Blood & Flame

Official Review

Boyd Rice released his first work in 1981 on Mute, under his own name. The NON albums that followed, such as Physical Evidence (1982) and Blood and Flame (1987), pushed noise toward ever less accessible textures. Rice is a Californian artist, among the first in the avant-garde to use the turntable as a creative tool, and the 1987 record continues the method that already defined his debut: short loops, layered over one another. The record contains nineteen tracks, built from jarring loops and layers of shapeless noise. Contemporary criticism received it as a deliberately unpleasant work. Trouser Press describes it as a sort of sound-effects library for very disturbed listeners. The same reviewer points out the dry humor of the titles, citing “(Theme from) Dark Shadows,” a reference to a well-known gothic television series. Formally, the material proceeds through repetition and superposition. The figures are short and cyclical, they add up without a melodic line and without narrative development, and each track’s length depends on accumulation more than on composition. Noise is treated as raw material to be shaped, with a grain that shifts from track to track. This approach places it in the site’s industrial/post-industrial catalogue , where NON stands for the most abstract and least rhythmic side of the scene. The dossier on Georges Bataille offers a second reading: repetition pushed to exhaustion and sound used as unproductive expenditure are the traits that dossier attributes to the most extreme noise. Rice’s public persona, with its provocative use of totalitarian symbols and imagery, remains a matter of critical debate. We note it here as part of the work’s reception, without taking a position. In 1991 Mute released Easy Listening for Iron Youth, a collection of NON material from 1975 to 1991. Listeners looking for an entry point to the project usually start there. Blood & Flame remains the record to hear for NON’s noise in its harshest and least mediated form.