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The Hafler Trio

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The Hafler Trio, “Masturbatorium” (Touch, 1991)

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The first part of Andrew McKenzie’s unresolved sex trilogy was created as a soundtrack for performance artist Annie Sprinkle’s “masturbation ritual,” a role that it apparently filled quite successfully. As a stand-alone effort, however, it is not among McKenzie’s most rewarding and enduring works. The problem is not lack of quality or ideas, but rather that it feels too unnaturally condensed to be truly satisfying.

I have a difficult time accepting The Hafler Trio as an especially erotic entity and the first half of this 1991 EP does not do much to help me make that leap. It’s still quite good, but it sounds more like vaguely tense ambient drone than anything libidinal. It begins with an insistently repeating piano note over a sustained bass hum buried low in the mix. Gradually, a shimmering bit of feedback drifts into the picture and something resembling a processed inhalation/exhalation begins ominously echoing the piano. 

Around the three minute mark, however, Andrew begins to go for the throat: the bass drone swells dramatically in presence and and a deluge of alternately shrill and spectral noises begin bouncing from speaker to speaker. The layering quickly becomes impossible to keep track of, as orchestrated chaos erupts and various mechanical sounds cohere into a dense throbbing rhythm that is probably as compelling as anything McKenzie has done.

Unfortunately, that highlight almost immediately segues into the markedly less beguiling lull of the second movement, which sounds like a web of crackling field recordings lazily unfolding over a deep and seismic pulse. At some point, it begins being buffeted by mutant digitized birds, which is not an especially sexy sound. That turns out to be a clever feint though, as the conspicuously eroticized final movement eventually evolves from the bass. The party commences in earnest at the precise moment that the early-Autechre-meets-futuristic-strip-club beat kicks in (supplied by The Anti-Group). 

I am surprised that Andrew allows the piece to flirt with IDM as long as he does, but he does ultimately crush it beneath a landslide of dissonant synth, increasingly seismic and overloaded bass, and (most significantly) the breathy sound of Annie experiencing some variety of Tantric orgasm. Knowing the source of the sounds and their originally intended context distracted me a bit from the full picture at first, which is that the climactic crescendo is an extremely dark one: Masturbatorium ends as a frightening mechanized aural apocalypse. It must have been quite a memorable show.

Given the provocative title, provocative purpose, and the decidedly immodest album art, the actual music on Masturbatorium is comparatively tame, content to serve as a tense and slowly intensifying backdrop for Sprinkle’s live spectacle. I was a bit wrong-footed by the overt nod to contemporary electronica, but I suppose it is fairly essential to the tone of the piece and the dynamics of the show. More troubling is the fact that the piece sounds like three separate and truncated pieces oozing into one another. The transitions aren’t clumsy, but the whole feels rushed compositionally—it progresses faster than seems natural. 

That may be by necessity though, as I imagine a 45 minute or hour-long masturbation ritual would be pretty demanding. Nevertheless, I definitely wish the first part had been allowed to unfold longer, as it was becoming an impossibly dense and vibrant monster of a soundscape at the point of its abrupt dissolution. There are definitely some striking moments, but there are some lulls too and it is all over a bit too quickly. Fortunately, the next part of the trilogy (Fuck) took the unholy combination of sex and The Hafler Trio to a much higher level.

(Note- this album is currently out of print and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future)

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The Hafler Trio, “Fuck” (Touch, 1992)

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Following logically from the female-centric Masturbatorium, the lengthier and more complex Fuck (1992) shifts the focus to male sexual energy, which manifests itself in considerably more visceral and aggressive music. Having exclusively heard Andrew’s more abstract late-period work before I finally got ahold of this album, I was completely blindsided by its explosive and visceral nature. I like it—brute force suites The Hafler Trio beautifully. This album is great.

Andrew McKenzie does not waste any time with foreplay on Fuck, as the first half blasts into a hot-blooded coital frenzy after a mere 40 seconds of ominous droning. It isn’t an especially abstract or intellectually detached dose of aural sex either—McKenzie could not be more blunt in his attempt to musically approximate an impassioned fuck. Naturally, such an endeavor has huge potential to be an embarrassing, unintentionally comic fiasco, but Andrew puts on an absolute tour de force and it is absolutely overwhelming (particularly played at maximum volume, as urged in the liner notes).

The backbone of the song is a beat that deftly replicates a rapid heartbeat that grows perceptibly faster and faster as it unfolds/explodes. That unrelenting pulse gives the piece a very tense feel and a palpable sense of danger, as it sounds like it could all derail into utter chaos at any moment. A lot of that illusion is also due to the escalating mayhem surrounding it, such as Andrew’s rhythmic moans and gasps, the sinister and hollow-sounding roars in the foreground, and the grotesquely amplified cicadas and woodpeckers that seems to be trying to burrow into my goddamn brain. McKenzie and his fellow mixers (Zbigniew Karkowski and ¬Hilmar √ñrn Hilmarsson) completely outdid themselves here—the first part of Fuck bursts from the speakers with singular violence and clarity.

