Nun Gun is a multimedia collaborative project between visual artist Brad Feuerhelm, and Lee Tesche and Ryan Mahan from Algiers. The group's first album, Mondo Decay, brings together a 144-page book of Feuerhelm’s post-industrial photography with an original soundtrack cassette produced by the two musicians.
The music draws inspiration from an eclectic source, Italian exploitation flicks from the sixties and seventies, particularly from the mondo, cannibal and zombie genres, and directors like Gualtiero Jacopetti, Umberto Lenzi, and Lucio Fulci. The place of the brutal tropical regions and landscapes is taken by the West and the shortcomings of capitalism, and Nun Gun emerge with a compelling concept and a firm foundation right off the bat.
Tesche and Mahan deconstruct the timeless work off horror/exploitation maestri, Riz Ortolani, Roberto Donati, and Fabio Frizzi, and take it to an all around genre defying dimension, drifting between the boundaries of disparate styles like industrial, noise, doom, jazz and psychedelia.
The release features contributions from greats such as Pop Group’s Mark Stewart who shines in the Frizzi/Zombie-based no wave-bent oddity, Stealth Empire, which provides a good taste of what Nun Gun is all about. Other guest acts include ONO, Mourning [A] BLKstar, authors Blake Butler, Sohail Daulatzai and Michael Salu, visual artist Luiza Prado, and musician/designer Farbod Kokabi.
Mondo Decay is out now through Witty Books and Algiers' Bandcamp.
Witty Books
ZR