I was looking for something different to listen to and this certainly didn’t disappoint. The label, Finders Keepers, describes Beth Anderson’s I Can’t Stand It as a collection of “yoga punk, tantrum raps and combustion pop”, and I really like that.

Born in Kentucky, Anderson studied avant garde composition in California with luminaries the likes of Robert Ashley, Larry Austin, John Cage and Terry Riley. She did a stint in `60s San Francisco and boy does it show. The influence of the City Lights book store – unofficial home of The Beats – screams loud. As do seminal sculpted streams of consciousness such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. For this comp, 7 tracks from Anderson’s back catalogue have been selected: 5 short, plus a pair of longer pieces. 

On the former her poetry is rapid and rhythmic. Breakneck and breathless. Anderson’s mad, manic delivery born out of performances at galleries and loft spaces, summons the artistic melting pot of 1980s New York’t Lower East Side. Venues such as The Knitting Factory and Arlene Schloss` A`s Place on Broome Street and Bowery. Accompaniment is sparse, provided either by the funky trap drums of Wharton Tiers – Glenn Branca`s bandmate in No Wavers Theoretical Girls – or the cowbell and beatnik bongos of Michael Blair – who went on to work with Gary Lucas, Lou Reed and Tom Waits. Yes Sir Ree sounds like a carny barker turned on and tuned into The Last Poets. Curios, perhaps, to be filed alongside Moondog and Eden Ahbez, but something about Anderson`s energy and attitude also makes me think of proto-punkers The Monks and The Fugs. 

The first of the extended numbers, Torero Piece, has Anderson sort of “beat boxing” while her mother Marjorie discusses the history and dynamic of their relationship. Anderson Senior’s  patient civility offset by her daughter’s wordless exclamations, which begin like an unplugged, lo-fi version of Laurie Anderson’s  O Superman, and gradually get more feral. 

The second, Peachy Keen-O, is an abstract arrangement of reverb and echo, rustling percussion, spooky voices, the odd gong and guitar lick. Constructed from collaged snatches of eavesdropped conversations, and featuring singing that could have been cribbed from a radio music hall transmission, it has an eerie late night black and white movie dark fairy tale quality. Kinda Charles Laughton’s Night Of The Hunter meets fellow early `80s New Yorker sonic experimenters, Gray. Strange, otherworldly and sorta psychedelic in its own way. 

Beth Anderson’s I Can’t Stand It is out now on Finders Keepers.