After getting about as crazy as it possibly can, the “lust” half of the album gradually becomes slower and calmer until it is ultimately winnowed down to just Andrew’s breathing. That breathing then segues seamlessly into the album’s languid, post-coital second half, which provides a much needed oasis of calm after the savage ear ravishing that preceded it. It doesn’t stay post-coital for long though, as a bass-y processed moan coheres into the slow and persistent rhythm of yet more sex. It could not be more different than the first half though, augmenting its languorous cadence with only a pleasant shimmer and multiple layers of steady breathing (presumably all Andrew’s, though Annie Sprinkle was intimately involved in eliciting the source material for the album). It all stops without warning in the middle of the piece, leaving only the ambient sounds of the rural night, a sloooow heartbeat, and some haunting distant murmurs.

I am not quite sure what McKenzie was trying to do thematically by ending the piece with such eerie ghost-like moans, though I suspect it represents a slow fade from consciousness into dream. Regardless, it sounds great and it is a perfect note to end the album on. Also, the ambiguous shadow it casts at the end of a such a tranquil and organic stretch is naggingly and deliciously mysterious. I can find absolutely nothing to gripe about here: Fuck is one of the most coherent, striking, and immediately gratifying albums in The Hafler Trio’s vast and elusive oeuvre.

(Note- this album is currently out of print. Also, the third part of The Hafler Trio’s improbable trilogy of sex-themed albums ( I Love You) has never been released.)

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The Hafler Trio, “Kill the King” (Staalplaat (1991)/Korm Plastics (2003))

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This 1991 release marked the beginning of the trilogy that many regard to be some of Andrew McKenzie’s finest and most inspired work. Appropriately enough, its 2003 reissue by devoted super-fan Frans de Waard (Beequeen) marked the beginning of something still more notable: an ongoing campaign to track down and reissue as many hopelessly unavailable Hafler Trio albums as possible…with all omissions, glitches, and compromises eradicated and all of the financially suicidal packaging triumphantly intact.

One of the qualities that makes Kill the King (a single 73-minute “ambient” piece) such a satisfying work is that McKenzie balances his characteristically aggressively contrarian and experimentalist impulses with massive, sustained, and subliminally buzzing drones and an occasional languorous pulse. Such concessions to listenability are quite uncommon in Hafler Trio’s oeuvre, but I find them to be quite welcome when they appear. I am certainly a fan of H3O’s more mischievous, bizarre, and abrasive tendencies, but having them presented within a context of semi-conventional structure and musicality definitely makes them more rewarding over multiple listens. I suspect Andrew would fucking hate to hear that though. In fact, he seems to have had some misgivings about Kill the King‘s direction even while he was making it, as he managed to only narrowly avoid making a perfect ambient drone album through an artful act of late-song self-sabotage (a brief, but thoroughly cringe-inducing, dental drill interlude).

Atypically, Hafler Trio actually seems to have been almost an actual trio for this album, as McKenzie was allegedly joined by artist/short wave radio enthusiast John Duncan and composer Zbigniew Karkowski. I say “allegedly” because they are not credited anywhere on the reissue, though McKenzie cryptically mentions that he was assisted by “a disappeared” and”a never was.” He also mentions that he composed one track using “a never can.” More concretely, performance artist/sexologist Annie Sprinkle makes an actual credited appearance, lending her voice to be chopped and mangled into unrecognizability for a cathartic and disquieting mid-song sequence (a fascination that Andrew more fully explored in later years with the help of Blixa Bargeld, David Tibet, and Sigur Rós’ Jónsi). Aside from Sprinkle and a distorted recording of a different woman speaking at the album’s onset, however, it is impossible to tell where any of the sounds may have originated, as they are all distilled into either a swirling, quivering shimmer or an ominous rumble.

McKenzie has long been quite hostile toward digital release (and sharing) of his music and it is easy to see why. Kill the King (as well as many other H3O releases) is more of a bizarre multimedia experience than an album—to miss the art and text is to miss something quite integral to the H3O vision. In fact, the accompanying booklet is a masterpiece in its own right, both as a feat of graphic design and as an impenetrable enigma. 

I am almost completely certain that the whimsically disquieting pictures, pages of brief evocative text, six seemingly extraneous song titles, and random (?) words in a silver font are mere red herrings that have nothing to do with the music, but I still have a sliver of doubt. And if they are, I am forced to wonder if McKenzie threw them in to be deliberately annoying and misleading, or if there is something deeply witty or profound being hinted at. 

Regardless of their original intent, all of those little touches combine to make it clear that this object is coming to me from a rather curious and alien place and bears little resemblance at all to the comparatively homogeneous commodities released by “serious” musicians that want to be liked. In recent years, however, McKenzie has taken his passion for unique packaging to the furthest possible extreme, forgoing CDs entirely in favor of offering one month of his creative life to create an individualized, one-of-a-kind “art object” for anyone who can finance it.

An amusing (and probably intentional) irony that I noticed when listening to Kill the King is that—if I didn’t know better—it would be totally plausible for a brilliant psycho-acoustic researcher to have been involved in the making of this album (like fictitious founding member Dr. Edward Moolenbeck). Or maybe the irony is that Andrew himself is something of a brilliant psycho-acoustic researcher. Superficially, this is drone music, but the attention to minor detail and pure sound is on a level that few have the ability or willingness to attempt. It’s almost like this album could have emerged from an aborted military experiment to create sound waves that are so vibrant and psychotropic on a microcosmic level that hapless enemy combatants would be unable to do anything but listen intently. This is, quite simply, an utterly absorbing and unpredictable release from one of the most twisted and calculating minds in modern music.