Sleaford Mods, Human Heads, Vibracathedral Orchestra. Kraak, Manchester.

Sleaford Mods
Human Heads
Vibracathedral Orchestra

Kraak, Manchester, 20th September, 2013.




'I don't like puddings'.


The Kraak exists off a narrow black brick sooted alley in the Northern Quarter of Manchester the kind of place where Engels and Peter Sutcliffe passed by both with very different intentions in mind. The bohemian quarter of Manchester, a place where the streets used to run with human filth and disease was the norm, a place where old age began in your 40's and people lived in cellars. The Empire.

Things have improved somewhat and you can now park your car on former slums and return to it several hours later to find it still intact. The pubs are still cramped affairs with 1930’s themed bar staff pulling Iron Maiden bitter, whilst across the street well heeled Manc pay £10 for three bits of tapas whilst washing it down with Boddingtons and Stella. They have record shops here too of course but according to the Undermeister the pickings are poor. After a spicy bowl in a Bradford style 70’s curry shop its up a few steep flights of stairs to a room with a stage and a wooden floor, a bar that charges made up prices for cans of red piss and a gents that will leak said piss into the venue - kind of. Some things in Manchester never change.

The Sleaford Mods aren’t wearing Keep Calm and Carry On t-shirts - they’ve come to cheer these miserable Mancs up and theyr'e succeeding. There's one young girl down the front whose swaying to the Mods pummeling beats and rants and she’s not just smiling, she’s beaming from ear to ear, a grin that would revive a dying man. Her hips are going like she’s warming up for a night at the Wigan Casino and she’s here with about fifty other souls to see the Sleaford Mods before they explode in the face of Saturday tea time mediocrity.

The Sleaford Mods are here to make your miserable existence that bit more bearable. Theirs is an existence laid bare, a shitty world full of shitty meaningless jobs and shitty pubs selling shitty overpriced beer to help numb the shitty life that people thinks great because we’ve got a SKY subscription, a 50inch telly and a two week all inclusive in Skiathos in October to look forward to. Theirs is a world of dodgy drugs and Amber Leaf 12 gram packs, tinned lager and pointless fights in pubs that used to be centers of social community but are now viscous drinking holes existing purely to see the clientele numbed before being ejected onto dog shit encrusted streets. Its a world few people write about or sing about or perform with any kind of grasp of reality or humanity, a world that is bleak but not without humour. Take them as your own my black hearted friends. The Sleaford Mods are here to help us on our merry way to the crem.

Its a simple set up - a lap top in front of which Andy rocks about clouding his face in a wreath of e-cig steam whilst Jase stands and rants in those flat Notts tones. Cans of lager are clutched and the songs come thick and fast. The whole things last about thirty minutes but seems like a blur that flies past in ten. They kick off with the new single ‘Mr Jolly Fucker’ before ripping into ‘Fizzy’ and ‘the cunt with the gut and the Buzz Lightyear haircut’ and the slightly more down tempo ‘Shitstreet’ ‘I built a swimming pool in my living room and I called it deep house’, a word that appears like a mangling of arse. The ‘Wage Don’t Fit’ and its chorus ‘When I said I didn’t like it, its because I really don’t’. One day we will all be singing these songs. Rants laid upon looped riffs with infectious melodies. Simple and effective.

Earlier in the day an Astral Social Club slot morphs into a Vibracathedral Orchestra jam which lasts for about an hour and takes us from synth bleat TG-ness to Faust forest follies to Eno-esque ambience. Six of them crammed on to the stage with a mass of instrumentation which they pick up and put down for about an hour, the thing shifting like the mutating beast it is. You can measure the intensity of any VCO performance by the amount of energy Campbell puts into it and about half way through he’s shaking like an off centre washing machine that has a lead brick in it. Its good to have them back.

