Also, if you were wondering, it sounds nothing like Phylomedusa and it isn't just uncomfortably weird like that, either, so no need to be worried. This album is weird, certainly, but to me at least, it isn't even slightly uncomfortable.
It's a noise album, sure (maybe), but it isn't harsh, it's just creative. Immensely, stupendously so, and exceptionally satisfying and listenable for such experimental music.
Perhaps it's because of their extensive backgrounds in free jazz and improv (and modern classical and drone...), or perhaps because they're neither Japanese dada nihil pranksters nor white supremacist proto-MRAs with a serial killer fetish, but Maja S. K. Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord approach noise from a totally different angle than virtually anyone I've heard in the scene. It's playful! It's colorful! It actually out-dadas the Japanese nihil pranksters because it sounds like these ladies would totally go around shouting irrational poetry while dressed as lobsters! The album follows a vaguely amphibian theme but it mostly exists as a loose framework on which to lovingly toss all sorts of unnatural sounds, be they produced by human voice, electronics, french horn maybe or a human voice through a french horn processed by electronics!
If, in the late-70s and early-80s, noise and industrial seemed like a total refutation of everything music and art and society stood for, and thus meant total freedom, they rapidly got codified and impressed their own rigid sort of code, limiting and herding self-expression to a great extent (in)to certain acceptable modes. OF COURSE, I basically just described the entire concept of "genre" and it's not like I don't love and appreciate tons of "traditional" harsh noise and even HNW, but it's hard for me to see Blixter Toad, with its cheery green anthroamphibian cover and chiptune and music box elements as anything other than two bad-ass chicks trying to put a little of that freedom and even danger back into noise by daring to inject a little levity, some dynamics, and theatricality-in-a-NOT-punching-glass-with-your-face-or-wearing-plastic-bags-over-your-head-way, into noise, and maybe even a little danger, because serial killers and genocide are beyond banal by now and banal isn't dangerous, while being a woman in an overwhelming not just male but frequently violently hypermasculine field is, well, literally dangerous. This approach is not entirely unprecedented (lord knows we've all heard that Kazumoto Endo album by now) and maybe I'm a poseur, maybe I let my ghost y-chromosome get in the way of my thinking rationally, or/and maybe I'm just a sucker for a good double album, but I can't help but take Blixter Toad as a sort of living manifesta, as propaganda of the deed, as theory transmogrified into praxis, as showing the way by doing the thing that needs doing. It's both inspiring and awe-inspiring. It's also just a really fun, exciting, rewarding listen.
Basically:
It drones, it clanks, it chops and dices sound into confetti and sprinkles it across the room, it frightens, it challenges, it teases, it pleases, it cheeses, it Jeezus, it plonks, it Blonks, it skronks, it wonks, it's divisive, it's insightsive, it's incredible, it's inedible, it's monstrous, it's weirdly human, it sometimes sounds like Pazuzu possessing Donald Duck and sometimes sounds like Tangerine Dream, it's bizarre as fuck, it's fun as shit, it doesn't care AT ALL what you think of it, but it's easy to love if you're so inclined, it's may even be the best double album of all time that isn't by Tantra, Beefheart or Betty Carter and it might be better than some of those! Yeah I went there!
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