The Tier Three Lockdown Diaries. Week Two featuring Steep Gloss

 

Tuesday 22nd

On this mornings walk we pass the Timid Lady. Its the first time either of us have seen her in months and she seems genuinely pleased to see us, waving and smiling as she passes on the other side of the road. 

Much earlier in the morning I’m in Sainsburys. At ten minutes past six to be precise. A member of staff at the door is checking people in and out and as I pass I see the number twelve on her screen. The shelves are full and the few people who are out shopping at this early hour appear to be entirely civilised and in no rush to panic buy which leads me to wonder if people that get up early to go food shopping are more civilized than those who roll out of bed with a hangover at eleven and elbow people out of their way in a desperate bid to secure the last turkey crown. Because I cant get everything I need I drive to the nearby Tescos where the atmosphere is very different and where it looks like they’ve been visited by a plague of locusts with some aisles being virtually impassable due to harried staff busily restocking depleted shelves. But there’s mountains of Brussel sprouts on offer so that’ll be all that matters to some, though why this most deplorable of vegetables becomes the centre of attention at Christmas will forever remain a mystery to me, despite the attempt of any number of celebrity chefs telling us that if you cook them right …

In the afternoon I ring Dr Steg and talk about the possibilities of a collaboration. We talk of Simon and his legacy, most of which has been deposited with Dr Steg in the shape of dozens of cardboard boxes.

Later I’m listening to Yoko Ono after her name crops up in the Bald Heads WA group. This after I come across a story in Private Eye relating the tale of Melody Maker critic Richard Williams who in 1970 was given the Lennon-Ono release Wedding Album to review. Williams mistakenly took the four sided acetate he was given to be the finished article not realizing that the constant tones on two of the sides were for recording engineer purposes only and not part of Lennon and Ono’s first foray in to drone. Needless to say the pair of them were delighted with the review and sent Williams a telegram thanking him, saying that they may even be the best sides.

Thursday 24th

So here it is Merry Christmas. A package arrives from Walklett containing the new Smell & Quim album Cuntybubbles, along with the Psych KG/Mama Baer/Kommissar Hjuler split, a reissue of Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome [which I’ve never heard] and some comp full of bands I’m mostly unfamiliar with, last track of which is Eugene Chadbourne meets Harsh Noise Movement in a collaboration that you have to file under ‘things you thought would never happen’.

In the park this morning I place two bird feeder fat balls on the wall where the rats are living and within two minutes a rat has picked one of them up and is carrying around in its wide stretched jaws, having chewed through the netting it carries it off. On the bird feeding tables that used to be chess playing tables I scatter some berry favoured suet which seems to send the park bird population in to paroxysms of delight and we’re soon surrounded by great tits, robins, starling, magpies, blackbirds, sparrows, dunnocks and of course pigeons, those muggers of the bird world who muscle everybody out of their way, fill their crops and bugger off, leaving where once was berry flavored suet a rather dirty chess board.

I call in to see my father and drop his presents off. We talk Brexit, Trump, cricket, rugby and what he’ll be having for Christmas dinner which seems to be a pick of anything from his well stuffed fridge. With his whisky and the latest series of Better Call Saul he’ll be OK for a while yet. He nonchalantly tells me that he’s been watching documentaries on Youtube [via his smart TV] this after he earlier tried to convince me that his TV has a mind of its own and how certain channels disappear only to reappear at a later date. Last week Netflix took over his set and I’m pretty sure he came close to throwing his shoe at it but all seems normal now. His next door neighbour is as deaf as him and due to the wafer thin dividing wall of the bungalow I can clearly hear whatever it is she’s watching. When my sister lived there she told me that one night he fell asleep in the chair so she turned the TV down to give her ears a rest but was still able to follow what was going on as the neighbour was watching the same channel.

[Christmas happens here - a magical time of year when half the population is pissed by midday]

Saturday 26th

Spend Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day avoiding people which is quite easy to do if you’re out of the door by eight am. This morning was no different but after arriving back home and nipping out to Sainsburys in hunter gatherer mode I notice that the number of walkers, dog walkers, joggers and cyclists doing the rounds has increased to what I consider dangerous levels. One woman is in an argument with three cyclists who are of course on the pavement on the wrong side of the road. I can only deduce that all these people have recently emerged from three day drink and food induced comas and having survived last night’s Storm Bella have decided to blow away the cobwebs by setting off into the teeth of its remnants.

