Further Adventures in Royal Mail Land with Hyster and Steep Gloss

 

D D Dobson - Ritual Bath

Hyster Tapes 30.

Recycled cassette. 50 Copies

Honkeyzontel Picnic - Facing Charges As A Sport

Steep Gloss. SG20

Cassette/DL

On Monday evening I answered the door to a young lady who said to me ‘Does an I-dwal Fisher live here?’ This she said while proffering a battered jiffy bag which I took from her and which I saw written upon it the words ‘Idwal Fisher’. Missing from underneath these words was the name of the town where I live and the post code.  Sending things in the post minus its intended town and post code is to put your mail in to a black hole from which the chances of it re-emerging are about the same as me bumping into Laurie Anderson in Cleckheaton library. ‘Its just that I thought it might be important’ she said, ‘ because its come from abroad’. Indeed it had. From Finland. I thanked her profusely and asked her how far she’d come? It transpired about a fifteen mile round trip, from the other side of Huddersfield and with that she was gone into the dark night. I felt befuddled. Should I have offered her money as some kind of recompense? Should I have invited her in for a cup of tea [probably not do-able under the current circs though] should I have explained who Idwal Fisher was? Maybe she just thought I was from Wales? No matter. After returning to the warmth of the living room I discovered that a Royal Mail employee had written at the bottom of the packet ‘try Huddersfield’ and beneath that an HD post code. I decided to send off a postcard thanking this kind person even more profusely than before while offering to do her washing up for a year or some-such by way of gratitude. As of today, no reply.

The next day I received a post card from the Royal Mail telling me that I had an item waiting for me but that I must first pay them £1.50 as the sendee hadn’t put enough postage on it. Then I got to wondering how it is that I’m all of a sudden finding myself more involved with the Royal Mail than I’d rather be and am I on some kind of watch list for awkward buggers? This, let us not forget coming after a visit from Plod wanting to know who it is sending me postcards with razor blades glued to them. 

Then I got to thinking whether this hassle was a price worth paying for not entering the digital realm? If these had been links in emails some poor lass might have never known where Cleckheaton was, the Royal Mail would be £1.50 down and I wouldn’t have two rather wonderful cassettes. Maybe it was meant to be.

Theres little chance of entering the digital realm with Hyster Tapes seeing as most of their releases exist as physical objects only, the majority on recycled cassettes that are also a very reasonable two euros apiece to purchase. To enter in to Hyster’s world is to come face to face with some exemplary ‘out there’ sounds. You can start your journey at ‘noise’ base camp in that all the Hyster releases I’ve head come from that germ seed but you’ll soon find yourself wandering lost in a room where just about anything that can make a noise is deemed worthy enough for inclusion on a recycled cassette. The D. D. Dobson release is no different in this manner in that some of it appears to be going in perpetual reverse and here’s a capstan coming to a shuddering halt and theres several conversations all going at once with one in particular exhibiting the characteristics of a gibbering lunatic. This is the musical equivalent of the detritus that accumulates on forest floors and over time becomes mulch that gives life to so many other things; a constant chatter of groans, whirrs, chunters and grunts not as escaping from a human voice box but from that deep mulch sound world. None of this explains why there’s sections of a syncopated finger-clicking surreality here or why theres a sirens wail [the classical kind, not the emergency services], or why a warbled tape presence should be here to set the tone. But it does. A series of cascading and rapacious tape swirls straight out of the Pierre Schaeffer book. Tell me this was recorded at Studio d'Essai circa 1953 and I wouldn't think any different and are they really trying to harness all that electrical power and do they have a van de graaff generator to hand with which to dissipate all this outage? Russians talking. Drones. And why is there a washed out Residents track in here? Why not is the answer. And why is someone blowing tunelessly down a trumpet tube while bombs fall on Libya? Can someone explain this to me? I’d be eternally grateful. On seconds thoughts …. Russians. A gong shimmering. Residual hiss and 1970’s telephone connection blat. Reel to reel computers going full bore just to send you your overdue leccy bill.

