- The unfolded CD insert from Gravitar’s 1997 album Now the Road of Knives. I don’t have the rest of the packaging—the water damage is from a house fire.
I worked in college radio in the early 90s—a fertile period for fucked-up guitar music—and a few weeks ago I tried to put my memories of those years to good use. I compiled a short list of lesser-known 90s noise-rock bands for a dear friend who loves the Jesus Lizard and Rapeman but isn’t quite old enough or obsessive enough to have heard about, say, Phleg Camp, who put out their one proper full-length, Ya’Red Fair Scratch, in 1992 (and who barely exist on the Internet today). When I got to the bottom of my mental catalog—after dredging up Star Pimp, Shiny Beast, Ed Hall, Nimrod, Barkmarket, Slug, Craw, Caspar Brötzmann Massaker, Distorted Pony, Zeni Geva, and maybe a dozen more—suddenly I remembered Gravitar, a band about whom I knew literally nothing but their name.
Gravitar used improvisation to write their music, and it shows: Now the Road of Knives is almost entirely instrumental, and its barely structured meanderings collage together frenzied drumming, hypnotizing riffs, ritualistic noise experiments, distorted dub, meditative interludes, warped Krautrock eruptions, and hands-down the most unhinged use/abuse of fuzz, delay, and whammy pedals I’ve ever heard.
