This recycled cassette is one of the most mysterious, brutish releases I've heard in quite awhile. To describe them as absurdist only grazes the sane insanity on this release. Decadent, hopeless, but most importantly, humor of the cruelest, most vile sort. The theme? Well, one side of this ultimate example of DIY is primarily poorly recorded evangelistic hymns, and who knows how long those putrid renditions of death-loving Christianity existed on this marvelously fucked tape. The only way they can top this is that it gets devoured by a $1500 cassette deck.

Reminiscent of the ultra-rare recordings of The Splice Girls who existed in the mid to late 90's, they released a long series of thematic recordings of embarrassment and degradation, of moral inertia, most of which were designed to disintegrate via various chemical treatments, being drug behind cars in mud etc. I heard on more than one occasion that customers of The Splice Girls were outraged that this almost inevitably happened. Well, when music is currency for drug trades, ahem, you get art that dies. Along the way to the tapes of literal self-destruction, the point revealed was simple: The process underscored so many existential cliche's, but to my mind most of the recordings were the perfect marriage of form and content, also known as feces and piss.

Enter our current lovelies, Children of Scaremidget. Aside the near-nihilist snatches of sound and tape manipulation, COS tread the same ground as the afore-mentioned Splice Girls, as well as being reminiscent of Costes and Suckdog at their respective peaking nadirs. Paragons of smut they were, the standard during the golden shower era of shit tape music, such as when the “Drugs Are Nice” LP ruled the top 40 millimeters of swirling bowl water. Well, that aside, the tape itself has a prank element to it—or does it? I sense no real irony here. On one side there is Southern Gospel. In fact, it's peppered throughout the cassette because it existed on the tape before COS made the wise decision to use the dilapidated Christian worship of death. As I recall, The Splice Girls did the same on several recordings. I realize that many people hate this kind of anti-art, but I think dung like this is as necessary to the vitality of moving music and performance forward or backward or sideways, because, let's face it. When you're this fucked up, the inner compass fails almost always. It's rather amazing how something so decadent, toneless, and untalented can provide the counterweight for all those lame asshole carbon copies out there.

There's little redeemable here, and for that, it's all the mo better glues. I for one am glad COS decided to go through with keeping nobody honest, themselves included, and I'm elated to report—they reached me, and I'll not forget these CHUDs anytime soon, barring dementia. They reached out and slid their cruddy fingers around and into my void with their wonderfully inept vocal cut-ups, their bargain basement organs (don't work my side of the street, assholes) strewn carelessly across some horrible static and tape hiss. What makes this tape such a whimpering success? a truer document of total fucking artlessness has never been needed more than now, what with a world of arteests who risibly take themselves seriously. It's hard to argue against miscreants who so boldly represent the general state of things. Very nice to meet you. 10/10 -- P. Somniferum (2 December, 2009)