Harmony Korine – Queen City Sounds and Art

Imagine one of the only weird hardcore bands from your hometown (you know, the one that listened to Crucifucks and Flipper coming up more than the usual suspects) gets bored with hard fast rules and were always into stranger music and the possibilities of sonic extremes in experimental industrial music and noise and makes a band you think would be good on a bill with Chat Pile, Mclusky/The Future of the Left or The Jesus Lizard. Or all three (four if you want to count The Future of the Left separately). TRAUMA KIT is that band from Boise, Idaho, a town that has a lot of secret talent. “PLATEAU” is the first song on the group’s new album TRAIN WRECKS TAKE TIME (which dropped February 23, 2024) is a caustic and seething bit of work that sounds like the story of dead end lives in dead end towns in dead end countries in a dead end civilization. It also sounds like what you do to express the pain of living through those situations and coming into the harrowing disillusion of having the realization of what you’ve inherited as a human in this time crash into you. It also comes across like the next searingly dystopian science fiction film made by Brandon Cronenberg if he teamed up with Harmony Korine for a story idea and really nailed what future looks like for most of us but the story of someone struggling to find some meaning and dignity in the detritus of world history yet not being completely hopeless and finding some glory in the struggle against the level best attempts of late capitalism to crush us into nothing. Musically you’re going to hear the aforementioned but also a bit of late 80s Voivod and maybe more than a little Shellac and a shred of Naked City. No complaints. Listen to “PLATEAU” on Spotify (Apple Music or Bandcamp) and you may recognize some of your own intrusive thoughts in the words and thrilling collisions of sound.

TRAUMA KIT on Apple Music

BÜNNI sounds like he deconstructed a New Age self-help video in crafting “A Helpful Guide.” The song with samples that are like a list of suggestions for deprogramming oneself from standard cultural conditioning and calling into question a personal complacency feels like an independent film short from the 1990s that would have appeared on cable access but shot to VHS. The music has a haunted quality with modern hip-hop rhythm style off the standard pop music time signature and processed vocals as a an instrument and a moody, slightly swirled melody that carries throughout in a dreamlike procession. The song works precisely because it is a subversion of expectations of what vocals should sound like in a pop song, how pacing needs to be to hook you and what the elements of melody and harmony is supposed to sound like. In challenging the listener to disconnect from everyday complacency and do something to make one’s life more meaningful now with even a small gesture that derails standard daily rituals the song’s sounds take one out of standard issue emotional responses. f Harmoy Korine makes another film, this music should be considered for the soundtrack. Listen to “A Helpful Guide” on Spotify and follow BÜNNI at the links provided.