The early morning Christmas Day walk is a quiet one and one which we spend walking mostly in silence. It thus comes as a huge shock to be wished a Happy Christmas by one householder who is stood on the threshold of his house in slippers and gown having an early morning fag.  

Sunday 27th

Andy Jarvis & Thomas Tyler - Deus Sive Natura

Steep Gloss. SG 23. cassette

Body Has No Head - Voice in the Other Room/Refacing

Steep Gloss. SG 25. Cassette

So there it went then, probably the weirdest Christmas any of us will ever know. Assuming of course that things will be ‘back to normal’ by the time the next one comes around. Whatever ‘normal’ is looking like by then. 

I’ve done my bit by staying away from other people and genuinely trying to do my best for the greater cause but if the street where I live is any indication of the bigger picture, it would appear that me and Mrs Fisher are in the minority. 

Having been furloughed until the 18th of January and with the better part of two of the darkest month of the year sitting in front of me like menacing succubi, I felt that the best way to avoid disappearing down a miserable pit of despair, would be to grasp the thing by the nettle so to speak. One of my biggest problems at this time of the year is the overconsumption of alcohol and the effects this has on my delicate physiognomy. Knowing my limits in regard to the indulgence of distilled spirits, wine, beer and festive comestibles I thought it prudent to leave them alone entirely this year thus avoiding the dead, wasted mornings and the interminable hangovers altogether and with the time thus gained, write, draw, read, listen to the radio, catch the back end of the cricket from Australia before it goes off at seven am, anything but wallow in my pit with a banging head and churning guts. This is an approach that I’ve never taken before, what with me being quite partial to having a glass of something to hand once the clock gets past four and it was something I wasn’t sure I’d be capable of doing now. My mission is helped by Mrs Fisher not having touched a drop since September and despite having numerous bottles of various types, strengths and colours in the house I thought I’d give it a go. 

This lasted until Christmas Day when I opened one of those 175ml bottles of wine you get in supermarkets that are marketed at people who want just the one glass of wine. I always wondered who bought such things and now I know. Of course this was all preplanned, the bottle in question [a passable Rioja] was bought in the last food shop before pulling up the drawbridge so it was always my intention to have a glass of wine with the Christmas Day meal. Then there was the post prandial cheese board and crackers and who can eat cheese and crackers without a glass of port? Certainly not me and having several bottles in the house I had to open one because not to do so would contravene some kind of Christmas Port Law that I’m sure exists. So it was no surprise to wake up on Boxing Day with a hangover. Just a headache but enough to necessitate the taking of pharmaceuticals. It soon passed and normality was restored. Helped along by ten cups of tea and some bananas I was back on the road to recovery and out for a walk, the cold winter wind buffing the cheekbones to a nice red hue before home, drawbridge and a Japanese anime film that passed without much comment.

One of the upsides to not drinking is that you have lots of time on your hands. All I have to do now is make the most of it. Its not unusual therefore to find myself listening to noise at ungodly hours of the morning. While the world around me is dark and quiet I’m sat in the poang listening to Body Has No Head and Jarvis and Tyler. Its an approach I can highly recommend taking advantage as it does of the solitude on offer at such times.

Body Has No Head is another outfit featuring Cody Brant who last appeared on these pages with a cassette of found American home recordings that I sent to Dr Steg and by the sounds of it is still swilling around as part of the 200 million packages currently within the Royal Mail postal system. Recorded in 2013 Brant is joined by Shane McDonell for two sides of primitive nineties noise the kind of which I hadn’t listened to in a long time until yesterday when I listened to the recently reissued Smell & Quim release Gothic Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Techno Charity Gnome [of which more later]. The resemblance to the second side of Pushy Gothic Gnome to whichever side of BHNH is I’m listening to now is quite remarkable with that long, repetitive pounding that has no end in sight filled with screams, honking drones and all manner of electronic screech. It doesn’t last long enough though before we are thrown in to table top noise land where cassette abuse, joins gadget noise, electro clatter, strafed bridge strings, xylophones gone mad and all that good stuff that used to turn up here on a regular basis thanks to labels like Smell The Stench. Maybe a hint of a boisterous electroacousitc set up here which, having no info to go on, I’ll settle for. An entertaining trip. 

