:GARISTA:

ZOVIET FRANCE (also known as :$OVIET:FRANCE:, Soviet France, :Zoviet-France:) was one of the early second wave industrial ambient bands following in the footsteps of Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound and Einstürzende Neubauten and has been active for over four decades now. Formed in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1980 by Ben Ponton, Peter Jensen and Robin Storey, ZOVIET FRANCE has remained a bizarre musical force that blurs the distinctions between industrial, ambient, drone, noise and musique concrète and remains a mysterious underground act despite releasing well over 20 albums to date.

It all started with the act's 1980 cassette release GARISTA which at the time found :$OVET:FRANCE: as the moniker of choice. Originally self-released, the album would eventually find other labels to reissue it on CD and vinyl. The band was one of those strange entities that participated in the underground tape scene and found its earliest cassette released wrapped in materials such as hessian, tar paper and aluminum foil. The group's musical proclivities were just as unorthodox by delivering bizarre hypnotic collages of sound that blended droning with vocal samples, field recordings, reverberating sound effects, tribal percussion and electronic sounds.

This abstract and surreal debut featured seven tracks that offered an otherworldly wild ride that clamored on for nearly 40 minutes. Even on their first offering ZOVIET FRANCE featured a sort of audio version of surrealist automatism where the artists suppress conscious control over the creative process and allow the unconscious mind to take the lead. While many industrial artists simply delivered repetitive cyclical loops of sound or even melodic touches, GARISTA is bound together only by a series of rhythmic pulses and somewhat of the electronic equivalent of the no wave movement that was sweeping New York City at the same time.

The album is unpredictable and unorthodox in about every way and as alienating as early Throbbing Gristle, Nurse Without Wound or Nocturnal Emissions. In other words this is about as avant-garde as you can get as the procession of dark ominous noisy sound effects consistently shape shift and deliver the musical equivalent of the inner workings of a complex machine going completely haywire. The album does deliver odd percussive and rhythmic counterpoints though as if several streams of consciousness intersected or like when two radio stations bleed into each other on a classic FM radio dial. Vocals occur but only strange utterances with no meaning. While ZOVIET FRANCE would add more elements of musicality to their repertoire, GARISTA shows the band at their darkest and most determined to divorce their "music" from anything else in existence.

For all intents and purposes this will come off as pure noise to most music lovers. This is basically designed for only the most hardcore of extremists who can appreciate many layers of incongruous streams of sound overlapping and derailing without notice. It's almost like a bunch of toddlers starting a band with a bunch of found objects in the kitchen and having a field day with it all. Well perhaps a bit more sophisticated than that but delivers the same chaotic effect. Call me crazy but i actually love these totally irreverent freak-a-zoid sound expressions if done well and this one works for me nicely.