Harm Stryker

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Harm Stryker is a politically and socially motivated experimental noise venture. The group features Kenneth Yates aka Caustic Castle and Kelly Nourse aka ConstantMauk from Richmond, Virginia. They are also founding members of the (areacode)noise collective concept and 804noise Richmond Experimental.

Harm Stryker

Reviews:

Emerging from the 804Noise collective in Richmond VA, Harm Stryker are Kelly Nourse and Kenneth Yates. Their sound is at the more compelling end of noise music: it is burbling, pulsing and glitchy, atmospheric and textural, rather than a crude sandblasting of the ears. In a better world, Harm Stryker would be heirs to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop scoring the new TV series of DR Who. As it is, they exist in a marginal zone that this release is unlikely to lift them out of.

Class Consciousness raises question it does not answer about the relationship between sound and politics. The title, the beautifully hand-screened sleeve and a couple of inserts- one denouncing gentrification, the other quoting Situationist Raoul Vaneigem- indicate the group's anti-capitalist orientation. But the lack of any linguistic content of any kind on the record itself- all of the tracks are instrumental and untitled- means that the way in which the music is intended to function politcally is left opaque. Are we to believe that the formal experimentalism of the music is inherently political? That claim would rest not on any agit-prop potential - because it is easy to imagine a listener encountering the music without having any political thoughts whatsoever- but on the sound's capacity to uproot the listener from their assumptions about the world. The problem is that. in becoming an established musical genre, noise has lost much of it's power to 'make strange". Harm Stryker may be superior exponents of noise music, but they have not yet done enough to restore that power. Mark Fisher [ wire #284 october 2007 ]