Issuing forth from Hove on the UK's South Coast, Evil Dick's "Coprophagism" is invert aromatherapy, mephitic devilry to stink up pop culture. 'Digitally cosmeticised', it says on the back of the CD, but the music within lets off a spirited raspberry at all things cyber. Repetitive beat syndromes warp, fromage and die. It's as if the wily fox that is the New Complexity has escaped the brown violin backwoods to enter a world of mobile phone bleeps, wristwatch alarms, aleatoric scatology, and other such rosy cheeked epiphanies. Not that it's all satire and cheese. The music's pauses, timing and sense of lyrical exposure envince a music al sensitivity - shy, lip-trembling, nubile -rare among post-lllbient extremists.
In a North London pub, Evil Dick (let's keep 'real' names out of it) explains his gripe with the world. Is he some kind of obnoxious latterday punk? "When I was 15, ten years ago, I wrote a song called "Slaves Of The Ford Escort", "he says. "But I wasn't listening to any punk. It was about my grandfather, who was in a car accident. He lost his ability to speak clearly. When you're growing up with someone going 'Whearghugh' all the time, it's weird. He had a sense of humour and was a kind of musician. He had a Bontempi organ. He used to give us tapes of the things he improved. He had the preset chords with the little finger punches. He used to cough halfway through, the dreaded cough. You'd have this brrrmmm [he makes a vibrato/tremolo sound]and this mournful, slow melody in the right hand which would be totally atonal. I transcribed my first piece from one of his tapes."
Writing down music from the age of 12, Evil Dick's brushes with tradition were haphazard: some piano lessons, playing blues records in the school classroom at lunchtime. How did the idea of becoming a composer arise? "I think it's teenage lo-fi-ism", he says, "when your rubbish tape recorder is your only musical equipment other than a bad drumkit and a bad piano. You mess around, and there's this unmentionable Evil Dick voice in my ear that says you can have a go, and it doesn't matter. I found a way with a bit of sellotape to hold down one of the tape recorder keys halfway, so that I could record the drums at various speeds. It fucked around with motor. That sounded better than my drums.
"Naturally, A-level music was horrible, while a subsequent music course at Bretton Hall near Leeds resulted in him becoming "more and more introverted". "They were doing bloody Oasis covers and I was thinking -this is a degree?" he says. "I became the aloof member of college. It's hard to be a composer. You've got to put up with grumpy musicians who genera lly don't want to do anything. I can't find anybody of my age who wants to do stuff like I want to do." Is that why Coprophagism was realised on a computer? "Yes," he replies. "I like computers, but ideally you do both. It's a social thing when you work with other people. It looks better. How can you perform with a computer or just play a tape? It sucks."
At present, Evil Dick is working for a Hove based dance label, but he abhors the commercial limits of the dance scene. As far as he's concerned, dance is a form of entrepreneurial gangsterism, an alternative route to big bucks. "All these guys understand is the timbre of current dance, and a bit of the place where it stops, because they know everyone in clubs likes that, they can take a break, take an E, then get back on with it. You've got the parameters of music -rhythm, melody, the sound -and it seems to me that if you're going to progress you need to progress on all fronts.
"I don't like Salvador Dali," he continues, expounding his aesthetic. "You can recognise everything: there's an ugly tree, a melted watch. I like to abuse technology, not just employ it. I was thinking of Nancarrow, Webern and Cage when I composed a piece called Expt In 5. It sounds random but in fact it's a sneeze. By sneezing onto a piece of graph paper and taking the co-ordinates of each droplet, I used the data to define the parameters (velocity, duration, etc), positions and tessitura of the notes. That was Expt In 5, the mucal version. Then I went to work and constucted Expt In 5:1. I placed the rhythm from the sneeze over a modulated pentatonic scale in five layers, each with fractionally different tempi. They start on the beat and then go gradually out of phase."
Unlike the systems music this suggests, Evil Dick's melodies have an unusual pungency. Maybe that's because his concept of the avant garde is less a protected realm of untrammeled freedom than a critique of the false and unthinking liberties of the shopping arcade.