Reviews:

(Smother) This new cd-r release by Public Eyesore is flipping straight up odd. And that's the way I like it, damn it. Leftist music that shifts the cacophony of found sound into distorted filters and echoed reverb. Nagaoag features the work of Bryan Day and Luke Polipnick, who strum guitars, flip the channels, and breathe in and out with gusto. Definitely an album that is suited for those of us whose ears are accustomed to strange whirlwinds of insanity--and fucking like it. - J-Sin

(Indieville) This record shocks and entertains simply because it's so incalculably zonky. Wildly abstract and improvised, the duo of Bryan Day and Luke Polipnick populate Yama Labam A with all manner of goofiness, from scatted Mike Patton-esque vocals to kitchen-floor percussion to twinkly-dink guitar twangs. The exercise is sometimes unbearable, often confusing and always radical - an almost rhapsodic expression of freedom and defiance. But at its core, it's nothing more than the recorded product of a formless jam session on the part of Day and Polipnick. Ultimately, in its attempts to defy limits, it limits itself to a curious but exhausting novelty that will only be appreciated in moderation. - Matt Shimmer

(Vital Weekly) Staying in the world of total improvisation we find Nagaog, with their release 'Yama Labam A', which are also the only two words on the cover. So it might not be a Public Eyesore release? Drums, synths, guitar and voice, in a total improvising, free mode of expression. Nervous, hectic, no strings attached to eachother, it seems like the musicians of Nagaog play for each individual player, then for the greater good. But if I'm honest, I must say that this music has something nice to it. It's intense and raw, yet at the same time, it's also quite personal. Especially the Jaap Blonk like vocalizations work quite well. Somewhere half way between free jazz and free punk. Although I must say, a bit more information would have been most welcome. - Frans de Waard

(Neozine) This is crazy stuff. It literally sounds like the word-salad, babbling invocations of an asylum resident. It literally doesn't make any sense - and thats what contributes to its intrigue (for me at least.) There is some scattered drumming or percussions of some sort. There is some stringed instrument playing, which I can only assume is a guitar being noodled to its slobbering simplest. There are vocalizations, and some of them sound like english words, others just sound like they are drooled out of a schitzophrenic between medications. Would I listen to it again, Hell yea!!! This CD is a train-wreck, and I just can't look away. I mean, it is literal noise, but it is super-creative and immaginative noise which sounds like emoive expression at its rawest. You can't plan for these things. They just happen. Here it happened in a magical way that might never be repeated (no should such a thing be attempted.) Its just like field recording, sometimes when you just turn on a recorder and go nuts, everything falls together into one brilliant mess. Nagaoag has just such a mess. Listening to this is like trying to put a jazz musician's brain back together after its being segmented into a puzzle pieces. - CHC

(Aiding and Abetting) Another of the Bryan Day collection, this one a collaboration with Luke Polipnick. A highly disconcerting set of guitar lines, vocal evocations and percussive wanking. Not for the faint of stomach, though noodly enough to excite extreme fans. - Jon Worley

(Touching Extremes) OK, I bet that only a few rarity kidnappers have heard improvisations where the principal character is a "singer" who seems to be trying to deliver himself from a straitjacket, accompanying the "absolutely free" music (with a slight tendency to electric fusion projects featuring Henry Kaiser - think Crazy Backwards Alphabet) with all kinds of vocal spasms, pants, hiss, growls, moans, lamentations and what else can be figured out - maybe. "Yama Labam A" (played and sung by Bryan Day and Luke Polipnick) is exactly that, an album that might be dedicated to those non-autonomous, prefabricated minds who pretend to enforce the rules according to which we should behave, although they've developed more complexes than an industrial area. "Good professionals" that theorize the norms of sexuality while suffering of eiaculatio precox or frigidity; "gentle souls" who blackmail feeble-brained beings by threatening to reveal hidden secrets to friends and relatives, rendering them addicted to pills and idiotic concepts; desperation-struck human failures who presume to be entitled to offer "advice" to couples, just because their marital life has been crap since wedding's day, as they're both ugly as hell and no one else would ever accept to share a bed with either. If you know specimens like the above mentioned ones, give this CD as a present, telling that a previously unreleased Mozart sonata lies in there, and don't be scared when they come back to teach some manners. These people talk about detachment, yet become hysteric when one tells the truth. Their eyes will escape yours: right-left-down, right-left-down. There's always an overlord to whom mental slaves must obey, in a pyramid of perennially expanding stupidity. No chance for this record to save the "elected" from that destiny, but surely this stuff is damn funny for a handful of bad-behaving thugs. - Massimo Ricci

