IDWAL FISHER

Filthy Turd

2012-02-05T17:01:00.000Z

Filthy Turd - Erect Roar Of The Eerie Moon Cock
Kafkex Rex. KR004. 3” CD. 25 Copies.

Filthy Turd - The Delicate Scent Of Sin And Temptation
Debila. 3” CD. 070. 3” CD. 25 Copies.

Unknown cassette [Filthy Turd/Joris J]
C60.

Unknown Cassette

Bile Enema
A5 zine. 71 copies.

There's every chance that The Turdster may be the only person working within the noise arena today capable of pushing it beyond its knowable limits. Not that The Turdster would class himself as a noise artist - singing bogman blues from the heart of Burslem Stoke-on-Trent is unlikely to satisfy a Hijokaidan junky but somewhere within these recordings the noise genre is mutating.

What you find between the ears though is only half the answer because for evolution in noise to happen subversion has to play a part and thats what we have here. With releases that appear like scattered buckshot Filthy fills our world with dispatches that rewire the whole straight up and down experimental market. Not for him the time consuming hand made process with one foot in the resale market twenty years down the line or the courting of labels to ensure at least a hundred LP’s exist in some capacity or even worse, death by ubiquitous CD, these recordings are spat out with urgency some of them eschewing even basic information such as artist name or label. Ludicrously limited three inch CDR’s aside what arrived here were a couple of cassettes which may not even be legit releases in their own right. They exist without need for any information at all and this is the fundamental crux of the thing. Spit em out and let the world take care of them.

Its whats happening on them thats important of course and for the most part its pretty much unclassifiable. Think immolation by dictaphone, found instruments, bugles, film samples, looped mantras, the sound of gales buffeting condenser mic, reversed vocals and noises whose source will never become apparent. And there is some noise of course, especially on the Delicate Scent where it hits you pretty hard. By giving us cassettes covered in marker pen, stuffed with hair and no info barring the track titles Filthy is separating the fetish for owning something of a limited quantity and filling us instead with uncertainty. It all makes for a much more sinister and rewarding listen. On the [what I’ll call the ‘unknown cassette that came stuffed with matted hair wrapped in a dirty latex glove’] the quality of recording is so lo-fi and murky you have to wonder whether this was the intended result and not some malfunction of a recycled cassette - either way it hardly matters. Through a murky mist of barely audible whistling static you can just about make out the invocation ‘sex and violence’ repeated and repeated [the flip could contain the work of someone called Joris J but this is pure speculation]. The Delicate Scent also contains wind chimes, reversed tape, soft mantras and urbanized zombie chanting, bogey man laments if you like, songs of some demented sorts. Its cover may be all the clue we need, a deformed figure with bare torso lovingly holding an ancient flip top cassette player/recorder. ‘Erect Roar’ is broken up into smaller segments with locked groove noises, banjo pluck forming deranged bogman blues and if you want visual stimulation to accompany your journey then theres Bile Enema zine in which Filthy maxims are pasted onto montages created by Manuel Pereira, one example being ‘What’s tremblin’ you fisherman’.

Sit in anywhere on these releases though and you will find that there’s someone in Stoke-on-Trent bypassing all the usual routes to experimental land and along the way producing some of the most remarkable material today.

You’ll find him in Burslem, down a ginnel, wearing greasy tracky bottoms playing a broken uke leaning against a piss stained wall thats covered in tatty flyers and obscene graffiti. If you see him shake his hand.

Contact:

Filthy Turd - dwyngarde [at] gmail.com / http://filthyfilthyturd.blogspot.com/
Kafkex Rex - www.myspace.comkafkexrex
Debila - debilarecords [at] gmail.com

Nackt Insecten - Reality Bridge

2012-02-05T11:57:00.000Z

Nackt Insecten - Reality Bridge
Blackest Rainbow Records. LP

For the English a snow storm lasting thirty minutes is enough to trigger apocalyptic headlines and a shortage of rock salt deep enough to give local councilors a restless nights sleep. Its snowing outside as I write and I know that even a depth of an eighth of an inch is going to be enough to stop me from seeing Midwich play in Leeds tonight. A journey of around 10 miles laid waste by a flurry of snow. I know I’m pathetic and that I should pull on my stout walking boots and head out of the door chin first into the tumult like Scott of the Antarctic but when given a straight choice between a night in with a bottle of Rioja, some glowing coals, a Porter Wagoner LP, today's Guardian, some freshly made vegetable soup, crusty bread, butter, salt, pepper, the cat, Mrs Fisher against the chance of being stranded in Leeds then … sorry Rob.You wait years and years for the return of the mighty Midwich only for the first significant snowfall of the year to bomb it like an avalanche. Bugger.

Tonight then I shall drown my sorrows in front of the glowing coals with the help of a bottle of the aforesaid Rioja and [after the Wagoner] another luxurious infusion of the latest Nackt Insecten LP.

I’ve been indulging in the new Nackster for a couple of weeks now and to say its pulled me out of a moribund hole is something of an understatement. Its as if I’ve been acting the Terry Waite part for ten years when along comes the jailor and chucks me the keys to a DB8 and says ‘here you go lad take her for a spin’. And deep, deep down I’d been hoping that this was going to be a drone album and a drone album it is. With massive knobs on. Not that I disliked Nackt Insecten’s past noise works [and not being familiar with the previous Quantum Odyssey] but having heard the droning contribution to the recent Pjorn comp I was secretly hoping that what I held was an LP’s worth of an extension of that work and so it proved.

I bumped into Mr. Ruaraidh Sanachan Nackt Insecten in Brighton recently. He’d made the long trip from Scotland and told me he’d been working for WFMU which as jobs go is up there with the best of them [helping out a New York freeform radio station versus sticking your finger up a criminals bum ...] that trip must have had an effect for out goes the noise and in comes the drone. But its not just the drone itself, its the manner of delivery: kissable vinyl, a sleeve that reeks of late 60’s psychedelia, a Led Zeppelin font. Its a nostalgia trip for sure but after getting all grumpy over the last two uninspiring review offerings this has come at just the right time.

There are no duds on this album. There are no dead minutes, no areas of murky limbo where your attention wanders. From the first it grips like a warm wet blanket. ‘Solar Plexus Skyscraper’ is all organ swell and dirty granulating overdubs of random key stabs that erupt like volcano plops. ‘Deathcatcher’ is an eastern tinged collaborative affair with finger cymbals, shruti box and twanged tambura. ‘The Atomic Age’ sees more organ swell but this time with disintegrating top end key abuse that breaks down and dissolves only to emerge again and again. ‘Suicide Overdrive’ is the choicest cut of all - a chugging Motorik monster of a driving beat complete with layered high fret guitar wank that has me in mind of Neu!, Chris Carter, Tangerine Dream and the lords of Leeds, Ashtray Navigations. Its incessant beat never deviating, a relentless beast that lolls round until its eventual and unwelcome collapse.

Easily the best release to pass through these hands this year and the one most likely to be still being played when the snows return in November.

Contact:

http://www.blackest-rainbow.moonfruit.com/
http://www.myspace.com/nacktinsecten

Kufuki

2012-02-01T20:51:00.000Z

Kufuki
Wonderyou CD. WNDU006

Still in Japan, still pointless. Whats with the Japs? Has all that radiation gone to their heads [feet,arms,internal organs?]. The Orient used to be a place of mystery and intrigue, now it seems like the home of half baked ideas and ill thought out processes.

Kufuki are a Japanese trio using traditional instruments, treated vocals, analouge synths and electronics. The results sound like the sort of aimless early 90’s overproduced, dub beat, ethnic farts as churned out by rote from the likes of Future Sound Of London and The Orb. To make matters worse somebody thought it would be a terrific idea to include messages of support from Kufuki fans around the globe so in between every other track there's someones recorded message - the first of which is delivered by some hyperactive teenage Japanese girl whose over enthusing was so painful to my sensibilities that it made me shout SHUT UP at the speakers. Lots of fun for Kufuki, not so for this listener. One track in particular stood out as being particularly awful [a triumph itself on a release littered with awfulness] - it sounded like a Japanese version of the Tom Tom Club’s ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ with the lyrics spoken by a Japanese robot while a zillion squiggly electronic effects swarm all over a moronic dum dum dum beat.

Its quite possible that this maybe one of the worst releases I’ve ever heard in my entire life and I don’t see how sitting here thinking up different ways to abuse it is going to make me feel any better so its best that I just stop now. Another one for the box [see previous post].

All of this makes the inclusion of an Astral Social Club remix all the more baffling. Its the last track and I dutifully sat through this muck in order to get to it. Was it worth it? Was it fuck.

Contact: http://www.naturebliss.jp/WNDU/wndu006en

Creative Destruction

2012-01-24T19:22:00.000Z

Creative Destruction
Various Artists
Hypnagogia. GIA07. 2XCD. 300 Copies

Featuring:

Kazuma Kubota
Government Alpha
Incapacitants
Defektro
Thirdorgan
K2
Astro
Guilty C

If I’d have been handed a Jap noise comp 15 years ago I’d have probably squealed like a girl and spent the next ten minutes dancing in a tiny circle on tippy toes. In 2012 its a different story. I’m often asked if I still listen to noise and the honest answer is that apart from when I’m given something to review I rarely do. Thats not to say I don’t enjoy the chance to indulge but as the years march on I find my appetite for it diminishing at an alarming rate. I still enjoy a live show of course and I feel that this is where noise still has the chance to flex its muscles but given a double CD of it to peruse I’m finding it hard to generate any enthusiasm.

[As an aside - in a recent bout of shelf clearance I took all my CD’s and hid them in boxes. Its my take on the Blue Peter time capsule thing in which you take a number of everyday items, bury them in a box and wait 50 years for someone to discover it hoping that they’ll marvel at the bizarreness of the contents - vinyl was being neglected and the balance had to be addressed - numerous noise CD’s had the lid shut on them for the good of my well being and into a dark future they went.]

Not the best time then to be handed a double disc set of Jap noise but with curiosity forever lurking I took the bait. And half way through the second disc I ejected and decided that I really had lost it. I could have waited until I was in a more receptive mood but then that could be a very long way off. I did though [eventually] dutifully listen and decided that there was neither anything very bad on here but equally, and more importantly, there wasn’t anything really remarkable. I made detailed notes. I watched youtube videos. I ventured on to various websites. I started writing what I consider to be the bog standard noise review .. sounds like this … slap of metal … ear shred par excellence … but it wasn’t working. All that came through was the realisation that at this moment in time a double CD of Jap noise just wasn’t doing it for me.

Anybody who knows their Jap noise artists will know what to expect here. A dodgy Incaps track aside theres some fine noise being made here and in the case of Guilty C a terrific 16 minutes worth of noise drone that eventually managed to lift me from my cups but by then my mind was made up. Into the box it goes.

Rammel Weekender Nottingham 9-11 March

2012-01-23T20:28:00.000Z

The first weekender of the year gives us hope that there is light at the end of the dark winter months. Yours truly will be spinning some records on one of these nights. Tickets are limited.

Astral Social Club
Bill Kouligas
Blood Stereo
Bong
Cheapmachines
Con-Dom
Dieter Muh
Ekoplekz
Ellen Mary McGhee & Sophie Mary Cooper
Heatsick
John Wall
John Wiese
Kogumaza
Mark Durgan
Modulator ESP
Nacht Und Nebel
Nick Jonah Davis
Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides
Patrick Farmer
Patrik Fitzgerald
Sleaford Mods
Spoils and Relics
Storm Bugs
Surfacing
Swallows
These Feathers Have Plumes

TICKETS

RAMMEL CLUB

Must Die Records / Wrested Thread / Bedawang

2012-01-21T17:51:00.001Z

Wrested Thread
Must Die Records. CD. MDR 017

Bedawang - Skin=Deception
Must Die Records. CD. MDR 020

Contact: http://mustdierecords.co.uk/

The war against CD’s began in earnest with an offloading of a bag of MDR stuff to Campbell HQ. I had an inkling that he’d take to Nigel Joseph’s Mogodon beats and as it happened I was right. Those thick, syrupy doom laden beats layered all over with hundreds and thousands of diddly diddly guitar notes, the soundtracks to numerous nights in on the Fylde coast with nothing more than prescription drugs for company and the bang bang bang of someone hitting their head against a council flat wall went down like a stripper on a stag do.

And after having my negative thoughts regarding MDR checked somewhat by the sublime Bad Suburban Nightmare I was hoping for something heading more into that kind of territory [think esoteric, tumbleweed, Ry Cooder on a windswept Morecambe Bay in January kind of feel] what I got instead was one middling work of muddling noise and one
of a rather more rewarding experimental nature.

Wrested Thread got off to a bad start after I visited the MDR website during a spot of pre-listening fact checking. There I was met by these words ‘“…pure aural abuse – certainly not one for the faint hearted”. Labeling your work with such an epithet I regard as rather foolhardy for there is no way on earth that you are ever going to fulfill such a claim. Pure aural abuse is what you get from the missus for coming home at seven in the morning pissed out of your brains minus a shoe with vomit down your shirt. Pure aural abuse is what The New Blockaders sound like coming at you through a 5000 watt PA system. Pure aural abuse is not what I got from Wrested Thread. What I did get was Astral Social Club on Blackpool drugs. Segue the tracks, replace painkillers with Timothy Taylors and you have a rather dull Astral Social Club album. I didn’t even approach it with caution, such is my nonchalance and lack of self preservation when inserting CD’s.

Things improved no end with Bedawang. Bedawang being the Belgian experimenter Christof Becu [who carries no epithets at all on the MDR website]. Not surprisingly I was more inclined to linger longer in Christof’s world seeing as how it contained sounds that were of recurring interest. The 24 minute closer ‘Blaschko’s Lines’ is the pick of the bunch; a taught affair in which the radiating therms of banked glow lamps buckle and fizz giving us a tempered noise drone that hardly alters through its course. The five preceding, and shorter, tracks range from star pulse radiation glitch to Sähkö like analogue beat. Becu sails close to the apocalyptic wasteland shores as created by the likes of Mika Vainio and encapsulates some of that feeling whilst adding touches of industrial ambience; half lidded pulses, deep rhythms, astronauts breathing, keeping the whole sixty minutes interesting enough to warrant return visits. More from Mr Becu please.

Must Die Records, even if their only getting it half right are at least worthy of attention.

Merzouga - Mekong Morning Glory

2012-01-13T21:23:00.000Z

Merzouga - Mekong Morning Glory
Gruenrekorder. Gruen 092. CD + Booklet

Mekong Morning Glory is a 49 minute journey in which the duo that is Merzouga transport the listener along the Mekong River taking in gentle wind chimes, screeching exotic birds and the sound of the Mekong itself emptying into the South China Sea. Its a delightful listen that is a relaxing as it is rewarding and made all the more so by the knowledge that the duo took their 2008 field recordings back to the studio in Cologne and mixed in prepared electronic bass [Jano Hanushevsky] and electronic sounds [Eva Pöppelin]. Pöppelin also takes on the producing duties and her results are a sonic adventurers delight.

Pöppelin has to take credit for the way in which she has matched the field recordings to the work done in the studio. Taught bass strings plucked like pizzicato violins are a match for the sounds of flocks of birds taking off, water fowl squawks could be electronic glitches, crowing cocks sit cheek by jowl with the haunting riff pulled from a two note bass string. When children’s voices appear the bass notes drop a tone and if you’d have told me I was in the midst of an Industrial Ambient release I wouldn’t have argued.

The journey unfolds at such an elegiac pace that I found it hard to sit through this release without nodding off and if you think this is being dismissive then you are wrong. In the space of about ten days I have played this every single night and without fail I’ve succumbed to its soporific charms. Upon waking I found myself at various stops along the way and it was as if I were being treated to some new found conflagration of bass pluck, torrential rain, children’s voices, whimpering dogs, waterfalls …

Its at about the half hour mark that Merzouga eventually encounter mass civilization and the field recordings capture this; outboard motors, mopeds, Hari Krishnas, floating markets, the sound of chopping, crowds, conversations, traffic cop whistles, car horns, Vietnamese pop, people jumping in the river and when the wind chimes reemerge to the sound of the gushing sea you know your journey is at an end.

I was mesmerized by Mekong Morning Glory in a way that I haven’t felt by a piece of music for a long time. I may be a tad behind the times here but the way in which the natural world and the recording studio have combined here is a sheer delight. For the patient listener its rewards are immense.

Gruenrekorder have encouraged me to listen to a number of their other releases which are available for download and even though I’m no big fan of downloads I’ve been so overwhelmed by Mekong Morning Glory that I feel that to ignore them would be a grave mistake.

Contact: www.gruenrekorder.de

Grey Park / Dear Beloved Henry / Albert Materia

2012-01-05T19:00:00.000Z

Grey Park - Three Notes On Stockholm Palindrome
267 Lattajjaa. LTJ104. CDR
5€/8$

Dear Beloved Henry / Albert Materia
Split release on recycled cassette.
Hyster. Hyster13. 50 copies. 2€

Grey Park releases arrive like birthday cards with tenners in. Having said that Stockholm Palindrome doesn’t surpass The Odyssey of Juri Gagarin [which came in an inverted coffee bean bag] or Planned Confusion [which was … gasp, choke, a proper CD] it still manages to arrive covered in Finnish hoar frost though. These sparse deliveries from the Nordic climes are most welcome seeing as how I feel they convey the true spirit of the lone sonic adventurer - Yuri Gagarin was all Soviet radio broadcasts [in reverse], with star radiation pulse for company. Planned Confusion was lightly flecked experimental drone made with stuff kicking about on the floor. There was the odd single and cassette too but these two releases are the ones that are usually floating around here [mainly due to the fact that the coffee bag is so prominent].

Most GP releases have some kind of radio flicking going on in them, usually around the shortwave band, along with the feeling of having been stuck in a lonely house watching the snow come down. By treading a plank that wobbles between bedroom knob twiddler and art space pro Grey Park have managed to retain my interest over quite a number of years now.

Stockholm Palindrome’s three tracks have a mild leaning towards Industrialism especially with an opening of heavy machinery drone in which a deeply buried generator fights it out with a buffeting wind. A mild aversion to all things Industrial is no bad thing indeed and Grey Park’s daubing in the medium are fine things to indulge in. The needle stuck in a run out groove, the TV voices, the morose drones, tape reverse, air raid warnings, the lonely mariachi trumpet wail of the climax to Morricone’s Fistful of Dollars soundtrack layered, looped and morphed into new weirdness and then a noisy burst before spoken voices, a madman singing, Diamanda Galas being strangled, all of it petering out like a dying Geiger counter. Chuck in some enigmatic track titles [M.2.T.2010, 2.2.T.P.A., F.A.F.O.D] and its another winner.

Hyster are Finnish too. I remember them for a particularly impressive live Dieter Müh release and for the fact that all their releases arrive on recycled cassette. Who Dear Beloved Henry is I have no idea though. Here he give us a single 24 minute track of tape spool drone, sea side organ slowed and distorted, fingers on fast running capstans until a revelation of its source; a Casio thump beat, a two chord keyboard chug with plenty of right hand plink to while away the dying minutes.