A Manc filling of Human Heads had me scratching mine. Male/female one with electronics and the other playing a table top fan whilst ‘singing’ and at one stage bouncing a tubular steel chair on the floor. I had it described to me as Volcano the Bear meets or Milk From Cheltenham. Its just Manchester innit?








     

Ambrose Field - Quantaform Series

Ambrose Field - Quantaform Series 
Music For Solo Flute in Virtual Places.
Sargasso. SCD28071






Ah yes, the flute. An instrument of torture. Unless of course its in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Having been forced to listen to Jethro Tull as a teenager I’ve had an aversion to the instrument and just when I thought I couldn’t take no more the world of light classical gave us James Bloody Galway.

All is not bad though. Having discovered Hariprasad Chaurasia, the famed Indian classical flautist, who’s traditional raga’s are some of the nearest thing to aural relaxation a man can get, I will quite happily spend a relaxing summers evening listening to his sublime playing whilst drifting in and out of consciousness, my head resting on a bejeweled bolster as a loyal punkawallah brings me a mint julep.

So I was intrigued to see how Jos Zwaanenburg would tackle award winning contemporary composer Ambrose Field's flute compositions. Divided into two different sections each deals with the flute in a different way; the ‘Quantaform’ sections are where you hear the actual flute whereas the ‘Technoform’ sections are where you hear the ‘electronic ambient interludes where the flute is absent and only its echo “its acoustic after image” remains’. Needless to say, it was these ‘Technoform’ pieces that I found the most intriguing.

This is to take nothing at all away from Zwaanenburg’s skillful flute playing. The pieces are meant to be technically challenging. I’m no expert on the instrument but you don’t need to be to realise that what you are hearing isn’t Ian Anderson stood on one leg or James Galway going through ‘Annie’s Song’ for the umpteenth time. The way Zwaanenburg stresses certain notes and pitch bends others is certainly impressive, as are the way the acoustics contrast during each set of 'Quantaform's’. Ambrose’s idea was to compose each piece for the acoustic space he had in mind, working backwards by analyzing the acoustics of each space and then composing the piece for it.

Its the ‘Technoform’s’ that prove to be the more interesting part of the project though. Especially during the middle section [5-8] where Field manipulates the echo of half caught breaths and Zwaanenburg’s feathery cycling notes turning them into flighty ethereal drones. ‘Technoform 9’ produces an ominous industrial drone, ‘10’ an electro-acoustic composition, ’11’ you could call glitch electronica.

I recommend headphones and a healthy twist on the volume dial too for there is plenty of detail in here. Whether you can overcome your flute aversion is another thing but I’m glad I overcame mine.



       


Sargasso

Zwaannenburg plays Field

http://ambrosefield.wordpress.com/

Smell & Quim - Spaceshit

Smell & Quim - Spaceshit
Must Die Records.
MDR026


I first heard Spaceshit at Diz Willis’ wake. Not feeling quite sure as to what it was exactly I was listening to I asked current Smell & Quim accomplice Paul Harrison for clarification and when he said 'its the new Smell & Quim album' nobody could have been more surprised than me. For it sounded nothing like any Smell & Quim album I'd ever heard before.

Appearing at the end of the millennium on Nigel Joseph’s Mental Guru label its 40 continuous tracks contained prank calls to prostitutes, the theme from the Onedin Line, twisted beyond recognition songs, very little noise and a sleeve that had green aliens on it. It was, and indeed remains, the most ‘out there’ Smell & Quim release to date.

Spaceshit saw a particular Smell & Quim era come to an abrupt end. The death of Diz and the departure of Neil Campbell, Harrison and the slow falling apart of the Sowerby Bridge crew led to more drinking, less gigging and a hiatus of about seven years in regards as to any significant Smell & Quim activity. Containing contributions from just about everyone who’d ever been involved with Smell & Quim up to 2000 the end result was put together by Srdenovic and Holly Hero [no doubt over a few gins] and is in some ways a tribute to Diz and those Sowerby Bridge years.

