Research Laboratories bring you The Rebel and Sexton Ming

 

The Rebel - I am sorry about my hair beneath the planet of the apes Golidlocks + the bare porridges smoke trak cigarets G 4 F-ort Bring out yer Dead

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 25 copies

Comes in plastic bag with A4 insert

Sexton Ming - Fuck Your Freedom

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 30 Copies.

Comes in plastic bag with artwork pasted to cardboard.

I’ve often wondered if Ben Wallers is the only person to ever write songs that reference the cricketers Alec Stewart, Jimmy Anderson and Brian Lara and also call for the death of all humanity? Wallers songs about the extermination of human existence was a common thread that ran through a lot of what he wrote while fronting the Country Teasers but is he really in to cricket? Well that is something because I’ve just spent the last six hours listening to Joe Root take on the Sri Lankan spin attack only to get run out in the last over of the day with a superb piece of fielding by leg slip. This after a shaky start where the openers Sibley and Creepy Crawley blew it once again in their battle against left arm spin. And theres me wondering how I’m going to start this review of The Rebel’s “I am sorry about my hair beneath the planet of the apes Golidlocks + the bare porridges smoke trak cigarets G 4 F-ort Bring out yer Dead’ when it was staring me in the face all along; Ben Waller, The Rebel, Country Teasers, cricket, race, sex, misanthropy, misogyny, death, hate, fear, nationalism, blind patriotism and all of it gathered up in humour darker than a miners pocket and delivered via a sound thats been to Nashville via Edinburgh and certain London suburbs while taking in The Fall [an often quoted comparison but one thats never sat easily with me], the Carter Family and the sodding Smiths. In essence all of the above, the fact that Waller’s uses a crippled swastika as a logo and that he calls his music publishing company IWASFUCKINGYOURDAUGHTERSOLONGANDSOHARDIFORGOTTOSORTOUTANYPUBLISHING is just my way of saying that Ben Wallers is and will in all likelihood, remain not just a great songwriter but also a total enigma to me. 

Its one of the reasons I’ll happily run in to my burning home to recover all the Country Teasers albums and more than likely several The Rebel releases too. It would be worth suffering a few flesh burns and some smoke inhalation lung damage to rescue what I consider to be a small run of essential albums and singles all made by a person whose never yet got the rewards he’s deserved. 

I’ve watched numerous interviews with Waller and marvelled at his almost shy demeanour and erudite conversation, his camo gear twin set, stetson hat, shirt and tie attire and his wire framed Deirdre Barlow spectacles. His obvious intelligence, softly spoken voice and contemplative ways seeming at odds with the subject matter of his writing. As ‘The Rebel’ I’ve watched video of his one man gigs as performed in a Mexican restaurant in Australia where he’s shared the stage with a babies high seat chair and sang songs of misery to an audience of bemused diners most of whom are wandering back and forth from the bar in obvious disinterest. Watching him deliver the blistering Point of View at the Windmill in Brixton is nothing short of shocking and exhilarating all at the same time; stooped over his guitar, shirtsleeves rolled to elbow and with what looks like deep scratches on his arm, a beatbox pumps out the beat while he picks a few chords on his electric guitar and in his flat delivery gives us this: 

Zyklon-B was a terrible gas

'Cause it killed off all those jews

That's why it made such a good gas

From Hitler's point of view

Points of view

I like Obey by the Brainbombs

And lots of you do too

But Sarah Payne's poor mum and dad

Can't share that point of view

Points of view

The bombs in your bag, it kills fifteen

But it also kills you

You must have been very serious

About your point of view

Points of view

'Kill all the Pakis!' rings out again

In the pubs and football stands

That's a point of view which can be very

Hard to understand

But humans have hot red blood

They like it on their hands

Men kill men kill men kill men

Till not one human stands

Fries are free

Toast is free

Kisses are free too

Your granddad killed a lot of niggers

To buy those free things for you

Now a bunch of Pakis wants to

Take them away from you

What color face deserves what

Depends upon your point of view

Personally, I think, and this is

Just my point of view

All human life must be destroyed

Here I have to admit that after the Country Teasers eventual and predictable implosion I let Waller and The Rebel drift in my attentions. Such was my Waller like lassitude I even failed to turn up for a gig of his at the Wharf Chambers. What a damned fool I was. LP’s I bought none, the occasional single yes. Wallers releases a lot of material and somewhere down the line it was one release too many and I took a turn in the road and never went back. Until now.

