Neptune
GONG LAKE
(TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS)
After tirelessly working in the noise underground for more than 10 years, this New England trio has released its most fully realized album with "Gong Lake." Initially, the rough hewn polyrhythms and clangorous guitars that propel Neptune's surprisingly melodic songs seem conventional enough. Amazingly, the band constructs their instruments out of circular saw blades, bike parts, gas tanks and miscellaneous scrap metal found in the trash. But make no mistake, Neptune isn't aping past metal bangers like Test Dept and E. Neubauten. At times the group rocks hard, creating disciplined almost danceable grooves, combining This Heat's ascetic experimentalism with Cop Shoot Cop's percussive wallop. Homemade electronics flesh out the sound, ricocheting off complex rhythms, adding texture and dynamics to Neptune's singular, highly musical approach.

Paul Lemos

NEPTUNE
Gong Lake CD – Table of the Elements
After nearly 14 years of operating as Neptune, and
while amassing a discography of 20 releases, the
Boston-based outfit finally make a splash onto the
national music scene with their most visible release
yet, thanks to the backing of avant-garde mainstays
Table of the Elements. Obviously, this is a CD review,
but it would be hard to stop at the descriptor of
"musicians" for this three-piece. Scientists, sculptors,
metallurgists, electricians, and blacksmiths should
also be added to that list with Neptune creating many
of their own instruments from scrap metal, broken
electronics, and malfunctioning sonic devices. Gong
Lake is an intimidating documentation of these
instruments, as the release sees the band eliciting
a calculated madness that recalls the raw ferocity
of the Birthday Party, the unhinged experimental
rock of This Heat, and the noisiest and nastiest
bits of recent Liars albums. The tension is palpable
throughout Gong Lake, and this is perhaps the band's
best quality: the ability to seize the listener and hold
them captive while the songs jut out at the oddest
angles, expose ugly underbellies, and translate a
rusted junkyard into its aural equivalent.
(Ryan Potts)

NEPTUNE - "Paris Green"
from Gong Lake (Radium)
Clang-Punk // Out Now

Not so sure what it all means—"move like poison marching slowly"… "massing our forces"… "massing rats in sewers"… "teeming, teaming in massing green"—but it sure don't vibe with the usual associations of things Parisian or things green. (Well, maybe if this were Paris during the Nazi occupation, then all the aural anxiety found herein would make more sense?) But then again, seeing how this is near-10-year-old cult trio Neptune—who specialize in homemade skronk-and-stun blasters and bash-and-crash whatsits made from "hobo electronics" and "bike parts, saws, old metal chairs, springs, light switches, gas pipes, oil drums, and other debris found in the trash"—perhaps "meaning" is just a back drop to the tunnel of scuzz ride they wish to take us on.

Skittery bass notes roll in circular patterns while layers of unidentifiable fuzz tendrils shoot to and fro, hither and tither. Vocals (hinting at a few math-punk records spun in their past) whine-moan in that classic NoMeansNo/Dead Kennedys form of guarded sass. Loving the farty, synth-sounding squirts and drones that regally signal the changes like a tweaker squad leader, shakey, but on, and still steppin'. Compared to some of their past heavily-rhythmic cog-and-sprocket interlockings or their über-spaz, call-and-response Neubauten splats, this tune from Neptune is downright rock, almost sorta linear even. But by the looks of their large back catalog, they've had time to dittle all kinds of skittles, so why not play one a weensy bit straight for a change?

- D. SHAWN BOSLER

Though Neptune have put out a lot of material over 12 years, the release of Gong Lake on experimental artists' haven Table of the Elements may net the band their widest exposure yet. Describing their records without mentioning the methods behind them, and the ensuing live spectacle, is hard to resist: On stage, they man heavy, foreboding instruments self-made from antiquated machines and scrap metal, forged at extreme angles like props from a German expressionist film. The band could never be reduced to simply performance art, though, and Gong Lake is just as rich in rhythm and atmosphere as any of their previous albums. Still, they remain primarily a live beast. Their sound is literally industrial, and it's way more fun to watch a factory bang shit out than just to hear it. Neptune still struggle with that, and even at their most song-oriented and cohesive, a Neptune record may always be an advertisement for their dramatic, otherworldly live shows.

