Satanicpornocultshop: .aiff Skull

It would be more surprising to find a 60-minute-plus CD labeled an EP if it were done by just about anyone other than the purveyors of extreme weirdness via found-sound that call themselves Satanicpornocult. As it is, such incongruity is more or less expected of these guys, as they take a term that’s been outdated since CDs showed up and strip it of meaning just a little further. The .aiff Skull EP does the same for music in general; vocal snippets, beats, and random noises are cut up and re-organized into a spastic mix that tends to evoke hip-hop at its best moments, but usually just sounds like Kid 606 beating the shit out of the Chemical Brothers. “U Can’t Touch This” and “The Message” both play prominent roles in the way of covers that play like crayon drawings of The Last Supper (not that MC Hammer’s original was high art, exactly), a few remixes of tracks by other cut ‘n pasters show up to fill things out further (the remix of *es’ “Ghost 2” is actually kind of fun, mashing up Ray Parker Jr. and Michael Jackson to hilarious effect), and a lot of stuff gets broken. Oddly, all the chaos turns the surprisingly subdued and rather lovely “Porque te Vas”, itself something of a dubbed-out Portishead track with Nas (whose “One Love” vocals are here in sampled form) on backing vocals, into an album-defining standout. Mostly though, this odds ‘n sods collection of cut ‘n paste throwaways is just as inconsequential as it sounds — it’s ultimately little more than a vaguely interesting means to a massive headache.