Meerk Puffy (Forcefield) – “Nung” LP – Animal Disguise Records [Album As Art #41]

Forcefield (art collective that birthed Meerk Puffy) – “Roggabogga” MP3/download

I know just a little about the legendary Forcefield collective and its ties to Fort Thunder, Load Records and Lightning Bolt, so little I didn’t even know Meerk Puffy were a F-Field offshoot.

It created a lot of confusion leading up to this review (it didn’t help that now-defunct Bart’s CD Cellar labeled it as “Forcefield”), but I’m all straight-up and filled-in and ready to describe Nang, a delightfully untactful, tasty crack-noise LP.

Most people describe Forcefield-related material as dominated by drum machines and muddy effects, and I’m not finding anything wrong with that description here. This is truly warped musics, surge-heavy enough to tether one’s attention and skronk-y enough to satisfy even the most jaded indie meatheads.

Did I mention the locked groove? Yep, I was just reading about this phenomenon in The Believer the other day. Lo and behold, something told me it was time to listen to my Meerk Puffy LP and BAM-PLOP-FIZZ-SMASH, it crashed my head like a window: Side 2, Song 1, when it ends, just keeps rotating into perpetuity.

It’s a wacky little cadence; I thought my record player was skipping — how many times have you heard that in a review? Actually true though — before I applied my locked-groove lessons and Gumshoe’d that shit.

You have to re-route the stylus to keep the record progressing; a pain, sure, but that’s not the point. There are records with 50, 100 and even thousands of locked grooves, mostly on Rrrecords, yet this is the only LP in my collection with an L-groove.

I gotta say, life is just WEIrd. What are the odds I’d pick this record, out of thousands, and listen to it the day after reading an extensive article on locked grooves (and the fact that MP3 files, which suck anyway, can’t duplicate a locked groove)?

Now that I’m sitting down with it again, of course, I realize Nung is something special, a Panicsville-ian delight that, like the best noise-/effects-milkers, never rests on its laurels. Constant movement is the calling card here, as is flexibility and fluidity. You just can’t teach this stuff …

For fans of Rubber Cement, Andy Ortmann, P-ville, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Black Dice/Eric Copeland (was just listening to Hermaphrodite the other day, too), button-pushing and levitating, not necessarily in that order. Skull-rattling.