Max Nordile / Hair Clinic | Hanging By a Fan Over Wet Cement LP

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