Albert Materia’s mainly piano built songs sound like Cecil Taylor doing a David Sylvian impression in French. On the first track you can actually hear him approach the piano and take a drink before cracking his knuckles and launching into a song in which each machine gun strike of the piano matches a vocal utterance.

Anyone familiar with David Sylvian’s more out there moments will feel a similarity with the eleven minute, self explanatory ‘Lullaby’. The French [?] accent, the mournful, wobbling delivery, the minor chords, the sense that I feel Materia is making this up as he goes along all adds to the charm of the piece. With his voice wavering between a dithering falsetto and a stuttering fa fa fa f-f-f-f-resh-ness he manages to imbue his songs with a naivety thats rarely found these days. His lyrics are also worth hearing:

I am the people
Where is my heart?
I am the chatter
I am the the noise, noise
I am the springtime noise

Its all rather marvelous. Somebody should give him a recording contract.

Contact: 267 Lattajjaa

Contact: Hyster

Asymptotem

2012-01-03T19:37:00.000Z

Asymptotem - Four Lines Cross
Total Vermin 58. Cassette

According to the Total Vermin blog Asymptotem were missing one vital ingredient the day these two tracks were recorded; Joincey. The peripatetic experimental drone pop maestro who finds his path crossing Manchester, Oxford and Stoke on Trent, whilst dabbling in more groups and recordings than seems humanly possible, was denied his place at the table due to the vagaries of the British rail network. Which is sad but having said that these two twenty minute pieces of achingly beautiful and whimsical folky oh so English drone are so damned perfect that we’ll just have to pretend he was there all along.

With a six piece line up containing two Sculptress members as well as TV boss Stuart Arnot I took an educated guess as to where these two tracks would be heading before insertion and playback but this still didn’t prepare me for what lay within. Both sides dwell in similar Sculptress territory; flutes, random drums hit with muffled mallets, the odd moaned vocal, kids toys, but here we have added beefed up and droning electric guitar, a drone that had me in mind of Matthew Bower playing from beneath a damp horse blanket. His droning guitar was there but made to stand at the back giving the other instruments space in which to be heard. But this is only on one side.

I don’t know which side it is which now but its the one that begins with a delightful twin flute duet before various of the above elements are added culminating in a crescendo of electric guitar wail that disappears into a trumpet squeak, amp buzz field of gorgeous emptiness. The other begins with blown tubes, Swannee whistles, sawn strings, softly hit drums, the piece held in suspension before the sound of Tuvan throat like moaning/singing and another flurry of drums. At times sparse Edgar Froese or maybe a more avant-garde Whicker Man soundtrack. However you want to compare it these are two tracks of outstanding beauty and creativity.

And it really is all so utterly delightful and for some reason so utterly English. Both tracks were recorded late on a summers day, maybe a rare warm one with ale in reach and bare arms on display. Maybe a picture of the Queen on the cover would have been more appropriate? Made me want to make a cup of tea, lay the floor with a map of England and look wondering if there were lay lines linking Stoke and Manchester.

Contact: http://totalvermin.blogspot.com/

Pjorn 72 comp

2011-12-29T17:07:00.000Z

Various Artists - Songs About Dying
Pjorn 72 CDR. PjornCD0023

I was amused by a survey in which 3,000 of Greggs customers were asked a number of questions relating to the festival that is Christmas. Ten percent of those asked ‘What is Christmas?’ thought that it was an invention brought about so that we could all give each other presents. Others thought we ate turkey at Christmas because thats where Mary and Joseph were born and another large portion of up to date, finger on the pulse human beings thought that the first day of Christmas was the 1st of December. And on it went. The true meaning of Christmas disappeared a long time ago and with each passing year gets buried deeper and deeper under a man made mountain of Argos ads, well worn Xmas singles and celebrity chef programmes. If you want to find the true meaning of Christmas these days head to your local out of town shopping center or sit glued to your 50 inch plasma TV for two weeks.

Like most people I’m just glad of the break at this time of year. Its a chance to overdo it on the wine and victuals without having to worry about an alarm clock going off and theres always the prospect of a bracing mid afternoon walk with a nip of whisky to warm you along the way. Of course the telly is shite. The TV companies would have you believe that Christmas time is two weeks of televisual bliss, fun for all the family, a televisual feast the likes of which we haven’t seen since the year before and when you switch it on its just a turd with a bit of tinsel on it.

I prefer to spend Christmas in the kitchen cooking meals to a background of contemplative Bob with the odd Harry Smith comp thrown in for counterpoint. As the wine works its way into my system the songs become more familiar, the vocal accompaniments more heartfelt and the food more forgotten. And then its to the Poang for an evening of Late Bottle Vintage Port and the review pile which I must admit has, in general, been of an outstanding quality this year.

I think my audience knows what I like by now and word has got round. You could argue that this is a bad thing - giving me what I like in the expectant return of praise - it could make me complacent. I prefer to see it this way - I could be wallowing in a sea of self indulgent, underworked, badly copied CDR’s with lousy art work, work that has little in the way of edification and has about as much chance of entertaining me as the Strictly Come Dancing final and the Hairy Bikers Christmas Special all rolled into one. I prefer the former.

Songs About Dying slips into the former category, but only just. The artwork doesn’t do much for me, theres nothing in the way of information and the CDR is badly recorded - it has those annoying digital clicks that curse many a rushed CD job [I overcame this by playing it at a low volume on the PC].

Fifteen artists then with most of them chipping in with something worthwhile - not a bad result for any comp really. Those that can hang their heads in shame though are UFO Antler Band with a contribution that sounds like a PE track recorded inside a Space Invader machine and Incest Whore who sound like a thrash doom band recorded in a paper cup. The rest brings much delight, especially the Nackt Insecten track with its slowly drifting seven minutes worth of organ drone purity [when did the Nackster drop the noise baton?]. Other highlights include Dead Labour Process who sound remarkably like Milovan Srdenovic, Andy Jarvis with a luscious keyboard/guitar drone thats more than a match for the emeraldic Mark McGuire, Usurper with a recording of a board game in progress, Jazzfinger, the ever wonderful Culver, Blood Stereo and Grant Smith.

Without going to the trouble of Googling all the artists involved here I’m pretty sure that they’re all UK based. Pjorn, for whatever reason they deem fit, have put this out into the world with little in the way of information. Pjorn must assume that the listener, with a PC and internet connection, will do the leg work for them. In pre-internet days [dons grumpy old bastard stance] you provided contact information for the benefit of the artists and listener alike but with social networking the norm this is leading to laziness and in my mind an impression of another release out of the way, let the buggers do it for themselves.

As a snapshot of whats happening in the UK today [again I’m assuming this is a fairly recent release] you’d gather that theres some people dabbling in drone, some in Dada like Schimpfuckery and some in deconstructed thrash but without recourse to a computer you'd be left pretty much in the dark as to anything but the track listing. Still, it beats watching the Hairy Bikers.

Christopher Hitchens and The New Blockaders

2011-12-18T14:50:00.002Z

The New Blockaders - Simphonie in X Major
Hypagogia. Cassette. PN03. 200 copies.

I first became aware of Christopher Hitchens earlier this year in an article written for the Observer newspaper. The article in question was written by his long time friend and author Martin Amis, in it you discover that Hitchens was a polemicist, an atheist [or as he would have preferred ‘an anti-theist’], an intellectual, a journalist, a writer, a documentary maker, contrarian, a thorn in the side of hypocrisy and the kind of person who would never suffer fools [The article is offline now but theres the great story of Amis and Hitchens enjoying a restaurant meal at the height of Thatcherism. As they were eating their meal a group of yuppies arrived one of whom decided to take it upon himself to arrange the tables to suit his liking. It soon became apparent to the pair that this fop haired product of materialism would need their table for his own devices. The man dropped to his haunches beside Hitchens and said ‘I know you’re going to hate me for this ..’ to which Hitchens cut in ‘you’re wrong, we already hate you’]. I don’t normally buy a Sunday paper but we were on holiday in Northumberland and with a lazy day stretching ahead in front of me I bought the Observer and read every word of Amis’s piece until somewhere deep in my skull a sticky went up with ‘buy some of Hitchens work’ written on it. It wasn’t until a few months had passed that the sticky popped up in my head and I bought ‘God Is Not Great’, where Hitchens, with his subtle humour and giant intellect, dismantles religion and in the process left this humble reader wondering why I had wasted so many years not reading Hitchens. Not that there are many writers like Hitchens.

Hitchens passed away on Friday the 15th of December after succumbing to a cancer no doubt brought on by his huge appetite for whisky and cigarettes. At the time of his dying I was reading a collection of his essays [Love, Poverty & War], when I opened his book on Friday morning this was at the top of the next page:

“The moral superiority of atheism … is often less stressed than its intellectual superiority. The intellectual advantage hardly needs elaboration: we do not normally accept unprovable assertions at face value, however devoutly they are maintained, and we posses increasingly convincing explanations for matters that once lay within the province of the supernatural. Skepticism and inquiry and doubt are the means by which we have established such a civilisation as we posses, professions of sheer faith are a hindrance to investigation both moral and material.”

Its typical Hitchens and the kind of thinking that gets even the slightest inquisitive mind fishing about for a drive gear.

In the same book you find this:

"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

And in 'God Is Not Great' this:

"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either."

The really sad thing about Hitchens passing is that he had reached the time in life when he was just about able to sit and bask in the reflective glow of his body of work.

I could go on for a while here, theres the dismantling of Henry Kissenger, The Clintons, Mother Theresa, his shift of political stance after 9/11, the heavy drinking, his verbal battles with lumps like George Galloway and numerous American TV news show presenters .. its best that you investigate him yourself. May he rest in peace.

----------

Simphonie in X Major is another TNB release getting the 20th anniversary treatment from Hypnagogia and the only thing thats running through my mind is how much reissue treatment can one man take? Its worth remembering that once upon a time things used to get deleted forever but in the 21st century you’re nobody until the carcass of your back catalogue has been picked over, remixed, enhanced, put on the latest format and [in the case of Pink Floyd] shoved in a box with a bag of marbles, a scarf and some coasters. Not that I’m comparing the picking over of the the Pink Floyd corpse with a cassette reissue of a noise classic from 1991. I’m still certain though that any self respecting TNB fan will already have a copy of Simphonie in X Major be it on the original Hypnagogia LP or as part of the 4CD Gesamtnichtswerk. To have it on cassette is worthwhile though. Its two twenty minute-ish tracks contain all that is good in the world of TNB and by extension the noise world at large. Listening back to it on headphones is an aural delight that takes in massive amounts of junk scrape, reversed tapes, buckets of nails, cutlery wars, medieval catapults being drawn taught all of it harnessed into a framework of surroundsound tumult. I do recommend headphones for this by the way - there are moments on first movement when the sounds panning from ear to ear leave a gorgeous space of wasteland somewhere just about where your nose should be.

Seeing as how the obverse to X Major has already been dealt with by Harbinger Sound its a shame that O Minor will probably not now see the light of day on cassette which is a shame. Hiss or crackle? You decide.

Smell & Quim - Lavatory

2011-12-13T21:11:00.002Z

Smell & Quim - Lavatory
Paleolist Press. CD + Booklet. 200 copies.
Published by the Smell & Quim/Milovan Srdenovic Appreciation Society [Russia]

Its no secret that I’m a big Smell & Quim fan. Maybe its because I walk the same streets, maybe its the drink, maybe its just a Northern thing but to tar them with a wide generic noise brush is to dismiss them without gaining an insight into the delights of their inner workings, because for me they’re one of the few bands working in the noise arena whose work is truly unique. As with last years return to form Powerfuck, theres enough noise to lift the slates of any humble abode but if you dig beneath the surface you’ll find that theres more going on than would at first seem apparent.

Take ‘Fishy Flirting’. Fishy Flirting [The Children of God Vs The Clit Hero Mix]; five minutes of coughing, abusive language, plucked strings, rifle shots and the word Hitchcock looped into a line until all thats left of it is the word cock repeated ad nasueum. Rumour has it that Alfred Hitchcock forever carried around with him the smell of fish. The title itself is corruption of Flirty Fishing. This being the practice advocated by ‘The Children of God’ founder David Berg whose female members were encouraged to use sex as a proselytizing medium. ‘Clit Hero’ refers to the diminutive Jimmy Clitheroe, a variety theatre and radio star of the 40’s famed for his schoolboy looks and cheeky humour. ‘The boy who never grew up’ committed suicide at his home in Blackpool aged 51 on the day his mothers funeral.

Serial killing stalwarts and public hate figures like The Moors Murders Hindley and Brady and The Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe continue to inspire but I feel this is more out of geographical proximity rather than any appreciation for their particular beliefs or sadistic bent. Peter Was A Truck Driver [Getting Wood at Garrards Mix] refers to Garrards, the wood yard in Huddersfield where the body of Sutcliffe’s eighth victim Helen Rytka was discovered. The reference to porn slang ‘getting wood’ in conjunction with a timber yard which is then connected to the killing of a prostitute is typical Smell & Quim word play. The track itself is two minutes of noise pummel interspersed with a Filthy Turd like dictaphone interlude in which a cloaked figure rings a plague bell whilst intoning the words ‘I am Deltar’ [I think] The sound of a truck engine revving and a clip from the infamous ‘I’m Jack’ tape is of course included at its conclusion.

MnM’s [Myra’s Shovel/Maxine’s Car M62 J22 Mix]; Maxine Carr the then girlfriend of Soham killer Ian Huntley. Carr was found guilty of perverting the course of justice by providing an alibi for Huntley and was sentenced to three and half years in prison. Junction 22 of the M62 takes you to Saddleworth Moor where Hindley and Brady buried the bodies of their victims. Again you can hear a truck engine revving and then a surprising 4/4 beat that eventually gets swallowed by mountain of noise detritus.

‘Frau Koma Is Coming [KKKarcher Spraydown Mix]’ takes us further afield. In 2009 a 17 year old schoolboy from Winnenden, Germany called Tim Kretschmer posted this message in an internet chat room: "I've had enough. I'm fed up of this pointless life. Always the same. Everybody laughs at me. No one sees my potential. I'm serious. I have weapons and I will go to my old school in the morning and have a proper barbecue. Maybe I'll get away. Listen out…’ This was picked up on and reported to the police. ‘Frau Koma is coming’ was the codeword broadcast over the school tannoy to warn teachers that the threat was real. Kretschmer killed nine pupils and three teachers before being shot by the police. Koma is of course amok spelt backwards. The track is a storm of feedback that begins with some exasperated ‘fuck’s’ and finds space for the softly intoned promise that ‘Frau Koma is coming’.

Its on Lavatory's live track ‘In The Brown Girl’s Ring Piece’ where you get to feel the power that Smell & Quim are capable of - Boney M’s 70’s chart hit is mangled into a loop of the title that sits alongside a raft of reversed disco-ish off kilter beats and of course lots of tumultuous noise. Only five minutes long though.

This wouldn’t be a Smell & Quim release without the odd porn sample either and at times it feels as if some tracks were pulled straight from a degrading dogging video made by people with tourettes in car park near Scammonden Dam [Huddersfield].

Lavatory picks up where 2009 Powerfuck left off. Gone though is the stylized Barbarella artwork and DVD packaging to be replaced by a booklet written in Russian that contains images that include various naked members of Smell & Quim, convicted pedophile and ex glam rocker Gary Glitter [as an aside - a couple of years ago it was reported that Glitter was looking to buy a house in the Saddleworth Moor area] Leeds born playwright, actor and writer Alan Bennett, Kretschmer, Jimmy Clitheroe, Hindley and Brady [and some of their victims], long time Smell & Quim member and inspiration nonpareil Diz Willis, some live photos including the cover showing the blood spattered drum that was the result of a particularly lively show in which drummer Michael Gillham failed to notice his injured hand and a picture of someone with a fish. Altogether it adds up to another prime slice of Smell & Quim. And I haven’t even mentioned Sniff Your Fucking Pee Pee, the sign off monster track in which the lyrics are spat out at such a vitriolic rate that you can almost feel the spittle.

Of course there are still mysteries to solve. I can hear the word Bennett during Fishy Flirting but whether this is a reference to Alan, William or [the last of the Moors Murders victims] Keith Bennett I know not and who’s the guy with the fish?

The track listing is worth repeating in full:

Cuntsocket
Thriller
Frau Koma Is Coming [KKKarcher Spraydown Mix]
Peter Was A Truck Driver [Getting Wood at Garrards Mix]
MnM’s [Myra’s Shovel/Maxine’s Car M62 J22 Mix]
Cocks To The Left [Northern Arsehole Mix]
Dreamfucker [Pissed Off Mix]
Muff-Diving Accident [Shit, Shave & Haircunt 100 Mix]
In The Brown Girl’s Ring Piece - Live at Hondenkoekjesfabriek [DisRespectable Reconstruction Mix]
Fishy Flirting [The Children of God Vs The Clit Hero Mix]
Sniff Your Fucking Pee Pee

Contact:

http://blackpoolshitcore.blogspot.com/p/smell-quim-lavatory.html

philmonopolka [at] yahoo.com

Smell & Quim appear on the Swinefest 3 bill in Leeds this coming Saturday 17th of December 2011.

Storm Bugs

2011-12-04T15:00:00.000Z

Storm Bugs - A Safe Substitute
Harbinger Sound LP

Harbinger 096

Vintage analogue synths, especially the ones made in Britain, are the kind of machines that make men of a certain age go week at the knees. Not for them the cheap thrill provided by a Korg Kaossilator or some other made in Japan box of circuits, it has to be British, preferably thirty years old and covered in lots of bakealite knobs. I have to admit that despite being a fan of analogue synth generated sounds myself I’m a total Luddite when it comes to recognising anything more specific than a Stylophone. I am not, in other words, one of those men who goes week at the knees at the sight of a WASP synth going cheap on eBay. So long as it sounds good its provenience can remain a mystery to me.

This mindset has been changed somewhat by the Storm Bugs. After years of soaking up outfits as diverse as Tangerine Dream, Mother Mallard, early Whitehouse, anything on Sähkö and even Tomi-bloody-ta it has been The Storm Bugs who’ve got me taking notice of the instrumentation being employed. Appearing in the late 70’s the Storm Bugs made good use of the VCS3. This British made analogue synth was to be found in one of the few studios in England catering for the composition of electronic music at that time. This being the late 70’s the Storm Bugs were no doubt pulling influences from a variety of new and exciting directions and thus A Safe Substitute whilst not exactly a Holy Grail of the period is still a deservedly important release.

Both sides of Substitute show what fertile times these were for experimentation. Thanks to the detailed sleeve notes a track by track break down reveals the use of tape delay, loops, the re-routing of signals and the heavy use of low frequency oscillators as well as three synths [two VCS3’s and a Synthi A]. Side two is pure instrumentation and where the VCS3 is at its most prominent. On ‘Hodge’ a shortwave jamming signal is fed through the VCS3 with the LFO chopping up the remains. The result is a thudding beat in which radio waves float in and out of hearing range, the beat becoming louder as the signal fades. ‘Blackheath Episodes’ uses three synths to produce a rhythm track in which varies modes of the beat are tweaked whilst the two VCS3’s provide background drones. Over on side one is where we find the vocal treatments. On an eerie ‘Mesh of Wire’ vocals are fed through two reel to reels, with a background of plodding ritualistic thump. On ‘Objective’ the thump becomes a slowly sequenced funeral beat with the addition of a haunting cornet and a drifting voice extolling the virtues of beans. The hard to dislodge tape murk covers the whole release like a fine film of gauze but its not a distraction. Early 80’s cassette releases will always carry with them the aura of lo-fidelity and as such this gives Substitute a patina of dirt that the passing thirty years has failed to shift. Wiping the muck of this release would be like polishing up and old master. It doesn’t really need it.

This is the first time A Safe Substitute has been reissued in its entirety since its 1980 release [some tracks having appeared on compilations in the intervening period] and immensely worthwhile and important a venture it has been. This period of musical creativity is providing a rich seems for labels wishing to stick coloured drawing pins into the slowly filling wall chart that is the UK underground scene circa 76-84 and long may they do so. Snatch Tapes, on which ‘Substitute’ originally appeared has a few other goodies lying in the vault that labels would do well to investigate.

The Storm Bugs went to ground for the best part of twenty years but are now back in business. Their primitive experimental synth works are being seen as the building blocks for a generation of electronica merchants who were probably just being born around the time that Substitute came out.

Contact:

Storm Bugs

Snatch Tapes

Bren't Lewiis Ensemble

2011-12-03T13:59:00.001Z

Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble - A Real Nice Clambake
BUFMS35. CDR

Some people will never understand John Cage’s philosophy or the fact that you can make music from cacti. For certain brains music has to have beginnings, middles and ends, it has to have a form that is recognisable as what is deemed to be music, it has to be something you can dance to, shag to, be the background to something being sold, it has to fill the dead air on car journeys, it has to fill the ears whilst walking, it has to lift one from the drudgery of the everyday with nothing more than a memorable beat or line, it has to have a face that feels comfortable and a form that is connectable. Nothing wrong with any of that of course but if only the imagination could be stretched a little further.

To your average Joe The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble are a bunch of people fucking around in a room and nowhere near likely to fill in any of the criteria listed above. Get them to listen to one minute of any of ‘A Real Clambake’s’ fifty odd or so and they’d probably tell you that this definitely isn’t music. OK, there’s a bit of the Isley Brothers singing ‘Who’s That Lady?’ but its only the chorus and its on a loop and its very feint and the sound in the background is a droney whoo and theres a bit of backward tape in there too .. and probably something else I can’t quite put my finger on.

I felt the same way myself. When I first listened to A Real Clambake I thought it was a mess of ideas cast adrift with little or no thought given to its conception and I’m the kind of person who likes to think has a wide taste in a variety of musical genres. But then I listened further and deeper and it started to work on me. It was like re-reading a particularly difficult book and finding it wasn’t just a jumbled up mess of sentences and weird words.

It was to Seymour Glass that I gave those extra listens. He handed me a copy of Clambake whilst in Brighton before teaming up with fellow BLE-er Lucian for a Saturday night headlining slot. You don’t take a CD from the creator of Bananafish and dismiss it after a couple of throwaway listens, you take deep and careful lungfuls and dive in for endless hours. And then you look at the history of the Butte County Free Music Ensemble and find that they’re a loose collective of music freaks with LA Free Music Society connections who formed in the mid eighties and then went to ground for a while, for a long while actually. Eventually it all begins to make sense.

In Brighton the BLE were down to two; Seymour and Lucian but judging by the Clambake insert it could have been anything up to a dozen of them, all with ludicrous monikers: Musclebutt, Joan of Art, The Good Trish, Thor Heglund, Montana Swisher. As Headliners they crawled under a large sheet of black and white cloth and made sounds from who knows what. Party poppers were popped in brief glimpses of flesh [a Cage homage perhaps?] but apart from that it was a mystery as to what sounds came from what.

It put me in mind of Clambake though, an hour and four tracks worth where nothing sits still for long; the twang of guitar, a hell-fire Baptist ministers sermon, gurglings, snatches of dialogue [Have you seen those Japanese tampon fetishist magazines?’] the buzzing of amp sockets, a solitary ‘ah’, indistinguishable groans, cassette tape being fast forwarded, the slowly encroaching breaths of a dangerous wild animal, people going ‘eeeehhh’, specks of electric guitar, flutes playing randomly, a loop of someone saying ‘first’, bursts of organ, a cello, shrieks, oddball Tv samples, radio trawls and there you have a very brief glimpse of whats going on [If I was to type all the things I can hear in Clambake it would be a long scroll down to the bottom of this page]. All of these sounds have been culled, mixed, layered, and edited from hours and hours of worth of sounds made back in 1987.

This is rich loam and every spin feels different. Its an easy comment to make but I do feel as though I’m being transported during its course. Clambake gives you the feeling of being in someone else’s thoughts and ideas. Somehow I feel I know Seymour Glass better from listening to this. Because it is so obviously music and not the accompaniment to a commercial, it has no beginning, middle or end or face or easy to attach label. Pushing it further I could take these tracks apart with software and build new libraries of sound, enough to fill ten libraries. Deconstructed it could furnish many a jaded listener with new listening possibilities.

I only had brief, half drunk conversations with Seymour and Lucien [the curse of the middle night of a three night experimental festival] and I was even stupid enough to ask Seymour why he’d wound up Bananafish [‘no time’ being the obvious answer] but still, I got this CD out of it. I feel theres a whole world out there I knew very little of. LAFMS and Smegma were my beginning BUFMS will be my continuation.

I recommend total Immersion over the Christmas period. As a way of escaping the onslaught to come it could be easier than hiding down the cellar. You could try it with other kinds of music of course but I feel that BLE would be the perfect antidote to Slades’ ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ and the Argos ads.

[4] Bob Hallucinations

2011-11-27T10:21:00.001Z

[4] Bob Hallucination
Dog Hallucination. 3” CD
50 Copies

Thanks to Peel playing their 12”’s that went on for 20 minutes I did have a soft spot for The Orb [Andy Kershaw took him to task over such indulgence of course] but for me, at a time when things were going tits up music wise, their music was as welcome as a found fiver in an old coat pocket. Their trippy ambient beats filled with quirky samples floated from my speakers like mind melting ether and then they teamed up with Mike Oldfield and Steve Hillage and it all went horribly wrong.

The Orb were the first band to spring to mind whilst listening to all 23 minutes [natch] of [4] Bob Hallucinations. Bob Hallucinations may not like it but thats what you get for sending your releases to someone who used to listen to The Orb. The production is pristine, the guitars layer and fall like glistening slivers of icicle melt, the field recordings are sublime and well positioned [a nail factory by all accounts], the beats [when they eventually appear] are all Muslimgauze-y and when put into one whole it should work but with it being so overly polished I find it as gratifying as overfeeding on Quality Streets.

Perhaps Bob Hallucinations would prefer it if I mentioned them in the same breath as Column One which I would do if only they’d lay off the hours of mixing and editing and pruning and making sure it all sounds just right. Stripped down and raked out into an hours worth of material there’d be enough sounds in here to keep me happy for many an alcoholic afternoon but as it stands now I find this too condensed and overworked. Pretty when ugly is needed.

Contact:

www.intangiblecat.com/doghallucination

http://www.intangiblecat.com/releases/bobhal3.html

ESP Kinetic / Astral Social Club

2011-11-27T10:12:00.001Z

Astral Social Club - V.E.N.U.S [For electronics and guitars, October 2011]
No label CDR

Astral Social Club - Generator Breaker
Dekorder LP. Dekorder 055

ESP Kinetic - ‘Want Some Of This?’
Harbinger Sound LP. Harbinger75

Contact:

astralsocialclub [at] hotmail.co.uk
www.dekorder.com

Eleven PM on a Saturday night is always a good time to grab some merch from the nodmeister. At the recent Ramleh gig he was chucking records about like confetti at a wedding. ‘Anybody not got one of these?’ says Campbell waving his arms about like a plane parker on acid. And all of a sudden it was like who cares about the Sabbath party band Campbell’s giving away records. Fortunately I’d scored the ESP earlier from the Underwood but the Dekorder and VENUS were received like golden tablets and carried home in the taxi like a new born baby.

I probably owe Campbell about sixteen gallons of beer by now and the upcoming tour of Cleck hostelries may redress the balance somewhat but In the meantime I’m still trying to link the stylistic bridge between Campbell’s first band ESP Kinetic and his current Astral Social Club project. There’s no point in trying of course. ESP Kinetic are early eighties Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV/Genesis P-Orridge acolytes, all orange hair, mascara and black finger polish banging away on drums to heavily reverbed vocals in grotty pubs in Northampton whilst ASC emit celestial drone via a network of arteries that flow between the hearts of dance, techno, motorik, drone, noise and pure experimentation.

Following on from last years unearthing of Fleck Nor comes ‘Want Some of This?’ The moronic come on of every pissed up football hooligan in England seems an odd choice of title for an ESP Kinetic release and its hard to imagine our GPO loving troupe clad in Lacoste shell suits hiding around terraced corners waiting for the other crew to turn up but there you go. Its primitive stuff of course. Even more primitive than Fleck Nor which at least had the sense to veer toward early Fall like riffage and MES like delivery now and again [when they weren’t genuflecting GPO’s way of course]. ‘Want Some of This?’ has Casio poke industrial instrumental ditties and early TG carnage all sharing space on muddied straight to Memorex recordings. Theres a live side and a ‘at home’ side with the punch coming from the ‘home’ side most notably on the longer outing ‘Two Faces Collide’ in which a driving bass riff is the backbone to ranting muffled vocals and spacey keyboards all combining to produce a raucous tumult. It’s what Gen would’ve wanted.

Fast forward twenty seven years and we have Astral Social Club. Since leaving the Vibracathedral Orchestra to their own devices about ten years ago Campbell’s work under the ASC moniker has blossomed into an ever flowing, multiplying body of work. An increasingly important and welcome body of work it is too and unlike some artists whose work appears with all the regularity of a well oiled turd, ASC’s prolific offerings are to be sought after and welcomed.

Generator Breaker’s seven tracks begins with a vibrating four chord descent from which we find shimmering guitars and vibrating electronica emerging. ‘Wishaw’ has a four to the floor thump that shares groove space with glowing heat lamp drones. Somewhere in there are the speeded up samples of European classical music. When the frenetic insect drone rumble of ‘Splashdown’ segues into the final track ‘Breaker’ the beats dissolve to leave a you adrift on a receding idyllic tide. This last, slowed down, ebbing away of residual drone and the final silence that follows had me flipping the damned thing numerous times.

Its hard trying to convey the sheer pleasure to be had from listening to Astral Social Club. After suffering a not inconsiderable amount of tosh in Brighton recently it was to something close to ASC that the weekend badly needed. Something beatific, life affirming, glowing, huggable, off your tits, nod your head drone. But its not all nod your head mindless boogie. Around the twenty minute mark on V.E.N.U.S a church organ like drone emerges from the beats thats precede it. For the next ten minutes it carries you off before breaking up into its constituent keyboard parts. Like this years earlier ASC release 'Scudding' this is a lengthy single. And whilst not hitting the hour mark its half hours worth are further essential Astral minutes.

Razzle Dazzle

2011-11-19T12:30:00.001Z

Glue Pour - Telepathy Shots/Preslav Literary School - Sonuna
Split LP. RzDz15. 300 Copies

Rouse Poussin - The Christmas Shots
CD. RzDz16. 80 Copies

Rubén Patiño - Eleven Stereo Moments
Cassette. RzDz17. 40 Copies

Michael Barthel - Noch Mehr Hölen
Cassette. RzDz18. 40 Copies

Contact: http://www.razzle-d.com/nw.html

I told Johnny Scar that I wasn’t going to mention Darksmith’s performance at this years Colour Out of Space fest but then my hurried answer was just as petulant as the performance we’d just seen. How could I not mention the fact that Darksmith, [Friday nights headline act] threw the teddy out of the cot five minutes into his set and spent the next twenty minutes or so exchanging ‘fuck you’s with the audience? Whilst stamping his feet, throwing his equipment about and drinking from a 2 liter plastic bottle of industrial strength cider he ranted, tore at his t-shirt, threw his chair about and generally behaved like a stroppy teenager whose just been grounded for a month. As acts of petulance go it was up there with the best John McEnroe moments but to see it unfold before my very eyes on the first night of a weekend of experimental music took some taking in. Some people said they enjoyed it but not for the sounds produced of course, which were intermittently interesting but on the whole so obviously chaotic.

And then there was the salad. I have this theory that the further south you go in England the more prevalent the green stuff on your plate. By the time you hit Brighton you need a machete to get through it. There must be thousands of rabbits starving to death due to the fact that the eateries of Brighton deem it compulsory to heap five handfuls of the stuff onto everything you order. I’m surprised its not used as a garnish with coffee. It was what probably pushed Darksmith over the edge to start with.

Colour Out of Space put me in the mood for Razzle Dazzle and a series of releases that cover electronica, tape experimentation, sound poetry and lap top bleep. I did play some of this to Phil T when he was here two weeks ago. It arrived on the same weekend of the Ramleh show. We sat and listened to Rose Poussin and what emerged from the speakers was a panning throb disguising various conversations. ‘Illusion of Safety’ said I. ‘Throbbing Gristle’ said Phil. ‘I bet the voices coming from beneath that panning throb are serial killers and sadists’ said I. But they weren’t. We were tricked into thinking this was homage to old school Industrial but when the voices became clear they talked about chess and the best way to hang a mirror. Disappointed we headed to the next track, another live one, this time a drone built on amp buzz and hiss. French voices appear. It ended. We left for Leeds.

Fortunately for me things improved in remarkable fashion when I played Michale Barthel’s Noch Mehr Hölen. Its a short trip but during it I heard voices as quiet as a mouses trot play with Clanger like voices, vocals mimic the exploding of a dirty bomb and a farmers field at five in the morning. On one track it sounds like they’ve gone down to the local Mental Institution and told everybody within mic reach to make daft noises. Some of it is so quiet that you really have to strain to make the most of it but that only adds to its surreal charm. Wonderful.

Rubén Patiño’s release is subtitled ‘stereo movements for a concert without performer’ and there is a certain air of detachment to these sounds. Most are single notes, test, tones, panned and pitched. Theres an air of 50’s electronic avant-gardism about it all giving the work a nostalgic feel which the format certainly benefits from. The two seconds of mock applause at its end shows that Patiño isn’t bereft of a sense of humour either.

Razzle Dazzle is a Berlin based label. Berlin becoming the emerging capital of experimental music. With the apartments of old East Berlin providing cheap rent for aspiring experimenters its no wonder that theres a plethora of artists and labels emerging from there. New York and London may have its fans but its to Berlin we head first. Preslav Literary School’s Adam Thomas and Glue Pours Benjamin l. Aman are both emigré sound artists working in Berlin. PLS’s work is cassette based, on Sonuna a pure church organ drone provides the basis for a layering of sounds that include child like voices, bird song and massed choirs. Such is the skill in mixing all this degraded sound that the end result becomes one amorphous globule of ghostly ethereal delight. Glue Pour’s end results lie in the same area but I guess that they arrive there via a different route. Telepathy Shots drone is one of electric current, held in check fizz, lost in space wilderness and while it didn't engage me as fully as PSL it still has enough depth to hold its own.

To Berlin then and no salad when we get there please.

Free Filth

2011-11-06T15:56:00.005Z

Clitoris Less Cunt - Ragged Ass Road/Viva La Muerte/Experimental Fauna

The Digitariat - Full of Advice

Filthy Turd - Small Feculent Creatures Creep From Lornas Witchy German Arsehole

As a kid free music meant the radio. Which meant you had to sit and wait for your favourite record to come on and when it did you taped it, usually missing the beginning and having the end ruined with DJ chatter [the exception being John Peel who famously never, or hardly ever at any rate, spoke over the records he was playing]. I must have had dozens of tapes all culled from Radio 1 shows; John Peel, Tommy Vance [TV on the Radio] David ‘Kid’ Jenson, Annie Nightingale. Happy simpler days when you only needed three channel buttons on your TV and the pubs shut in the afternoons. The other way to get free music was to give a friend a cassette tape, usually a C90, and in a few days [or weeks if you were Gavin Walker] you got in return two albums or one whopping double album. The downside to having an album on a C90 was that if your album ran to over 45 minutes you never got to hear the last track in its entirety.

As we advance deeper into ever wider technological vistas though the prospect of having everything thats ever been recorded since the year dot will soon become reality. The most irreverent click track, the last fart of Bob Dylan, the umpteenth Grateful Dead show, every chart single, every radio show, in every language, all of it will be there in a series of noughts and ones in an easy to download zip file. And the last track wont be cut short.

I still cant reconcile with myself whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Growing up in a era where records were seen as rare and exotic items that had to be bought with hard gotten cash the laziness in which you can amass a music library within seconds sits uneasily with me. On the other hand coming across a band that interests you and being able to have a couple of albums gratis to shove on your ipod appeals to me no end. I'm confused.

Of the stuff that fills my inbox the above items have been flitting round my lugholes over the last month or so. Its easy to dip in and out of MP3 files so I jump between Filthy Turds wasted middle England gabba mantras to Digitariat PE rant to Clitoris Less Cunts genre riddled songs.

Clitoris Less Cunt are a Canadian band who with a name like that are going to get themselves noticed. No Vicars tea parties for them I fear. Not that they’ll care. Three blokes having a good time in frozen Canada mixing ‘pop-noise/blues-grunge/garage’ on Ragged Ass Road, ‘electronoise/vintage beat/powerelectro’ on Experimental Fauna and ‘electroacoustic/noise/ambient’ on Viva La Muerte. Which got me to wondering when it was that bands started overlapping so many different genres? The first track on Ragged Ass Road sounds like Wolf Eyes meets Bob Log III, the first track on Viva La Muerte has delicate acoustic guitar pluck, the first track on Experimental Fauna has anguished, screaming, out of puff vocals set to a series of TG like throbs and pulses and then the slide guitar kicks in. Theres no point trying to make sense of Clitoris Less Cunt. They’re having a good time and thats all that matters.

In a bid to find out more about the last Digitariat release I reviewed I emailed Paul Knowles and received in reply [as well as an answer to my question] a link to his new Digitariat album. Full of Advice finds the Digitariat in full on primitive power electronics mode assailing mindless consumerism and dead end jobs. On ‘Neon Victorian Workhouse’ Knowles sounds like a cross between Mark E Smith and William Bennett. Remarkable, as David Coleman used to say. At least you cant accuse Paul Knowles of getting into a rut. Coming on the back of Breaking Glass and its glue record experimentation this comes as something of a shock. If you want to know what Paul said in regard to Breaking Glass go here.

Its like cuddling a rat but you just cant help liking the Filthy Turd. That weasly face looking up at you from the crook of your arm all twitching whiskers, lank fur and drain smells. Its been a while since me and the Filthster locked horns but once you get to hear that messy dictaphone rant noise you cant help but get sucked in. Most Filthy releases sound like they were made on a dictaphone which gives them an audio verite covering over which Filthy shouts his rabid offerings. My favourite on ‘Small Feculent Creatures Creep From Lornas Witchy German Arsehole’ comes on ‘Poisoned Rubies Delirious Worms’ in which Filthy shouts ‘you rocket shiny temptress’ in a voice thats as near to Captain Beefheart as Stoke is going to get. Other outstanding offerings include ‘Hair, Shit and Death’ and the opening track ‘The Shuddering Fingers of a Sexy Intruder’ in which the Filthy Turd croons ‘the meat is rotten’ whilst stirring a big black pot with flames coming up the side. Totally indispensable and one of this nations greatest assets.

And thats me done with downloads for a while. I have a Finnish folk LP to sink in to. Cardboard sleeve, the whole bit.

The New Blockaders - Antimonia II

2011-11-05T17:54:00.000Z

The New Blockaders - Antimonia II
Dot Dot Dot Music 7”

Contact: http://www.dotdotdotmusic.com

I’m not the only writer in this house you know. Mrs Fisher also dabbles with the keys, her chosen subject being travel. And whereas I amass records, CD’s and cassettes for my troubles Mrs Fisher amasses memories of travel. Since the advent of Ernest [the preferred name for her laptop] Mrs Fisher has been entering various travel writing competitions and the results have been rather welcome. The rewards for all this tapping of keys, besides various mentions in the Guardian Travel Tips pages, has been an iPad, a digital camera, £200 in foreign currency and two luxury breaks in the hotel of our choice. The luxury breaks are for next year and have already been booked. One is a night in the Devonshire Arms near Bolton Abbey North Yorkshire on the 30th of March and the other is two nights at the newly refurbed Marriott Hotel situated in Seven Dials central London the dates being the Bank Holiday weekend of May the 5th and 6th.

Observant TNB watchers will already be familiar with these dates. On the 31st of March TNB will play in Berlin along with Vagina Dentata Organ. On the weekend of the 4th to the 6th of May TNB will, at some point, play at the Broken Flag Festival in Tufnell Park London. You see my dilemma. With news that Jet2 are introducing flights from Leeds/Bradford airport to Berlin next year there is the very slim chance that there may just be a flight on the Saturday of that date that will get me to Berlin in time to see the TNB/VDO show [I could fly from Manchester but I could do without traversing the M62 as part of my escape]. With the London dates my chances are a little better. We’ll be there for the 5th and 6th but which night are TNB playing? We have a freebie dinner chucked in with the prize but which night to book it? Of course Mrs Fisher isn’t so cold hearted as to deprive me of at least one night at the BF Fest [attending both would create a permanent schism] but which one to attend and which night to book the dinner? Maybe they’re playing the Friday night and I’m screwed anyway? Its all finely balanced but at least there is hope.

In the meantime theres the slow trickle of quality TNB material to revel in. Antimonia II is two sides of prime TNB scrape in which the Rupenus brothers battle it out with seconds from seizing jet engines, lengths of rusty scaffolding pole, boxes of nuts and bolts and a pair of ball-peen tinning hammers. If anything these two short sides of primitive junk noise are even more visceral than the recently released early live works of which they share a great deal in construction. Perhaps then the seven inch vinyl single [an attractively flecked one too] is the perfect way to hear noise at this level of destruction? As ever its to The New Blockaders that we turn to for quality noise nihilism.

Not sure how many of these exist but the chances are that if you want one you’re already going to have to track down a copy at an inflated price to experience a further, essential, TNB thrill.

Protagonists of David Gadson

2011-11-04T19:21:00.000Z

Protagonists of David Gadson - First Edition
no label CDR

Contact:

cupempty@gmail.com

www.reverbnation.com/protagonists

God is not Great

To the Wharf Chambers in Leeds to dish out ALAP badges like communion wafers. Which got me thinking. Funny thing religion. People eating bits of other people, babies having their genitals mutilated, animal sacrifice, Papal indulgences, suicide bombers. Of course you can do anything in the name of religion. I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchens splendid book ‘God is not Great - How Religions Poisons Everything’ and when you look at religion in the cold light of day, as you should, it all begins to unravel. Hitchens makes this unarguable point: if you or I were to cut the foreskin off a baby boy and suck the damaged member we’d be incarcerated but if you’re a Jewish ‘mohel’ you can cary out his procedure with the states backing. I could go on at length of course but then you’d never know what Ramleh were like. Buy the book for yourself and discover more.

Ramleh certainly thinned the crowd down at Wharf Chamber and this was the three piece ‘rock’ Ramleh not the two piece Power Electronics Ramleh. For the majority of the audience Ramleh’s three chord rock chug wasn’t their thing and at an hour I must admit to having my patience tested but this was my first time, the legendary Ramleh, who play very few gigs at all, Gary Mundy, in the flesh and then the Sabbath party band came on.

After the event I tried to reconcile my inner differences. Did I like it? Not really. In parts they sounded like an instrumental U2. At times they really hit a defiant stride and took you with them but it was only later that I realised that all my favourite Ramleh rock records have Phillip Best on them and tonight there was no Phillip Best. It left a gap that was the reason I couldn’t fully engage with them. At least we got see Early Hominids blast out a twenty minute piece of ultra throb. Early Hominids are beginning to hit their straps now and glueing big beats to the kind of bass throb that Merzbow excelled in is a direct way to my non religious black little heart. And due to a Manchester Skullflower gig being cancelled we got a last minute Voltiguers appearance in which Bower and friend whipped up a ten minute twin guitar wall of thrape. A perfect way to quick start your evening.

As ever, a pre gig snorter was arranged in the Duck and Drake. Shuffling homeless scruffs rubbed shoulders with shuffling home owning scruffs and as ever CD’s swapped hands. One such was given to me by someone called Jonas who had long hair and wore a brown storemans coat. He described the contents as mock jazz but I’d describe them more as quintessential English colonialist surreal humour in a Vivian Stanshall meets Diz Willis kind of way. Which seems pertinent as Diz’s name cropped up regularly during the late afternoon swiller.

Protagonists of David Gadson is four tracks of spoken word observations over backings of sax squawl, urban jazz and Jelly Roll Morton on a loop. I was particularly smitten with ‘Doom Radio with Reginald Ffolks’, in which someone with a plummy, lispy, English accent reminisces about his old records [Vera Lynne] and his Teddy Bear over the aforesaid Jelly Roll loop. The deadpan estuary English delivery and living in the city observations of the proletariat getting pissed and vomiting cheered me no end but it was all over too quick. 26 minute including silence leading up to the hidden track in which we get to find out that Steve’s favourite chord is D minor is way too short. More please.

Bad Suburban Nightmare

2011-10-18T20:07:00.001+01:00

Bad Suburban Nightmare - Highways I
Must Die Records. CD. MDR 018

Two days of blissful wandering along the Rhine in the autumnal Dusseldorf sunshine had to have its downside and it arrived on the flight home. Crammed into the back of a 737 with the boisterous remains of a hen and stag ‘do’ desperately trying to make a pissed up weekend spin out until last orders we jointly gritted teeth and gave thanks to the fact the flight lasted less than an hour. The half dozen beers I’d had earlier in the day did the trick and I somehow managed to doze off leaving Mrs. Fisher to suffer the knob jokes, the shrieking laughter and the sounds of cans of beer being popped all to her good self. Before I dozed off I heard one of the stag party say in a loud and authoritative voice ‘I’m rounding the weekend off in style lads … I’m having a Stella’. Stella Artois being that essential watery anesthetic so beloved of those wishing to attain drunken nirvana in six easy steps. This, coming from someone who’d just spent two nights in one of the best brew cities in the world. Its enough to make you weep.

I didn’t take any music with me this time. I usually do but for once I’d thought I’d clear my head of the stuff. I’ve been listening to a lot of Soft Machine lately you see [and Kevin Ayers of course] and I needed to cleanse the palette, start afresh, give the old shell likes a rest. Which is what I did. And then today I thought I’d give Bad Suburban Nightmare a spin and my ears came back all shiny and new.

BSN is one man and his guitar, [barring a few loose drum hits and the odd plonk of piano] who creates a desolate sound that flits between Ry Cooder, Keiji Heino, Neil Young, Phil Todd, and late era John Fahey. Armed with an electric guitar and the odd pedal or two BSN watches the tumbleweed go by to an accompaniment of whammied strings, lonely notes and harmonic strum. The sparse use of notes and the laid back atmosphere of it all gives the release a supreme sense of desolation. The maudlin vocals on the first and last track which become nothing more than mumbled nothings by the time of the third add further dust to an already windswept release. The longest track on here is the one that gets the Ry Cooder comparisons, ‘Rollerskate Highway’ is pure sun bleached lizard territory and not far from Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas soundtrack only with more distortion and added eeriness. ‘Thee Angels + Th Dark’ is where the Heino comparisons come in, lots of wailing upper neck frot and chin back angst. Its to the bookends of this release where it really sinks its hooks though. In a voice that makes Bob Dylan sound like choir boy BSN sings/moans/wails about death and dead bodies and the fit is perfect.

I don’t normally go in for introspective guitar noodling but this works. I found myself being strangely hypnotized by it all. Maybe I listened to too much American guitar based music as a kid and this has dragged me back to a time when anything American sounding was to be lapped up. Whatever, no more Soft Machine for a while though.

Amniotic

2011-10-10T20:25:00.000+01:00

Amniotic - Unlover/Let The Dogs Erode
Caul Imprint. 2XCDR

Amniotic - Unit 63
Caul Imprint. 3”CDR

Contact: http://caul-imprint.blogspot.com

Amniotic is the work of solo female artist Johannah Henderson who, if I’m not mistaken, was last seen working alongside Jase Williams in the chaotic noise/rock/improv outfit The Mothers of the Third Reich. Here she ditches the random drum bashing of MOTTTR for a far more personal project involving birth. The results of which, in parts at least, are quite a revelation.

Hendersons songs are ghostly affairs, most of them featuring murky bass guitar runs as backbones upon which she layers guitar frills, apocalyptic spoken word prose, piano motifs and field recordings. But its Hendersons haunting vocal delivery and the blurred recording technique which leave the most memorable and affecting memories. Singing lyrics that only rarely appear she buries her voice deep in the mix so that it emerges at times either like a lost soul or a bewitching lorelie. Match this to songs which are at times stripped bare to nothing but single instruments and you have a very effecting delivery.

Its not often I get to review material such as this so this has been a salve of some sorts. I have to admit to fearing for the worst upon opening Johannah’s jiffy bag, Anybody who’s reviewed as many noise releases as me will know only too well the feeling that arrives with the emergence of hand painted CDR’s. I like to be proven wrong now and again though, it keeps you on your toes.

But back to the music.

I was lifted from my cups. I found myself humming certain bass riffs. I downloaded the 27 tracks onto the ipod for midweek consumption [all these tracks, as seems the norm these days, are available for download]. I pondered becoming some kind of Svengali figure taking Henderson from her south coast roots to transport her to worldwide stardom but I fear the reality is that a lot of people just wont get this music and entreuprenuriship doesn't sit easy with me either. These track work because the construction is experimental in approach with the results being entirely listenable in an across the board fashion. Give this to someone trying to wean themselves off indie pap and you have instant success. It works on many levels. The blood red artwork, torn piece of birth certificate and snippets of paper all go towards making these three releases parts of one birthing whole.

On ‘The Number E’ [second track on UNIT 63] to a background of photocopier noise she bangs away like The Shaggs whilst moaning sweet, mumbled nothings. The track ebbs away on a sweet drooping bass guitar run. ‘The Valley of Wine’ is a simple song with a simple two chord strummed acoustic guitar run with a vocal sample that ends ‘come and see the blood on the streets’ the voice emerges from the murk with an eeriness that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The three instrumental triptychs on Let The Dogs Erode sound like a cross between Alan Bishop guitar twang and one of Tom Waits weirder interludes. The title track on ‘Unlover’ is built on a sample taken from some lolloping machine upon which she plays a dainty guitar refrain and sings, moans, whispers unintelligible sweet nothings. Its quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. All of it is recorded in a murk that makes you wonder if the masters have been dipped in some special ‘make it all sound like its been recorded in a strange space’ formula. And lets not forget the instrumental ‘Industrial’, a four minute slice of muted roar and stretched leather strapping that wouldn’t look out of place on a Column One release. ‘Kamikaze Citizen’ contains vocal work comparable with the Cocteau Twins Liz Fraser and just for good measure theres some seagull squawks and a beautifully melodic fiddle to drowse along to. Its mind boggling stuff.

But I try not to get too carried away with myself. On repeated listens I wondered if I’d tricked myself into thinking that this was better than it was and sure enough some of the tracks on ‘Unlover’ drop below the quality bar. Some tracks contain a certain naiveté that lightly scars the better work but this is small beer. There are times when Henderson’s vocal delivery seems to teeter on the edge of Japanese opera too especially on the track ‘Soliel’ but I can forgive her these slights because so much of whats on here is of such inventive quality.

Its not everyday I get to come across a talent at such an early stage of development. I feel as if I’m at the beginning with Johanna egging her on to produce more quality work but even if she never releases another thing she’ll have left us with these enigmatic jewels

[Let The Dogs Erode contains a video work but such is the nature of hand painted CDR’s that I fear placing them in a PC that I rely daily on - its not available on the download either. A vital missing part for which I can only apologise].

Sudden Infant - Noise In My Head

2011-10-02T15:39:00.000+01:00

Sudden Infant - Noise In My Head [The Actionist Music and Art of Joke Lanz]

Published by Marhaug Forlag. Hard cover. 160 pages [16 colour].
300 copies
ISBN 978-82-998765-0-6

www.marhaugforlag.no

www.suddeninfant.com

A quick plug for Lasse Marhaug’s new publication venture Marhaug Forlag. Noise In My Head is a collection of essays and an interview with Joke Lanz coupled to numerous photos of Sudden Infant actions, Lanz artwork, concert posters and flyers. Theres also a visual discography and pictures of fans wearing Sudden Infant t-shirts. What more do you want? With only 300 copies out there though I guess there’s going to be a lot of disappointed Sudden Infant fans. Get one while you can.

Mixed Band Philanthropist / Broken Penis Orchestra

2011-10-01T11:36:00.001+01:00

Mixed Band Philanthropist - The Impossible Humane [25th Anniversary Edition]
Hypnagogia Cassette. PN01. 200 copies

The Broken Penis Orchestra - Plays With Itself
Hypnagogia Cassette. PN02. 200 copies

Back in the mid nineties I decided to dabble in the art of making sounds from samples. The idea of creating something new from the bits of something old appealed to me and not in a Stars on 45 way either. Influenced by the likes of Illusion of Safety, Nurse With Wound and Aphasia I armed myself with a Fostex 4 track, various music formats and a bottle of whiskey. Over the course of a few nights I sat and spun and edited and eventually made something new but alas not something worth listening to more than once. I soon realised that I had neither the patience, skill or wherewithal to create anything of any longstanding merit and gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Which is why I admire those that can do it. They make it seem so effortless when in reality some poor sod has had to spend the best part of a summer painstakingly splicing together and mixing an unending series of three second samples into something coherent and listenable, all without going mad.

In 1986 Mixed Band Philanthropist did what I could could never dream of doing and released ‘The Impossible Humane’. Thirty odd minutes of splatter collage created via samples originating from the likes of Merzbow, Smegma,Vortex Campaign, Organum, H.N.A.S, Etant Donnes, Andrew Chalk, Asmus Tietchens, Nurse With Wound, The New Blockaders and about twenty odd other artists working on the fringes of experimental music. Its car crash tape collage still stands today as one of the best examples of the genre. Its perpetual barrage of split second samples are a dizzying mess of sixties pop songs, scrapes, industrial whirr, uncategorizeable racket, ghostly voices, electronic beebles and burrs, sped up records, tape whizz, machine rumble, snatches of reggae, bucket damage, kazoo farts, disco spots and about three thousand or more [I’m guessing] other samples that really shouldn’t work but by some slight of hand or genius, actually do. Which is the thing that draws me to such work in the first place. On paper snatches of steel bands shouldn’t be found on the same side of tape as Geordie MC’s, Michael Jackson, pneumatic drills, early Merzbow muck and 50’s doo wop but on the Impossible Humane they do and again, it works. Totally. Then comes the added bonus of being able to listen to this to the point of ad nauseum, mainly due to the fact that there are so few reference points that every listen brings something new. And this is 1986 remember, none of that taken for granted home computer and digital editing fancy Dan stuff. You can put this down to the talents of Richard Rupenus, K. Jameson, and D. Lucas who, no doubt influenced by those twenty odd artists, put this thing of beauty together.

This release also gathers in the 2003 MBP single ‘The Man Who Mistook A Real Woman For His Muse And Acted Accordingly’ plus a reworking of this single by The Broken Penis Orchestra. ‘The Man Who’ … uses the same template as The Impossible Humane but this is more of a nudge nudge Friday night lads out affair with lots of knob jokes coupled to comedy sound effects - it wouldn’t have looked out of place stuck to the cover of Viz magazine or on the b side of a Stars on 45 Pints single, what with all the North East Geordie DJ gorm thrown into it. Rupenus R must have been busy with his pause/record button during many a late night Metro Radio session to have gathered together all the source material used here. Still, it works, thats the main thing and despite all the oo-er vicaryness of it all you still cant help but admire the damned thing.

Then we have The Broken Penis Orchestra. ‘Plays With Itself’ has seen the light of day twice now [both on CDR], once with PyschoChrist in an issue of 33 and once with Hypnagogia in an edition of a 100. Its worth releasing again though. BPO is Stan Reed of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer fame, or as he’s credited here Srad Tene and again its a kaleidoscopic array of sample mania. This time the samples sit a little longer allowing for the formation and reinforcement of ideas. Samples drop out of the mix only to reappear moments later and despite the obvious Nurse With Wound influence I did detect bits of Negativland and Smegma. ‘Plays With Itself’ is almost as fevered as The Impossible Humane but with completely different samples of course [it was originally released in 2000]. Here you can expect, Melt Banana thrash, spoken word, Nintendo missiles, lonely sax solos, noise drone, flutter, jazz skronk bands, gospel choirs, rock drumming, heavy piano chords, R&B bass runs, twanging guitar, religious radio bollocks, struck tubular steel as modern gamelan all of it threaded together with reverb, echo and lots of industrial string. There’s also room for ‘Could Someone Please Turn This Off’ a track that appeared on the ‘Bone Tickling Nightmare Pig’ comp.

What impresses me about both these releases is the inventiveness and patience thats needed to put such material together. The fact that even after 25 years The Impossible Humane hasn’t dated one tiny bit is further testament to its originality. Both are towering releases and ones that you really need to own. For those seeking further enlightenment I suggest digging around in the BPO back catalogue. ‘Testicle Difficulties’ still gets played around these parts on a regular basis.

I’ve reviewed some of this material before in a previous guise but its been nothing less than a sheer delight to hear it all once again.

