One day I will work out why I feel so compelled to listed to the work of David Brenner, but for now all I can say is that he creates “music” unlike anyone else and I find it totally and utterly intriguing. This album was released in April this year and is a collection of offcuts as it were. David says it is, “another body of Frankensteinian works, collecting scattered live jams, random sessions, unused recordings, accidental toxic runoff, and other mutant or orphaned material spilled forth over the past several years, with material dating back to test trials for the outfit’s first live shows in 2018… and beyond.” This means it is diverse in its output, with the arrangements being very different between songs, and includes a plethora of guests within its tracks such as Benjamin Levitt (Megalophobe, Gridfailure-live), Richard Muller (The Third Kind, Great Planes, Gridfailure-live), Lane Oliver (Yatsu), Andy Hess, Jared Stimpfl (Secret Cutter, Orphan Donor), Neil Barrett (Pornohelmut), Jon Paris (Rack), Pete Tsakiris, Liz Ciavarella-Brenner, Rob Levitt, Natasha Padilla, and platinum-selling session player Mac Gollehon. We get clips and snippets of old movies, music which has direction, and music which spreads across the toxic wasteland, filling the voids where no-one else dare venture. I find his albums relaxing, but I can imagine others while find them frightening and heralding the dawning of an age of which they want no part. A friend of mine was watching a podcast I was involved with where I mentioned Gridfailure so he went and investigated some albums and came back shocked and stunned by what he had heard, yet was going to investigate further as he too found it intriguing. David has told me I have written about more of his music than any other person on the planet, and while I am not sure what that says about me and my musical tastes, I do know I feel I am more balanced by hearing this. Music from the other side of the apocalypse? Improvisation taken to the nth degree? Music that refuses to sit inside any such categorisation? No idea, but yet again Gridfailure have produced something which is at the very boundaries. Available free on Bandcamp, if you dare.
8/10 Kev Rowland