The Sleazy Listeners: The Romance is Over
CD - Squirrelgirl, Canada - 2003
Reviews:
The Sleazy Listeners: The Romance Is Over (Squirrelgirl)
Montreal multimedia artist Zev Asher (aka Roughage) pits his sound-deconstruction skills and haunting, Leonard-Cohen-on-mesc vocal stylings with Norwegian noise musician Lasse Marhaug's garbled DSP logic for a tribute to cheesy lounge pop. The result is full-on Merzbow-meets-Manilow. As lush, pastoral orchestral arrangements are distorted and bit-crushed into the stratosphere, Asher's low-end vocals rumble about love, heartbreak and "the sticky juice that'll make it slide." While digital piss-takers like the U.K.'s V/Vm have made attempts at this sort of tongue-in-cheek glitch-schmaltz, the Sleazy Listeners don't sound gimmicky and do a great job pulling out the haunting and disturbing quality of this cringe-worthy music. 8.5 /10
(Raf Katigbak, Montreal Mirror)
The Sleazy Listeners: The Romance Is Over (Squirrelgirl)
Montreal based Squirrelgirl Records hasn't been doing too badly lately. Label owner Jen Morris's collaborations with labels like Intr_Version and RrsR/Mangenerated and her participation in last year's Mutek Festival means that she's quickly made a name for herself in the often convoluted world of North American experimental music.
Yet it's this first 'official' release from Squirrelgirl that might be the one to bring the label to the forefront of a dynamic and already eclectic scene. Rather than focus solely on local talent, she's set her sights across the Atlantic to Scandinavia, to a project that's happened almost entirely by accident.
The Sleazy Listeners features Norway's experimental music bad-boy Lasse Marhaug (Jazassin, Tore Honore Bore) and Canada's own troublemaker Zev Asher (Nimrod, Roughage) who got the band started after two years mailing recordings back and forth between Toronto and Trondheim after a chance meeting at the Tromso International Film Festival in January 2001.
Elevating the eleven songs here from just another trip down glitchy memory lane to a full on exercise in pop-music deconstructivism, the two have managed to incorporate everything from Leonard Cohen 's back catalogue to B-grade porno soundtracks in a cohesive and lucid fashion. It's pretty impressive when you consider the massive physical disconnection the two shared while writing the material here.
"Dumping Grounds" starts things off and greets us with a strange mix of choral voices and what sounds like circus music, all flipped over backwards with Zev's half-speed crooning gently floating on top. Think V/Vm remixing a Kitty-Yo B-side.
"Foot and Mouth" simply turns the distortion pedal up a few notches and butchers the harmonics for good measure, giving us that extra special distorted pop music gone-horribly-wrong feel. "Makes Me", though flanged and phased out to the very brink of collapse, somehow reins itself back in to become something otherworldly and oddly beautiful with a string section crawling its way to the top of the mix.
Fans of the pair's previous work might just be surprised at the even more pronounced left-field direction this project brings them. It's less Merzbow -lite than a rejected alternative soundtrack to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .
Ultimately, this slightly disturbing journey through an avant-garde pop music wonderland becomes a perfect soundtrack for those mornings when you just don't know which side of the bed you've woken up on. It satisfies more and more with every listen. Recommended.
(Olli Siebelt, BBC)
The Sleazy Listeners: The Romance is Over
One of the most disturbing albums I've heard in a while has got to be the latest release on Squirrelgirl records, The Romance Is Over, by the twisted duo of Norway's Lasse Marhaug and Canada's Zev Asher, a.k.a. The Sleazy Listeners. The looped and chopped swingin' lounge samples combined with unholy sound Manipulations and the creepiest crooner you ever heard (Asher) give the album a bad-trip David Lynch quality. Sheens of noise are shattered and scrambled over the top, creating a layer of frantic urgency, while jazz-noir samples undulate in pitch, giving a very uneasy ebb and flow to the album that's sort of like watching your best friend eat out your ex. The fifth track, 'Foot to Mouth', transcends madness into the sublime as the grand organ progressions and choirs are bit-granulated progressively into the stratosphere.
(Rad + Vince, Vice Magazine)
SLEAZY LISTENERS " The Romance Is Over "CD
Now this is good! Totally unusual...a collaborative by Zev Asher and Lasse Marhaug. You may know Norwegian genius Marhaug from various projects, and Asher from his own brand of experimentalism from way back. But this is totally different than any of that. Here they create a dark, strange jumble of media cut-up, reassemblage and ambience. Like Barbed, or a musical Randy Greif, faulty turntables skipping away in the background. Ambience produced almost exclusively by competing bits of gathered sounds, like vinyl records messed with, TV show theme songs quietly destroyed, harmless Samba or Jazz music finely grated, all swirling softly and mostly unidentifiably in the background as a muted but colorful layer. Like a psychadelic lightshow of sound. Effected music snippets and corrosive tape experiments have never been used so effectively! But there is also often a voice, or vocals, a deep, slowed-down lyrical interjection that's somehow creepy, worked over many tracks. Someone has made lyrics to this aural feast. They aren't there often, and they aren't really singing, but it's there, making the entire experience something beyond simple media cut-up and sample manipulation. Has this early sixties, British or European feeling to it. Almost as if you dropped a lot of acid and then immediately stepped into a time machine and went back to London in 1962, or a ski lodge in Sweden in 1977, all the scenes and experiences melding together into a bizarre, idealized, postcard vision. Listen to the sample. This may not be for everyone, but there are many of my listeners who will feel they've found the best record of his type of work they've ever feasted on. (Manifold.com)
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