Shit and Shine

This latest statement from the long-running, inscrutable, and gleefully self-indulgent solo project of Craig Clouse is billed as Shit and Shine’s “krautrock album.” Longtime fans will no doubt be familiar with Clouse’s “deep solid groove repetition” aesthetic, as Clouse has always had a fondness for obsessive repetition, but 0 aa RIOT (pronounced “Zero (ay ay) RIOT”) is a surprisingly fresh twist on a familiar formula. In essence, it feels like a great Can album with all of the vocals, guitars, and other melodic elements stripped away to leave behind only an unstoppable and eternally shifting bass and drum groove. Or, as Riot Season suggests, it sounds like Can if their line-up was reduced to just Holger Czukay’s bass and a Roland TR-1000 drum machine and “sharpened up with modern tools.” While I suspect that many fans of the actual Can might beg to differ due to Clouse’s singular passion for relentlessly monomaniacal repetition, that does not stop 0 aa RIOT from being a leftfield masterpiece of hypnotic and muscular minimalism.

Unsurprisingly, Clouse throws down the gauntlet immediately with the opener (and lead single) “Steve’s Pool,” which is essentially ten glorious minutes of the same throbbing two-note bass line anchoring a continually shapeshifting beat. While it is technically two notes, it is probably fair to describe it as an endearingly maniacal one-note performance and it improbably works brilliantly, as the beat continually mutates in compelling fashion with a host of dubby flourishes, dropouts, shifting cymbal patterns,  and alternately dragging and propulsive dynamic shifts. There is admittedly a subtle melodic guitar or bass motif that fitfully appears as well, but it is less of a hook than a mere tool used to snap into and out of a particular rhythm, as Clouse does not need a fucking hook to spice up his hypnotically throbbing groove..  

That said, the following “Planned Cancellations” does boast an unconventional hook of sorts, as there is a recurring sample mocking both record collectors and colored vinyl, which is an amusing and characteristically contrarian move for Clouse as this album is exclusively available in two different shades of limited blue vinyl. Aside from that bit of endearingly post-modernist irony poisoning, the piece is most notable for a much more driving and tense groove as well as some flickers of bubbling synth weirdness and jazzy vibraphone melody. It arguably resembles a broken-brained and kaleidoscopic deconstruction of Bitches Brew era Miles Davis set to a heavy bass groove, but the best bits are the dubbed out spatial sorcery of the drum fills and the various stumbles and falters that fitfully disrupt the throbbing majesty of the groove. 

The album’s second half opens with yet another stone-cold minimalist banger, as “1100 Parking Spaces” combines a deep bass throb with more of a clattering “locked groove” approach that is continually stammering and reigniting. There is also a stuttering organ loop buried in the mix, but the main attraction is again Clouse’s talent for dubby percussion effects, as the snare seems to flutter around spatially like a disoriented bat. The closing “Pyramid of Cylinders” then doubles down on its predecessor’s “locked groove” approach, but it is otherwise a comparatively radical departure from the rest of the album, as the insistently stomping beat is fleshed out with another misanthropic sample, whooshing race car sounds, an annoyingly looping guitar figure that sounds like a chopped-up blues/southern rock lick, a very unexpected bass solo, and a brief snippet of ‘60s pop. 

To my ears, it maybe errs a bit too much on the side of willfully annoying and overly loose and improvisatory, but not so much that it qualifies as a misstep, as it ends the album with a messily adventurous and self-sabotaging disruption of Clouse’s otherwise winning formula, which seems deeply fitting for this project. It does feature some impressively crisp and vivid drum sounds though, so perhaps it will grow on me someday. We’ll see, i guess. In the meantime, the other three songs sound pretty goddamn amazing to me. While I cannot pretend to be a “fuckin expert” on Shit and Shine’s entire mercurial, demented, exasperating, and fitfully brilliant oeuvre, 0 aa RIOT has officially joined Malibu Liquor Store, Ladybird, Jealous Of Shit And Shine, and 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral in my personal pantheon of instant Clouse classics. 

Listen here.