WOWEE ZOWEE (16)

By: Jason Loeffler
April 18, 2018

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the subject of our favorite albums of the Nineties (1994–2003). A new installment in this series will appear each Wednesday during 2018.

SECOND TOUGHEST IN THE INFANTS | UNDERWORLD | 1996

I was an atrocious college student. Quaintly self-destructive, I frittered my student loans on Namiki fountain pens, library late fees, martinis at the Excelsior Inn, and lavish gifts for not-so-pretty graduate students. I racked up incompletes and failing grades and later left without a diploma. Stranded in a small, mossy city in the Pacific Northwest, I needed a quick way out of the southern end of the apocryphally named “valley of sickness and death” into which I was slowly sinking.

Sometime before my exodus, however, a godless South African design professor suggested I look into the work of an English design collective: Tomato. Already known to me for remixing the jankiest technologies available (8mm film, faxes, Letraset, etc.) for gigantic corporations, I dug a little deeper and learned that two of the firm’s members had a music project: Underworld. I made a quick trip to the worst record store in town and had a listen to their then-recently released second album. Everyone there told me their first one was better. How would I know? I’d never purposely listened to electronic music before, much less acid, house, techno, trance or whichever raver-hippie ghetto I’d assumed they’d arrived from. One press of the play button and I was floored.

This was a new landscape. This was ecstatic digital music made on a well-oiled mechanical typewriter: winding chains of tintinnabulating arpeggios framed by hyperactive hi-hats, pulpy stream-of-consciousness lyrics, vocoded Delphic chants interrupted by occasional guitar, a faint whiff of dissonance, and bass that didn’t let up until the power went out.

After the campus design lab closed for the evening, the willowiest lads from my program decamped for the 24-hour off-campus Kinko’s. My cohort bobbed in mindful unison to the overwrought spiel of Blur, Pulp, Ride, and other 4-letter bands, while I rocked out to Underworld’s Second Toughest in the Infants. While they designed perfectly acceptable and professionally perfect logos for non-existent businesses, I busied myself crossing the Art of Crass fuck-all with the daintiness of Jan Tschichold: cutting up specimen books, fixing them with scotch tape, tearing it all up, passing them through the copier again and again until I was left with a fractal typographic mess. On breaks, I stood in the rain, drank coffee, smoked Camel Lights first, then straights, with my Discman pumping, pumping away and experienced something approaching joy. I had new music that, to this day, remains new. Pulse and pathos arrived to me from 5,000 miles away on thin, silver disc and I was ready to accept the miracle.

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WOWEE ZOWEE (16)

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