Moth Cock - Twofer Tuesday (2014)

Fuck-up pop. Likovi iz filma Gummo odaju počast američkoj agrikulturi.

mothcock.bandcamp.com/album/twofer-tuesday



Across a sprawling infinity of basement sessions and dozens of limited-run releases since 2009 (including Bremmy [2012] on your’s-very-truly HausMo), Moth Cock have honed their fractured jams into a maximized assault on [normalcy] ["good taste"] [all that is holy]. The Kent, OH-based duo’s symbiotic live performance tactics congeal into slabs of grab-bag noise mayhem, intent on further addling the minds of a growing demographic of droopy-eyed heads from the US midwest underground and across the free world. Doug Gent pours out a stream of atonal clarinet exploration, cycling through alien arpeggio runs and phrases of open-mawed skronk to trace a fragmented incarnation of “jazz” that wanders well past the “free” distinction into untold depths of nonsensical oblivion. As Doug airs his woodwind fodder for the sculpting, Pat Modugno processes it through his barebones rig of loop- and effect-pedals, splintering live tones into a kaleidoscopic clusterfuck of corrupted blips, squeals, and digital death knells. The extended recursion of all of these elements, glued together into irregular loops and plastered across our faces in intensifying bursts of generatively interlocked arrhythmia, can propel listeners into a state of sheer mental overload, or send them back to Sheetz for some emergency chicken nuggets (“What do you mean they’re sold out?”).

The two sidelong sessions offered on Twofer Tuesday expand in unexpected new directions while upholding the tradition of extreme fuckery we’ve come to demand from the Cock boys. “Gatorboi” drops a series of skewed beats and sampled squiggles into the already busy mix, conjuring touches of outsider techno production from the looped content saved onto Pat’s Boss RC20. The duo constructs and demolishes each segment of their damaged suite, speeding through conflicting queasy atmospheres and ecstatic horn blasts on the way to the bass-drum bursts and corroded clarinet “laughter” of the climax. On the B-side, “Lee” slithers even deeper into musique concrète zones, twisting clipped snippets of classical fanfares into a loping string mantra that decays across a grid of stretched samples and truncated woodwind melodies. The introduction of Doug’s contact-mic vocalizations elevates the warped proceedings into something of a personalized ritual, complete with requests to “get out of my brain / get out of my brain,” likely addressed to Scanners or particularly intrusive lizard people. Do not fret, dear listener: it has been clinically proven that forty minutes of new Moth Cock will do wonders for your mental health, improve your hand/eye coordination, and finally transform you into the successful human being you have always dreamed of becoming. Why, you ask? How, uh, I mean, who are you referring to here? I, hmm… What. What was I talking about … ? Who is this again?? - hausumountain.com/?page_id=1301

Moth Cock might be able to finagle some public arts funding if they tout Twofer Tuesday as the bridge between New Orleans jazz and Black Dice. It's a Gummo-grade tribute to a version of middle America that blossoms amidst its own entropy. Doug Gent and Patrick Modugno apply a consummately noise-bro attitude to hip-hop, but skew neither harsh nor boom-bap. On both wind instruments and electronics, the two shred in a way that must keep their childhood music teachers up at night, pacing the kitchen. And then what do you make of the album's title, an allusion to classic rock gimmickery? At least on New York's Q104.3, “Twofer Tuesday” refers to a weekly programming block featuring two, count 'em two, songs in a row by each band played. On a purely logical level, Twofer Tuesday would be a less absurd endeavor if it were recorded at a high school football game where some recent dropout spiked the marching band's Gatorade cooler with Robitussin. Thanks to baffling structure and an ever-present mid-tempo lilt, I'm tempted to lovingly peg the Cock Boys as deviants or perverts, but I learned that my casual use of such terms inspired member Patrick Modugno to shave his mustache last year. Ok, maybe I exercised some poor judgement by implying that they're convicted pederasts. But c'mon, if enough teens started listening to the Moth Cock, it's not unfathomable that today's concerned mothers would have conniption fits on par with those raising metal heads during the height of the Reagan-era Satanism scare. For real though, wake me when we live in the America where all the cool teens are jamming Twofer Tuesday. --Mike Sugarman

