Timglaset #8

Timglaset #8 - Lists


Found shopping lists are revealing pieces of social flotsam. If found outside a UK supermarket they may also reveal that even after decades of saturation cookery television across all channels the home nations are still filling their baskets with bottled sauces, frozen pizzas and lard.

Its all Joe Possett’s fault. He’s been posting pictures of found shopping lists on his Twitter feed which has led me to start picking up bits of scrap paper out of supermarket trolleys and off of car park floors. They’re quite revealing. In a psychologists hands a found shopping list would no doubt reveal all manner of human traits. Even the paper they’re written on can lead to exploration and explanation; backs of envelopes for the thrifty, scraps of lined paper ripped from spiral bound notebooks for the studious, post-it notes from the office worker, pre-printed shopping lists with pictures of Peter Rabbit on them for miserable joy suckers. And then there's the spelling or as is sometimes more likely the case, misspelling and then acronyms [WUL], abbreviations [POTS] and shopping lists with added doodles. Shopping lists in blue biro, blunt pencil, felt marker, the shaky handwriting of the elderly, scribble from those in a hurry and of course the items on the list itself which will more than likely tell you which social bracket the list fell in to.

What you put on your shopping list wont be found by Google but if it falls in to the hands of Joe Posset [and me and a few others] the chances are it’ll get passed around, admired, prodded, poked and generally delighted in.

Themed Swedish zine Timglaset went with ‘errors’ last time around but has taken lists as its theme for issue eight. Five long slender sections all wrapped in a Japanese like obi sash some with colour pictures, some with poems, a game you can play using a 20 sided on-line dice and lots of general good stuff in-between.

The editorial is a list. A 21 point list of things that happen when you put a zine together. David Kjellin’s list is all bullet pointed black dashes and lines and baffles me but Johannes S H Berg’s poem 'Apophatic List: finding your place w/o using GPS' contains the wonderful line ‘your 12 year old t-shirt leaves you bit by bit but the holes stay with you’. Bengt Adlers list is called ‘The List of Truths:’ and is of course two empty pages.

And so it goes. Much is baffling though especially Filip Lindberg’s ‘tider tal’ which takes up the whole of section 2 and is nothing but data and the odd bit of Swedish that even Google translate couldn’t help me with but no mistaking alcohol and a series of pictures of lots of lovely bottles of the hard stuff given to us by Malcolm Green in a piece titled ‘Curated Drinking 00 to ∞’. Michael Björn's list is a list of lists; people, places etc … Mirfield’s very own Paul Tone has a collage/diagram that is what? I have no idea. ‘Ear Training Oh Happy Day’ it says.

In section 4 Pete Spence gives a list of of 26 artists and composers all in alphabetical order [Appel to Zog] all given the first name Max with Max Ernst given a red ‘E’ for his surname. The game is in section 5 and is by someone called Ozelot and is called ‘Artistic Action Random Suggestion Table’ where upon you roll the 20 sided on-line dice and pick an action from the first column, then roll the dice and pick another action etc .. Until you have something like ‘You will ‘cut up’ ‘a post-punk’ ‘dance’ then ‘xerox’ it. Hours of fun.

Attention to detail is the thing though. On the back page of section five we find:

LAST
LIST!
LOST
LUST?

‘The List is Too Long’ as Eugene Chadbourne once sang. Or not as the case may be.


https://timglaset.com/

Jacques Demierre

Jacques Demierre - ABÉCÉDAIRE/AB C BOOK
Lenka Lente. Book + CD

ISBN : 979-10-946-22-8



Jacques Demierre describes himself as an improvisor and a composer, a person interested in the relationship between language and music. Swiss born and judging by the long list of releases, installations and publications to his name a busy man. One of life's constant workers, always touring, always recording, writing, making noises and notes.


The cover shows Demierre sat at a piano, eyes front, palms on top of thighs, a picture of perfect contemplation. Which is something he does do a lot of. This book could have been titled ‘Demierre’s Philosophy on Improvisation, Methodology and lots of other things In-Between’. His philosophy on philosophy. Roland Barthes, Zhaung ZI, Derrida are all mentioned as is the Swiss born Sinologist Jean François Billeter. Demierre obviously does a lot of thinking and contemplation. A lot of deep thinking and a lot of deep listening.

Each letter of the alphabet gives Demierre the opportunity to pass thought on things that matter to him most so ‘A’ gives us ‘A Piano Tuner’, ‘Amorous’, ‘Amity’ each piece a page or so of musings and philosophising, on everything from linguistics to Luciano Berio cooking pasta [Pasta] to his work with the LDP Trio and the DDK Trio to his method of working to his thoughts on listening;

‘The ultimate state of listening, if it exists at all, is in no doubt void of emotion, or rather it entails neither the presence nor the absence of emotion. It is a kind of evenness of mood that refers us back to ourselves immersed fully in the experience’.
   
Expand and discuss.

