STATEMENT

BIG BLACK: AMEN A PEN A CANAL–ENEMA!

by STEVE ALBINI

“I can dig the Ramones and the Birthday Party and the Stooges and SPK and Minor Threat and Whitehouse and Link Wray and Chrome and Pere Ubu and Rudimentary Peni and Four Skins and Throbbing Gristle and Skrewdriver and the Ex and Minimal Man and US Chaos and Gang Green and Tommi Stumpff and the Swans and Bad Brains all at the same time, and if you can’t then fuck you. I don’t give two splats of an old negro junkie’s vomit for your politico-philosophical treatises, kiddies. I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix. Robin Gecht hacked up a bunch of whores in Chicago for it. Gacy strangled buttboys for it. Dean Corll killed twenty seven (or more) schoolkids for it. Imagine the bang–not just fucking (which is about as severe a sensation as most people get), but fucking little boys. Poor little innocents who have never done anything bad to anyone, and here’s this savage splitting them asswise. And he kills them. Mean killings, like with an oxy-acetalyne cutting torch. Or a pissed-on straight razor. Buttfucking little boys while butchering them. That’s how bad we need it. Me, I’m not that desperate yet. I stick with the noise. But an articulated noise that hangs there in your memory and causes further damage. These guys I knew in Montana really dug the whole ranch-hand aspect of the place. Ball cutting, ear notching, lip tattooing and skull crushing. Especially the skull crushing. They used to love to watch the cows die. It was either that or go home to the trailer park and watch their five half-naked siblings run around in the dirt. What would you do? Big Black is a way to get the old blood to boiling without having to buttfuck and garrotte little boys, or hang around slaughterhouses. It’s as simple as that. I want to push myself, the music, the audience and everything involved as close to the precipice as possible. Although I’m kinda worried about what we’ll find there.“