Joe Colley Waste Of Songs Oral Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $14.00 Throughout Waste Of Songs, the California sound artist Joe Colley shifts between several modes of sound production and positions the ensuing results as something of an argumentative dialogue. On one hand, Colley vigorously investigates hot-wired ignitions of broken sound with an unbridled curiosity for quirks and fizzles from electronics set awry. One particularly placid example of this mode of production would be the self-evident Clay Sound 7" of water being absorbed into clay. But more often than not, he contextualizes this sound research through an increasingly refined sensibility that exposes much dark thoughts of abject malaise and allegories of an existential malfunction. The noxious electricity of cross-wired cable buzzing and erratic disturbances on Waste Of Songs introductory track -- aptly titled : "Bruise Voltage and Field Error" -- demonstrates Colley's ability to wrangle erratic sounds into a focused statement of sonic negation. Waste Of Songs bristles with a vast array of events, too numerous to catalogue; yet Colley matches his diversity of his caustic explosions, sawtooth drones, and magnetic interferences with the constant threat of electrocution. At one instance on the lengthy "Arc and Wrong Lifetime" when Colley produces delicate fillibrations of controlled electric squigglings could easily be playful noises for Matmos or Mouse On Mars, he refuses such references by detonating accumulations of static abruptly splintered through brief flecks of silence. Elsewhere in that same track, glassine timbral masses appear on the event horizon as an ethereal minimalism, only to express their true nature as ghastly radioactive vibrations that brashly rattle the stereo field. In the midst of this polyphony of noises, Colley remains stoic and in control of these sonic machinations. This is not an exorcism of inner demons or an attempt to bring civilization to its knees; rather, it's an honest rumination on his fractured sense of self and his disconnect to the world at large, poised somewhere between Luc Ferrari's psychic dislocation and John Duncan's existential hammering.