Flux of Yellow Daises

2011-09-22T19:07:00.000+01:00

Flux of Yellow Daises - ECT Disasters.
No label CDR

Contact: Cult.ofCthulhu [at] yahoo.co.uk

ECT [Electro Convulsive Treatment] is a rudimentary treatment to say the least. Having electricity pumped through your brain in the hope that it has a positive effect on your wellbeing seems to be up there with ice pick lobotomies in the prod and hope stakes. The adverse effects of ECT aren’t something you’d want either, amnesia and, some argue, brain damage. You wouldn’t give it to a dumb animal but apparently 12,000 people in the UK are given this treatment every year. According to my sources Tim Telsa has spent 20 years within the walls of the UK’s secure psychiatric hospitals and whilst he was a patient I’m assuming he was one of those 12,000.

Listening to ECT Disasters is a depressing affair. Bookended by two awful rudimentary death metal type tracks its 26 minutes and numerous tracks consist of the audio dubs of a television documentary on ECT highlighting one woman's treatment that went horribly wrong. These samples are then interspersed with basic noise blasts that I’m assuming are there to represent the treatment itself. The whole thing is poorly recorded, as if it was taken down on a portable cassette radio with judicious use of the pause/record button. The packaging is shoddily put together with just a sticker affixed to the front of a CDR case with an A5 paper insert containing contact info and a ‘religious statement from the Cult of R’Lyeh’ whose prophet is of course Tim Telsa.

As a musical artifact it’s value is negligible. This is all but an aural documentary on the barbarity of ECT with some death metal chucked in as light relief. Its worth lies in highlighting ECT and Tim Telsa’s state of mind. You have to worry about both of them.

David Vélez

2011-09-21T19:10:00.001+01:00

Many thanks to Colombian sound artist David Vélez who answered my call for factory field recordings. Whilst listening to the recent package of Gruenrekorder releases the thought came to me that there didn’t seem to be any artists working with factory sounds. Well, David is one such artist and having listened to some of his work I find the need to plug it with evangelical zeal.

http://www.con-v.org/cnv70.html

http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab017.htm

Both of the above links will take you pages where David’s work is available for download.

The first link will take you to ‘Memoria Fragmentada’ and the second to ‘Funza’. Both are brooding works that mix sounds taken from the countryside with those found in factories and cities. The factory sounds aren’t deep pummel industrial, this isn’t a Sheffield steel mill here, but more ‘one operator, one machine’. The results are a beguiling mix of distant rumble, traffic, rain and the rhythm of someone going about their daily work on a semi automatic machine. Industrial ambience fans are in for a huge treat. Some of it sounds as if David was stood recording all this at one end of a huge half empty factory whilst all the work went on at the other. The results are certainly eerie.

The above links will also take you to two fine labels; Impulsive Habitat and CONV both of whom have plenty of their catalogue available for sale and download.

Truant

2011-09-20T20:13:00.002+01:00

Truant - The Truant Accord
Memoirs of a Flatworm. CDR. 100 copies.

Contact: http://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/

Rob Hayler’s reintroduction into polite society has been a major boost not just for Leeds but for a wider thinking world where folks of a droning melody bent meet electronic dabblers of a nodding persuasion. Not only have we seen the re-emergence of some of his long forgotten solo material via a couple of small run three inch CDR’s we now have a lost Truant album to ease us into autumn with. Hayler’s solo project Midwich was an electronic wand with which he conjured drones and infectious motifs of a repetitive nature but he didn’t stop there. Back at the beginning of 2001 he chowed down with Phil Todd and the enigmatic ‘Cloughy’ to create Truant. They released one album and then went back to whatever they were doing in the first place. Fast forward ten years and the masters of a lost second album turn up at Todd HQ and whaddayaknow its been worth digging up. Why have we been sat on this all this time they all cry? Well, nobody really knows.

I suppose you could stretch your imagination somewhat and call Truant a supergroup. Clough played in the ~~short lived~~ long running Krautrock influenced Rancid Poultry, the Toddmeister was heavily involved in Ashtray Navigations and Rob Hayler was holding down his keys with Midwich. When they met they produced something melancholy, drifting and with their first album a raga composed by Klaus Schulz [maybe]. That first album was one thirty eight minute track but this lost second release contains five tracks covering the same time span. Its as equally soporific as the first but really bursts into life with the introduction of Todd’s bleeding guitar work, especially on the last and longest track Animal Kingdom. Clough’s lazy bass runs on New River Apple set up meandering paths down which Hayler’s electronics shimmer like tarmac heat-waves. Illusion of Choice is probably the edgiest track here with the electronics becoming slightly more urgent and groaning before it all packs in like the batteries have died. ‘Nosed’ is a fifty second opener of keyboard skree and dumped guitar solo thats there to lull you into a false sense of security but once that wandering bass couples up to Todd’s wasted guitar and Hayler’s glowing electronics Truant Accord becomes something rather special. Maybe they really were a supergroup after all?

Olypmic Shit Man / Raionbashi & Kutzkelina

2011-09-19T18:20:00.000+01:00

Raionbashi & Kutzkelina - Aktion 091216 Berlin
Harbinger Sound. One sided LP. Harbinger 089
100 regular copies + 50 artist enhanced copies

Olympic Shit Man - Supercharge
Harbinger Sound. Double LP + Magazine. Harbinger 065. Promo.

One of my lasting memories of Istanbul is seeing a couple of local youths walking around in t-shirts emblazoned with eagles above which read the words WEST YORKSHIRE. The first time I saw someone wearing one it stopped me in my tracks. The street was busy so that by the time the sight had registered with my brain and it had worked out a response he was long gone. Similarly the second time around, this time in a packed market street. My camera was buried under piles of tourist detritus, my brain all agog. Why are people walking around Istanbul wearing t-shirts that say WEST YORKSHIRE on them? I looked in clothes shops for one of my own but all in vain. Of course it doesn't matter what it says on the t-shirt if you cant read the language its written in. Its there for effect only. I have a couple of t-shirts with Japanese characters on them that mean absolutely nothing. They’re just designed to look like Japanese characters. Its the same thing with printed English to people who don’t understand English. Anyway.

Two releases from Harbinger Sound that are both firmly aboard the good ship noise but with each coming from vastly different angles. Olympic Shit Man was the short lived collaboration between Mark Durgan and Andy Bolus. I think they released next to nothing and did barely any gigs. As far as I know when you get this there’s not much left over. Supercharge originally came out as a cassette in the mid 90’s on Mother Savage Noise Productions. Such is Harbingers bent to release such obscure material it has to take shape over two LP’s with the fourth side showcasing two live events [one from 1994 and the other from 2006]. To add to the all round madness of it all you also get a decent sized magazine of Bolus drawn insanity to while away your listening minutes.
The live stuff I eventually found more rewarding but that takes nothing away from whats some prime mid nineties noise muck. The 1994 recording is a bit dodgy as you’d expect but it does reach a certain crescendo in a ‘lots of noise things going on at the same time kind of feel’. Bizarre as it sounds Durgan’s well oiled noise gadgets do indeed feel as one with Bolus’s lay out of v-techs abortions, toy guns and broken things that go kkkkrrrrrkkkk but its the 2006 show in Antwerp that hits the spot. At one stage it revives old school Jap noise but the odd tinkling, whirring, scratched records and burnt out fizzing PC stack feel to it gives the meat of thing a gravitas I’d have never given it credit for on first passing. Supercharge meanwhile is alive with TV and film samples, angular noise farts, socket abuse, dustbin torture, unidentified scrape, eruptions of speaker distortion, shortwave whine, high pitched skree. The onslaught is incessant but at times gaps do appear, presumably these being when Bolus’s equipment broke down and Durgan carried on in his own manly fashion. As the trawl through 90’s noise tape land continues expect more noise gems such as this to be unearthed.

For those of you yet to experience a live Raionbashi & Kutzkelina performances this one sided piece of plastic archiving of a recent Berlin show should be at the top of your shopping list. Raionbashi solo shows always did have an element of performance art in them but now that he’s hooked up with the phenomenally vocally gifted Kutzkelina things have blossomed. I saw them perform at last years Lowest Forms Festival and the performance had mutated into a full blown ritual; washing of hands, nailing of wood to the stage floor, the humbling act of drying each other and then of course the sounds themselves. Between them they combine a series of relatively mundane sounds into a whole that is extremely unsettling. On their own the sounds of barking dogs, snoring, female shouts and a lazy accordion may seem innocent enough but once they’re combined they transform into something thats quite bizarre and deeply unnerving. Beginning with a barely audible snore, a bell is introduced, a ringing bell, then female shouts, a few wheezing keyboard keys, as things begin to build a flattening blast of noise erupts and then pigs eating, eerie unidentifiable sounds and then Kutzkelina’s incredible yodeling and if you think yodeling doesn't belong here or has some kind of joke status then you couldn’t be more wrong. Out of all this a dizzying cacophony develops a maelstrom of head swimming tumult that eventually cuts to leave you back at something resembling normality. I wouldn’t mind a full blown Raionbashi & Kutzkelina DVD for these rituals. It needs to be seen as well as heard.

Astral Social Club/Tomutontuu

2011-09-17T15:24:00.000+01:00

Astral Social Club - Wet Wheel/Hot Wheel
Tomutonttu - Syvät Sävyt
Tipped Bowler 12”. TB012

Astral Social Club - Snaefell/Mocne
Trensmat 7”. TR021

Astral Social Club - Scudding [For Electronics and Air July 2011]
No label CDR.

I have it on good authority from the Nodmeister himself that all of the above releases are singles. No problems there until you realise that Scudding runs to almost an hour in length. This is dangerous Orb territory. I’m happy to give up the argument before its started though, if Campbell says its a single then a single it is. For those with a three minute attention span though Scudding will be hard work. Taken as one elongated piece of work it sounds a little like the Campbell issue running amok in the Klang Klang studio whilst proud parents look on, arms folded smiling appreciatively. You can hear them throughout most of Scudding, playing, pulling Sellotape off its spools, making a mess and poking each other in the eye, all the things kids get up to. Over it all Campbell plays a broken beat that morphs into different guises, gets covered in various pops, whirrs and squeals before flourishing into an ecstatic dance orgasm at around the 40-odd minute mark. Its probably the most experimental thing I’ve heard from ASC and single or no single its up there with the best ASC work.

The Tipped Bowler release finds us in is more familiar ASC territory. A longer Wet Wheels becomes a sped up Mother Mallard synth fest where the pulse slowly builds into orgasmic glow stick waving proportions until it cuts straight into Hot Wheels and a short jam before the taxi arrives. A major ASC nod anthem for sure. Just make sure you play it at 45.

Syvät Sävyt sounds like David Lynch dance music. Someone went into the toy instrument department of Hambleys and set everything going at once, played it all backwards, forwards and sideways and gave it to Tipped Bowler. Sort of. By linking together what could be sections of sped up backwards and forwards loops of stuck grooves Tomutonttu has created something in very much the same vein as ASC only with an end result that sounds like the glueing together of much studio floor tape waste. And I mean that in the most sincerest way folks. Over all this forward and reverse madness are stuck quirky melodies played on bits of broken Casios. I could of course be totally mistaken. Fingers are applied to records on turntables with no belts and spun to insane speeds. Somehow it forms a whole that is danceable but only to those with the correct amount of drugs in them. Insane and totally refreshing.

For those of you not in the know Snaefell is the highest mountain on the Isle of Man. You can hear the sheep up there and on Mocne, you can also hear Campbell getting his wind back after getting to the top of its 2000 meters. Snaefell is shiny yellow sun bursts and starlike explosions, psychedelic techno, beats morphed into mangled head swim. Its also got a maddening keyboard run that’ll have you nodding before the first spins taken effect. Mocne is even more urgent. Play it in your car and impress the hoodies in your neighborhood, play it at you next Tupperware party, buy some whizz and dance around the garden in the middle of the afternoon. ASC can have this effect on you.

As ever trying to pigeonhole ASC becomes almost impossible. With a foot in the dance section, a foot in the experimental section and various limbs in genres that include ambient, drone, Motorik and maybe even noise, the job becomes an impossible task. At least ASC are still evolving, bringing something new with every visit. Your humble scribe doesn’t try to make sense of it all he just sits back and basks in its warmth. You should do the same.

Contact:

Tipped Bowler: www.tippedbowler.com

Trensmat: www.trensmat.com

ASC: astralsocialclub [at] hotmail.co.uk

Gruenrekorder

2011-09-15T16:20:00.000+01:00

Ernst Karel - Swiss Mountain Transport Systems
Gruenrekorder CD. Gruen 091

Tom Lawrence - Water Beetles of Pollardstown Fen
Gruenrekorder CD. Gruen 087

Andres Bick - Fire and Frost Pattern
Gruenrekorder CD. Gruen 074

Playing With Words - various artists
Gruenrekorder 2xCD. Gruen 065

Contact: www.gruenrekorder.de

The worst thing about the relapse [or the ‘Istanbul Goat Virus Round Two’ as its known round these parts] is that it robbed me of my powers of concentration. During the first phase of its manifestation two weeks ago all I needed was the strength to pull a CD from its sleeve and insert it into the stereo. During the more virulent second phase all I could manage was staring out of the window whilst listening to the cricket updates on Five Live Sports Extra. As I slipped between coma and semi coma news of wickets falling in Somerset and Warickshire entered my head only to leave again moments later. As a means of whiling away the days it was as good as it was going to get. For some strange reason the sound of any kind of music drove me to absolute torment. I decided it was best left alone. These last few days then have given me some idea of what my retirement days might be like and if I ever make there in such lousy shape I may as well take up alcohol as a distraction.

Thankfully I’d become familiar with this batch of Gruenrekorder releases the first time around so it was a just a matter of working my way back in.

Gruenrekorder is a two man label stroke organisation dedicated to the promotion of experimental music and phonography. Phonography meaning ‘an acoustic experience loaden with musical sounds’. Now I’ve always been a bit of a passenger when its come to Field Recordings [a term that Gruenrekorder also use], I do have some of Chris Watson’s work, some Touch releases that cover the same ground and the odd bit by various Schimpfluch members where they’ve stuck microphones hither and thither and recorded whatever’s emerged, but this is my first serious chance to get to grips with a label dedicated to such material and to give it a serious appraisal.

At least with Field Recordings you know what you’re getting. It says it on the tin. Swiss Mountain Transport Systems is, as you’d expect, the sound of ski gondolas, funiculars and chair lifts all doing what they do up the sides of Swiss mountains. The genius of it all is finding the musicality within these things. So the door locks, the winding motors, the support towers, the funicular tracks and the non mechanical outside sounds such as cow bells and people al become part of a greater experience. It seems obvious but I want to point it out. The first and longest track here is probably Karel’s best; ‘Oberterzern-Unterterzern’ is a 12 minute piece [each track is, I’m assuming, a complete journey] which begins with the closing of the automatic door locks before emerging into open space and a wonderful hum drone. I guess that the suspended gondola is acting as an enclosed speaker with the wire becoming a conduit for the noise produced by the winding motors. The pitch of the hum changes as the trip continues. The serenity is abruptly interrupted as the car passes over support towers. The hum builds and dies away only to be severely jolted by another support tower. Its an impressive piece of field work that will certainly appeal to anyone with a bent for Industrial ambience, which in a way, I suppose this is a pure version of. For a gondola ride alone its worth seeking out for its musicality, should you ever find yourself in Flumsberg please indulge. The other three gondola rides on here have their own idiosyncrasies but nothing as expansive as this. The funiculars are harsher affairs as you’d expect with the added bonus of stops along the way to pick up passengers. The eleven and a half minute chair lift ride that is ‘Oberdorf-Wiessenstien’ [now sadly defunct] is a white knuckle drone ride of buzzing inertia that builds in intensity as it nears the winding station and gently fades as it recedes. Its all recorded with incredible clarity and will reward anyone who takes pride in their playback equipment. My only gripe was track seven which is nothing but the sound of a helicopter transporting building material. Not what it said on the tin.

Pollardstown Fen is a calcium rich, spring fed fen in Ireland which has become home to all manner of wildlife including numerous species of water beetles. Tom Lawrence took his underwater microphone there and recorded what happened beneath the surface. Apparently water beetles like to stridulate. Stridulation being the ability to announce ones presence by the rubbing one body part against another. Remarkably Lawrence recorded one particular water scorpion going at it for over nine hours at an incredible 110 decibels. Part of that experience is included here. My problem with Lawrence’s work here is that even though I find it all absolutely fascinating [ and the sleeve notes help a lot] the sounds eventually become grating and with over seventy minutes of it to go at its an arduous task. But you don’t have to play it all at once. Taken in small doses the delights of water beetles rubbing their nether regions together do reward the inquisitive listener. Track two ‘Seven Springs’ is a cacophony of several beetle species all in ‘antagonistic high alert’ the results of which are comparable to electronically produced noise albeit, one of an especially repetitive nature. Think scratched Hecker CD. Interesting material just very, very demanding on the listener.

My big problem with For ‘Fire And Frost Pattern’ is that it skates dangerously near to ‘new age’. Its two compositions of ‘fire’ and ‘frost’ remind me of the days when doped up hippies used to sit and listen to whale sounds going yeah man and wheres the bean casserole. Andreas Bick creates two almost thirty minute pieces, one representing heat and the other cold. As you can probably guess Fire Pattern contains the sounds of volcanoes but after that struggles a bit so includes the man made sounds of ‘singing flames’ [a kind of late 19th century flame organ] and alcohol burning in bottles. Its OK but not a patch on Frost Pattern which has far more depth to it.
I was lucky enough a few years back to experience one of the sounds included here; whilst walking around the edge of a lake in Sweden one morning I heard a high pitched sound followed by a low rumbling one. It turned out to be the air escaping from beneath the ice. The entire lake was frozen over, but was slowly melting. Maybe a mile in diameter and the entire piece of ice was floating, air escaping to its edges in small spurts. On a cold, still morning with no one around it was an experience I’ll never forget and one I’m grateful to Bick to be able experience again.
Ice, snow, frost, cleaving icebergs, Bick uses them all to good effect and incredible sounds they make too. Capturing the sound of falling snow flakes by attaching contact mics to sheets of tin foil also works. If only I could shake off this new age thing maybe I could like it just that little bit more. I’d have been quite happy to have listened to all of these sounds as individual tracks. Collaging them into ‘suites’ or ‘symphonies’ or ‘patterns’ leaves me um … cold.