That said, Gong Lake makes for an exquisite flier. Considering the band's output on the whole, the songs on Gong Lake are comparatively discrete, and the dynamic shifts especially pronounced. Though lord knows what machine has been subverted to make the noise, many songs start from stretched, ominous tones that may as well be from keyboards, notably on songs like "Copper Green" where the band hangs several little noise fugues like tree ornaments on one central, icy one-note drone. Neptune do find occasions to add vocals, and any other texture is welcome with such unforgiving instrumentals. It's mostly a flat and ominous near-whisper on songs like "Grey Shallows", which doesn't add to the song so much as pull back the curtain a bit and disrupt their brutally mechanical groove. Vocals feel less like an afterthought on more simmering tracks like "Black Tide" and "Yellow River", adding to their seedy and ominous feel. More traditional strings (be they from baritone guitars or something more unusual) dominate songs like "Paris Green" and "Blue Glass", making them almost straightforward rockers. This is where more animated vocals struggle for some of the focus of the clattering rhythm and stunning drum performances; "Yellow River" strikes a better balance, as voices add to the song's foreboding, nearly hip-hop groove.

From the vocals that crib from the Vincent Price playbook to the creepy-crawly vibe of instrumentals like "Red Sea" and "Purple Sleep", these songs can be campy and fun just as often as they are oppressive, and can easily be both; there's just as much of the impish sound manipulation of pioneers like Raymond Scott as there is Einstürzende Neubauten. Either way, Neptune are formidable architects of sound, regardless of what they had to build to get there. While Gong Lake is more a refinement than a breakthrough, the record doesn't suggest stasis; rather, you wonder how what could have been a performance-art gimmick has sustained itself for 12 years without running out of inspiration or steam, and Gong Lake is a fine argument for them sticking around.

-Jason Crock, April 29, 2008

Let's face it—there's very few truly inspiring, fresh rock bands left on the face of the planet. At this stage in the game, I'm looking for tractor-beam rock, or exposed - zombie - cranium rock, or Apocalypse 3000 rock. Perhaps this is why I so often turn to weird music for an answer, which at its best seems to undo tired sonorous trajectories that have been hard at work since the inception of 'perfect' temperament. But at what point on the giant wheel that is Western music does the ethereal return from its place on the fringes of abstraction and become something pointed, palatable, semiotic? Imagine dense sound miasmas—some natural (the violence of a river) some synthetic (violent factory noise) are all equally human, in the sense that they inherit our politics the minute we observe them—we graft our dreams and our fears onto them. For local noiserock jammers Neptune, disjuncture and failure aren't imbued in dissonance; that derisive connection is forged by culture and history, and little else.

Neptune is a three-man sculpture/electrical engineering/performance team who build their gear by hand; a mess of barrels, blades, auto scrap and other miscellany both domestic and industrial, all modded with electronics. The resultant soul-of-Neptune is something akin to a scrap yard on fire, or Godzilla's drum kit. Founded by Jason Sanford in 1994, Neptune was a senior thesis project that would become a decade-and-a-half-long mission, culminating this month with a release on Jeff Hunt's glorious experimental Table of Elements label. TOE is also home to Tony Conrad, Faust, John Cale and Rhys Chatham—not bad company to find yourself in, and they deserve it after ripping their limbs off for music that no other band in the world dares to do with the same fervor, understanding and devotion. I'm serious. These guys are America's post-punk answer to Neubauten. Not Liars, people; Neptune. They don't use Game Genie, they make new games.

Their forthcoming record, Gong Lake, is a total monster, and one of the best sounding records from their extensive discography. Recorded at Machines With Magnets in Rhode Island with Kevin Micka (Animal Hospital), the album is equal parts Beach Boys and terrifying. "Black Tide" grabbed me right off the bat with its beautiful, somber melody that is just barely holding on—a zone where subdued harmony and negative space are nearly indistinguishable from each other. "Ebbing" ends the album perfectly—no lyrics on this one, just a single repetitive synth passage with clamorous, bubbling, sizzling decay strewn about. But what makes this record so especially different than their previous releases is that it feels like a complete studio effort, an album which demarcates a total sound world. Baritone guitarist/percussionist Mark Pearson says, "These weren't created to be performed ... some elements of the physicality of it didn't render itself live very well."

You don't actually have to go any further than Neptune's sonic approach to understand the pathos of the band. The instruments themselves are weapons—these dudes have been injured by them many times. "I used to play circular saw blades," says drummer Dan Boucher. "That's what really killed me the most." This acute sense of physicality resonates with Neptune, the performance artists. They are literally battling these instruments every night, getting them to go through with their plan, and a big part of the Neptune live experience is watching a rock band grapple with equipment that vehemently wants them to fail. Or, as Boucher puts it: "We work for the no money we get paid." Where Neptune abandons the beaten path of their noise brethren is that they are still the rulers, the overlords, the puppeteers of song. Neptune logically deploys blasts of noise, brackets chaos, syncopates trash, and does so in such a seamless and natural way that it's often hard to believe there's a master plan behind it. "People think that so much of our songs are whatever happens in the moment," says Boucher. "It's not that way at all. We get bummed out if it's off."

2008 will be Neptune's biggest and busiest year. Between the TOE release and a maniacal tour schedule, Neptune is going big. Says Boucher, "I have a personal goal to beat our record of 117 shows in 2006. So that's at least 118." In the coming months, Neptune hits SXSW, heads out to California for a slew of shows, comes back east to teach a class in upstate NY on instrument building, and then gears up for Europe. And fortunately, none of the label hoopla will have any effect on their devotion to handmade, private press releases which they'll continue to output. "We were the main distribution point for our stuff," says Pearson. "If you wanted something, you'd come up to one of us at our show. We know who's going home with what we've created." So when you see them, be sure to grip something directly from the band. Or ask them to wrap you in ventilation duct material and put chunks of gas pipe on your ears—you'll hear the ocean, I swear.

By Daniel Lopatin

Even if post-apocalypse freak music isn't your thing, the three members of Neptune should impress. They build their guitars, drums, and cables from things like saw blades, gas tanks, and rust. They use these instruments to rock as hard as humanly possible, in the spirit of bands like Einstürzende Neubauten. Their violent screaming is as captivating as the moments they sing on key. I'm sure their live shows are terrifying, and that makes me like them even more.

By Jennifer Marston

Active now for close to 14 years, Boston band Neptune has crafted not only a formidable array of releases that document their squalling, post-industrial noise punk, but an awesome arsenal of home-made instruments they they've used to etch each and every one of their tracks. Though beginning life as the extension of a sculpture project by Jason Sanford, the band has shunned the austerity of art galleries in favor of cranking out high-octane, oft-visceral exercises in disruption.

Their discography stretches to around 20 releases, but Gong Lake, their debut for Table of the Elements' Radium imprint, is the first to be widely available outside of Neptune's own merch table. Five full-lengths in now, and the band is nothing if not tightly wound – no hesitation, no faulty missteps. As such, Gong Lake presents a solid half an hour's worth of the trio's finely detailed improvisations and galloping, percussive punk, bounding from the queasy loops and pounding drums of "Grey Shadows" to the more carefully considered and ominous oscillations of "Black Tide."

While Neptune's penchant for homemade instruments is well known, they wisely avoid reducing their work-shopped creations to kitsch levels. Instead, they spend the whole of Gong Lake blending a number of different homemade synths and effects boxes with more tradition drums and baritone guitars. The results are slyly alien, invoking a creeping sense of the bizarre and unfamiliar that's effortlessly meshed with exceedingly familiar rock dynamics. Thus, while "Paris Green" may start with commonplace guitar strums, it quickly gives way to the chunky low-end of a synth of unknown provenance, one that battles for space with a rising tide of screeching oscillators. Elsewhere, "Yellow River" ricochets with the effected sounds of a mutated thumb piano, opening up spaces for echoing synths to shoot past the percussion's insistent rhythms.