The Jarvis/Tyler tape follows a similar noisy path albeit it from 5000 miles away in Stoke-on-Trent via Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. And I cant help but feel that this is all Tyler’s doing, with Jarvis playing the straight man trying to get him back on the road to nuance before it all spills over into total chaos which he fails at and which it inevitably does. Hence that helicopter roar has TV samples and rudimentary guitar pluck before we hit the full on chaos which is again nineties in fashion and not incomparable to certain noise-mongers of that era. Four tracks for your delectation that all bear the imprint of those determined to do our hearing no end of damage with howling screams, metal destruction, scrape, Dicta-noise, feedback and for respite and balance the appearance of the occasional showtime crooner. All I want is a room somewhere ...

    

https://steepgloss.bandcamp.com/album/deus-sive-natura

https://steepgloss.bandcamp.com/album/voice-in-the-other-room-refacing

 

RJF and Holy Grails

 

RJF - Greater Success in Apprehension & Convictions

Harbinger Sound. LP w/ sleevenotes + poster.

Once the resurgence in vinyl took the nations CD buying public by storm, records termed ‘Holy Grail’ used to appear with unnerving regularity. David Keenan’s still much missed record shop Volcanic Tongue used to find new ones weekly. On the back of more than one glowing Julian Cope review I bought a few myself and yes I could see the importance but rarely did I feel that my world had shifted. I dare say that there were some good ones in and amongst all those Holy Grails but surely the time must come when there are no more Holy Grails to discover? Then again maybe this is some sort of ongoing process with more recent releases becoming Holy Grails as time passes, their importance arriving at the same time as the information that only 25 copies of the thing were ever made. 

An original copy of Greater Success in Apprehension & Convictions might set you back a grand these days. Only 300 copies were pressed and unless you were one of the very few who picked them up at the time or were lucky enough to score a cheap copy at one of Sweden’s second hand markets [stories do exist] it looks like you’re going to have to make do with this Harbinger LP or the previous Segerhuva CD that Tommy Carlsson put out back in 2008.

The story behind Greater Success in Apprehension & Convictions involves its remaining incalcitrant member, drunken phone calls, all round general obfuscation, transgressive imagery, right wing leanings and an attitude that begins and ends with a huge fuck you. Its a story that Carlsson has already expanded upon with much clarity within the pages of As Loud As Possible and has expanded on even further here with some illuminating inner sleeve notes. Its an interesting story and one worth seeking out seeing as how it centers around RJF’s remaining member Leif Thuresson, a genuine misanthrope who wasn’t going to trust just anybody with his magnum opus, thus beginning a journey for Carlsson that would involve getting to get to know Thuresson personally before being passed fit for the job. Thats Thuresson’s picture on the inner sleeve; an umbrella nonchalantly laid over his shoulder and a look in his eye that tells you he’s more than familiar with the inner workings of A Clockwork Orange. I may not be the best judge of character in the world but I’m not getting much in the way of touchy feely love here.

It’ll come as no surprise then that Greater Success in Apprehension & Convictions is a horrible record with a horrible sleeve filled with horrible sounds. What might be more surprising is that after almost forty years it can still stand on its own two feet. 

Horrible doesn’t have to mean unlistenable though and by unlistenable I don’t mean bad noise. Using analogue synths [i’m guessing just the one] a tape violin of Thuresson’s own making and ‘a stolen rhythm machine’ RJF put together seven tracks of thee most primitive and brutal Power Electronics. A primitiveness that is its greatest strength and the reason it still sounds good today. Any kind of polishing or hint of professionalism at the time would have ruined it. Sometimes less is certainly more. 

