'Awful Answers' by Peter J. Woods
If the routine soundscape of daily modern life is passivity and automation—cars passing by and mindlessly computer keys tapping data into spreadsheets— Awful Answers is an aggressive disruption to daily life, and such aesthetic disturbance pays off by giving listeners a smart, timely commentary on how the mainstream media mimic certain racist dynamics of power.
Woods, a long-time frequenter of the Milwaukee noise and post-punk music scene, describes Awful Answers as a sort of companion to his previous album Simple Questions (2022). Simple Questions explored, according to Awful Answer’s liner notes, “the rhetorical reproduction of Whiteness” in the media by manipulating and distorting the words of right-wing pundits. This new album works with the raw material of a monologue from liberal comedian Tina Fey as a way to criticize the ways that liberalism in the US addresses racial violence by showing “outrage while supporting that violence through inaction.”
With blaring static and unforgiving waves of distortion, Woods has managed to create something like a sonic border, one that is permeable only if you’re willing to get close enough to it. Consisting of two long songs, “The Display” (13.5 mins) and “Awful Answers” (25 mins), the album is best captured by the image of someone throwing a TV into a blender and the TV refusing to die, with ghostly echoes of political shallowness slipping out. In “The Display” harsh static noise occupies most of the song, but the more you listen, the more you hear something underneath that is crawling towards the surface. The unsettled feeling it creates challenges those lofty mislabels of harsh noise music as emotionally stunted. The title track begins with the punchline of a joke about white supremacist groups by Tina Fey, followed by short, repeating bursts of distorted audience laughter—laughter that eventually sounds like screaming, resulting in a long, uncomfortable confrontation with the reality that violence hidden in plain sight. The album will be especially exciting for listeners invested in music projects that refuse to offer resolution or escapism.
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Awful Answers is headphone music that prompts us to ask a series of inciting questions about what sorts of political messages we uncritically accept as the default norm, or worse, as a mere source of comedy.
