Vim Fuego Ever listened to a harsh noise or grindcore demo and wondered how the musician... no, performer, because this may not be music, is actually making those hideous/beautiful sounds? Have you considered what instruments might actually be involved? Is this created by over-amplified, distorted strings, or by some evil Dr Frankenstein electronic circuit soldered together with crowbars? And is that a human voice, altered beyond bestial into impure noise too dirty to be called white? Drums or machines? Are the microphones used in the recording process broken, or can human-created devices tolerate such stresses far beyond the red-line? Is this just the hideous nightmare outpourings of a cybernetic entity spontaneously formed inside a labyrinthine silicon chip?

In short, have you ever wondered where the boundary between noise and music is?

Here it is, right here.

Don’t try to understand or interpret “Phyllomedusa, The Destroyer”. Like quantum physics, it just is, and it’s beyond the understanding of most humans. There are two correct responses. The first, and more usual, is to recoil like pain receptors flinching from a flame. The other is to seek more, yearning for further stimulation of already overloaded pleasure sensors, like an overdosing addict knowing death will result but plunging the needle ever deeper in search of that elusive final apocalyptic high.

Few will tolerate this. Fewer still will find gratification. But which urge is stronger- fear of the potentially unpleasant and painful, or the desire and drive of Sacher-Masoch’s perversion?

Vim Fuego If a frog croaks in the swamp and nobody hears it, did it really make a noise at all? The answer to this slight rephrasing of George Berkeley’s 1710 philosophical though experiment is “fuck yeah”, but the more important question is if that croak was “Spikeballs & Monklets (CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE Vs Phyllomedusa)” would anyone really want to hear it?

There’s really only one reason most people would ever attempt listening to this split shared between CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE and Phyllomedusa, and that is to hear one of the oddest covers of Blondie’s “One Way or Another” ever recorded, distorted into a weird mass of grind, sludge, and noise. That comes later, but first, the rest of the album.

Catastrophic Blunt Force Intracranial Haemorrhage Fluid Leaking from Ruptured Eardrums, or CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE is actually a far more entertaining name than the music. Their contribution to this split seems to be their first release. “Removing the Limbs of Sacrificial Bodies, Displaying the Gastrointestinal Tract from Esophagus to Anus, Hanging in the Trees, the Skin Stripped from the Heads, Lifted Above the Leaves, Blood Dripping to the Forest Floor in Praise of the Great Beelzebufo” (and I’m not writing out that fucking title again!) is a nine minute song, of sorts. It has a comedy intro about toad breeding, before descending into a formless mush of pingy snaredrums, blown out bass, and gargled vocals. Sir David Attenborough even puts in a guest appearance. It seems like the performers are not in the same time continuum, so it’s a bit chaotic. Listening to the full track is something of a feat of endurance. If you get to the end, congratulations! You haven’t actually achieved anything, but at least the racket has stopped.

Pyllomedusa’s lone amphibiphile big frog regularly burps forth frog fancying anthems of wildly varying quality and genre, depending on the species of toad he’s been licking. A majority of his releases are noise for noise’s sake. There might be instruments, or even some element of performance involved, but who can tell. At his most awe inspiring, he spawns sludge so thick and deep it would swallow Mastodons and Iron Monkeys. And in between the two, he can be a one man grindcore battering machine. “Spikeballs & Monklets” falls somewhere between sludge and grind, a stinking swampy mess unique to Phyllomedusa. It is so DIY you can almost see the bent nails and hammer marks where big frog has knocked this all together by himself.

The biggest problem with big frog’s musical output is the lack of variety. The lo-fi recording process means the first song generally sets the tone for the album, and you are going to get several versions of the same song over and over. “Coat The Globe In Toxoid Calamity (Uninjurious To Lissamphibia)” is a thunderous sludge/grind monstrosity. So is “Spikeballs And Monklets (Ephippibane)” and “Browning Of The Bottom Right”, and the next two tracks too. Unfortunately, the tempo hardly varies, the vocals are throat-shreddingly awesome, but totally indecipherable, and the guitars too indistinct for it to matter if there are even riffs involved.

