Flux Information Sciences were a quasi-No Wave artsy-fartsy Brooklyn band formed in the mid-90's by a Portugese/Brazilian guy and a Malagasy/French guy. Friend-of-the-blog Jumanji introduced me to their weird, twisted world some years ago via this very album, but the full impact of their off-kilter, Idiot-Flesh/Sleepytime brand of minimalist electro-punk didn't fully sink in until just recently. Signed to Michael Gira (above right, who you might know from Swans AND a near-future episode of Illogical Contraption Radio)'s label Young God Records, F.I.S. quickly made a name for themselves in the hoity-toity art scene of millenia's-end NYC with both their chaotic live shows and fiercely primitive compositions, leaving bewildered onlookers to draw disparate comparisons to other loose cannons like Foetus, Ministry, Gang of Four, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Cop Shoot Cop. Undeniably, this is some bewildering, brain-melting shit, deserving of only your most intense and immediate attention.
PS: Rumor has it, Private/Public was recorded before a live audience who were required to stand before the band naked and blindfolded. So, uh, there's that too.
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Flux Information Sciences on Last.FM "Parking/Shopping":
The album art looks like a scene from The Night Porter.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Porter
ReplyDeleteThat movie sounds kinda nuts. Worth watching?
ReplyDeleteits boring. so is the damned that is similar and has the same people.
ReplyDeleteFlux Information Sciences are rather dull to me. They want to be DNA and MARS. But are just too put on. They miss the fundamental spark of total fucked-up-ness that made those bands, especially MARS, so compelling.
ReplyDeleteI've been a crazed and devoted fan of The Man's work for most of my life. But I haven't been very impressed by many of the bands he's signed to his label. But its his label, he can do whatever he wants.
I love it whenever some pretentious twit gets on a board and says what music "wants to be". It's a sly little way of saying that someone copied someone else, whilst framing it as if the music, itself, is trying to be something it's not. So, first off, neither Tristan nor Sebastien is a fan of DNA and certainly not MARS. I think they found the former interesting, but it did not influence the music any more than anything else you listen to a bit. If you said Neubauten, James Chance, Residents, Gang of Four, Kraftwerk, Devo or Faust were influences, then you'd be closer to some semblance of truth as far as influences go. In fact, DNA is some super pretentious shit, where Flux was a silly/serious poke in the eye and kick in the nuts. DNA is from a different world, of curated music. Flux was fun. DNA: un-fun. Get it? I was there for the recording of Private/Public and am on the album cover. While I may be somewhat biased-- as I was there for the band's entire evolution-- I'm not defending Flux as much as trashing your crap little inference. Did you ever listen to their music? It seems like all you heard was some clanging and clattering and that gave you everything you needed to categorize it, which is a clever little trick designed to lighten cognitive load but stands in one's way of actually hearing what the hell is really going on. As far as the label goes, it seems to me like nearly all of the artists have something good, but-- with the exception of Devendra-- they never hit. So what? Ulan Bator, David Coulter, Charlemagne Palestine, Calla, etc.... MG chose to work with them because they were rather unique and struck him a certain way. (By the way, I was the guy he mentioned who got struck in the face the first time he saw Flux). I don't much care for Akron/Family's stuff, but.... Whatever... They do their thing, and I respect that. To the person who made the DNA comment: You might try listening and hearing the unique qualities of music before painting your own bullshit over it. Comparisons. "This is like this." What are you... like... 14?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, who even listens to Mars? Pretty much only people who heard them on No New York. I don't listen to them. Or DNA. Pardon my bluntness, but fuck DNA and Mars. Whether you like Flux or not, how you could even compare music with a stomping beat to freeform intellecto-dreck is totally amazing. If you'd even said that they sounded like one of Glenn Branca's projects, I could vaguely see that. You're just lumping shit together because of loudness, "experimentalism" (a catch all for anything alien to your ear) and some kind of cultural continuum that you perceive. You don't know shit about music.
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