An attack of basic repetitive beats and distant tortured vocals is still enough to get the vinegar rising and if you leave out the vocals all together, as they do on ‘Jugend Dance’ you can fill that space with random synth blurts and let the rhythm that evolves go on a deranged rampage of dysfunctional syncopation. I’d wager ready money that people have danced to this in Swedish Industrial nightclubs and if they haven’t then they should have. Those synth spasms are a constant and crop up on ‘Christmas Laughing’ [?] where the vocals are supplied on stretched tape and the rhythm is accompanied by a intermittent melody ripped from a broken stylophone. ‘Maximum Pain’, ‘Minimal Brain Function’, ‘Convulsive Repulsive’, hacked off heads, black and white imagery, the whiff of scandal and political distaste, all the major tropes of the era but still carrying a punch. Holy Grail stuff I reckon. 

Those sleeve notes mention a second album, more likely lost now or disintegrating within a cassette shell on a forgotten shelf or a box under a bed. That leaves us these seven tracks alone. Not much but enough to build a legacy on. 

@HarbinerSound

  

The Tier Three Lockdown Diaries. Week One

 

Monday 14th

An email arrives from Steve Fricker a.k.a. The Forgotten Man of Noise. I’ve not seen or heard of him for years but rumours of a new Smell & Quim LP arriving on his long running, on and off label cum distro Cheeses International have ben circulating for a while now. 

In the days when there seemed to be a Noise gig at the Red Rose every other week Fricker was a regular often lugging along several boxes and bags of records which he set up at the back of the venue, some of which he actually sold.  When a Dieter Müh tour of Europe coincided with a night of Noise at the Red Rose Fricker offered to put them up for the night in his flat in Stoke Newington. Then still a duo Dieter Müh had already dropped off their gear at Fricker’s and it was just a matter of getting a few hours sleep before getting to Heathrow for a 5 a.m. check in. Except on the night in question Fricker was in no mood to go back to his flat in Stoke Newington to get some shut eye and was determined to make full use of the Red Rose’s two a.m. late night license. I tactfully reminded him that two people now sat outside the venue shivering and tired wouldn’t mind a few hours kip before getting on a plane to which he waved his pint at me and and said ‘they want the moon on a stick don’t they’ and with that I left them to it. Later on I heard that at around three a.m. they managed to prize him from the venue and get him in to a taxi. With all thoughts of getting any sleep now abandoned Dieter Müh gathered up their kit and made their way to Heathrow airport, only to get five hundred yards down the road and realize that they’d left behind a bag containing several vital pieces of equipment. Needless to say Fricker was now safely in the Land of Nod sleeping off six hours of drinking and despite waking up all his neighbours the man could not be roused. And so it was that Dieter Müh set off on a European tour, tired, miserable and gearless.

Tuesday 15th

A bright sunny morning and up and dressed, fed and watered and then the hill that is Moorside to stretch our legs and blow away the cobwebs. The first thing we see is a skinny older gentleman wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and a t-shirt bringing his wheelie bin out for collection. He has a stiff leg and looks about 70. At first I think he’s a jogger bringing his bin out before setting off up the hill but not with those legs one of which is stiffer than the other, both of which look like matchsticks. 

In the cemetery I discover the graves of people I used to know; pub landlords, fathers of friends and names that seem familiar but which I cant place. The chapel of rest is long gone and some of the older gravestones and monuments are in a pitiful state of collapse, the surviving relatives and family either dead, moved away or long past caring. Its not like it would take long to right them or put them back in to some kind of shape but this seemingly simple task seems to be someone else’s problem and certainly not the councils, whose upkeep of the cemetery seems to consist of emptying the bins and trimming the foliage.

In the park birds are sunning themselves in the upper reaches of bare trees and rats are feeding on a dissolved fat-ball that someone has placed on a stone wall. We stand and watch them for a while and I decide to film them on my phone getting nearer and nearer as I go, the rats watching me as they eat. I get within three feet and all six of them disappear, but only for a moment until one reappears soon followed by its mates. They seem almost tame, inquisitive and far from the notorious image we all have in our head of vicious black sewer rats capable of chewing your face off or eating babies. As we leave a pair of old ladies out for a stroll take our place and stand and watch for a while. 

