Mark Deutrom - Iraq Self Released by Keith Boyd 10.02.06
          Fuck George Bush! There, I said it. In that one short statement I'm being upfront with you on my thoughts about the president so, if that turns you off, stop reading this now and go back to whatever you were doing before. Have we ever had a more duplicitous, sneaky, puppet-headed, in the pocket of every mega-corporation, lying, double-talking, war-baiting, religiously-monofocused git as our president than this man? I say you'd be hard-pressed to find one and that includes the last great Blackened Pope of American politics, Richard Nixon. The man and the people surrounding him have essentially been jockeying for the past 25-30 years to amass enough wealth and power to control and destroy the world we all live in. It seems to have become a game of how stacked of a deck can you make it and still call it democracy. From the environment to the war on the Middle East to scientific research, tax cuts and a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body this guy has attempted to stamp his evil Alfred E. Newman image on all of it. In my lifetime I've never seen our country as lockstep and polarized as it is now. Given that one of the president's main jobs should be to bring about the unity of the middle ground and focus on what can be done for the common good, I think we can safely brand these two terms as sinister failures.

            It's in light of these sentiments that I heartily recommend and enthusiastically endorse Mark Deutrom's new release, " Iraq ". Mark Deutrom (or Mark D. as he is often listed as) had been doing time for the past several years in the sonic underground with such low end doom merchants as The Melvins and SunnO))). This disc is his third purely solo release and is a great experimental follow up to his wild and scary CD, "Gate". Whereas "Gate" was a bad-acid trip through the folded on itself sounds of a contact-mic'ed iron gate, " Iraq " takes the equally grating noise of George Bush's voice and folds it to similar effect.

            The disc is comprised of a one hour cut and was generated from a single loop of seven different recordings of Bush saying the word Iraq . All of the recordings were lifted from the big speeches of the last several years, infamously including his speech to announce the beginning of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco. Given it source you might expect at heart some measure of its' origins to peek through and it just doesn't happen. The word has been layered and folded on top of itself so many times that it has lost all human touch. According to the liner notes there are 14,112,000 repetitions of the word Iraq per minute. I feel that's the heart of this bold statement. In the repeating of words and jingoistic slogans from every mouth of this shameful administration, we're being tricked into seeing the war in Iraq and several other issues) as though they aren't related to human beings. Through repetition the PEOPLE of Iraq have become as empty, hollow and alien as the sounds on this disc.

            The Alien blipscape that results from this method is a perfect mirror held up to the same process that unfolds every night on Fox News, CNN and the president's weekly radio address. I loudly cheer just this sort of magickal reversal tactic. It's a creative and sonically interesting assault perpetuated in response to a corrupt and dying regime and era. What with all the recent cracks beginning to appear in this administration's image (Katrina response, Abu Graib, Cheney's hunting accident to name a few) maybe the best we can do is to be like Mark D and add our voices to the backlash of dissent while hoping that our votes will actually count in 2008.