Listening to Total's Tanzmusik der Renaissance reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with Joe. We were discussing upcoming releases we were excited about or amused by, and just before parting, I made the remark that I "would buy an album of squishing cat shit with bare toes if King Crimson released it." While far from conventional and accessible, King Crimson's last album, The ConstruKction of Light was far from the artistic equivalent of feline feces fetishism to my pleasant un-surprise. It was only when I listened to Tanzmusik der Renaissance that I discovered the perfect synergy of Tidy Cat and unshod feet.

So what possessed me to buy this steaming toss? Pure impulse combined with the hubris of a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but practice paradiddles. I found it for $2.99 at Newbury Comics, my new favorite record store of all time. It was marked "experimental rock," which sounded at least somewhat promising. I assumed it was just some small indie company unloading some free promotional CDs, and not that it was absolute gobshite. I was wrong.

Tanzmusik der Renaissance is "experimental" in that it sounds like some guys bored with playing silly things like notes, dicking around in someone's home studio; and "rock" in that they slather distortion over everything (which includes, more often than not, electric guitars). I'm sure they think the tracks they laid down are high art, though. Otherwise, they'd never bother with pretentious titles like "Phantom Bombing Shroud," "Receiving Metal Arrows," and "Srebenica Forest Glade" But then, I'm also sure they have special bong-circulator suits to aid their creativity.

"Phantom Bombing Shroud" starts out promisingly enough, in a mediocre way: it could either turn out tolerable or horrible. It continues on. You glance at the CD counter. Five minutes in, nothing has changed. It's the same arrhythmic, amelodic noise that could be the intro, interlude, or end degeneration of a post-rock epic. Then, in a brief moment of unpredictability, the layers-- about three deep-- peel back, and the track ends. What the fuck was that? Is this part of some extended suite? After all, the tracks are marked on the album's cover with lowercase Roman numerals.

The following track, "Green Trem," amounts to roughly the same thing, only with aimless tremolo fuzz guitar. It's a bit more interesting than "Phantom Bombing Shroud," if only because it actually has a rhythm, even if there isn't a real melody (or even a tone row). "Green Tambourine" adds-- you guessed it-- a tambourine shaking, in no recognizable pattern, along with the aforementioned noise. And it goes on like this!

Finally, at the record's end, something again sounds almost promising; the 27-minute "Srebenica Forest Glades" begins with a calculatedly hushed relative quiet that sounds like it could be the beginning to a considerably less remarkable Mogwai Fear Satan. You are rewarded with: 1. a lazily tapped cymbal; 2. the same godawful meaningless noise; and 3. a flute adding precisely no meaning, and not much more timbral variation.

Did you get bored reading those last few paragraphs? If you did, multiply your boredom by the album's suggested retail price, in pennies, and raise that to the power of six. If you didn't, then maybe this record is the one for you, as listening to it is every bit as interesting as reading my literal description of it. Tanzmusik der Renaissance is the distorted, lobotomized, and blurred artistic vision of a world where squishing cat shit between your piggy toes is horribly ignored by the unwashed masses.

The band members, whose names aren't listed in the liner notes (a shame, as new forms of kidney stones and ulcers could be named after them), seem to really mean what their likely drug-addled brains have dribbled onto tape. Sadly, it can't really be called music. I mean, I'd like to think that I'm pretty open-minded-- I've argued to considerably more snobby people than myself that rap, techno, and industrial actually are forms of music, and that they should recognize the fact, even if they hate the music itself. However, this latrine-on-spinning-plastic contains no melody, no harmony, no rhythm, and no appreciable attention to the kind of sonic craftsmanship that might result in intriguing tones to tickle the ear.

While, to some, a Stockhausen piece may appear just as random and ill-thought out as anything Total have pieced together, at least he's got meticulous, anal-retentive scores to back himself up. All these guys have is the scraping of digital bong-resin. In short, buy this record only if you thought Throbbing Gristle sold out.

-Craig Griffith