Blang!


Genre: cybernoise

Era: 1990s – present

Country of Origin: UK

Supposedly named after the imaginary sound made by hardened pieces of vomit falling onto a metal drum, Johnny Bistle and Mike Dreff’s Blang! are one of the more divisive groups to have come out of the Isle of Wight in recent years. The duo met in 1990 at a mutual friend’s wedding (the friend is now divorced), and set themselves up as an “antidote to harmony” after discovering that they shared a mistrust of chords, in particular G Major.

The pair are no strangers to controversy. Their 1993 debut album, Click:Blang!, was banned in Warwick for violating mediaeval decency bylaws, and the release of 1996’s Eyeball Picnic was picketed by the RNIB for being recorded at frequencies designed only to be heard by the eyes; indeed, it was only with the 2001 release of Tinnitus Bullets, a violently bleak noisescape consisting largely of distorted recordings of an angry wasp trapped in a photocopier making copies of a piece of A4 paper with a skull drawn on it, that Blang! dented mainstream consciousness. The album enjoyed a brief stint in the charts, peaking at #12, and the single Ear Shrapnel was used in a television advertisement for Müllerice.

Blang!’s discordant noiseflashes have been described as “baffling, stomach-churning horribleness” (Jjared Fwytt, Music Or Die), “like being raped” (Sooxy Gange, Hot Pop!) and “just shit” (Pope John Paul II, Catholicism Today), and it appears that, for now at least, this will be their legacy: in 2005 Bistle was arrested in Oslo for what Norwegian newspapers described as a “decibel-related atrocity” and he is currently serving a six year prison sentence on a fjord-based prison ship.

Sadly, the band’s future remains uncertain.


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