Slugfuckers

“Slugfuckers’ sole full-length Transformational Salt, originally released on Tom Ellard’s (Severed Heads) Dogfood Production System in 1981, is an absorbing slab of Australian DIY, dense with thought and fury. The album brings together reprobate dub poetics and thug-drubbing spite in a mangled collage of post-punk disjunct and proto-industrial churn. Art and subcultural adherents are roundly slagged throughout. The group emerged from a college milieu in Sydney, and they’ve been categorized alongside contemporaries Bleeding Arseholes, Rhythmyx Chymx and N-Lets as anti-music ensembles prizing untutored spontaneity. More useful comparisons include Desperate Bicycles and the Pop Group. Also credited for a sound that seems to collapse, but could also be described as openness or constant fluctuation, is the then-newly translated Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guatarri. Terry Blake (guitar), John Laidler (guitar) and Graham Forsyth (bass) formed Slugfuckers in the late 1970s, with Austin Laverty (drums), Craig Wilcox (keyboards, percussion) and Gordon Renouf (saxophone, bass, guitar) joining later. Transformational Salt followed two 1979 singles, ‘Three Feet Behind Glass / Live At Budokan’ and ‘Instant Classic’.” —Sam Lefebvre