Pleasure Is No Fun, Grand Mal’s 1996 album Re-Released

 

 Listen: https://share.amuse.io/album/grand-mal-pleasure-is-no-fun

Another lost album fetched from the abyss by St. Chriko and Stockholm’s Groover Recordings. This time  it’s 1996’s PLEASURE IS NO FUN originally put out by the late Terry Tolkin on his No. 6 label.

1. Grand Mal was a band that began in 1995 in New York City. The compulsion that drives the formation of any band is always the same: an impulsive, anarchic flight from society, propelled by something almost like romantic love.

2. PLEASURE IS NO FUN was the second record by Grand Mal. It was concocted using ingredients familiar to everyone: literature, history, pain, rage, heroin, Budweiser, love, joy and of course, desire. 

3. All the lyrics to the songs on PLEASURE IS NO FUN were written while riding the subway. To step through the sliding doors into a wheeled sepulcher, to travel beneath the earth, to contemplate the truth of the City, to marvel at one's place in the inverted catacombs above, was an endless source of inspiration. 

4. When the members of Grand Mal weren’t at their day jobs — drug deliveryman, shipping and receiving clerk, furniture mover, waiter — they rehearsed and worked on demos. Rock and roll was their only solace, their only escape from the absurd calamity of life.

5. Isn’t it miraculous that a spark of time, a slice of eternity is trapped and preserved every time a song is captured on cassette, CD, vinyl etc? Once the ‘play’ button is pressed, a simultaneity of present and past occurs, bending time, exploding it and giving us access to not only asynchronous temporalities but also discontinuous spaces. This is the miracle of recorded music. It is resistant to diachronic time, partakes of eternity and it is always untimely — it bursts the seams of historicity.