(ITDE) Here's a weird one for you - Bryan Day and Luke Polipnick on an uncredited, somewhat secretive un-Public Eysore release; complete with spasms of flayed drums, random miniature clockwork noises, and Tom-Waits-channeling-Yamantaka-Eye vocals. Like many of Day's collaborations, listeners are more or less required to meet the music on it's own terms; those expecting Nagaoag to greet them halfway will be sorely disappointed. Indeed, even for experienced listeners, there is precious little to prop one's self up with. The code-like boxes covering the entire of the inside cover mimic liner notes, inviting the curious to give up more than a moment in fruitless study. Of course, Nagaoag doesn't want to give anything away too easily. Your attentions are better spent actually listening to the distorted, plonky guitar in aimless reverie; the chattering marimba backdrop, and an occasional rush of cymbal splashing against Day's distressed Goldthwait-ian yelpings... "The world becomes me!" Although I don't think the voice additions always work on "Yama Labam A," I'm highly impressed to find them at all. It is obvious that extended or avant-leaning vocals are a tremendously difficult and challenging medium, especially when used as a major element in a long work. This took guts, and should be commended, especially in an experimental format where a certain amount of mistakes or failure is to be expected. - DaveX

(The Chickenfish Speaks) I'm going to write this review with the same kind of effort that band put into making this slog. Here goes. Jdia ijfpandfpu fdmapfy idofhafiadfi oifjamsdufae kfj[maumae jfmaoimajajad. Oaj[fadfjaek,'flja df[aj,faf afa[opfa,]perioa[o fama' dpfoa,dr[aiaga'dfac afnaga. ;fnda adfjona ioarnaio[amnamaiohjadfakmoaiojm canafiumaeo[I afhaehi. - Mite Mutant

(Ampersand Etcera) Yama Labam A is a release on Eh? (28), a Public Eyesore off shoot. The two play guitar and drums respectively, and the music on this is an avalanche of percussive energetics across the whole armoury of drums cymbals and other banging pieces and complex guitars (electric and acoustic) that all at the same level in the mix: you can either focus on the clattering fast-forward momentum or the intricate and at time surprisingly melodic guitar: or even let them both wash over you. But then there is the third element - vocals by one of the two which swings between Waits-ian growls, Japanese noise squeels, high singing. Generally not-English (my guess is created noises [yaps, squeeks, expostulations, Dada poetry] but possibly other languages) it occasionally emerges with words and phrases. On the whole it works well, it is equal in the mix with the other components. The level of activity changes, but there is always a strange swampy feeling to this, probably from the Dr John vocal-phrasing and sound which seems to pervade it (alabamy could be somewhere in the title). More unsettling than Day/Boardman this would have benefited from perhaps a little more variation (the last track is more relaxed) as it becomes harder to take over the full 50 minutes - but is enjoyable in smaller doses. - Jeremy Keens

(Sound Projector) The undeniable grotesquerie that peels off yama labam a (EH?028), particularly from the twisted voices and swollen tongues of the incoherent vocalists, gradually burrows a way into your forehead like some giant slug. - Ed Pinsent

