Porest - Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery LP

Label: Nashazphone

Our Review:

Mark Gergis is one angry dude – and he has never had any qualms about making his audience squirm with the uncomfortable truths about living under the influence of America, with its messy politics, problematic foreign affairs and unsavory histories. Porest is the moniker that he has used for only a portion of his musical productions, as he also fronts the agit-prop Khmer-styled rock band Neung Phak and he's responsible for some of the very best collections from Sublime Frequencies (i.e. Cambodian Cassette Archives, Choubi! Choubi!, and of course Oman Souleyman, amongst many others). In the curation and context of all of those other records, Gergis constructs a viable alternative to what is marketed as "world music." With Porest, all the pleasantries that hang on those other productions are dropped in his naked expression of his "post-globalised hate pop, cabalistic text-to-speech drama and violent tape music against soapbox anthems and swirling barbed-wire psychedelia." The opening salvo to Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery is a ridiculous rap-battle via earnest radio-drama dialogue between Gergis and a sampled voice who constantly demands for Gergis' passport. He later parodies the politics of progressive liberals, who blindly leap into any revolutionary cause without any self-reflection or existential grounding and may cause considerable harm to places like Syria and Iraq. Humor always plays a part in the politics of Porest, even as the subject matter can be deadly serious. Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery counters the lyrically driven pieces with a number of approximations of Iraqi-pop and Indonesian fuzzed-out psychedelia. Given that Gergis is working with Peter Conheim and Alan Bishop on these recordings, one can easily locate the aesthetics between Negativland and Sun City Girls.