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Stella were a trio from Cincinnati (Ohio), consisting of
Kevin Hall on guitar and vocals,
Charlie Manion on bass and
Lauri Reponen on drums,
who engaged in brainy and virulent noise-rock on the five-song EP Love Songs in the Key of Drone (2010),
the six-song EP Idiot Loser (2011),
the seven-song EP Post-Grippo Empire (2013),
on the 15-minute nine-song mini-album Big Table No People (2014),
on the 20-minute ten-song mini-album Planned Obsolescence (2016),
which replaced the bassist,
and on Career Suicide (2018),
which contains studio-manipulated live performances.
The trio changed dramatically sound when it replaced the bassist with electronic keyboardist Tony Squeri, and renamed itself Stella Research Committee.
A Proposed Method for Determining Sanding Fitness (2021)
opens with the anarchic android jamming of Murdurd and
the piercing electronics of Nails,
and then gets even more hostile via
the frenzy of Sanding and especially
Hanging in My Screamer, torn between
dischordant Steve Albini-esque industrial music
and Pere Ubu-esque "modern dance".
The cacophonous minimalism Monologue is the overture for
the seven-minute The Blast Cabinet Conference, a
Sun Ra-esque astro-jam with visceral punk angst, and possibly their best song ever.
The highlights of Killed Alive (2023) are the
metallic industrial Production Deficiency Rehabilitation, with echoes of
SPK and
Nine Inch Nails,
the spastic tribal dance of Intergalactic Fraud
and the twitching and abrasive seven-minute industrial threnody C-Suite Overhaul.
(Copyright © 2023 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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