Interview with dave phillips (Schimpfluch Gruppe, Fear of God, Dead Peni) [experimental music/fluxus/industrial/noise]

The no part of it interview series was a series of questions answered by 30+ people at the same time around March 2019.   A new entry is published on the 13th of each month.   



Scheduled in March 2019
I wonder how many people will read this having not heard of dave phillips.  I started this series of "interviews" partly wanting to pick the brains of a number of people whose work I do not fully have at hand.  In dp's case, I have heard/bought quite a lot of it, he is very prolific, and interviewed him once before already, but I would add that he is still one of the foremost and distinctive noise artists in the history of the genre.  I'm not necessarily speaking in terms of popularity, but the most innovative, yet utilitarian approach to the totally open-ended idea of being able to do whatever one wants with recordings.  At times it is as raw and primal as it is classical and precise, transcending simple "fluxus" or "avant-garde" appelations.  His work is a genuine mythos of its own.  With that, at the risk of saying something less articulate than I have in the past, I'll just add a quote from the previous interview:

When I saw him perform twice last year (2011), both sets were distinctly different, but both succeeded in affecting a certain aboriginal feeling in my body, by way of subsonic frequencies or animal instincts or what-have-you, and bypassed my natural inclination to be turned off by what I would normally call sanctimonious presentations in a performance context. One set consisted of several layers of untreated insect field recordings, like a choir that was conducted into an exhilarating sort of Eno-esque hum. Dave passed around infosheets that expounded upon the importance of bugs in the entire scheme of our food chain, and sat barefoot Indian style.

The second set was even more visceral, a video montage of animals being skinned alive, a live wolf getting its leg hacked off and its head stomped into mush, or a dead monkey with the word “CRAP” carved into its forehead occupied the screen alongside messages like “errare humanum est” or “the self some imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life”. Walking around with a mask on, breathing into remote loop pedals, and triggering various sounds of animals screaming over string samples, Phillips chiseled together a dizzying miasma of tragically unnecessary pain, graphically unrelenting death, and the intrinsically cruel nature of human condition, who in its “civilized” state, refuses to tend to the ugly corners of reality. It was still the most effective exhibition I have ever seen, and I think that Dave Phillips will be remembered as a shining example of someone who transcended academic circles and noise or music scenes alike.

http://nopartofit.blogspot.com/2020/04/interview-series-14-dave-phillips.html