Quintron
Internal Feedback 001-011
Bulb Gold Reissue Series
I’ve seen (Mr.) Quintron twice over the last two years and, evangelizing leisure-suit clad agent-provocateur he was, he never approached the raw nerves madness and ignoble savage intensity of Internal Feedback, now proudly reissued by Bulb Records. Let’s set our boundaries here, Mr. Quintron is relatively accessible these days, but he’s still eons weirder than most of the canon fodder we prop up on stages these days. Yet, Internal Feedback finds a completely different and desperate Quintron, bereft of Miss Pussycat and the old-fashioned organs that he beat to shit onstage, focusing instead on all manner of odd percussion and blood curdling screams warped and distorted through answering machines and broken microphones and homemade vocoders. I gotta admit, I think I like this Quintron a whole lot better.
Internal Feedback owes a lot more to the unrestrained antisocial enthusiasm of the No Wave movement than subsequent releases, but less metropolitan than anything on the Skin Graft label for instance. For me, Quintron always had more of a Flannery O’Connor medicine show feel to him, and that’s important when you’re from Kissimmee. One look at the cover photo sets even more of those all-important boundaries – there’s a blurry black-and-white Xerox of what “must” be an anorexic skeleton in a white suit shrieking and pounding on all manner of drums, voodoo mod, if you’ll allow me the stretch.
The music inside ISN’T what you’d expect, beginning with “……” drumcentric meanderings augmented with abstract squiggles of electronic gadgets that must have been stolen from the Mystery Funhouse. I predict the big single will be “Sound of a Passing Train,” which is Quintron’s low-fi approximation of just such an event. Personal fave is his treatment of “Fever,” which features Quintron vamping it up with oodles of vocal distortion and some martial drum freakout accompaniment. Both Yoko Ono and Benny Hinn are jealous.
Bulb Records, 323 Somerville Ave, Somerville, MA 02143
