Consumer Electronics

Consumer Electronics aren’t flashy enough to make a big song and dance out of a new record. They consider the work to speak for itself. That what they’ve created will protest its own set of purposes just fine rather than shake its ass for the public to lap up with a surgically implanted cannula to gather the excitement and log its ensuing impact.

Rather, Philip Best (Whitehouse, Ramleh, Skullflower) and Russell Haswell prefer to let it leak through the ventilation shafts of the modern music-consuming landscape where its demented messages, ones symptomatic of an equally demented world, a world regularly erecting all manner of sordid atrocities, naked truths and monoliths, are allowed to gradually seep into the system like a parasite sucking on one’s eye.

Their unique spree of apocalyptic performance poetry by Best (‘vox/virus’) and Haswell’s insane sorcery with the avant-garde (‘electronics/fx’: check out his Downwards remixes for evidence of such blinding, witchcraft spoils) since the group’s inception in 1982 established them as pioneers, if provocateurs in power electronics (with William Bennett of Whitehouse during Best’s ensure with them would be the prime example here) and experimental art terrorism designed to unsettle and interrupt the everyday flow of normalcy and all it’s fallabilities, whilst also working to unlock a dormant side of humankind, for better or worse, long eroded.

This is the kind of art that prospers yet prefers to be left alone (for those who seek this species of art know exactly what they’re looking for), and active at the edges of all things, yet radiates loud and clear with an uncomfortable, confrontational headlock at the heaving core of our contemporary crisis, never missing the mark regarding how to encapsulate our nationwide existential ego-threat and dread as a self-aggrandizing birthmark, sunburn, or flimsy stitch in time. A crisis that Consumer Electronics, electronic interrogators, and everlasting iconoclasts have been soundtracking for decades now.

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Husks Of The Dead is the long-running audio/visual/performance document of Jack Conrow AKA Jack Control.