Blarf, "Badass Bullshit Benjamin Buttons Butthole Assassin" (Stones Throw)

Who is Blarf? I wish I could tell you, but Stones Throw Records is deliberately keeping his identity a mystery. My semi-educated guess is label boss Peanut Butter Wolf, whose vinyl weighed a ton in 1998—it may be even more now. Whatever the case, this Blarf character hooked me from jump with "Badass Bullshit Benjamin Buttons Butthole Assassin," a title that demands immediate investigation. Your curiosity will be rewarded with some of the most insane sampladelic tomfoolery to smack you upside the noggin since Black Dice and Fat Worm of Error.

Blarf's Cease & Desist album is a hallucinogenic action painting of mangled-to-hell samples, noise explosions, ludicrous juxtapositions, judiciously selected spoken-word snippets, and head-nodding beats. On Bandcamp, Stones Throw cheekily tags this surreal collage as "devotional" and "hip hop," which is funniest thing the music industry has generated this year... intentionally, anyway. I'd bet your annual salary that none of the samples have been cleared through the proper channels. However, I have a hunch that the authorities would not bother to scrutinize the cultural anarchy of an entity named Blarf.

"Badass Bullshit Benjamin Buttons Butthole Assassin" is a maximalist bouillabaisse of disjointed funk beats, fun-house-mirrored tones and textures, and samples familiar and obscure, including Esther Williams's "Last Night Changed It All," Barry White's "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More," and Richard Pryor (cracking wise about religion). The amazing video—which is not safe for work nor for the maintenance of sanity—is the perfect visual analogue of the music. This is the audiovisual equivalent of the best worst acid trip you've never had. I give it two double-jointed thumbs up.

You can stream the album on YouTube and/or Bandcamp. If you're in LA on July 6, you can hit the release party for Cease & Desist at Lodge Room (all ages!).