BBBlood/Posset/Stuart Chalmers - Delirium Cutlet Impaste
Crow Versus Crow. CDR/DL. 50 copies
Gavin Prior - Always Summer Somewhere
Art Print + DL.
brb>voicecall - Cloth White Skin
Muzamuza. Cassette/DL. 32 copies
Its a well worn truism that a third of all restaurants go bust within a year of opening. Not that its stops people giving it a go. I can cook they say and with that sink 50K of their life savings into a little bistro kind of place where everything is going to be just so much jolly fun. Which it rarely is.
Like running a pub isn’t just standing behind a bar drinking beer and chatting, running a restaurant isn’t just serving up food and drink. For a restaurant to work there has to be in place all manner of requisites one of them being a decent toilet cleaner and if you haven’t worked that one out then your customers are on a one trip visit. I don’t run restaurants, I eat in them and if the shit hole’s a shit hole then you can bet the kitchen’s not much better.
It always amazes me how people get such important matters so horribly wrong; the dirty toilet, the grubby menu, the clueless waiting staff [a recent trip to Leeds saw me witness a waiter trying to bend a cork out of a wine bottle], the dusty dust catchers on the wall that have been there for ten years, the drinking glass with the lipstick smear, the table that time forgot.
A recent article in the local paper alerted me to the fact that the pub up the road had recently been refurbed and was now being run by mien hosts ‘Joanne and Kevin’ and that they hoped to see customers old and new in their ‘traditional English pub with a continental twist’. The ‘twist’ eventually revealing itself to be nothing more than readily available bottled continental lagers. Me and Mrs Fisher took it upon ourselves to visit said premises one Sunday afternoon when the urge to drink a pint of Guinness came on strong. So on a bright and sunny day we made the trip up the hill and found ourselves the only customers in the English pub with a continental twist. While the landlady glumly polished glasses behind the bar her husband played pool with their son shoving the odd 50p in to the jukebox to regale us with some shite or other. After sitting down with our drinks and appreciating the early spring sunshine the landlady left her glass polishing and began to close all the curtains until we were all in almost complete darkness. Looking at each other slightly baffled we watched in slack jawed incomprehension as the landlady brought in to life a TV screen the size of a garage door upon which she summoned the Eastenders Sunday omnibus edition. No they weren’t there come Christmas. Its a tale I’ve probably bored you with before but it paints a familiar picture and sets the scene for this ...
A recent Easter walk and drive jaunt around the Northern parts of England found us within the confines of a Spanish restaurant that had halloumi on the menu. This restaurant I will neither name or tell you the whereabouts of because the people running it [and guess what, they’re not from Spain] seemed like genuinely nice people who wanted to bring to a provincial northern town the taste of the Iberian peninsula. Or somewhere near there anyway. And there’s nothing wrong with ambition and wanting to have your own restaurant and being your own boss and so what if its not authentic, so what if its got halloumi on the menu? So what that the fishcakes are off the menu because the suppliers let them down?
Except that wasn’t all. The restaurant opens only on an evening, this in a place that is busy for eight months of the year and has visitors the year round. To contact the restaurant you have to ring a mobile number to make a reservation [‘I’m just ten minutes from the door of the restaurant love, I’ll ring ya back] and when you get there on your Saturday night the couple in question are having an argument over how loud the music should be [not flamenco obvs or even the Gypsy Kings but George Michael and various blandish soul singers] albeit in a good natured manner. The menu was short and ran to about fifteen tapas dishes and paella - seafood and chicken and £13 a head thank you very much. Tapas dishes were £4 each of which, for reasons that can never be explained, can only be ordered at a maximum of ten at a time. We sat at table near a couple with small children who were tired and cried and rolled around on the floor wanting to be anywhere but a Spanish restaurant in a provincial town in the north of England. There was a choice of about six wines and ridiculously cheap they were too. Our waitress brought us our plates and knifes and forks and placed them in front of us before issuing a cheery ‘enjoy!’ and then I noticed that she did that to everyone else in the room every time she placed something on a table; glasses, cutlery, food, bills. The wall on our side of the room looked like the inside of an IRA cell during a dirty protest, the other side was brick but had been deemed deserving enough of a coating of the same stuff. A bullfighting poster hung from one wall along with the word ‘ESPANA’. Our nine dishes arrived all at once on a huge tray and for the most part it was good. Not great, not Michael Winner historic, not even memorable, except for the wrong reasons of course and you’d have to go a long way to find a serving of clams in white wine sauce for £4. There was patatas bravas which were roasted potatoes with a tomato sauce topping, the bread was soft and white and had been drizzled with olive oil and what I’m guessing is paprika, the olives were fiery hot having been marinated in chili oil, the chorizo/green bean thing was good too but I never did work out what the melted white stuff on the top of it was. There was ‘Spanish rice’ too and Serrano ham that looked suspiciously like the stuff that comes in packets in supermarkets. But still, only £4 a pop.
With mostly empty bowls and plates in front of us and evidently having crossed the finish line the ‘enjoy’ waitress came back and placed everything on the table in a red plastic bucket and took it away. Table now empty we were given two shot glasses of clear liquid by the wife half of the team and after inquiring in to what it was we we were about to drink we were told ‘peach schnapps’.
Look on Trip Asdvisor and the restaurant in question gets good reviews; ‘lovely little restaurant, friendly atmosphere, we always call in here when we’re in town’, with just the odd grumble about the food not being that authentic and the wine being expensive [and if you think £13 for a bottle of wine is expensive you really need to just stay at home and watch Eggheads]. Which just goes to show that there a large numbers of restaurant going people in this country for whom authenticity only applies to fish and chips and beef dripping. Which leads me to Sleaford Mods and English Tapas and the unerring ability of the British to take something good and turn it into something not so good; like ‘pork pulled’ pizza on a supermarket shelf, and the bowl of noodles accompanied by roast potatoes my 80 year old father likes to eat in Huddersfield market and the curry in a giant Yorkshire he get's at the ICI Club.
All this apropos of nothing in particular suffice to say that the week spent walking and driving and steam training around the North of England was, for the most part, music free. Apart from listening to Pop Master on the Ken Bruce radio show whilst sat in the car park gazing in to the Hole of Horcum wondering if I’d ever get the use of my legs back there was little in the way of musical entertainment for the trip. A week to clear the aural sinuses if you like. A chance to indulge upon return and listen to music on vinyl. Except most of the following isn’t on vinyl. But does that make it any less authentic?
Before leaving I was impressed by the three way Crow Versus Crow split. The triple split being an item you don’t see too much of these days. Certainly not round these parts anyway. A compilation yes but the chance to get to hear three works of about 20 minutes each is a rare one and for the label a bit of a risk. Like all comps you’re unlikely to like it all but what am I talking about, this is 2017, you can do what the fuck you like with the digital version. Press on.
Posset, BBBlood and Stuart Chalmers have little in common apart from the fact they work on the edges of the underground radar. Posset is all dictaphones, audio vérité and the odd sample, whereas Stuart Chalmers works looped samples in and around his trusty zither like instrument of choice, while the Baron [I cant help but call him that] is known for his noise work. Listening to these three works though, there’s every chance that some kind of cross contamination has taken place, the Posset track ‘What’s Going On’ is sweet mix of heavenly Albanian polyphony, dreamy Eno-esque piano, edited to death gobollalia and his daughters birthday party and is by far the best work I’ve heard from Posset. The dictaphone still looms largest of course and ultimately its this that gives Posset his now distinctive ‘sound’.
Chalmers’ begins his ‘Birth of the Bamboo Medusa’ by stretching some panpipes cassettes out of shape through the wonders of heavy duty capstan abuse. These loops slowly evolve NON style until we arrive at the eerie scrape of shovel over concrete, a Stapleton like drone, a tin whistle gone wrong and the voices of the dead trying to talk to you. Appearing incapable of recording anything like dud material Chalmers stature grows with every new release. Am I repeating myself here? The way he takes you through this twenty minute piece is a total delight and I know I keep saying this but had he been doing this in 1979 Steve Stapleton would have more competition.
The most surprising track of the three is the Baron’s. BBBlood’s ‘Absent Lottery’ is not the box twiddling noise roar I was expecting and is instead a collection of environmental recordings captured on phone and cassette and treated in the confines of the homestead. A departure then, a new direction and one that works well, for when the track eventually unfolds from its lo-fi noise and sometimes very indistinct field recordings there emerges a loop of not inconsiderable beauty. The roar does come eventually, a burning bonfire of pallets but its job is but to herald the end of proceedings and what is, I’d consider, that rare thing, an essential three way split. Trebles all round for Crow Versus Crow and all involved.
So is it Chalmers thats influencing those around him or is this just a good time be having your ear near the ground? Is it Chalmers we have to thank for The Baron producing found sound loops or is this a leaning towards more sample and looped based genre of a yet to be defined category?
Gavin Prior, the Dublin based composer, sound artist, guitarist and bottle washer has graced these pages before with what I remember being a pastoral tinged, guitar plucked ambient release featuring squeaky play swings, bird song, giddy child laughter and mooing cows. It had its moments as does Always Summer Somewhere which, with summer being just around the corner is neatly timed. This time things are more Brian Eno than Jim O’Rourke and for the most part it works. After listening to quite of bit of ambient Eno these last few weeks I get that same kind of slow moving vibe from most of these tracks; the title track itself is a descending sequence of iridescent wine glass rim rubs, the minute long Outeros sunspot radio frequency chatter and the twelve minute long ‘Life on ASMR’ a moody atmosphere that puts me in mind of long defunct German ambientists cum soundscapers Maeror Tri. Each download comes with an LP sized art print to put on your wall.
Best played in the dead of night during a cold snap in January is brb>voicecall’s Cloth White Skin. Three tracks of Industrial Ambience that is all analogue hiss, scaffold rattle and submerged beats from the recently rejuvenated label Muza Muza. Who originate from the North East of England, where such things do seem to originate and which is the perfect antidote to Gavin Priors ‘Always Summer Somewhere’. Just what I need to reset the chakra before diving into that pile of MB once again. Think dark, moody hiss and rumble and the feeling that you’ve been trapped inside the shelled out room on the cover for too long. A brick disintegrating inside an industrial drier, the groans of the damned, found sounds perhaps manipulated and added to. Too short a release by far but authentic beyond doubt.
Crow Versus Crow
Gavin Prior
Muza Muza
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