I went to work on Monday and I came home knackered. Not just a bit tired with being up since 5.20 tired but bone achingly knackered. Not because I’d overdone it in the exertion department but because I’d been on my feet for most of the day in boots that weren’t as comfy as carpet slippers or Merrell walking shoes and that was something I hadn’t done in a month. At work the talk was of nothing much but the virus and what people had done with their furloughed time [decorate, walk the dog, light a barbecue, mow the lawn, watch tv, drink beer] and after that conversation fizzled out, nothing. Thirty nine hours of tedium followed by three days off with nowhere to go is my foreseeable future.
Workday evenings are normally spent trying to write while listening to music and on those night when I’m too knackered for that, I watch people on Youtube mend shoes. Mrs Fisher is being furloughed though so thats not happening. Instead I sit across from Mrs Fisher in my Poang, then I fall asleep and when I awake I read a book while Mrs Fisher taps away words on her laptop telling me all about who she’s fallen out with on Twitter and Facebook. For the most part silence reigns. This too is the foreseeable future.
No more diary for me then. I don’t want to write about the safety boots I bought at Screwfix and of how we saw The Timid Lady on the walk [which we still do Friday, Saturday, Sunday] and the squirrels in the park [they’ve had babies], the queue at Tesco, how useless certain members of the government are and Trump’s latest act of lunacy
Instead I shall concentrate on the music.
Smell & Quim - Cosmic Bondage
Hospital Productions
DLP.
Smell & Quim / Harsh Noise Movement - Jenny Lives With …
Love Earth Music. LEM216
CD
I’ve become a lot more receptive to the digital release of late, the pretend lockdown has played a part, but I’m unlikely to ever become a flag waver for the format/s. Since MP3 and several of its likeminded comrades began to appear I’ve gone from a seething, loathing mentality to happily taking such things in my stride. As has been noted on these pages many times before, where digital wins when it comes to time, space and money it can also lead to confusion, as a recent exchange of emails with Regional Bears proved, when it was deemed that if I’d have had the actual releases in my hands, instead of digital files, my digital based thoughts would have been of the much more enlightened kind. Its a fair point and another reason that the format/s will continue to be nothing more than access points on certain devices that I own.
Then I get Cosmic Bondage in the post. The 1995 Smell & Quim classic that originally came as a Barbie doll with a cassette hung around its neck and then as a CD and then as a cassette in a ludicrous edition of ten as issued by Vis-Vis Audio Arts. Finally, finally after twenty five sodding years it gets the vinyl treatment from Hospital Productions, a double album that comes housed in a transparent slip case no less, a limited number of which have been delivered in opaque neon pink vinyl. I have the neon pink. Do you know how happy this makes me feel? Does it make me feel happier than if I’d have bought it from iTunes? Does it make me feel like I’ve escaped viral infection and found ten grand in used notes on the same day? Yes it does. Lets forget digital for a moment.
Mid nineties Smell & Quim finds Milovan Srdenovic at the point where Nonnen had gone and D. Foist had yet to appear so Cosmic Bondage is credited to Srdenovic and Jack Shit with guest appearances by Hakim Tubbitz and Ibrahim Ibrahim on North African lung pipes. Crazy days with Smell & Quim pumping out miasmic gas like ‘Vaginal Clackers Will Drive You Crackers’ and ‘Bou Jeloud’, a near fifteen minute call and response between those rasping lung pipes. This being the mid nineties its hard to escape the gay porn and thus you’ll need to turn the volume down at the end of Vaginal Clackers unless you want your neighbours to hear a man in pain screaming ‘fuck my ass’. ‘Anthem of the Quim’ republic with its cartoon like gong bash and parping march turns up as parts of ‘I Can’t Wait To Get My Tongue In Those Yummy Earthling Brains’ which runs to just over a minute. This will do me. ‘Fleet Enema’ is sixty plus seconds of studio tape sludge, ‘Rectoplasm’ is ten minutes of clacking groan, ‘Cosmic Bondage Club’ opens out in to an ungodly howl with various voices screaming from the wreckage. It doesn’t get much better than this.
At the other end of the scale a humble CD, but still as warmly received. ‘Jenny Lives With …’ has within its surface the full-bore pummel that is Quimtessence. A track which until last year could only be found on another of those ludicrously limited Vis a Vis Audio Art releases until German label Total Black did the right thing. Its a fearsome racket of course, much more in keeping with recent Smell & Quim material. As is the track ‘More Teabagging, Vicar’ where long running UK Noise outfit Harsh Noise Movement find time to incorporate the old Tetley tea bag advert as voiced by gruff northerner Brian Glover, all this before splattering everything in sight with a similar fifteen minutes worth of full on roar. Whether this is homage to Smell & Quim or a reworking of an obscure Smell & Quim track I can not tell you.
Tracking either of these releases down will be have to done via the wonder of Discogs seeing as how neither label has them within their online walls. A curious affair.
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