Black Pig Liberation Front is a collaborative poetic terrorism and ritualistic love performance ensemble. Using text, electronics, turntables, film, dance, explosive tonal attacks, and beautiful flowing erotic atmospherics, they seek to create sacred zones, temporary communal spaces in time. Maranda Pleasant is our shaman of the evocation, divining and organizing bodies, creating trance states.
“Black Pig Liberation Front is a very unique and original concept created by Rhode Island-based frontman Denis Mahoney aka Tariq Zayid. On this first major album from the killer ritualistic terror and love ensemble, complete with infectious magical incantations, Mahoney and Fringecore have managed to gather together an amazing group of collaborators and contributors, each of whom add a unique dimension to Black Pig’s explosive grunt n’ groan n’ groove collage tonal attacks, animated by Mahoney’s intensely penetrating voice and words and the Torres brothers’ electronica and scratch turntable work. The entire album is a stream of intensity and psychic energy, a celebration of the greatest festival, that of tracing the ’self’. No more so than on the totally exhilarating ‘Frequencies are the Fetish’, a magnificent collaboration between Black Pig and Sonic Youth luminary Thurston Moore, whose soundtracks, especially created for this album crash and thump, sometimes in bizarre violence and others in sensual beauty. The re-mixes of the Thurston pieces by New York’s DJ Shecky; Belgium’s avant-garde maestro DJ Low and London’s Nihilist and Disatronaut, plus ex-Test Department’s David Coulter make this not only unique, but blisteringly memorable. In its own way, Automutilator is equally outstanding with Black Pig teamed up with Banyan, whose cast not only boast Mike Watt and fellow Porno for Pyros member and ex-Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, but the inspired genius of guitarist Nels Cline. When you add to that, the other festering Black pig tracks and Mahoney’s collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on When Two Become One and Shamen Trip, you have a veritable feast. They say that a true festival leaves no trace, no possibility of remembrance, well this CD certainly does.” – Derek Woodgate, Fringecore Magazine
Review Wire Magazine:
Taking their title from the Situationist text by Raoul Vaneigem, and marshaling the forces of alchemy, magic and the words of Giles Deleuze and William S. Burroughs, this large ensemble explodes in a mess of ’signifying’ to match any evangelist, vowing to raise your consciousness to a higher plane.
Their chaotic music theatre noise, propelled by HipHop beats, is supplemented by NYC experimentalists from Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt from the Minutemen and guests including DJ Low and Nels Cline. The recording is a multi-layered nightmare; a sense of paranoia prevails, and shock tactic samples disrupt the smooth flow; the notion of ‘the city as a jungle’ never felt more resonant. The BPLF collective enschews the cult of personality and star systems; a strategy embodied in their colorful alternative names (my personal favourite is Kosimar The Magneticist). However it seems Denis Mahoney alias Tariq Zayid is the main ideas guy. A prolific poet and writer(and man behind Ring Tariq press), he declaims his inventive poetry against the heavy beats. The Black Pig is a mythical figure of rebellion, borrowed from Celtic religion by WB Yeats, although Zayid claims to have found parallels to the image across Europe and the Middle East. BPLF wear their terrifying pig masks at their ecstatic, shamanistic performances to promulgate the image of destruction. Like the semi-obliterated texts on the cover, Zayid’s meanings are obfuscated by layers of additional sound collage from the Torres brothers and treated distorted vocal noises and the ubiquitous TV samples which overload tracks with information.
Each recording is a soundtrack map, filled with foreign hieroglyphs; as with Burroughs, hidden meanings will leak out through the gaps in this contrived chaos.
Ed Pinsent (Wire)
Track Listing:
Time: 140:52
Genre: Rock
- 1. Hello
- 2. Storm (4:45)
- 3. The Catalyst (3:15)
- 4. Pataphysica Sequentia (5:44)
- 5. Festival Anti-image In 7 (13:47)
- 6. Thurstoned (6:25)
- 7. Blast Cap Frequencies; Break Vers. (5:43)
- 8. When The Two Become One (1:03)
- 9. Frequencies Are The ***; Indeterminate Music #2 (3:14)
- 10. Shaman Trip (2:13)
- 11. Static Nomad Wave; Codex 7 (7:57)
- 12. Automutilator (6:44)
- 13. The Revolution Of Everyday Life (9:29)
- 14. Tame (71:29)