Reviews:
(Chattanooga Pulse) Electro-madness one-man-band Honnda is perhaps like the aural equivalent of the comedic aesthetic of the VHS-obsessed video blog site Everything Is Terrible! or Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, with a playful strangeness that incorporates culture jamming and prankery into its sample-heavy, hard-edged beatbox-dominated tracks on its debut album Fantasy Remover. It is also, apparently, intended to be a workout album—surely, to be utilized in conjunction with some absurd exercise device seen on a late-night infomercial circa 1990. The man behind Honnda is Amnon Freidlin, also known as a guitarist for the visceral no-wave band Normal Love and a former member of the harsh Brooklyn post-everything group Zs, and his feisty, mischievous side comes out on Fantasy Remover unfettered, perhaps like a bizarro-world Girl Talk. For about half of the album, Honnda seems content to stay on his particular level of amusement and insistent stimulation without any semblance of high-art intentions, among a blasé female’s recitation of “Honnda, Honnda” or even excerpts from a customer support phone call, where his artificially pitch-lowered voice asks a woman if it would be OK if he sampled her voice and put it over some phat beats. (She politely declined.) Fantasy Remover gets better as it progresses into weirdness, where its sonic adventures are more pronounced, like on “Stay in Line,” which features a background buzz and unnerving pitter-patters of what sounds like electric guitar fretboard taps. The final track, “Feel the Burn,” answers the unasked question of what Janet Jackson’s music in the early ’90s might sound like with sampled no-wave guitar skronking. This writer is trying to imagine the appreciative audience for Fantasy Remover, which bears the challenge of possibly being too weird for dance-music fans and being too dancey for avant-garde-leaning aficionados. Nevertheless, Honnda seems happy to writhe joyfully, on a giant pile of VHS tapes and Janet Jackson records. - Ernie Paik
(Impose) With recent album announcements and accompanying stellar tracks from both Fuck Buttons and Eric Copeland, there is no dearth of electronic pulsating weirdness ready to be unleashed on the world. The latest in a string of avant dance music comes from relative unknown Honnda, a project operated by solo artist Amnon Friedlin out of Brooklyn. It has elements of both Tobacco and Dan Deacon but it also markets on the underground grime scene, making for a what turns out to be a complicated, unwieldy, and mesmerizing listen that feels like it's just fallen right off the tracks. You can listen to the whole Honnda LP, Fantasy Remover, at the Bandcamp here, but stream our favorite track below for a musical tartness that makes you want to dance, but you can't really dance to. - Dayna Evans
(Tiny Mix Tapes) "A goop of commercial radio pop, corporate surrealism, noise-tronica, and new jack swing designed to make you fist-pump so hard you explode into a ball of light…" Welcome to the world of Honnda, folks. Amnon Friedlin — renowned for his work with ZS, Mouthguard88, and Normal Love (of which he is a founding member) — has been hard at work dredging the backwaters of pop’s most remote watersheds for the rudiments of one screwed-up slurry. Britney Spears, Test Department, G-funk, New Jack Swing, the soothing voices of customer service representatives: these are but a few of the identifiable aural relics in the post-apocalyptic landscape known as Fantasy Remover, where summer never ends, the ice cream never melts, and the townies are all sporting Dorito sunburns. No, seriously — that’s the best way to describe the mutants in Friedlin’s latest tutorial-cum-music-video, entitled “How to Burn a CD.” It’s as though the members of Die Antwoord fell into a vat of molten Doritos (after eating too many carrots, of course) and emerged even more sinister and sillier than before. As for the pedagogy, well, it’s every bit as pyrotechnic as you’d expect, and you will walk away from this video premiere knowing how to burn a disc. Besides providing us with a fun way to put all our blank CD-Rs to use (or copies of Yeezus, take your pick), “How to Burn a CD” also serves as a tantalizing taste of Fantasy Remover’s scrambled pop palette. And, TMTers, it’s your lucky day, because Friedlin is hooking us all up with a FREE download of the new album, over at the recently-created Honnda Bandcamp. It’s also available on cassette, via Public Eyesore. Check it out, and feel your fist bumps carry you into the light. - Zcamp
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