Dave Phillips & Cornelia Hesse-Honegger - Mutations

• Dave Phillips, born in Zug, Switzerland in 1969 and based in Zürich, Switzerland, has been a purveyor of radical sounds
since the mid-80's, when he formed the very influential and short-lived band Fear Of God, often cited along Napalm Death
for pioneering the grindcore genre. After the dissolution of Fear Of God, Phillips intensiefied the performance with the
ensemble Schimpfluch-Gruppe, dedicated to continuing the visceral aesthetics of the Viennese Actionists. He is also
involved in a doom-metal project, called Dead Peni and in the noisy electro-acoustic quartet Ohne. Since a few years, he
has focused more and more intensely on field recordings of animal sounds, “pure” or reworked.

• Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, scientific illustrator and science artist, was born in 1944 in Zürich, Switzerland. For 25 years
she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the natural history museum at the university of Zürich.
Since 1969 she has collected and painted with painstaking detail leaf bugs, heteroptera. Since the summer of 1987,
following the Chernobyl explosion, she has been studying the mutated morphology of insects found in the regions hit by the
radioactive cloud, starting with the Ticino region, in the southern part of Switzerland. She later expanded her research to
the areas adjacent to power plants, such as in Gösgen (CH), Leibstadt (CH), Sellafield (UK), Krümmel (G) and
Gundremmingen (G), as well as the Three Mile Island in the U.S., and the Nevada atom bomb testing area. In 1990 she
travelled to Chernobyl itself. These researches have resulted in articles and books which brought controversy in the
scientific community.
The cover depicts a mutated and a normal looking head of drosophila subobscura.
All original source material used for the pieces on this record was recorded out in various places in Thailand and in Vietnam between
1994 and 2007. These pieces can be considered as articulations between the constructed works of Dave Phillips ( such as. ‘They
Live’ ) and his pure field recordings pieces ( ‘Frogs Rain’, ‘Ghi Am Viet Nam’ ). He is here indeed juxtaposing, layering, condensing,
stretching, distorting, - in one word mutating - these sounds into balanced progressions, punctuations and dense climaxes which
generate an overwhelming and sometimes uneasy environment. “Mutations” is an hallucinatory cinéma pour l’oreille, unsettling,
brooding, ominous, but always restrained, controlled. The sprawling ebb and flow, the unsettling and recuring waves of animal
activity, lead you progressively closer to the horror. “Mutations” is a lysergic trip to the heart of darkness, and a warning about the
devastation at work.
The LP was mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD) in Philadelphia.

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