ST 37 Ballardesque

ST 37’s “Ballardesque”: A Typology of Disaster “I’ve always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.” Charles Ransom in The Drought INTRO: The last time I saw ST 37 was in Tampa, Florida in 2023. They played in a pavilion constructed from assorted pieces of chromium and enameled metal—the radiator grilles of cars, reflectors of electric heaters, radio cabinets and so on—fitted together with remarkable ingenuity to form what appeared at a distance to be a bejewelled temple. That tour they workshopped the songs you hear on this album. Even in the embryonic form I heard that night, there was no mistaking the blistering psychedelic wall-of-sound DNA that permeates ST 37’s work. A sound that is a derangement of the senses and a roar of the alien and alienated fueled by a brutal Texas sun. Ballardesque feels to me like a work of amplified grief. A rage against the modernist myth of the future. Mid-20th century science fiction sounded a chord of optimism about the future. Huma