Thanks to Research Laboratories I’ve been cursing my reticence and have spent a week catching up and with increasing incredulity wondering to myself why it is Wallers still languishes in cult status territory when his songwriting is of such import. I sure as hell hope he doesn't go to his grave without wider recognition.

Wallers solo work as The Rebel bears distinctive marks; the lugubrious sing/talk delivery, a trebly electric guitar plucked with spidery fingers, beats delivered from a programmed beat machine, a small keyboard capable of producing catchy riffs all of this fed into a four track mixer to which he adds samples taken direct from tv, the BBC World Service, tuneless whistling, Star Trek dialogue, his own dialogue, typewriter clatter, washing machines. The results benefiting from being suitably lo-fi and distorted so as to make the finished whole sound like its been dubbed and re-dubbed on to a forty year old Boots C120.

On ‘I’m sorry …’  there are thirty tracks [including a hidden extra track] and covers of songs by Chaz and Dave, Rod Stewart, Paul Young, Timbuk 3 and Spaceman 3, there are songs of quotidian existence containing gonzo keyboards [In a Polski Slep 4/4] and how Cafe Oto could be improved by being converted in to a McDonalds [McDonalds Dalston Jnctn], there are instrumentals where the keyboard goes all swirly Robert Wyatt, there songs plucked from seriously out of tune acoustic guitars, there are songs where Wallers bangs the keyboard with his fist or at least thats what it sounds like, found sounds are included that are the result of leaving the tape recorder running while making a cup of tea with the radio on in the background. What there isn’t is much in the way of what you might call verse chorus verse structure [unless you count the cover versions] but there is plenty of experimentation, extemporization I dare say and ideas a plenty. I imagine Wallers mind being a seething, boiling sea of ideas and most of his waking moments filled with the realizing them. 

Track titles include:

DAY 1 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

DAY 2 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

DAY 4 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

LECKING BLACK COCKS & SUSTAINED BASS NOTES [a natural history program tv sample about black cocks which is then mixed in to a sample of how Prince used sustained bass notes] 

CLOWNS DON’T LIKE 2B LARFTAT

IM SORRY ABOUT MY HAIR

MIDNIGHT LAY HAT RUN

FLIDAY POLEM

What happened to ‘Day 3 at The Submarine Races’ is not recorded. And there at its almost end is Wallers singing ‘bring out yer dead’. Perfect.

Thirty one tracks of keyboard blurts, found voices, noises, part songs and a Chas and Dave cover might lead some to wonder as to whether this is Wallers at the Finnegan’s Wake stage of his career or whether this is just a continuation of what he’s been up to for the last twenty odd years. What the hell do I know?   

Meanwhile, somewhere down on the south coast Sexton Ming has abandoned his porridge van and picked up his cudgels in the fight against police brutality. How we got here is anybodies guess, my exposure to Sexton Ming being a limited one from when he had his porridge van and released stuff that sounded like him doing the washing up as he sang opera. A strange one for sure. An outsider artist of a certain stripe and so far off the no audience radar as to be living in a suburb of Yemen.

Mings eclectic, some might say scattergun approach towards sound collage and erm ... song construction has taken a serious turn to the left with the inclusion of ‘The Beating of Kelly Thomas Mix’. Thomas, an unarmed, schizophrenic homeless man was beaten by six police officers for resisting arrest and died of his injuries five days letter. Sound familiar? This was California nine years ago. Its a harrowing listen with Ming adding lo-fi buzzing to the police audio of the event, an attack that saw zero persons get any jail time. 

Elsewhere Ming swings his piano from jazzy cocktail, to silent movie to vaudeville, all samples of course, then there’s proto PE noise, pub chatter and more bizarrely vocals in which his voiced is sped up to resemble Smash aliens. On ‘Forced to Eat His Flesh’ he goes the full Andrew Liles and chucks in tortured souls, clashing cymbals and the wails of the damned. There are tv samples, bird sounds, funereal dirges delivered in a Nick Cave style manner and some neo folk industrial ambience. Someone shouts ‘shut up you old bag’, an acoustic guitar riff … endless it is and not to everyones cup of tea but perfectly fitting into the Research Laboratories ethic of providing us with music from the outer reaches of wherever this is.  

 https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

 

  

The Last of the Lockdown Diaries. The Final Entry.

 

Friday 15th

It started snowing yesterday morning and didn’t stop for nigh on ten hours. Then the temperature dropped and overnight froze in to place all that had fallen. We watched it falling while making ominous statements like ‘this lot looks set in’ and ‘I bet the buses have stopped running’ the kind of comments English people like to make when faced with such horrors. After lunch we decided that a bit of snow shouldn’t put us off our walk so spent thirty minutes donning suitable clothing before setting out into the thick of it. At the bottom of the road we were met by the sight of an articulate lorry that couldn’t make it up the hill because of a car coming down it sideways. Dotted about were various abandoned vehicles, some of which bore the scars of slight collisions. There were people with snow shovels doing there best to keep their drives and the road clear, and a policeman in a van trying to keep things moving. There was also no shortage of four wheeled vehicles, the owners of which were no doubt on essential journeys which could in no way be put off until the roads cleared, all of them driving like twats spraying snow and slush around like it was the best thing ever. 

The walk turned in to a soggy nightmare of sorts. After slipping and sliding about for half the journey we decided to take the short cut home through the a well travelled footpath only to discover that the snow had turned to mud in places and at others into ankle deep lakes of melting snow. As Mrs Fisher sauntered through in her wellies I prayed that my walking boots were still waterproof and even though my feet went a shade of blue my socks were still dry upon return.  

This morning the frozen slush is so thick and permanent that it resembles a frozen Bering Strait, the pavements an uneven, irregularly, corrugated ice spectacular where only the brave and the foolhardy dare to tread. This means the weekly food shop will have to be deferred and being bereft of comestibles and in need of nourishment I set off in to town on foot, over the frozen slush and using bits of road when there was no traffic about. I soon caught up with a man wearing plimsolls who was having trouble staying upright and wondered as to the suitability of wearing Dunlop Green Flash in such weathers.

Sunday 17th

Thats it. Back to work tomorrow. I cant say that I’m that enthused with the thought though I dare say there’ll be no shortage of those for whom the return will be a return to normality of sorts. Strange people with whom I have little in common. I’ve developed new routines over the last month and I’ll be sorry to see them go; the quiet mornings listening to Radio 3 while doing the Guardian crosser on my phone, the endless cups of tea, making meals for Mrs Fisher, the daily walks. I’ve cleared the review pile, not died of the virus, read what books I wanted to read and poked about in old boxes of cassettes, yesterday I sat listened to an old Sigillum S cassette and followed it up with Nurse With Wound / The Hafler Trio. The things you don’t normally do but enjoy immensely.

 

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles

 

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles

Cheeses International. CI15. LP. 

