35 years after the release of their critically acclaimed album Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth, Hastings Of Malawi have released a new album - an epic sound poem entitled Visceral Underskinnings. It is a 40 minuate film without light that reflects on the human conditioan, on modern society, on the nature of telephony and electricity and an attempt to make sense of the world in which we live that provides no answers. Another musique concr?te jewel created with the same peculiar, disjointed, uncommercial and totally original aesthetic. It is a sound collage of diverse elements including the voices of George Washington Johnson ('the whistling coon' 1846-1914) and Dr Hastings Banda - the first president of Malawi. It includes randomly generated computer music, voice synthesis, recordings of cold war number stations, American military sound weaponry and recordings of the some of the many sound sculptures produced by Hastings Of Malawi over the last three decades and they produced sounds that sit in that grey area where sound art and music meet but they reject both labels and cannot be comfortably placed in either camp. This is not an easy album to listen to but persevere and you may or may not be able to decipher its meaning.