Wigan label Steep Gloss is quickly turning into another essential outlet for all things unclassifiable/wonk/sound-art/dada call-it-what-you-will, a veritable treasure trove and a steadily growing one at that. None so stranger than Honkeyzontel Picnic, this being the duo of Luke Poot and Darran Adcock who’ve submitted a lockdown classic of sorts as accompaniment for those of us who are struggling to make sense of the world. For nothing here makes any sense. Forty five tracks, some of them but mere seconds long of surreal absurdism thats a Northern Giles, Giles and Fripp meets Suicide meets Kagel meets Joincey during a lockdown in Park Hill Flats where they wrote songs while banana peel scrapings dried out in the oven. Luke Poot [I’m suspecting its him] delivers the lines to such beautifully ridiculous songs with a seemingly bunged up nose [at times whispering in your ear to Julius Eastman type bashings and toilet noises], like he’s halfway towards falling asleep or perhaps a heavily narcotized Larry Grayson, while as accompaniment we get random electronica and homely domesticity; squirts and squeals, cassette cuts, squeaky doors, kitchen sounds, sweeping up sounds, toy pianos and thumped tupperware, smoke alarms and whistles. Some tracks exist for as long as it takes to recite the lines they hold:  

‘Bugs Bunny, more like Insect Bunny’

‘grandma died in the paddling pool playing with nail clippers’

‘thats isn’t cooked its just wet and Sellotaped’

And actual sneezing, ‘sneezing in a bin-bag so as to huff it later’ delivered with a flatulent raspberry and hopefully in isolation.

I cant help but think that Poot and Adcock have found the zeitgeist here. Nothing much makes sense in the world these days so why not hunker down with forty five tracks of sheer lunacy and become at one with Honkeyzontel Picnic covid Stylee. Count me in. Well worth the fifty bob.  

Hyster

 Steep Gloss

   

  

Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Todmorden.

 

Reynols - Gona Rubian Ranesa

Outlier Communications. LP/DL

Jake Blanchard - Morass

CDR

Friday morning started like many other Friday mornings in that I got out of bed and went food shopping but when I got back things took a very different turn. Mrs Fisher had received an email saying would it be possible for you to drop off some of your books at Salts Mill? This brought on a mix of emotions ranging from mild terror to nervousness to wild joy. Neither of us had been inside a bookshop for a good eight months. Apart from supermarkets and one visit to Oxfam I don’t think I’ve been inside a public building with other people since March. Mrs Fisher hasn’t even been to the supermarket. Or Oxfam either come to  that. Before shit came to town visiting a book shop on a Friday had become a regular thing for us; locate a book shop within reasonable driving distance, drive there, buy books, have lunch, go home, open bottle of wine, read books all while giving thanks to everything thats good with the world. And now I stood with a box of rolled oats in one hand and a tin of adzuki beans in the other while being asked if we could do that which was once so natural. Today even. Why not go after lunch I said ? Which is what we did.

We drove there, put on our masks and after scanning the NHS app in at reception we were once again inside one of the best book shops in the country. If you’ve not been I highly recommend it. If you live in a small village or town the chances are that Salts Mill will be bigger. It is huge, vast and only part of it is open to the public, the rest awaiting development and a return to everything not being shit. It has a couple of very good, common sense, reasonably priced restaurants, an art supply shop, several antique shops, outdoor clobber shop, a home-wear shop where you can pay £50 for a lemon squeezer and buy things for putting things in that come from Italy and of course a book shop. A flagstoned floor book shop with books laid out on tables and enormous windows with views up on to the hills on one side and the village of Saltaire with its close terraced streets on the other. They have the biggest collection of Hockney’s in the country too, all of it on permanent display and just being there makes you feel better about yourself. Even if you’re wearing a mask and have to leave your details at reception. Needless to say the book shop is also huge with plenty of space to move around in which is just as well under the current circumstances. They like to promote local authors too which is where Mrs Fisher comes in and unusually for a book shop they seem in no hurry to shift anything with discounting seemingly a dirty word. Some of Tony Harrison’s books have been there that long that they’re starting to yellow, others curl at the corners but its all part of the appeal. Its the sort of place that sees you leaving with that huge compendium of Oulipian literature or the compete dramatical works of Tony Harrison or the recently republished Ariel with that wonderful wood print cover even though you’ve already got two copies at home. People leave weighed down with books, pens, brushes, craft paper, £50 lemon squeezers and bulging stomachs all of them swearing blind that they’re coming back next week if not sooner. 