Thanks to Must Die Records re-releasing it in a split track format you can skip to track 19 and ‘Fannies and Priests’ to listen in on a drunken conversation about shagging that must have taken place in Graceland [the house cum studio in Sowerby Bridge where drink sodden S&Q activity loomed large] at three in the morning [or, quite possibly three in the afternoon] after large amounts of alcohol had been consumed. ‘Fannies and Priests captures for posterity the slurring before it turned into snoring and then there’s ‘Fucking Ada’ which consists of thirty seconds worth of a room full of drunken people shouting 'fucking Ada' at the tops of their voices. A snapshot of everyday folks lives in a hill side West Yorkshire town circa 1999.

Littered throughout Spaceshit are two recurring tracks of an Hawaiian nature in which a lap steel and a Martin Denny rhythm are fed through short loops upon which a manic ‘yeah, yeah yeah’, some pummeling drum and bass and the sound of a needle being carelessly pulled from a record are slopped all over it. 30’s Jazz, 80’s pop and old blues records are all looped and mutated into shapes far distant from their origins. Frantic film voices become deranged chatter, stuck CD’s come and go, The Hollies ‘He Aint Heavy’ is just about discernible [going backwards, stuttering, breaking up] under a drum beat that's also treated and breaking up and going backwards. When Milovan sings ‘Too Much Dipsy Doo Will Make You Cooney’ right near the end of it all on track thirty six against, what is possibly Stewart Home reading from one of his books, you want to punch the air, pull down your pants and tip a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine down your neck in drunken homage.

There is little in the way of ugly noise on Spaceshit and some people may find that rather odd. What It does have though is buckets of Smell & Quim humour and a gentle hint of nostalgia. After listening to it again for the first time in 13 years I now find myself loving every daft sodding minute of it - the juvenile track titles: ‘Any Other Arsehole’, ‘Master Testicle In the Knickers of Time’, ‘Can’t Fuck, Wont Fuck’, ‘Beef’, the recurring Hawaiian lap steel, the dopey prostitutes who don’t realise they’re being taken for a ride [‘do you have any girls who can do circus tricks?]. Every daft and glorious sodding minute of it.

Thirteen years later its a sentimental ride and an affectionate one too. A release whose purpose is that of a fingerpost to a time past. It is also, quite possibly, the best Smell & Quim album to date. Go and argue over that one. Over a few beers obviously.       



Must Die Records

The Black Neck Band of the Common Loon / Patrizia Oliva & Jason Williams

The Black Neck Band of the Common Loon - The Fleshing Beam
PRO030. CDR 100 copies.


Patrizia Oliva & Jason Williams - Untitled
Setola di Maiale CD



What fun, what jolly japes. An hour or so of Brighton improv and some Italian noise with an Eastbourne filling thats the common link courtesy of Jason [to give him his full name] Williams. Or as I call him the six foot nine inch length of peripatetic noise thats more likely as not to be found on a bus or a train or cramped uncomfortably in the back of a car trailing halfway across the country on the off chance of deafening a few people in a room above a pub.

He’s been ‘at it’ for as long as I’ve been writing this drivel but never have I seen anything appear with his given name on it before now. I suspect a maturing, a growing of sensibilities, a chance to put his name to something. Literarily. 

Having abused guitars and noise boxes for years it seems only natural that he should bring these forms to his involvement with Brighton improv duo The Black Neck Band of the Common Loon who when not grubbing around in Hectors House and various other houses of Brighton ill repute are chilling with Unky Thurst and doing their best to keep improv alive in the land of salad and cock rings.

Having just soaked up a few bars of improv courtesy of some Smegma offshoots in the last review it seems appropriate to pluck their 'The Fleshing Beam' from the pile. Where we find Andy Pyne playing drums and vocals and the curiously named Blue Pin playing electrified violin, piano and ‘whine’ as well as even more drums. They take on collaborators now and again, mainly as ballast I assume, this time with the aforementioned Jason Williams as just down the road accomplice. To it all Jase throws in modified cello, tenor sax and of course, electric guitar.

And it works a treat. Over eight tracks and fifty minutes worth with the moods swinging from all out thrash to Pharoah Sanders fluttery flute solos to sparse drum rattle and tinkly piano. Strings are tugged and frotted, when the vocals appear they’re buried deep in the mix so that they emerge sounding like Native American chants except that the Indians have had too much fire water and things have gone all sloppy. All this on ‘Static Pleasure’. Breathy flute like wheezes are forced gently down the neck of a sax and are joined by scattered drum rim shots and a forbidding sounding church organ that mutates into a moaning vocal drone. Beats or rhythms that are more like slightly speeded up funeral marches or quick march Eraserhead themes are slathered with wild cello [Force Feeding The Flock]. On one track theres some kind of garbled language that sounds like a Turkish stall holder shouting his wares or a call to arms by an overzealous Iraqi or is this a Lightning Bolt cover all played out to massed spazzed out drumming and masses of guitar abuse. If anything our Mr. Williams bosses things a little, I guess he can’t help himself, not that the rest would have complained seeing as how the results are so effective  


The collaboration with the Italian vocal improvisor Patrizia Oliva on the other hand harks back to Williams earlier days as noise provocateur when making a racket was all that counted and bugger the aftermath. After what turns out to be probably the worst first track of a release I’ve ever heard, anywhere, by anybody here now and in all likelihood, the future too there does appear to be something of worth lurking within but bugger me if it didn’t labour in revealing itself.

Oliva’s voice is a gentle thing, a child singing nursery rhymes or a dreamy Japanese schoolgirl absentmindedly moaning the lines of a J-Pop song whilst staring out of the school window. An ethereal presence that when left alone is a very strange thing to listen to indeed but when slathered in Williams own brand no-fi noise gubbins becomes a so far out there what-the-fuck moment you have to wonder whether this was all one big joke on the Wire magazine or a genuine attempt to reconfigure whatever clash of genres this actually is. Oliva’s vocal moments are few and far between alas. I’d have liked to have heard more but when calm does descend, to a level of barely heard buzzes and shuffling, we’re left with too much of Williams glitch dub noise and too little of Oliva. A curious release and one that's had me baffled for quite a while now. I’m either so far off the pace these days I don’t even know my own arse or this is the new dogs bollocks. Someone else decide for me please.

 

Foolproof

Black Neck Band of the Common Loon. Bandcamp

Seto Di Maiale

Bandcamp

When I was younger I soaked up as much music as was humanly possible. Having very little money meant that, like a lot of other kids growing up in the 70’s, I had to tape music off the radio and even the TV and when money did come along, usually in the shape of a gifted fiver or maybe a WH Smiths record token I’d spend all Saturday afternoon perusing the selections on offer even though I knew exactly which record it was I wanted and which record it was I would be taking home on the bus with me. Singles and LP’s were played over and over again until the lyrics became ingrained. Sleeves were poured over and ruminated upon, talked about, ogled, held in awe and inspected for hidden messages. Run off grooves would be held up to the light to see if there were any jokey references from the pressing plant. Tapes were made from LP’s I borrowed off friends but no matter how hard I tried I could never get an album on to one side of a C90 thus ensuring that lodged in the memory for ever more would be the last track of an album that cuts off mid word. Picture discs and shaped vinyl only enhanced the pleasure. A record with a picture on it. Whodathunkit? Coloured vinyl. Smelly vinyl. Clear vinyl. You lapped it all up and wanted more. You could never get enough. And when a mate mentioned a new band that you needed to hear a tape was produced from a top pocket and you took it home and looked at it as if it held the secrets of the universe and when you played it you knew that just maybe somewhere in there the secret of the universe lay waiting.

