A COLLECTION OF THE MOST HEINOUS SOUNDS
FEATURING
THE LOST ATHENS TAPES
“I walked around until I ended up back at the start of nothing to find out that all I believe is dead, nothing is everything to dread and all that’s left is read…”
NOW AVAILABLE ON iTUNES, SPOTIFY, AMAZON, YOUTUBE, AND WHEREVER DIGITAL MUSIC IS FOUND
Where do we start?
Music is not the end of the game; there’s always a lot more to the story than what you hear. Heinous Bienfäng remains an underground master of visualizing music with a cinematic aftertaste. Audiences would leave wondering what the hell they had just seen, and questioned what was real/unreal/really-unreal, and be asking whoever would listen when they could experience it again. “Not another fine bloody mess” was the day manager’s mantra on clocking in for their shift the day after a Heinous performance, finding a stage littered with feathers, fake blood, random pieces of toast, Krispy Kreme donuts, and on occasion (if they were particularly fortunate) some jello brains, fish carcasses, and a band member passed out behind the drum riser.
Ten years ago Heinous himself met a tragic fate when a treatment-slash-experiment schemed up by David “The Doctor” Dreyer (Legend of the Seagullmen) and Brent Hinds (Mastodon and Legend of the Seagullmen) went awry on stage. Hooked up to a big machine that should have mutated him into a creature that could sing, Heinous and the apparatus were struck by a bottle (a five-gallon water bottle, to be precise) hurled by a passionate fan. In a flash of rancid smoke, Heinous became no more.
There were Heinous sightings from time to time, but nothing credible or concrete until Christmas of 2017, when Heinous was discovered living on a desolate sandbar off the coast of Cocoa Beach, FL. Imprisoned by pirates and gangsters that had conspired to keep the idea of Heinous Bienfäng suspended forever. Luckily, a tribe of manatees rescued him from his watery cell, and migrated him north passed the pirate goons and henchmen capturers.
Inside his tattered suitcase full of stage props, wigs, and empty Mickey bottles were this random collection of masters he had collected over the years.
In 2005, the band recorded with David Barbe in Athens, GA during Hurricane Katrina. The ensuing mayhem from the storm led to a series of hasty coincidences and disparate fates that banished the master tapes into Heinous’s prop case, to while away a dozen years, unreleased until now. The session featured Johny Muhumba and The Doctor (in those days aka MC Negativity) on guitars; Armadillo Nosebleed on Trombone, Keyboards, and Theremin; Throbbing Non-Toxic on bass; and Tungsten Sodomy Bingo on drums, all joining Heinous’ signature growl. The tracks from these sessions are “The Heinous Nation”, “Mouthful of Bunny”, and “Birthday Song”. Also, a new version of “Take Me To The Right” first recorded by Heinous and His Cheap Moves (Oranga Tanga) in 1991.
Makin’ It Nice For The People was released in 2003 and feature Chunkyhalatosis on bass and Orudis Wasbe on drums with songs produced by Clint Steele in his studio and by the band and the late Peter Crescitelli at Man-Or-Astroman’s Zero Return studio in Atlanta. Songs from this album are “The Fever of Sound”, “Danger Makes Me Happy”, “No More Staring at the Sun”, “Cut”, “The City of Lies”, and “Pushin’ on the Nipple”.
“Satan’s Camaro” was the title track for one of the first Enhanced CD’s ever released, in 1997. It came with a printed comic/trail guide, and extra material should you be bold enough to put in your computer’s disc reader. Produced by Shachar Oren in a Little Five Points studio in Atlanta, what was essentially a one minute song was extended to ten and recorded cinematically to the timing of the movie by the same name.
Live sessions recorded on WREK 91.1 FM, the voice of Georgia Tech, in 1996 feature Aaronoscargrover and Goofy Fra Diavolo on guitars, and give us “If Trees Had Tongues” and perennial show-closer “Fish”.