The hardest part of the outing wasn’t the mask wearing or getting home and worrying if the covid app was going to start bleeping but at having to endure the lousy traffic in and out of Bradford. I’d sort of forgotten how spectacularly awful and dispiriting it is driving in heavy traffic, and not because it was particularly foul that particular afternoon. The drive in and out of Bradford is as depressing and dangerous as it gets, a cross between Wacky Races and Death Race 2000 as undertaken by suicidal bus drivers, deranged taxis, local youths in souped up VW Golfs all taking place between nondescript industrial buildings selling brake pads and carpet remnants, boarded up pubs, forgotten churches with smashed windows and those hideous modern brick buildings surrounded by out of control weeds that are the headquarters for vehicle breakdown companies and debt recovery outfits. The mere sight of them sucks the life out of you. I’m glad I don’t have to do it every day.

I bought a book of course, its impossible to leave Salts Mill without one. Having an enormous reading pile I decided to buy lightly and purchased a copy of Yukio Mishima’s ‘Star’. One of those Penguin Modern’s that cost a couple of quid and can be read in an hour or so, which is what I did Friday evening. Then my long delayed copy of Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season’ turned up and my book reading world got shoved up against a wall and had its nose flattened. Its the kind of book that I thought didn’t exist anymore; a genuinely shocking and deeply disturbing book and one that refuses to leave you. It’s set in the small nondescript town of La Matosa, Mexico and interweaves the lives of several desperate, lost and shiftless people. People for whom life has little meaning beyond drugs, drink, casual violence and even more casual sex. After I’d finished it I realized I needed to read it again, and for the first time I can ever remember I turned from the last page to the first and started reading again. If you like your fiction dark and unsettling I couldn’t recommend it any higher.

Anyway, never mind all that, Reynols are back. Back with their first new studio album in seventeen years. Seventeen years. Where does all the time go? I remember hearing about Reynols when they emerged in the late nineties and the word was that they were making thee most out there psychedelic music you ever heard in your life, most of it driven to the pumping beat of their drummer who has Down Syndrome and then when you actually got to hear the music it was like a slow nod of appreciation growing in to full blown, wide eyed, wide smiled, head nodding, fist pumping, ejaculatory, exclamatory yes! They were indeed totally mind blowing. One of my favourite Reynols listening experiences was with the Betley release ‘-------’. The Toddmeister shoved a copy in my hand during a Saturday afternoon drink in the Duncan and me being a lightweight in the drink department fell asleep upon getting home and woke up early the next morning. Six o’clock Sunday morning if memory serves. If you want to know what weird feels like try listening to ‘-------’ when you’re wide awake at six o’clock on a dark winters morning. Imagine a psychedelic record as recorded in a concrete block in the desert by people who for whom the norm was a forgotten four letter word. Then I saw the documentary about Reynols [Buscando a Reynols] and it all started to make a little bit more sense. Reynols just liked to have fun. They loved to make music. They loved putting out albums and over a short period of time between the end of the nineties and the beginning of a new millennium they pumped it out in a frenzy of creativity. During this peak of creativity they were booked to play a gig in London but were denied entry for not having the correct paperwork [or something like that] and decided to spend their time in immigration custody making a new single using only photocopies of the paperwork that had been given them which was released as a single one side ‘Don’t Cry For Me England’ the other ‘Cry For Me Argentina’. Did I mention they come from Argentina? I bought more Reynols stuff along the way including a CDR that was an hour long drone, they fried my mind and now they’re back.

I have no idea why theres been a seventeen year hiatus in all things Reynols but I’m glad that its come to an end. Even if its been for this one release its been worth it. For this is prime Reynols, dig in and and don’t hang back. Highest possibles etc ... Spread over two sides of vinyl [green vinyl if you’re quick] this is where Reynols meet Neu! via the shamanic rituals of a peyote chief all of it covered in Tomasin’s ever enthusiastic shout and call vocals. On the opener ‘Cameso Cator Sitero’ he sounds like he’s leading a chaotic line dance, shouting out instructions as a wild jamboree of chugging guitar and a never ending swirly solo does the rounds, ‘Lintiri Tepe Roli’ is a much slower Apocalypse Now Doors themed The End with equally spooky keyboard runs and backing vocals straight out of a Sun City Girls soundcheck, ‘Acotan Silago Foli’ is as equally drowsy while the albums closer ‘Corlo Sattru’ sees Reynols push the Komische buttons and set the controls for the heart of a kiddie playground where the entire Reynols ensemble pick up their instruments and follow a tuneless military flute before the whole things collapses in a glorious heap. Welcome back my Argentinian friends. Lets hope you stick around for a while.

