Philly eats its own tail, the snake chomping
down, feasting on shit and entrails. But that’s Philly. You can’t explain
Philly to someone who hasn’t spent an inordinate amount of time there (like I
have). Basically, you have to hope the person who needs an explanation can hack
it long enough to decide whether they love it or hate it. Some just run
screaming within minutes of getting caught in traffic along the Schuylkill
Expressway. Others decide it’s just better to not get off 95 after all.
Then, there are those who love it. Those who
can tap into its idiosyncrasies and curiosities. Those who draw inspiration
from its decrepitude hidden just beneath the surface of a thin veil of
respectability. (And, truly, the veil is thin.) MMNNSSD, the duo of Mark Dilks
and Marc Zajack, sticks a needle deep into the city’s vein and extracts some
kind of blood-substance that they subsequently sprinkle on their recordings.
“Exiting the Infirmary,” a painfully accurate summation of what it’s like to
wake up every morning there, is an off-kilter barrage of electoacoustic/found-sound/folk/noise/tribal
sound art, a surprisingly penetrable
series of pieces that continually warps itself in surprising ways the further
it goes.
Perhaps nothing gets to the heart of the
MMNNSSD vibe than “Longest 3 minuetes [sic]
of my life,” a squirrely mashup of source material that sounds like the
cassette deck it’s playing through is situated underneath an industrial magnet.
It’s gripping stuff, certainly not drawn out, nor does it overstay its welcome.
By the time a hip hop track breaks through the static and the noise, all bets
are off. It’s Philly in all its trash-heaped mayhem and glory, catalogued in
three minutes, a microcosm of a cassette tape and a lifestyle. I wouldn’t even
begin to change anything about it.
--Ryan
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