(KZSU Zookeeper) Demented vocal improv alongside back alley free jazz. With respect to timbre, the vocals are kind of cross between Mike Patton and Tom Waits. Few lyrics are detected, mostly drunken, delirious and physically sick outpourings. The band consists of drums, sax, elec. guitar, bass, and back alley percussion. - Percee Northrupp

(Chain DLK) It was hard to find any info about this (title and artist name being the only writings on the cover), but with the web nothing's really secret, isn't it. Nagaoag is Public Eyesore's Bryan Day at guitar and vocals and Luke Polpnick at drums, if I got it right from previous reviews. Listening to the first track, I though this sounded like an unlikely jam between early US Maple and Fushitsusha - bizarre, rambling vocals, sometimes meowing, more often wandering cluelessly, over fractured guitar lines, almost psychedelic dilatations and restless drumming. The formula is the same throughout, but I'd also add Captain Beefheart, Oxbow and definitely Storm & Stress/Talibam! to the possible references. Very interesting, obviously and willingly unnerving but far from being gratuitous trash - in an apparently fertile period for free-form incests and "musique brut", this could even get some deserved exposure. - Eugennio Maggi

(Addreview) It's difficult rating an album that's simply a cacophony of guitar tuning and random vocal bursts. Schizophrenic listeners will enjoy. - Laze

(Sea of Tranquility) The eight unnamed pieces that comprise Yama Lamba A are generally undifferentiated: tiny envelopes of sounds, struck, plucked, layered and dense up and down the bandwidth shimmer, sustain and collapse against one another in a haze of specifics that yields up shifting glimpses of the briefest fragments of truncated silences: latticed gaps amid incessant thrumming. Like the works of Eloine and Shelf Life, Nagaoag generates an immersive field in sound and texture that seems to have descended into granular, component-level existence, unperturbed and happily post- everything. But unlike Eloine and Shelf Life, Nagaoag incorporates daubs of voice, transforming the pure abstractions of the multi-layered audio bath into something decidedly more literal. There's an odd tension to the way the slurring voice sits within the aural surround emanating from the highly specific clatter of the sources. Not a profound tension, more like the tension that results from being subjected to too many hours of the arbitrary. While no scream for meaning is needed, and the juxtaposition is clearly intentional, the problem is an indoctrinated response to mouth sounds that goes sort of like "voice = language = narrative". It's a disconcerting response (perhaps coming only) from this listener, but sadly unavoidable. And unlike the shrouded sources - all as teasing, unexpected and mysterious in their origin as those early works by Dome - the voice does not engage the listener in the same way. The vocal component poses no further issue of identity, and offers neither mystery or surprise - only more of a noise that is not noise. - Kerry Leimer

(Dead Angel) Even by PE's often impenetrable standards, this is a cryptic one, featuring label head Bryan Day and Luke Polipnick together on an obscure release containing absolutely no information outside of the band name and title, available only on an "secret" subsidiary of Day's label, with "liner notes" that are nothing but a dense wall of indecipherable code boxes. (If you wonder how I nevertheless divined the lineup, well, I'm psychic.) The eight tracks on the disc are squarely within the PE aesthetic, though -- lots of meandering freestyle weirdness that might be the product of detuned guitars or something else entirely, erratic and unpredictable drum rattles, and -- unusual for one of the label's improv releases -- a lot of vocalizing. Note, though, that by "vocalizing" I don't mean singing; rather, there's lots of moaning and keening and muffled babbling floating up through the murky ambience and strange sounds, making the entire work sound like the product of deeply schizoid asylum inmates turned loose in the recreation room to flail away in disconnected fashion of whatever happens to be lying around. The only thing you could even begin to compare it to would probably be the first Beme Seed album (which was itself once famously described as the sound of a band tuning up for forty minutes or so), except that even Kathleen didn't sound this lost in psychosomatic space. An epic of strangeness that'sweirdly compelling if you're in the right frame of mind, or a completely incomprehensible work of dadaist art if you aren't. - RKF