Closer to home by a margin of around 7,000 miles comes Jake Blanchard. He of the Tor Beers and The Tor Fest and the magic pen with which he doth create thee most wonderful works. He drew fifty individual ones for Morass and glued them to the fold out card sleeve and sent them out in to the world [maybe even Argentina, who knows?] where they were held close to the hearts of people who were heard to mutter the words ‘Weird West Yorkshire Psych’ or ‘mines a lambic’. That sort of thing. He being one of those fine upstanding human beings keeping the West Yorkshire freak flag a-fluttering by turning his house into a studio and filling it with electric guitars, synths, tape recorders, mixers, every instrument in the house perhaps and doing it in fine style too if this is anything to go by. No doubt influenced by those other furry freak brothers Campbell and Todd, Blanchard throws himself into a stinking hell hole pit of psych and comes out smelling of things in eternal reverse, of sporadically hit bits of drum, of droney electronica. Here comes some motorized Egyptian synth thrash as bashed out on the back of a six bottle frenzy on Friday night , betcha didn’t see that one coming and if I’m not out of the poang doing the jasper jig, up and down, up and down I’m up the bloody tree. Don’t stop me now folks. 

https://jakeblanchard.bandcamp.com/

https://outliercommunications.bandcamp.com/

   

 

Deezering

 

Ashtray Navigations - Para Sol Production

CDR/DL

brb>voicecoil - Alms of Guilt

Muzamuza/Opal Tapes. CD/DL/Lathe cut 12”

I’ve yet to decided whether my Deezer subscription is a blessing or a curse. Having access to 56 million tracks, 30,000 radio stations not to mention innumerable podcasts and playlists and lets not forget the sodding lyrics is like been given the keys to the sweet shop only to get gut ache from overdoing it on the wine gums. On the face of it everything seems totes amazeballs: all the music ever recorded by anybody who stood in front of a microphone for ten of your English pounds sterling per calendar month. Chuck in Bandcamp, an internet connection and digital storage space and I can now happily flog off my entire record/CD/cassette collection thus freeing up valuable space for my toilet roll collection.

Having a Deezer subscription means that I’m in danger of moving from someone who much prefers having an actual physical musical object in their possession to someone who streams music via a smartphone and bluetooth speaker and doesn’t have to get off their arse to turn an LP over every twenty minutes/change a CD every hour. The only problem I have with streaming/downloading is that I loose a connection with the artist/band/project [and sometimes an actual connection when wi-fi goes awol] and besides getting in and out of the Poang is good for me. Getting in and out of that Poang is likely to be a major part of my total exercise between now and the vaccine coming along. Don’t knock it. The more LP’s I have, the more records I play, the fitter I get. 

There’s a huge disconnect between streaming/downloading and owning a physical product and even though I may be able to listen to the King Crimson entire back catalogue in chronological order [barring 1975’s live album ‘USA’ which, for what I must assume are contractual reasons, isn’t on there] I feel as if I’m not a part of the music, not a part of what the band wanted me to be which is a buyer of their music, especially on vinyl. Or perhaps Fripp isn’t fussy so long as I’m buying it in one form or another? With Deezer I can listen before I buy though, using Deezer as a sampler if you like, it saves me the bother of buying those albums and tracks that didn’t really click and buy those that I really like which is why the vinyl of Lark’s Tongues in Aspic turned up last week. If you’re the kind of person who’s wasted many a Saturday afternoon digging around in record shops buying things on chance because you like the cover or were swayed by a review in the NME only to discover what you’ve paid good hard money for was crud and that the review was glowing because the reviewer was a friend of the band, then you know this works.

