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Kim Pieters, bassist and singer (and abstract painter),
and drummer Peter Stapleton
recruited the Terminals' guitarist Brian Crook and second guitarist
Danny Butt,
and in 1993 Flies Inside The Sun was born from the ashes of Dadamah.
Their improvisational spaced-out music relied on feedback, guitar noise and
synth cacophony. A few of their songs
(Absent And Erotic Lives, Sleepwalk, Icarus) were
unreleased Dadamah songs.
Compared with Dadamah,
the album An Audience Of Others (Kranky, 1995), a work of
imposing psychedelia, merged
Pere Ubu and Dead C with a more uncompromising attitude.
The delirious Mothers Kiss sounded like an extremely loose Jim Morrison-ian nightmare.
The Man With No Arms picked the most free-form and cosmic elements of
early Pink Floyd.
The longer Absent and Erotic Lives is an avantgarde concerto of
abstract instrumental noise.
Icarus
The 15-minute Sleepwalk is the epic centerpiece. Tribal drums duel with
cosmic distortions for about three minutes. Then the music collapses into
a black hole and only towards the end returns to the same kind of hell.
Peter Stapleton (drums, synth, radio), Kim Pieters (bass, organ, drums, vocals)
and Danny Butt (guitar, amplifier, synth) reunited in late 1994 as Rain and
recorded Sediment (Metonymic, 1996), an even more abstract and anarchic
work that focuses on synthesizers instead of guitars, from the mayhem of Dragonfly to the
harrowing drones of Lost Angel Memory, from the spare percussive
landscape of Radii to the dense metaphysics of
Secrets Of A Rented Island,
from the disjointed improvisation of Violet Stains Red to the
calm and almost Tibetan tinkling of Corridor.
The 13-minute The Blindfold Test opens with slow-burning guitar noises,
then turns into a ghostly parade of dissonances, then delves into
free-jazz jamming, then into a hellish fresco of drilling sounds.
Rain's second album, Sycamore (1998), was less radical (Pieters plays
only on two pieces).
While not as extreme as the Rain album, subsequent works by
Flies Inside The Sun (FITS) have continued to juxtapose loose vocals and
free-form improvisation.
Flies Inside The Sun (Metonymic, 1996), recorded by the quartet of
Pieters, Butt, Stapleton and Crook, is the classic.
In Casanovas the tribal percussive pattern and a rumbling distortion
increase in loudness while Pieters' wailing recedes. The guitar's spastic
strumming duels with synth noises and wandering bass lines in
Living in the Real World.
Quiet drumming underlines the subtle guitar-bass exchanges of
She Passes By.
But these are mere appetizers compared with the centerpiece, the
21-minute Detour, abstract sound-painting at its best:
long instrumental drones, ethereal dissonances, spare percussion.
Masterful drumming and sound effects create a flow that seems to combine
Pink Floyd's A Saucerful Of Secrets and a coitus interruptus.
A monster distortion leads a gargantuan group improvisation
which in turn leads to a massive geometric riffing pattern.
Pieters, in the meantime, was active in the all-female improvisational trio Doramaar that released Copula (1995) and Terra Incognita (1996).
Cactus Sky (Metonymic, 2000) salvaged FITS tapes
(recordings from 1996-99) that were lost in a fire and features
a trio of Brian Crook (guitar, organ, synth),
Peter Stapleton (drums, shortwave radio) and Danny Butt
(guitar, synth, computer).
The work as a whole is not cohesive, but
the nine-minute excursion into electronic music and musique concrete of The Black Ship,
the ghostly ambient music of In The Shadow Of Mysterious Succulents (a naive childish hymn against a fibrillating background of undecipheral sounds),
the electronic nebula exploding into supernova of Green Hear Ted Orange,
the pure sound exploration of The Birth Of Sand And Gravel and Plateau (the beginning and the closing pieces),
and even the more conventional Velvet Underground-ian orgasm of A Spy In Your Love
rank among their most successful pieces.
The standout is the ten-minute crescendo of Farenheit, an electro-acoustic work that rocks out while imploding into scary abrasive drones.
The same trio is featured on Le Mal D'Archive (Metonymic, 2001), that
collects four lengthy (and mainly electronic) suites from 1999 which abide
by the dogmas of the previous FITS albums:
dissonant, disjointed music halfway between free-jazz improvisation a` la Art Ensemble of Chicago, psychedelic freak-outs a` la Red Krayola, and atonal
chamber music.
Stapleton also formed
a free-noise "supergroup" featuring himself on percussion,
Kim Pieters on bass/keyboards and
Bruce Russell on guitar (Dead C). The three released
Last Glass (Corpus Hermeticum, 1994),
comprising six instrumental improvisations
(Viper's Window runs the gamut from extremely
cacophonous free-jazz to
extremely dilated acid-rock, and all punctuated by propulsive percussions,
Auto Violet Reco fuses all of them in one long riff-oriented sonic
massacre,
while the dissonant chamber music of Last Glass, the
wild guitar meditations of Valerian and the tribal frenzy of
Stoney Verities attempt to coin a new kind of ambient music);
Sex/Machine (Metonymic, 1999), recorded between 1996 and 1998.
and the single Cold Sweat (Ecstatic Yod, 2002).
Stapleton and Pieters also launched the project Sleep with
Enfolded in Luxury (Metonymic, 1999) and
Ghostwriting (Metonymic, 2001), more conventional works in a
progressive/pyschedelic-rock vein.
Brian Crook recorded his first solo album,
Bathysphere (Metonymic, 1999), surprisingly mellow and ecstatic
a` la Tim Buckley,
and helped his wife Mayrose Crook record the third and fourth
Renderers albums,
The Surface Of Jupiter (Ajax, 1997), that includes
Carnival of Souls, and
A Dream Of The Sea (Siltbreeze, 1999), both anchored to a
gloomy form of roots-rock. It would take several years before Mayrose and Brian
Crook recorded another Renderers' album,
Ghosts of our Vegas Life (2006).
Flies Inside The Sun returned with
Burning Glass (Metonymic, 2004), which collects pieces recorded between
2000 and 2003.
The music is still highly experimental, bordering on electro-acoustic research
and dilated cosmic free-jazz (Dust And Equation).
Burning Glass is one gigantic wave of wavering noise.
Nightwatch of the Mirror is one long buzzing sound, modulated to
become a high-speed Helios Creed-style
guitar freak-out.
Sunblinded Eye is a chamber concerto for bells, bass drones and
casual instrumental sounds.
The album boasts the best production value of Pieters' and Stapleton's career.
Btwxt / Bdvld (Celebrate Psi Pheomenon, 2004) is Pieters' collaboration
with Birchville Cat Motel's Kneale and Sandoz Lab Technicians' Kirk.
Brian Crook followed his first solo Bathysphere with
Bible Black (2002), a much more traditional work, and then with
the totally different
Artificial Light (2006), credited to Anti-clockwise, an electronic
and psychedelic pastiche.
Submarine (Last Visible Dog, 2008), credited to the Renderizors,
collects unreleased Renderers material of 2000-01,
a collaboration Sandoz Lab Technicians.
Stapleton's project Eye released Black Ice (2005) and Meridian (2006).
The Renderers finally returned with
Monsters And Miasmas (Last Visible Dog, 2009), that includes the nine-minute Harvesting The Sea, influenced by post-rock as much as by their usual idols,
and the more straightforward
A Rocket Into Nothing (Ba Da Bing, 2011).
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