Prizes! Yay!

Nutrition Fun - Barring Any Future Indescretions
Unread #41

I once bought a compact disc because the sticker on the plastic wrap held a tiny blurb from a Crawdaddy! or NME or Charley Jones' Laugh Book Magazine album review and it said, "Like Boyzone put a bomb up the asshole of Viking Metal, collected the viscera, and fed it to the cute baby cub of Pedro the Lion and Tigermom." I guess I'm an easy sell.

The terse description of Nutrition Fun's release Barring Any Future Indescretions (sic; also, sick) mentioned the word "drinking." That was all it took; I was sold. I'm attracted to the idea that oftentimes drinking is good -- not spectacular, but good -- for keeping the assembly line that churns out ideas and words and phrases and prize-winning pieces (prizes! yay!) going at a steady and productive pace. But I also recognize that drinking can just kill ambition dead. It can delude one into thinking that less significant, more fleeting pursuits (going on YouTube and watching clips from Cast Away in the dark and crying in the dark) will be just as rewarding as creative activities.

I'm not certain if consuming alcohol is good for Nutrition Fun (this is a one-man effort; the Unread web site describes Andy Berkley as a "wide eyed loner kid"; inside the cassette is an address in Omaha where you can write him). Maybe it facilitated the whole process of releasing classified information about himself. Or maybe it gave him the courage to record tracks in one take and refuse to cut them again or add any sort of overdubs. His vocals are unintelligible, but I caught bits here and here, buried beneath the acoustic guitar and doleful organ: "I should have never even spoke" and "But I have my doubts about me."

And maybe a bit of imbibing was what led him to produce the angry bursts of noise on many of the tracks. Swirling, harsh noise that makes you think of the caved-in television you had in your childhood bedroom—the one with only an antenna—and how most of the channels were overrun with static. There's another noise track that reminded me of sauteing something in a pan and when it was finished, I pondered for some time one how noise-folk cassettes such as this not only joyfully test the resolve of the listener and subtly exhibit the many levels of concentration necessary to be an artist, but also push the boundaries of the genre in which it exists.

That was a bit of a mouthful. I'm going to lie down.