Racebannon

Nebraska's quartet Racebannon (Mike Anderson on vocals, Chris Saligoe on bass, James Bauman on guitar, Brad Williams on drums and Dave Britts on turntables) were heirs to the great tradition of extreme punk-rock as inaugurated by bands such as the Laughing Hyenas and Killdozer. The short album First There Was Emptiness (Level Plane, july 2000), runs the gamut from manic hardcore (the psychotic spastic Disintegrator Integrator, the visceral screamo rant of Under The Influence Of Gravity, the breathless Maybe I'm Just Camera Shy) to the astral detour of Space of Time (how Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine would sound in the punk era). The six-minute Yr Test Scores Speak For Themselves opens with a "noise and strum" nightmare before launching into a chaotic rave-up and closes with a ghostly coda. The frenzy of DNA Bloody DNA implodes in a sort of bluesy agony and ends in pure instrumental cacophony. The vomit-like Goteamgonethegreenlightgunfight takes a bold detour into distorted jazzy jamming and hyper-psychedelic chanting. These three pieces are the marks of an evil rock genius.

That was only the appetizer for the superhuman tension of In the Grips of the Light (Level Plane, jul 2001 - jan 2002). The seven-minute opener, Fox Boogie, is already a stormy desperate ramshackle hardcore that slowly decays into sheer madness but that pales in comparison with the hurricane of Flip N' Fuck which after two minutes descends into another deranged mayhem. Go With The Flow doesn't even try to coalesce and simply emits primordial sounds and screams. The eight-minute Sober And Sad is shaken by a relentless seismic emotional turbulence, with rabid screaming, atonal guitar and anti-rhythmic drumming competing for attention in a sort of hypnotic exorcism, and it all collapses in a coda of ugly noise. The eight-minute Clubber Lang is a sneering rambling coupled with a radioactive miasma of instrumental jamming that eventually becomes just a faceless wave of random noise. The eleven-minute I'm Yr Egomaniac is a whirlwind of shouts, distortion, torrential cymbals and electronic whistles that decays into a feverish sound collage. Fuck Yr Obvious Words is a choral singalong as sung by a group of drunk deranged cowpunks while the world is being devoured by a nuclear fire. Electricity is their supersonic tribute to Captain Beefheart's 1967 classic.

The rock opera Satan's Kickin' Yr Dick In (Secretly Canadian, jun 2002 - nov 2002) is divided into seven untitled movements. There are peaks of punk ferocity in the third and at the end of the seventh, and of disorganized insanity in the fifth, but the album never even remotely matches the peaks of the previous two albums.

Then the band split and the members worked on other projects. Anderson and Saligoe formed Rapider Than Horsepower that released Stage Fright Stage Fright (2003), This Is My Big Night (2004), Rapider Than the World (2004) and What's Our Visibility (2005). Anderson and Bauman formed Medusa that recorded En Raga Sul (2008).

After a six-year hiatus, they regrouped without the DJ for IV - Acid Or Blood (Southern, 2008), which contains The Killer (an old 2005 single).

They still released Six Sik Sisters (2011), Unwanted Sounds (2012), which contains 27 minutes of noise.

Anderson was also involved in Thee Open Sex.