Radio Transmissions

‘Radio Transmissions’ captures one of our most gleefully mischievous musical ventures in action, writes RENÉ SCHAEFER.

Paul Kidney is a true original – a flower punk, a zig zag wanderer, a larger-than-life character who couldn’t blend into the anonymous mass of society if his life depended on it. The bands he’s fronted since the mid-1980s are legendary for treading the fine line between chaos and inspiration: Southern Fried Kidneys, Kiss My Poodles Donkey, Monroes Fur. All of them are whispered about still for their sheer absurdist lunacy and melding of all the most gratuitous rock’n’roll excesses and normalcy-defying counter-culture gestures.

For years, Kidney and his partner Jules lived in a psychedelically painted Bedford van. You would see it parked outside venues across Australia and you’d know that Mr Kidney would be on the dance floor, twisting like a multi-coloured stick insect dervish to some of the world’s finest music. Even now, his shock-headed presence in the audience still confers a seal of approval, the greatest compliment to the band playing. No critic or industry maven carries this much clout.

The “Beddie” has been put out to pasture these days, but Kidney shows no signs of slowing down or mellowing out. His latest venture is a musical collective by the name The Paul Kidney Experience. While the line-up may vary slightly from gig to gig, some of its mainstays are Matt Gleeson (drums), Nell Day (violin), Don Rogers (bass) and guitarists Richard Walsh, Ben Butcher and Troy Naumoff. On stage, the band creates a largely improvised wall of noise as backdrop to the singer’s freeform hollers, yelps and flailing gyrations. It is as much a visual spectacle as an aural overload, as instruments blend into a dense mass of screeching mayhem and sinuous rhythms.

PKE live are not so much concerned with individual songs or subtlety as they are with total immersion in beautiful chaos. Like a caricature of free jazz, it can sound like seven musicians all soloing continuously for 40 minutes. It’s physically draining for the observer, but as in quantum physics, the patterns that emerge out of this seemingly random maelstrom can be endlessly fascinating and strangely attractive.

Capturing these spontaneously emerging forms on something as mundane as a compact disc is no easy feat, as their structures are elusive and transient at best. The best way seems to be to stick some microphones in a room with these merry pranksters, press record and see what happens, much like the spontaneously improvised jazz sessions of the mid-20th century. This is exactly what happened on the two radio broadcast recordings that make up this album.

“On stage, the band creates a largely improvised wall of noise as backdrop to the singer’s freeform hollers, yelps and flailing gyrations.”

‘Dustberries’, recorded at Melbourne community radio station 3CR, starts off like an out-take from Gong’s 1977 album Floating Anarchy, all space noises, delirious wails and ambient hither-and-thither. Before too long though, it spirals into the soundtrack to your worst Charles Burns cartoon acid nightmare: flesh melts from your hands and human-sized insect larvae are hiding in the cupboard, while the dogs that live inside your walls are trying to suck out your eyeballs. About two thirds through this 24-minute track, a fuzzed-out Lubricated Goat guitar riff emerges from the squirming morass and things become more focused, pulling the listener back from the edge of dissolution.

‘Tardigrades’ is from a different session at 3PBS-FM. While following a similar pattern, it sounds more like a cage full of demented jungle animals on a peyote binge, tearing apart the still twitching corpse of Jim Morrison and haphazardly reassembling its constituent parts into an automaton capable of playing cocktail lounge versions of Ornette Coleman compositions on an out-of-tune grand piano in some anteroom of hell. The structure of this piece is a lot more varied, and consequently more involving to the casual listener. Guest horn-blower Lloyd Honeybrook contributes some inspired avant-jazz sax squawks and shit just keeps falling apart. It’s a beguiling mess and probably the most fully realised documentation of PKE available so far.

By pulling back the densely claustrophobic woolen blanket of their live shows, Paul Kidney and Co reveal the intricacy beneath the noise, bouncing stupidly fertile ideas off each other and having a ball at the same time. It’s no substitute for the full-on assault of their gigs, but rather an elaboration and elucidation of the keen intellects behind one of Australia’s most gleefully mischievous musical ventures.

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‘Radio Transmissions’ is out now independently.