Sissy Spacek – Geometric Reason CD
Sissy Spacek
Geometric Reason CD
SSSM, Japan
SSSM-151
Sissy Spacek have been operating at the fringes since their inception in 1999, building a body of work that defy's easy categorization while continuously redefining the outer limits of sound. With a catalog that stretches from blistering noisecore to austere minimalism and blown-out maximalist chaos, the project, anchored by John Wiese and Charlie Mumma, has long functioned as both a band and an open system for collaboration, experimentation, and sonic extremity.
This new album, presented by SSSM, finds Sissy Spacek working in a distinctly musique concrète mode. It’s a dynamic, untamed collage assembled from electronics, acoustic instrumentation, and voice—cut, spliced, and reconstituted into something that feels immediate and disorienting. The album moves with restless energy, embracing abrupt shifts, dense layering, and moments of uncanny clarity that surface and dissolve without warning.
A notable aspect of this release is its vocal presence, which threads through the compositions with slurred ambience, a clear nod to Wiese and Aaron Hemphill’s project Strain of Laws, with the voice functioning less as a narrative anchor and more as a volatile material within the larger sonic architecture.
The lineup brings together a formidable group of longtime collaborators and core contributors. Alongside Sissy Spacek mainstays John Wiese and Charlie Mumma, the album features Mitchell Brown (Gasp, LAFMS), Aaron Hemphill (Nonpareils, Liars), and Jay Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed). Each brings a sensibility, resulting in a record that feels cohesive and constantly in flux, shaped by the friction and overlap between these varied pallets.
The album was assembled at Studio 2 in Altadena, California, under circumstances that inevitably left their imprint on the work. Following a displacement of nearly six months due to the Altadena fires, the return to the studio marked a charged and transitional moment. That sense of rupture and re-entry can be felt throughout the record in its uprooted volatility, its density, and its refusal to settle into a single mode.
The artwork, designed by Wiese, consists of five postcard collages that mirror the album’s compositional approach: layered, tactile, and assembled from disparate fragments into a unified whole.
This release also marks a meaningful connection between Wiese and SSSM’s Hiroshi Hashimoto, whose relationship dates back to August 2000 in Nagoya, Japan. The two first met at Tokuzo during a now-legendary lineup featuring K2, Government Alpha, and Tadayuki Miura. What followed in the ensuing years of correspondence and exchange, trading as a long-distance dialogue, now finds a new expression in this release.
Sissy Spacek has a deeply rooted history with Japan. Their 2018 tour included a stop in Nagoya at HuckFinn, sharing the bill with Contagious Orgasm, Gang Up On Against, Mürmür, and Chaos Channel. Over the years, they’ve also released work through a number of key Japanese labels, each highlighting a different facet of their sound: Dotsmark (including both a grindcore album and a collaboration with Hijokaidan), Hello From The Gutter (noisecore), Daymare Recordings (spanning minimal and maximal approaches), and 777 Was 666 (loop-based industrial noise). Taken together, these releases underscore the project’s remarkable range and its love for Japan’s experimental and noise underground.
With this new album, Sissy Spacek continue to expand their already vast sonic vocabulary. It’s an album that is shaped by time, distance, and reconnection, both personal and musical, while remaining firmly committed to the group’s core impulse to push sound into new, unpredictable forms.
