by Thom Jurek
With their acerbic wit and blood-thirsty attack, Borbetomagus are virtually unlike any other band anywhere. They make Peter Brötzmann seem warm and fuzzy. There is no intellectual response to music like this; you either love it or it grates on you so badly you have to take it off the box, leave the room or die screaming to be let out of the torture chamber of an existence that would allow something like this to be conceived of, let alone created. Saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich, along with guitarist Donald Miller, create the most extreme noise three instruments like this with amplification can make. There are only two "tunes" on this fine disc: "Bathed in the Blood of the Lamb" and "Grunion Run."" They are both very long tracks; the first is over half an hour, and the second over 25 minutes. They are different from one another in their approach to extreme tonalities and in dynamics, but, other than that, like what's going on musically, you have to hear for yourself. This is scary music -- the kind that makes you have nightmares about serial killers. But it's also the kind of fun-house fare that makes you want to live free or die, to scream in ecstasy, and laugh with glee with the knowledge that the creative impulse is alive and terribly well and living in America, of all places. This is music beyond language because it is the roots of language itself: the impulse that attempts to express and organize that which is unspeakable. Highly recommended.