The words ‘experimental music collective’ strike fear into the heart of every music reviewer. All too often they disguise a lack of musical sense and absence of any kind of tune beneath the façade of ground-breaking experimentalism, and they’re notoriously difficult to review. Impossible to judge by normal standards, there’s often little that the poor reviewer can do other than give them a respectable three stars and hope that nobody buys it. It’s like someone entering the Olympic figure-skating with a plastic toboggan.
This three-CD collection of singles and unreleased material by (dare I say it) experimental music collective Amp, however, is such a mish-mash of feedback, droning keyboards and tin-can clatterings that it’s impossible to even grant it the obligatory three stars. There isn’t even anything vaguely like a chord for the first six or seven minutes, and, to be honest, if I wanted to listen to waves of distortion and occasional whale noises I’d watch the Discovery Channel on a crap portable TV.
The fact that this experiment drags on for a total of thirty-eight excruciatingly drawn-out tracks makes it even less palatable. Apparently the CIA are looking into using it as an innovative sensory-deprivation torture technique. When I first began reviewing I promised myself that I’d never use the phrase ‘it’s just noise’. Which is why this review ends right here.