Monday 20th
Today I receive a text message from work. It says ‘Back on 4th’ after some deliberation I type back ‘August?’
With my time at home now a limited resource I start to think of all the things I’d still like to do with it. It seems ridiculous that after 20 straight days off work, the vast majority of which I’ve spent within these four walls, I see the remaining days as a diminishing resource and start to panic at the thought of the things I want to get done not getting done. I can’t say I’m looking forward to going back to work but neither am I dreading it.
Tuesday 21st
A day that will be remembered for the kitchen chair collapsing under Mrs Fisher whilst eating our evening meal. We bought two chairs from Ikea as a stop gap ten years ago and have used them daily ever since. They’re of the collapsable variety made from two bits of plastic and aluminium tubing. We’ve often joked about how long they’ve lasted when they only cost us a fiver each. Today Mrs Fisher has been using her kitchen chair as a work chair, seeing as how she was complaining that the chair she was using yesterday was giving her back ache. Mrs Fisher later admitting to shuffling said kitchen chair about under her desk to get comfortable, deducing that this action must have weakened its welds resulting in the thing collapsing under her. Mrs Fisher suffers no trapped fingers or broken bones, only hurt pride and a few aches.
A day that will also be remembered for the arrival of two Smell & Quim releases, one of them being the magnificent Hospital Productions reissue of Cosmic Bondage. After beginning life as a one hundred copies Barbie doll tied up with string with a cassette hanging off her neck, its now transformed into a magnificent double neon pink vinyl album with a sleeve housed in a printed transparent slip case. Impressive to say the least. I play it in the afternoon drowning out some building work going on next door and reminiscing about the time I went to see Smell & Quim at the 1 in 12 in Bradford where I saw this very release on the merch table. Why didn’t I didn’t buy one is something I’ve asked myself ever since.
Bollock freezing this morning with a north-easterly breeze blowing away all the clouds and bringing cold air with it. I call in the Co-op for urgent supplies while Mrs Fisher stands guard outside. She spots a two pence piece on the pavement and we debate the pros and cons of picking it up. Normally I pick up found coins and put them in my loose change whisky tin [which is now almost permanently empty due to constant use of contactless payment] but what if it has the virus on it? In the space of four weeks I’ve gone from nonchalantly picking up loose change to worrying about whether it has the ability to pass a deadly virus.
Wednesday 22nd
I’m reminded of the Bill Hicks sketch where he talks about the dangers of overdoing CNN and Fox News. This was during the first Gulf War when American news channels showed nothing but DEATH FLAMES BOMBS DESTRUCTION 24/7 on a rolling news agenda that made it sound as if the end of the world was just around the corner, then you looked out of your window and all you could hear was the chirruping of cicadas. Its a bit like that now. Isolate yourself from the news and it seems like any other day, albeit with quieter roads, closed shops and queues outside the supermarkets. Except that there’s a virus out there that they haven’t got a cure for and the government seems to be about as much use as the Keystone Cops after an hour on the bong.
Thursday 23rd
Mrs Fisher tells me that she’s just heard the traffic news on the radio and that of the three incidents reported one of them is the road to Brighouse I use to do the shopping. I decide to take a different route and drive past the big Tesco, my usual shop of choice, which I haven’t been to since the lockdown kicked in. Seeing that the car park is deserted I turn in and do the shopping there. When I get to the checkout the bloke in front of me is chatting away to the check out girl about how much he misses going to the pub and that now he’s always drinks too much because there’s nobody to tell him to stop when he’s drinking at home. All this followed by gales of laughter. From him, not her.
Over the bridge heading towards Brighouse someone has spray painted the words ‘Gary Gravas Grass’. If they did this by leaning over the bridge I’m impressed because all the letters are of even height and all the s’s are the right way around. The alliteration is also impressive.
I buy the local paper and post it to my mother who lives on the west coast. Since Covid-19 its thinned out somewhat with advertising, sport and sections on ‘What To Do This Weekend’ replaced by sudokus, crosswords, word searches, lots of stories about how people are coping with the lockdown and government sponsored ads telling us to respect the two meter rule, wash hands etc… The only section of the paper thats getting bigger is Deaths which has grown from half a page to nearly two, almost all deaths reported being amongst the elderly. Some notices say that the funeral service can only be attended by close family with some funerals being screened live by the funeral directors.
At the top of Whitechapel Road a man waits in his garden as two blokes unload a big box from the back of their huge white van. Further down the road the van passes us, pulls in and the process is repeated. We cross to the other side as they’ve parked on the pavement and as we near them we see that the bloke on the ground is struggling to take the huge box from the bloke on the back of the van. After some too-ing and fro-ing, to me, to you, the box drops to the floor landing on one of its corners. Theres a bloke stood in his garden, shorts and t-shirt, arms folded watching everything unfold whose package this most surely is. The delivery driver who dropped it says to the man ‘Bloody heavy that mate. What’s in it?’. ‘Its a garden shed’ he shouts.
While tapping away at the keyboard Mrs Fisher comes in to see if I’d like a cup of tea. We both notice that the social calendar is still showing March.
After returning from yesterdays walk I decide to make a soup out of everything thats left in the bottom of the fridge. My main aim is to make a pot of curried carrot soup but after roasting some peppers that don’t look too appetizing [now that they’re marinating in their own juices] Mrs Fisher suggest chucking them in with the carrots. Its a masterstroke that promotes this humble dish into something far more substantial. Cheers all round and time to break out the Rich Tea.
Friday 24th
During a coronavirus press briefing The President of the United States suggests to one of his medical experts that injecting disinfectant cures the virus and that this is something they should be looking in to. This results in the manufacturers of disinfectant issuing public safety notices asking people not to ingest their products. It seems like a defining moment and when ‘all this is over and everything gets back to normal’ it’ll be one of main talking points. ‘Hey, remember when Trump said we should be injecting disinfectant’.
A later walk this morning as Mrs Fisher doesn’t work Fridays. We see the Timid Lady in the distance and she immediately crosses the four lanes and divider of the motorway bridge to escape us. It must be the warmest day of the year so far and for the first time its short sleeve order.
I ring my 84 year old father to see if he’s alright and if there’s anything I can do for him. He tells me he’s fine and that he’s had an ant infestation in his kitchen. This after accidentally standing on an ants nest in his greenhouse and bringing them in to the house.
Saturday 25th
Whilst waiting outside the Post Office for one of the three people inside to come out, a man who sounds like he’s got a really bad cold joins the queue behind me. While we’re stood there a local ‘character’ I haven’t seen in years comes past [i.e. someone who’s always in the pub and seems to know everybody else in the pub and all the local drug dealers, minor celebrities, coppers etc...]. Its 9 a.m. overcast and there’s a chill wind blowing but he’s wearing nothing but flip-flops, shorts and a t-shirt. They exchange a short greeting, the man behind me being the more enthusiastic of the two. While I’m at the counter getting my packets weighed he reaches the counter next to me and in a snivelly, blocked sinus voice says ‘Can I draw £9.85 out of me account please’.
In the Discount Pound Shop there’s a man in the queue in front of me wearing safety glasses and a mask.
Walking back from town I pass what is locally known as the ‘Iron Bridge’ as its wall are indeed made out of iron. On both sides and in white spray paint there’s more of the Gary Gravas Grass graffiti.
In the last few days I’ve seen a kestrel hovering in the fields behind where we live and the sound of a woodpecker near the bottom of Whitechapel Road, neither of which I’ve ever seen or heard around here before. There also seems to be more goldfinches and an abundance of feathered wildlife in general.
Sunday 26th
Yesterday turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far. After the initial cloud cover burnt off the sun came out and all the neighbours with it. At ten o’clock last night we could still hear some of them singing.
Up early and up Moorside before eight o’clock. We cross the road by the motorway bridge as there seems to be a constant stream of joggers heading our way. A car heads towards us at walking speed with its hazards on. Presumably broken down and coasting as near to home as possible. We see the Timid Lady in the distance and we go to cross but she goes to cross at the same time so we head back and as we do she acknowledges us with a slight wave of the hand. Despite it being quiet warm she still wears her white mac. Then theres The Cheery Man still all in black with black woolly hat jammed down over his eyes.
Shit Creek - The Land of the Remember
Crow Versus Crow. CVC 016. CD
50 Copies.
SUN FLOW ER [Works on Paper 2018-2019]
Andrew Wild
In the land of the cryptic crossword the word ‘flower’ comes up with great regularity. Its there to trick you in to thinking of roses and tulips and daffodils when in most instances its relating to things that flow. Unless its a double bluff. Evil bastards, cryptic crossword setters.
Sun Flow Er is a collection of Andy Wild’s mixed media artworks as produced between 2018 and 2019. Works that I like to think compare to Schwitters’ cut and paste collages only with acres more white space. Pictures of actual flowers torn from magazines overlaid with aging masking tape, compressed rags and net curtains, meshing, graph paper. One of my favourites is Rose Hill and some circles of paper with a line descending to a small dark square, a balloon of sorts surrounded by three different sized squares. Its the indentations and markings that make these abstractions so rewarding and I wouldn’t mind seeing them in the flesh one day. You should see them for yourself and maybe buy one to hang on your isolationist walls.
Mr. Wild is a man of many talents; artist, designer, radio show host, maker of podcasts and head cheese at Crow Versus Crow, where his artwork adorns many a cover thus giving his label a definite aesthetic. They are things of joy to behold and are of the kind that get you thinking that a lot of work and thought went in to them.
The Land of the Remember is evidence of such; inked lettering splattered Steadman style style, set amongst the Wild abstract collages and inside, hand written liner notes and a mathematical diagram that makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Who Shit Creek is though I have not the faintest idea. I can only relate to you what I heard which was a series of segued tracks which were the result of an almighty improv jam between Astral Social Club, Pink Floyd [early 70’s version], Robert Fripp, Soft Machine and a gamelan orchestra.
All just pointers of course but it gives you some idea. Fourteen tracks spread across fourty minutes, all of it a freewheeling, heady, sprawling, fizzed up, escalating, dizzying, droney improvised collage. A bit like Andy’s work. Could they be the same man?
The droney key wheeze of track three [‘Meatspace Infinity’] is punctuated by plucked strings, the end result recorded on to a cassette with a loose jack-plug so that there’s plenty of tape stretch and sound fragmentation. ‘This is the Trap’ is where Robert Fripp comes in with his high up the neck speckled notes that shimmering and cascade. The opener ‘Happy Skeletonzz’ and ‘A Raga Called Cherie’ owe their dues to ASC with the latter being smeared in a Doors-y, Mountain like keyboard solo,
Matthew Atkins - Imaginary Cartography
Minimal Resource Manipulation
MRM 028
15 Copies.
Is there any real need to review something that came out four years ago, in an edition of fifteen? Well, there is if its any good but here's the really weird thing; after coming across this release last week during a lockdown spring clean, I duly listened and was impressed enough to find out more. So while listening I performed a diligent online search and the first return was from Norman Records who rather miraculously still have a copy for sale. Yours for £7. Whodathunkthatone? That's two people within a radius of ten miles owning a copy of something that only fifteen exist of and that until last week I never knew existed at all even though I had a copy. And its four years old. It is good though. In case you were wondering.
From what I can gather Matthew Atkins is a London based sound artist, field recordist, sonic manipulator who, on this evidence at least, uses his field recordings/audio verite as a base upon which to adds layers of droning ambience, piano, cello, electronics. This results in tracks like 'Tropical Algebra' where the sounds of Atkins shuffling through boxes of 16mm cine film offcuts and foreign coins is mixed with the ominous sci-fi soundtrack like drone, like when the five astronauts who've managed to escape the burning mothership are left standing on a desolate planet surface and all they can see is rocks and mountains in the distance.
Or 'Winter Frost' where somewhere in the background, probably Morton Feldman, is tinkling a few piano keys as the close up sound of a hamster eating a carrot is reverbed and looped around it. The kind of closely mic'd sounds that have fans of pure sounds creaming their pants in delight.
An austere and soberly paced collection of compositions that gives you plenty of space to wander around in and explore. The sonic equivalent of finding a second hand bookshop in a town you've never visited before and in that bookshop finding a book you've been after for ages and it's only a quid and it's been signed too.
E. Granby Granby - Cold
FPBJPC - Concert Performance March 8th 2017
J.S. Hogan - Ahh - I See Pan
Melkings - Movement Musik
Possett - The Golden Handshake That Almost Broke My Wrist.
If you get bored during the lockdown you could always play spot the genre with this lot. Go to the Regional Bears Bandcamp page and listen to ninety minutes of J.S. Hogan attempting to translate the conversations of a deep sea diver, or Movement Musik’s lo-fi floor scrapings, or FPBJPC do for improv what the Nazis did for racial harmony. Have a good old listen and get back to me. Because I have absolutely no idea.
I can get my head around Possett because I have some kind of a mental map where Possett fits in, that being somewhere between the gurgling dictaphonic gibberings of Dai Coelocanth and the soundscapes of Stuart Chalmers. I can get my head around E. Granby Granby because they/he/she/them/I use a saxophone but the rest, and here you should all take a bow, create the kind of sonic mind fug that you only thought existed on expensive art records released by the likes of Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys, the kind of art gallery stuff that spans four LP’s and costs £200 and comes with an art print thats a fecal smear.
Information is minimal. Even through the Regional Bears Bandcamp page. Maybe this is a good thing. To listen without prejudice. I made notes of course but did little digging, instead counting my ignorance as a blessing. Thanks to the lockdown I had lots of time to. The J.S. Hogan release has two thirty minute tracks bisected with two shorter tracks. Here we have the kind of formless meanderings that can lead you either to sonic nirvana or the nearest nut house, depending on how strong you like to take your experimentalism. Most of track one is like a muffled Clangers soundtrack, outtakes from an Open University documentary on molecular biology as shown at 6 a.m. in the winter of 1973. Track two is the deep sea diver conversation, track three lost me somewhere while four is gig chatter and unidentifiable hum. After the best part of ninety minutes of such things the last five become violent sheets of static. Placed there no doubt so as to wake you from your slumbers.
Movement Muzik move in much the same area with two twenty minute tracks that sound like live to condesor mic electro-acoustic gig. A bit like listening to Adam Bohman test his kit out while someone recites pages from a history book with an American accent. Like they deliberately recorded an electro-acoustic set onto a fifty year old Boots the chemist C120, then dubbed off five copies onto a TDK C90 that once I had ‘Now Thats What I Call Music 23’ on it just to see how far they could degrade the sound before it crumbled to nothing.
FPBJPC’s ‘Concert Performance March 8th 2017’ is one of the worst things I’ve ever listened to since … ohhhh since I started remembering. It begins with some piano tinkering that gets polite applause before incorporating a violin and with it something that might have been recognised by visitors to the parlor of a wealthy Viennese doctor in 1926. We get atonal sax parp and military drum rattle, Parisian accordion squeeze and a spoken word performance enacted by people who got their inspiration from fence posts. If you last long enough you also get an accordion version of Radiohead’s Creep. Kill me now.
At least I could go back to E Granby Granby whose looping, slightly delayed, over-dubbed sax riffs play some kind of sombre snake charmer act. Like instead of trying to get the snake to rise out of the basket they’re trying to get it to go back in. Ten tracks of sombre sax riffage that could have been recorded after the ingestion of large doses of largactyl such is their soporific nature. Honk if you want more.
After suffering much of the above for most of a lockdown afternoon it was with relief that I fell in to the arms of Posset. At least here I knew I was in safe hands. I clamped on headphones, stuck my knees under the table and let Possett lead me by the hand. I’ve not heard much Possett of late so I was glad to be back in the saddle, letting the North Eastern hero stroke my inner ears with looped Dictaphone drone, where a spot of heavy breathing down the old telling bone finds twangs for friends, where voices are truncated down to the merest of inflections where they’re rewired and retooled, where a conversation becomes a work of fucking art man. Call it whatever you want. I call it a Godsend.
There are seven tracks within which to fold your noggin. They all encapsulate what is good about capturing the world via the wonders of Dictaphone and cassette. Stutters, moans and the ramblings of mad men ply their trade between the glorious gibberish created from sped up Italian speak your weight machines. Springs are spronged. The inevitable destruction of wobbly tape continues its inexorable decline in to the pit of deadly despair where a V-Tech speak and spell machine relates its dying wishes to a set of clockwork comedy teeth.
Curried Carrot and Roasted Pepper Soup
4 bell peppers [or whatever you have left over but not too many green ones as they can become too bitter]
1 large onion chopped
carrots chopped - whatever you have left over but at least 500g.
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp medium curry powder
1 green finger chili
2 Indian bay leaf
2 garlic cloves crushed
thumb sized piece of ginger grated
2 tbsp of olive oil
25 g of Butter
1.5 liter of stock - veg or chicken
coriander.
Method
Heat oven to gas mark 6/400
Brush the olive oil on to some baking parchment and place in a roasting tin. Place peppers on baking parchment and roast for an hour turning every twenty minutes. Place in a bowl and cover with cling film. Leave to cool.
Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan.
Pierce the chilli several times with the point of a sharp knife and saute along with the onion the cumin and the bay leafs for ten minutes on a medium heat.
Add carrots and cook for another 10 minutes.
Add curry powder and grated ginger and cook for 2 minutes.
Add stock and bring to a simmer. Cook on a very low heat for an hour stirring occasionally.
Turn off heat and leave for an hour, Remove chilli and bay leafs.
Remove skin, stalks and seeds from the peppers, cut in to small squares and add to the carrot/stock.
Blend with a stick blender, adjust the seasoning if needed. Serve with some sprinkled chopped coriander.
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