Wednesday, February 23, 2011

WARFARE NOISE I - Compilation (Cogumelo, 1986)

When I was a kid I knew this dude who was a total fucking dick. A real asshole. A total douche. I was best friends with his younger brother and he used to beat him up. I kind of hated him for that. But I also hated him because he was an asshole, a smart ass who used to pick on everyone who was smaller and younger than him.

When I was about eighteen years old I sold him a broken walkman. It was yellow and pretty small and he thought it looked pretty modern. That's why he wanted it. I thought it looked kind of girly. That was the second reason why I wanted to get rid of it. The first one being that it did not work very well. The following day he came to my house. He was pissed off because I had sold him a walkman that didn't work. He threatened to beat me up. He could have. Easily. He was about twice my size and used to lift weights in his backyard. He had filled a couple of buckets of paint with cement and had connected them with a metal rod. He would lay on his back and do bench presses with that.

I told him that I was not going to give him his money back and that he had probably broken it and was now trying to return it. The conversation cooled off quickly and concluded when this asshole walked back to his house with the walkman in hand. He was clenching it. I was a bit shaken. Never been much of a fighter but that day I realized that it takes an asshole to confront an asshole.

Anyway, I had to put up with this dick because he was the one who introduced me to Mayhem, Minotaur, Sarcofago and the whole Brasilian movement. He had connections who were into underground metal and on one occasion even showed up with a copy of Slayer fanzine. He talked about Mayhem with reverence. I loved their logo but had never heard their music. And we are talking late 80's, way before the whole Norwegian scene blew up. He used to dub tapes of his friends of pretty obscure bands. Imperator was his favorite. Minotaur was a close second. He was pretty good at drawing logos, which he would work on for hours in the spines of tapes. He learned silk screening and started putting logos in white T shirts. 

One day he showed up with a tenth generation copy of Warfare Noise. He had taped over one of his mother's bolero tapes in his shitty boombox. The quality of the sound was beyond disastrous. You could barely distinguish between songs, but to him, it all sounded fantastic. I kind of admired his blind resilience in the face of bad sound. 

Dickboy does not listen to metal anymore. He is one of those people who outgrew metal and considers it childish. Back then, I could not listen to this compilation and take it seriously. Nowadays, I love it. I now possess this blind resilience in the face of bad sound.

((WARFARE NOISE HERE))

No comments: