Smell & Quim - Atom Heart Motherfucker
Wonderland Media. LP

Smell & Quim - Quimtessance
Total Black. Cassette.






Two Smell & Quim releases that originally appeared on Juntaro Yamanouchi’s Vis a Vis Audio Arts label in editions of ten. Yes, ten. Unless you are Juntaro or Milovan Srdenovic or married to him or are someone very lucky you don’t have a copy in your house. Which is a pity as I consider Atom Heart Motherfucker to be one of thee best Smell & Quim releases. Up there with Jesus Christ in the Quim canon as far as this humble scribe is concerned.

I reviewed Atom Heart Motherfucker via a download that Lawrence Burton made available on his most wonderful Ferric Archeological website. Thanks to some incredibly astute American people person with superb taste in music we can now wallow in an 180 gram vinyl version. It really is the very thing, a thick black slab of black heavyweight vinyl capable of lopping off toe joints should you drop it. Juntaro may have a cassette copy with a poo smeared man on it but I have it on 180 gram vinyl.

In case you missed it Atom Heart Motherfucker is piss and shit pub toilet noise as narrated by someone with a thick West Yorkshire accent who isn’t Peter Sutcliffe. That would be Milovan then. ‘Fuck it, kill it, eat it’. The Quim war cry. A madman let loose on a hotel reception desk bell. The noise is deliriously powerful and wonderfully wrong in all the right ways, ‘Wrong Hole in One’ is a blistering re-entry into the West Yorks environs with a pint of Websters Green Label in each hand, there’s Michael Gillham destroying his bathroom in ‘Careful with That Axe Michael’ and the new mantra ‘Bucket Fulla Piss’ which has Milovan and Simon Morris screaming ‘BUCKET FULL OF PISS’ until their lungs rupture. Listening back to it again you cant but marvel at Srdenovic’s technique in putting all this together. Smell & Quim make noise albums that aren’t just one play shelf fillers, they’re some of the best noise records you will own. You can read the original review here.

Quimtessence arrives in one of those folded A5 pieces of card that has a cut and paste collage cover showing a grainy picture of someone having a good time/suffering for their cause. A form of release that I haven’t seen in many a year and produced in me not exactly a Proustian Madeleine moment but certainly a small twinge of nostalgia. All this thanks to German label Total Black who judging from their Big Cartel page may have already sold out. Or maybe they just haven’t got around to putting it up there? No info on how many of these exist but I’m guessing there’ll be more than ten. 

Here we have four essential Smell & Quim tracks with a blistering live version of Bucket Fulla Piss as recorded in Lisbon 2016 in which Morris and Srdenovic take it in turns to make the words ‘bucket full of piss’ sound like someone trying to exorcise demons. The bladder emptying frolics continue on side two with the sound of a bucket filling with piss and god knows what else [Pissypoo] while both the title track and ‘Noize on Feel The Cum’ are the kind of full on grinding noise blasts that do you actual good.

All this Smell & Quim activity had me digging around YouTube where I found their most recent Berlin gig and the band still in fine, chaotic, drunken form. Gillham, Morris and Srdenovic in Elvi suits, cock and balls strapped to the fore, Srdenovic collapsing to the floor where he spends the rest of the set behind their set up until he eventually surfaces, alone on the stage, with the most euphoric grin you’ve ever seen. Long may they reign supreme. 


Wonderland Media


Total Black