Demierre also give us his views on Capitalism [this after seeing someone begging outside an Armani store], his feelings of being denied access to a concert hall’s Steinway at a prestigious event [and being told that such a grand instrument would be unsuitable for such avant garde machinations] what its like to play improv under time constrictions [it takes away the need for an ending] and so forth. Its all very readable [and dual language, the first half of the book is in French] and gave me a better understanding of Demierre who becomes yet another improviser/artists/composer that was unknown to me before Lenka Lente's introduction.

The CD contains a thirty minute vocal work called ‘Ritournelle’ a work that Demierre expands upon under ‘Y’ and ‘You’ [You, yeux, eye, I. Geddit?] and within which he attempts to capture the cyclical nature of Franz Schubert’s ‘Winter Journey’ and the last ‘lied’ of that cycle ‘The Hurdy Gurdy Man’. Winter Journey being Schubert’s take on Wilhelm Müller’s poem cycle comprising of twenty four vocal/piano compositions.

After having listened to Schubert’s ‘The Hurdy Gurdy Man’ and then to Demierre’s version I wondered how Demierre could take such a minimalist, bleak, austere and haunting composition and transform it into something totally unrecognisable. Its an exhausting listen, as exhausting as it must have been to record it with each series of words emerging staccato like in a constant morphing stream, Demierre trying to gulp down air as each word transforms form one to the other before being replaced by yet another. Exhausting yes, but exhilarating with it.





   

www.lenkalente.com


http://www.jacquesdemierre.com/


 

Skullflower

Skullflower - Werecat Powers of the Crossroads at Midnight
Nashazaphone. NP25. LP


Someone pointed out that in the last roundup of Nashazaphone releases I forgot to include even a mention of the Skullflower LP ‘Werecat Powers ...’. This may have been subliminal. I did play it. It buzzed around my head but me and Skullflower sort of kind of don’t get on. Me preferring Bowers more contemplative work with Marcia Bassett under The Hototogisu moniker and specifically that splendidly titled De Stijl triple LP 'Floating Japanese Oof!' A 3 LP set that still manages to float my oof.

Back in the 90’s I saw Skullflower at the 1 in 12 in Bradford. Bower played his guitar with his back to the audience, all knobs on 10, for what must have been an hour, which at its end was just me and Paul Harrison. I once saw him in Manchester in a room above a pub [twas ever thus] knelt on the floor in front of a set of speakers waving two microphones about creating equally damaging, swirling waves of noxious feedback [which didn’t empty the room].

So I think I’ve got Skullflower sussed. Prejudice is a terrible trait though and blind prejudice is the worst of the lot. So there’s a very big chance that I may have had my Skullflower blinkers on when I penned that last Nashazaphone review realising subconsciously that I had left it out and not caring that I did.

My respect for Nashazaphone and its founder Hicham Chadly means that I now beg all your forgivenesses and give you my most humble opinion of ‘Werecat Powers …' which despite the title I find myself warming to. I may go further. I actually deeply like it. Not love it or want to marry it but if I heard it while at a friends house I would inquire of that person as to its origins and where I could purchase a copy. I even like the Bacon-esque cover.

Here Skullflower is Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies with their ongoing part of a Nashazaphone trilogy that according to the press release revolves around investigations in to the ‘Darkness of Aegypt’ which leads me to believe the pair may have been taking succor from Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, a book I’ve never got around to despite it getting the thumbs up from William Burroughs and being sat on my to read pile for years.

If this is what Skullflower are up to know I’m interested. All three tracks bear a similarity with the first side long track ‘We Move on Points of Shattered Mirrors’ a ceremonial like, buried deep, high end drone containing what I’m taking to be heavily processed guitars that constantly crash against each other in collapsing waves of Stygian gloom. The flip ‘Charnel Ground’, is a bass heavy throbbing oscillating drone that masks all manner of guitar skitter while last track ‘Departure Lounge’ has a more cinematic appeal, the drone surging and falling, forever being pulled out of shape to an undercurrent of soaring ritual rhythm.

How this fits in with more recent Skullflower work I have no idea but I now fear I've been missing out. I'll put Floating Japanese Oof! to one side for a while. I have some catching up to do. 

        

Chow Mwng

Chow Mwng - Perforation Function
Self released CDR + booklet.


We left Chow Mwng at the back end of 2017 after he [Ashley Cooke] delivered one of those total left field slugs to the jaw [that almost didn’t make it because it arrived as an email and almost got deleted] that left my head ringing with the sounds of Dada improv, cassette abuse, abstract noise and all other manner of good stuff.

That was the enigmatically titled ‘ULOT-CA’ which contained songs. Yes, songs. Not ones that you could sing to, unless you were very drunk or had taken some strange kind of drug but songs none the less. I liked it because it sounded fresh and invigorating, the work of someone working quickly when in truth it probably took a lot of effort. I was glad I didn’t delete. I’m glad I have this too for it carries on in much the same vein except these aren't songs. But I reckon I could spot it as a Chow Mwng release after ten seconds such is its singularity.

