free”composing. No need to choose between ignorable music and unignorable music. Life too mixes these freely as when dinner must be made or a senator chosen. Agit-ambient? Ethio-no wave? Noise-dub? Jugband-techno? A declaration: the circulatory system joins continents and contents. Never the same bloodstream twice flowing to the barricades.
credits
released May 27, 2021
made entirely by Olias Nil who is solely responsible for its contents //
recorded at 60 Cycle Hummingbird, Oceanside, CA
text track one/: ‘The Market for Lemons’(1970) by George Akerlof extracted > julienned //
additional singing track two/: Julia Kim-Cohen + last verse borrowed from ‘A Was For Anarchy’ from the album Who Put Out The Fire? (1998) by the lategreat Monorchid (highly recommended) //
lyrics track three/: borrowed > rejiggered from‘Cygnet Committee’from the album Space Oddity (1972) by David Bowie with the exception of the middle four minutes comprised of the blues standard‘Smokestack Lightning’performed most compellingly by the lategreat Howlin’Wolf //
text track four/: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith as dramatized for the Milton Friedman public television program Free to Choose (1980) //
tracks five and six/: performed by Yong Cha Kim, Julia Kim-Cohen, Noa Kim-Cohen, and Olias Nil at the Jeffery Stein Childrens Music Garden at Alta Vista Botanical Gardens, Vista, California //
track seven/: informed by Buda`s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007) by Mike Davis //
track eight/: title adapted from the novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn ~ the part of the Welsh mining industry is played by The Monsanto Company, Creve Coeur, Missouri //
scenography track nine/: inspired by a film by Julian Flavin + offered as a tribute to the lategreat Milford Graves //
phrasing track ten/: pinched from M Resplendent with affection //
supported by 6 fans who also own “conscience, virginity, potato”
What a box set. Both these albums are exceptional, although my slight preference is for The Fire Show. The LP with the live tracks shines a new light on the creativity and technical prowess of this band. So many incredible tracks spread over this set that it's near impossible to pick a favourite, but the one that keeps repeating in my head is Conception Blues. Other contenders are The Antipathetic, Explosion: Cerebellum, and Magellan Was A Felon. Just pick this up, you won't be disappointed. sentient meat
Marvelous experimental music from this Tel Aviv musician that fuses outré noise with almost folk-like arrangements. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 13, 2022
Rhythmic post-punk from Horseface with a pop-forward sense of melody and the open-ended expressionistic impulses of DIY. Bandcamp New & Notable May 31, 2022
supported by 4 fans who also own “conscience, virginity, potato”
Sonic Youth is one of those bands where you easily run out of superlatives to describe what they created. This could've easily come off as a cynical cash-grab by a band that had broken up 11 years prior to the release of this record, but that's not what this is. Some of my favourite Sonic Youth instrumentals. sentient meat