Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Porest – Tourrorists! (2014 Digital reissue)





Let's Roll

Tourrorists! – The fourth full-length album from your one-man detonator, POREST has just been reissued digitally. Tourrorists is a diabolical luxury excursion through swirling Mid Eastern psych-rockers, contraband cut-ups, illegal pop epics, Guantanamo disco, and instrumental songs of political sabotage. This 2014 digital reissue has been remastered and completely reconsidered for your current life – which is much worse since Tourrorists was first released. Unfortunately, Tourrorists is more fitting for this decade than the last, so what do you have to gain? Let's face the facts – If nothing can start you, then nothing can stop you. 

Tourrorism is highly downloadable via iTunes and all the familiars. 
Click here for Tourrorists on CD Baby (with sound samples)
Also available on original Compact Disc format (Abduction Records 034) via Forced Exposure


Video:

•  CONTINENTAL REVOLT   •  HOYDA

Press:

An outrageous act of subversion authored by Iraqi-American musician, media prankster and cultural saboteur Mark Gergis, “Tourrorists!” addresses the political climate and media-constructed reality of post 9/11 America with all the subtlety of an exploding pipe bomb ... Though it kicks ip a socio-political shitstorm, it’s still surprisingly musical ... Sprinkling the album with what he calls “instrumental songs of political sabotage”, he references Turkish psychedelic rock and infectious Iraqi pop, giving us a glimpse into the soul of the area that is often talked about, but rarely experienced – its rich history of creating art through joy, religious ecstasy, and passionate expressivity.  – Jim Haynes / The Wire

This might just be the most horrible album ever created … so badly written that I want to vomit … stupid instrumentation that doesn't make any sense ... This record is annoying enough to want to kill people, first of which would be the authors.  – Simon Thibaudeau / indieworkshop.com

Porest's music is thoroughly saturated with thought-provoking, point-blank politics that take deadly aim at many of the orthodox institutions that North Americans take for granted as "our way of life." Marriage, misinformation by major media corporations, domesticity, passivity, tourism, terrorism, the wholesale slaughter and exploitation of the so-called 'Third-World' by the U.S.A. and their allies (which includes us, unfortunately) ..."Tourrorists" will undoubtably go down as Porest's most inflammatory and most provocative work ... bound to piss you off or offend you in some way shape or form; and we mean that as a very high compliment.  – Aquarius Records

...Jars listeners into questioning the Orwellian slow-boil in which we're all currently immersed.  – Mike Rowell / SF Weekly

There is no doubt in my mind, "Tourrorists" is the definitive artistic statement on America's so-called War on Terror. ... Generally, I feel that music and politics rarely make good bedfellows. More often than not, the ideas pushed by today's musicians proclaiming themselves as "Political" or, even worse, "Punk Rock," either lack the intelligence to generate a real dialectic, are entirely hypocritical when one examines their lifestyles and ties to major multinationals, or simply continue to beat a dead horse that doesn't interest me in the slightest ... most of the music being made today seeks only to entertain, which is fine in and of itself, but where is the artist who would rather make himself a martyr than a minstrel show? The artist willing to be interrogated, hounded, and hated for asking the wrong questions, for saying what no one wants to hear? Mark Gergis is that kind of artist.  
– Heavy Vibes

I don't claim to understand every angle Gergis is working, but I admire his bravery in releasing an ambiguous, provocative album that could easily get him lynched in most parts of the country.  – Will York / SF Bay Guardian

"Tourrorists" might be the most devastating protest record since (Eugene Chadbourne's) "Country Music in the World of Islam".  
– Francois Couture / All Music Guide

 ... As current and confrontational a tip as creatively possible ... a venomous reaction to America, Americans and their ongoing war(s) ... uninhibitedly outspoken and thought-provoking sound-bite masterpieces ... hair-raisingly confrontational ... eerie and disturbing ... Porest lodges a well-aimed spit-wad into the eye of capitalist America. You can’t argue with the truth."  
– exclaim.ca


Porest – aka: Mark Gergis, is a composer, performer, producer and international audio/visual archivist. Across twenty years, Porest has released several solo and group efforts incorporating multi-layered music, off-pop songs, audio collage, field recordings, and surrealistic radio dramas. His solo and group live performances slip between heady multi-instrumentation, political dirty bombs and absurdist irreverence. Gergis is a co-founder of the experimental Bay Area music and performance collective Mono Pause and its offshoot Neung Phak, which performs inspired renditions of music from Southeast Asia. Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, an ethnographic music and film collective out of Seattle, Washington – and more recently, with his own record label – Sham Palace, Mark has found a platform to aptly share decades of research and countless hours of archived international music, film footage and field recordings acquired during extensive travels in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

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