Vile Plumage - Three Sisters Lost in the Darkness of the Banbury Seam
Invisible City Records. ICR60. Cassette
50 Copies.
Vile Plumage - The Amnesiac Experiences The Vortex As If She Were An Eel
No label. CDR
Dai Coelacanth - Someone Needs to Stop Them.
No Label. Cassette.
Hows the lockdown going? If you’re already thinking the Netflix subscription was a waste of money you could always try to block out the real world by submerging yourself in the mysterious world of Vile and Dai. Its what I did yesterday and it worked a treat. Cast away on an island of cassette noise, surreal messages and radio plays put together by disparate voices, I luxuriated, sunk deeper within the Poang, looked out on privet and sparrows, bees and dust motes, the sun shone. All was well with the world. Except it wasn’t.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but this country, this sceptic isle, this Eden, this Aldi with the queue outside is being run into the ground by a lying, feckless, lazy, serial shagger, a man who thinks morality is for mugs, a vainglorious buffoon who has to employ an ideas man because he has none of his own, a stuttering waffler, a joker, a man with many deaths on his hands, someone who boasted of shaking hands with people in an hospital containing Covid-19 patients and who then got it himself, an idiot, a liar who employs liars and thinks nothing more of it than you or I would in deciding which shopping bags to take with us to our socially distanced supermarket. These are not good times.
I’ve been on holiday this week. Mrs Fisher is still being furloughed. Having no desire to go anywhere with our new found government sanctioned catch and spread the virus freedoms, we pass our days quietly at home. Mrs Fisher writing, me painting stood up in the kitchen with the sunlight and a gentle breeze flowing through the house. The weather has been glorious. Hose pipe ban next up. Car washes shut down just after they’ve been re-opened. I listen to the World Service and the afternoon concert on Radio 3, if its to my liking. This week there was a very strange Polish opera based on the works of a Romanian poet that sounded like something Kurt Schwitters could have penned. What the neighbours thought of it I have no idea but I think they think we’re a bit bonkers in here anyway.
These three arrived yesterday and I dug straight in. Poang, cassette player, headphones, pen and paper. I was in for the long haul. The Dai Coelacanth tape is a recycled TDK C90, spray painted black. Once I entered I had no idea when I would leave. This could be a ninety minute job. If you’ve ever had the chance to experience a ninety minute Dai job then you’ll have some ida of the situation I was getting myself in to here. I was trapped, carried away, stuck in on full volume [Mrs Fisher told me after my journey that the leakage from my headphones had given her a good appraisal of the release too]. Its probably the most deranged Dai release I’ve heard yet and thats saying something. His, being the world in which a thousand Dictaphone edits are Jackson Pollocked onto magnetic tape to create visions of 21st Century hell. This collision of commercial radio samples, shitty 70’s pop music, First Aid techniques, found Burselm street sounds and all-round general shitty noise are interspersed with the utterances of the man himself. As if giving out maxims of deep importance he emerges tourette like in periods of calm to deliver his maledictions:
I was a putrid human
Shopping for lamps always disappoints
Cut price paranoia
Don’t get any of it on your shoe
Do you love car parks?
The only thing you find here is bastards
One million worms
Always the worms. I think the man is obsessed. All these bon mots are worth memorising, try them out on your neighbours or the person two meters away from you in the supermarket queue. It’ll do wonders fro your state of mind. Maybe these snippets of Stokie wisdom are all taken from one of Dai’s novels in which the cut-up techniques of Burroughs and Gysin are deployed with debilitating effect? You could ask the man but you’d have to track him down first. The last time I saw him was in Greece. A chance encounter with a slippery character.
The trip was taken from me when the cassette stopped and automatically flipped. I prepared myself for the other side [not literally, though with Dai tapes you can never be sure where you’ll end up] and was met with heavy vocal loops, local radio and a perma-cheery DJ announcing The Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ which is what it ran out on shortly afterwards. Listening intently to tape hiss for a few moments I eventually realised that I was getting no more and tried to reassemble my thoughts.
Processing a Dai tape and trying to encapsulate the experience is akin to making sense of Pynchon. Don’t go there. If you like Burroughs and noise and whisky and the sound of litter blowing around Stoke gutters, all at once, all together, then this is for you. There is nobody else comes close to creating such chaos. Hold him dear to your hearts.
Vile Plumage is Duke Burnett and Peter ‘Bunny’ Cropwell, though you may know them by other names and voices that may sound familiar to listeners of the above. Its them two you can see on the cover leant over a table with hoods up and horror masks on. Here be 21st Century ‘bring out yer dead’ chants, a world of ultra-murk and Wicker Man style tape sacrifice where boxes of scruffy 80’s chart cassettes are mulched down to Kagel fodder before being set alight. Where the wastelands of Stoke sit cheek by twittering jowl with budgies and grinding gears, where dust is the clog in the machine, a machine that keeps going long after everybody else has clocked off and gone home for fried eggs on toast. Horror voices, EVP’s culled from shut down Burselm bingo halls. The horror, the horror.
Burnett and Cropwell, along with The Burselm Community Radio Players are also responsible for ‘ The Amnesiac Experiences …’ a radio play assembled from dialogue spoken by persons of an invited nature as set to a soundtrack of various sounds and noises. Several of these radio plays exist but this is the first I’ve come across on actual disc. Maybe the lockdown has provided the ideal opportunity for such a project? People stuck at home, connected by the internet, speak the magic words into your phone and send them to Burnett and Cropwell who weave their magic.
What makes these radio plays so enjoyable is the way that different accents, delivery of lines and found spoken word audio sits easily within a soundtrack that at times seems like a warm up for a TNB gig. Lines of dialogue hang in the silence as if looking for somewhere to settle, lines that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Hammer Horror film, dialogue taken from interviews with housebound people talking about their own personal history, people talking to themselves wondering if the window cleaner’s coming today or not, Cropwell words come at a steady stream, delivered in a measured tone as as traffic trundles up and down a nearby motorway and ducks fly overhead, disembodied voices appear like ghosts, then more silence and the creak of doors, care home sing-alongs, street walking Jesus bother-ers, drunken folk songs and rocking chairs. Imagine Jac Berrocal telling you a nightmare bedtime story while acting all the parts. Lets all move to Stoke-on-Trent.
http://helicotrema.blauerhase.com/radiophrenia/
http://crowversuscrow.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-crow-versus-crow-radio-show-105.html
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