Then you started working for a living and you could afford to buy a lot more music. And your record [and tape] collection grew more quickly. Now you could afford to take risks and some of the records [and tapes] you bought were not only the recommendation of friends but those of writers of music papers like Sounds and the N.M.E. and Record Mirror and soon you began to realise that some of the people reviewing didn’t share the same tastes as you and you ended up with records you didn’t like that much and they got sold on to second hand record dealers or mates that wanted two copies of the same LP so that they could play it on their stacker record deck thus enabling them to listen to both sides of the record without having to turn it over.

And then they invented computers and the internet and the world of music shifted on its axis.

Having every note of music ever recorded available to stream and download may seem like a dream come true to someone like me but I find it anything but. I now find having too much music available to me a distraction. Having everything ever recorded [almost] within my grasp is like being a kid let loose in the worlds biggest sweet shop except that after being in there for a few years I’m now sick of it and look back on the days when I played a record to death and ogled the sleeves with great fondness. Hard drives have been filled as have memory sticks and DVD’s, all full of countless thousands of hours worth of music, most of it still un-listened to, uncared for and ultimately unwanted and all I want to do is spin a Roy Harper LP I bought this afternoon for £2 in Vinyl Tap.

There is only one way to combat this fear and that is to go back to how I used to listen to music. I can do this with whatever format of music I care to choose, I prefer vinyl but I'm not averse to CD's and cassettes and MP3's but the overriding factor is one of familiarization. I’ve been adopting this method for about last few years now which is why the review rate has dropped off the end of a cliff. Coming from someone who used to write a zine and listen to tenth rate noise CDR’s with my finger pressed on the fast forward button I know which method I prefer.

In the early days of downloading it was all Napster, and then Myspace appeared [and oh how we all laughed when Murdoch bought into that clunky monster and turned it into the biggest turd on the web] and when Napster got caught by the goolies any number of soulless P2P’s chock full of bugs and porn appeared.

At the fag end of 2013 things have settled down and you can go legit if you want: iTunes, Spotify, YouTube [typing ‘full album’ into YouTube gives you 9,500,000 returns] and any number of other websites allow you to stream and download to your hearts content.

And then there's Bandcamp with which I’m now listening to the new Sleaford Mods album [and you should too]. I’ve found myself coming to like Bandcamp, mainly because I get a lot of CDR’s to review that refuse to play and the labels involved have a Bandcamp page where for absolutely nothing [barring your device and connection] you can listen to their output to your hearts content.

All of this so as to give my fellow traveller Rob Hayler over at Radio Free Midwich an enormous plug. Rob has set up a Bandcamp page whereupon you can listen to his own true Midwich-ing including a piece he played at the Wharf Chambers earlier this year that he dedicated to yours truly [still one of the proudest moments of my life]. Then there’s that other fine Leeds label Sheepscar Light Industrial who have yet to release a dud and whose physical releases disappear pretty quickly. And the Sleaford Mods of course, whose new album is yet a fine greasy smear on the MacDonald’s window of life.

Streaming and downloading has its benefits and I'd rather have it than not but the magic of those early years will never be replaced by a few clicks of the mouse.

  

Bandcamp

Midwich

Sheepscar Light Industrial

Sleaford Mods

Psychoyogi / The Subs [Cribers] / Half An Abortion / Early Hominids / Pigface Records

Psychoyogi - Opulent Trip
CD

The Subs [Cribers] - Spilling Gravy in the Castle of Unfathomable Terrors.
Crater Lake. CL003. Cassette. 50 copies.

