Equus: In Dust - Magnet Womb/Hyperdeemic Nerdle [Peel Session] (12 February 1993)

I don’t remember seeing [In Dust] in anyone’s lists of tips for ‘93, but they certainly should have been. - John Peel during their session, 12/2/93.

In fairness to the tastemakers of the time, it would have been a brave soul to state that everyone would have been listening to the pile-driving techno metal of In Dust by the end of 1993.  Their high points are very high indeed, but it’s music for Hulking out to rather than party music.  And that’s never an easy sell.

The Peel Show got In Dust to do a session for them during a brief window when the trio were releasing records, namely the Bewildermental EP and an album called Nosebleed, which will give you some idea of what to expect when you press the play button. The band were still playing live in the mid-90s, but released no further records.

Magnet Womb is the stand out track for me. It fuses together the clatter and bang of Foreheads in a Fishtank with the audio vitriol of 70 Gwen Party from what appears to be the perspective of a particularly malignant form of incubus, whose progeny sits in the womb and appears to devour the vital organs of its carrier. As the lyrics state:

Your brain is now mine/ Your mind is now my lungs.

Tap into your knowledge/Eat it from the inside.

Swallow your intelligence/Use it as my own.

Written down, it reads as utterly grotesque, but set to music, it’s brilliant.

Hyperdeemic Nerdle is slightly harder to get a handle on given that the lyrics at times veer close to gibberish, but I also think it passes for what In Dust might put forward as a a particularly twisted love song. I’m probably projecting that take on it after the lines about having a talk by the wall, just as all coy teenaged couples seemed to do when feeling each other’s interest out. The track rocks as hard, maybe even harder, as In Dust’s fellow Ulstermen, Therapy?, and like them, In Dust use audio sampling of what sounds like police radio to fairly chilling effect. 

As for the two tracks which I passed on, Boredom Result rocks away like Hyperdeemic Nerdle and was on the list for inclusion, but it seemed slightly less compelling to me, albeit that it had me wishing I could be at a Boredoms show. Meanwhile, Auntie Christ deserves a prize for its title, but should have that prize rescinded for being the only one of In Dust’s session tracks that bored me.

Video courtesy of Wallcreeper Records

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.