Where Miss Marples Meets Olive From On The Buses.

 

Pauline, Olive and Eros - Cheap Listening

Bandcamp DL

Rake Fliehr - Belter Wonker

Help For Zeros. CDR

Neil Armstwrong - Banjo Tear

Help For Zeros. CDR

Folk Rabies - A Taste of Harlequin

Help For Zeros. CDR

I was sifting through the detritus in my inbox the other night when the name Pauline Oliveros jumped out at me. Its not a name that frequents my emails that much, in fact never before in the history of siting down and writing this shit has the name Pauline Oliveros frequented my inbox ever. Its not like we’re on first name terms, what with me not knowing Pauline at all, not even through other people or people who might have been in a building the same time as her. The email appeared to have been written by someone with an unusual grasp of English and contained the usual Bandcamp link. And then not long after another email from the same person apologising for I know not what with the same link attached. Clicking on said link [a sometimes fearful business at the best of times] took me to a page where the first thing I saw was an image of Olive from On The Buses. Olive being a sad, downtrodden creature with few redeeming features whose mission in life is to irritate her husband by wailing ‘but Arfur’ every ten seconds.  On The Buses being a lame 70’s sitcom revolving around the lives of two bus drivers, their families and their ongoing battle of wits with a gormless Inspector called Blakey, think a gone to seed Hitler in his later years crossed with a feeble minded idiot. If you’ve never seen it then count yourself lucky and do everything in your power to keep it that way for as long as you live.  

Its a spoof then. Pauline, Olive and Eros.  A play on words thats an attempt to inject humour into a situation that doesn’t really need it, a way of putting out your music behind a nom de plume so that you can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune from a position of anonymity.  There’s nothing wrong with using an alias of course but a short email and a link to a one track Bandcamp page is never going to set my world on fire. Next.

And then an email from someone called Kirk who’d like to send me some discs from his label Help For Zeros. Now this is more like it. Actual discs in the post and when they come there’s three of them, all containing cover art as drawn by the same person, all of them the works of people I’m unfamiliar with, with no contact info as such and in the case of Rake Fliehr handwritten track titles written directly on to the disc. Its been a while since I’ve had a ‘blue’ CDR with handwritten info on it, very neat handwriting it has to be said. Lets party like its 1999.

I sat in the poang and fed each disc into the slot in turn not knowing what to expect at all and was pretty much royally entertained, all three releases being of the looped, reverse cassette experimentation that I’d pretty much happily listen to all day long when given the chance. After an hour or so all three had passed and deciding I needed more information for review purposes I did some online research which is where things started to get a bit strange.

Apart from a Discogs page mentioning seven Help For Zeros releases with several more pending there is absolutely nothing. Of the seven releases listed every single artist is an unknown with one release to their name. You see where I’m going here; Rake Fliehr, Neil Armstwrong and Folk Rabies all join Greenmark Steamboat, Rudolph Dimple, Sasquatch Quiche [a collaboration with Kommissar Hjuler und Frau] and Carpetbag Trout in the one off release gang. You don’t need to be Miss Marples to work out whats going on here. 

Maybe Help For Zeros and its one artist for every release schtick is the work of a prominent experimental musician keen on keeping their identity a secret and finding themselves in need of an outlet for work they’ve rather not put out under their own name, so they adopt a persona that allows them to work with no distraction all the while concentrating on their main line of work. Or maybe this is all the work of Kirk Smeaton the person who originally got in touch. Hand sketched covers and all?

For the record; from Rake Fliehr we have lo-fi murk, Joe Jones machine clatter, upright sombre piano moods, Sputnik bleeps and crunches ripped from abused Dictaphones and voices pitched so slow and low so as to make them sound like roaring lions. This being my favourite of the three. Neil Armstwrong is more spacey with stretched tape, close up sounds of ants chewing wood, found sounds, pianos pounded in oak forests, wobbly voices, Dalek voices, capstans rocking on the fast forward/reverse axis. Folk Rabies is that same piano tumbling though acres of twanged springs and wattling turkeys, gamelan and lost souls, again with plenty of tape abuse and for good measure some content snoring. 

As for Pauline, Olive and Eros, think Cock E.S.P. and one of those tracks where two women are having an argument over a sheet of noise.

I’m out of here. Life’s complicated enough as it is at the moment.

  

https://clairaudience2.bandcamp.com/track/cheap-listening

https://www.discogs.com/label/1475523-Help-For-Zeros