Half An Abortion - Small Scale Demystification Quandary
Angurosakuson Cassette
Anguro 008

Early Hominids - Two Halves of Delirium
Angurosakuson. CDR

Human Combustion Engine - Goats Balls/Gods Balls.
Angurosakuson. Cassette

MSHR/The Tenses - Split Tape
Pigface Records. 019
Cassette. C40

Ju Suk Reete Meate - Solo 78&79
Pigface Records. 016
Cassette. C40


My doctor told me to stop letting the review pile approach insurmountable levels and to get on with it. After all, he reasoned, some of the stuff you get sent probably only gets listened to the once anyway and seeing as how you’re so far behind with the review pile most of what you’re reviewing has long since been sold out or given up for dead or forgotten about anyway. Its not like the world’s hanging on your every word either is it? And besides, the people who send you this stuff want an opinion within oh ... six months at least, and most important of all want the world to know that the thing actually exists. I mean some of these people had gigs to promote that were tied in to the release you were sent and that was like months ago.

As with Psychoyogi. Who despite being a mouthful had a gig in June to promote Opulent Trip. Psychoyogi sound like they like to listen to lots of quirky English 60’s band like Giles, Giles and Fripp whose angular jazz like leanings and oh so English tales of funny people they delivery with great accuracy. I also detect Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Soft Machine. The ghost of Kevin Ayers looms large. Singer/guitarist Chris Ramsing holds the thing together with a guitar thats a bright thing with many quick changing chords on it that runs to tinkly solos as the bass plucks out back notes. His voice resembles that of a 1920’s crooner meets Viv Stanshall singing into a lozenged shape microphone. Short instrumentals of the kind heard during afternoon spa recitals are sprinkled throughout but the actual songs are the stand outs. These guys can really play too as evinced in ‘Shadows’ with its breathy delivery and Zappa like sharp turns in the chord department. I found myself curiously drawn to their work but only because I do like the likes of Giles, Giles and Fripp and Soft Machine and some of Zappa’s more quirky output. If those names don’t mean anything to you then you may find their output totally alien but I do recommend you at least give them a go, but not before putting on your smoking jacket on first of course.

Also finding their inspiration in the past are The Subs[Cribers]. A sometime synth duo out of Stoke comprising of Markylooloo [Marky Loo Loo? Looloo? and Mika [Jarvis I think]. Six songs that sound like rough demos from an early 80’s Human League or a chipset Kraftwerk covers band trying to do Depeche Mode numbers. Which is no bad thing of course. It all works thanks to the harmony created by Marky Looloo’s half spoken/sung Midlands tones and Mika’s matching sing song singing voice. I see them both sat on the floor of a living room in Burslem, crossed legged, picking out their favourite preset rhythms and drum sounds from a cheap Casio keyboard before writing the words on the fly. A favourite track would be hard to pick but I did like ‘Blown Away’ and its line ‘Will I ever learn to fly’. The songs are so short and happy you can forgive them the worst sleeve of the years and the terrible band name. Impossible not to like and destined for cult status.  

The Subs[Cribers] appear on Pete Cann’s Crater Lake label whilst Pete Cann himself [under his still annoying everyone but I’m not changing it anyway ‘Half An Abortion’ moniker] appears on current Loiner Pascal Ansell’s Angurosakuson label. Stuff happens in Leeds and people need to know about it. Whether they’ll want to hear Pete’s junk noise more than once though is a moot point. The kindest thing I can say about Half An Abortion’s ‘Small Scale Demystification Quandary’ is that some of it almost sounds like TNB scrape. Pete likes to smash things up and when he does the results are usually pretty good but when he introduces masses of feedback over the top of it I find myself wondering if his quality control monitor is on the blink. The quieter moments on here are thus the more revealing ones.

Further Angurosakuson noise abuse comes courtesy of those Belgian ale connoisseurs Early Hominids. The pink elephant being what you see after listening to this at dangerous volumes whilst consuming the two halves of requisite numbers of Delerium’s that is all it takes to render speech, thought and coordination muddled. The conjoining of Neil Campbell’s Astral Social Club mutant beats and Paul Walsh’s Foldhead noises produces a delightful mixture of ear assault where the noise bleats crumple under the sheer weight of synaptic rupture of psychedelic noise. Nine tracks and 45 minutes worth, the highlight for me being track four which sounds like a disco being destroyed by an army of invading DJ’s all playing Merzbow’s Pulse Demon in unison on Technics coffins that they push into the venue on hospital trolleys. A mighty sound for sure. And again all Leeds based.

