Imagine yourself on your knees with your head inside a 40-year-old dryer. You’ve thrown a stack of newspapers, three bibles, six rolls of quarters and a handful of nuts and bolts into the dryer drum along with 100 pro-anarchy pamphlets. Now put the dryer setting on ‘high-spin’ and let it rip; this will give you a taste of what it’s like to listen to the 1983 anarcho-punk album “Farce” by Rudimentary Peni.
OK, an anarchist, a skater and a gorilla walk into a bar. The anarchist drinks water, the skater is high and the gorilla is an animal. Much like the lyrical content of the short, punchy songs on the album, there is no punchline. At only 15 minutes long, the EP contains 11 songs, each ranging from 51 seconds to two and a half minutes. There are no melodies, zero refrains and nope, no verses neither. Every song is a variation on a simple formula: a rabid drum beat, a breakneck bass line and a distorted-beyond-repair guitar riff, each tripping over themselves to keep up with the ferociously fast lyrics of singer and writer Nick Blinko.
I was introduced to this record by a young man named Nick (not Blinko), who was carving bowls on his fish-deck board at Shockus park in Ocean Beach. Nick was dressed from head to toe in black except for what looked like a bright, white lacrosse helmet on his head. When I approached him to ask about the black metal t-shirt he was wearing, the band name written in illegible hardcore letters across the front, I asked, “is that a lacrosse helmet?”
“Hockey.”
While I don’t think a hockey helmet provides adequate protection in the case of falling off a skateboard, I also don’t think he gave a sh*t. Nick described himself as a fan of symphonic black metal and hardcore genres. He identified Rudimentary Peni as ‘anarcho-punk.’
The anarcho-punk scene is a branch of punk subculture that developed in urban areas across England in the 1980s. Rudimentary Peni, along with bands like Crass and Poison Girls (and the Dead Kennedys in the US), led the charge for a counter-counter-culture movement that criticized the rise of commercial adoption of punk aesthetics, the ‘selling out’ of successful punk acts and the tendency for members of the punk community to conform to a singular punk image.
Describing their own image, Peni drummer Jon Greville said, “The majority of people [at our shows] were clearly disappointed that we didn’t have any green [mohawks] and multiple piercings.” In the 80s, anarcho-punk groups distanced themselves from other punk subcultures by rejecting violence, promoting total anarchy and supporting issues such as animal rights and labor rights.
So that’s what the album is going for lyrically, but where this album thrives sonically is in the relentlessness of the instrumentals and the pace of the narrative. The production is similar to the rawness of Blink 182’s first tape, “Buddha,” but the amateur experimentation in Blink’s sound is replaced by Peni’s authentic commitment to making the ugliest sound possible; the messiness of the mix feels like a product of artistic intention rather than inexperienced tinkering. This becomes even more evident when taking a closer look at the target of Blinko’s screaming.
He HOWLS the words like an alley cat in heat, and they read at times like the manifesto of an afflicted destitute or conversely, a philosophical tract by Albert Camus.
From the song “Cosmetic Plague”:
“The barriers between us are forever maintained by our acceptance of the roles others choose to define / In a world of competition life’s portrayed as a contest where we’re forced to live by making gains at others expense / But no-one’s really gaining when a perpetual conflict’s the result of our relationships based on pretense.”
Blinko was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and has had a career as an artist, releasing several successful sketchbooks of pen-and-ink drawings. His drawings have also served as the cover art for every Peni album. The virulent sketch-like images are often haunting depictions of grotesque personages enveloped by meticulously detailed patterns that seem to project the overwhelming sociocultural dread the band is retaliating against. All-in-all, if that doesn’t adequately describe the aesthetic Rudimentary Peni is striving for, keep your head in that dryer for five more minutes.
Listen to “Farce” by Rudimentary Peni by scanning this code.