Rev99 is a multimedia collective with a strong conviction to the freshness of thought and attitude, which the title per se of their second CD plainly tells. The title is a sobering banner of insight in the blind roar of flapping flags, perhaps even redirecting, shifting, by that CD title alone, focus to the real reason for the New York disaster, as to why it could happen, i.e., to the circumstances of a built-in structural violence that is always on full force, and which would make young men think they had a cause that was so holy that they would decide to die for it. The title of the CD therefore has many implications, also on a lingual, semantic level, which would, I think, even make Noam Chomsky breathe harder.

The label’s characterization of the CD is worthy of a quotation:

The label info also reveals the strange circumstance that two tracks had to be withdrawn from the original CD trackings, ‘cause of copyright problems. These tracks (3: Britney Spears Autopsy & 17: Notes On A Nervous Breakdown) are now represented by silences corresponding to their durations… However, Pax Recordings offer free mp3s of the controversial tracks at their site, where you can also read 99 Hooker’s reaction to the matter. This is highly interesting and important writing, so I suggest to the reader to really take the time to read 99 Hooker’s text and reflect on it. 99 Hooker also suggest that you download the forbidden pieces and burn complete CDRs of the CD plus the mp3s. That is exactly what I did, so this review considers the complete CD. I simply found a double-CD-cover, to keep the original CD without the two forbidden tracks plus the extended homeburnt CD with the complete track list, and of course I inserted the original CD cover into the double CD cover. Voila! Easy as Tony Curtis!

“…in Texas …and my friend had a vision, and she saw these oriental children coming to her, and she went to the camp, and she found out they needed a home, and needed to be taken in, and she took them into her Christian home and adopted them, and these boys now jump rope for the glory of God, to Christian music…”

Yeah, boy, that is part of the text of track 1, Christian Music, apparently ripped off of some local Christian radio station, revealing that kind of down-home American religiosity that shapes the minds of future serial killers… This funky text is spoken in your right ear (earphones) or speaker, while rev99 kicks ass at left with a doomsday mix of pumping repeater gun guitars and space static, which at least gives some hope in the hopeless situation of the freaked American (Great Babylon) spirit…

“…price of bananas will never be the same…”, which reminds me of my good old Dallas buddy with whom I invented The Space Cattle Herders (and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy wasn’t even written yet) and the Dean of The Bananas University…
Well, this is track 2, conveniently titled The Price of Bananas… and here we go again with a sonic megamix of all kinds of fractionalized audio bits, wrapped in sugary curtains of elastic guitar solos, waving about like seaweed in a swell… and there’s no time to get caught up in anything, for it all gets as superficial as the surface of America, with all these signs and highways and bypasses and detours and filling stations and the hihowareyous and the haveanicedays and the recurrent serial killings and school shootouts and all this betrayal of the heart and the soul which has been going on and increasing since the demise of the buffalo… and the piece stops as soon as it starts, just 2:36 long… These are insane hits from inside-out Americana; the only righteous sphere in a vindictive, revengeful super power without spiritual guidance… which squeaks and creaks on a descending plane towards Iraq… like a glacier calving at Tarfala…

Britney Spears Autopsy is the first of the forbidden items on (not on) the CD… Maybe the Britney brat can’t appreciate creativity when it gets wild and wicked, and perhaps she can’t take being sampled (while wonderful Björk supports her sampling artists!), but then again, I don’t even think she knew about this little piece of a stuttering sound poetic knitwitbit of a grimace, this wry dirty joke out of the corner of the mouth, and besides, there’s nothing here to be offended by. It was just some policy down the line of production that stuck som paragraphs into the wheel of the printer, but you can bypass this by simply downloading mp3s and printing the stuff yourself… However, frankly, musically or aesthetically, this little gesture is pretty insignificant amongst the other, razor sharp incisions into the space-time continuum that this collective bunch of musicians present here, like on the next track – Everything’s Been Done Before – which they, hahaha, call a remix!!! All the shit they do is a mix of things arriving from all possible and some impossible directions, and this is one of the best pieces… this feeble-minded male humming happy-go-lucky carefree voice muffled to the right, and this frantic activity of cut-up radio or TV voices, raging sound explorations and a humping beat somewhere behind the wall, across the hall or in some darn club your passing on the street. This is insane in a brainstorming, psychiatric kind of way. It pleases my thirst for the absurd and pleasantly whacko soundscapes of the free-flowing subconscious.

It’s fuckin’ impossible to WRITE about this session, Mr. Man, impossible!!! Track 5 starts off gently with a repetitious beat which is kind of low-volume, so you turn up the sound and get instantly lured into another tight-hipped sex scene over in some murky corner of the laundromat, where you went to wash all the flags you used to design a makeshift identity in Honey-Suckle Patriotism… and then this came and blew you away into a cosmic upsurge, downsurge, sidekick cross-surge of colliding sofas, armchairs, kitchen tables – and someone misses Dean Martin! Shit, this machine tickles!

Rev.99 are a proud crew of space cowboys, collecting their paraphernalia of sounds from a variety of allocations from each direction thinkable, but the trick is to get all this into a swinging concept that works, and maybe it’s my glorious generosity, or maybe it really does work! To me it does. I enjoy this wild stuff immensely.

Track 6 opens with the clarity of a children’s choir, the title being Radical Episcopalianism.
This is immediately layered in between or behind a distorted and bouncing bass and a close-up male voice talking at you. “…I love bumble-bee, bumble-bee tuna…” is repeated by a female singer and layered in a 1940s musical atmosphere squared, with a roaring bass section and a rolling drum beat, into which a Zappa voice steps, hard and persuasive, threatening, just in from the street, hat pushed back, hairy fist… and the variations are endless as tinkling bluebell guitars and fairytale percussion of gleaming reflections soar all over the curved surface of Radical Episcopalianism… and we could easily be at planet Rupert with all its amnesia. Even some Terry Rileyish Prophet 5 synthesizer sounds are panning inside a more serene section of the work, like in the famous Ten Voices of the Two Prophets, as birds are sensed if not really heard, and the atmosphere transforms more and more into a high altitude Tibetan meditation of shiny, winding, weightlessly soaring, hovering sensations… and I get even more impressed by these guys from America!

I think I’ll leave it at that. This CD is probably necessary for all you fans of the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and Spike Jones, ‘cause this is a latter-day musical havoc of an essence of the best and most crazed ingenuity coming out of the land of the brave and the free, full of intelligence, wit and radical humor, much in the tradition of the aforementioned, on a spiritual level, so enjoy, enjoy – and learn something in the process! You can love this only if you’re free, and most people chain themselves down. C’mon, break away, break loose of your inhibitions; turn up the volume and play this holy shit CD over and over!