Something fascinates me about the brutal Midwest underground. The shows are impossibe to find, the venues are constantly changing, and the musicians themselves are some of the most fucked up, unconventional people you'll ever meet. In a basement littered with empty beer cans and reeking of low-quality marijuana, you'll find one of the tightest countercultures in all of society. People who don't care about appearance, intelligence, or even conversation. Folks who wake themselves up with a bong hit and a brew. Men who scrape by on minimum wage jobs to afford an apartment/art space where all the subtle insanities of their everyday lives can come out to torment them. Broken tapes and violins (raped by analog processing) are the feral and destitute mating call of a people so sickened by the norm that rather than rebel against it like so many others, they embrace its exact opposite. Society is driven to be attractive - strong, ample minded, intelligent. No one wants to be an ugly, disgusting motherfucker. No one wants to make people uncomfortable solely by being around. No one wants to be a true outcast - or so I thought.

Think about your favorite artist or album. Think about art in general. What do we embrace as good? Those things that strive for beauty. Those pieces that, either through structure or narrative or whathaveyou, seem to scrape the divine. Great art is a gift from the heavens. It breathes life into the reckless, callous existence we call life. 

So what happens when that philosophical base is smashed? What happens when music becomes so disgusting, so utterly repulsive that it mirrors an abortion more than a birth?  

I shouldnt have to tell most of you about the great cosmic ugly that is Burning Star Core. Hands down, I'd say Amelia was the most creative and overlooked release of 2003, and, on top of that, last year saw two more stellar records, Operator Dead...Post Abandoned and the outrageously viral Blood Lightning. With  a crew of both highly regarded noise musicians as well as extremely high noise musicians, C. Spencer Yeh (the mastermind behind the ever-rotating and constantly shifting line-up of BSC) has been carving a raw psychedelic epitaph on the tombstone of American experimental music since the late late 90's, and with Challenger, he appears ready to bury us all.

The outrageous, surmounting overdrive of "Mysteries of the Organ" should be enough to render the "shimmering" guitars of post-rock impotent, while still scavenging for the primitive, cerebral, spacey dissonance that at first made shoegaze enjoyable. "Beauty Hunter" is executed with such magnificent understanding of what drone should be, while "Through the Bars of a Rhyme" is the primal soundtrack of a daterape and attempted murder. Unsheltered ears will embrace the perverse vocal experiment that is "Mezzo Forte", and for those still holding on to the conception that great music is an attempt to achieve perfect beauty, "No Memories, No Plans" will destroy all your preconceptions of what "beauty" is. In a world dominated by that "beauty", it is hard to appreciate what is truly ugly. The stangnant, visceral tone and mood of Challenger seeps with a slowly brooding, mind slaying insanity that is truly disturbing. Of all releases in the slowform experimental noise underground, the only album with half as much significance as this release is Emeralds' Allegory of Allergies, a piece whose aesthetic is so far removed from the broken, discordant nonsense of Challenger that I am incapable of comparing the two.

C. Spencer Yeh has a hold on experimental music, and he commands the craft better than any other artist 20 years his senior. Only in a world overwhelmed with images of the gorgeous, can we thrive off the grotesque. Challenger is the most perverse and disturbing collection of mindnumbing, heartrending, anxiety inducing tracks ever put to wax. And now I understand what C. Spencer Yeh wants his listeners to feel. He wants us to feel lost in a sea of inescapable horrors so crushingly powerful that our only logical response is to curl up in the fetal position and await imminent death. A prisoner of war, a Thai sex slave, a strangled rabbit. Burning Star Core exists so we can feel the most intense emotion in the human spectrum: utter and complete despair. Challenger will disturb you if you let it. It will kill you if you want it to. Singlehandedly, it is the most powerful record I have ever encountered. And it is truly horrendous.

-Jack Britton