Richard Flesh - Violent Ballets

Limted, custom-packaged tapes available

Violent Ballets isn't rap or r&b or instrumental hip-hop, which means you won't find anything else like it here. 

So, what's it like? Maybe art rock? But with very little rock and really fucked up art at that. Released the same day the U.S. declared COVID-19 a national emergency, Violent Ballets does make for perfect pandemic music, though recorded months earlier. A while back, presumably while he was working on this, I asked Richard Flesh what he'd been listening to lately. He sighed, maybe even groaned, and got that look people get when you ask them something too excruciatingly complicated to get into. But we were at a barbeque in Wantagh Park, and the schmutz was flowing — like I said, these were simpler times — so with only a little prodding, he indulged me and rattled off a litany of geniuses not typicially mentioned in the same sentence. I can't remember exactly who but for comparison's sake, let's say it was La Monte Young, Shostakovich, Sun Ra and John Carpenter (at least one or two of those names probably came up, at any rate).

Produced, arranged, composed, performed and collaged by Richard Flesh, and mixed by the esteemed Gareth Jones (the guy who introduced sampling to Depeche Mode), Violent Ballets draws as much from the psychosphere that passively haunts both Memorial Day celebrations and long-overdue national emergency declarations. If the spot on the wall your cat spends hours staring at made a sound, it might go something like this.