320 copies

Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome

Chondritic Sound. CH-363. CD

Smell & Quim/Mama Baer - Wooden Nail Pony

Carpenter Prod. USA. HOM-Inc boot 12. LP

40 copies

Latex Days - A Tribute to Awkward Geisha

Love Earth Music/Harsh Noise Movement LEM234. 2 x CD

Coming away from a Smell & Quim album singing Bobby Shafto wasn’t what I was expecting but when the needle left the groove there I was:

Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea

Silver buckles at his knee

He'll come back and marry me

Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe

Its the last thing you hear on side two, Simon Morris singing an English folk song before the solemn clang of a church bell and the return of the stylus. And sing it he does, in a resonant, trembling voice like he’s auditioning for Steeleye Span. The result being the raising of the hairs on the nape of the neck and the recurrent thought that he’s not around anymore. A year has passed since he was put to rest and there’s still a big gap where he should be but performances such as this, on a record such as this are reminders not just of himself but of just how good a voice he had. I’m told that these were the last recordings he ever made and it seems apt that they should appear on a Smell & Quim record, a band that he was a major part of for what must have been twenty five years.

Cuntybubbles arrives via the crazed locked down brain of Milovan Srdenovic who has been using his enforced time to create a Smell & Quim lockdown classic that will be seen as one their best. Surely a miracle of our times created out of the unlikely triumvirate of death, plague and pestilence. Let us all rejoice though for out of such darkness emanates a stone cold beauty. Then there’s the rebirth of Cheeses International, a label I’d long assumed defunct and with it the reappearance of the forgotten man of noise Steve Fricker. His website may be next to useless but there you go, thats yer man right there.  

As ever Milovan has crafted his sound using a connoisseurs eye, venturing to places where other bands are either fearful or sane enough not to tread. Dark places, Bobby Shaftoe places. Thus we have Stewart Keith reciting the story of the Wicker Thing [a wicker cock that is Smell & Quim’s take on The Wicker Man] his words delivered as if by a pungent Gandalf with deranged bagpipes and buggery as accompaniment, there are porn film climaxes, flapping flywheel belts that make a syncopated rhythm, military drums, snatches of live action as laid down in Birmingham and Leeds, theres Milovan intoning the words ‘mouth, crop, gullet, bladder, bowel, vagina’ over and over again and that these are the only words to this song makes perfect sense. We have pissing in a bucket because we must have, looped samples of an indeterminate nature wail away until stripped back to reveal further layers that may just be the man himself shaking that noise shaker thing, an instrument that looks like a purloined buddhist prayer wheel riven with nails, bottle tops and ribbon. Opening track ‘Cleopatra Frankenstein’ has a loop of Stewart reciting a story which settles on the words ‘a very beautiful maiden must hold the bough while a man from behind has anal intercourse with her’, ‘Old Spunker’s lengthy rhythm stride derives from sexually congressed thigh slaps and moans before dissolving into a military snare drums rattle, ‘Jimmy Savile - Timelord’ is a short clatter of samples; Tarzan yodeling, Milovan and Morris giving us Savile’s catchphrase ‘as it ‘appens’ and the word ‘nonce’ repeated with growing gusto. ‘The Quim Reaper’ has Morris singing the words ‘and now we’re gonna die’. This being probably the most profound track Smell & Quim have ever given us.

Cuntybubbles is a built around the long track on side two, itself an amalgam of several shorter tracks; The Cuntybubble Variations contains ‘The Theme From Cuntybubbles’, ‘Pissy Tights’, ‘Cannibal Adderley Street’, the literal ‘Mouth, Crop, Gullet, Bladder, Bowel, Vagina’ and last but not least the pounding Wank Engine’ before Stewart Keith tells us all the story of the ‘The Wicker Thing’ and the beautiful town of Bell End and its deadly tradition.

This is up there with Jesus Christ, Cosmic Bondage and Stephen Hawkins Butt Plug and which ever other Smell & Quim release it is that you hold as your favourite. A ribald mixture of collective voices culled from beyond the grave and the Outer Hebrides where Jimmy Savile sits aside old spunkers and wicker cocks, where the full regalia of the ‘Wank Engine’ compliments the noise dance of ‘Cleopatra Frankenstein’, where filthy noise meets people pissing into buckets. 

In some ways I see it as a tribute to Simon Morris. His presence is there throughout and finally and most memorably with a sodding folk song. Was it ever anything else but madness in here?   

