BIRTH (DEFECTS) – Fictional Days

After punk came post-punk (the everything music), then hardcore, and after hardcore (ca. 1983) the brakes were cut. Many bands formed because their members could take elements of the music that made up their histories and backgrounds and apply it to instruments to bring upon the world the combinations of sounds they heard in their heads. In a decentralized market built around music scenes and their organs of outreach – zines, tape trading, show trading, low-stakes touring, indie labels, distribution arrangements, merch tables, and person-to-person contact – it was possible, sometimes easy, to show up and meet the people already involved. If you kept coming back, you could become friends. If you had access to an older, attuned sibling, or one of someone you were friends with, you may have benefitted from proximity to this world before your hand ever got stamped or X’d up. If you were really lucky, you lived in or near a place that bands regularly played, and if you were blessed you had access to a hub like a good college radio station or all-ages venues, you could be close to or part of musical projects, gain exposure, and enter this world as a part of a perpetual recruitment facility; ROTC for those whose fought a psychic war on a culture for sale. Put a young person already interested in this form of expression into the library of a college radio station and take a look at their face when they get in there for the first time. It’s remarkable and it happens to this day. Give someone with a ravenous appetite for all kinds of music more of what fuels them, and they’ll eventually form their own paths. Those with an affinity for loudness and an entry into the genre discover noise, and learn that a band isn’t even needed to participate, just some gear, maybe a table or podium or even just a rug, and the will to make it scream and throb. For those who noise is not a repellent, a whole worldview comes into play, and the gears may turn again: how does one add this sort of atonal violence to the concept of organized music? It’s also not a concept that plays well in most examples, and so wasn’t often considered; noise being chaos, music resembling order, with one inevitably getting in the way of the other, to where the noise needs form/format as much as the music. It happens now and again (thinking right now about the use of tapes in Steel Pole Bath Tub’s music, part sample/part horrific texture), but not always in the way you hear it in your head. When Sean initially told me about the concept of Birth (Defects), I had hope, because Sean knows about music and noise, be it 20 years ago or now, and like all people who know, have opinions strong enough to see their ideas through. This was an exciting notion because when you put these ideas together, it doesn’t matter as much as whether someone thinks it could work as much as it does that they believe it can, because they’re gonna do it. Instead of using noise as a gimmick or some marker within heavy music, Sean (vocals, electronics) and Rob Savillo (guitar) both believed there could be places within and on top of the songs that used noise as not just texture, but an element as critical as any other instrument. The idea in Sean’s head was, “What if Hijokaidan wrote catchy songs?” Well, guess what, Sean. I found one, and only one, great example of this approach working well, back when I was a teenager. And today, after about 30 years, I’m here to tell you that it exists – a reverse Discogs lookup, a knowledge of labels, and access to a file sharing platform you’ve probably heard of, led me to it, on a compilation from the Alchemy label called Aiyoku Jinmin Battle Royale, released in 1992. All I remembered about this CD was that it was in the library of my college radio station, all of the credits were in Japanese, and it contained a live cover of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” by a band with a fake name (Ash Ra Hara Temple), masking a collaborative one (Subvert Kaidan) with another fake name (Sabato Stairs). This was a collaboration between heavy/awesome Osaka prog trio Subvert Blaze and Jojo Hiroshige, lynchpin of noise familiarly known as Hijokaidan (and proprietor of the Alchemy label and record shop). Having the gaijin translation of the track and its makers was no help, because they also changed the name of the song to “The 21st Century Psychopath,” effectively burying it from existence. But it’s real. I played it four times while writing these liner notes. It’s a screamer. I’ve been digging through records and CDs ever since the ‘90s trying to come up with this track. And I’m here to tell you that along this path, I’ve uncovered records that only a few people in a certain area remember, with no effective means of sharing that knowledge to those who could really use the inspiration. Like the filmmaker Alexander Payne said, “you never know when you’re living in a golden age.” But any record might be the one that hits your internal tuning fork, dulls out all other stimuli and sets you on your path. You can get lucky and take home something that could change your perception of what music can be. — Or you can wait for someone else to do it. Fortunately, the concept Sean described is a tough one to scale, and Birth (Defects) got to it, put down the flag where they wanted it, after waiting for Savillo to come back in from the cold and return to music. Fictional Days is the final word, a representation of the group’s aesthetic further along than their proof-of-concept singles and tapes, to their long-in-the-works full-length Deceiver/Mirror. This is a band that changed around its primary influences, while leaving them, and their effect on the music, fully intact. To get to the story of what you’re holding: band forms under valid concept, executes, succeeds on their terms. Birth (Defects) have held Sean and Rob as their sole constants; their lineups have included three separate bassists, six drummers and a few second guitarists, all from their own scene in the Baltimore area. The lineups on these tracks span nine years and are split between alternate versions of previously-released songs, and covers that informed their sound and histories in music. Curiously, even the versions of tracks from 2015 and 2017 invoke a side of the band that plays a few shades darker and more withdrawn, fully in line with endless afternoon/void anthems like the Sonic Youth track “Sunday,” or anything that would’ve landed on the back half of any Nirvana record a la “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” Earlier Birth (Defects) records confronted you head on, but these hover in your blind spot before putting a black bag over your head and pulling you closer, and down into the No Trend-esque gravity wells (originally done by The New Flesh and SSD) that close each side. While “Postcard” by Sheffield post-punk group The Comsat Angels might appear to be the outlier here, its inclusion proves out the hypothesis I wrote above about where you get on board with music. Most people have to dig through the Earth’s crust to find this band, whose first three albums are deceptively and increasingly heavy, and portray a collective acknowledgment and acceptance of the fear outside one’s immediate sphere. Rob Savillo can tell you about why he came back to music after an early divorce and subsequent alienation from creative pursuits, and how that connection between the love of friends and the music that binds them together brought them back. I don’t know many people who discover the Comsats and don’t become forever attached to them, and even J. Robbins, who engineered the covers portion of this release, had only discovered them, and followed suit, because Birth (Defects) brought the song to the studio. If that doesn’t prove out the vitality of the connections between music and the friends who introduce you to it, will anything? If you take anything away from this record or this band, know that they did things exactly as they intended, made this sound precisely the way they wanted it to (hat tip Barrett Jones), did not compromise their ideals, and found it within them to stop and start back up when they needed to. Once you’ve finished listening to this in full, you’re in the small and important sect of people who will understand why. May you experience fictions this profound for the rest of your days, and find ways to make them real. — Doug Mosurock, January 2026