Vomit Lunchs is the name of an otherwise undocumented Japanese partner whose biographical record is restricted to the epistolary position the Hot Air partner has documented. The Bureau notes at the outset that the available record consists, in its entirety, of one Western-distributed document, one documented label-narrative position and a small number of later secondary references. The partner's personal name, city of residence, date of birth, activities outside the documented Hot Air partnership and later release are, on the available record, unknown.
The Hot Air documented narrative position discloses that the Vomit Lunchs partner was, by trade, a carpenter or possibly a house-builder, working at the sustained distances of the outer islands of Japan, and that the method derived from the sustained months of non-urban isolation with, in the Hot Air vein, only the sound of chickens and wind for company. The correspondence with the Hot Air partner was conducted through a fractured English idiom that the Hot Air partner has preserved in the documented narrative. The Bureau respects the thinness of the biographical record and does not extend it beyond what the Hot Air partner has documented.
The method: Vomit Lunchs's self-description is documented as ‘para-para-manga style’. The Hot Air partner has glossed the self-description as ‘a form of musique concrete audio animation flickbook, each sound equivalent to a flick book page with the pages firing rapidly at the listener, persistence of vision creating the effect of a moving composition’. The Bureau reads the method as distinctive: the manner operates by the analogy with the animated-flickbook tradition (the persistence-of-vision working principle the cinematic tradition has cultivated), applied to the sonic palette through the rapid-collage method. The Hot Air antecedents are the Stock, Hausen & Walkman tradition (the collage partner the Hot Air partner has documented as adjacent) and the Tex Avery animation tradition (the documented Hot Air comparison for the frenetic working energy the Lunchs position has cultivated). The Hot Air partner has documented the difficulty of distinguishing, in the Lunchs catalogue, the degree to which the sonic material is found and the degree to which it is Lunchs-generated.
The release is violent clash between killer bastards of ear dot Remix 3" (Hot Air / Fat, 23 January 1998, picture disc 3-inch CD). The document was the first and last picture disc the Hot Air partner released across the catalogue. The partner imprint was rechristened ‘Fat’ for the single document, on the basis of the cover image: a photograph of banana-and-pineapple fritters frying in hot fat, taken by the Dicky's Skull partner on the Brighton pebble beach during the documented post-gig hangover position. The Lunchs ambition, documented in the demo-letter cartoon-strip position, was for the document to be pressed as a one-inch-thick vinyl record; the ambition was, in the Hot Air partner's documentation, beyond the manufacturing position no pressing plant in the world was able to provide.
The Hot Air partner (the Brighton-based imprint and micro-studio operated by ‘Dicky's Skull’, the pseudonymous name of the partner) has documented the Lunchs position as the demo-tape partner the imprint pursued across the early catalogue. The Hot Air partner has documented that of the many demo tapes the partner received, the Vomit Lunchs position was the one exception that the imprint elected to release. The Brighton location is documented as having included the Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel partners as associates across the Hot Air catalogue.
The Bureau's editorial reading: Vomit Lunchs is filed at Tier II as one of the Japanese transgressive-noise tradition's most minor but distinctive positions. The single documented Western-distributed document, the ‘para-para-manga style’ method self-description, the documented carpenter / outer-islands working biography and the partnership with the Hot Air imprint constitute the significance the Bureau files. The position is adjacent to the Gerogerigegege early transgressive-Japanoise tradition (the Yamanouchi partner's sustained configuration), but operates at the more-minor mode characteristic of the 1990s Japanese cassette-and-mail-art network. The Bureau files the position because of, rather than despite, the thinness of the biographical record: the position exemplifies the Japanese tradition in which the sustained mail-art / cassette-culture / pseudonymous partner is definitional for the vein.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Renaissance · last revised c. the Anthropocene