Is Print Putting One Over On Us?
by Jonathan
OK, I was gonna go out on a limb and say that Print’s absolutely my favorite new-ish NYC noise band going. Then, somewhere within the smoke-like random patterns of the parasitic Arp-ish whatisit that clouds my mind, I detected the thought, “Maybe they’re just new to me.” After about an hour of pursuing other unrelated winding strands of logic, I found my way back to the former question that was snaking away – the one of Print’s physical maturity - and followed it all the way from deducting that they’d been around from some time to the following scandalous conclusion:
Settle down and bear with me for a moment while I explain how I arrived at this bold inference.
I employed the World Wide Web, which you are aware is an ideal tool for tracking down information about local musical entities, to sniff the band’s trail. After about five minutes of deep inquiry, an inherent challenge when a band is christened simply “Print,” I found the group’s site and recognized that they had a 2005 EP, Rotary, and a 2006 LP, Highlights of Horror – thus proving that I was incorrect in my assumption that they were a new band. But I was still determined to write about them and, hunting for any shred of information to illuminate exactly what Print is, as their site is cryptic at best, I could locate no more information about the enigmatic quartet. I found an equally mysterious blog and Myspace page.
I Googled “print” plus, the title of their 2006 LP, “highlights of horror” (a phrase search - in quotations), to find a mere eight entries, most of which referred to an old silent 8mm compilation of early horror classics like Nosferatu, Der Golum, etc., and only two pointing to the band: the first, a link in the blog Arcane Radio Trivia which led to friendly review of the record in the Stranded In Stereo webzine (ending, “Not that I’ve seen a photo yet”) and the second, a playlist from a podcasted Spanish radio show entitled, ceilo liquido, that oddly sandwiched the stellar track “Hunted Haunted” between What Made Milwaukee Famous and Sparklehorse.
And that’s all of the information I could find.
Perhaps you are familiar with “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the speculative 1940 Jorge Luis Borges story that appeared in both El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), and hence, compiled in the canonical Ficciones (1944). The plot of the story involves the discovery of a mysterious country in an annual encyclopedia - one that couldn’t be found in earlier or later editions. He later learns that the country was the invention of a conspiracy of intellectuals.
With this in mind, I ask you, “Who exactly is this Print?” They certainly has a web page, a blog, and a Myspace. And they’ve included images of their commercial releases within. But any sicko could create and iimplement all of this in a few hours. And, while I’m positive that I witnessed some group billed as Print blow me away somewhere on a bill before my own band at Glasslands Gallery on March 2, 2007, how can I be certain? Is it only I who smells something fishy on the banks of the East River?
Before I get to the bottom of this, I would however like to point out that the entity we’re referring to as “Print,” whether concrete or abstract, authentic or humbug, play some of the more arresting noise rock out there, with plenty of intensity, groove, thud, screwed up harmony, and structure - loosely harkening back to the mid-to-late-1980s bounce of the Birthday Party-informed Touch and Go bands and the kind of artful atonal abrasion and frayed ends of 1990s Providence stuff – but with enough imagination and distinction to be utterly contemporary.
Maybe one of us will live to tell the world their deep dark secret.
Print performs tonight with the Art of Shooting and Black Horse at the Cake Shop. Go here for the details.
http://www.printxx.com/
http://myspace.com/printxx
http://www.printxx.blogspot.com/
visit NewYorkNightTrain’s Digital Dump for free Print MP3s and videos
