From the Volcanic Tongue website:
2002 was the 20th. anniversary of the founding of The New Blockaders, one of the UK’s most consistently defiant and formally hostile experimental groups. Starting with their name, they combined a masked mythology worthy of the Justice League of America with a militant anti-art/anti-music stance. Their stance manifested itself in a series of obliterating aural documents and a string of ‘live offensives’ that did violence to feeble concepts of musicianship and technique. The core of TNB are Richard and Philip Rupenus. For all their lack of any public profile, this pair of provocateurs have had an absurdly disproportionate influence over the development of noise music. In the early 80’s they fostered vague umbilical connections to many key post-Industrial players, forming loose alliances that shed a little contextual light on an otherwise intensely personal and deliberately hermetic project.
They supported Whitehouse early on, collaborated several times with David Jackman’s Organum and once with Coil, on the 1984 Vortex Campaign cassette Dolbied. Richard Rupenus also recorded an obscure album for Steven Stapleton’s United Dairies label as part of Masstishaddu, as well as working as Bladder Flask and co-ordinating and producing the globe-spanning Mixed Band Philanthropist project. Their key early collaborator, however, was Mirror’s Andrew Chalk, whose Ferial Confine did much to energise the duo’s already profoundly nihilistic a-musical vision. Yet for all their grounding in the UK tape underground, their influence has been most forceful in Japan, where they have been eulogised by noisemakers like Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants.
The New Blockaders/Thurston Moore/Jim O'Rourke
The Voloptulist
Hospital Productions HOS-144
CD
Dream-team hook-up between a trio of the most important free-noise theorists of the modern age, the UK’s New Blockaders and Thurston and Jim of Sonic Youth et al. Hard to work out who is doing exactly what here – though the presence of drummer Chris Corsano on the second track is pretty unmistakable – but the overall feel is of one of TNB’s early Symphonie X works populated by thin strings of feedback, the crackle of electronic jack-to-jack friction and a subtle ring of bone. Beautifully eerie and a little more pro-drone than the bulk of TNB’s work. Second track is just unbelievable, with a slow hiss of feedback torn apart by Corsano’s triumphal, spirit/energy scattershots, marching a legion of ghosts all the way over the horizon. Highly recommended.
http://www.volcanictongue.com/newblockaders.html