The pseudonymous American cut-up project that buried thousands of stolen samples in dense, vulgar, funny collage, and earned a place in the absurdist-noise canon for it.
Broken Penis Orchestra is the American cut-up noise project the Bureau files at Tier III, conceived and directed under the name "Srad Tene" and first heard on CDrs issued in tiny editions by PsychoChrist Productions of Seattle. The method is collage on a warehouse scale: thousands of stolen, chewed and mangled samples adjusted into patterns that are anarchic on the surface and oddly coherent underneath, full of catchy loops, sudden bursts of piercing noise and blind turns.
What sets the project apart from the harsher end of the form is its register. The work is openly absurdist and vulgar, raspberries and farts sitting among the noise, silly and unsettling at the same time, and at least one early release carried a pointed message about American religious evangelism. Reviewers reached repeatedly for the same comparisons, a broken Nurse With Wound record or the compositions of Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, which places it squarely in the cut-up and collage tradition, only pushed toward farce.
That comic-collage sensibility is exactly why it belongs to the Nihilist Records circle of Panicsville and Cock E.S.P., where offence and absurdity are treated as material rather than ideology.
The Bureau's reading. Broken Penis Orchestra is filed at Tier III as a distinctive cut-up project of the American absurdist-noise circle.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene