Evil Moisture is Andy Bolus, a British artist who has worked under the name since the early 1990s and who treats noise as one outlet among several for a single, consistent method. That method is collage: the cutting, layering and modification of found and self-made material until it becomes something dense, disorientating and frequently grotesque. In sound this means home-built electronics and a tangle of reel-to-reel machines, switching devices and home-made tape-loop delays, fed through cheap effects until the result is a low-fi musique concrète quite distinct from the clean wall-noise of the harsh-noise mainstream.
The titles tell you much of what you need to know about the sensibility: Instant Whip Stewardess Sausage Accessory, Creem-Lube Romantic Storage System, Tongue-Phones Earstick Tri-Ax Chakka Khan. There is a wet, bodily, scatological humour running through the work, closer to underground comix and the abject than to the militaristic pose of much power electronics, and a cartoonish absurdity that sits oddly and effectively against genuinely abrasive sound. Bolus came up partly through that comix world, and his records, zines and screen-prints share one aesthetic; his 1994 publication Gunk and the later Deathneyland, the latter issued by Le Dernier Cri in Marseille, are of a piece with the audio.
The discography is large and scattered across small labels and self-releases, from early cassettes like Cartopsy in 1991 through CDs such as Gak in 1997 and on into a steady stream of vinyl and digital work. Much of the strongest material is collaborative. The 1995 split with Macronympha, The Tentacles of the Octopus Sometimes Compete Against Each Other, pairs him with one of American noise's most uncompromising units; there are long-running collaborations with Panicsville and a record with Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, and even a session with Yamatsuka Eye of the Boredoms, which places Bolus firmly within the international noise underground.
For this archive Evil Moisture belongs with the tape-and-collage wing of noise, the lineage that runs from musique concrète and cut-up through to the lo-fi cassette underground, and with the artists for whom noise is inseparable from a visual and printed practice. The Bureau files Bolus as a connecting figure of that world: prolific, idiosyncratic, and committed to the cut-up as a way of working across every form he touches.