Secret Fun Club Reveal the Dark Side of Legos in “Mastodon Rickles”

San Diego‘s Secret Fun Club has been the longstanding musical outlet for drummer and engineer Sal Gallegos (Some Girls, Three One G) and bassist John Rieder. An ongoing collaboration that formerly included guitarist Nathan Joyner (Hot Nerds, All Leather), the band has been making odd, challenging, and relentlessly heavy music on its own terms since 2000.

A duo of bass and drums since 2007, Sal and John began writing, demoing, and performing brutal new arrangements for two solid years, finally recording what would become the Three One G LP Skull With Antlers during the first half of 2009. With drums that call to mind Bonham (if he had preferred meth to booze) playing sides of beef and bass tones that alternate between motorcycle rumble and insectoid modulation and filtering, the band has mastered doomy, frenetic noise with occasional forays into quiet minimalism and copy-and-paste sound sculpture. W.T. Nelson (Geronimo, Bastard Noise) has collaborated with his brood of Trogotronic outboard gear to contribute painful frequencies across the range of human hearing. The newest album enlists his assistance again, along with equally brutal noisemakers Justin Pearson (Dead Cross, The Locust, Retox, Planet B), Sam Lopez and Esteban Flores.

Video by Nathan Joyner (Hot Nerds, All Leather).

101 was recorded in San Diego, CA by Sal Gallegos and John Rieder. Mastered by Nathan Joyner. It will be released digitally as well as on smoke-colored vinyl through Three One G Records. Preorder, here.

Secret Fun Club’s latest release, the wild-eyed brainchild of Sal Gallegos and John Rieder, once again show that these two have mastered the art of auditory experimentation. Fluctuating between moments of scientific static worthy of alien airwaves on “Billy Joel Osteen,” to seemingly straightforward jazz punctuated by soothing vibraphone and just-slightly-off time signatures that feel like a calm descent into madness on “Ted Nugent Was Goth in High School,” Secret Fun Club proves repeatedly that their creativity is vast and unrestricted by any one musical direction. An indulgence in volume and repetition, abrupt turns, and uncomfortable silences, Nathan Joyner (who also mastered the album) created a video for track “Mastodon Rickles” that fittingly gives unnerving, disorienting, and pixelated insight into a colorful but cruel Lego world.