How do you like your noise? If you answered wrong, then the Paul Kidney Experience is for you. There’s something quite fetching about their tripped out psychedelic sounds, their endless patience and their deafening booms. It’s more than just Kidney’s inhuman wails, his mop of swirling hair, his psychedelic attire, there’s a booming scary heaviness that psychedelic music has never called its own until now. And it only does so now because it’s terrified. Paul Kidney Experience are a weapon. They fill a room, make it vibrate, sear its paint. This is experimental music, at times the first piece Dustberries, recorded at 3CR, sounds like death metal, that’s until the guttural growls turn to wailing shrieks and the music, these intense slabs of sound just build and build before finding an equilibrium and begins chugging along heavy but agile like a jam band. Then there are these unseen cues, a series of suites that launch and launch again, working up into an hysterical transcendental state, where if you fight it, it only takes you deeper. You may know Mr Kidney from his previous Sydney based outfits Kiss My Poodles Donkey, Monroes Fur or from his current PBS radio show Ear of the Behearer. He is a good man who likes his noise loud. He’s roped in various local musician of ill repute including members of improvisational duo Infinite Decimals, The Stabs, Baseball, Dead Ant Rainbow and Star Ten Hash. They also like their noise.
This debut LP feature two pieces over 20 minutes each, one recorded at 3CR, the other at PBS. The second, Tardigrades, with some different personnel from the first, follows a similar recipe, loud, building, wails, growls and music exploding and evolving with violence and purpose. It’s definitely the heaviest psychedelic music you will ever hear. Tie die usually suggests the gentle and soothing, here it has teeth and is an expression of a willingness to experiment, to take your head apart and see what’s inside. Good luck.
Bob Baker Fish