The various artist comp Playing With Words is release I got the most out of. Its a release that calls itself an ‘investigation into the spoken word’ and I call ‘one to take to the desert island with’.
It includes 42 artists over two discs, most of which are new to me, which means theres little room for detail here, but just to wallow in the majesty of voice, whatever the language, is sheer majesty. Once you’ve blown up all your electrical equipment and bust all you strings and gone partially deaf from all your noise gigs there’ll still be the human voice to entertain you. I’ve seen noise artist do gigs using nothing but their voice, I’ve seen Jaap Blonk do Ursontae, I’ve seen Phil Minton make gurgling sounds for half an hour and its all been totally sublime. OK, the genre does have its down side and can become very self indulgent. I’m happy to have forgotten the name of the American sound poet I once saw at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music fest but for every bad apple there are plenty of golden ones. Fortunately thats the case on Playing With Words and its not only words you get to hear. Jaap Blonks submission is a series of cascading voice samples that sound almost electronic. There’s the irrepressible and still sadly missed Bob Cobbing performing the 2000 version of Alphabet of Fishes along with David Toop and Paul Burwell. Barry Truax’s ‘Shaman Ascending’ is another vocals turned synth. There’s clips plucked straight from Radio 4, someone reading out the letter they’re writing with the sound of pen scratching on paper, there’s an incredible Trevor Wishart track that I’m desperate to share with anybody who’ll listen and a track by Salome Voegelin in which someone struggles to read a flyer with Welsh language in it in a supermarket cafe. Totally wonderful. Its a rewarding listen even if there are a few bumps along the way but the best thing about it is the fact that its available as a free download from the Gruenrekorder website. Plus, if you download it you wont have to strain your eyesight reading the tiniest writing I’ve seen on a CD release.

Gruenrekorder don’t just release Field Recordings and Sound Art though, you’ll find them investigating Soundscapes as well as running a workshop and an intermittent dual language downloadable PDF magazine called Field Notes. Its archived and worthy of your attention. Theres also a few more free downloadable albums beside the one I mentioned. Having never heard of Gruenrekorder a month ago I know find myself a fervant fan.

What interests me now is has anyone done any true ‘Industrial’ field recordings? I mean in actual working factories? I’ve been musing this for the last few days. I wonder if there are too many obstacles involved? Its not like you can just turn up at a factory with your equipment and say ‘I’d to record your machines please’. First you’d have to find out which machines makes the most interesting noises and that in itself would take months of ground work. Then you’d have to get the companies permission. The company involved would no doubt have to give you assistance as I’d doubt whether they’d just let you wander around their premises until you found what you wanted. The results could be interesting, just hard to collate.

Istanbul

2011-09-08T21:32:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd bring a little bug back from Istanbul. One of those nasty little bastards that grows on the pull chains of filthy Ottoman toilets. Not that I ever found a pull chain, or an Ottoman toilet for that matter, but somehow, despite all the usual precautions, a bug found it's way into my digestive tract. It began to bite during the return trip making the near 4 hour flight particularly unpleasant. Increasingly so when I realised that even if I was strong enough to pick up our cases, I still had to traverse one the busiest motorways in England during the tea time rush hour. At least I wasn't on my own, Mrs Fisher, in an act of total unselfishness, had caught the very same bug.

So there we were waiting for the bus to take us to our car, shivering and weak under gloomy Manchester skies wondering where this is all going to end. By now the thing is really starting to take hold and all we’re wanting to do is get home and get to bed. I'm shivering uncontrollably, my head is thumping, my throat feels like I've been sucking Nitromors pastels. I get the cases in the boot and bang my head on the door frame getting into the car. I feel like I've been banjoed by Sonny Liston. I'm starting to get clumsy and feel my sense of balance is deserting me. But an hour or so later we're outside 17 having managed to steer the limo past lumbering HGVs and the inevitable spray. With fingers gripped to steering wheel and with the windows going up and down [too hot, too cold] we cross the moors to the safety of home. We dump the cases in the living room, where they will stay untouched for two days and go to bed. It's 5.30 in the evening.

Before I stumble upstairs I ring work with the ridiculous idea that I may somehow be able to sleep this thing off and there's a slim chance that I may just be in in the morning. Six days later I realise that I was just kidding myself.

During the night I experience a mini cold turkey moment. If I had ever got addicted to heroin and then decided to get off it then this might be something like it. I sleep in two hour stints then wake up, thrash about for a bit, moan inside and begin detailing my symptoms inside my head: hot and cold flushes, muscle aches, headaches, a throat that feels like someone has lined it with battery acid, a mouth so full of strings of gob that I can’t shift them even with my fingers.

I’m intensely thirsty and decide to get up for a drink of water. Getting out of bed proves to be more difficult than I thought. It’s like one half of me wants to stay where it is whilst the other half knew that if water wasn’t ingested soon then there could be trouble ahead. With immense concentration I manag to get first one leg then the other out of bed. I slowly lift my wobbly frame to its full height before staggering to the toilet smashing one of my shins on the corner of the bed in the process. I sit on the toilet, head in hands, elbows on knees covered in sweat and release about a thimbleful of urine. I hang my head over the sink and try to get rid of some of the mucus that has formed in my mouth. When I try to cough up the stuff at the back of my mouth my stomach turns and I think I’m going to vomit. I get most of it out and manage to drink a little water but it burns my throat as it goes down.

I make it back to bed without any further disasters to find mrs Fisher in much the same state. We pass some mumbled greeting before going all fetal, one minute too hot the next too cold, covers on, covers off, each body a trembling mess of immune system chaos.

When I sleep my dreams are vivid and hallucinatory. I fly past miles and miles of perfectly lined up street cafe tables, all empty and laid out for the first customers of the day, carpet shops and bazaars whizz by on a journey that ends about 3 am when I am woken by the most violent stomach cramps I have ever experienced in my whole life. This time the part of the brain that makes me want to stay in bed is quickly overruled and I make haste to the toilet. When my arse cheeks hit the wood I release the most violent, black and horrendous pound of slurry it has ever been my misfortune to experience. It was ejected with such force that if it hadn’t have been for the porcelain it would surely have stretched a good 12 feet. It came in two parts. I had a breather after the first and then the second wave hits me. This time a trumpet blast of liquid fecal matter aided by a fetid blast of disgusting air. I moan inside.

I sit there in junky toilet Trainspotter mode for quite some time, trembling, sweating, trying to breath normally, only slightly aware of the stench that surrounds me. And then I fear for the future motions of Mrs Fisher. I tidy myself and the toilet up and stagger back to what is now a mess of sweat soaked sheets to continue what was to become 16 hours of bedridden torture.

At 10.30 the next morning I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep for four hours. I know I have to get up but the half of me that wants to stay in bed is the dominant force. Get up. What for? To eat something. Not hungry. To drink something? I could do with a drink but then I can get a drink in the bathroom. Get up and have a shower? OK.

Mrs Fisher was by now downstairs having crawled out of bed two hours ago, she’d brought me a cup of tea which I couldn’t drink because it was too hot and burnt my throat but which had now gone clap cold and was as equally undrinkable. Get up and shower and have a cup of tea I say to myself. Cups of tea can cure anything. Everybody knows that. I get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom. My head is light and I feel dizzy. I have to take small steps and try not to bump into things. I am aware that my sense of balance is out of kilter and that there is a good chance I could easily fall out of the shower. Whilst waiting for the shower to come on I stand over the sink and try to get rid of some of the gunk that has accumulated in my mouth. I realise that my toothbrush is in my case but we have Listerine so I gargle with that and my throat feels a little better. After getting out of the shower I throw on the first clothes I can find and very carefully make my way down the stairs on unsteady legs. I’m feel marginally better, as in last night I was dying and flatlining but now theres a blip on the machine. It isn’t much but its something to cling on to.

Mrs Fisher is sat in her wing back chair. She doesn’t look well. I make us both some tea and realise that even though I dont feel hungry I have to get something inside of me. I mash up two Weetabix in milk and let them go soft. I let the tea go cold for a while then take a sip. It is incredibly painful to take even a tiny sip of tea. As the tea goes down the pain in my throat becomes so intense that I can’t help but involuntarily pull my head back, which intensifies the headache which coupled to the fact I’m shaking all over and have a stomach that resembles a rancid goats bladder, doesn’t make me feel too good about myself. I grab at my throat and rub the swollen throat glands. They feel like two Victoria plums. I stare at my Weetabix like its radioactive waste. I put half a spoonful in my mouth and make myself swallow it. Its agony but the pain is short lived. I wait for the pain in my throat to subside then take another mouthful. I repeat the process until half the bowl has gone and then I feel sick. I take a tiny sip of tea. As it goes down it meets the Weetabix coming back up and I just make it to the sink before unleashing it. I stand holding the sink, trembling, sweating, going hot and cold on and wonder how long this is going to go on for.

In the living room the cases still stand where we’d left them. Neither of us has any energy so thats where they stay. My toothbrush is inside mine but considering the state my gob is in brushing my teeth really doesn’t seem to be that important. Instead I lower myself steadily into the Poang and give thanks to Japanese designers and Swedish furniture stores. Mrs Fisher throws a quilt over me and there I lay, gob open, breathing unsteady, head swimming, aching, staring out of the window like a coma victim. Neither of us says much.

After about three hours I get the first abdomen cramps. I throw off the quilt and make for the toilet. Weaving, head all a swim, trying not to knock pictures off the wall I make it to the top of the steps. After a short burst of diarrheic filth I tidy up, wash my hands and decided a sip of water might be in order and the Listerine might be a good idea too seeing as how I’m already up here. The water goes down easier after the Listerine.

I update Mrs Fisher on my condition upon return. She looks at me like a cow about to be slaughtered. At 6.30pm we decide that we really need to eat something even if our bodies are telling us they didn’t need anything. Mrs Fisher volunteers to make some cheese on toast and disappears into the kitchen. I managed half of it. Its like trying to eat glazing mastic. Even with the help of a half cold cup of tea I can’t manage any more of it. Its like my stomach has shriveled to the size of a tennis ball and is refusing to allow any more food in, assuming I had appetite or throat enough to cope with it.

At 7.30pm I return to bed. Mrs Fisher comes along. We take glasses of water, paracetamol and throat lozenges [by the grace of God there was a stash of the things in the medical tin]. Our cases stand like monuments to a time when we could move about like decent human beings.

The next night was much like the first. The dreams were the same, the aches the pains but the throat has taken over as pain area number one. It is so painful by now that swallowing anything; water, spit, cold tea, is impossible. I have to resort to leaning over the edge of the bed and rolling long strings of gooey gob into my water glass. My lips are now totally chapped. The inside of my mouth feels like the sides of a Bombay sewer. My throat is crippling me. But I know that if I’m losing water at one end it has to go back in the other. So during one of my toilet visits I manage to gargle some more Listerine and it does the trick again. So I stand on unsteady legs, holding the sink with both hands head back gargling, then a sip of water, gargle, spit, drink, gargle, spit, drink. I manage to get all the mucus out of my mouth and despite the shakes and the woozyness in my head I do feel a teeny tiny bit better.

The next morning I’m downstairs by 7.30am. I stare at my Weetabix mush and can’t force even a half a spoon of it down. I stare at it for fifteen minutes before giving up and going to the fridge. The fridge is almost empty. We’d frozen two pints of milk and some bread before going away and this is what we were now living off. The bit of cheese was a bonus. There are also four eggs in there that haven’t gone out of date so I suggest some soft boiled eggs. The old bung em up idea. I eat a half of one and drank half a cup of tepid tea then take off to the Poang.

The continual onslaught of antiseptic lozenge and Listerine is doing something right. I sit with a glass of water taking sips and am managing to take it down and keep it down. The abdominal cramps are now coming about every four hours but the emissions are getting smaller. I decide that what we need is soup. So I raid the tin cupboard and right at the back I find three tins of chicken and vegetable. I wipe em up and take out a pan and then notice they are all a year out of date. Then I remember we have some packet soups. I dig out a chicken noodle one and make it up. I stand dipping the bread into the stock and despite the pain in my throat it feels like a morphine injection. I know that we were going to get better.

We get the soup down along with some bread and retire to our chairs. I can concentrate more now which is a good sign. I’d gone to the toilet and farted and nothing else. Soon proper stools would appear. I would regain my appetite and all would be well with the world.

That night we make sardines on toast. Its a defining moment. We go to bed at around ten pm and the dreams are gone. I awake at five. The shakes are receding. I’m still a little unsteady but the appetite is coming back. The throat is still sore but I know how to fight it now.

I go downstairs, open my case and take out my toothbrush. After bushing my teeth I make breakfast. Three Weetabix, granola and honey. Why hadn’t I thought of honey before? I was mad at myself but knew that the road to recovery was now in full view and that with the honey and the lozenges and the Listerine normal life was out there for the taking.

By day five the only really problem I have is the throat. Mrs Fisher has still got the headaches but the violent shits never did really appear for her. For days now the only thing we’ve talked about is the state of our poo. Its like being on a six month trip round India. I know that once the solid stuff starts coming through again I was home and dry. Literally.

The worst thing about this illness, apart from the obvious, is the ability to not be able to think straight. Its like being given a particularly strong soporific drug. That first day of the illness I sat and stared out of the window for about eight hours straight. No TV, no radio, no PC, nothing. The illness did not allow anything else to intrude. The next day we decided that a bit of moronic daytime TV might be all we were up for and it was but by day three I had regained the ability to concentrate. It seemed like a good idea to catch up with the review pile.

Sat in my Poang with headphones attached I listened to all of this in one straight go:

Olympic Shitman - Supercharge [Harbinger 2xLP/magazine]

Raionbashi & Kutzkelina - Aktion 091216 Berlin [one sided Harbinger LP]

Astral Social Club/Tomutonttu [split 12” on Tipped Bowler]

Astral Social Club - Snaefell/Mocne [Trenmat 7”]

Astral Social Club - Scudding [CDR]

Andres Bick - Fire and Frost Pattern [Gruenrekorder CD]

Tom Lawrence - Water Beetles of Pollardsdown Fen [Gruenrekorder CD]

Ernst Karel - Swiss Mountain Transport Systems [Gruenrekorder CD]

Playing With Words - v/a [Gruenrekorder 2xCD]

Flux of Yellow Daises - ECT Disasters [CDR]

Truant - The Truant Accord [Memoirs of a Flatworm CDR]

Some of it I listened to twice. I really like most of it. Now all I need to do is find the right words.

The Digitariat

2011-08-22T20:53:00.000+01:00

The Digitariat - Breaking Glass
CDR. No label
50 copies.

I have to admit to a slight penchant for vinyl abuse. Those Youtube clips of Christian Marclay throwing vinyl hither and thither whilst keeping five turntables going never fails to amuse. AMK, Dennis Duck, even TNB material showing smashed records adorned with rusty screws lifts me from my cups. There’s something in the act of destroying a record to make another record which I find immensely appealing.

One person I thought would never turn to vinyl abuse is Paul D Knowles. His Digitariat outfit is more generally known for noise of the electronic variety and its here I have to declare an interest. For me and Knowles have a history of sorts. I saw his first ever live outing where [then working under the Dachise moniker] he supported Smell & Quim and Con-Dom at the 1 in 12 Club Bradford. We used to communicate via the post dhalinks, he used to live not far from here in posh Harrogate and his Dachise single for a nascent Tochnit Aleph label was a release that pulled me back from a noise abyss. At a time in my life when I felt like giving up on noise, this particular single [Sugar Path], dragged me back in. Having ditched Harrogate and Dachise for Berlin he now finds himself ferreting his time away in London with The Digitariat.

Breaking Glass is a departure from all his previous work, the bits of it I’ve heard at any rate. For it Knowles has created a cast of Hazel O’Conners Breaking Glass soundtrack LP and used it to create a 42 minute piece of loops and general chaos. There’s a sliver of the cast included with every copy [thereby instantly lifting this release from something mundane into something far more interesting - CDR labels take note] which gives you some idea of how fragile the cast must have been when it was in one piece - think lightweight anorexic flexi disc.

The sounds he creates with it are similar in playback to AMK in particular, things kick off in a fairly rambunctious fashion before settling in to a series of locked grooves, glitches and snatches of garbled vocal, some of them seeming to go in reverse which has me wondering if this record was so thin it could have been played on both sides. It does have its moments but at 42 minutes I found my patience being seriously tested. Its not all noise though, melodic moments appear fitfully but for the most part this is fairly harsh in a ‘I can’t take it no more’ fashion.

I guess that with hitting the 42 minute mark Knowles is angling for a vinyl version somewhere down the line and I dare say there’d be takers for it. Potential buyers will have to have plenty of patience though for this does grate at times. I still got something out of it though, even if it was for short periods. The last five minutes are probably the best but by then I fear that even the most ardent of listeners will have moved on, no doubt digging out that sterling AMK flexi cut-up Pinch-A-Loaf release.

http://www.myspace.com/digitariat

I emailed Paul asking him how he actually made the glue record. Here is response:

'A few years ago I turned the TV on late on a Sunday night and there was a documentary on about Toyah. It was a faith programme and I couldn’t really understand what her religious faith was, something “new age” and seemingly unspecific. I wasn’t interested in that subject, but the old music and videos were great. The 80s revival stuff seemed to have completely missed out on the Toyah treasure trove, perhaps it was just beyond the pale. This week I went to some second hand record shops and bought most of the Toyah LPs for 10p each and for the same price I got a copy of Hazel O’Connors ‘Breaking Glass’.

The film ’Breaking Glass’ is hard to find on DVD at a fair price, my memories of the film are from when I was in my pre-teens. It used to be on Channel 4 late at night between Xmas and New Year holidays. The music, which was supposed to be punk or post-punk, certainly had a naff stage-musical feel to it. Very overdramatic.

I had first happened upon the process of making a cast of a vinyl record many years ago. I was experimenting with old records after reading the liner notes of a C C Nova CD which described use of burning, scratching, use of masking tape and glue on a record before playback. With the glue, I found that glue stuck to the vinyl of a record lifted easily once dried. Lifting the dried glue from the record, you can see how fine it picks up the details of the grooves.

What would be the inverse of the grooves lifted inside the cast? The idea that the cast would be the exact opposite of the grooves of the vinyl doesn’t exactly follow, rather than sounding like something completely opposite and other it actually sounds like a ghostly version of the original. Of course, the spiral runs from inside to out which makes it a backwards record, but inverted grooves should be more complex that that, and I’m sure there is something else other than a reverse. The glue also makes bubbles and their disturbances help the needle to jump around to a random point without any manual guidance.'

Must Die Records

2011-08-15T20:52:00.000+01:00

Nigel Joseph - Radioactive Snuff
MDR013. CD

MDR Sampler
MDR004. Comes in circular tin with badges, stickers etc. 50 Copies.

Various Artists
MDR019. CD [Not pictured]

Ignorance - Language and Labyrinth
MDR012. CD

Like most people who pass through the Ceramic Hobs Nigel Joseph has had his runs ins with the Psychiatric wing of the National Health Service. I once interviewed him at the fag end of a particularly drunken day in Blackpool and his recollections of some of the drugs he’d been proscribed made heroin look like sherbert dip. As is usually the case though, he seemed far from mad. Maybe it was the beer. I’ve been a bit of a fan of Mr Joseph since he began sending me his home made noise releases back in the 90’s. These shoddy CDR affairs usually contained basic rock tracks in which he distorted everything to maximalist buggery. There was something in the immediacy of this approach which appealed to me at the time, noise for making a noise sake pure and simple. He once threatened to release the ultimate noise release - a hundred noise cassettes sewn into a dead dog, released for one minute, on one day and then deleted forever [ … about that mad bit again]. There’s also been the Nervous Breakdown zine,a chaotic mess of newspaper cuttings and genital drawings and involvement in other west coast acts, besides the Ceramic Hobs theres the mysterious power electronics influenced Ambulance Chasers and the ridiculously named Heffalump Trap.