The circular walk around Scholes is one that I completed daily during the first lockdown in April and its one that it looks like I’ll be doing until the 18th of January which is when I go back to work. Yes, its that old furlough feeling once again but this one dead in the middle of winter which if you’re lucky gives you six hours of daylight and if you’re really lucky some sunshine to go with it. I have Mrs Fisher for company too as she was made redundant at the end of October and has settled into a life of writerly ways as I’ve continued working. I get the idea that she think I’m going to be disturbing her days of peace and quiet with hours of turntable abuse but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead I shall use my time to sift through the review pile, make my way to the bottom of the to read pile, walk around Scholes, say hello to little old ladies going to watch the rats and hopefully avoid joggers and getting in to arguments with cyclists who think riding on the pavement is legal.

I shall also use this surfeit of time to pass judgement on the various Bandcamp links I get sent on a now daily basis. Expect no in-depth assessment and carefully weighed up judgement [not that there’s much of that going on here anyway], instead a brief summary as to what it was I was listening to while writing this crud up.

Today it is to Vexspectra we turn. This being the one man Experimental Noise project of Ian Liddle who at one time seemed to spit out noise releases with the same rapidity as Merzbow and who moved to Berlin with all the rest of the sensible people twenty years ago so as to paint, draw and sell t-shirts, all while making a god awful racket. 

Vexspectra finds Liddle experimenting with Noise by filtering in Drum & Bass and ranting  Londoners, everything overloaded and firing in the red. Not all of it is full on though, there are longer drone-like workouts too like on the seventeen minute ‘Holidays in the Sun’ and ‘Drome’ where the noise is replaced by murk and subterranean murk. On ‘Okcocacolahallelujah’ you’ll find a live track as recorded at the Red Rose with that other London based, long gone project The Digitariat; a three minute punk inspired blast of noise with one of them shouting ‘Craig David Eminem’ ad nauseum over a sea of gadget rupture and sweat. One of several releases that Liddle has put on Bandcamp for our delectation all of which I’m assuming, are from that twenty year ago period. 

Remembering that I haven’t watched my rat video I check my phone to discover that its only one second long. 

https://vexspectra.bandcamp.com/music

Wednesday 16th

Last night neither of us felt in championship form and wondered if we’d contracted the dreaded, me getting the blame as I’m the only one of the household to enter public buildings i.e supermarkets to buy food to stop us from going hungry. I haven’t had a drink for weeks but wish I had a nip of something to hand so as to settle a bubbling stomach. Instead I get an urge to eat chocolate and drink coffee, coffee which is weird as I don’t like coffee that much. So I demolished a box of Toblerone triangles and rink the last of Mrs Fisher’s now forgotten instant decaf which I suppose isn’t like coffee at all. 

 

The rest of the night was spent reading books, me with Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Mrs Fisher with John Cooper Clarke’s autobiography which she thinks would be much improved by the removal of his many lists, most of them being of records and bands that he likes. But what about all the Jewish jokes I say to her? What Jewish jokes? It transpires that she’s been skipping chapters. Unforgivable.

For the whole of the evening I have Radio 3 on at a volume that I can listen to without it annoying Mrs Fisher. A Roberts radio placed at a distance not one foot from my left ear. I find Radio 3 to be a beacon of sanity in the run up to Christmas [and most other times come to that] seeing as how its the last station on earth I’m likely to hear Slade, Shakey, Macca, Kirsty, Queen, Wham and Robbie William’s churning out their festive cheer while being egged on by perma-cheer DJ’s reminding us at every turn that the Big Day is almost upon us.  The 5-7 evening slot is hosted by the jovial, erudite and enthusiastic Sean Rafferty whose guest for the night is the bass-baritone Gerald Finley and while I’m no big fan of opera he does give a marvelous rendition of Chestnuts Roasting By An Open Fire which when it ends has both me, Rafferty and no doubt a few hundred thousand listeners totally in awe. For the first time this year the merest glimmer of festive cheer is felt to enter my bones.

Radio 3 has a reputation for being stuffy and snobby but as long as the likes of Elizabeth Alker and Ian Macmillan are at the microphone I shan’t feel like an urchin at the window peering in. I try to catch as much of the weekend breakfast show as I can and was amazed to discover that one of their presenters was the son of a Dewsbury miner.

