Algebra Suicide Still Life LP
Still Life collects sixteen tracks drawn from a handful of mid-to-late ’80s releases by Chicago duo ALGEBRA SUICIDE, who combined deadpan spoken vocals/poetric recitations from Lydia Tomkiw with stark, spindly guitar lines, shadowy keyboard textures, and percolating drum machine, all arranged by her then-husband Don Hedeker. The resulting sound-based performance art managed to avoid the trap of artifice and pretension, despite any assumptions that a phrase like “poetry-music duo” might conjure, with sonic parallels to a number of European minimal/cold wave acts, UK experimental pop hometapers (think SOLID SPACE and the like), and even some of the less confrontational projects that evolved out of the No Wave scene in New York. Hedeker’s droning and pulsing musical accompaniment offered the perfect backdrop for Tomkiw’s lyrical observations, which she delivered in a dry, Chicago-accented monotone that only further underscored the hypnotic impact of the pair’s songs—sometimes shimmering and melodic, sometimes icy and mechanical. If you’re at all interested in some of the more eccentric corners of early minimal synth or ’80s-era art-schooled post-punk but haven’t explored the ALGEBRA SUICIDE discography yet, this anthology is a really useful starting point for further research.