After playing Radioactive Snuff a couple of times I can only begin to wonder if all those mind numbing drugs have finally done the trick. Forget noise, this is nothing but an hours worth of head nodding chill out muzak for the heavily sedated. Its not that away from what Astral Social Club achieve but whereas ASC will use a loop and a 4/4 thump as the first stages of a joyous trip to ear nirvana Joseph never pulls out of first gear. ‘Chlorpromazine Dreams’ [the first track] tells you all you need to know, Chlorpromazine is Largactyl by another name, a powerful antipsychotic. Thump, thump, thump ‘Vaginal Snot’, twenty minutes worth of thump guitar neck wringing. Thump, thump, thump. ‘Born Dead Too’. Thump, thump,thump. And so it goes. I reckon that you’d have to be on the same drugs as Mr Joseph to get even the tiniest bit of anything out this.

Its a problem I had with both of the comps too. I don’t know what it is they’re putting in the water in Blackpool but through MDR there seems to be an outlet for hours worth of cheap chip set cod reggae spliff muzak made by people with names like Mindrocker, Lava Surf and Nipper. The two spoken word outings by Miles Hadfield and the Must Die Sound System appeal most because they’re quite obviously not cod reggae dub step chip set head bobbing drug music. Both are wry and despondent observations on decaying suburbia written in poetic language and delivered in a flat voice [with a bit of programmed beat in the background it has to be said]. Marvelous. Elsewhere Variable Phantom provide some found sound static but spoil it by putting what sounds like moaning vocals over it and Bad Suburban Nightmare’s 16 minute magnum opus sounds like one of Ashtray Navigations more raga like outings. Think Derek Bailey playing swamp music. Apart from that its all pretty depressing. A bit like Blackpool.

Which leaves Ignorance, who from their cover art would lead you to believe they’re a bunch of dark metallers getting their hands mucky in the devils work but who on first listen display nothing more than prosaic noise flutter, amp buzz and what I like to call Norman Collier noise. Thats the kind of noise you hear when the wire to one of your speakers has become frayed and the signal drops in and out. Amusing for the first minute or so but after five you want to kill somebody.

Must Die Records are a not for profit label whose motto is ‘love music, not money’. Entirely honorable sentiments and if you go to their website you can listen to most of this stuff for free. Its seems churlish then to criticise a label with its heart in the right place but when you don’t like the music they put out what can one do eh? I dare say that there’s an audience for this kind of thing but not at number 17.

www.mustdierecords.co.uk
info [at] mustdierecords.co.uk

Sex Lies and Magnetic Tape

2011-08-01T20:48:00.001+01:00

Sex Lies And Magnetic Tape
C60 Cassette. 20 copies.

Thanks to the new craze for robbing copper wire from sub stations I’ve been without the internet for a week. The one that caused the power surge here caused half a million pounds worth of damage [not half a million at number 17 of course but in the surrounding area] and all for £50 worth of copper. They caught the person responsible so about now he’ll be tucked up in a comfy cell with an x-box and a flat screen TV to stop him getting bored. At his trial he’ll be offered an equally comfy chair to sit in whilst social workers try to fathom out his Oedipus complex or some such other bollocks. Talking of bollocks, thats what I’d do to him. Cut them off, fry them in a little butter and force feed them to him - fork in one hand gun in the other.

Day one was the worst. ‘No internet’ I said to myself, ‘what am I going to do instead’? By day three I was a little less worried. I’d caught up with some DVD’s, ripped some music on to the PC and almost written a letter. By the time I’d bought the modem, returned it because it was a router, bought a modem router, plumbed it in, managed to configure it, worked a 54 hour week and caught up on some sleep I was less worried. I can get by without the internet I thought. It can be done. I may not be able to order online from Second Layer and Amazon anymore, I’ll have to rely on the phone and letter writing for keeping in touch, I wont be able to download any more free music, i wont be able to listen to the radio online, no Youtube, no Cricinfo, no more Thursday night RL games on dodgy far east websites, no blog … but I will be able to live without it.

During this internet interregnum I also listened to Sex Lies And Magnetic Tape and when getting back online discovered I’d been listening to Doomstep. There’s the internet for you. Without it I was listening to a tape and with it I was listening to Doomstep. Praise be.

On first listen my spirits were immediately lifted by the sound of some promisingly Dieter Müh-ish ritualistic industrialness but this initial enthusiasm soon waned when I realised I was listening to what I now find is commonly called a ‘mix tape’. Someone, quite cleverly I’ll give you that, has mixed and segued [you’ll have to forgive my ignorance of technical terms here] some of their favourite bits of music into two larger thirty minute pieces of music. I’m probably some way off the mark here but I detected hints of Column One, Muslimgauze, The Orb’s dubbier moments, Godflesh, Tortoise, Primus, Ministry and what I fear was some neo-folklike tambour banging All About Eve wailing. On the second side a curious piece of bachelor pad Moog music appeared and then the whole thing ended with some good old fashioned death metal - or whatever it is they call it these days.

All well and good if you like that kind of thing and I’m not averse to the dubbier, ritualistic moments that some bands experience. But the more I thought about it the more non-plussed I became. None of the artists involved are given any credit, presumably so as not to draw any kind of legal attention, no label info, no contact info. Someone please enlighten me.

No idea of how many copies exist but they do come with some ridiculously over large, though well prepared, A4 artwork.

And with my trusty modem by my side I shall now embark on a mission to catch up on all the sub genres that may have been invented in the last week.

Contact: http://www.sexliesmagnetictape.co.uk/ [downloads available]

An exchange of emails reveals the following tracklisting for this release:

SIDE A

1. DAVID ROSENBOOM - AND COME UP DRIPPING
2. DEMDIKE STARE - BARDO THODOL
3. FOREST SWORDS - HJURT
4. ULTRALYD - SAPROCHORD
5. AUFGEHOBEN - DOXA CAVEAT
6. SWANS - WEAKLING
7. CINEMA VERITE - SCHNITT
8. ELM - DEEP MIRAGE
9. 23 SKIDOO - THE GOSPEL COMES TO NEW GUINEA

SIDE B

1. PETE SWANSON - F.I.A
2. MENACE RUINE - UTTERLY DESTITUTE
3. ELECTRIC WIZARD - IVAXOR B PHASE INDUCER
4. HARMONIC 313 - DEPARTURE LOUNGE
5. WOLVSERPENT - SERPENT
6. SIMON SCOTT - ASHMA

RRR Record Store Record

2011-07-29T21:38:00.000+01:00

RRR - Record Store Record.
RRR - RSR. LP + Tote Bag

I once had that Ron Lessard in my back bedroom you know. It’s true. About seven years ago Steve Underwood needed somewhere for one of his star performers to kip during a UK tour and I was the chosen one. Ron had played Manchester under his Emil Beaulieau guise and had shown us that noise needn’t be someone leaning over a table full of gadgets trying to deafen everybody. Ron kipped in the back bedroom where I now type this. Before hitting the hay we spun some records and the day after, along with the Durgmeister, we killed some time before the Leeds show by watching an old Jacques Tati film.

What I liked about Ron was his boundless enthusiasm for all things noise related [except noise records at one in the morning after a hard day on the road that is] he showed me an Emil Beaulieau release in which the label responsible had made the covers from the cut centers of old vinyl records, ‘why didn’t I think of it before’ he said slapping his forehead. In the short space of time I was in his company he seemed to be forever on the look out for new ideas for his RRRecords label.

I’m not alone in having serious respect for Ron and his label. He’s single handedly released some of the most seriously outlandish and some would say insane, noise related releases ever; the 500 artist locked groove LP, the 1000 track locked groove LP, the Pure CD series, the state by American state series of box sets that kicked off with the 10LP California job, the Recycled cassette series, the hand made sleeves and inserts all of it released without much in the way of fanfare but all of it received with that knowing feeling that the Ronfather has done it for the noise cause once more.

Perhaps the Record Store Record may be seen as his most outlandish release yet. Not because of the bag that comes with it or the deluxe gatefold sleeve with inserts but because the Record Store Record is actually a record with only the sound of record shops on it. Lesser labels might have issued this on CD or cassette but then that would have lessened its effect. It had to be vinyl of course. This record then is, in essence, a portable record shop. If you’ve never been in a record shop, and I bet there’s plenty of people out there in far flung places who haven’t, then this is your chance to experience them in the comfort of your own home.

It will come as no surprise to those who’ve had the chance to visit some of the shops involved here that people do what people do in record shops; they talk shop, they talk shite, they answer the phone, they joke, order pizza, wrap packages, they even play records. Some try to make noises out of stretched Sellotape but if you hear as much of stretched Sellotape as I do then you’l know that this can become irritating very, very quickly. This is pure audio verite for those who’ve never shopped at five of the best record shops that cater to the noise record buying public. The shops involved were Second Layer in London, Hospital Productions in New York, Weirdo Records in Cambridge USA, Sarvilevyt in Lahti, Finland and of course Ron’s own shop in Lowell. You kind of get the idea without playing the damned thing of course which is all part of the beauty and the madness of it.

Its this over the top absurdity that makes this such a stand out release. Tote bag in RRR camo colours, deluxe sleeves .. no expense spared on something that for the most part will be played just the once and in some instances not at all. I can see people buying this just for the bag. Ron is also so unassuming as to put the photos of his RRR shop on the insert and in true ‘lets totally confuse em’ RRR fashion puts the photo of Second Layer on the cover, a shop that still carries the signage of its previous owner Sound 323.

Contact: http://www.rrrecords.com/

The New Blockaders - First Live Performance

2011-07-16T14:19:00.000+01:00

The New Blockaders - First Live Performance
Hypnagogia CD. GIA06.
300 Copies.

First Live Performance was given the vinyl treatment by Vinyl On Demand a few years back and as with pretty much everything else with TNB’s name on it disappeared in an instant. I’ve just been looking at my own copy. I gently eased it from its bubble wrapped chrysalis and stroked its textured sleeve, my spine going all tingly and the hairs on the back of my neck stiffening. TNB have that effect on some people.

First Live Performance was June the 8th 1983 remember. A time when punk had stubbed out its last meaningful fag and Trevor Horn jacked in singing with Yes to form ZTT. Its worth bearing this in mind whilst listening back to these two eighteen minute tracks.

As ever its the sheer ferocity of the delivery that knocks you sideways. The junk noise chaos that emerges from your speakers is a staccato one, each painful spike in volume coming at you like heavyweight jabs whilst that undercurrent of discomforting shuffle and scrape forces you to rethink during its course. How did they do that? Why does it still sound so fresh and vital? This is head clearing junk noise and electronic squealing par excellence that even after all these years never fails to fill you with astonishment and admiration.

The sound quality and production on these two 18 minute outings far surpasses the live material that turned up on disc 4 of Gesamtnichtwerk it is also a far more forceful outing than Live at Hinoumea and Live at Anti-Fest.

Much has been written and said about TNB’s early work, some of it even by me, the only thing left to be said is this; if you don’t have these two live events, in whatever format you choose, you aren’t just missing a few pieces of the jigsaw you might as well not have it. Essential in every way.

Godspunk Volume 10

2011-07-10T15:40:00.001+01:00

Godspunk Volume Ten.
Pumf CD. Pumf 686.
£5

Its not often that I find myself writing about celebrities but after what happened last week I find myself in the curious position of emulating the work of a tabloid journalist. Let me say from the outset that I have no interest in celebrities and their comings and goings and who shagged who and which footballer’s spent this on that and which MP’s been caught with his trousers down, I really couldn’t care less about any of it, but there we were on the last night of our holiday on Paxos sat at the table of an al fresco restaurant, the Ionian sea lapping the harbor wall, me swirling the last of my wine and puffing on a post prandial gasper, when I heard American voices.

But first some information; We rented a villa in Loggos. Loggos is a small port on the tiny island of Paxos which is just off the island of Corfu in Greece. Paxos has the benefit of having its own built in lower order filters. First you have to get to Paxos by hydrofoil or ferry, then onward by car or bus or foot, the roads are tiny, steep and winding, the harbor is shallow and unsuitable for larger boats. There are no big screen sports bars, no all night nightclubs, two for one drinks offers, gangs of drunks in states of disarray chucking each other in the sea at four in the morning. In other words its very quiet and thats why we like it.

So there we are at around 10pm on Thursday evening at the back of a slowly emptying restaurant and these Americans come in. There’s three blokes who all look like they know which end of a surfboard is which and a blonde with big tits in what Mrs Fisher likes to call a ‘fairy dress’ - meaning all bits of tassels with lacing up the back - and after a small kerfuffle in which they moved from the harbor side of the restaurant they came and sat at the next table to us. The blonde was sat in profile about six feet away and I was damned if I didn’t know who she was. The waitress emerged and became excited, then she disappeared again only to re-emerge within seconds with her daughter by her side to ask the blonde if she could have her autograph. I sat swirling my wine and thought, well she must be someone famous and put the old grey matter to task. Mrs Fisher burbled in one ear about next years trip and alternative destinations whilst ‘awesomes’ and ‘dudes’ in west coast accents appeared in the other. And then a lightbulb came on and it struck me. I was sat but six feet away from Pamela Anderson.

My first instinct was to keep this information from Mrs Fisher. Mrs Fisher was sat with a view of nothing but the back of her head and has terrible eyesight to boot, even with her glasses on. I reasoned that if I did tell her she would blurt out an inappropriate ‘WHO?’ in a voice loud enough to turn the heads of diners across the bay. My next thought was that I had my camera in my bag and that a photo of me and Pamela would not only make the blokes at work incredibly jealous [most of the blokes at work are of the kind who think that anything with blonde hair and big tits is proof of Gods existence] but that I would have something to email and a memento of the evening. And then the cogs went round once more. I became involved in my own reasoning batting ideas hither and thither and whilst Mrs Fisher bandied about ideas about next years return trip I thought my thoughts. At heart I couldn’t care less about celebrities and film stars but here I was sat six feet away from one of the most famous blondes of recent years. This would probably be the only opportunity in my entire life to get photographed with a famous blonde with big tits but still I dallied and thought on. Then I thought, why bother them? I wouldn’t like to be harassed during my meal. But then maybe she likes the recognition? Maybe she wallows in the adulation of the hoi poloi and has no qualms about strangers putting their arms round her for nothing more harmless than a split second snapped photo. But then what if she hates being photographed in such a way? Especially by English tourists with half a litre of white wine in them stinking of fags and Trumpers cologne. And on it went.
In the end I decided it was in the best interest of everyone to leave them be. Even if she was the kind of person that feted public affection I wasn’t going to pester her only to find out when it was too late that one of the surf dudes was really an employed body guard who has a black belt in everything and takes exception to Miss Anderson’s evening meals being interrupted. It could have all got very embarrassing. They ate their food, drank their beers and then they left and while they walked away all I could think to myself was ‘you used to suck on Tommy Lee’s todger’. Because I knew more about her than she knew about me. I had anonymity on my side and Pamela had none [a Google search for Pam returns 53 million returns] and ultimately I respected her privacy and even felt a little sad for her. She cant go anywhere without being recognised and I can go where the hell I want. Even now as I write about this I find myself feeling slightly uncomfortable in a sleazy journalist kind of way. After they’d left I told Mrs Fisher who’d been sat at the next table and she squinted at the couple now locked arm in romantic arm walking slowly back to their digs along the harbor road. ‘Fucking slapper’ she said folding her napkin ‘are we off or what?’

All this apropos of nothing. I’ve been listening to the new Godspunk comp as I typed those words and I get the same kind of feeling as when I’ve reviewed the previous nine - lots of throw-away guff and the odd diamond.
UNIT with their godawful xylophone agit punk bore me to tears now. I wish they’d go away. Even Howl In The Typewriter's form seems to have dipped - no ballsy pop anthems of silliness, just silliness. There are highlights amongst the 26 tracks, thirteen bands and 80 minutes but you’ve got to dig to find them. Foxhole UK with their guitar and drum raw punkyness lifted my spirits as did the fact that someone left UNIT to go on their own and dish up the best track of the lot - The Red Guards offer the comp what seems to be a straight lift of a Chinese approved pop tribute to Mao Tse-Tung. A bizarre thing in its own right and as anyone who has had to endure Chinese pop music will confirm, its forced enthusiasm and straight forward delivery is both irritating and catchy at the same time.

After that ... not much really and I did listen to it all including the hidden track at the end. Honest.

Hello Pam, where ever you are.

Contact: www.pumf.net.

Lea Cummings

2011-06-23T21:31:00.001+01:00

Revelations From The New Silence - Volume III - The New Astrology
Kovorox Sound. Kovo-062. CDR

Revelations From The New Silence - Volume IV - Human Potential Movement
Kovorox Sound. Kovo-063. CDR

There seems to be a big push from the electronics giants to get us to buy all manner of new fangled TV technology. It would appear that if by now you haven’t got a 60” plasma 3D HD Sky Box TV Plus wall mounted monster of plastic and glass then you are indeed living in the dark ages. Black and white tellies? 12” portables with bent wire coat hangers for ariels? Not quite but here at IFHQ we still make do with a hand-me-down CRT that comes complete with a busted vertical hold - all is well until you watch a rugby match and then the posts look like bananas. You get used to it though. It may be big, it may be bulky but when we sit down on a night to watch Breaking Bad it still all makes sense. Which had me wondering if these advances in visual technology are worth bothering with? Eraserhead is a classic film that no amount of TV wizardry could improve and I’m not hearing a big clamor for Laurel and Hardy to get the 3DHD treatment.

I would personally prefer advances in listening technology but there doesn’t seem to be a market for it. Most people seem to be quite happy listening to their music through anything they can get their hands on, a pair of tiny plastic ear plugs, the speaker on their mobile phones and for those modern sophisticates the the ipod docking station, a sterile piece of audio equipment that has pushed the barriers of sound quality about as far as the Mongolians have modern dance.

I’m no hi-fi buff but I know a decent sound when I hear one. I still use the main bits of a hi-fi system I bought nigh on thirty years ago. Its ugly and bulky but it still kills mp3 players dead in their tracks. When I crank it up all the tiles on the roof rattle and neighbours three doors down have to turn up their TV’s to compensate. Its the reason why I like to listen to most, if not all my review material on it at least once just to get that full effect.

Which brings me to Lea Cummings latest round of drone works which for some inexplicable reason sound better on a pair of PC speakers than that 30 year old hi-fi. I generally familiarise myself with review material on the PC before transferring it on to what Gary Simmons liked to call his ‘big one’, but for some strange reason the transition was a poor one. I’m fairly certain that when I listened to the first two volumes of this series my ears were in rapture but through which mode of digital transport I’m at a loss to remember. Either way, digitized through PC speakers equals good. Hi-fi bad. Shows what I know.