Its been a busy year for Milovan. Not only a new album but new material via a split LP with Mama Bär, a track on the Awkward Geisha tribute Latex Days and a reissue of the 1998 SPITE cassette Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome. So not all doom and gloom then.

The Awkward Geisha tribute comp is well worth getting, not only for the Smell & Quim track Dolphin Cunt but for the truly eclectic gathering of the other twenty-two participants, lots of whom are new to me; Ghostskull, Kenji Okamoto, scum2.1, Bloody Shiv, Drifter, Prize Fuckup, Dead in Japan … I have no idea. The latter being me not another band name. As you’d expect there’s lots of noise but much else in-between including a truly memorable version of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ by Gimp Gash. Eugene Chadbourne teams up with Harsh Noise Movement for seven half minutes of noise called Kojak is Dead that draws things to a close. I shall now show my ignorance by admitting to never having heard of Awkward Geisha so how these tracks compliment/balance/showcase their work I couldn’t tell you. If you go looking for one of these I hope you have more luck than me.

On the Mama Bär split LP ‘Wooden Nail Pony’ the Smell & Quim side contains a full on noise storm called ‘Filthy Cunt’ a track that ebbs in and out of various bowel and bladder movements but at only 40 copies there’s not going to be many getting to hear it. This brings us to the reissue programme and with it the fact that lots of Smell & Quim releases reside on ultra limited, hard to track down lathe cuts and cassettes, especially a lot of the earlier stuff. The reissue of Pushy Gothic Gnome highlighting the fact that somebody needs to put all these together in one place so that they can be easily accessed, Youtube cuts will not suffice though at the moment they’re better than nothing. A double CD of rarities and joy, a treasure trove of obscure but delightful  noise. It needs to be done. Whether the cover from Wooden Nail Pony is included depends on how brave the publishers are, even the Discogs jpegs are pixelated. 

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome features the late 90’s line up of d Foist, Holly Hero and the Syrup of Love Unlimited Orchestra. Its the line up that existed for a couple of releases and some memorable Bradford 1 in 12 performances. Here Milovan adopts a speeded up broad Yorkshire gnome-y voice ‘I’m from Bradford in West Yorkshire’ before channeling his inner Elvis as d.Foist sprays everything in sight with his splatter beat electronics, I have the feeling that some live material may have been incorporated too. Interesting to hear what would become Astral Social Club tropes in and amongst the turmoil. What the Syrup of Love Unlimited Orchestra contributed is not recorded but I bet it involved drink and was an integral part of what eventually develops into a total noise burn out on side two.  

All together now:

Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea

Silver buckles at his knee

He'll come back and marry me

Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe

Cheeses International

Carpenter Prod

Chondritic Sound

Love Earth Music

 

Tier Ten Lockdown Diaries. Week Four. Dai Coelacanth and Blood Stereo

Tuesday 5th

I see the sack of shit with the knot in the middle was on the telly last night. Apparently we’re all going to have to suck it up for a little bit longer but because we’re such a resilient nation who fought them on the beaches and in the factories we’ll soon see the back of Johnny Virus and everything will be back to tickety-boo tea and crumpets before you can say two World Wars, one World Cup. Somehow I don’t think its going to be that easy.  

This morning I have to go food shopping because we don’t have any. Not any fresh stuff that is, we have tins to see us out until next Christmas but there’s only so much Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup you can eat. So its to the deserted roads I take and to a deserted Tesco’s car park I arrive. The first thing I see inside the store is a bloke without a mask on. I say bloke, I mean slug. A huge fat bastard with greasy hair, his cold purple marbled gut dangling from beneath his ill fitting black t-shirt and all the time I’m thinking to myself I thought this virus homed in on such people, its almost like the fucker’s asking for it. There must be some kind of damage to my retina here that I’m unaware of, the threat of flashbacks in the middle of the night or something, an unheralded trauma awaiting me at five am when alls quiet but I survive and fill the trolley with various comestibles all of which will keep us going for another week. Then I discover that the Bog Roll Bandits have been at it again. I ask the woman on the check out about it and she tells me that soon after the sack of shit gave his speech last night they descended like locusts and took it all away. I could understand this kind of mentality if the virus gave you the shits but unless I’m missing something I’m pretty sure that having the trots isn’t one of the symptoms.