Another downside of Deezer [though this isn’t Deezers fault at all] is that I’ve been down the Prog black hole for far too long now. My Prog peregrinations seeing me arrive via King Crimson at the door of Peter Hammill, which is where I start getting all twitchy. My ongoing battle with Yes has ended. I now declare that they’re a great singles band and if Topographic Oceans had contained 39 tracks of three minutes or less instead of four they might have won me over completely, as it is I’m still unconvinced as to their greatness. Discovering that Geneses wrote a song about supermarkets also threw me: Aisle of Plenty, you can find it on Selling England by the Pound should you be curious enough to hear Peter Gabriel sing the line ‘Birds eye dairy cream sponge on offer this week’. 

Can having too much music be a bad thing though? Maybe I just need to hold back and not get too carried away here. Maybe I should be more judicious in my musical selections and rather like that kid in a sweet shop, not get gut ache from overdoing it on the wine gums but instead take my time and suck on a more meditative Mintoe. 

You can have the entire digital Ashtray Navigations back catalogue for one hundred and seventy six pounds ten pence exactly, a hefty sum, but keep in mind that you’re keeping two people in bread and water here. It might sound like a lot of money but this also allows those same two people to carry on making some of the best sounds on the planet. After finally putting down the 4CD/LP Greatest Hits job I was cheered to find that new material had already surfaced from Ashtray HQ with a release made entirely from the Toddmiester’s own hand. Para Sol Production could be and is like every other Ashtray Navigations release in that it contains the scraps of every other genre thats ever gone before it. Even Blaxploitation soundtracks, snippets of which I picked up during the first track with Todd chopping out stabbed guitar riffs like he’s got his cuff buttons stuck in the bridge strings. ‘Creaturetime’ is all dreamy swirls and much better value for money than anything I’ve heard from Oneohtrix Point Never, ‘Running California Eyeshutter I Socket Sitting Under The Great Blue Virtual Palm Tree of Your Mind Image Pulling That Old Face Like Seagulls Stole Your Chips or Something’ is a languid beatbox driven slice of ambience over which Todd runs his fingers up and down a piano bashing out notes like Keith Jarrett after one too many in the Fenton. 

Hows your rule of six, last orders at 9.30 pm lockdown of sorts going anyway? When I mention that the current coronavirus rules don’t really affect me that much I get accused of being an unsociable misery guts, which is exactly true. Pubs hold about as much appeal to me as Victorian plague pits these days so I’ll see you all on the other side if thats alright with you. Waking up to find that Bunker Boy has got the virus had me spraying the cornflakes but then I thought of Bolsorano who also contracted the virus and survived thus enhancing his reputation as a strong man. Johnson survived too but at least he goes jogging and cycling which might just have been enough to save the oaf, the nearest Bunker Boy gets to exercise is walking up the steps of Air Force one and I bet that tires him out. Or has he got the virus? If he emerges from this intact [which I’m sure he will] he’ll go the same way as Bolsorano and Johnson and escape with reputation enhanced. I don’t usually wish ill will on anybody but in certain circumstances I allow myself exceptions. This is one of them. But I digress.

Last but certainly not least come brb>voicecoil who in my last recent review of theirs I renamed brb>voicecall. For the entire review. Maybe I was dazzled by the super limited clear blue lathe cut slab of wax that it came on? Thats my excuse anyway, that and my inability to see letters where they should be. This comes in that same most desirous format though this time in a stunning transparent green, and CD [via Opal Tapes] and download via Bandcamp which is sort of where I came in. Of the six tracks of treated field recordings, twisted found sounds and cold industrial ambience that populate Alms of Guilt [Kevin Wilkinson, for tis he, describes himself as an ‘audio manipulator’ and ‘sound deconstructor’] my favourite pick would be the nearly ten minute long The Truth of Demons with its clanging elevator cables and rolling steel pipes thats as near to fellow north easterners TNB as we’re going to get here. There be glacier slippage, mic’d up truffle hunting pig snorting through detritus, inhospitable winds, the march of insects, heavy stones dropped in to dark reservoirs on lonely moor tops, the sound-worlds that Wilkinson creates via brb>voicoil are cold and unwelcoming but never less than totally absorbing.  

https://muzamuza.bandcamp.com/album/alms-of-guilt

https://www.brbvoicecoil.com/

https://ashtraynavigations.bandcamp.com/album/para-sol-production