More Leeds based merriment comes courtesy of Human Combustion Engine. Yet another project courtesy of the Todd/Delaney hit factory. I saw Mel play an HCE set on her own in Todmorden the other week where the acoustics of the church the gig was held in did those eerie, spacey sounds a world of good. A total Moog synth experience if my decoding of the fools fonts on the sleeve is anything to go by and one that benefits from being all wonky on one side and more ambient on the other. If, like me, you have a few Tomita albums tucked away that you don’t tell anybody about, or have a hankering to dig out a Tangerine Dream album now and again, purely those early ones [not the first one obvs as that is neither meditative or electronic] that are all echoey and transcendental then this may be the one for you. This is more your thinking mans synth blather though with one strand hovering in the background going all wobbly whilst in the foreground the Millennium Falcon ticks over warming its engines up. Not one to confuse with Ten Pints Too Many or any other of those so called ‘vintage synth lovers society’  ‘bands’ that emerged in the wake of the Emeralds debacle but pure weird synth burble. A directionless wander in the greatest possible sense.

The Pigface label isn’t from Leeds, as any self respecting fan of ‘underground music’ should really know. The label started by Smegma member Ju Suk Reete Meate over thirty years ago has resurfaced mainly due to the resurgent interest shown in cassette only labels. Late 70’s and early 80’s Pigface records are now highly sought after items -  a measure of the importance with which they are now held. These guys were making crazy sounds when the rest of us were happy with what was left of the Sex Pistol making records with seedy bank robbers. Five cassettes have appeared over the last couple of years with two being handed over to 40’s jazzbo drummer turned Smegma collaborator Lee Rockey and the other from Tenses - another Smegma offshoot featuring Meate and Oblivia - who also appear here sharing a release with MSHR who, I discover, are a duo making noises with synths of their own making. The MSHR/Tenses is a collaboration between the two and as you’d expect its a constantly changing scenery of parps, synth stabs, spoken word LP samples and general all round buggering about in the name of jamming improv. Apart from an instance where someone goes a bit mad with a gong I found it all to be in the finest Pigface tradition. Think bells, toys, things that are shaken, rattled, banged, bonged, dropped, kicked, bashed and blown, plucked, prodded, patted, poured and popped, clanged, cut, creaked and coddled into a myriad juxtaposition of sounds.

The Ju Suk Reete Meates solo stuff is a different bag altogether with one side showcasing his solo guitar work and the other a session in front of a pump organ. There’s other instruments involved too including a bass guitar played by foot and some reel to reel tape loops but the main instruments ring loud. I’ve heard some of Meate’s solo guitar stuff before via the De Stijl’s reissue of his other 78/79 guitar solo work and this is a fine accompaniment to have. The guitar is loud and freakish, squealing along to the singing of bowed sheet metal. The loops appear like snoring insects, the records are stuck in forced grooves emitting remnants of 50’s rock and roll bands, the trumpet it doth parp and the guitar [electric au natural] a frantic spazzed thing, twanged hither and thither, scratched and slowly scraped down the length of one string bringing forth a joyous hum from the speaker. The pump organ pieces are the best work I’ve heard from Meate, not a Nitsch blast but a considerable presence all the same with a powerful drone emerging that comes at you like a twisted horror flick soundtrack played by a demented Dr. Mabuse. Through it all you can hear the squeak of the pump being pumped, in other hands an irritant but here most welcome and redolent of a quirky NWW Sucked Orange track. Not something you hear in church everyday.

To be thrust into the Smegma/Pigface spectrum once more makes me realise how boring a lot of other so called improv/experimental music is.








Psychoyogi

Craterlake

The Subs-[Cribers]

Angurosakuson

Pigface