D Coelacanth - Ghoul Town Tails Two

A5 booklet.

[contact details to come]

Yesterday morning I sat in the poang and read the second instalment of Dai Coelacanth’s Ghost Town Tales. I should be back at work but instead find myself reading about the Gravy Scientist and the Heavy Fractions Band and find myself much preferring this new found freedom. I look upon it as retirement-lite, a trial run for the real thing should I ever get there and if I do ever get there I shall spend my mornings reading such as this. A fine start to the day. Bugger the crosser and covid give me Mole Seventeen, Rat City, Alan Rammer and the Fang Thugs.

As in the first outing there is no pretence to plot structure, punctuation, beginnings, middles or ends. This is no obstacle to enjoyment though, in fact to any decent minded William Burroughs loving literature freak there is much to enjoy here. Especially the vivd imagination of Dai which is capable of producing this;

‘Jarry loves a mushroom I noticed the room upstairs contains gheng zone I could feel it when I came out of the toilet river beyond the static window they make a facsimile but exaggerate certain features to gain viewers frozen scabs organise a car pool verena tries to discourage this kind of talk suzi was editing she told everyone that she no longer needed to eat they don’t look fresh vhs crime you think people can’t sense it but they can mr lee drilled into someones face and shouted something about pie fillings.’

The ‘pie fillings’ are a constant as is ‘spanish milk’  ‘mr lee’ and dozens of other character including the mysterious ‘mole seventeen’ and his/hers/their various similarly numerated counterparts. 

Amongst the many fine aspects of his work Mr Burroughs’ writing was rich enough to furnish many a band with a moniker and so it shall be with Ghoul Town Tails Two. Take your pick from these few gems;

Subliminal cemetery

Cannibal gas

Spider jail

Dunbar ming

The electrified flap doctor

Mole people in shemp masks

Bucket spiders

Such is the richness that entire stories are to be found within short paragraphs though what’s happening is how you interpret it. It could be something to do with ‘the shemp’ or ‘mr lee’ or buckets or mushrooms or that mysterious Spanish milk. I have no idea. Like Naked Lunch meets Blade Runner with all the richness that those two can conjure. 

Gulping this down in one sitting takes your mind to a strange place. You read on and on as if transfixed, drugged, the characters and language enveloping your fevered mind filling it with all manner of imagery. Or you could dip in at random take a paragraph and etch in to your skull these words; 

‘grisly tape cult they just sleep and drool sprocket collector not even pagan satellite …’

http://chocolatemonk.co.uk/nonmonk.html

Wednesday 6th

A bright and frosty morning and the pavements are quiet and almost ice free so we take it steady up the hill and around and past the car thats a storage space, the houses that seem to take forever to have their extensions built, the drug dealers house [so called because it sits behind a high wooden fence and has a padlock and chain through it] only occasionally having to cross the road to keep a distance from fellow walkers. No joggers today so let us assume that they are all hard at work saving the nations economy from rupture.

Nearer to home there’s a road that passes the school that is all uphill and has several speed bumps set in to it. Approaching us at quite some speed is an empty low loading van, the kind used for transporting broken down vehicles. As it passes us I see that the driver is a young lad who is gripping the steering wheel tightly with both hands while bouncing around in the seat like he’s riding a bucking bronco. He hits each speed bump full on, the van rattling over each bump with increasing volume as it approaches us, almost deafening us in the process.

When a service bus appears we sing the ‘how many people are on the bus song’ which goes something like ‘how many people are on the bus, on the bus, on the bus’ to no tune in particular. As yet we’ve never seen more than three. Most of the time they’re empty or have just the one solitary passenger. 