Moth Cock, the Kent, Ohio based electro-acoustic duo of Doug Gent and Pat Modungo, have been bringing their oblique, richly textured improvisations on tour throughout the Midwest and northeast for a few years now, tickling and pleasing the eardrums of fans of underground noise, free- jazz, and electronic rhythmic music alike along the way. This tape, released on the Chicago based label Hausu Mountain is a ripe new document of the band’s electronic experiments, and provides a good sense of what the band’s recent live shows might be like. During a Moth Cock set, Modungo characteristically applies live processing through effects and loop-pedals to Gent’s clarinet playing and his own trumpet playing, which results in the broken and oddly groovy sonic zones that the group is known for. The two sidelong improvisations that grace this tape certainly don’t stray from that formula, and the pieces are a rapid fire progression of each new loop taking shape, developing to the degree of static chaos, and then giving way to the next one, each textural space more compelling and ominous then the next. Some of the angular beats that drop in during the madness really spice things up, and kind of seem like the weird hip-hop that might fuel the dance-floors of alien societies. This tape for the most part is pretty rhythmic, but there are some “ambient” moments (particularly on the second side), that are kind of, um, beautiful. Some samples make appearances on the second side as well, and this I think might be new territory for these guys but either way, both the sounds and the playing on this recording are really good. As a whole, this is an experience that really sets a vibe and paints a landscape, if you know what I mean. Listen in, trip hard.  - Nick Neuburg

Miles inferred that the wildest vibes have no name. Maybe a reference point or two, but too fucked up for categorization. These guys from Kent, Ohio are coming for your head and there isn't anything surreptitious about their tactics. At times, it resembles a vortex of free jazz and noise with a few other strains of experimental music thrown into the blender; unrelenting varied faces comprised of wretched sonic squalor discharged by clarinet and trumpet; electronic freak outs that sputter and bustle as fragments of unstable noise and damaged loops fissure and smolder - in my parlance, a blazing hash rocket. Previously I decided to take a break during the World Cup, as I am a fervent follower if futbol. However, I just have to tell you about the smash and grab, hyper-kinetic baked chaos from Moth Cock. Twofer Tuesday on Hausu Mountain is not total football by any means. Rather, it resembles the heavy metal, on the cusp of bedlam that resembles Die Schwarzgelben. Anyhow, back to business. For me, Two for Tuesday means to double the quantity. Better ensure the provisions are sufficient, because the outer zone vibes this duo cranks through a tripped out medicine machine dominate the room in the manner of dank indica haze. It may sound like a welter of confusion to the uninitiated, yet the glowing kinetic mass is continuously in a process of building and razing. This duo operates transiently, spewing their turbulent, stoney mix over the denizens, exulting in the deluge, and then moving expeditiously to the next endeavor. Nothing is out of reach, nor out of bounds. Clarinet and trumpet rage next to electronics that writhe uncontrollably. Loops begin to fracture and fray when the clarinet's breathy tones become enveloped in drone. Climbing a steep, jagged terrain comprised of textured electronics, the duo, undeterred, drive hard for the peak. The flipside is even more bonkers than its predecessor. Upon pressing play, the listener is immediately transported to a house of mirrors. Ephemeral loops along with clarinet and trumpet are spliced and splintered until ejected capriciously. What will happen next? Did you pack that extra bowl? Samples are strewn across damaged tape moves and spectral voices. The middle of the flip is for serious heads. Then they hit these high flying humid zones, emitting an infectious, lethargic vibe. Later fervent arpeggios that could be from an Atari 2600 are joined by cascading glitter.  - honestbag.blogspot.com/2014/06/moth-cock-twofer-tuesday-hausmo-18.html













Bremmy (2012)
mothcock.bandcamp.com/album/bremmy

Moth Cock is Pat Modugno and Doug Gent from Kent, OH. Off stage, Doug’s hair and beard conflate into a blondish entity and Pat’s mustache conceals his upper lip. Take this moment to imagine them with these facial hair configurations against a midwestern landscape. (Do you see them?) On stage, the prairie scene deviates and Shit Gets Real: Doug feeds volleys of clarinet skronk into Pat’s small rig of pedals and samplers, and Pat chops and manipulates Doug’s live deluge of “free-jazz” into something far more “free” than “jazz.” Layer by layer, the duo builds a sonic beast out of screeches and fractured loops and we listen as it trips over its own feet (wings?) over and over and over on a crooked path back to the Ohian underworld.

