Sometimes a disc comes along that is so funky it makes you cranky, and the fact that those two words do not rhyme (even though you probably thought I thought they did, huh?) demonstrates the general feeling of off-ness, out-of-whackdoom, that infiltrates the consciousness (and most probably the unconscious too…) on those rare occasions.
A CD in a makeshift cover (all parts of it reproduced here!) arrived at Sonoloco’s door a while back. I did not know what to think at first, but I let it lay there in the vicinity of the Macintosh, where I let stuff brew a bit before biting into it with my reviewing tools…
On this here pepper cookie pre-Lucia Swedish Sunday I’m getting there. It takes some investigative skill to dig up information about this issue – Alice The Camel – and the label – Mang-disc – and especially the obscure soul behind it all, a guy who probably is called Skot Spear, but who works under the very obscure alias Id M Theft Able…
This all could well halt a less curious reviewer, but with a few strokes of the keyboard I gathered at least some viable information (I think…), and I spent a few hours last night at
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/314/id_m_theft_able.html
loading down the lot, which added six extra Id M Theft Able CDs to my pretty collection!

When browsing the Web – O Holy Circuits of Human Ingenuity! – I also found out that Mr. Spear had registered himself as a Fluxus artist, by following the instructions at the Fluxus registry page:

Our center of attention for the moment, Herrn Id M Theft Able, registered the following about himself, which does help us reach at least some understanding:

As you see, we can now determine the whereabouts of this highly creative lo-fi, Fluxus-oriented artist. He lives in Windham, Maine, does radio, performs… Wow! The picture is getting clearer!
I also found my old friend Rod Stasick at the Fluxus registration! Otherwise I only meet him at The Stockhausen Courses in Kuerten outside Cologne in the summer. Well, Rod’s presence makes me feel even more comfortable, all of a sudden, being in the room (in an auditory, time-space sense) with Id M Theft Able, alias Skot Spear.

I move over into Spear’s homepage (http://www.kraag.org/) and find the following:

Now I almost feel that I’ve known this dude since I was a kindergarten kid in shorts in 1957, bare-footing through the grass of July in Swedenland!

He describes his intentions with his audio diffusion thus:

Since it appeared to me from what I read somewhere that he didn’t care much for reviews, I thought it was a bit strange that he sent me a CD, but when I commented on it in an email he replied promptly:

So, here we go!
No doubt Skot Spear is gallant rider of the free, open spaces of sonic dimensions. The freedom of creativity has reached new heights in his output, amply proved by his CD Alice The Camel, which arrived in a totally individual cover, made up of found graphics, tolerably assembled into the shape of the CD jacket… and with some bits of scrap paper falling out of the envelope too…
If you order this CD, or trade for it, or ask for it free (that IS an option!), you will get a completely different set of graphics!

The music? Well, that is what this is about, but the above extraneous information fits into the picture, makes everything about this artist conceivable, because I think Skot Spear lives his life in a self-propelled work of art that is… his life, so that all the bits and pieces of ideas, graphics etcetera are just as important as his audio as an entry into this strange – but also eerily familiar, as all this cut-up maze of audio could have been cut right out of yourself, your own day-to-day panic and pleasure – art… and life is simply about seizing the right kind of panic, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all out there on a limb, aren’t we, desperately holding on to whatever reason we might find, momentarily.

Anyhow and anyways, Skot Spear – Monsieur Id M Theft Able – is making hard justice to the Eastern Seaboard of The United States, shrouding it in his Fluxus veil of rancid and pungent fragrances, the fog-horns calling out of desolate spots in the fog off-shore, from Portland Head and elsewhere…
His music comes in a series of dreams, sometimes reminding me – in their vocal protrusions – of French sound poet François Dufrêne, saliva-dripping, the oral cavity bursting with mangled, hopscotch morphemes, which whirl out in a cloud of human breath.
Some other properties of his sampling methods bring to the fore guys like Öyvind Fahlström, who made works that are now classical by recording bits and pieces from television programs in hotel rooms in New York City in the 1960s, reassembling them, turning them into utensils for his art, which also, in its visual aspect, has things in common with Skot Spear’s act of achieving his makeshift CD covers, by cutting from magazines and rearranging into new contexts. (Check the magnificent issue Öyvind Fahlström On The Air, edited by the renowned Teddy Hultberg, containing a fat book with the art an the texts of Fahlström as well as two unique CDs with his audio art; ISBN 91-522-1817-1, issued by Fylkingen).

Alice The Camel comes in one single 54-minute track, so it’s just to turn the volume up and float out into a sonic mindscape of many colors, an up-turned Alice in Wonderland country where any sound is possible, where any idea gets its allotted time to prove its identity. It’s noisy, very noisy, but textures arise and recede in wavelike motions in this noise, brilliant grains of gold and silver invade your face, halt for a second like gleaming colibris, until they disappear in fast, jerky movements, not unlike the sudden sideways motions of August dragonflies in shady forest opening by the river.
I’ve just recently reviewed a mighty CD from Canadian duo Morceaux_de_Machines on the No Type label, and Id M Theft Able moves through the same ideological landscape. They use laptops, but I don’t know what the hell Skot Spear uses, but maybe laptops as well. There are so many ways of making sounds sound these days that only the ingenuity and discrimination of the artist sets the rules and the limits.
There aren’t many obvious limits to Skot Spear’s audio art, even though I’m sure they’re there, somewhere. It’s hard to find the underlying structure in his relentless forth-welling of ideas dressed in cumbersome auditory shrouds, but you name it, we like it!
When children’s voices repeat something that sounds like “it’s the end of the line”, it all gets very beautiful inside all this brute mishmash of contradicting forces, like a temple in the middle of bustling downtown N.Y.C.
The shortwave static, the shortwave-sounding interference, reminds me of Karlheinz Stockhausen and his Kurzwellen. There is nowhere to hide, and if you keep hanging in there, you will sooner or later feel transformed into another level of listening; a hypnotic state of utter awareness and letting go of cultural defenses. That’s when this music gets really interesting, physically and mentally. That’s when you also realize that this indeed is a composition; not merely a jumble of haphazard samplings. It takes a while to realize this, but when you do it’s easy to appreciate the true worth of this art. That’s where I am now, and I’m going to leave the Macintosh, lie down flat in the gravity of my bed and let the rest of Alice The Camel do the trick, taking me for a soaring flight into the mind-transforming psychopharmacology of the art of Id M Theft Able…

Lastly, some lettrist poetry from Skot Spear's homepage: