Max Nordile – Building A Better Void LP

*Max Nordile (Preening, Violence Creeps, Uzi Rash, et al.) tosses Gilgongo 30 minutes of trudging, free-form sprawl that draws unassuming and collateral reference points (in the label’s mind) to a highly regarded catalog of outsiders that spans decades (Jandek, Little Howlin’ Wolf, Nihilist Spasm Band). It’s an honor to challenge any listener, with Building a Better Void.

“Max Nordile has a patented collage method. In this day, I almost hate to say it’s perhaps a distinctly American sound, like squawks from the rubber room. Although, this is sharply not a conversation between “Mattie” and “Hattie” concerning the “Wooly Bully” and the desirability of developing dancing skills (with no attempt made to synthesize these divergent topics). What you’re listening to is a tangled mass, a phone call from a scribbled area code, herking and jerking its way off the map. It’s catchy, it’s bent.

After it said so much to me, I returned to the record, and then again and again. “Thanks so much,” I said to it, like it is said in the divine hand of “Diligent Pores.” And once more I’m gripped into powerful clang at the intersection of joy, mystery & abrasion.

It is mercurial; an icy slip wherein the listener is absolutely unable to get the balance or footing to stand upright for all of thirty minutes. Building a Better Void is a jittering slob but a true testimonial to the San Pablo blocks of trauma-cracked sidewalks of Ishmael Reed’s Blues City: Oakland, brawling and husky.

I feel as though I “came to” inside this album, awakened from a black out mid-party – but whose? The details are lost to me now. I struggle to move but not to escape, like bearing witness to the stupid drunk deft hand of William Eggleston’s video phantasmagoria, Stranded in Canton, or hamming on quads ’round the joyous, unhinged roller rink that is The Shaggs.

I want to call Nordile a junkyard James Cameron of aural thrillers, epic in scope, but he’s a poltergeist in the back seat, whispering spookies, in a vehicle we call Rolling Thunder Revue No. II. New fires to replace the bad ones. Freed punk. Friendly spirits.” – Forest Juziak