Nocturnal Emissions - Collateral Salvage

The album started in a Moroccan bathtub. Nigel Ayers, submerged late at night with water running in and out of his ears, listening to three different nightclubs bleed into each other through the walls, each pumping its own mix of local music and international pop hits, all fighting for dominance. That accidental collision is the blueprint for everything here, and it makes Collateral Salvage the most danceable record Ayers has made in a project that has spent decades on the noise end of the spectrum.

This is beat music built entirely from wreckage. Hundreds of samples of indie guitar-pop are cut up, layered, and pushed over tabla and vintage analogue synths, with strong bass lines holding the whole thing down and rhythms that split the difference between funk and something more eastward. Swinging saxophones, flutes, and horns pile up over mbiras, driftwood marimbas, wicky-wicky guitars, and pitch-shifted sitars, all interrupted by fragments of song and surreal speech. Track titles like "Jesus' Twin Brother," "Burn, Bush, Burn," "Daisycutter," and "Resistance Is Fertile" tell you exactly where the politics sit. The title itself is a pun on "collateral damage," the Gulf War euphemism, twisted into salvage: sonic recycling, reusing what has already been discarded, with results nobody planned.

Ayers has been running what he calls an anti-career under the Nocturnal Emissions name since 1979, and this was his 25th CD under it. Friends describe him as a professional freak. Nobody is entirely sure what he does for a living.

Released on Soleilmoon, this CD collects fifteen tracks and more than an hour of music. A rare case of an industrial lifer making a record you can actually move to, without giving up a single one of his teeth.