Reviews...

OUTLET Magazine, Issue No. 24, December 1981, Trev Faull (Essex UK)

BOMIS PRENDIN's "Phantom Limb" is their second nine inch flexi album for the Artifacts label (AY5). You may recall the first in a previous edition of this magazine. As before the pressing is of high standard, forget the flimsiness...it doesn't relate to the music in anyway which is quite out of this world.

Candee, Bomis, Miles Anderson and Corvos are the group. The album begins with a balanced instrumental called "Salutation". They follow this with a mutant version of the twist called "The doppler twist." A wash of fizzling instruments slide easily along a well oiled path whilst a strange, enigmatic voice beckons you all to do the shift. It's brevity, like so many of the tracks is matched with it's brilliance. "Vacation A" and "Psychlotron" are both experimental instrumentals. The former is choc full of piping percussion sounds with a kind of harmonica cum synth lead and with a strange feeling of disorientation about it. Oh, I just tumbled...they're playing live in the fourth dimension!!

The latter track is like a large industrial machine feeding off a line of synths and tapes sounding very close to something The Residents might dream up. "Silence" has words rather than lyrics and they flow because BP direct your mind to listen to their co-ordination in a certain way. The mood is eerie, the voice of Candee drifts across an ocean of awakening spirits in ever increasing whispers. Two more instrumentals follow "Contrabande" and "Shoe party". The first evoking memories of a chamber music string ensemble on Mars playing great classical odes to long dead Martian composers. "Party" enters as an extension of this theme coming over like radio signals chasing the empty spaces between atoms.

"Monster Zero" is a sci-Fi song about some of the greta monsters from the fifties like Godzilla and Rodan. This opens side two like being left in a squabbling den of frightened mice. A happy, playful sound and like the majority it lasts well under two minutes. Three instrumentals follow with a creaking sound to "Spatula", a weird organ sound from deep in the grotto on "Phantom limb" and the pulse of formless sound on "Intonarumori".

"The Doppler shift" returns for part two on a variation of 'Do the standing still' and the backing takes on many uneasy positions and is quite scary! The brief instrumental "Grid lock" is an exercise in piercing percussion and heavy tramping noises...perhaps Godzilla is still about? Finally we arrive at "For a long time" with garbled voices coming over in an unexpected rush. In fact you find yourself still trying to fathom it all out well after the needle has returned to rest and the record is lying motionless on your turntable.

This is quite frankly a bold and adventurous rush of sound. It's totally listenable (ie not avant garde or white noise) and at times starkly disorientating...but listen, E still equals MC2 doesn't it? After this album I'm not sure about things anymore.