Warning: This recording is deeply, willfully obtuse, enigmatic and difficult. May cause loss of patience in otherwise open-minded listeners.
If you're already a fan of 23 Skidoo, you're probably wont to ignore that warning. You already know that, throughout their brief existence in the early 1980s, 23 Skidoo were an exceedingly inaccessible outfit, offering their clattering, mostly undanceable brand of noise-blighted funk in strictly linear doses. They rarely stuck with a groove for long, preferring instead to tease their audience with five-second bursts of straightforward rhythm and melody and shred expectations mere moments later. But even if you're intimately familiar with a record like their 1982 debut Seven Songs, you're not likely prepared for what's on this disc.
Seven Songs has justifiably been hailed lately as something of a classic of the post-punk era, a concise, pointed attack on the senses that contains most of the band's easiest listening in tightly governed chunks of collapsing funk. Their final album (discounting a 2000 reunion LP), 1984's Urban Gamelan, largely eschewed the harmonic elements of Seven Songs for a more bare-bones, percussion-focused approach to the sound, accented by the occasional relapse to white noise or sputtering bass. It's a far more abstract final product, and a difficult listen for those seeking some sort of immediate payoff.
As uncompromising and abrasive as Urban Gamelan is, though, The Culling Is Coming makes it look like a hippie drum circle by comparison. Originally released between their other two albums, The Culling was never meant to embody a statement of purpose by the band, but instead to merely document a pair of live experiments in industrial noise-making (this reissue appends a third) for posterity. This helps explain why it's just now reaching CD for the first time, but it also helps explain why it's the one 23 Skidoo recording nobody ever really talks about.
The performances themselves are entirely freeform explorations of pure sound, with no real sense of build or release, which is really where the disc falters as a listening experience. The first performance, given the over-arching name "A Winter Ritual", was performed at Dartington Music College by brothers Johnny and Alex Turnbull, the band's two key members, using Gamelan, gongs, flute, and kendang drums, and it's the most straightforward section of the disc. The duo moves through a series of loose improvisations built on repetitive patterns performed on the Gamelan and Kendang, hanging snatches of nearly melodic flute just out of the listener's reach. Unfortunately, rather than use the intriguing textures they develop as building blocks for something bigger, only once do they actually choose to develop them, on "G-3 Insemination", wherein some sort of tambourine-like percussion instrument is used to lend a sense of urgency to certain passages, thus giving at least a sense of development.
"A Summer Rite" is much darker, inhabiting the same headspace as dark ambient pioneers Current 93 and Nurse with Wound. The Turnbulls are joined by Fritz Catlin, and all three are credited with "Metal Percussion". Most of the sounds seems to be coming from tape manipulations, though, as crunching, buzzing, scraping and animalesque human utterances dominate the proceedings. The fact that this was recorded at the 1982 W.O.M.A.D. World Music Festival is almost funny-- I can't imagine what a W.O.M.A.D. audience must have thought of these guys, heads shaven clean, faces painted with camouflage patterns, assaulting them with a minimalist collage of inscrutable sound.
"Move Back - Bite Harder", the bonus offering on this reissue, is perhaps the most interesting, featuring a series of heavily manipulated looping vocal samples and fleeting snatches of squealing and incidental noise, but as it drags on for 27 minutes, it's hard to stay focused on it. The Culling Is Coming is of primary interest for devoted noiseniks, people with huge amounts of shelf space devoted to Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Nurse with Wound, and the like. As a fan of 23 Skidoo and an admitted dabbler in the world of dark ambient and noise, I can't recommend The Culling Is Coming to anyone else, really, though it is an interesting document of a challenging band at their most confrontational.
