Leslie Keffer "Represents: Live 2005" 12inch

“Vocals, Radios.” As line items on record sleeves go, that’s fairly cryptic – it could mean anything. But that’s what Ohioan noise artist Leslie Keffer was working with on the four live improv eruptions that comprise Represents, and with each live set in a string of them, she arrived at a different result. “The Union, Athens, OH, 3/15/05” is a car wax on acid until it’s an active trash compactor, multiple tonal prisms and pressures overloading for 12 gnarly minutes. The next night, in Baltimore, her radios and radio DJs unleashed ripcord after gnarly ripcord; it’s alternately conflagration, or primal scream therapy, or buzzsaws dueling. In New York City, she made her No Fun Fest debut with a querulous blizzard groove, while homecoming “Tusco Terror House, Akron, OH, 4/11/05” kneed and elbowed its way even deeper into hard, rollicking, scrambled-signal ecstasy. While a roughness characterizes Keffer’s other early recordings – as years passed, her sound became clearer, more refined and contemplative – Represents, ruled by chance and location, is by necessity a rawer experience, a valuable artifact of a heady, bygone New Weird America era.

-Raymond Cummings, April 2023