I can’t help but imagine the metallic assemblage on the cover of Can Knock the Hustle as some sort of horribly inhuman, quasi-organic entity, slipping and sliding around in the guts of old computers and activating long-forgotten sound effect patches with its many wiry tentacles. Even the purest computer music is often undeniably nature-resembling—reverb-laden microsounds like swarms of tiny underwater creatures, uncomfortably textural lashes like the wet slap of a large fish out of water—but this new release from Leeds oddballs MazzaGieyn and Territorial Gobbing is distinctively so. Following their first collaboration, 2019’s Domestic Uranium Now!, Can Knock the Hustle features TG mastermind Theo Gowans in an unusual laptop role, but he (unsurprisingly) retains his quite usual sense of irreverence and indiscriminatory sampling techniques; the sources utilized range from BBC sound archives to a video file that is presumably the 1977 Japanese cult classic ハウス (Hausu). As these bizarre interjections gel and scuffle with MazzaGieyn’s array of restless data streams and half-formed melodic flotsam, we’re subjected to some mental images that I’m sure most of us could’ve done without; now I’m just imagining that horrible alien mass burrowing into my skin to (invasively) remove my precious turnip cysts, or stealing all my poop to make its coffee. If you hear those telltale sounds of digital slither or mistakenly triggered samples, run.
All proceeds from TG’s Bandcamp sales are currently being channeled to a fundraiser for Wharf Chambers, an essential space for weirdo music in Leeds. Feel free to empty some pockets.
Noise Not Music 