Here we have a thirty minute sound collage composition the source of which was a broken cassette tape that was itself a recording of Nurse With Wound playing last years Tusk festival. The cassette in question coming from a certain David Howcroft whose instructions to Cooke were ‘do something with it or destroy it completely’. Deciding not to destroy it completely our man put it back together and constructed something that you might describe as TNB meets Jandek meets Derek Bailey meets John Cleese doing his Monty Pythons squeaky woman voice meets Ashley Cooke reciting ‘poetry’ in a maelstrom made from carnival sounds and Dada performances. With added Adam Bohman.

I think I mentioned Bohman in the review of ‘ULOT-CA'. It has that feel to it. Of anything can happen. Of joei de vivre. Esprit de coeur and lots of other things that probably need italics. What starts out like Derek Bailey trying to work out the chords to Sultans of Swing morphs through radio noise, capstan abuse, throat singing, smokers coughing and toneless chanting to ‘improvised prose’ the text of which you’ll find in the booklet.

A big part of the appeal, even if it is only for a short duration is Cookes speaking/singing voice where words like soil become a stilted ‘so-oil’, a matter of fact voice that at times is a bark and at others softens and comes down a semitone as if whispering in your ear. How much of that half destroyed Nurse With Wound tape survived on here is open to scrutiny but there’s plenty in here that is decidedly Nurse-esque; samples of ancient TV shows, lunatic accordion squeezing, plucked bridge strings, un-sourceable rhythmic loops, whether this is Nurse or Cooke I can only guess. Only the man himself will know.

As good as last years ‘ULOT-CA’ was a part of me hoped that this was going to be more than another collection of off-kilter songs. I'm happy to report that this is the case. The man has surpassed himself.



http://www.chowmwng.co.uk/  


https://chowmwng.bandcamp.com/

NWW PLAY TNB

Nurse With Wound - Changez Les Blockeurs
United Dirter. DROMLP138




Nurse With Wound reworking The New Blockaders first album provides the opportunity to  dig out the original just to remind myself of its uncanny ability to remain as fresh and invigorating as it did on the day it was released thirty five years ago. Not that I should look for an excuse. In a just world the playing of ‘Changez Les Blockeurs’ should be a yearly ritual carried out by any discerning noise fan, the pulling of the record from the sleeve with dainty fingers, the settling of the needle, a gentle, appreciative rub of the sleeve, all a preamble to playing what will always be regarded as one of the best noise albums ever made.

How it was recorded is a secret thats been carried through those thirty five years by the Rupenus brothers who created it. When played it as part of this months Wire Invisible Jukebox selection Storm Bug’s Steven Ball remarked that it sounded like someone ‘building a shed’. I myself have described it as two elephants fencing on squeaky bicycles, or something like that anyway, that it sounds like nothing else before or since is the reason why I and lots of others keep returning to it.

Back in 2004, on its 21st anniversary, Vinyl-On-Demand gave it the reissue treatment and thats the copy I go to when I need my chakra realigned after listening to too many mediocre noise albums. It puts you back to where you need to be. Its construct is simple but yet devastatingly effective; it could be two elephants fencing on bicycles and it could be two squeaky wheelchairs fighting over a slack spring, it could or an army of tin men dismantling a Jean Tinguely sculpture while bouncing around on pogo sticks in need of 3-in-1. Is this the result of hours worth of studio work or did two people really once go down to the shed at the bottom of their garden and chuck some rusty metal about for 40 minutes? We’ll never know and thats half of the appeal.

I’m informed that Steve Stapleton was the first person to hear ‘Changez Les Blockeurs’ and it seems fitting that he’s the first of several numerous notables to give us his reworking of it [a 3CD set of interpretations called Changez Retravaillé via Italian label Ricerca Sonora lies imminent] or as it says on the back of the sleeve ‘NWW Plays TNB’. So what do you get for your hard earned apart from an excellent cover by Babs Santini the back of which features someone getting a custard pie in their face, an insert that mimics the Nurse With Wound list with the bands and artists replaced by the TNB manifesto and a piece by Paul Hegarty that weaves the pair of them into the Surrealist, Dada, avant-garde ethic? You get ‘Hallelujah T.N.B.’ which sticks closest to the original and a black hole dense ‘T.N.B. Amen’.

On ‘Hallelujah T.N.B.’ the squeak, grind and groan of the original appears to have been intensified, an intensity that is eventually joined by the heavenly choir of the Latter Day Saints their angelic voices emerging from the tumult until they themselves become subsumed, morphing their way into new structures and sub-harmonies. ‘T.N.B. Amen’ is a dense lower down in the mix loop, the high end buried flat going around in an industrial dryer becoming ever more hypnotic as it progresses. In their somewhere is Changez Les Blockeurs, with all its shuffles and clangs and scrapes and screech. And that's it. Simple but effective. A palimpsest of sorts. You can’t improve on a classic though. This is a new work and should obviously be seen as such. Comparisons are futile. Nurse With Wound bring us back to the original via a much darker route. It's Nurse with Wound's main road. Raise a glass, or a hammer and give thanks.

I hope I’m still here for the fiftieth anniversary where I will perform my own personal Changez Les Blockeurs ritual once more, with the same LP I have now, maybe a slightly more worn copy by then but one still capable of revealing its deepest mysteries.
 


Dirter Nurse With Wound The New Blockaders  Ricera Sonora