Your Overlords Want You to Hate the Cheese Mites

   The collection, "Your Overlords Want You to Hate the Cheese Mites," continues the development of the Cheese Mites. Recorded over the years 1982 to 1985, but probably more accurately 1983, the 'Mites maintain their basis of their sonic palette of feedback and loops, but with increasing maturity. "Oriental Mysticism" is a swirling mix of haunting vocals and rattling percussion, with muted fuzz tones randomized punctuations. In contrast, "Can I have My Slippers?" is four minutes of throbbing loops, graced with cascading arpeggios and buzzing tones.
   What follows is the absurdly brief blast of tremulousness - "The Alignment Signal" - and then, back to staccato motifs looped under the name "There is No Good Rocking This Evening." While loops are the theme in this album, "Last Words" finds Johnny & Williwill in a echo-drenched duet, where one guitar taunts the other, as two stumbling drunks would sloppily maul and berate one another.
   Repetition by way of digitized loops, however, returns in the colossally epic, 18+ minute long "The Calculus of Sentimentality." Here we find as complete a departure in sound, yet with virtually all of the same elements. Based upon a coda of gentle, lilting strings, and Johnny's echo-soaked voice seems to be disclosing closely-held secrets in a dreamy fog, yet intelligibility remains foreer cloaked, while Williwill weaves patterns of melancholy on a nakedly unprocessed guitar.
   There is growth in this collection, over the frenzied lunacy of earlier recordings. True, traditional song structure has only been dabbled in elsewhere, yet the evolving sense of "tone poems" continues to be revealed in the sophistication of execution.