Pigeon Funk's 2001 debut 12-inch is packaged with a public health service announcement. "Could you be so kind as to perform some pigeon abatement on the front of your residence?" the landlord notice-like sheet requests. "Birds [particularly pigeons] and their feces dust are THE main source of the human disease MAC [microbacterium aviary complex]... Walking past your residence, we are forced to not only breathe the excrement dust blowing about, but also be physically bombarded by the pigeons roosting above." And yet, when good health is perpetually endangered by the mundane, there is cause for celebration. The EP's cover is adorned with Pigeon Funk's construction paper-cut, high school pep rally-stylized logo photographed on a sidewalk splot of pigeon dung. The microhouse aerobics session heard on the record (supposedly inspired by how pigeons "dance"), also finds bliss while the MAC fever kicks in your head.
Pigeon Funk is the side-project of Bay Area laptop-noise stalwarts Kit Clayton, Sutekh and Safety Scissors. "Dorkcore" could be the possible definition for their sound: a hybrid of noisecore and coagulated microhouse that typically hits the disco floor and falls down laughing after attempting to dance. Is there an issue of life-threatening intoxication? Possibly, but there's also an odd innocence at play here. It reminds me of how an acquaintance spent 20 minutes telling people how the Empire State Building trumps the Transamerica Pyramid in size at San Francisco's Chinese New Year parade. Pigeon Funk's eponymous debut could serve as dorkcore's Rosetta Stone. The opener, "Pied-billed Grebe" awakens that genre with a digital-dub melody spraying forth in the air while bloops and blops scatter like leaves. The Berlin-dub element (reflecting Clayton's solo flotation-tank meditations) reappears elsewhere in the levitating rhythms of "Opposite of Opossum", and how "Anotherp"'s synth gloss paints the evening stars that can be barely seen through the ganja haze.
However, Pigeon Funk finds little need to break bread with Jah when the Saturday morning cartoons are on. "Pigs on Fun" sets this spirit with rickety toy-synth percussion and an electro-dancehall melody that jabbers with 20 tablespoons of sugar in its mouth. Those same calories fatten "Fly the Coop" and its Pokémon-disco piece that spills cheap beer all over the carpet. "Pom Pomp Po P" is the most accomplished moment, where contorted house number nearly sounds like a field recording of a financial district-block party with its slickly reverberated beats.
True to the oeuvres of Pigeon Funk's members, the minute-detail-per-second ratio is so high that the music demands several listens before noticing every bit of digital detritus. The overall impact may be too busy and demanding for idle club listeners, but there's so little solemnity here that the bewildered needn't be too worried. Here you have the Zappa-esque collage piece "Pombo Doente" that superimposes a NPR-dry voice instruction track about injured pigeon rescue techniques over a black market bazaar of FM radio-dial recklessness, nose-blowing, and disco breaks for kindergartners. To rationalize the connection between aviary care and such cacophony would be just a wee bit pretentious, mind you. However, the album's prime weakness is its homogenous, glib emotion that can grow wearisome over the course of 50 minutes. Fortunately, the closer, "Poule Bossa" leaves listeners with a moment to take to the heart with a sleepwalking bossa nova tune that walks around the block until it gets falls into an open sewer and ascends through clouds of heavenly distortion toward the after-life.
