A little while back n0teeth stumbled across an obscure gem of a compilation on Spotify called Professional Test Record. If you look this title up on Discogs, chances are the first entry you'll come to is a genuine 1965 test record from Australian label W&G which this 1997 CD (also released by an Aussie label, Black Hole) appears to be riffing on.
The back sleeve tells us where Black Hole Records is coming from, featuring as it does a somewhat cringe-inducing rant against the "fake" alternative scene. In this case however the label does have a fairly strong claim to releasing some of the most out-there and extreme music of the late 90s. Especially in a year like 1997 during the radio friendly backwash grunge left in its wake, with nu metal slowly but surely mounting its assault on the charts and "industrial" being increasingly used to mean "occasional use of samples; film & game soundtrack appearances licensed by TVT".
A once-over of the track list yields no familiar names besides KK Null's fearsome noisecore vehicle Zeni Geva, which turns up towards the end of the CD. Before we get anywhere near that the listener is treated to some delightful racket by artists so arcane some of their Discogs pages mention no other appearances (nevermind releases) besides this compilation.
Having said that, it's not a wild stretch of the imagination to suggest KKKK might be a side project of KK Null's. The other band names tend to have something of the afterthought about them - Whore, Ragewar, and Unnatural Jesus would all look right at home on a compilation of exactly the kind of juvenile post-grunge angst-rock the manifesto on the back of the CD defines itself in opposition to.
That's not to say the music feels sloppy or cynically phoned-in, far from it - but here at n0teeth towers there would be no ripple among the staff if we were to learn that most of the tracks were one-offs specially made for Professional Test Record by the same small rotating cast of international noise scene luminaries.
After KKKK's pleasingly crunchy opening salvo “Are You Experienced” (not a Hendrix cover), Interior comes in with the straightforward techno bounce of "Cell", followed by some beatless gurgling knob-twiddle from Whore.
Hints of more metallic content first appear on track 4, with some guttural guitar grind spicing up the "Afgh:aan Narkotic Breaks". However, it's not until after Mitsuru Tabata's (he of Acid Mothers fame) creepy carnival freakshow instrumental "Hypochondria" that great big hot chunks of metal really start to fly. Black Hole's very own Public Hanging introduce themselves with a tortured scream, a thirty-second pause and then in come the skronking, awkward, angular riffs. Bog-standard death metal this ain't.
Psychic Date provides a nice, Coil-esque ambient interlude; Unnatural Jesus' sub-Skrew/Bile/Malhavoc chug is as uninspired as their name. "What else ya got?" n0teeth asks ourselves while prodding the skip button.
Mostly, more passable techno-metal gubbins, it turns out, until the aforementioned Zeni Geva track. A two and a half minute burst of distorted low end guitar filth culled from a US radio session, deftly showing some of the more questionably heavy acts on here how it's done.
Some homegrown Aussie talent usurps the Japanese noise rockers, however, on the PTR's final song. feedtime [sic] are a pre-internet post punk band from Sydney with a raucous noise rock n roll sound that must have got them signed to Amphetamine Reptile without old man Hazelmyer so much as blinking. The perfect music to sit in a wrecked Toyota pickup wearing a white vest and pounding tins of Victoria Bitter to.
Here at n0teeth we like to encourage the reader/listener to support the artists by purchasing directly where possible. It isn't possible, in this case, so we'd urge you to stream the fucker on Spotify, preferably at an antisocial volume: