Familiar on bills featuring experimental bands like Palberta, Big Neck Police, and Palm, The Sediment Club—Austin Sley Julian (son of Ivan Julian, guitarist for the Voidoids), Jackie McDermott, and Lazar Bozic—deface their media as much as their media defaces its scene. “Psychosymplistic, Psychosymplastic Here!”, the title track from The Sediment Club’s new record of the same name, is a barrage of self-conscious no-wave irony. Now making the blog rounds after having premiered on Noisey, Sley Julian still manages to quip that, “We’re not on the up and up.” Nestled among beer drinkers and wry observations about some scene or another, the quip attacks music business narratives imposed upon bands in their messy diversity.
“Psychosymplistic, Psychosymplastic Here!” is a no-wave artifact against a present that imagines itself detached from the cultural conditions surrounding the movement. The quick-cutting video, all double-exposed and mutilated, now circulates thanks, in part, to “Washed-up, jaded trendsetters/trying to gauge the room.” Those trendsetters—maybe the masked beer guzzlers in The Sediment Club’s video—gathered, killed, and memorialized noise acts like Sonic Youth and transgressive filmmakers like Jon Moritsugu that the band evokes. There’s a surging rhythm section alongside unpredictable guitars; there’s also outrageous self parody of the band itself and its pop-cultural moment. Sley Julian’s frenetic yelping is now cool enough to sate the desires of the media whose narratives shape Brooklyn and allow some sounds to make a living only so long as they support them. The Sediment Club’s release, however, also empowers us to imagine a world where a noisey video premiered on Noisey because that’s a pretty good joke.
You can pre-order The Sediment Club’s Psychosymplastic LP, due out on July 24, from Wharf Cat Records.
