> THE NEW BLOCKADERS Profile and Reviews

The New Blockaders (abbreviated TNB) began in 1982. The founder-members, R. and P.D. Rupenus, having previously been involved in several music/art projects since the late ’70s. The New Blockaders play what they refer to as “anti-music” as opposed to industrial music. Over their career The New Blockaders have recorded with Coil, Merzbow, Jim O’Rourke and Thurston Moore among others.

Some reviews:
TNB’s debut is full of chaotic Dada referentialism putting in the bag cryptic Max Ernst collages on the inserts, Hegel or nihilistic Situationism on a declamatory manifesto, and disturbed tumult on their sound, to bring the corpse of art into the crematory again. And you will expect to hear overcharged electricity or deranged machinery, which is as far from that as it makes this edition an intelligent turn in retrospect. You will be tempted to think first of Erik Satie’s Musique D’ameublement (Furniture Music) in a perverse manner. TNB reversed the logics that would generate muzak, ‘a music which was urging you to take no notice of it and to behave (during the intervals) as if it did not exist,’ according to Satie. The noises here are intrusive and sound as if the furniture is what produces them. A squawk symphony filled with rusty wheels and creaking wood floor. There’s even a dog disturbed or a trombone that sings along the crawled households; so that in difference to the angst of their Industrial contemporaries (Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse) it was in Changez Les Blockeurs’ case a syntax destruction, an anti-narrative in the form of a happening that would draw a sort of acoustic noise art continuity with the assemblages and environments, early sixties pre-Fluxus, of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman or Claes Oldenburg, or in case you permit me the license to align them to something academic, John Cage’s 1940 score Living Room Music which reads: ‘To be played on household objects such as magazines, a table, books, the floor or using architectural objects like window frames,’ will allow it. Predating the Guds Soner, TNB refurnish. e/i

Two untitled pieces which are actually Industrial and concrete noise performed in real-time manipulations environment. Monotonous metal scraping, chains clinking, boots tramping, dog barking, and also modified sound of wind instruments creating a very obscure atmosphere. Probably this TNB recording is the most successful interpretation of literary works from two ingenious Soviet writers, Platonov and Gastev. The first one is a well known apologist of so-called Soviet realism art, he is calling for the never-ending creation of something huge existing in infinite space (imagine virgin lands illuminated by only one electric light bulb, and a sole sheet of paper blown by wind). But the sound arrangement is rigorous and very rational – here we find the strong reference to great Futurist and labour systematization theorist Gastev. A really wonderful album. OHMs

Revolutionary nihilist manifesto from England. This LP is an excursion into the world of anti-music and anti-composition. The packaging includes no credits, notes or titles. It does include a statement of the groups’ nihilistic viewpoint. This anti-composition creates dense, mechanical atmospheres. One feels propelled into a dark and mysterious workshop where every small sound is heard and felt, but not seen. Instrumentation, if there is any in the traditional sense, is undefinable. Aeon

Metalworkers unionised along the line of Anarchist-Surrealist poetics. A warehouse symphony, workers pile scrap metal in honour of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Invisible commandos parachuting back in time on tyreless bicycles in the Paris commune, BMX stunts on the barricades, railroad hand-carts creep through loops in the alleys and anchor-chains of Kronstodt. Timeless, historical and recommended. ND

(Source: http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.sg/2007/03/new-blockaders-changez-les-blockeurs.html)

More Info At: http://www.thenewblockaders.org.uk/

4iB Records | For intrinsic Beliefs