Michael Clough - MetaMachineMusic
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3” CDR. SLI028
Neil Campbell - Oystercatcher Salad
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3” CDR. SLI029
Hagman - Inundation
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3” CDR. SLI030
Daniel Thomas’ Sheepscar Light Industrial label keeps to its perfectly timed release schedule with three more perfectly timed releases. I’ve reviewed the previous 27 and as far as my now rapidly withering braincells recall I don’t remember reviewing a duff one. Or even a less than interesting one. Horrible word ‘interesting’. How do you like my new coat? Oh, its interesting. A noncommittal weasel word that gets you out of a hole when needs be. Like here.
Sheepscar Light Industrial is what I think of when I see the dead pubs at the side of the M621, or the rain making the suburbs of Leeds look grimmer than they already are. Its the same grimness felt from reading David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet [and if you haven’t and your penchant for uber noir Yorkshire grime runs deep then I urge you to investigate]. I see the stark brutalist edifice that is Millgarth police station and I think of David Peace’s 1974 and Sheepscar Light Industrial and the sodium lights that barely brighten the flyovers in Beeston and Hunslet. Leeds and its Ballardian industrial estates and edge of town shopping centers and overpasses and the long road down through Hunslet past the Tommy Wass where it always rains. This is where Sheepscar Light Industrial fits in. Its what comes to mind when I hear something by Daniel Thomas or David Thomas who together are Hagman or with any [and many] of their multitudinous formations and labels.
Hagman - The two Thomas’s with two ancient computers talking to each other. The gentle beetling of corrupt data chatter. Information exchange eventually morphing into something that is a dysfunctional rhythm. Something giving you just enough to hold on to, to help you carry you along on your trip from Sheepscar to Mabgate.
Michael Clough’s MetaMachineMusic is all pneumatic drill’s combining in to a two way drone where the analogue cycling is underpinned by a flat out shortwave radio line that phases and undulates throughout. I think it was Seth Cooke who took to task the council workers digging up his road at 7.30 in the morning by taking that drilling sound and turning it in to something far more listenable. Clough, a one time resident of Leeds and no stranger to its murky edges, has done the same here albeit ending up with something that modulates into something with far smoother edges. I dare say that an analogue synth has played its part here ironing out that drill until its a munched up mess of shortwave fizz and out there drone.
Campbell’s work under his own name is shorn of the far more in your face electronics of his Astral Social Club stuff and here is no exception. Hear a one second vocal stutter, an electric guitar played with a sawing horse hair bow, chirpy birds, a clanging drone. Like being stuck inside Big Ben with your grannies budgie at midnight. Here you can luxuriate in the grates and grinds. This is no disco remix. But it is, I’m reliably informed, an edit of a recent live performance. I hear the words ‘fish and chips’ as the thing beast disappears around the corner.
I have been quiet for quite some time and physical copies of these will have no doubt long since gone, but fear not for reward can still be found online.
http://sheepscar.blogspot.co.uk/
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