Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked car at dusk, on a hill overlooking his town. With him is the nameless boy he's recently been hired to kill by Gilman Crowe, a senior with a fake Neo-Nazi streak. The boy finds all sorts of aesthetic and emotional pleasure in watching people in the town below turn their lights on one by one as they realize it's getting dark. The distant and depersonalized movements become the patterns in a non-pictorial language: a flash here and a flash there. He does a similar thing with stars. As Larry says, "When you imagine the stars are a far away, upside-down city at night they seem more important." Larry later realizes, when reading the boy's notebook, that he just can't carry out the deed. As a reader of the novel, you get second-hand information about what's covered in the journal, but Cooper avoids offering too much about how the boy went about it or where his language took him. The aura of the unknown remains intact.
Wolf Eyes' latest is the aural equivalent of Cooper's aforementioned scene, another bold bit in the band's steady onslaught of material. Listening to Dead Hills, I saw Larry and the boy falling apart to AM radio hiss, barely recognizing the patterns around them, nonetheless sensing something sinking into and altering their emotional states. Current 93 channeled a similarly pre-lingual world of death and sex through their feedback, but where David Tibet evokes the haunting pre-Surrealist imagery of Lautréamont, Wolf Eyes act as the equivalent of three horror-obsessed punks in a forest, destroying a house by fire, watching their own homemade pitch-shifters burn and sing.
Since getting their start in the cassette underground in 1997, Wolf Eyes have produced over 40 releases, each archiving a beautifully troubling practice. With an approach to music akin to Vienna Actionism or a second-generation snuff film, Wolf Eyes bleed analog, mark their territory with piss, and shout all crazed over layers of sirens and random pulses. Aaron Diloway (Hanson Records), John Olson (American Tapes), and Nate Young (who builds much of Wolf Eyes' equipment) are Ann Arbor, Michigan's most interesting band, and the town's most explosive assault on regularity since Negative Approach busted up in 1984, or perhaps since John Brannon's post-Negative Approach act Laughing Hyenas hit their peak around 1990.
The title track from Dead Hills is its most impressive piece, launching from Colecovision explosions into tape loops running backwards before high-pitched rattling creaks like rusted gates over a stock horror film ding-dong effect, one of those incidental noises intended to signify that the person on screen should duck or run. It's equally reminiscent of suburban decay, conveying images of a pained girl drinking whiskey in a quilt-covered bed, hearts on her wall, a stuffed animal squirrel at her side, and a screaming wolf stenciled onto her headboard per Sue de Beer's Hans und Grete. In eleven minutes, "Dead Hills" shifts from tired video game rolls into rabid bugs and the screams of wounded animals. By song's end the shit has really hit the fan: a tempest of hijacked past-future laser guns run amok (and if you look closely to stage right you can spot Merzbow dancing with eyes closed-- he looks happy!). Like a nature recording of a forest in which each object has a contact microphone duct taped to its back, the agonizing, detailed noises define the lives of snowflakes' voices, screaming as they melt on the asphalt.
The next two seances-- "Dead Hills 2" and "Rotten Tropics"-- are more percussive, and kind of slinky, relying on overt shouts from their human singer to make their point. Unfortunately, the mystery of the first "Dead Hills" becomes a Big Black loop, like David Yow keeping apace with Cock E.S.P. But trying to find concrete musical analogies for the Wolf Eyes magic-- especially after being so fucking blown away by "Dead Hills"-- is unfair, and a bit of a letdown. The songs aren't weak, but they've already shown us what was written in the book. Never do that; keep shit hidden. Relegating the record to more obvious categorization, the entire offering seem less heroic and more human for its epilogue.
Despite this last-minute fall from the sublime, Dead Hills' 24 minutes are a briefly frightening fragment, a churning mass in the continually evolving oeuvre of one of the underground's most important tweaked-out bands. Outside any historical context, it force-feeds you, one by one, the screeching souls of those crickets you tortured as a kid.