At the top of the park we find that we dawdle for longer than usual as the sun is warming us nicely. We stand and watch a robin, two blackbirds, a ground feeding bird that might be a fieldfare while at the bottom of the park an inquisitive squirrel approaches us to see if we have anything for it. We don’t and walk home. I can almost see the disappointment in its face. No rats to be seen. Maybe they killed them all off. I don’t know.

Constance/Nyoukis - Whit?

Chocolate Monk. Choc.500 boxset. 

50 copies.

Contains:

Constance/Nyoukis - Where Warble Ends/Minatures for Joan. Split lathe cut 7"

Constance/Nyoukis  - The Glue Tank/The Great Gut Fixed. Split cassette

There Goes Blood Stereo - CDR

Your Mind Hiss - Cassette 

A6 pocketbook -  Constance / The Click Inbetween - Nyoukis / Failing Lights

Three photographs

Two button badges

It was at a Chameleon gig in Nottingham a few years back that a well refreshed Nyoukis sat down beside me and related the tale of how Blood Stereo had been followed around America by Susan Boyle. Not literally of course but via the numerous billboards that carried her image. This after the mighty Subo found fame with her singing through tv show Britain’s Got Talent and had crossed the Pond to conquer America. ‘SHE’S FROM FUCKING BLACKBURN!’ he shouted into my left ear at a volume the whole room could hear ‘AND I’M FRAE FUCKING BLACKBURN. WHAT ARE THEY FUCKING ODDS MAAAAAN?’ Then he began singing a song that I cant for the life of me remember the name of. When I say sing it was more like a full throated roar and one that I very much enjoyed. A personal performance and a remarkable one at that which still, after all these years of gig going is one of the highlights, even though it wasn’t part of the gig. Whether Nyoukis remembers it is doubtful but that really doesn’t matter. 

I must have seen Blood Stereo numerous times over the years but I shall see them no more for the plug has been pulled. Yes ladies and gentlemen its time to don the black and mourn and at the same time give thanks for all that has been gratefully received. To celebrate/commiserate Chocolate Monk have put together a box of choice items; a split single, a split cassette, a split CDR of reworked Blood Stereo material and a tribute comp by people who Chocolate Monk assure us we’ll have never heard of. There’s also an A6 perfect bound booklet containing Constance’s surreal artwork and Nyoukis’s vibrant cartoon heads, several photomontages and a couple of button badges for good measure. Just don’t think you’ll be able to follow the link and purchase one as they’ve all long since gone. 

‘Whit?’ is probably the response they got when news of Blood Stereo’s demise went public. Its what you’ll hear north of the border. Probably in Blackburn where they’re already laying out the wreaths. Whit? Is a good way to bow out though. I delight in Constance’s Sun Ra like solo on ‘The Glue Tank’ on her use of garbled vocal loops and spacey electronics on ‘Where Warble Ends’. On ‘Minatures for Joan’ Nyoukis blows ever so gently over the top of empty milk bottles as a ghostly Wurlitzer does battle with rattled ducks. As ever when you listen to Blood Stereo you enter realms that seem to be other audio dimensions. Its where the avant-garde meets the kitchen sink and the pubs and parks of Brighton.  I swear they could make a decent album while stood at a bus stop. For all I know they may have already done so. The thirty minutes of reworked material in ‘There Goes Blood Stereo’ is a woozy head trip where everything in your peripheral vision goes blurry before you black out and fall into a soft bed and dream sweet surreal dreams of an unfolding collage full of gulls, moans and reversed Minions, a foghorns lament for clanking metal and the grinding axles of wooden carts full of plague victims, where Dictaphones meet the saliva gathering in your jowls, where drones and unearthly sounds slither and come to rest on a bed of Kagel clockwork toys. Oh the joys.

So thats it then for Blood Stereo but surely not the last we’ll see of the Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis or, heaven forfend Chocolate Monk. Because y’know, things have been shitty for too long now for me to take this kind of news.

http://chocolatemonk.co.uk/available.html

Saturday 9th

What should have happened is for Donald and Melania to chomp down on a couple of cyanide pills before Donald Jr shoots them in the head while coked out of fucking brains before then dousing them with petrol, sorry gasoline and setting them both on fire in the Rose Garden with Fox TV news cameras present and a maskless Sean Hannity asking Donald Jr if he’s really ANTIFA in disguise. But thats not going to happen and it really pisses me off.

The last couple of days spent in an ever increasing spiral of incredulity as to what’s happening in Washington DC and the fact that there’s someone holding the most important post in the world who is obviously mentally ill. Doom scrolling through Twitter I find a Trump supporter who says its all Pelosi’s fault that people got into her office because she failed to lock the door behind her, like she was sat in her office with her feet up when the shit hit the fan. I feel like saying something but remember Mark Twain’s famous dictum; Don’t argue with stupid people, they’ll only drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience. 

Then I awake this morning to find that the Orange Man Child has been chucked off Twitter and that outside its a beautiful winters day. I’m not much of a winter fan and to some extent dread the long dark days, the wet, the cold, the fight to keep body and soul intact before the arrival of spring. Today is glorious though so I’m off out alone with crispy footsteps across a park thats covered in frost an inch deep watching the blackbirds rootling around in the frozen leaf debris looking for breakfast. Its early, very quiet and still, not a breath of wind, the sky a blue going to white and when I get to the top of Scholes Lane the sun hits me full in the face and its blinding. I walk past people defrosting their cars, people with their bonnets up trying to put life into batteries that have succumbed to the cold. My favourite winter car drivers and you always see one or two, are those who scrape a postcard shaped oblong into their windscreens before drive off at speed, their windscreen wipers going full bore. I once saw somebody pour boiling water on to the windscreen of a car that was frozen solid, I stood and waited for the inevitable crack but miraculously it never came. Maybe they were on to something?

Last night I finished the second volume of JG Ballard’s short story collection while listening to Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No 3 in F-Sharp Minor. They seemed well matched. The Scriabin at times, especially during the last three movements sounding like Cecil Taylor in full flight. Then some Beethoven piano sonatas as I’ve been reading about him lately not realising that he’d spent his later deaf lug years frequenting the less than salubrious drinking dens of Vienna pulling out of his pocket a conversation book and pen so that he could communicate with his fellow drinkers. This brings to mind the age old question of which of the five senses would you choose to give up should the situation be forced upon you? To which I’d probably say smell with hearing the last to go. Then imagine being a genius composer and having to spend the last twenty-eight years of your life as deaf as a post. Thats some kind of torture.

I’ve not seen that many online gigs since the onset of the plague. In fact up until today I’d only seen one, that been Graham Dunning way back in March/April last year but now I’ve seen two. Or one and a bit to be precise as there’s still two more to come of the three concerts featuring the work of Morton Feldman as broadcast live from Wigmore Hall. Watching someone pay Morton Feldman’s piano works at 11.30 on a Saturday morning is one of those things you’d thought would never happen but we live in strange times. The effect on me is almost transcendental.  I find myself watching Petroc Trelany introduce the pianist Kerry Yong and the repertoire he’s about to perform that for the most part sounds like an architects to do list: Projection 1, Extensions 3, Durations 4, Intersection 4 …. I carry the bluetooth speaker around the house with me as I reheat some lamb broth and defrost a tea cake. Mrs Fisher is readying herself for a Radio Leeds interview about her new book and although not nervous the playing of Feldman is obviously grating ‘What the bloody hell is that you’re listening to?’

Sunday 10th

We have new neighbours across the street. The Monkey Crunchers moved out while it was snowing and the new people moved in under the cover of darkness. When we pass the house this morning we notice that in the garden there’s a three foot tall concrete Gandalf outside their front door.