Press:

Brad Tyer, Houston Press, June 22-28, 1995
 

Some bands practice for years, writing and arranging and mastering their instruments, affecting images, subjecting themselves to the harness of management and the rigors of the sign-a-deal dance, only to discover that their product is still, somehow, considered inappropriate for commercial consumption. Then there are other other bands that take a far-fetched musical idea (like mayhem, for instance), aggressively fart around with it for a few months, play about two live gigs, break up, disappear and then a year later, when individual band members may already have tenure in hell for all anyone knows, hawk up a gob of indispensable racket such as Plenum – which, besides being a band-described "mannerist exercise in manic self-deprecation," is also the greatest example of unaffected sonic artiness to see daylight in Houston since I can’t remember when.

I looked it up so you wouldn’t have to: a plenum, in the definitions most apropos to the CD, is "a space or all space every part of which is full of matter" or "a condition in which the pressure of air in an enclosed space is greater than that of the outside atmosphere." Those definitions explain something about the explosion of noise on display here. Though the band existed, in its brief life, on the periphery of the local rock underground, Lozenge was not a rock band so much as a noise improv ensemble. The guy indentified as Kurt yells and plays fretless and double bass and kazoo. Kyle yells, too, and plays electric accrodion, oboe, English horn and an array of obscure electronics. Philip yells and beats on metal with sticks. The result is deserving of a title rarely earned in a day and age sorely lacking in the genuine article: Weird Shit. It’s persussive noise, carnival juxtapositions and unpredictable rhythms. And it’s based on a notion of absolute anti-humability.

There are no singles to draw your attention, just 22 digital tracks of background noise that refuse to stay in the background, something that disqualifies Lozenge as any stripe of ambient band. You wouldn’t want to listen to this at home (actually, I’ve been doing just that with increasing frequency this past month, but I’ve got too much time on my hands), and I suspect it to be unsafe driving music. Matter of fact, I can think of only one thing this disc, as strangely beautiful as it is, might be good for: the soundtrack to your next seizure. It’s serving just fine as the soundtrack to mine.