Bleep

After Roger Doyle saw his 1975 debut LP Oizzo No reissued by Cacophonic last year, the Irish experimentalist and company leader Roger Doyle now has Oizzo No’s follow-up Thalia (1978) given new life by Dead-Cert. Put this thing on and you can see why Doyle was named on the seminal Nurse With Wound list - Thalia is a set of ominous and psychedelic avant-concrete that disorients and delights in equal measure. Throbbing Gristle, Carl Stone and Roland Kayn spring to mind. Reclusive Irish electroacoustic artist Roger Doyle begins his inimitable Thalia with the same beeping snippet you’ll hear on the radio, just as the hour strikes before a news broadcast, as if to signal upcoming information of great significance. As it turns out, Thalia is just that, an essential work by a pioneer all too often overlooked. What ensues across the release’s runtime — three gargantuan pieces and one breather a third of the way through — is akin to an absurdist audio play, only the script consists of garbled crowd noise, desperate weeping, and a generous amount of atomic minimal drones.