Despite the skies being grey and full of rain we decide to go for a walk after lunch and don waterproofs, boots, hats, scarfs, gloves and into my pocket I shove half a bag of bird seed which I intend to leave out for the birds in the park, or the rats if they get to it first. We’re about three quarters of the way round when the rain really starts to come down and we’re both remarking on how well our showerproof pants and jackets are holding up when I feel the first signs of dampness around the knee. By the time we get to the park we’re both damp from the hip to foot and the birds/rats can wait another day. The pace is upped until we crash through the door dripping like taps.

Papal Bull is where Jon Marshall and Joe Murray [Roman Nose and Posset respectively] arrange Dictaphones, things that can be rubbed to make sounds and mouth cavities in several notable formations. I think it was the former that sent me the file that I see is called ‘Four’ but for the life of me I cant find a trace of it on their Bandcamp page containing as it does but the two tracks that appeared on a soon to disappear seven inch lathe cut. Neither can I find the original email as I’ve been having email trouble recently, partly due to working from now a creaking twelve year old iMac that will have to be replaced sooner rather than later. But still I have sounds and you have a link to the two tracks so all is not lost. ‘Four’ looks like its been aimed at a vinyl release containing as it does two LP friendly tracks both of which spread their tape spool in a most accommodating manner. Its where Joe Posset’s tape sludge meets John Marshall’s found sounds, movie soundtracks, creaking windmill loops, random voices. At times they’re killing beetles with the soles of shoes, gibberish appears regularly as does tape squeak, jabbed Dicta buttons and empty milk bottles jingling together atop a washing machine on its final spin. A nice lady speaks, 

someone is playing the bass strings on a cello with their teeth as a babble of voices leak through miles of magnetic tape. Oh they joys.

https://papalbull.bandcamp.com/releases  

Friday 18th

Yesterday evening I called in to see my 84 year old father. Not one to be buffeted by something as threatening as a pandemic he’s seeing out the lockdown with steely determination. He says he’s not missing the pub because of all the restrictions in place when they’re open; sitting alone at a cordoned off tables, having to wait until the bar staff come to you, filling in your details, and having to ‘swishy swoshy’ your hands all the time, something he says while making hand washing motions. At least he’s got plenty of whisky in, or will have on Christmas Day when he opens several bottles of the stuff. 

A terrible nights sleep and up at six a.m. with a headache which I do my best to rid with copious amounts of tea and ibroprufen. By nine o’clock I must have drunk ten cups and after some breakfast I’m feeling normal again so go food shopping. I sit the early  hours out in the poang listening to the cricket from Australia which is being played out in front of a crowd of 18,000 people in temperatures that we can only dream of back here in miserable old England. It seems a world away in more senses than one. 

Last night I listened to Klaus Schulze’s debut 1972 album ‘Irlicht’ because his name keeps cropping up in a Bald Head’s Whats App group plus its been a while since I indulged in his first two albums. As usual I end up going to Deezer and am blown away by just how much of his stuff is on there. I decide to make it my lock down mission to listen La Vie Electronique which appears to be here in its entirety, before going back to work. Seeing as how the original release ran to fifty CD’s it should see me out. Expect updates.

As such todays Bandcamp recommendation is Schulze’s last release ‘Silhouette’ which came recommended by the Mirfiled Maestro himself Mr Walsh and is just as god as he suggested. No doubt there are plenty of clunkers in Schulze’s back catalogue but if he doesn’t make another record he can rest easy knowing his last was a good one. Expect meditation and drone and those wonderful heavy synth washes where it sounds like he’s using all ten fingers at once.

Sunday 20th

In the park I lay out some peanuts for the birds on various activity tables. These being tables with board games printed on to the surface that I’ve never seen used for anything other than putting food out for the birds. There are no rats in this corner of the park this morning but as we pass a holly bush I see something move and when I look closer I see that there are several rats walking around its branches. One of which is eating from an upturned half a coconut shell that somebody has deliberately tie-wrapped to a branch so that it can hold nuts and seeds. Dropping a few peanuts in we stand back and sure enough, seconds later they’re being taken.

I save a few peanuts for the squirrels who seem to prefer the bottom of the park and I wonder if there’s some kind of hierarchy at work. Rats at the top, squirrels to the bottom and never the twain shall meet, unless the food runs low forcing each in to the others territory. There’s a lidded box nailed to a tree which the squirrels access by lifting the lid with their heads. We don’t have to wait long until one comes along and takes from the box some monkey nuts which it stuffs into its cheeks and runs off with.

Yesterday I went to Huddersfield to meet up with a small hardened group of desperate normality seekers. Sometimes known as the Bald Heads of Noise. Today being twelve months to the day when we met up at the Royal Oak in Halifax to say our goodbyes to Simon Morris. We said we’d make it an annual event but with the pubs being shut its impossible. Campbell’s tweeted that the second hand market has become some kind of vinyl mecca comparable only to Tokyo and New York and its hard not to go and meet up and see some faces I haven’t seen in a long time and see if his claims are true. This being the last Saturday before Christmas you’d expect the place to be heaving but its absolutely dead. I Park at the top of town and having plenty of time on my hands take a leisurely stroll up through to Greenhead Park and after turning a corner I’m met with the most amazing smell of someone cooking curry. Its only an hour since I’ve eaten breakfast but if someone was to put whatever it is that cooking in front of me I’d happily scoff it. I’m half tempted to track the aroma down and knock on the door and would you mind if I had that recipe for whatever delicious meal it is you have cooking but then they’d probably think I was some kind of nutcase or covid spreader so I shuffle off back in to town to wait outside the train station.

Where I watch prostitutes going for a warm in various taxis, the drivers of which wait for no one as there is virtually no one about and who are probably glad of the company even if it means sitting in a small confined space with the windows up and the heaters going. I kill ten minutes in Vinyl Tap where I soon discover that my appetite for record buying has dwindled to virtually zero. This isn’t helped by the sight of single LP’s attached to £30 price tags, though their are some Sun Ra LP’s for tenner each, all of which I suspect to contain tracks from the early 60’s when he was still yet to fully embrace the ten minute Moog solo. Then I see the Thurston Moore Record Store Day marijuana leaf shaped picture single for £20 and my spirit slumps again. A bloke at the back of the shop is shouting at the top of his voice through his mask ‘GREAT TRACK THIS MATE WHAT IS IT?’ which comes out something like GRAY TRAT THI MAY WHARRISI? all directed to the shop owner who’s playing some kind of nondescript alt country pop track. To be fair to Vinyl Tap there’s a decent section of reasonably priced second hand goods, no doubt pulled from downstairs which is firmly closed to the public. So don’t let me put you off. 

And then we’re all together. Unseen in each others company for a year and isn’t it a pity we can’t sit down inside and chew the fat and instead wander around the very well spaced apart market stalls, following the green direction arrows and alighting on the first of several traders who have on this last Saturday before Christmas humped numerous heavy plastic boxes of records for us to look at. Having got out of the habit of using cash I realise I’ve only got a fiver in my wallet but even if it was stuffed or even if there was a cash machine five feet away I don’t think I’d be buying anything such is the depths of my vinyl lassitude. Not that the choice isn’t good and the prices very fair and certain people are filling their boots so all is not lost.

Goodbyes are said and before we’ve even got around to Brexit its time to go with promises of meeting up again whenever its safe to do so. 

Stuart Chalmers and Claus Poulsen - When There Were Birds

Blue Tapes. Cassette/DL

The third [I think] collaborative effort from those finely matched collaborators Chalmers and Poulsen. Their last outing was a beatific humdinger of a blissed out, languorous work called ‘Fictions in the Age of Reason’ which is where you need to go to escape those panic buying covid catching queues but this a different beast all together. These are shorter workouts culled from two live performances as recorded in Leeds and Bradford a couple of years back. I remember the Bradford one vividly [and going to gigs in general mores the pity] as me and Mr Walsh, who was on the undercard, ventured out on a filthy night totally unsuitable to gig going [a gig I’d quite happily walk there and back in my bare feet right now, but thats another story]. These shorter tracks are less immersive of course but no less intriguing, hence the TNB like scrape of Fuse Noise which until now has escaped their recorded work. As far as I know. There’s still plenty to enjoy though with Chalmers scrapey, looping, echoing, swarmandal strings a constant bringer of strange etherealness as Poulsen’s dreamy, droney, electronics and shortwave radios float around in a space once occupied by early Kraftwerkers. 

https://www.clauspoulsen.com/2020/10/01/stuart-chalmers-and-cp/

https://stuartchalmers.bandcamp.com/

http://www.bluetapes.co.uk/

Duncan Harrison & Ian Murphy

 

Duncan Harrison & Ian Murphy - Slow Lightning

Sham Repro. SR-002. LP/DL

‘We better do it now’ are the first words you here on this Duncan Harrison, Ian Murphy is it a split, is a collab lovely slice of wax courtesy of Sham Repro. Assuming you play the Duncan Harrison side first of course. The words are spoken by the man himself and I know this because he has a distinctive voice. If he wasn’t doing whatever it is he does during the day he really should be working in radio, such are his languid easy on the ear intonations. I’d personally stay up until well after ten o’clock just to hear him read the late news on Radio 4. Yes I would, really. Or why not give him a show documenting what it is that goes on in Brighton in terms of the undergrahnd guvner. Because for quite some time now Brighton and its outliers have been producing some deep and nutritious loam from which all manner of sounds have sprouted.  As soon as this sodding virus sods off I’m straight down there just to take pictures of the rotting pier and collect some field recordings, soak up the vibes, get me some mung bean salad and pay six quid for a pint without flinching. Its been too long Brighton. I think I’ve said this before but it bears repeating.

I don’t know how long it is Harrison and Murphy have been knocking around the south coast but it seems inevitable that those working within similar spheres within the same post code will eventually come together and as far as I’m aware this is the first time its happened between the two. Thats if this is a collaboration? Their names adorn each side of the record and each track is given a title but each bears similarities within the sounds too especially with the inclusion of Harrison’s voice, oh that voice, appearing on both. A collaboration then? Maybe or maybe they’re just working with each others sound and why not because they compliment each other to a great degree. 

‘Mount Zion Bathed in Lightning’ and ‘New Index of Delusion & Error’ are both collections of sounds and voices that you’d find on either of their solo projects, Murphy with Hobo Sonn and Harrison under his own moniker but here something special seems to have happened. That its taken both of them five years to put this together shows that this is no chucked together amalgam of sonic detritus as done over a weekend down in Hove when Seymour just happened to be in town. This is a heady ride in the world of found sounds, field recordings, tape muck, samples and decay and its one of the best things I’ve heard this year. 

Murphy’s side has the rhythm of skateboard wheels on uneven paving, a computerized text converter voice mangling various pronunciations of fellow south coast luminaries, records slowing to halt after the turntable has been turned off, voices edited to reveal bits of words, the end result being a sea of mangled form. There’s vinyl crackle and Harrison saying ‘fuck you’ and he can say fuck you to me for as long as he wants, his words tumbling over each other between duck quacks as two seconds worth of The Clangers moonlike soundtrack appears. An abandoned piano being pounding precedes a sublime five minutes worth of Basinski like looped decay thats studded with high-hat hip-hop beats, buried Broadway sing-a-longs and operatic tenors. Thats quite some trip.

A short video on the Sham Repro website gives us some idea as to how these sounds were collected with Harrison traveling through barren landscapes and sitting at street side cafes, a two and a half minute, cine verite exploration in which the camera never stays still while capturing beach cats and Harrison forever glimpsing over his shoulder in european market squares.

Harrison’s side was recorded in Jaffa, Ramallah and the Roedale Valley and its where we find the going a little darker; passages of granular ultra murk culled from deep pocket crackle boxes, broken tape recorders, pan scourer scrubbing marathons, outdoor gobby sessions, obscured voices, words spoken into Dictaphone’s that emerge as meaningless lullaby babble, its where Sunday morning church bells sit next to delicate piano melodies, a Saturday afternoon in a Brighton cafe with everyone speaking at once. But please, let Duncan speak alone for a moment.      

Certain people whose opinion I value highly, have been speaking of Slow Lightning in glowing terms, record of the year and all that. I don’t think they’re that far off the mark.

https://duncanharrison.bandcamp.com/

https://ianmurphy.bandcamp.com/

https://www.shamrepro.com/