Having been a fan of My Disco since my 16-year-old self plucked their 2006 release from the shelf almost purely on the basis it was called Cancer, I’ve had the joy of watching their brutal brand of disco grow ever lonelier to the point the party lived on only as some Proustian reverie from three-day old tinnitus in the grips of the mother of all comedowns. There were a lot of picks over this era in service to my mostly hormonal angst that don’t stand the test of time, but this one continues to pay dividends. From their origins in more recognizable post-punk forms, the three Stus of My Disco – brothers Ben and Liam Andrews and Rohan Rebeiro – continue to eke fresh meat from rock triodom.
In more recent times, the restless activity of the band has spawned more explicitly non-rock offspring: guitarist Ben has taken up the searing ambient noise of Blarke Bayer and Rohan’s percussion has forked out into both more liquid forms (R. Rebeiro) and more locked grooves (Kangaroo Skull). Bassist/vocalist Liam, meanwhile, has partnered with Neubauten’s Boris Wildorf and Regis to form the Traveling Wilburys of pulsating Sturm and Drang with the band Eros.
A lot of this side wax has come courtesy of My Disco’s unlikely new home at Downwards, and so follows Liam’s second release under his putative solo moniker, AICHER. I say putative as, unlike the project’s first offering (Lack / The West Retaining Wall in 2023), Rebeiro has been summoned to up the clatter for AICHER’s second release. The album follows some live performances the duo debuted in Japan last year, which earned a follow-up on record.
As implied by its title, Defensive Acoustics is animated by properties of space both physical and, true to My Disco’s later work, the temporal space of relief between volleys of pummelling noise. The physical space in question here is Ishiguro Building, a co-opted live venue in Japan that does exactly what it says on the tin (“an aged and abandoned pharmaceutical store in Kanazawa”).
Hostile environments like this offer a suitable playground for the pair’s brand of sonic disquiet; one that harnesses the anticipation of silence as much as the obscurity of what lurks behind each strange dispatch from the dark. Opener ‘Ascertain’ doesn’t dwell too long on its scene-setting bell chimes and groaning synth before we reach the full amplitude of thick stomping low end carrying the glassy high-end slap-back of what sounds like a bed of loose nails rattling on a floor tom. From this advancing threat that sounds like Nurse with Wound soundtracking a Resident Evil boss cut scene, ‘Harness Pleads’ brings things into closer quarters as ringing sabre-like metal jousts with humming sawtooth bass for control of the side chain.
If the instrument IDs have seemed dubious thus far, I felt completely in the wilderness with ‘Servitude’, which bears the tactile quality of balls of clay raining down on corrugated iron over a field of drifting Helmholtz resonances. A lot of this elusive sonic character comes from the unique imprint of the performance space AICHER have endeavoured to recreate, and both players have thoughtfully designed their inputs around the inimitable properties of a certain space in time. The acoustics are served well in turn by the pair’s adventurous arsenal of instrumentation and, as a regular attendee of Rebeiro’s Omniversal Hum series where he often double-hands as host and performer, I’ve seen this dinful menagerie grow considerably over the years.
Thus ends the Rebeiro-paired side one, punctuated by the arrival of a drum machine. For ‘An Exhausted Image’, a subdued loop anchors a restless bed of bass oscillating like a violin cage-fighting a didgeridoo, while ‘Constriction (andereBaustelle Version)’ kicks the beat up into a more Downwards Records torque. The intensity crescendos with the title track, as we are swallowed whole by carnivorous metal in a grey kaleidoscope of screaming trebles and buckling bass that would probably wet someone’s whistle in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Closer ‘Possession’ offers a well-needed Melatonin, showcasing the more serene purrs that factory flotsam can make when it is no longer being battered like a Teutonic avant-clanger.
Where This Heat cranked the dank from meat locker acoustics, there is a full-spectrum crispness and fidelity to the record that sidles in nicely under the Downwards banner. It would have been more intuitive to channel the trusted and established codes of industrial design, but ‘Defensive Acoustics’ upends the trope that everything recorded in an abandoned building has to sound like it’s amplified by a flank of wet beef. Peppered throughout, Liam’s deadpan vocal work also offsets the tumult around it with signature chilling calm; one that evokes a newsreader placidly doing his thing in front of a freeway car pileup that continues to stack up just when you think it surely has to be over. Unexpected turns like these have seen his work stay evergreen over all these years between rock and harder places, and continue to stand up as one of my precious few non-regrets of teendom.
