Tony Byker & Kev Byker Collaboration 1993

Sir Grand Citizen wrote
"Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm obsessed with the long-defunct grebo outfit GAYE BYKERS ON ACID. I still listen to their music quite regularily, even almost 20 years (!) after first hearing their mutated, dirty sounds. One of the things that has kept them 'vital' to me is that, both during and after the group's existence, a number of side-projects, alter-egos and elusive single-releases slipped through the cracks (to a generally disinterested audience, sadly). The thrill of the hunt, the slow determined process of eventually finding each and every GBOA-related release... it spurs me on, and keeps both the music-lover and the rabid-collector in me happy.

STEROID appears to be a project by some (at least one, maybe three?) ex-Bykers in the early 90's. Not much info is provided on the CD-artwork, nor is much info available on the internet as of yet.

The music on "JISM HARVESTER" is quite Byker-like, with the hard overamp'd guitars, the vocal movie-samples, and the slightly dubby asthetic.

Where it deviates from the GBOA-sound is in the song structure. A few songs have vocals, but only 2 have vocals which are clear-enough to make-out the words (or most of the words). And while the songs are long (the average track length is about 7-minutes, with at least one track besting 10 miniutes!), they often lack any sort of melody or standard set-up. Rather, they seem to have found sounds that they liked, and structured them to repeat, overflow, and repeat again with the occasional fill and sound-sample.

While that may sound like a damning statement, in fact it is far from it. I find that the structure and quality of the sounds works, and works very very well. It's a hard, abrasive album, the hard distorted beats remind me of Skinny Puppy (very high praise indeed!), while the riffing guitars and mutated vocals bring to mind industrial legends like Ministry.

And while the songs may seem to meander and wander aimlessly, it still ends-up working brilliantly! In fact, I found myself floating in a bit of a daze at times from the repeated beats and fuzzy aural highjinx.

A release definately for Bykers fans (in fact, track #4 "True Force" is like a companion piece to the PERNICIOUS NONSENSE track "Radiation", including much of the same rhythm, guitar, and "Taxi Driver" samples!!). Fans of the GBOA alter-egos Purple Fluid Exchange will find much to love on this release, as it really is very similar to PERNICIOUS NONSENSE in almost every way".