Review Summary: The ever-blurring line between what "is" and what "isn't".
After a lot of thinking and mulling over of the various ways I could
try to justify the statement, “Ultra Shit Folk is as far from ultra shit as could be,” I’ve come to the conclusion that doing so would be a disingenuous attempt to sell the unsellable. Ultra Shit Folk doesn’t succeed because its name is such a misnomer that you’d think you were listening to the wrong album once it starts playing, in fact quite the opposite: Ultra Shit Folk lives up to its name in nearly every way. It is very loosely “folk”, and it is quite apparently “ultra shit” so far as it is played with an air of apathy and almost deliberate sloppiness that pushes it into that realm of decidedly unclassifiable music that is home to so many other musical pariahs. And by very loosely “folk”, what I really mean is that it takes the elements of folk, and abstracts them to the point that they’re unrecognisable -- Roro’s tuneless guitar noodling, less-than-rudimentary drumming and throaty vocalisations owing themselves more to free improvisation and noise rock than anything at all folk-related.
In this sense, Ultra Shit Folk in a lot of ways owes itself to Perrot’s main project, Vomir; similarly aiming to deconstruct the definition of music to the point that the line between what
is and what
isn’t become so blurred that it’s hard to tell where one side ends and the other begins…and although Vomir quite safely sits on the side of what is generally seen as
not music (again, a very debatable topic), Ultra Shit Folk toys with the notion, finding itself fundamentally grounded in the reality of music. At the simplest level it owes itself to convention, but by the same token, it is just as unlistenable as any of the static noise of Perrot’s main project; the second last movement caked with enough distortion and feedback to render everything beneath indecipherable. In contrast, the opening movements combine amelodic faux-flamenco and drunken-sounding vocalisations in a manner that brings to mind the most abstract forms of freak folk and Reynols-esque lo-fi. And from this somewhat digestible base, it builds into a noisy, formless mess of sloppy shredding (if it could even be called that), feedback, incorrigible bashing and fuzz.
Yet at no point does it completely detach itself from the concept of music; melody and structure (so often it feels I am reaching when I say this) rearing their heads even when everything else is consumed by noise. Long-form dirges are held together by steady, albeit simple-beyond-words, beats and the shorter-blasts of incoherence maintain an ever-so-tenuous grasp on melody to grant themselves credibility. Credibility isn’t what Perrot is shooting for though; his strive for anti-musicality much more prominent in the makeup of what Ultra Shit Folk
is at its core. But, in sacrificing musicality, Perrot manages to push the underlying emotional baseis to the fore; his quirky, yet incisively cynical personality as much on display as his musical ineptitude.
It may be Ultra Shit Folk in name and form, but as ultra shit as it may be, it is a shining example of how anti-musical concept and contrastingly semi-musical sound can be balanced without compromising either of the two.
“What brings all of my…work together is its non-savoir faire, its anti-musicality; the fact that anyone could do it. I see it as pouring out all of my disgust in the rawest, and most absurd ways possible.”
