SAVAGE AURAL HOTBED
The Strain and Force Handbook (Microblister)
Reviewed by Holly Day

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Another great Twin Cities-based band, Savage Aural Hotbed is more an experience than a band. Creating their music almost entirely out of found and hand-made instruments, they've created this amazing class of music that makes its niche somewhere between ancient tribal percussion-intensive music and something that might have been recorded in an auto shop. Not only does the band play music made out of instruments with self-descriptive names like "Propanophone" -and, of course, circular saws, police scanners and hollow metal and plastic pipes--they make music inside the instruments themselves. Some of these songs were actually recorded inside a huge steel grainhopper, with the band beating percussion against the walls of the hopper. Like the atempo shaman percussionists of the Inuit, the mismatched pounding of this record will send you off on the closest thing to an out-of-body experience you may ever experience in your own living room.

© 2001 - Holly Day