borbetomagus: barbed wire maggots

CD reissue of what was the fourth Borbetomagus album, originally released on LP by Agaric way back in 1983. The trio of Jim Sauter (reeds), Don Dietrich (reeds) & Donald Miller (guitar). Recorded at In-Roads, NYC, May 7, 1982. "Recorded at In-Roads on Mercer Street, Barbed Wire Maggots documents a gorgeous evening of extreme sonic dialogue. Sauter and Dietrich's reeds skinny-dip into virtual classicist free mode at times (think 'Trane having an erotic dream of Frank Wright), but more often they tangle like electric eels dropped like tampons from the poop hatch of a 747. Upper register bowel tingling never felt so good. Miller's guitar joins them up in the stratosphere, plugging raw current into metal bowls, sizzling like a wok full of stewardess jiz, just creating and distorting and worrying the fabric of the cosmos like some idiotic terrier-god from a lost part of the Upanishards. Everything just moves so beautifully here. All of the early Borbeto hallmarks are on display: the ducks-attacked-by-lawnmowers thing; the Wilhelm Reich Busts Another Cloud scenario; the angel-wire-thimble connection ; the part about the cop car getting crushed by a bulldozer inside a maelstrom in a sewer drain -- it's all here. What is most remarkable about the music on BWM is how fresh it still sounds. There're no clichés brunted about here, nothing that's time-coded in the least; it's even difficult to really categorize the music inside any genre. Jazz, industrial, rock, free...there are elements of all of those here. And they are blended and/or smashed together in ways that will make yr hair feel lighter than feathers, lighter than maggots, lighter than anything." --Byron Coley