Dracula Completo

Zombified anti-art, sound design (lol) damage from Twitter’s most naughty, Louis Johnstone, pairing with Trilogy Tapes in a partnership that makes more sense than the music itself ever will. A fella of many aliases – a necessity when you’re on the run from the Gatekeeper Police – you’ll likely know him better for his output under the Wanda Group name, though the A Large Sheet of Muscle moniker (a phrase I imagine first coined in one of his numerous tweets about wanking) seems to have been in operation for a few years now. It’s hard to keep track, and that’s probably the point. Regardless of how its labeled, Dracula Completo is very much a part of the same poisoned mind, an unspooling of concrète electronics and twisted samples, rabbithole (il)logics, and pitched-down, mostly spoken-word, sometimes Richard Dawson-like ramblings that confer into a mutant poetry for the eternally perverse. In truth, it’s hard to talk about what Johnstone does without sounding like the kind of thing he’s out to skewer – preciousness, culture’s watchmen, The Canon, probably my very own self if he even knew I existed – though I won’t let a little thing like ridicule stop me. As with all of his previous output, the principle intention of Dracula Completo seems to be to provoke and challenge, though I wouldn’t equate that with inaccessibility. This is as engaging as ‘experimental’ music has come all year. Much as he’d probably reject the assessment, there’s more truth and beauty in Johnstone’s particular style of absurdist pisstaking than the majority of artists operating in the same realm that are deemed serious and respected. Remain unserious. Much disrespect.