Nordile, Max

Nordile, Max

Hanging By A Fan Over Wet Cement

Gilgongo

***"Hanging by a Fan Over Wet Cement is the music of listening after listening, when water runs relative to the sound of your own footsteps, and you lean over the resonating chamber of a trashcan like it’s a campfire, then fill it with wheezy laughter. Only, the steel mesh of Hair Clinic / Max Nordile’s field microphone is all mangled and bludgeoned, and the field extends into his home garage. The same contact-foraging quality of attention goes into the beginner’s brain improvisations, whether on saxophone or skipping stones. And the mixing and editing is in large part a visual process, with Nordile monitoring slips of time and intention for the contours of song. It’s a prickly and startling listen, influenced by sound art, alive with noise. Nordile, a member of Debt Rag and Shelter Music, among other groups in Olympia, WA, traces the album’s inspiration back to the duet of birdsong and idling garbage truck, and named it for the language artifact of a dream. The cover shows degraded spiral forms in Scottish petroglyphs. Hanging by a Fan Over Wet Cement is creative, personal music to mirror the distorted balance of consensus reality."—Sam Lefebvre

Nordile, Max

Building A Better Void

Gilgongo

***Max Nordile (Preening, Violence Creeps, Uzi Rash, et al.) tosses Gilgongo 30 minutes of trudging, free-form sprawl that draws unassuming and collateral reference points (in the label’s mind) to a highly regarded catalog of outsiders that spans decades (Jandek, Little Howlin’ Wolf, Nihilist Spasm Band). It’s an honor to challenge any listener, with Building a Better Void.  “Max Nordile has a patented collage method. In this day, I almost hate to say it’s perhaps a distinctly American sound, like squawks from the rubber room. Although, this is sharply not a conversation between "Mattie" and "Hattie" concerning the "Wooly Bully" and the desirability of developing dancing skills (with no attempt made to synthesize these divergent topics). What you’re listening to is a tangled mass, a phone call from a scribbled area code, herking and jerking its way off the map. It’s catchy, it’s bent.  After it said so much to me, I returned to the record, and then again and again. “Thanks so much,” I said to it, like it is said in the divine hand of “Diligent Pores.” And once more I’m gripped into powerful clang at the intersection of joy, mystery & abrasion.  It is mercurial; an icy slip wherein the listener is absolutely unable to get the balance or footing to stand upright for all of thirty minutes. Building a Better Void is a jittering slob but a true testimonial to the San Pablo blocks of trauma-cracked sidewalks of Ishmael Reed’s Blues City: Oakland, brawling...