1. Herald of the Roggaboggas
2. Bass Gnm2 (Program to Repeat for Duration of Journey to Roggaboggas)
3. 3rd Annual Roggabogga Motion Picture Soundtrack
4. Radio Puebla Metallica “Summoning of Larry Rinder”
5. Inverse/Interior Plane of 3rd Annual Roggabogga (Behind the Scenes)
6. Shmoos Bass Slow
7. #74
8. Radio Puebla Metallica “Vagina Music” (Program to Repeat for duration of Vagina)
9. Assassins RMX “Assassabogga” (Program to Repeat for Duration of Assasination)
10. Space Dribs
11. (Zap)
12. Zitomer Pharmacy Doorman
13. Hodowm (Program to Repeat)
14. Bass Gnm 1 (Program to Repeat)
15. Field Recording of 3rd Annual Roggabogga
16. Endless Dribbler
17. 2nd Annual Roggabogga

Long ago, from the mid-90s to the new millennium, two noise aliens known as Patootie Lobe and Meerk Puffy, known collectively as Forcefield roamed Planet Earth as part of a group of alien bohemians who inhabited the legendary Fort Thunder, a hollowed-out warehouse in Providence, Rhode Island used as an anythinggoesspace, in which their bizarre Martian festivals/ rituals took place along with their charmingly out-of-place attractions (cookie bakes, bicycle repair and full-body-knit-wear wrestling matches- hell yes). Their room-mates were legendary sub-bass-and-drums apocalypsebringers Lightning Bolt and soon, purely by chance, they ran into two other cosmic jokers, Gorgon Radao and Le Geef, both hailing from the very same freaky planet as Patootie and Meerk, and who joined in on the trip, bringing the native music/ poetry from home to our inexperienced Terran ears so as to fill us with joy, innocence and happiness… and perhaps even enlightenment. 

Then, suddenly, in 2001…

Fort Thunder was demolished to make space for a Shaw’s Supermarket Parking lot. Fuck!*

So much for being enlightened! Now that their home and artistic playground was destroyed, our four alien heroes realized that us capitalist cocksucker Terrans needed their insane creative noises more than anything. And so, they infiltrated the 2002 Whitney Biennial American Art exhibition with an installation seeking to educate us earthlings about the peaceful yet noisy ways of their glorious home planet: Roggaboggas.

Heard of it? It orbits through the same surrealist solar system where the Planet Residents resides with it’s Daliscapes and Dada-cities and Planet Boredoms with it’s spirit-temples and cartoon forests, and it’s simply full of knitted creatures who talk with analogue synthesisers whilst dancing and frolicking through the Roggaboggian plains to the sound of their own weird conversations. There is no war, no greed, no money and no work. Instead the inhabitants spend their days in joyful and worriless play. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two… 

So in preparation the four heroic Roggaboggians made a trip to their home planet and brought back a spaceship full of their native Roggaboggian friends, stuck them in a room with lotsa weird lights and told them to, y’know, act natural. Sadly these crazy natives found the state of our planet so distressing that they could not dance as they usually did, and so they all just stood still and were consequently mistaken for mannequins that the four Fourcefielders had dressed up in knitted costumes. Still despite their refusal to dance for us unenlightened ones, the Roggaboggians did not completely shun us. No, instead they shared with us their Roggaboggian philosophies and sciences, they talked at great length to us about their culture and art, their nature and animals, their habitats, politics, hats and foods. To our unenlightened human ears of course, it was the oddest of the odd strange electronic sounds, whirrs and farts and explosions, bubbles and pops and chirps. But while perhaps we couldn’t understand the language itself, we understood the meaning within and as such, the whole thing went over very well.

Skip forward to 2009, when this album is being reviewed, the four Roggaboggian ones have long since departed this doomed and greedy planet: though their Whitney Biennial installation was a success that had reached and educated some of us deeply-flawed Terrans, there were and still are a million billion stuck in thrall to the brain-and-soul destroying powers of television and consumerism, and had not even heard of the four Roggaboggian one’s attempt at showing us a simpler life of dance and joy, and who would foolishly reject it, were they exposed. So the Roggaboggians all departed, leaving us to our own selfish self-destruction: we were a lost cause. But just before they returned to their utopian home-planet they left us something behind, out of pity for our dying Earth perhaps: An album, ROGGABOGGAS**, named after their planet, in the hope that maybe, if enough people listen, their might be a chance of saving us, the human race. A chance of ridding ourselves of the greedlings and taking on a new utopia of dancing, like that which exists on the faraway Roggaboggas. The album is their last message to us, and when all seems lost and the human race is on it’s last-legs, there will always be this seedling of hope, this tiny glowing ember that, though it consists of a wholly untranslatable electronic language, will still speak to us simply through the sound of the language itself: that we need not worry about work or time or deadlines or insurance, or any other mundane things forced on us nowadays to stop us from developing real aspirations, instead we must simply dance. And then dance some more.

