new release: the new blockaders

Thomas' artwork for The New Blockaders audio postcard

Here is a belated final bow of our FMOA audio postcards series - a new untitled offering from The New Blockaders. All purchases of the audio include a limited edition postcard, featuring a new design collaged together from my collection of 1920s-1940s pictorial ephemera.

Since buying my first actual TNB record ages ago, on my first trip to Osaka (at the tiny Alchemy Records shop manned by a non-verbalizing Maso “Masonna” Yamazaki), I’ve been fascinated by the enigmatic nature of this project. With a winning combination of bizarre humor, a commitment to exploring the aesthetics of negation, and indifference to self-mythologizing (hence the regular masked live appearances), TNB remain the ‘ne plus ultra’ of noise as an expressive form. The deformed, cut-up portraits on their album sleeves have been the faces that “launched a thousand ships,” inspiring legions of soundalikes and (in one case) a notorious Japanese counterfeiter who recorded his own noise at home and released it as a TNB "live bootleg"!

So it’s a definite honor to have things come full circle in a way, and release this new 15-minute slab of characteristic hyper-intensity from The New Blockaders.

A little more background information, for the unfamiliar:

“It’s only with hindsight that we perceive worth. Those who deviate from the norm are often ridiculed, forgotten, dismissed as cranks and generally abused. Their work is seen as unimportant, frivolous, unfathomable and even pointless. Some of the visitors to the Cabaret Voltaire may have attacked the stage, but what they were experiencing was a significant shift in artistic expression. The audience saw people shouting and screaming, history saw a reaction to the senselessness of a Word War that would mutate into a movement whose influence is still felt today. In 1982 The New Blockaders released their first album comprising two extended tracks of disorientating junk noise, scrapings, rain on a tin roof and what sounds like wild elephant parps.

TNB had planted the seeds that would continue to grow until today you’d be hard pressed to find anyone involved in Noise who doesn’t cite TNB as an influence. What began as a short run LP has somehow mutated itself into a manifesto that proclaimed their rejection of not only art but also anti-art, seeing as how even anti-art is an artistic stance in itself. TNB are sonic nihilists for whom the destruction of everything and the rejection of everything is just a starting point. There is no compromise, no Rock star stance, no confusion as to their aim. Nowadays, they still manage to spew forth a fair amount of material and have found a vent for their live frustrations, but its those early and hard to find releases that have gone on to achieve mythical status.”

- Mark Wharton, Idwal Fisher 

Order / listen here