But then along comes the Blondie cover. “One Way Or Another, I'm Going To Kill You” (see what he did to the title there?) is instantly transformed from kitschy New Wave schlock rock into a psychopathic sludge serenade. The bouncy, poppy main hook of the song is hung, drawn, and quartered, becoming a mechanized torture device. Debbie Harry’s laconic vocals are replaced by the gargled, grunted roar of a t-rex with a throat infection. Forget fictional monsters like Godzilla. big frog is a real, live sociopath hell bent on the destruction of mankind for the sake of the amphibians.

This ugly, noisy mess can be listened to for free, and to be honest, it needs to be that price. It was also released on CD, limited to 50 copies, but it would be an extremely dedicated grindcore collector who shelled out for it. As a whimsical mud encrusted, distortion soaked curio though, it might be worth a listen for someone with half an hour to spare and a very open mind.

https://phyllomedusa.bandcamp.com/album/spikeballs-monklets-cxbxfxixhxfxlxfxrxe-vs-phyllomedusa

Vim Fuego So what did you do for Save The Frogs Day, April 29, 2017? Not a thing? Didn’t know such a day even existed? The day is marked every year near the end of April. Don’t know why anyone would give a slimy green shit about frogs? It’s a good thing Phyllomedusa exists then.

OK, it would be hypocritical of me to pretend I’d heard of Save The Frogs Day before I discovered Phyllomedusa. The band’s only member big frog is somewhat obsessed with frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, and caecilians. Not heard of caecilians? Once again, neither had I. Look them up. They are snake-like, burrowing, almost blind amphibians. Besides fantasizing about frogs, big frog makes some incredible, and at times, incredibly challenging, music. He blends grind, noise, and sludge in immense distorted compositions, often overlaid with frog calls and horror movie samples, observed from an avenging amphibian’s angle.

The quality of Phyllomedusa’s music varies greatly. Some releases are so badly recorded they could just be a microphone stuck in a jet engine’s backwash. Other times, it sounds like a Mortician record played at about 4 r.p.m. Fortunately, ‘Beast From The East’ is of a higher quality, a voyage into the deepest sludgy primordial swamps imaginable. There’s no messing around with introductions. First track “Accidental Colonization In The East” drops straight into a massive distorted groove, with big frog snarling over top of it. It is a visitation into a grinding bass driven subterranean world where speakers emanate frequencies nothing man-made has any right to transmit.

There are instruments in there somewhere, but it is impossible to tell where bass and/or guitar ends, drums begin, or what species the vocals are actually coming from. And this happens six times, at various tempos between sluggish and tectonic. There are a few anti-human samples thrown in, but basically, it’s the same massive fucking song repeated again and again. There seems to be little in the way of riffs or distinguishing features differing from song to song, but the overall effect is so heavy, so powerful, so primitive, and so primal it matters not.

There may be incredible herpetological lyrics involved here, but there is no way to understand a single word. Imagine a nine foot long bullfrog with chronic indigestion complaining about it to a neighbour half a mile away and you might have some clue as to what big frog himself sounds like. He groans and burps and croaks his way through the six songs here, never once emanating a sound which sounds even vaguely human.

And to big frog’s message. Why is it important to keep a closer eye on frogs? Being amphibians, frogs spend most of their time in wet or damp conditions. Unlike reptiles, their skin has no scales, and is constantly exposed to the environment. This means frogs are incredibly sensitive to any sort of environmental changes whatsoever. They are in effect unwitting environmental barometers. The current prediction from the frogs? Well, the planet is in the shit, and it seems humans are to blame. Amphibians are generally quite a sturdy bunch. They first crawled from the sea about 370 million years ago, and seemed to like water, so headed for the swamp. Amphibian species seem to have been going extinct of a rate of one per 500 years for most of the intervening eons, until humans came along. Up to 200 species may have disappeared since 1980. The causes for this are man-made- pollution, infectious diseases, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and over-harvesting for the pet and food trades.*

We are the murderous, destructive bastards, and big frog wants to see an end to us, to save the frogs and thus the world. We were warned.

*Source: https://www.savethefrogs.com/about/why-frogs/