As much as a seemingly unkempt aggression is Neptune's hallmark throughout Gong Lake's 10 tracks, these three are no ordinary brutes. Time and again, their dedication to expanding a familiar rock lexicon with instruments of their own creation calls to mind the work of folks like This Heat. Much like those Brits attempted the use the basic palette of punk rock as a spring board for deeper experimentation, so too does Neptune work a similar trick, obliterating the familiar structures of rock and punk with otherworldly timbres and tones that are wholly of their own design.

By Michael Crumsho

Reviews of Neptune/One Second Riot Split run through FreeTranslation.com for maximum hilarity:

Neptune opens the hostilities for four incandescent titles in the big tradition of their broken noise to the industrial tones, result of their indépendantisme DIY frenzied.  So frenzied that this trio multi instrumentalist tinkers with himself these instruments.  Concept arty for autonomous music, their noise resounds of this improbable encounter between Einsturzende Neubauten, the Sonic Youth of the beginnings and the punk spirit without limit of a Former The.  Although it in be their music done in appearance of bric and of end possesses a unique sound where the tones dance on of the rhythmic epileptic one to the Lightning Bolt.  The diptych "Tell my people à go home Leaves I'S LEAVES II" opens this split with a first folded title in 2'15min, as primary as dancing, a second, his during darker, slower, resuming the even weaves rhythmic and mélodique to give another face of the music of Neptune, more emaciated.  "Clocks" jumps you to the mouth after some instants of frenzied bruitisme encounter of the cliquetis of a clock and other improbable samples.  With this piece, Neptune gives actually the impression to play heart an electric generator, to play heart an electric disposal of 2000 volts, squarely detonation, the saturation to his crisis électrisant the trio.  Remains only "27" to close this set with a delirium noisy nagging experimental a nothing post-moderne.  For those that do not know, do not hesitate to throw you on these titles to the energy also seizing as if you discovered them on scene.  An experience to live where the feeling to meet The money Surfer with Max and the scrap metal merchant catches you. 

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And an excellent new one gone out for Distile Records!  The label does us to discover two groups, Neptune and Second One Riot, on a split album available in vinyl only.  The first ones are American and rather crazy from the standpoint musical.  One could assimilate them to LiarsLes Birds according to the envelope. so their universe is close.  This is enough sticks all, without for as much to be does not import what.  Dived in completely psychedelic and irritated noise, the trio digs into also in the rock math or the old voucher metal.  The mood brushes the unusual one and is done rather alarming, reinforced by even darker samples.  As for the song scream, this is as if that went out of an old thriller.  One would believe oneself with Hitchcock, version.

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American French Split on a Parisian label.  More precisely Lyon against New York.  Honors to the foreigners.  Neptune, this is not unknown by here.  This is a plethora of discs, of which the last one on the of bordeaux label The Vegetable Natures (they want to do to naturalize themselves or what?) and these witty sons of Cop Shoot Cop (they would have been born to Lyon, one would have said the witty sons of the Bästard) continue to dig the sillon to scrap blow and of ideas of genius bric-a-brac trader.  The two first pieces are called Tell my people à go home.  Leaves I'S and Leaves II.  This is all some kept, some forces quiet, in blow of marshal fitting with steel with this direction of the hangs evident on the party I'S.  The 3rd title names itself Clocks and believe the or no, but one has the right to 4 minutes 42 of a tic tap of a clock on which ones graft themselves small noises where the time is done effectively to count before a sonorous flood does virulent low, of screams in the distant one and of a supported rhythm we go out of torpor.  But the tic tap is there, it oversees us.  The last entitled piece 27 remainder in the domain of the strange one.  But this is that that is well with Neptune.  Even with a sheet metal noise vaguely tribal, bleeps bleep and other crissements, they arrive to hold you in breath six minutes.  Although there, no, this is becomes annoying from the half.  One cannot have good to all the blows.  The small new one of lyons.