Hirsute Pursuit: Tighten That Muscle Ring

Hirsute Pursuit: Tighten That Muscle Ring

Finally, a bit of extremity. Hirsute Pursuit have made me squirm and wince like no other music has since I was a 17 y/o sitting, jaw-dropped, before TG's Very Friendly or perhaps listening to SPK's Leichenscrei for the first time in University.

Industrial music should make you uncomfortable, it should provoke and challenge you. It is, perhaps, the Burroughsian legacy that compels so much Industrial to be uncompromising and stark in its subject matter and its delivery; the cut-up novels (especially Junky) are not only disorientating and impenetrable but, when you do attempt to navigate the jungle of words, it's pretty gross and disquieting (if realistic).

Such things are, no pun intended, hardening. Little offends me or revolts me now. Tighten... doesn't offend though, it just forces me to engage with music in a different way, one my mind isn't used to. We've all heard weird sex stuff in music, or even downright disturbing rape/abuse claims/allusions for shock value (and not just lyrically a la Tyler and Earl), but the slurping, plopping, groaning and grunting of Hirsute's sophomore disc are a new level for me. 

I'm heterosexual but won't shirk or besmirch gay content in culture; it's all culture. However, HP's use of such graphic and immersible bodily and contextual asides (such as a breathless response of "Yessir" make for a compelling atmosphere of sexual intensity)  really bring you in close to gay sex, audibly so. It's not that I'm repulsed by gay sex at all, but that such proximity to a sexual act makes me uncomfortable, shy even, and forces me into a momentary moral dilemma: how should I be feeling? Should I feel bad that I said 'eeew' aloud after a few tracks of relentless, sloppy anal pummeling put to a trip-hop beat? I've not been engaged in this way since the aforementioned Leichenscrei where dead-voiced women discussed sexual abuse at the hands of their carers.

Repulsion isn't the issue. These recordings are so intimate and so unashamedly so that one feels as voyeur but, being heterosexual, a uninvited one. The atmosphere, eventually, solidifies to one of concentrated transgression; this is Industrial, this is the anything goes because there isn't anything else worth going and doing; the sound of freedom and expression. Boyd Rice (featured here on a cover of Boys Keep Swinging) does this elsewhere, he creates an atmosphere of saying what the fuck you want but, rather than obscure it, making you feel as if you've been dropped into a very intense conversation about said subject and might drown for want of context. I feel out of my depth  and yet riveted.

The beats? 90s electronica through a post-industrial lens. Trip-hop, some slimy house and guttural exotica are wrapped up in skittering textures, spittle-flecked flexes of bass and synth but, otherwise, overly percussive and reliant on the chorus of gasps and grunts. Happily, I was expecting tepid DAF-impersonations, but this is a fuck to Gabi and Rob's cheeky tease.

A challenging, deep listen. I'll happily revisit.