Twang Zumb Tumb

Garbage Pail Kids - Garbage Pail Kids

Steep Gloss. Cassette/DL

Free Magic Show - Motown

Steep Gloss. Cassette

Electrolarynx - Electrolarynx

Steep Gloss. Cassette/DL

Labas Krabas - Der Tsar Home Et Bomba

Base Materialism. BSM 024 Cassette/DL

Royal Hungarian Noisemakers - Le Roi Est Mort

Unsignedlabel US069 CDR/DL

25 Copies

RibaStuka

Unsignedlabel US065 CDR/DL

25 copies.

I’m quite certain that I suffer from some kind of word blindness. Not full blown dyslexia but something along those lines, something that makes me write words not as how they are but as how I perceive them. While writing I constantly confuse words with double vowels in them, like the ‘ua’ in ‘guardian’ or ‘guarantee’ which I always think should be written ‘gaurdian’ and ‘gaurantee’. I know it looks wrong but something deep within the soggy grey mush tells me that its right and to leave it as be. I blame the ie/ei police. Spellcheck saves me such horrors but it couldn’t save me from referring to Newcastle outfit ‘Voicecoil’ throughout a recent review as ‘Voicecall’. Because I get whole words mixed up as well. I do it often and while its not the end of the world it does make my toes curl with slightest of embarrassments. This means I have to be extra vigilant with releases like the Garbage Pail Kids cassette which has sleeve text that looks like its been printed offset in 3D and Hungarian releases that come in French. At least I have the internet to help me in the right direction. 

Steep Gloss joins Research Laboratories and Base Materialism as UK labels that are fairly new to me. All of them releasing prime weird, experimental musics in small runs with digital as back-up for those who prefer to buy their music in chunks of zeros and ones. They join an ever increasing roster of labels that show what the Bearded Wonder would term ‘The No Audience Underground’, to be a continuing, ever growing, thriving, vibrant nexus of like minded people. People who since lockdown and the closure of live venues have spent their weekends preparing online gigs, making cassette sleeves while recording fridge hum and coffee grinders just because you can.

I watched a few of these online gigs as the lockdown kicked in until regular FaceTime dates with friends took precedence. The name Territorial Gobbing cropped up on a number of tweeted flyers [along with plenty of others that I need to explore] and its here too on the Garbage Pail Kids release. This being a collaboration between Leeds based ‘cartoon improvisors’ Territorial Gobbing and Basic Switches, who jammed some sounds before locking tables in the live situation just before Christmas last year. At an undisclosed location but most likely Chunk, a bout of festive noise buggery took place that involved, amongst various noisemaking boxes, gadgets and Dictaphones several kiddies sing-along records. Two people having a wild time with a Bontempi organ upon which the opening of George Michael’s Last Christmas stutters into life before being killed off again and again and again only to be resurrected for an audience sing-along finale. This admixture of cheezy pop song, kids singing aye-aye-yippy-yippy-yay, Michael Finnegan and scuzzy noise makes it a certified winner. All recorded to phone for added lo-fi vibes.

I can tell you little about Free Magic Show other than they are based in Edinburgh and comprise of Joe Coghill and Michael Fundowicz. One utilising radio and tapes the other computer. Two twelve minute offerings of an electro-acoustic sounding nature that at times exhibits a cinematic feel, samples such as helicopter chop, muezzin call to prayer and aircraft taking off might not win any originality prizes but they do fit. Side two is the livelier of the pair and drifts into noisier territory with all manner of strange voices joining pots, pans, pianos, and gutted tape gubbings. When listened to on trusty headphones this provided me with all manner of delicious ear tickle. There is a slight case of too many samples spoiling the broth here and even though some of them might be well worn I wouldn’t have minded hearing some of them investigated in longer workouts.     

Electrolarynx sees ten ‘vocal artists’ collaborating with the noises made by each others domestic sound sources. Thus you get YOL’s retched quotidian observations regarding empty vodka bottles coupled to the unidentified whirring sounds submitted by Jonny Marks. At least I think this is how it goes. They’re all paired up with each other anyway with Dada-esque gurgles, murmurs, throat clearings, whimsical hums and the sound of children running around finding homes amongst the dripping water, chopped vegetables and crackling chip fat. This juxtaposition works and to some extent the differing sounds are complimentary. Take Toxic Chicken making childish poopy, farty friendly lion noises to the accompaniment of extractor fan hum, or Bryce Galloway slapping jaw tightened cheeks to YOL’s boiling kettle. An interesting experiment and one that undoubtedly works.  

These vocalization techniques are all over Labas Krabas whose song like improvisations [voice, electric guitar] nestle between all out noise tracks and a Thin Lizzy sample. Labas Krabas are Newcastle’s answer to Sonny and Linda Sharrock, only if they had gotten into much more noise and Thin Lizzy. Last seen sitting on a porch picking like The Haze and screaming like Bjork with her knickers full of wasps, our intrepid pair of improvisers wail and spray and pluck and twang in a homely fashion that has me almost teary. Last track ‘Blueberry Mountain II’ is a thing of rare beauty and makes you wonder why they bother with the noisy stuff at all; a breathy 14 minute ride with vocals ranging from Betty Boop twee to Junko scream, to Linda Sharrock’s fluttering ululations and with frotted electric guitar accompaniment to suit. As it fades to nothing but a slowly plucked bass string, the vocals become ever more ethereal and deranged. Marvelous.

        

I wonder how many small experimental labels there are in Hungary? There must be more than Unsigned. The Turd played a gig there once so there must be more happening than I know about. Le Roi Est Mort is yet more belt and braces Noise Industrial from the Hungarian collective [whose motto is ‘God Save The Noise! Noise Save The God!’]. They like it noisy for sure but the best track on here is a vocal heavy one; ‘Ráááz, with vocals  courtesy of Zopán Nagy who moves from Ursonate like zangs and tumbs to all out scream as a subdued Whitehouse throb festers below.

Perhaps the pointer as to what’s going on in Hungary lies with the collaborative work that is RibaStuka. Ten tracks composed by several Unsigned artists with all vocals and words performed by Xabi N. If you’ve been following Unsigned reviews some of these names will be familiar but there’s new ones to explore should you wish to expand your Eastern European Industrial Noise Knowledge. All tracks are segued giving for a seamless fifty minute performance of slurred Hungarian monologues and conversations to which are added Industrial ambience, subdued pulses, shortwave fizz, heavenly voices and found sounds. Some of these monologues are slowed to sludge others come through a vocoder, some sound like confessions to a past crime given in a seaview hotel as seagulls scream overhead. This babble of voices becomes at turns eerie and quite disturbing. Tracks are given titles like; Fehér Öltöny, 3 Kívanság, Eldobható Eldorádó and rather bizarrely George and Gerry. Last track is called Rámköhögi which is Hungarian for ‘coughing on me’ which is either a deadly fetish or something that happened after a friend walloped down a big glass of Unicum unaware of its kickback properties. 

 

   

Unsigned

Steep Gloss

Labas Krabas/Base Materialism

   

 

Virgin Inflation Cult

Jean Louis Costes - Stop Music No Good

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 30 copies

Don Mandarin - Take Me To Cape Town [Mary Visits Elizabeth]

Research Laboratories. CDR. 20 copies

DN0 - Inflation Now!

Paisley Shirt Records. Cassette/DL

I don’t know how it happened but in the middle of last year I came across the Costes youtube channel and I made a bet with myself as to how long I’d have to wait before I saw a lump of shit. It wasn’t a long wait. Costes was jumping about in a field in France with his electric guitar, probably singing about how useless American Noise bands are, and then he shat on it. Not that you saw him actually shit on his guitar but there was what looked like a very loose stool being dropped on to an electric guitar.

About fifteen years ago me and Walklett went to see Costes at the Brudenell where he was touring his play Holy Virgin Cult, a play apparently based on his own childhood that was some sort of critique of religion that involved Costes and his female cast of two stripping knacker bare before pissing on each other and then, au naturel, shitting on each other. I happened to be at the bar when the pissing started and watched the barmaid’s jaw fall ever lower as the pint she was pulling got fuller. It was about the time that the shitting started that someone in authority appeared and pull the plug, telling us all to go home and do something far more sensible and civilised instead. Not having a ringside seat I inquired among the dispersing audience if it actually was shit they were dropping on each other only to discover that it was chocolate sauce they’d carefully loaded their bowels with pre-performance. Still, what a night eh?

Apart from the accidental Youtube sojourn I don’t think I’ve listened to anything by him since that gig so to see something by him drop through the door came as a bit of a surprise. Apart from triggering a few happy memories it meant that I could dig around on his website and see what he’s been up to to. This leads me to discover that he’s been adding to his book and film portfolio like a beast. Costes isn’t a man to stand around, I reckon he records something everyday, setting his preset rhythms on his drum machine before singing songs about the size of his cock and how useless American Noise bands are, all sung in English in a very strong French accent with lots of reverb. His books now include the tome ‘Underground Hitler’ the cover of which shows him in a distressed state doing his best Hitler impersonation and, it goes without saying Viva La Merda. None of them available in English alas*.

The eight tracks on Stop Music No Good are pretty much as I remember him, a full on exploration of the Costes psyche as put on tape and spat out using synths, loops and vocal effects to help aid digestion. His lyrics can be quite funny, especially on I Met God and Papa Dick where he gets to sing about his dick. As with the youtube session I wondered as to when the shit would appear and there it was, about the second line in, the word ‘merde’, I felt at home.

Papa Dick is the one you can sing along to and I feel we all should. A eurobeat synth pop song thats a pean to his penis, all the places it goes and all its foibles 

Papa Dick is too big

Papa Dick Is too huge 

Papa Dick is so strong 

Papa Dick is the king

...

Poop poop on the clit-o

Poop poop on the cack-o 

It doesn’t get much better than this. 

The leap from Costes to Bert Kaempfert is a huge one but it is one that must be made if we are to untangle the inner workings of the other Research Laboratories release laid before us. For it is Bert Kaempfert’s foot tapping easy listening classic Afrikaan Beat thats the backbone of a Basinskie-esque opener from Don Mandarin. Not that its a foot tapper anymore. Slowed down to less than half speed and drowned in a lethargic steel mill rhythm it becomes something else entirely, a lava lamp stoner trip for heavy eyes and them who likes to take heavy drugs. The other three tracks move in a similar fashion albeit one of them for just twenty seconds; underwater communications, submerged wanderings, Eraserhead murk and drones, ultra tape sludge extraordinaire. 

In sunny California its important to get DN0’s name right, thats DN-oh. Inflation Now! I get the feeling that the exclamation mark is important too. Whether this is instruction or warning I know not. What I do know is that DN0 are a trio made up of Max Nordile, Ian Dugas and Steve0 and that this cassette is the distillation of a four hour improv session. I once sat through a three hour improv jam at Install in Glasgow, Don Dietrich, Mikawa, Keenan and others I cant recall all going full bore until inevitable tiredness kicked in. As it did with me. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep and when I awoke all players were virtually on their knees, the kora player looked absolutely done in. But here its just the three of them and for the most part its all suitably loose in a drunken Fall session kind of way with Dugas’s drums doing a good job of skittering around and keeping quiet when need be as the twin guitars of Nordile and Steve0 go part Magic Band part pull the strings off the neck TWANG. Nordile sings like a Saturday night drunk and a fine thing it is too, Tom Waits trying to do an angry Chet Baker, a depressed Youtuber telling his subscribers that he hates them all. Things go wild on a couple of cuts but these are rare outburst from a trio who seem happier exploring their spatial awareness. Space baby, its the final frontier.     

*  Many thanks to those who have pointed out that the mighty Amphetamine Sulphate has published Costes in English [The Last Crusade] and has Underground Hitler waiting in the wings.

Amphetamine Sulphate

Paisley Shirt

Research Laboratories

Costes

Pumf

Godspunk Volume Twenty-One - Various Artists

PUMF. PUMF 798. CD

Quougnpt - Wear And Tear of the Thrust Bearing

PUMF. PUMF 805. CDR

Several weeks ago I received an email from someone offering up a copy of the new Godspunk various artists release for review. I replied that Pumf supremo Stan Batcow had long stopped sending me the Godspunk series after I rather ungraciously gave one a kick in the guts rupturing its appendix in the process. This due to the good to bad ratio being becoming seriously out of kilter, something that had been happening for a while and [most crucially] that there were always too many tracks by UNIT on them. A band I’ll never come to terms with. Besides, I was way too busy sealing up every draught in the house in an attempt to make it Covid-19 proof all while bleaching the three hundred face masks I bought on eBay and making a sign that said KEEP OUT! POSTIES AND DELIVERY DRIVERS EXEMPT. And then Stan goes and sends me one anyway. 

So what to do? Do I burn my ears once more with the ridiculous UNIT a band so deliberately obtuse they make Yes sound like Status Quo doing Derek Bailey, do I roll my eyes across the words The Large Veiny Members and wonder who the fuck would ever want to be in a band with a name like that? Oh and heres the taurus board who seem to prefer lower case and Stan’s own project Howl in the Typewriter who sound much better stripped down but thats hardly ever. They’re all still there bursting with energy and pride all of them waiting to unleash their music on me and I have about as much enthusiasm for this as a Hermes driver on overtime. So I thought I’d give it a listen. What harm could it do? Its not like my calendar’s bursting with social engagements these days and then theres always the urge to see if UNIT have got any better. Spoiler alert, they haven’t. If you like bands that in one song can go through ten key changes, twelve genre changes, five shifts in tempo and have a singer who sounds like the kind of person waiting to pounce on you in the pub so that he can tell you about his run in with the pigs at the CND rally in Hoxton then this is the band for you. If not avoid. 

As for the rest; Johnny and the Kaprikorns are a straight up and down shit kicking country band, Satanik Seagvll Sekt starts out all electro/punk and ends anthemic on seagull sounds, Harsh Noise Movement loop sounds to hypnotic effect, the taurus board is all digital reggae and The Large Veiny Members make Orb sounds for Glastonbury stoners. Saving my ears from total torment are Lettuce Vultures with some decent Yankee rawk thrash and Nil By Nose whose trip up north for a funeral [presumable Simon Morris’] is a spoken word piece of some significance with observations from his journey put to a soundtrack of synthy electronica. There’s a fridge magnet and booklets too, Stan puts a lot of work into these releases but as before, they’re just not for me.

By way of added torment came the unpronounceable Quougnpt. Here be seven tracks of mainly film, TV samples and pop singles all put together in a fashion so as to create new atmospheres. Plunderphonics I believe its called. Actually not that bad in places especially with the young lass reciting Spike Milligan’s the Ning Nang Nong. 

I came, I listened, I went back to bleaching my masks. 

PUMF

Opening Time

Saboteur/Saboteur [Yves Botz & Roro Perrot]

Decimation Sociale. CD/DL

Quentin Rollet & Romain Perrot - L’impatience des Invisibles

Decimation Sociale. DSCDQR. CD/DL

Maginot/Maginot [Romain Perrot & Paul Hegarty]

Decimation Sociale. CD/DL

Olivier Bringer & Romain Perrot - Histories de la Nuit

Decimation Sociale. DSCDDOBRP. CD/DL

Vomir - Social Distancing

Decimation Sociale. DSCDVOMIRSD. CD/DL

Clov and Hamm, in Beckett’s Endgame, wind up an alarm clock and then listen to it ringing. When it stops Clov says: ‘The end is terrific!’ Hamm replies ‘I prefer the middle’.

I see the pubs are open again. These now being the places where you can get an alcoholic drink and some mediocre food in an atmosphere that more closely resembles an operating theatre only with more idiots and squashed chips in the carpet. I’ve been going off pubs for a while now and especially since the smoking ban, seeing how fag smoke was the only thing masking the smell of stale piss in the bogs and the body odour of your fellow drinkers. Not that I smoke anymore. Between the ages of sixteen and forty you couldn’t keep me out of pubs, now you’d have all on getting me in one. Like a lot of other things in life, they aint what they used to be. If the future of drinking in pubs is sitting in perspex square in a Wetherspoons, being table served by someone in a medical visor and rubber gloves I’ll stay at home smothering myself in Decimation Sociale releases instead. Much more pleasurable.

Romain Perrot’s label is a depository for things struggling to find a home elsewhere and I quite like that. Its a brave man that puts out a CD of two men shouting and screaming at each other over scrabbled acoustic guitars and randomly hit electronic equipment for forty five minutes but thats Saboteur do. Its a good place to start for a French label, the word ‘saboteur’ deriving from the French word ‘sabot’ these being wooden clogs that workers threw into their machines [probably during the Industrial Revolution] thus wrecking them in the process. We used hammers, the French used shoes, whatever it takes people. Its what Perrot and Botz are doing to their instruments, their voices and our delicate ears. A live track as recorded in Paris in 2019. 

Its a similar set up for Perrot and Quentin Rollet with Rollet’s alto sax moving around Perrot’s lapping shortwave noise and unstable ambience. Rollet takes his horn apart, blows down the bell, clacks the keys and generally matches what Perrot is creating with [judging by the sleeve] a vast array of electrical equipment, keyboards and the effluvium of Parisian flea markets. Things take a turn for the savage on ‘Sans Aveu’ where electronically treated vocals from Perrot makes him sound like a cross between a Dalek and the singer from Bolt Thrower before Rollet does his best Albert Ayler impersonation on ‘La Tradition est une Trahison’. These juxtapositions of sax and all out synth blurt making for an ear opening experience. Last track ‘Embrocation Siamoise’ blossoms like a 70’s era Tangerine Dream opening. This is no bad thing.

When Perrot teams up with Paul Hegarty on Maginot the mood turns more industrial with another live recording as laid down in Paris and Hambourg. Its two central tracks being awash in tape noise and electro-acoustic clatter as first an American radio advertisement and then a call to a car insurance company are distorted and muffled to create disturbing atmospheres. This not unlike many an Illusion of Safety release with mundane conversation replacing the transgressive themes of serial killer confessions and the reminiscences of those who survived extreme torture. The last track here being a one minute and fourteen second ambient homage to Edgar Froese.

The most disturbing and challenging release of the five sees Perrot team up with Olivier Bringer whose vocal technique lies somewhere between the out-there workings of Ludo Mich and the terrified screams of a demented lunatic. Rarely have I experienced such ferocious deaf screams but there they are mingled in with simpleton gibberish and the noodly random synth plod of Perrot, as if a feeble minded idiot was giving an account of their troubled life while suffering agonising flashbacks capable of reducing them to intermittent, rigid terror. No track titles are given but I did catch the word ‘desolet’ sobbed over and over. At times Bringer sounds like a demonic succubus, at other like Papa Lazarous. Track four dissolves into the barely audible, just the merest of synth and Bringer mumbling to himself by track five he’s sounding like a crow.   

At least Vomir is doing the sensible thing by covering up. A black bin liner should repel even the most determined virus though getting around might prove difficult. The zeitgeist has been captured by the Harsh Noise Wall maestro, who I’m assuming is Perrot himself. Harsh Noise Walls though ... its been a long time. An hours worth of unwavering mid-range electronic cacophony delivered with enough low-end crunch to give it that clenched fist, bent elbow, curled lip, gurned face oomph. The volume is entirely up to you of course. I prefer mine at number four with headphones on. The opportunities for playing this at high volume sans 'phones being negligible should I wish to remain on speaking terms with Mrs Fisher to say nothing of the neighbours and if I do the same with headphones I loose all nuance. Maybe its my headphones? I do tip the toe into the noise waters occasionally though I'd never choose a Wall Noise release. For noise to work there has to be a dynamic, a shift in tension, lows as well as highs and Harsh Noise Walls doesn't give me that. Losing yourself in that maelstrom is all well and good but it's a largactyl versus speed, sledgehammer v chisel, shipping tanker v Ferrari, Liberace v Debussy, old pubs versus new pubs contest. Which is no contest at all. 

http://www.reclusoir.com/

https://decimationsociale.bandcamp.com/