Release of the Day: Public Health - Another Council For Life

I can't help but think of William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" when I think of Power Electronics. The poem begins with the stanza "That is no country for old men. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the trees/– Those dying generations – at their song,/The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,/Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/Whatever is begotten, born, and dies./Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unageing intellect." It's where Cormac McCarthy got the title of his book No Country For Old Men and it's an absolutely harrowing meditation on mortality and relevance. 

My friend Andy and I were talking about power electronics a couple weeks ago, actually the same night I picked up this Public Health tape, and he was saying how he was somewhat over the whole genre, and I think that that's to be expected nowadays. You see, there's simply not as much compelling Power Electronics being made now as there was in its heyday - for every incredible contemporary project like Alberich, there's a dozen of minute merit. There is less territory to conquer. There are fewer controversial ideas to enumerate. And feedback simply isn't shocking. Every time I hear a grown man or woman with "shocking" lyrics, I think to myself that perhaps his or her parents never effectively stopped their child's temper tantrum.

The upside to this is that where older power electronics succeeded through gregarious garishness, the best modern power electronics, as conquerer worm, breaks through the top-heavy carcass of its ancestors by way of restraint, taking something like a middle path, if you will.

That's a long introduction to Public Health's excellent new tape Another Council for Life, another of the recent killer batch from Ascetic House. The four-song cassette covers a lot of ground, at some times mimicking the distorted warble of William Bennett of early Whitehouse and sometimes taking on the crunch of a Genocide Organ record. These songs, however, have a lot of structure. I mean. They're actual songs that include repeatable mantras. It's kind of a pop song's chorus, at least in analogy. A.S. Haas isn't satisfied with that, though. He also weaves in elements of other industrial/noise subgenres like dark ambient.

Unfortunately, I can't really find a stream of a song from the CS. If you have one, please e-mail it to me so I can update this with a stream, or feel free to post it in the comments below!

You can pick it up through the Chondritic Sound webstore like other AH releases, but these are also often usually stocked at Mount Analog and Heaven Street Records.