John Wiese's shape-shifting Los Angeles band, which swings from seconds-long cut-up grindcore detonations to long electroacoustic pieces, and counts much of the noise underground among its rotating cast.
Sissy Spacek is the noise band John Wiese founded in Los Angeles in 1999, and the Bureau files it at Tier III as a distinctive and prolific unit in its own right rather than a footnote to Wiese's solo work. Its current settled form is a duo of Wiese on bass, electronics and voice and Charlie Mumma on drums and voice, but the project has run through many personnel and many sounds across its life, the constant being Wiese and the intensity.
The early method was cut-up. The band assembled collages of previously recorded demos and live performances, edited heavily and sped up by computer to an extreme tempo, producing the rapid-fire noisecore and grindcore bursts it is best known for. That is only one mode, though; across the catalogue Sissy Spacek moves between those seconds-long detonations and long-form musique-concrète and free-improvisation pieces, the progressions deliberately unpredictable.
The output is enormous. Like Wiese's solo discography, Sissy Spacek runs to dozens of limited albums, cassettes and singles since the self-titled 2001 debut, much of it on Wiese's own Helicopter imprint and the rest scattered across Misanthropic Agenda, Dais, Gilgongo and others. The band is part of what placed it in an LA Weekly ranking of the city's best punk bands, an odd but telling recognition of a noise unit.
What ties the project into the field at large is its cast. The collaborator list reads as a map of the experimental underground: C. Spencer Yeh, Kevin Drumm, Masahiko Ohno of Solmania, Sara Taylor of Youth Code, Aaron Hemphill of Liars, with recorded contact reaching to Merzbow, Smegma, Hijokaidan and The Haters. The name, taken deadpan from the actress, is one of the high / low gestures the Los Angeles scene favours and tells the listener nothing about the assault inside.
The Bureau's reading. Sissy Spacek is filed at Tier III as a distinctive, prolific Los Angeles noise band, notable for its cut-up grindcore method, its range from detonation to electroacoustic patience, and the breadth of the underground it has pulled through its rotating line-up.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene