Leitmotiv Limbo

 

Leitmotiv Limbo - Minimal Sphere

Servataguse Muusika. SM004. Cassette

A cassette that set off from Australia on the the last day in July and arrived here six weeks later. Maybe it had to be quarantined on the way? Maybe it went in to the same bag as the Dr Steg postcard with the razor blades on it and when it got as far as Cleckheaton sorting office it had to be x-rayed by a team of experts [no further news on that particular incident by the way] or maybe they just gently squeezed the jiffy bag and went ‘nahh … it feels like a cassette to me mate, put it in with the regular mail’, ‘a cassette?’ comes the reply ‘didn’t they like die a death when CD’s came out? like when the internet took over music like the Mafia does your business demanding protection money, explaining to you very quietly and with a hint of menace that this is the way things are going to be from now on?’

I quite like this cassette with its alliteration and its printed red j-card Led Zeppelin font. I have no idea what the black, half Rorschach alien dagger splat is on the cover and I doubt it adds anything to the release itself seeing as how this is eight tracks of grimy, minimalist, buried beats as made with ‘analogue instruments of carefully selected materials’ [a black and white image of a decaying corpse or a 1950’s nuclear bunker would have been more in keeping but thats where we are]. For those of you who judge books by their cover, and I count myself amongst that number, this cassette could have contained anything from re-workings of Jimmy Page’s soundtrack parpings to some kind of techno homage. Not that I’m going to try and educate anybody as to what it is they put their releases in but still ... you see where I’m coming from here. 

Because the cassette took so long to arrive a digital version appeared in the interim. And when compared side by side the difference is of such staggering proportions that you’d think you were listening to a different release entirely, the grime of the cassette wiped clean by sterile Covid-19 swabs, washed clean by people in plastic smocks wearing masks and latex gloves. I took myself off to the Servataguse Muusika YouTube channel to test this out and found Elijah [for tis he] standing at a couple of tables in an Adelaide pub making sounds that resemble Aphex Twin [au naturel] circa Selected Ambient Sounds, Panasonic, Chris Carter’s TG sludge, all from four wooden boxes with wires coming out of them. For a moment I came over all nostalgic and pined for a gig, any kind of gig, but particularly one where pub tables are shoved together and people sit and listen and nod in-between going to the bar for a pint and then you get talking to somebody you haven’t seen in years and you miss the rest of the set entirely only to be told that that was the best gig anybody had seen since Government Alpha nearly jammed with Tony Conrad, I mean people were actually fainting from the sheer beauty of it all, they couldn’t handle its intensity but you were at the fucking bar getting another bottle of Erdinger.

But I digress. The eight tracks of minimal Sphere have names like Planning and Plotting, Guardian of an Other Order, What Just Happened, Flotilla on Fluid Crystal. Maybe its the miles between us thats causing some kind of temporal dislodge-ment on my behalf but this just works for me right now. Had this arrived from a suburb of Hull I might have been less impressed but between Australia and this small room on the other side of the world a transformation has taken place and these eight tracks, most of them not much more than a couple of minutes in duration, have become so much more than their whole. It might not blown your mind and it might not be the best thing you hear all week but for a moment there I was listening to a cassette of homemade synth sounds and all was well with the world. I hope you buy one. I hope you don’t have to wait six weeks for it to arrive.

http://www.servataguse.com/

Knock, Knock.

 

Rovellasca - Delirium, or Sonata

Crow Versus Crow. CVC017

Cassette/DL. 50 copies.

Vatican Shadow/Salford Electronics - Temple Gas Mask

Hospital Productions. HOS-677

Cassette/DL. 200 copies.

Posset - Pestling The Unalterable

DL 

Posset - Grindcore My Rave Years

DL

Venusian Death Cell - The Rose

CDR

At around nine a.m. Wednesday morning I answered the phone to a most irate Mrs Fisher. While halfway through her personal ablutions she’d received a knock at the door and thinking it was the nice post lady she made for it déshabillé; shower cap, tatty sweater, no make-up all while shouting down the stairs, ‘I’ll be there in a minute’ then fighting with the slippy front door mechanism only to be met by the grim stare of two police officers.

After a momentary grilling through a crack in the door it became apparent that it was me they were seeking and after further questioning said it was in relation to some post that had been sent my way courtesy of a certain Dr. Steg. Said post containing items that could lead to injury should they be handled without due care and attention vis-vis the daft bugger had sent me something with a razor blade glued to it. They waved the offending item in Mrs Fisher’s face and said that they would return.

Which is where we stand at the moment. Needless to say, this didn’t go down well with Mrs Fisher. Her mood that day further darkened when after retrieving a pile of wet clothing from the washing machine discovered the entire load covered in tiny bits of tissue paper, this due to me not checking trouser pockets pre laundry basket entry. When two workmen turned up next door and started pulling the bathroom out the day was beyond repair. You can imagine the looks that awaited me when I returned home from work. All of this on top of Mrs Fisher having been made redundant the week before. Not good. Wine and promises of ‘this wont happen again’ can only get you so far but fortunately for me the ship of calamity was slowly steered into shallower waters. I now await the return of plod.

Still, lets look on the bright side; the Russians have found a cure for Covid-19 even though they’ve only tested it on seventy-nine people and the streets of the United Kingdom will be much safer going forward thanks to the promised arrival of hundreds if not thousands of Covid-19 Marshals. These people will be tasked with doling out friendly advice, hand sanitizer and masks all while making sure people don’t come closer than two meters together except in pubs and restaurants where anything still goes in a desperate lets not hide it bid to make up the shortfall in Rishi Sunak’s depleted tax revenue account. 

At least my purple snood arrived from Uniqlo. Thank you Mrs Fisher. Thank you Uniqlo.

In other news I signed up for a Deezer account. I still don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing and its something I’ve been having a lot of internal conversations over. One part of me thinks ‘well, how do the artists get paid for their work and what happens if my phone has no charge and the wi-fi’s dodgy just at the exact same moment I’m in the mood for that ECM comp?’ while the other thinks ‘well, at least I can listen to the entire King Crimson back catalogue for ten quid’. For musical exploration purposes it seems to be a portal of discovery while on the other hand I’m wondering if I’ll ever have to buy another physical object ever again. But does me craving having the physical object make me a collector rather than just a listener? I can listen to the new Ashtray Navigations release via Bandcamp [that other now essential online portal of discovery] and never have to look at the Ash Navs LP/CD combo I bought ever again. But I like having the physical object. Its mine. It has art and information on it, the entire release is an artistic statement in so many different ways and if you have lots of them you have a collection of sorts and if you have a Deezer account you have a way of listening and thats it. So much is missing. So much of this sits uneasy with me.

When you’re running out of shelf space maybe this is the way to go? When we’re all crammed into some Ballardian [Covid-19 free] hellscape, elbow to sharp elbow having access to everything ever recorded ever via certain online retailers will be par for the course and buyers of vinyl will be seen as weird antiquarians, the kind of people who don’t mind getting up off their arses every twenty minutes to put more music on. Whatever.    

A couple of people who are still very much working within the physical domain are Andy Wild of Crow Versus crow and Dominik Fernow of Hospital Productions. Crow Versus Crow cassettes are things of beauty and well worth having, the cassette shell here having an opaque textured sheen, the sleeve containing Wild’s own artwork that is Twombly meets Schwitters but here leaning more towards the Schwitters. Rovellasca being Invisible City supremo Craig Stewart Johnson who according to the Bandcamp press ‘explore[s] emotional resonance within delicately constructed monolithic palimpsests’ which is a fantastic line and one that I almost understand. To my ears its a very mellow and utterly absorbing industrial extractor fan drone played out in three parts, the tape hiss adding to the work immensely, one of those drones that leaks out of bass amps and rumbles across the floor vibrating your flares before disappearing up your leg.

Dominik Fernow’s project Vatican Shadow is one I’ve read about but not heard, usually on Twitter where people make jokes about Vatican Shadow’s cover art being leaked, a joke that is totally lost on me. After various investigations I now know that Vatican Shadow lay down heavy beats in an Industrial meets Hardcore Techno kind of way. Not that I know a thing about Hardcore Techno, or Industrial come to that, but it seems apposite. Thudding beats of a stark and brooding nature which after Salford Electronics has smeared it with his grey suburban grime becomes ever more depressing. All that’s left to do is alter the BPM and cover it in black and white artwork reminiscent of 1990’s Power Electronics outfits, thus lots of soldiers shooting at things in the desert and the trying on of gas masks. One for the dark nights ahead. Dark Knights ahead.

Posset’s pair of releases have been very kindly put on to disc for those us digital averse or who prefer the physical but these are to all intents and purposes digital releases. The CD’s  are kindly received as it means I can listen with headphones on through the hi-fi midweek as Mrs Fisher looks for a new partner on Tinder. As ever its always a pleasure to hear what the Possetted one has been up to. A most singular voice from the north east and who can resist a release that takes its title from a line by Beckett. This would be Pestling The Unalterable of course and not Grindcore My Rave Years, Beckett long since having snuffed it before such things became available to consumers. 

With Dictaphone and tapes in hand our intrepid hero sits on a park bench every morning watching the geese make their way toward the water. Those expecting a Chris Watson-esque recording will be disappointed to find twenty minutes of someone gasping for breath as small feathered things tweet and tape squidge burbles and boils and bubbles along like bad guts after too much beer and curry. The twelve tracks that make up Grindcore are an extension as such but add to the mix the belchings of beelzebub, intergalactic communications, people having sex in millisecond bursts, drunken readings of Finnegan’s Wake, cats growling, the Clangers on acid, cats whisker radio trawls and people playing tubas while hitting metal buckets. This exploration of sound through the medium of tape and voice is one that I never fail to delight in, Posset achieving with such humble equipment sounds that eclipse those working within well equipped studios.

Meanwhile, over in Ireland Idwal’s favourite Metal band Venusian Death Cell has delivered what is surely their shortest and arguably best work to date. Ten tracks in under 20 minutes of sucked through a condensor mic straight to tape fuck you I don’t care I’m doing it anyway with my whammy bar and drums all coming through in spectacular wall of sound ear bleed-o-rama metal as you never heard it before. David Vora [for tis he] has been doing this for so long now it feels like coming home every time I get one of his releases. The manic vocal intros, the two stringed up and down the neck ‘Orphan’, the pounding drum of ‘Rotting in Hell’, the Slayer cover and ‘Master’ where Vora bangs a piano, hits play on a beat box and reverbs his guitar to shreds all while singing the word ‘master’ over and over again. Long may he continue to rule in hell.

There’s a knock at the door. I must dash, Mrs Fisher refuses to answer it. 

CVC

Vatican Shadow / Salford Electronics

Posset

davidvora10 [at] hotmail.com

Tristan Tzara Meets Nurse With Wound

 

Tristan Tzara - Minuits Pour Géants

Nurse With Wound - On The Edge Of Outside

Lenka Lente. Book + CD

ISBN : 979-10-94601-33-4

One benefit of being in an ongoing on-off Kirklees lock down loop of sorts, is that I've been doing a lot more reading than usual. The benefits of sitting quietly with a book are much ignored and while some people go batshit stir crazy after two hours of being indoors and start redecorating their houses or subscribing to all sorts of shit to watch on the telly I find the quiet and solitude that a book brings to be as good for my mental health as any amount of therapy. Not that its that quiet around here anymore but you get my drift. In some respects it's a little like being in a holiday cottage on the Northumbrian coast only with more police sirens, barking dogs, kids playing tuneless recorders and the rumble of the M62.

Mrs Fisher is the more voracious reader of the two of us and when not writing herself is capable of chewing up novels in a day, while I like to take a more casual approach, dipping in and out of books of various genres with a nonchalance that some people might find whimsical or dilettantish. I skip from newspapers articles to short stories, to rereading bits of favourite books, occasionally I'll get my teeth into a really good novel and will tear through the pages with a manic zeal wondering why I don’t read more novels only to be distracted once more by that book on Kraftwerk or the forthcoming Kelman. 

Last week I swung from reacquainting myself with The Importance of Being Earnest to the second installment of Francis Stonor Saunders fascinating account of her families escape from Romania during the Second World War to Kafka's Metamorphosis to Private Eye [the latter I now realise being far too cynical and wearisome for pandemic reading]. After flicking through a Dora Kinsley book on the lives of famous authors I decided that the three novels of Cormac Mcarthy's I'd read were nowhere near enough and that I should get hold of some of his others, perhaps with an eye to taking them on holiday next week [yes, an actual holiday] but then what about the 'to read' pile? That ever present jumbled tower of books that is forever a reminder of money spent but not benefited from. Its certainly shrunk during lock down but it still lives in double digit territory; The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Edgar Allen Poe, all those Pushkin Press Japanese short story collections, Celine's Death on the Installment Plan, Martin Amis ….

I'd like to read the words of Tristan Tzara which Lenka Lente have put in to a book along with a well paired Nurse With Wound CD but as is sometimes the case, the words come in French. I have no problem with this. Lenka Lente are a French publisher and I don't expect them to pander to my lack of bilingualism. With previous Lenka Lente publications of a similar nature, I have at times been able to circumnavigate this problem by casting around for an online translation, but not this time. I have at times in the past scanned pages and translated the resulting images using online software but time isn't on my side here and to translate ‘Minuits Pour Géants’ would deprive me of my precious dilettante-ish reading time. Instead I do some Tzara research because I now realise that I know little about him other than he was one of the co-founders of Dada. I now know a little more; painter, avant-garde poet, performance artist, director, composer, critic, essayist and an eventual mover towards Surrealism. Born plain old Samy Rosenstock he changed his name to one that is said to be a Romanian pun on ‘sad in the country’, or ‘sad donkey Tzara’ in French, though this seems subjective. English translation of Tzara’s work appear to run to his poems and Dada manifesto’s leaving me Tzara-less as far this goes. Ah well.

Ten minutes of new Nurse With Wound sort of makes up for this but it didn’t satisfy my craving enough, so I played A Sucked Orange as I dug around for the Nurse With Wound/Hafler Trio split cassette from 1987, a release that still fries my mind to this day. I didn’t find it so I played On The Edge Of Outside on repeat for a bit. Expect heavy, portentous guitar, hammered piano and a soundtrack to something scary, preferably by Peter Strickland. Nurse With Wound here as a quartet and that heavy guitar courtesy of Andrew Lille who seems to revel in such things, cascading sheets of echoing guitar, scraped strings and wild tumult beneath which eventually appears the sounds of a gutted upright piano as played by the survivor of an industrial press accident. 

Très bon. 

http://www.lenkalente.com/