The structured improvisations on “Bremmy” utilize a bewildering sonic vocabulary: undercurrents of recycled brass, bursts of maniacal pitch-shifted melody (think Ralph Records ca. 1978), screwed half-rhythms, Stalling-core Looney fanfares, and when Pat’s trumpet enters the mix, waves of throbbing drone. Taken one at a time, each of these sounds could make the layhuman furrow his or her brow and be all like, “Hey, yeah, hello? Could you please keep it down? I’m just trying to live out my life here in peace.” Taken all together, looped and processed beyond recognition into one pulsating mass of brass chaos, the tones of Moth Cock knock a chunk of Ohio’s soil up into Interstellar Space and out past the event horizon into a whole new zone. -  hausumountain.com/?page_id=698

Quite simply, the best tape I’ve heard in a long long while. At times, I felt like I was listening to some old school Morton Subotnick shit. These jams are heads and tails above all but a very few “noise, synth or whatever” artists hitting it today. You must have this in your life.  - Cassette Gods

What a tape though, folks. All buzzin’ flies and digital capillaries oozing blood-red through the prism of 1990s noise, with an extra helping of lazer. The word ‘busy’ comes to mind, and this time it might even be too much. [...] There’s no sign of let-up, either. Plenty of fight in these dudes, and I salute them for it. Give me hell, purveyors of hand-crafted trips. - Tiny Mix Tapes

A fractured maze of clarinet sounds filtered through the bare pedal rig to break it into a million pieces and torment those pieces even further by continuing to break them apart. It is the sort of fucked up anti-music that you might expect from the freeform electronic units such as Supersilent or Mnemonists, although on a slightly more local scale.  - Weed Temple

Rust Belt wind section Moth Cock has a penchant for creating its own language with the sole purpose of befuddlement. This often entails using clarinet and trumpet to get jazzy, like Benny Goodman jazzy. Yet, one member is a whacked out beatsmith so you can certainly bank on these guys freaking out the squares with their klezmer Black Dice schtick. – Ad Hoc FM

Moth Cock, what are you? The sound of sidewalks crumbling and skyscrapers sinking to the earth? Of an entire Bed Bath & Beyond’s worth of plates and dishes shattering? Of metallic beings from another planet stuck in a traffic jam? More logically, of moths fucking? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Moth Cock has made the only kind of Moth Cock music that Moth Cock could make, and that is Moth Cock. - Impose Magazine

[...] the cult legendary Mothcock duo – an Ohio based project that seems to transcend itself, and the boundaries of reality for that matter, every five seconds. Seriously, these guys are the epitome of enigmatic jamming and were no doubt beamed down from space (or Sheetz) for us to behold. Mothcock are a national treasure and are also the eighth and ninth Wonders of the World, non-debatable. - John Elliott (Spectrum Spools, formerly in Emeralds) for Sterile Criticism

 

Khaki Blazer

Patrick Modugno is probably best known for his work as part of the Ohioan noise outfit Moth Cock, but he's also put out some solo beat work as Khaki Blazer. On his own, Pat produces a loopy, exploratory type of groove that's reminiscent of hip-hop fans-turned-sound-collagists like Heatwave or Run DMT.
Listening to garbled monster fights over a faintly drunken, thoroughly abstracted house pulse is definitely the kind of thing that begs a deep dive into one's headphones or headspace, but Khaki Blazer remains adept at sound sculpting live as well. Today, independent record store Experimedia posted a recorded live set from Pat on their soundcloud, taken yesterday at the Stone Tavern in their home base of Kent, OH. The 22-minute clip is downloadable below.