MAX NORDILE “Primordial Gaffe” (Paisley Shirt Records)

Max Nordile doesn’t strike me as the paisley-wearing type, yet here is on San Fran’s Paisley Shirt Records with Primordial Gaffe, his latest controlled and blurted performance art/noise tape. Kevin, proprietor of the label, also thinks it’s “unlike anything else on Paisley Shirt,” so here we have a true original, a misfit from across the bay willing to plant his flag wherever avant-loving masses can get to it. Kevin’s happy about it, so let us be happy about it too!

Max makes skewered guitar/bass odes to the sound of the current of a quarter-inch jack being plugged into a practice amp or a tuning peg cranking waaay beyond the point where it’s doing anyone any good. As such he’s an explorer, a sound savant that’s either so far ahead of his time that we’re just hoping to catch up or so deep in the weeds that we can barely see the path connecting the main road to the remote fieldsite where he’s tinkering. Either way, the seasick hammers of performance suggest rhythms and patterns and connections to each other that only those with the keened ear will be able to put together, like detectives on the case.

Never noise rock because not rock and barely noise, but perhaps claiming no wave as an ancestor, making this no no no no wave or something equally absurd as a descendent category, Primordial Gaffe will satisfy the adventurous among you. Like those of you with guitars and beat-up fedoras and an inkling to traverse the far corners of the world in search for archaeological rarities. Plus, the tape has a neat silver shell and j-card!

https://www.discogs.com/artist/4004537-Max-Nordile

https://paisleyshirtrecords.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

MAX NORDILE "Hair Clinic" C22 (Freaks)

Max Nordile may or may not have set up a flash mob to improv with dedicatedly out of tune instruments in the middle of one of Chinatown’s six-way crosswalks during peak rush hour traffic. He then, possibly, moved the party on south two blocks to an underpass camp to better commit his mumble-fess'd transit-gressions amongst the rapt & swaddled, possessed & dispossessed. The possible chronology is suspect. 

The point is to make not a one hot lick 
o’ sense of sound or sensation, but many?

Know trumpets and crossing signals were herd
-ed in the making of this dis(t)reet recording.

Oakland has no sound problems having problems with sound 
solutions. (GRN + GNR = NRGX2)

"Fucking science”, indeed. 

Disorient yourself accordingly…

https://thesefreaks.bandcamp.com/album/hair-clinic

and/or

http://freakslabel.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

MAX NORDILE “Go to Sleep, Fool” (Digital Regress)

Max Nordile is the lowest of the lo-fi, the no-est of the no wave. He’s a Nothing Band, he’s a Dolphin saxer. He calls Oakland home, but he’s probably living mostly in the Oakland sewer. He collects all the musical instruments the topside Oaklanders flush down the toilet. I bet he wears retro A’s hats. My writing homie Jacob is from Oakland. I wonder if he knows Max.

“Go to Sleep, Fool” is the aural equivalent of someone filling a few tube socks with Quickrete and flailing them around at objects that purport to make music. When the music comes, it is not how you expect it. It is a freeform death salad of sounds and styles, from Greek to Cobb, noise to noisette. A jittering, collapsing apartment block on a faultline, “Go to Sleep, Fool” will be imploring you to actually do the opposite: stay up because there’s too much racket going on … fool.

https://digitalregress.bandcamp.com/music

--Ryan