During my listening through of the Sonic Doing and Thinking playlist I stumbled upon “Pain of Glass! Justice Yeldham at Club 85” and was immediately smitten. I was fascinated by the tumbling wales and howling of a person quivering a piece of glass with their mouth – biting and slicing their cheeks in the process. My interest was peaked when they proceeded to smash the piece of glass over their head. I love the guttural energy, the huge fuzzy tones and vocoded vibrations – but immediately I thought “How could someone capture this energy into a record?” surly this is a sonic spectacle, the records must be underwhelming.
While researching Justice’s work I suddenly remembered hearing rumblings of their music before – akin to “A guy who plays a piece of glass is going to be on a Death Grips record” I remember hearing that his recorded work was good, I was excited to check it out – but the question remained – can a piece that’s mostly spectacle still translate well onto recorded music, when the visual substance isn’t there to contribute?
In Justice’s case – kind of. Justice’s most acclaimed record “Cicatrix” feels like 60% fun, noisy, spikey textures and the remainder is filled with boring and usual noise. I don’t think this makes Justice’s work any less impactful – they are still a fantastic sound artist with great visceral ideas and sounds. I feel like Justice offers work that’s uncontrived, fun to watch and sometimes fun to listen to – overall I’ve found that in their performance, the spectacle tends to pick up the slack when the audio is lacklustre – it would be unfair to judge their work on audio alone. I learned a lot from Justice’s art, especially about how to incorporate spectacle into my own performance and using different found or reclaimed objects to record with. I’m certainly looking forward to more work from them.