I was first exposed to the four Roggaboggian ones known as Forcefield (after the Spaceship function that allowed them to pass through our heavily-polluted atmosphere??) when I stumbled across their posthumous*** album LORD OF THE RINGS MODULATOR**** in a HMV in Angel. Methinks that the suits running the shop had ordered it in by mistake, given it a listen and deemed it totally unsellable, coz the thing, despite having thirty-one tracks was priced at £1. Intrigued by the frankly awesome name o’ the thing, as well as the mysterious album art, a skull, possibly Neanderthal with what looks like chain mail resting atop it’s scalp, and encouraged by the cheap price I decided to pick it up. On the back I saw no list of songs (in fact there are no song titles whatsoever) just a picture of the back of two peoples heads, wearing again, what looks like chain mail (I later realized that it was their famous knit-wear suits depicted). The music therein was nothing short of an assault on my poor bewildered senses. The first track was a minute of cymbal splashes/ smashes distorted, reverb’d and amplified into oblivion, the next was a volcano eruption of white noise that sloshes around your head proper if you’re wearing headphones and sounds like someone’s melted down a vat of old television sets all tuned to static, and then recorded the sound of the electronic gloop running down a mountainside into a Roman village, encasing men, women and children in the sonic slime as it goes. The third track was five minutes of one ultra-repetitive robot repeating one Roggaboggian consonant as fast as he can coz if he goes under a certain speed he’ll rust over or fall apart or something. Some semblance of a beat appears on track four underneath yet another white noise natural disaster, this time it’s a hurricane ripping out palm trees with it’s extreme blustery sonic attack that cuts out at two minutes to allow one of our (at this point in the history) two Forcefieldians to read a short passage from, you guessed it, Lord of the Rings before the white noise yet again returns as blasts of hot air from geysers on their home planet which sear the surrounding air until you can’t see nothin’ through the fuzzy smog. I can’t possibly describe all the thirty one tracks here as this ain’t even the album I’m reviewing but I’ll mention a few of my favourites: Track 6 is the sound of the Forcefieldian ones spaceship calculating a route back from Earth and Track 10 sounds like Renaldo and the Loaf playing industrial music in an abandoned factory early-Einstürzende Neubauten style, only without the high-pitched Monty Python vocals. Track 22 is THIRD REICH AND ROLL-era Residents fending off their sonic cave from the normals with a blitzkrieg of nightmare sounds and on track 24 there’s another short passage from Lord of the Rings that either Patootie or Meerk has learnt English to read (though he still has a fully-electronic Roggabogg accent).

Intrigued by this bizarre and mysterious album of alien noise and Ring-and-Electricity Worship I decided to explore, with the infinitely helpful tool of the internet. Unfortunately I unearthed scant information about the group, only that they had another album entitled ROGGABOGGAS or sometimes THE THIRD ANNUAL ROGGABOGGAS (a homage to legendary industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, who’s first few albums were always ‘annual reports’ of some kind, perhaps?) and that, thank Buddha, it was available on Amazon. A week later it arrived. I was in for a trip… Allow me now to describe the sounds of Roggaboggas in order as they appear:

The album begins with Herald of the Roggaboggas, a rallying cry (drone??) for Roggaboggians everywhere, to be sounded when Forcefield are near. And let me tell you, this Silver Surfer ain’t pretty: this is one minute of one note reptile mating call flattened into a gloopy sonic pancake to just let you know that you’re about to start a musical journey to the home-planet and this is the last stop where you change your mind and retreat back to Earth. Next comes Bass Gnm2 with it’s instructions: ‘(Program to Repeat for Duration of Journey to Roggabogga)’. It’s twenty one seconds of convoluted alien rhythm using all but one synth-note/ Roggaboggian vocal noise and a kick drum. Put it on repeat and you have the grooviest and weirdest alien dance music that’ll make you want to dress up in wooly clothes and dance around plus it lasts as long as you want it to. Make no mistake this is useful music. Put this on and the world of work and celebrities is forgotten with every shake of your confused yet enlightened body as you properly begin your journey. Now there ain’t no turning back. This is the noise Forcefield rocked out to in their spaceship on the way back to Roggaboggas to collect their mates for the Whitney Biennial Installation and it’s fucking out there. 3rd Annual Roggabogga Motion Picture Soundtrack takes you through some sort of Roggabogg jungle/ ocean. Here you can hear the sound of the weather formations moving across the alien sky, the waves of the ocean crashing down onto the Roggaboggian landscape and the sound of the Roggabogg forests and their trees swirling with electronic life. The whole thing is smothered with splodgy water-through-an-effects-pedal noise and four minutes in there’s some kind of epic thunderstorm when you think you’re speakers are gonna explode, that sounds like an ambient cover of European Son by the Velvet Underground when Lou Reed, John Cale and co are sexually torturing their instruments in order to wring out as much tasty ear-splitting feedback as possible. Next is the inexplicably titled Radio Puebla Metallica “Summoning of Larry Rinder” which shows the effects that some of our Terran “world music” has had on these noise aliens put through a Forcefieldfilter where one second gets repeated over and over like some kind of crazy summoning chant.***** Inverse/Interior Plane of 3rd Annual Roggabogga (Behind the Scenes) is the making-of documentary for the same film****** that Forcefield so kindly put together a soundtrack for earlier on in the album. This is, to my ears at least, the first example of Roggaboggian conversation recorded on the album, in the form of weird electronic noise. The track begins with some incessant squeaky nattering from some native creature or other. It sounds a bit like birdsong that’s been remixed into a dance beat and then chopped up into random patterns. Soon some kind of whining/ crying animal joins in with long drawn out moans and a whole bunch of others arrive, forming a slowly building cacophony that lasts almost fifteen minutes!
Shmoos Bass Slow is another dance track ‘cept this time they’ve got that weird moaning animal that bleated all over the last song on vocals. He sounds a lot more happy now he’s in the spot-lighting humming his weird native vetch over the squelchy beat, rather than having to make do with being in the background like last time. The song #74 is the sound of a Roggaboggian philosopher explaining to us lucky Earthlings the secrets of Roggaboggas through splodgy, cosmic synthesizer calls, whereas “Vagina Music” is another broadcast of Forcefielded world music from the Roggaboggian radio station Radio Puebla to be played on repeat until your mind is well and truly enlightened/ melted, though I have a suspicion from the title of this piece that this is also the kinda thing that Roggabogg folk put on when they want to get down with the ladies, if ya know what I mean… ‘Program to Repeat for Duration of Vagina’ reads the instructions, need I say more?
Things get a bit dark with “Assassabogga” more Roggabogg dance, only this time Forcefield have subsumed our own Terran drum and bass into their crazy sound. This ones to be repeated “for the Duration of Assassination”. Ooh er. In Roggaboggas when a person needs ‘offing’ someone will get sent a CD with this as the sole track and a piece of paper with the targets name on it. Or at least that’s what would happen if everybody there wasn’t too busy dancing too it. Space Dribs is a cosmic two-minute Roggabogg mating call recorded in space that you can listen to in order to get in the mood before you flick on “Vagina Music” and the four second track (Zap) is the culmination of those two actions (say no more, say no more). Zitomer Pharmacy Doorman is a spirited debate between several Roggabogg philosophers and Hodowm and Bass Gnm 1 are more examples of Roggaboggian dance music to be played on repeat, the former being the fastest on the album, the latter the slowest and most laidback and that leaves Endless Dribbler, an odd one off where Forcefield seem to have taken a novelty blues record from Earth and had a reflective conversation of quirky electronics over the top, as the last ‘short song’.

Just before that however lies the epic Field Recording of 3rd Annual Roggabogga, and after it the even epic-er 2nd Annual Roggabogga.

Field Recording is just that, Forcefield have gone and plonked a microphone in a Roggaboggian city/ jungle and recorded everything that’s walked past. The sound quality is noticeably poorer than the rest of the album but hey it’s a field recording. The real deal. It begins with a painful jolt of sound and from that point on everyone shows up: the whole thing is filled to the brim with buzzes and blips and scratches and hiss and every other sound you can think of. At some point you can here the voice of a lost human women saying something indecipherable- how did she get there?! Then, roughly five minutes in the whining animal earlier makes another return and starts bleating again while a group of robots play some fucked up drum and bass for two seconds and we’re left again with the sounds of the local wildlife. Around seven minutes in Forcefield begin to perform a live version of Motion Picture Soundtrack from earlier on in the album, before this too disappears into the maelstrom. Occasionally you can hear little melodies being played on Roggaboggian instruments that sound just as strange as their voices… and then more humans appear… what’s going on here?? This ain’t no field recording! This is a snippet of the Whitney Biennial installation! And those humans, lucky bastards, are the ones who experienced the philosophy of the Roggaboggas first-hand in that room. Lucky thing we have this album for those who weren’t fortunate enough to be there (me included).

