As anyone who has found themselves whispering sweet nothings into a porcelain bowl after miscalculating their consumption levels will know, the urge to be sick (or “yack”) rises and falls, ebbs and flows, looping like an internal tide forever on the turn. This is perhaps best illustrated by Stewart Lee’s ode to barley wine and the gaping anus of Christ. If you’ve spent nights into mornings seeking oblivion to repetitive soundtracks, you may well know it all too well.
Ren Schofield aka Container has been scrambling brains with his noise-led techno barrage for twenty years. He’s played to fields of thousands, shared beds on warehouse floors with mangy dogs, and released some of the most hyper-active, forward-thinking music you dare even imagine.
Following on from 2021’s Creamer EP – a fourteen-minute exercise in brain-pulverising sonic athletics with more ideas crammed in a single sub-three-minute outburst than most artists can sprinkle throughout a career – Yacker races further down this same path, chasing havoc like it’s going out of style.
And there’s havoc a plenty. Yacker is eighteen-wheeled carnage. It rockets forwards like a spanked shark, chumming in shallow water using your ears as bait. It’s all crashes, groin-girding bass, and cacophonous fire-alarm electronics.
Schofield’s full intentions are revealed within the first thirty seconds as ear-melting musical structures tear through faces, unsuspecting or otherwise. The ninth track, titled simply ‘Onion’ rides the bass engine like a turbo-injected rodeo bull. It’s cut from the same cloth as Shit and Shine, assuming that the cloth is sheet metal and it’s being hacked into with a surgical saw.
There’s something of the modern world’s tumultuous information bombardment in Container’s sounds. An inescapable onslaught of twisting and contorting beats and squelching synths. Yet, at other times, it feels like Schofield is simply letting lose, letting rip, letting us have it just to see what we can withstand.
The title track is a case in point, doing a bang-up job of mimicking digestive turmoil. “Yacking” can mean talking at length or it could even be an Aussie term for hard toil but, here, it’s hard to envision it as anything other than a reference to vomit. Its battle to control a rising and unpredictable set of tumbling frequencies perfectly replicating “yack” undulations.
Much like ‘Cock/ver10’s famous proclamation “Come on you cunts, let’s have some Aphex acid ”, Yacker screams to go faster. Which, seeing as frenzy and drive are Schofield’s calling cards, is already pretty damn pacy. So much so that even the half-step trudge of ‘Drooper’ marauds with stalking menace.
The finale, ‘Spritzer’, is a little palate-cleansing ballad to close things off. Like fuck it is. It’s yet another mind-grinder, with scrap metal noise introduction, à la The New Boyfriends, before exploding into the boisterous crash cymbals meets car alarm set of breaks that kicked this whole thing off on album opener ‘Abrasion’. The sickness rises again.
