You Are Playing Like A Fuckin' Pub Band part II

You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band [2]
The 7.17 From West Wittering Is Late Again
Cassette. 30 copies each.


Featuring:

Dylan Nyoukis/Ryan Jewell

Onomatopoeia/Sudden Infant

Dieter Müh/Balinese Beast

Cheapmachines/Concrete Violin

BBBlood/Emil Beaulieau




To buy or not to buy? That is the question. Whether it be nobler to make holes in ones bank account on the off chance that what you’re buying will be listened to more than once or take solace in the fact that it might be worth a few bob on eBay in ten years time. I have to admit that I haven’t been spending much moolah on recorded medium of late. In fact I don’t think I’ve bought anything from my preferred retail outlets this year and to them I give my condolences. I don’t even download stuff anymore. I just don’t have the time to soak it up. It’s one of the reasons I jacked in the printed zine game. Lots of people want to see their name in print and will happily bung you their latest wares for review but after a while you end up floating in a sea of procrastination, anxiety and self doubt. That ever growing pile of review material becomes a monkey on your back. You end up not listening to things and when you do, not listening to them properly. One spin and a few words and its off to the next. After a few years of this you wonder where the joy went in actually receiving review material. That big fat package from America is now a lead brick that means you don’t get to go out of the house on Saturday [your only free day] and instead of soaking up some summer sunshine you find yourself in a small dark room trying to think up interesting things to say about the umpteenth noise release to cross your path this month. Since the demise of the paper wing of this venture review material has trickled to a crawl and for that I am  honestly grateful. It now means I can concentrate more on what I do get. The fact that I don’t buy that much material anymore means I can go back to what I used to buy and this time really listen to it. Because when you start treating music as background or as something to fill a space I feel it loses its potency. It becomes just another commodity. And I like to take my music seriously. This is an ongoing rant by the way, you’ll find different versions of the same whinge in previous posts.


If I’d have bought these upon release they would have cost me a tidy sum and I did consider coughing up the necessary nuggets but that anti-spendthrift jag digs deep so I decided to let these pass. After a previous post in which I commented that it was quite possible that an artists greatest work could lie in obscurity on a ridiculously limited release I did wonder if any of this lot had submitted a hidden magnum opus just for the sheer perversity of it. I think Onomatopoeia did.

For those that missed the boat there were six of these cassettes, all released for one day as part of a movement to get people back in to record shops. You could only get them in the shop on the day but by the miracle of reviewland the rest of the set arrived marked as ‘black copies - private collection’. I couldn’t have been happier. After careful perusal I don’t think that there’s a hidden classic but it did shine some light on to that enigmatic English project Onomatopoeia who after years in the wilderness has emerged with something quite startling. The rest veer from ‘I want to hear that again pretty soon’; to ‘I never want to hear that again’. One side has a UK based artist the other from shores afar. I’ve reviewed the Smell & Quim/Family Battle Snake so heres the rest:




Dylan Nyoukis/Ryan Jewell:

Nyoukis has been fraternizing with vocal deformity for a while now. I’ve seen him share stage with the likes of vocal juggler Phil Mintion and its a joy to behold. His shrine to Jaap Blonk fills an entire room. Here he sounds like someone with Down Syndrome straining to pass a hard turd. Its pretty funny. I hope the facial gurns matched what I heard. This is a positive review by the way.

Ryan Jewell attempts something similar to what Nurse With Wound did with ‘Rockett Morton’ in that a phrase of dialogue loops back on itself becoming slightly phased along the way. Oh hum.


Onomatopoeia/Sudden Infant:

Has Onomatopoeia been hankering for an IRCAM place? Has he been brushing up on his 50’s Stockhausen? We last found Ono Man resurfaced on another West Wittering release, a vinyl stretch of an old cassette where odd instruments became something else entirely. Ono Man is now all sonic swoops, analogue burbles, dreamy star dreaming, all Daphne Oram, all Astro, all spacey lost in space, floating in space, watch this space. We need to hear more of this new Onomatopoeia as it all sounds very promising.

Sudden Infant go all Jacopetti soundtrack on us but its still unmistakably a Sudden Infant track. A weird knocking of drums that could be a mock African tribal beat with car horn, scratchy records and a nice lady loosely tied to a tree in a leopard skin bikini going ooh ahh oh no you brute etc… mock live applause for and aft.


Dieter Müh/Balinese Beast

No mistaking the Mighty Müh. Ominous Industrial loop churns, unsettling atmospheres, malevolence hanging in a thick oppressive atmosphere. Even the audio limits imposed on cassette dubs cant hide the fact that the production levels here are of a distinctly high quality. Another one to add to the stupidly hard to get hold of DM catalogue.

Balinese Beast are new to me. A Greek. No doubt a friend at arms with Family Battle Snake Bill Kouligas. What’s it sound like?  Sounds like Jap noise screams, box abuse, jack socket destruction, silence, Evil Moisture, sonar beeps, gabba vocals, feedback, synth farts …

Cheapmachines/Concrete Violin

Cheapmachines by name cheap machines by nature. Phillip Julians project garners much praise and deservedly so. Here he comes over all TNB junk scrape but the Industrial whirr is never far away. A series of short excursions [on a series of tapes that aren’t very long to begin with] that showcase Mr. Julian’s penchant for experimental noise of a machine based nature.

Not heard much by Concrete Violin before. In fact this could be a first for me which seems odd since this American solo project has been around since 1999. Cue French dialogue and then lots of straight on noise coupled rather oddly to bird song, aircraft taking off and voices. I can’t say it set my heart a-skip but it was alright in a kind of luddite noise fashion.


BBBlood/Emil Beaulieau

I’m pretty sure BBBlood used to be Baron Bum Blood which links well with Emil Beaulieau’s alter ego Ron Lessard and his RRRecord label/shop/empire. Though what the two R’s in RRRecord stand for I don’t now … maybe Right Royal? Ripped Rectum? Regal Reginald? Robotic Ruminant? Real Round? Maybe Ron had a stammer? Both do noise of course. BBBlood chugging along quite nicely thank you with some found sounds and junk scrape coupled to a droney thing. Emil Beaulieau does cardigan noise. Would we have it any other way?


Like I said some of these tapes are on the short side, maybe C15’s or even C10’s. A gathering of their work on CD release wouldn’t go amiss somewhere down the line either.