Lastly we have the twenty minute 2nd Annual Roggabogga… is this a change! This is the calmest of the calm and the quietest of the quiet. Whereas pretty much every single other song(??) on the album is packed to the brim with as many different sounds as the four Forcefieldians could imagine at the time this one is sparse enough to be some freaky avant-classical experiment. Then after the ten minute mark these noise aliens decide to pick up the pace a (tiny) bit with mutant bee sounds and some more of the white-noise-condensed-into-liquid thing that they’re so fond of. More than anything it’s good for establishing some kind o’ cosmic environment around you to help you block out the irritations of normal life and at times things get seriously Eraserhead. It’s the sound made by giant Roggaboggian statues who’ve come to life and started clunking around and talking to each other, causing impossibly deep sub-bass frequencies over extremely long periods of time, like some kind of unfathomably colourful electronic Sunn O))) experiment. 

Anyhow, ROGGABOGGAS is a great album if you don’t mind the lack of actual song arrangements. If you consider anything without a discernable tune to be too much then steer clear but don’t complain when you need something new to escape from the suits that run this world. Coz where else are you gonna find a literal musical trip through another world? This album is worth buying just for that. I’d also like to comment on the packaging: the little CD booklet contains page after page of photographs and pictures of the inhabitants of Forcefield’s strange world, standing against colourful backgrounds which is very nice, plus at the back lurk the album credits which contain such awesome alien monikers as F.I.N.B, Aunt Joby Joby and Reverse Dingleberry. Noice.

Man! What a sonic safari that was. I’m gonna take some time out here before I let you get on with the rest of your life to say how refreshing it is to see a Noise album that ain’t about total nihilism and/ or the death of art, as much as I love that kinda stuff. See, every now and then something destructive comes along and crawls into the arts to break down some boundaries and shake things up a bit, right? It happened to the art world with the unholy trio of destruction Surrealism, Futurism and most gloriously nihilistic of all Dada, and it happened to Rock music when Punk arrived on the scene and told all the twiddly-solo bands to fuck off. As we speak there’s another destruction happening that began not long after punk, it’s called Noise and it’s the ultimate Fuck You to every pre-conceived notion of what-the-hell-music-is ever. Never has there been a more totally destructive (un)musical force. Bands like Japan’s Gerogerigegege (it means vomit, diarrhea, ha ha ha, I shit you not) and, er, Japan again’s Hantarash******* flushed out all talent, melody, harmony and beauty from music in a glorious tidal-wave of grey, black and, in some cases, brown sludge, only keeping behind dissonance and a tiny bit of rhythm now and then. But noise always seemed to be on a downwards trip and after more than a decade and a half, isn’t it time we began to use noise in a positive way? Now that the slate is wiped clean and we’re free to do literally anything, can we not use these new-found musical ideas to construct something totally new, something utopian? This is why Forcefield were/ are such an important band. They were all about noise, but not necessarily destruction. In fact they were the opposite. These forward-thinking aliens decided to make a racket that didn’t have no melody or nice tunes but yet was playful and joyful, and occasionally you could dance to it! Let us all raise our glasses to these intergalactic lords of progression to be the first ones, (as far back as 1995, shit!) to start the beginning of something new. 

*I would like to offer up a jovial FUCK YOU to whichever soulless corporate cocksucker made this happen. 

**ROGGABOGGAS was released in 2003 when I was a wee one at the tender age of 10. Back then my ears were filled with the moronic macho bollocks spewed by such poisonous individuals as 50 Cent, because that’s what was ‘Cool’ at the time. It’s nice to see how far I’ve come.

***Or should that be ‘Post-departure’?

**** LORD OF THE RINGS MODULATOR was unearthed long after the four Forcefieldian heroes had left our shitty planet, back from the days when it was just Meerk Puffy and Patootie Lobe at the controls and they’d discovered a classic piece of Terran literature by some guy named Tolkien as well as some kinda electronic device that made sounds which reminded Meerk and Patootie of a popular Roggabogg mating call from back home, greatly inspired by these two Earth artifacts they decided to name their first album after them.

***** In case you’re wondering (I was) who Larry Rinder is, my best guess is that Forcefield are referring to one, Lawrence Rinder, the former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney museum. I’ve no idea why they want to summon this guy save that it’s probably something to do with their installation at the 2002 Biennial. There are some videos of him on YouTube if you’re interested.

******For a some genuine Roggaboggian Cinema type ‘FORCEFIELD: video III’ into YouTube and prepare to have your brain melted by it’s bizarre Eraserhead-for-children imagery.

*******Noise Music is massive in Japan. Over there Noise bands get to appear on game shows alongside chart-topping pop stars. Why can’t we have the same kinda deal over here??