Reissue of the second Harry Pussy LP, "Ride A Dove", originally released on Siltbreeze in 1996.

"By 1996, with one LP, a handful of 7"s, and a couple dozen gigs under their collective belts, Harry Pussy had thoroughly scrambled the mid-90s scuzz-rock ecosystem. Their acclaimed first LP, described by David Keenan as 'a black hole that devoured genre and flattened any attempt to classify it,' fused Japanese noise, '80s hardcore and post-Ayler jazz into a dense, white-hot ball of punk anger and insanity. The band's newly expanded trio lineup of Bill Orcutt, Adris Hoyos and Mark Feehan toured with Dead C, Sebadoh, and Sonic Youth. Thurston played their video on MTV's 120 Minutes. Nirvana gave them shout outs. Everyone expected the sophomore Harry Pussy LP would be more of the same, a logical next step, a synapse-melting punk orgasm that would shatter the coke-bottle spectacles of noise stoners, record store clerks, and college radio DJs across the USA. Instead, we got Ride A Dove: a 30-minute, tempo-less, musique concrète collage of feedback, whiny Sonic Youth fans, overdriven room tone, hijacked jungle beats, unhinged screaming, and the near-constant squall of the self-oscillating low-pass filter on Orcutt's Korg MS-20. Recorded on Sony Walkman and Tascam Portastudio, mixed through a RAT distortion pedal, then chopped and scrambled with SoundEdit 16, it took to new heights the Siltbreeze tradition of terrorizing mastering engineers by burying everything with shitty post-production (cf. Jim Shepard's Radio Shack reverb on his Picking Through the Wreckage With a Stick LP). Thanks to the single unbanded groove on each side (and similarly unindexed CD), the relationship of Ride A Dove's 'songs' to its listed song titles -- which allude to Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, and most of all, Black Flag, whose 'Rise Above' is echoed by the malaprop of the album title -- was decidedly obscure. One might be forgiven for characterizing this career anti-move as a simple challenge, an 'ok, sell THIS' to an unsuspecting distributor -- Matador Records, who surely had no idea what they were getting into when they scooped up Siltbreeze for a manufacturing and distribution deal -- or to fans naively anticipating simple catharsis. Rather, Ride A Dove is an intensely personal document of a disintegrating marriage and band; a snapshot of an era when noise groups were unexpectedly emerging from complete darkness into mere shadow; a diary of questionable decisions regarding marital fidelity and drug consumption. It's a raw, vulnerable record that is more Rumours (1977) than Metal Machine Music (1975). In the aftermath of Ride A Dove, and the near-apocalyptic Harry Pussy/Shadow Ring/Charalambides tour that followed it, life went on. Bill and Adris split up, guitarist Mark Feehan decamped, and Harry Pussy soldiered on for a few more records, including the sleeper double LP Let's Build a Pussy (EMEGO 146LP), which perhaps stands closer to Ride A Dove's high-register wail and conceptual monomania than any other of the band's recordings. As for Ride A Dove itself, the intervening decades has made it almost fashionable, yet harshly adorned in a raggedness that's as cozy as a fiberglass sweater." --Tom Carter

Christina Carter from a blindfold test in The Wire

Harry Pussy “I Started A Band” From Ride A Dove (Siltbreeze) 1996 [After crowd noises at beginning] Oh! It’s Harry Pussy! I don’t know what era this is from. 1996, from Ride A Dove. I haven’t heard this since... 96? The year it came out. Charalambides toured with them... I think the controversy has been settled. I felt it was a controversy because... make no mistake, it was chaos at times, from the audience’s perspective. However, I always knew it was a lie that [Harry Pussy] didn’t know or couldn’t control what was going on. There was one tour we went on where it was pretty out of control, but I felt that people didn’t realise it was chaos because they were pushing it towards that, or allowing it to happen; they had the ability to rein it in. Things were technically precise, they were executing complex pieces. [Guitarist] Bill Orcutt will say I’m a nerd for saying it like that [laughs]. One thing that has been great in the recent past is seeing him play and getting to spend a little time with him again. I think they’re amazing musicians, especially Adris [Hoyos, drummer], and that used to tick me off, the attitude of some people that she’s just randomly playing. It’s complicated when you get into technical ability, emotion, intent, but this is not random. This is organised, conscious music that had the ability to create a type of chaos, but also, if you could understand, because it was repeated night to night, a type of restraint and focus.

It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had because I was able to see them over and over. That’s an important part of touring for me, and touring with another band, to see how different people deal with these conditions, having to be up there in front of people night after night, how they handle that, what they bring to it. How they deal with being in the centre of whatever type of vortex it is. Touring with them was really fun, too. Do you think you have a handle on touring now? No, I haven’t had the chance to do an actual extended tour for a very long time. I think I got fairly good at dealing with the boredom, the routine. How do you keep yourself interested and excited night after night? You don’t. I don’t believe in building false excitement or interest. It would naturally come. You’re in a new place, you’re playing for new people. And hopefully there is an atmosphere established by the people putting on the show. I never went on tour where I played the same thing every night. If I was playing the same group of songs, I always had more than I would play in any one night. I never played them in the same way, often in radically different ways. And often I would make things up on the spot as well, putting myself into a precarious position. And that’s the exciting part, to see what’s going to come out of that. And sometimes failure is just as interesting, especially when you feel you’ve failed and other people disagree.