Returning to Kafe Haerverk for 2 nights of crazy left field electro funk and joined with Jan Christian Lauritzen(noxagt mm) on drums the second night plus local maniac djs to keep the party going late into both nights. This show is going to BUMP!
There’s no other band working today for whom the words ‘post-everything’ ring quite as true as they do for Shit & Shine. They’ve traversed uncharted plains between noise rock, outright digital abstraction, and pop-like tropes, shifting from non-sequitur to non-sequitur, donning blue face makeup and rabbit masks, and yelling rambled nonsense over drum rhythms repeated for half an hour at a time before breaking into haphazardly assembled concrete pop. They’re utterly unlike anything else, but only by being sort of like everything else all at once.”
Shit And Shine Biography 2023
It’s a trope repeated until it borders on cliché. Artists who, when asked what motivates them, trot out: ‘This is just something I have to do.’ The suggestion is always, ‘God knows what would happen if I didn’t have my music…’ The statement rings hollow in most cases when you work out the person in question only releases one album every four years. But there is a special sort of artistic soul who obviously has a pathological need to get sonic ideas out into the wild as quickly as they can render them in sound.
Following in the footsteps of such uber-productive giants as Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti, came post punk band The Fall who released on average an album a year for four decades no matter what calamity befell frontman Mark E Smith; garage rock musician Billy Childish whose insane discography makes The Fall look like navel-gazing slackers; and IDM producer Aphex Twin who has released music under more aliases than most musicians have released records. In the 21st Century we’re seeing the likes of Finnish hypnotic NWOBHM psych rockers Circle and doomgaze duo Nadja join their ranks with Discogs-busting back catalogues but no one in the field of post noise rock and out-there electronics is assembling the kind of monumental back catalogue that Shit And Shine is.
In the 19 years since Craig Clouse co-founded this singular project he has amassed what can now comfortably be referred to as a Body Of Work. That is: 28 albums – although that will have risen to at least 31 by the end of this year – plus nine EPs, three 7”s, two cassettes and three splits, that ostensibly cover a multitude of styles, from grindcore to R&B, from techno to krautrock, from noise rock to dubstep, from industrial to jazz. We say ostensibly, because not a single one of this multitude of tracks will sound anything like a genre purist would expect or even want them to.
Clouse, an American, was living in East Molesey, Surrey in 2004 and already a member of the sludge metal, post-grindcore band Todd when he formed Shit And Shine with pal Frank Mckayhan. He describes late night sessions of laying down extremely heavy repetitive hypnotic ‘noise rock’ epics, using a basic sampler and mixing desk, as: “Something to do after the pub.” They had few ambitions for the project but were picked up within months by UK avant metal label Riot Season on the basis of a four track recording. As the project began to take shape and landmarks such as Jealous Of Shit And Shine (2006) were released, their live shows began to take the form of mind-bending rituals that felt more like the initiation into some bizarre cult than a regular rock show. There would often be a big circle of drummers on stage with two guys, usually dressed as rabbits, manipulating electronics, as all hell broke loose in the venue. The weirdness of these events – beyond references to the Japanese progressive punks Boredoms or the idea of ‘a Butthole Surfers for the 21st century’ it was hard to really convey what they were like – meant they became a world of mouth underground sensation rather than a household name.
In 2010 Clouse moved back home to Austin, Texas with his family and Shit And Shine arguably became a different, more interesting, more focused beast around this time. Now, when they play live it tends to be either just him or a duo on stage. Since relocating Clouse has produced records that can (essentially) be called ‘electronic music’. But anyone wanting to boil it down much further than that has their work cut out for them. True, occasionally clear sonic fascinations bubble to the surface. In 2010 the pulverising Bass Puppy EP revealed an infatuation with dubstep; while Chakin (2015), an ensemble album featuring Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, King Coffey and Nate Cross, is something not entirely unlike a jazz fusion record; and ‘You Were Very High’, featuring eye-watering samples of Black Sabbath, Rhianna, Steely Dan, Prince and Van Halen, is future R&B meets techno.
These days releases mainly fall into two separate categories: the extreme metal-adjacent and electronic dance music-adjacent. People attempting to define how the sound of his electronic LPs are progressing over time, he reveals, are hearing things that probably only exist in the ear of the beholder however. Clouse explains: “Ultimately I really just want to make electronic dance-based music. It’s what I’d like to be mostly known for making – it’s what I concentrate on most and it’s what I want to get good at most.”
But generally speaking, the words “electronic dance music-adjacent” are doing so much heavy lifting that you can hear them creaking, straining and ultimately shattering into pieces because of the intense weight they’re having to deal with. Shit And Shine, really don’t so much have a sound as a sensibility – a groove or a tone or a vibe that puts your head in a really strange place – and like few other groups that have been productive for such a relatively long period of time, there is no real way of predicting what a new record is going to sound like. His setup is commendable in its minimalism: “It’s pretty simple really. I have an Erica Synths LXR-02 drum machine, a Roland SP-404 MKII sampler and a couple of desktop mono synths. Pretty much everything is recorded at home in Austin, Texas.”
His new album – and first long player for state51 after the brilliance of last year’s Singularity lathe-cut EP Above Ground Pool, released in conjunction with The Quietus – 2222 & Airport, named for an intersection close to his home, manages to defy all usual EDM strictures. The album opens with a skeletal modern funk – an almost bracingly minimalist sound – but the overall style evaporates when you try and nail it down. Acid house, minimal techno, electro, funk, krautrock, hip hop, found sound, spoken word, live percussion and industrial are blown apart and then reassembled over 13 tracks in a way peculiar to Clouse. So the record feels like a Shit And Shine classic even if it doesn’t quite sound like anything else that’s come before. And this has always been the double barrier to entry with Shit And Shine. When the penny finally drops gloriously for a new listener, they find themselves thinking deliriously, ‘Oh my word, this track is insane, I can’t stop picking up the needle and putting it straight back to the start or hitting the repeat button.’ But not only is it unlikely that there will be another track with a similar vibe or similar style elsewhere on the record, or even on the follow-up record, Clouse is actively unlikely to ever do anything again that sounds even remotely like it.
But then, you get another Shit And Shine record, and after the initial confusion of, ‘What does this even sound like? I’m not sure I understand what he’s doing’, something clicks, the magical process repeats and you get just as captivated by another track. Eventually you realise that Shit And Shine – who are occasionally purveyors of great headphone music; occasionally supply the ideal soundtrack to a raging, beer-fuelled kegger in some dank basement; occasionally drop one of the most avant garde club bangers you’re likely to hear that year; occasionally produce the ideal soundtrack to a long drive or walk – are, more importantly, true artists: never giving you what you want, but most of the time giving you exactly what you need.