The Witch Trials: Jello Biafra’s eerie synthpunk side-project
After just one album, San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys were already towering figures of the Californian hardcore scene. Whipping up eager attention from his 1979 bid for city mayor and that year’s blistering debut single ‘California Über Alles’, frontman and provocateur Jello Biafra instilled a sharper pang of danger to the West Coast punk explosion, wielding acidic political excoriations and volatile live shows as viscerally documented on their 1980 cartoon nightmare of a debut Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.
During Dead Kennedys’ first European tour in October 1980, Biafra and guitarist East Bay Ray stopped by Morgan Fisher’s Notting Hill home studio in London to drink spirits and jam. Known as glam outfit Mott the Hoople’s keyboardist, Fisher had a second name for himself as an iconoclastic art-punk deconstructivist in the vein of The Residents, crafting the 1979 ‘compilation’ Hybrid Kids – A Collection of Classic Mutants and its Christmas follow-up Claws featuring inside-out covers of rock and pop hits, each track a fictitious band but all produced by Fisher.
Inviting The Sounds’ Adrian Borland and minimal industrial artist Christian Lunch, the gang picked up the nearest synthesiser or drum machine and began recording a totally improvised synthpunk collage of creepy keys, hissing beats, and toxic expanses of haunted electronics. While the horror fog renders definite band positions unclear, consensus dictates Lunch on synths, Fisher on electric bass, and twin guitar scrape from Borland and Bay Ray.
Biafra plants the seeds for his future spoken word ventures, slipping into the guises of deeply evil, nameless characters and excreting discoloured commentary on the scorched political landscape and societal rot with a degree of venom he’d never wield again.
Each of The Witch Trials EP’s four tracks crackle with live urgency and sonic dread, starkly established on the opener ‘Humanoids From the Deep’. An ill and corrupted terrain of disorienting synth-soaked deformity and buzzing noise, the perverse score coagulates and congeals around Biafra’s B-movie stream-of-consciousness vignette of “genetic mutations rising out of the water clawing, clawing, screaming” and ascending to white-picket suburbia with salivating, bloodthirsty want.
Indeed, each of the EP’s tracks – ‘The Tazer’, ‘Trapped in the Playground’ and ‘Meat Beat’ that follow – all lurch out of the speakers like bog bodies rising from a stagnant pool. No other release has quite captured what toxic waste would sound like if it were aurally translated, The Witch Trials collective dousing their punk experiments in corrosive electronic slime in horrible tandem with Biafra’s surrealist reportage.
One can sense Biafra’s keen stir of the unholy brew the gang has conjured, scoring lyrical collages of LAPD epileptic seizure guns and Agent Orange-riddled creatures from Vietnam crawling toward former US national security advisor Henry Kissinger for EC Comics-style revenge.
Released in 1981 on Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles with no marketing or credits in the liner notes of some issues, The Witch Trials EP was instead accompanied by the following cryptic passage: “The Elephant Man / Poses Nude In Our Centerfold / You Poisoned Our Parents / And Forgot About Birth Control”. Still dank and subterranean nearly 45 years later, The Witch Trials’ one-off dabble gifted punk one of its most fascinatingly lurid far-out offerings that glow ominously with undimmed energy.
