AEM041 Hot Sugar

Nick Koenig, for one of his new songs, made a field record­ing of the wind, mapped the sound to a key­board, and played out a melody on the breeze. OK Poc­a­hon­tas. But seri­ously, this found-sound technique—which extends through­out Koenig aka Hot Sugar’s oeuvre—deserves some atten­tion. Not in the sense that these kinds of exca­va­tions are new: over half-a-century’s worth of art music exper­i­men­tal­ists and Japanoise ter­ror­ists have found ample sonic uses for every­thing from vac­uum clean­ers to plas­tic surgery pro­ce­dures. What makes Hot Sugar inter­est­ing, how­ever, is not the aes­thetic extrem­ism or aggres­sive anti-musicality of some­one like, say, Merzbow, but rather the pret­ti­ness, catch­i­ness, even human­ism this artist extracts from these instru­men­tal (but not instru­ment) mate­ri­als. In the world of outre industrio-acoustic stud­ies, this kind of pop-smithing amounts, iron­i­cally, to the oppo­site of con­ven­tion­al­ity, a length of par­tic­u­larly per­cus­sive cop­per pip­ing swung at the hydra­head of No Fun con­ser­vatism. In Hot Sugar’s mel­lotron, tune­ful­ness becomes radical.

I draw this par­al­lel between Koenig and some of the more eso­teric exam­ples of tape-n-scrape not because the two sound any­thing alike, but because the con­nec­tion shows that the term “noise music” is, and per­haps always was, kind of mean­ing­less. Hot Sugar’s style, despite resem­bling some kind of cross­breed of 70s blax­ploita­tion sound­tracks, ambi­ent house, and 8-bit video game themes, is nonethe­less akin, at least in prac­tice, to Ein­stürzende Neubauten tape-looping a crate of plates break­ing in a dank Ger­man ware­house. But where Indus­trial purists mis­used machin­ery to cre­ate lit­eral, albeit bor­der­line unlis­ten­able, por­traits of urban decay, Hot Sugar sol­ders the same base met­als into some­thing you could find on the radio, although maybe 500 years in the future, and in space.

We’ve posted a cou­ple songs here for a teaser, but Koenig’s made his first release, the sound­track to a movie he directed called Straw­berry Banana, free for down­load on his web­site, www.hotsugar.biz. Check it. While com­posed of indi­vid­u­ally great tunes with hooks that get lodged in your head like a badly-cast fish­ing hook, the whole thing flows nar­ra­tively, and should, like any irri­tat­ing and reac­tionary rock critic would tell you, be lis­tened to together, in one sit­ting. It’s true, really. But for fear of tak­ing any more years off my life, let’s move onto the 7-inch.

A-side “Gus Sneaks Out,” might be what hap­pens when you put a trunk-mounted sub­woofer in a wind-up music box. How Koenig makes this stuff hap­pen is still mostly a mys­tery to me, but while the tune is busy with whirrs and blips and cut-up stabs, it still thumps like a motherfucker–a form of lowrider music for the tiny, imag­i­nary peo­ple who live under my floor­boards. When we spoke, the man behind Hot Sugar men­tioned that he was using vocal­ists and MCs for his upcom­ing full-length, and while it’s not hard to imag­ine some­one spit­ting bars over this instru­men­tal, it is hard to place, exactly, how such an addi­tion would change the vibe. This music, despite the heavy-processing of its ori­gins, still man­ages to come across as deeply, cel­lu­larly organic—even wooly. I’ve tried rap­ping on the track a cou­ple of times, and although I’ve attempted using real words, the only thing that seems to sound even remotely cor­rect is a kind of syn­co­pated gorilla bark. This, I guess, is the real Jun­gle music.

“Juic­ing Up” is a slightly dif­fer­ent story. A tit­u­lar ref­er­ence to con­sum­ing a juice box, and not, I believe, abus­ing steroids, the B-side con­tains one of the insa­tiably hooky lead-lines since “The Final Count­down,” the kind of melody that repli­cates itself virally inside your brain and causes break­outs at embar­rass­ing times. This is mis­sion music, the kind of thing you would lis­ten to en route to the most impor­tant thing ever, and then lis­ten to again on your way home. Fuck Ritalin. “Juic­ing Up” is like musi­cal con­cen­tra­tion from con­cen­trate, arche­typ­i­cally empow­er­ing in the sense that it might actu­ally make you think you’re the uber­men­sch, or at least his Game Boy screen dop­pel­ganger. Never let me drive to this song, because I’d focus on the road so hard I’d come to a com­plete stand­still in mov­ing traf­fic. No vocals here. No dis­trac­tions either.

The point to these extended for­ays into per­sonal anec­dote is that Koenig’s music is, for sam­ples culled from “things you can’t buy com­mer­cially” (as the artist says), well, per­sonal. If quin­tes­sen­tial noise music is alien­at­ing, then Hot Sugar’s noises are quin­tes­sen­tially emo­tional, the end result of an alchem­i­cal process by which all fre­quen­cies and found sounds can be ren­dered coex­ten­sive with the human soul.

Ben Las­man

Side A — Gus Sneaks Out Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Juic­ing Up Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]