Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs - 1958/Santos
Sonic Oyster Record. CDR
Picked a couple of Sonic Oyster discs up at the Volcanic Tongue stall at Instal 08. I was probably drunk and gurning at Keenan’s missus at the time. Oh you can have these as trades for all the stuff you sent she tells me in her American drawl. Cheers our kid I reply in my best heavy woollen tones whilst snaffling them into a pocket and keeping them there whilst I slept on sofas and ate chips and deep fried sausages and fell asleep during three hour skronk outs because I’d been deprived of my eight hours and comfy bed and Weetabix and replaced it all with J&B and crafty fags and veg curries at three in the afternoon.
And after a very pleasant journey home down the west coast mainline in glorious winter sunshine I returned to Idwal Towers and in the best of moods I stuck 1958 into the slot and the room filled with the sound of a Glaswegian raga. Because both Youngs and Paine and [by implication] Sonic Oyster Records are Glasgow based. Young plays the bass and a Japanese flute going by the name of a Shakuachi whilst Paine plays electric guitar and percussion. Add all that to Youngs lost sounding, solitary note bass plucks over that lonesome flute and you have a 24 minute mind healing joss stick session in your hands. There’s more to these 24 minutes than that though, at times I feel as if I’m in In-di-ah and the Ibex are on the dusty red horizon others I’m in the spaces that Throbbing Gristle used to occupy on works like Hometime, drifting electric winds of grizzled melancholy. Better than a massage. Well almost.
1958’s second track Armorial Sands drifts in like a B-movie flying saucer before setting up a peppy chakra beat that collapses into scatter drum shots and a crescendo of warbling flute and bass runs. Both tracks leave me in a sate of bliss hit repeat-ness. Paine and Youngs have worked their magic over me. Their sounds settle like dust motes through a sunlit window and best of all remain unclassifiable. In a genre filled world this is manna from heaven.
Santos is equally as beguiling although the trips are shorter. Paine and Young are credited with cymbals, drums, gongs, ring modulation and shortwave amongst the Shakuachi breaths.
Besides working with each other on numerous releases they have each in turn interbred with multifarious dabblers of the sonic arts and released a staggering amount of music. Sonic Oyster Records is Paines own imprint and worthy of further investigation.
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