Dudes straight took over the last Whitney Biennial. Whether it was the extensive photographic portraiture and videos of snowboarding bros shredding around the world, or the ceiling-high murals from the Destroy All Monsters collective rendering the mug-ugly visages of The Stooges, The Nuge, Sun Ra, and Grand Funk Railroad for all the art world to see, there was a palpable masculine presence as their hobbies somehow became high art. The weirdest room of all, though, belonged to the Forcefield collective. In a darkened enclave stood legions of dummy robots, unholy and menacing crossbreeds of Chewbacca high priests and Jawa fag-hags with tasers. Randomly they would spaz or flash red-lit eyes, emitting high-pitched squeals or other analog squelches. The effect was much like that of a G.G. Allin show at Alice Tully Hall, as blowhard art patrons were literally pinned to the back wall, afraid that at any moment one of the orange-haired mannequins might make a charge at them with a clawful of shit. Forcefield had turned the Whitney into a paint-huffing haunted house for at least one room, and it was hilariously terrifying.
Without the showroom dummies in conical hand-knits and Cousin It wigs, it's hard to attain the same effect with just this plastic wafer of sound effects and pre-programmed loops, buttressed by live recordings of the ever-mysterious Patootie Lobe, Meerk Puffy, Gorgon Radeo, and Le Geef-- but it'll have to do. Snatches of tiger-stripe patterns and Moog patches only begin to touch upon what kind of weirdness and odd-colored light is emitted from Forcefield's compound in Providence, RI, which serves as a primordial omphalos of sorts that led to offspring such as Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. While these groups are busy embodying "rock," Forcefield is operating on a sub-sub-conscious level of scrambled UHF signals and stoned-brain alpha waves, reveling in the mental damage that maxi-thins and public access shows can really do when given a chance to melt together.
Amoebic and amorphous, they absorb synthesized sounds both scathing and cheesy. "Hoedown" is drum-machine cowboys and crow meat for twenty seconds, while the slightly longer "3rd Annual Roggabogga Motion Picture Soundtrack" is some of Sun Ra's primitive spacefarts under a fuzzy-rug waterfall with Battlestar Galactica reruns in the background. "Inverse/Interior Plane of 3rd Annual Roggabogga (Behind the Scenes)" is nigh on fifteen minutes of droid sighs (replete with Warhol white-wig and golden-shag tapeworm), and Technicolor ripples from deep within the Ituri forest, their Atari 2600 plastics firmly melded with their engorged frontal lobes.
More ethnic illness is in the "Radio Puebla Metallica" bits, as tablas loop ad nauseam before the acid-house of "Assassins Rmx 'Assassabogga'" salivates over the diva-skulls still dressed in floor-length jack o'lantern argyle gowns. "Field Recording of 3rd Annual Roggabogga" is another quarter-hour of robot jungle juice live from the Whitney, or some other such lost continental ceremony, and the "2nd Annual Roggabogga" is similarly sustained damage, making the end of the disc a bit too mind-numbing to crawl through completely.
Beta-era digital collage and grade-Z cultural clutter are what powers Forcefield best, and while the glossy pics add another element to the puzzle, it remains impossible to fully assess their work through this release alone. The parameters of early Boredoms meta-lingua and art school-era Devo's synthesized jocko-lobotomies are firmly in place, as are each band's outlandish dress codes, but there's so much more going on up at the compound (video art, installation, comics and other newsprint publications, etc.) that this can be but a Roswell-like fragment of their obscured Tommyknocker craft.
