I have a friend who, when he was in high school, used to drive around in sunglasses with his car’s visors down, one with a sign that said “Blind” and the other that said “Driver.” Needless to say, he caused quite a bit of panic when he’d pull up to four-way stops and just sit there for a while as incredulous motorists tried to get through the intersection as quickly as possible to get away from him. Of course, he got pulled over for it, but this was rural Maine, so he already knew every cop in town. He got off with a warning.
It’s with this same sense of goofy irresponsibility that Mike Griffin (Parashi) and Johnny R. Spykes (uh, Olson) drop Braille License Plates for Sullen Nights, an EP featuring two untitled tracks of miasmic electronics and reeds. The kindred spirits to the “Blind Driver” want you to get right up on the bumper of the car in front of you, get out, and run your fingers over the license plate to check if it’s got some sort of vanity message on it. Little do they know that you’ve already read the thing with your eyes before you’ve caused this massive traffic pileup. Little do you know that there’s a blind cop rubbing his fingers over your license plate at the same time.
Spykes/Parashi’s sense of lunacy borders on the dangerous, but isn’t that type of mischief the most fun? Here you’ll get the aural equivalent of running your fingers over a dirty, gritty license plate for eight minutes as you beg for meaning, before you ultimately come away with gross fingers that you’ll have to wash off pretty thoroughly and with more confusion than ever as you fail to understand the deep, personal joke or pun (or baffling message) that the driver in front of you intended. Which you can contemplate from your cell at county.
Seven-inch available from Radical Documents.
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