When I was in college one of my Education professors was trying to describe the difference between Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. He said when his kids are watching the Street they're jumping around, distracted, in and out of the show, unfocused. When they're watching Mister Rogers though, they're attentive and quiet, and then they come to the dinner table and say things like, "Daddy. Machines don't have feelings."
This is the first time I've disagreed with Fred Rogers. The new Shredded Nerve, Milking the Predator Nest, kept reminding me of Nurse With Wound's Chance Meeting Of A Defective Tape Machine And Migraine. Which was odd, because it sounds nothing like it. CMOADTMAM was created by accident when irr. app. (ext.)'s Matt Waldon was dubbing a copy of Nurse With Wound's iconic first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, and the machine began to malfunction and the mangling of sound and vision began. They released the final results of the time- and tape-bending exercise as Chance Meeting Of A Defective Tape Machine And Migraine.
As I mentioned, Milking the Predator Nest made me think a lot about Nurse With Wound's unintentional release, but it wasn't because of what it sounded like. If anything, Milking is a distant, mean cousin to Randy Greif's The Barnacles Inside. But it made me think about what Mister Rogers had said about machines not having emotions. Milking the Predator Nest sounds like what Matt Waldon's defective tape machine must have been feeling as it was approaching its end, not quite in sync with itself, striving to catch up with time and constantly, spectacularly falling behind. A slow, steady wave of frustration starts to grow and by the end there's nothing left. Just the feeling of being spent in the service of finality. Pull all you want, Farm Boy. The teet is dry. Fucking excellent.