With 11 tracks spanning these two releases Lea Cummings takes a further break from his Kylie Minoise noise shenanigans to hold down synth chords in varying patterns thus building up drone works that wouldn’t seem out of place on Polish film soundtracks. Its all very filmic indeed and having just scoured my notes for the first two volumes I can’t help but concur with myself. Elixir Vitae sounds like a monged out Charlamange Palastine let loose on the organ at Cologne Cathedral, others rumble along like Arctic tumbleweed all cold and desolate. Shining Dream of Possible Reflection is the mirror image of a William Basinski shortwave piece - the resemblance is uncanny. But its the filmic quality that lingers. My only small gripe is that I feel drone needs more space to work in and with these eleven tracks coming in at under ten minutes a piece they’re just getting going when the their times up. JLIAT created drone work similar to these and wasn’t afraid to let them run to over an hour in some instances. Maybe Mr. Cummings needs to spread his wings somewhat.

Contact: www.kovoroxsound.com

You Are Playing Like A Fuckin' Pub Band part II

2011-06-12T13:02:00.001+01:00

You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band [2]
The 7.17 From West Wittering Is Late Again
Cassette. 30 copies each.

Featuring:

Dylan Nyoukis/Ryan Jewell

Onomatopoeia/Sudden Infant

Dieter Müh/Balinese Beast

Cheapmachines/Concrete Violin

BBBlood/Emil Beaulieau

To buy or not to buy? That is the question. Whether it be nobler to make holes in ones bank account on the off chance that what you’re buying will be listened to more than once or take solace in the fact that it might be worth a few bob on eBay in ten years time. I have to admit that I haven’t been spending much moolah on recorded medium of late. In fact I don’t think I’ve bought anything from my preferred retail outlets this year and to them I give my condolences. I don’t even download stuff anymore. I just don’t have the time to soak it up. It’s one of the reasons I jacked in the printed zine game. Lots of people want to see their name in print and will happily bung you their latest wares for review but after a while you end up floating in a sea of procrastination, anxiety and self doubt. That ever growing pile of review material becomes a monkey on your back. You end up not listening to things and when you do, not listening to them properly. One spin and a few words and its off to the next. After a few years of this you wonder where the joy went in actually receiving review material. That big fat package from America is now a lead brick that means you don’t get to go out of the house on Saturday [your only free day] and instead of soaking up some summer sunshine you find yourself in a small dark room trying to think up interesting things to say about the umpteenth noise release to cross your path this month. Since the demise of the paper wing of this venture review material has trickled to a crawl and for that I am honestly grateful. It now means I can concentrate more on what I do get. The fact that I don’t buy that much material anymore means I can go back to what I used to buy and this time really listen to it. Because when you start treating music as background or as something to fill a space I feel it loses its potency. It becomes just another commodity. And I like to take my music seriously. This is an ongoing rant by the way, you’ll find different versions of the same whinge in previous posts.

If I’d have bought these upon release they would have cost me a tidy sum and I did consider coughing up the necessary nuggets but that anti-spendthrift jag digs deep so I decided to let these pass. After a previous post in which I commented that it was quite possible that an artists greatest work could lie in obscurity on a ridiculously limited release I did wonder if any of this lot had submitted a hidden magnum opus just for the sheer perversity of it. I think Onomatopoeia did.

For those that missed the boat there were six of these cassettes, all released for one day as part of a movement to get people back in to record shops. You could only get them in the shop on the day but by the miracle of reviewland the rest of the set arrived marked as ‘black copies - private collection’. I couldn’t have been happier. After careful perusal I don’t think that there’s a hidden classic but it did shine some light on to that enigmatic English project Onomatopoeia who after years in the wilderness has emerged with something quite startling. The rest veer from ‘I want to hear that again pretty soon’; to ‘I never want to hear that again’. One side has a UK based artist the other from shores afar. I’ve reviewed the Smell & Quim/Family Battle Snake so heres the rest:

Dylan Nyoukis/Ryan Jewell:

Nyoukis has been fraternizing with vocal deformity for a while now. I’ve seen him share stage with the likes of vocal juggler Phil Mintion and its a joy to behold. His shrine to Jaap Blonk fills an entire room. Here he sounds like someone with Down Syndrome straining to pass a hard turd. Its pretty funny. I hope the facial gurns matched what I heard. This is a positive review by the way.

Ryan Jewell attempts something similar to what Nurse With Wound did with ‘Rockett Morton’ in that a phrase of dialogue loops back on itself becoming slightly phased along the way. Oh hum.

Onomatopoeia/Sudden Infant:

Has Onomatopoeia been hankering for an IRCAM place? Has he been brushing up on his 50’s Stockhausen? We last found Ono Man resurfaced on another West Wittering release, a vinyl stretch of an old cassette where odd instruments became something else entirely. Ono Man is now all sonic swoops, analogue burbles, dreamy star dreaming, all Daphne Oram, all Astro, all spacey lost in space, floating in space, watch this space. We need to hear more of this new Onomatopoeia as it all sounds very promising.

Sudden Infant go all Jacopetti soundtrack on us but its still unmistakably a Sudden Infant track. A weird knocking of drums that could be a mock African tribal beat with car horn, scratchy records and a nice lady loosely tied to a tree in a leopard skin bikini going ooh ahh oh no you brute etc… mock live applause for and aft.

Dieter Müh/Balinese Beast

No mistaking the Mighty Müh. Ominous Industrial loop churns, unsettling atmospheres, malevolence hanging in a thick oppressive atmosphere. Even the audio limits imposed on cassette dubs cant hide the fact that the production levels here are of a distinctly high quality. Another one to add to the stupidly hard to get hold of DM catalogue.

Balinese Beast are new to me. A Greek. No doubt a friend at arms with Family Battle Snake Bill Kouligas. What’s it sound like? Sounds like Jap noise screams, box abuse, jack socket destruction, silence, Evil Moisture, sonar beeps, gabba vocals, feedback, synth farts …

Cheapmachines/Concrete Violin

Cheapmachines by name cheap machines by nature. Phillip Julians project garners much praise and deservedly so. Here he comes over all TNB junk scrape but the Industrial whirr is never far away. A series of short excursions [on a series of tapes that aren’t very long to begin with] that showcase Mr. Julian’s penchant for experimental noise of a machine based nature.

Not heard much by Concrete Violin before. In fact this could be a first for me which seems odd since this American solo project has been around since 1999. Cue French dialogue and then lots of straight on noise coupled rather oddly to bird song, aircraft taking off and voices. I can’t say it set my heart a-skip but it was alright in a kind of luddite noise fashion.

BBBlood/Emil Beaulieau

I’m pretty sure BBBlood used to be Baron Bum Blood which links well with Emil Beaulieau’s alter ego Ron Lessard and his RRRecord label/shop/empire. Though what the two R’s in RRRecord stand for I don’t now … maybe Right Royal? Ripped Rectum? Regal Reginald? Robotic Ruminant? Real Round? Maybe Ron had a stammer? Both do noise of course. BBBlood chugging along quite nicely thank you with some found sounds and junk scrape coupled to a droney thing. Emil Beaulieau does cardigan noise. Would we have it any other way?

Like I said some of these tapes are on the short side, maybe C15’s or even C10’s. A gathering of their work on CD release wouldn’t go amiss somewhere down the line either.

Merzbow - Kamadhenu

2011-06-01T20:48:00.001+01:00

Merzbow - Kamadhenu
Hypnogogia CD. GO01.
350 Copies.

To Dusseldorf to sup ale and meander along the Rhine footpath smoking cigars all the while wondering how vegetarians manage to feed themselves in a country where meat comes on every plate. I wonder where Masami eats when he tours here? What does the biggest veggie name in noise eat when he’s in sausage land? Does he bring his own pack up? And which are his better years? The analogue or the digital? I dare say that digital era Merzbow has its fans but those analogue releases seem to have more going for them. There’s more happening, more intent, more balls, more shock, more variety, more pain, even the covers were better. Now all we get are pictures of animals and noise made using Merzware. I imagine a Masami built software program that lets you create a noise work in real time - no editing, no mixing, no need to listen to it again - there’ll even be a track name generator. All of it designed to increase the productivity and decrease the involvement.

I can remember when I really used to like Merzbow. Some of his early works are amongst my favourite listens - Batztoutai With Material Gadgets, the split 7” with Lasse Marhaug. Green Wheels is a classic even if the CD half of my release is buggered due to a fault a the pressing plant meaning it hits a recurring loop about twenty minutes in … actually, maybe thats an improvement. I even get a kick out of listening to the split with Ladybird - Japanese karaoke squawk in one channel and Merzbow squiggling away in the other. Where did all the fun go Masami? When I got to see Merzbow play for the first time he was already into the laptop as musical instrument and with the introduction of the laptop the beginning of the end of my interest in his work. At the 2007 No Fun Masami picked up a junk guitar and thrashed along with his laptops but for me it was too little too late. The laptops, the incessant release program, the way that labels line up to put out every last second of his Merzfarting leaves me feeling totally ambivalent towards Masami and his Merzbow outings. And whilst I’m here whats all this Merzbient ambient thing going on? Yours through Amazon.co.uk for just £102.49p.

When I was in paper mode Blossoming Noise used to send me Merzbow box sets to review and I gave them a fair crack of the whip. Whilst listening to them I tried to pick out the samples of chicken noises and found myself being drawn in and enjoying his work once more. The sounds were distinct, identifiable, most tracks coming with that great Merzbow underchug of throb with all manner of swirl and chaos laid on top. But I didn’t find myself going back to them. I eventually got tired of seeing them doing nothing and flogged the lot on eBay [I don’t do much eBaying but I reckon I’ve sold more Merzbow product on there than any other artist - there seems to be no lack of people willing to buy it either].

Kamadhenu is my first chance to catch up on what Merzbow since those Blossoming Noise days and I can’t say I’m all that enthused. My first mistake was to play this through the PC. For Merzbow you need plenty of wallop [which makes the Merzbow iTunes page even more laughable] so to the stereo and volume please maestro. And after several spins only mild interest was detected. For this is noise by rote and only briefly engaging. In fact you’d be hard pushed to call it noise, for the most part it sounds like a 70’s sci-fi movie in which the the main computer room goes tits up, imagine lots of tape spools going jerkily backwards and forwards until smoke comes out of them. Hey ho.

I sincerely hope that there are ‘interesting’ Merzbow records out there but I have neither pockets deep enough nor time enough to discover them for myself.

Cock E.S.P.

2011-05-24T20:54:00.000+01:00

Cock E.S.P. - Historia De La Musica Cock [A Tribute to Experimental Music 1910-2010]

Split release between:
Little Mafia [LM078],
Breathmint [BM330]
SunShip [Sun56].
CD.

When coming across a Cock E.S.P. release the thought often occurs to me that they’ve never played the UK. They’ve played a few European dates but for some reason the UK has never experienced their absurd, abrupt, chaotic and some may say even pointless live shows. Continual sole member Emil Hagstrom is a big man who likes to put a comedy chicken head over his own and along with his fellow band members [a varying quota depending on who isn’t injured, in jail or in hiding] destroy whatever equipment they’ve got by hurling it at each other, the walls, the floor and the audience. Writhing about in pools of beer, blood, bar stools and broken glass they produce what can only be described as noise in its purest sense. Noise as a racket, an unstructured, ramshackle blast of spew from which only the fit and the lucky emerge unscathed. Its in the live arena where they really blossom but only very briefly. Most of their shows are done and dusted in under five minutes this being the amount of time it takes them to make all their gear inoperable or lame someone so badly that urgent hospital treatment overrides any quest for noise nirvana. For some they’re still the best noise band around; loud, stupid, fun and never taking themselves too seriously. Their releases [both audio and visual] add much needed dashes of absurdist humour to a genre not entirely known for its ability to raise a smile and their ‘songs’ like their live shows are usually very, very short. The Cock E.S.P./Evil Moisture 5” single contained 381 tracks, this on a format that holds about five minutes of music. Each ‘song’ was but a series of clicks, blasts, grunts and screams [at least thats how I remember it]. I doubt that there’s a Topographic Oceans of noise lurking in Hagstrom’s mind.

Pity the poor bugger then who has the unenviable task of tapping in to Discogs all the details to the 99 tracks that constitute ‘Historia de la Musica Cock’. Billing itself grandly as ‘A Tribute to Experimental Music 1910-2010’ these 99 tracks are a series of short bursts of noise related fragmentation. Its like someone threw a hand grenade down the hole at Hospital Records and captured the sound of the debris as it landed in the street. The longest track is 44 seconds in duration, the shortest about eight seconds, the CD is further broken up into ten separate sections each being given a title [We Are the Duchampions, 4.33 Inches, Anal Fausting, Immature Ejaculation …] but here’s the deal, each track contains Hagstrom working with other people. Most tracks were recorded live between 2009 and 2010 and judging by the amount of people he worked with he’s been a very busy chap. Eighty two collaborators I made it, a disparate bunch including Blowfly, Andy Ortmann, Leslie Keffer, Ceramic Hobs, Rat Bastard, Suffering Bastard [maybe a relation?] and lots and lots of other people I’ve never even heard of including Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck [a band who can surely only dream of seeing their name in lights].

But what of the release itself. 99 tracks in 38 minutes means that the sounds come at you in a relentless switch back of noise related spazz. Track one is of course a full on blast of ear wax dislodgement there to let you know that Hagstrom really can do full on noise bit [this time with fellow Cock Matt Bacon] from there on in its like having eighty odd artists all demand your attention in a short space of time. At the time of typing track 60 is playing; ‘Betley Welcomes a Very Good Stinky Arse Fuck’ a Joincey Bastard [?] related tune which not only tips a hat to Phil Todd but Smell & Quim at the same time. Track 62 is Froggy Mountain Breakdown a 47 second Costes madrigal with distorted guitar solo and rapid string pluck. Its exhausting trying to cross reference each track so its best just to let them run over you and in this respect it manages to stand on its own 99 legs. Track 83 is 33 seconds of shamans lament, 84 is 24 seconds of some seriously high end sax squealing, track 85 comes in two parts, one part Astral Social Club shimmer the other some thrash. Track 36 is titled ‘Medley’ and manages to incorporate 14 blasts of noise within its 25 second time frame. Its around this time I began to appreciate the sheer amount of work that must have gone into this release, each track has a name, each track can be cross referenced so you can see who was working with Hagstrom, the cover art is great, the packaging shiny and fetching, you could even frame em. I kind of um … loved it in a daft sod way. Its not everyday you get 99 track noise CD’s through the post. And did Hagstrom call it a draw at 99 track because 99 was the maximum number of tracks a CD player could handle? I’d be interested to know.

Perhaps then, the ultimate noise album to give to your ADHD affected cousin? Lots of cocks, lots of fnarr fnarr track titles and if you look really, really closely theres even a knob on the back cover. Where would we be without knobs in noise.

Contact: www.cockesp.com

Hyster

2011-05-22T13:08:00.000+01:00

Various Artists - Second One
Hyster. Hyster09.
C60 Cassette.
100 copies. €2

I must admit to having rather a soft spot for Hyster. A tape only label for whom the word prolific has no meaning. Eleven releases in ten years. All of them on recycled cassettes and all of them damned cheap. Some people may assume Hyster to be a lazy bastard mustering the energy but once a year to spit out whatever it is lurking in the cassette deck whilst others may think ‘oh how quaint’. I fall into the latter category. Even the website is bog standard, a one page homage to basic HTML with no picshas or nuffink. One of their first releases was a live Dieter Müh affair which was damned near one of the bands best outings - I quite like the perversity in finding what could be a bands best work lying in obscurity on a recycled cassette. Besides Dieter Müh and the mighty Culver much of what appears on Hyster is a mystery to me - all of it [or at least all of what I’ve heard] seems to carry with it an air of loss and solitude, an atmosphere aided an abetted of course by the decaying nature of recycled cassettes they appear on. The last Hyster tape I reviewed was the 2009 Re-Clip affair, a slightly messy release it must be said with analogue beats escaping like loose GMT time signals, all of it dubbed onto a particularly dodgy tape - it comes with the territory I suppose.
The prosaically titled ‘Second One’ though is a real winner, a far more upbeat affair for the most part with some fine head bobbing moments and a classic track from the ever groovy Crank Sturgeon. Five tracks on one side and a side long outing on the other. Aiko kick things off with some sample madness and what sounds like photocopier noises layered on to amp buzz and a gently strummed acoustic guitar refrain. Cleavage pump out eight minutes of murky heavy duty arms out straight, jab em into the keys Emeralds like synth throb. Crank Sturgeon provides some garbled Schimpfluch lunacy in which un-synced hand claps and Dada verbals mix with someone trying to talk whilst drinking and having a piss at the same time. Re-Clip meanwhile appear to have morphed into some kind of Mego tinged slow analogue beat machine. Not bad in a swaying, meditative Midwich kind of way. Which on side one leaves Hiss Nausea and almost four minutes worth of distorted to buggery gabba beats.
This comp would have been just about perfect had it not been for the last ten minutes of the Varropas track ‘Moln pa Drift 1978’. A gorgeously fragile side of crumbling drone in which a small and recurring wobbly hit string motif is pulled through a landscape of wheezing machines and outer space burbles. Even the deterioration in tape quality at the onset adds to the all round ambience, as it continues upon its wavering path it grows in volume until the tape runs out. If it had carried on with its miserable start to the very end I’d have been happier but you can’t have everything can you?

Contact:

plaa [a] pcuf.fi
http://www.pcuf.fi/~plaa/hyster.html

You Are Playin' Like A Fuckin' Pub Band

2011-05-15T14:44:00.000+01:00

Smell & Quim / Family Battle Snake
You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band.
Split Tape
The 7.17 From West Wittering Is Late Again.
30 Copies.

On a recent sojourn up the North East coast I found myself in Newcastle. Its one of those places that feels to me like it didn’t really like having its face scrubbed. There’s still plenty of guano covering the supports on the Tyne Bridge but all those tapas bars and bits of fancy new architecture look like they’ve been stuck there deliberately in a bid to make the place feel a bit more European, a bit more cosmopolitan, a bit more Biarritz than brown ale. There’s still a few decent pubs left [and no visit to Newcastle is complete with a jar or several in the Crown Posada] but I always leave feeling like I’m glad I don’t have to live there. Not that where I live now is anything special of course. The recent spate of stabbings [including the death of a local drug dealer] does give Cleck a certain piquancy I’ll admit, but I’m still quite happy here thank you very much.
I mention the North East as on my way back I passed through Middlesborough. A place made out of six inch piping, pumps and gantries. Its another place I wouldn’t choose to live but Michael Gillham seems to find himself there. After listening to the Smell & Quim track on You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band, I can only conclude that theres not much else to do there except smash things up. I’ve seen Gillham ply his wares with Smell & Quim and with his own band Snotnosed and Its an impressive sight; a tall scary bloke with a shaved head and piercing eyes wrecking pubs and venues with hammers and whatever else comes to hand. ‘More Tea Vicar?’ is a twin assault with Srdenovic laying on the industrial sludge beats and Gillham destroying all things metal and domestic. The end result sounds like a free for all with a sledgehammer in a pan lid factory. Every assured blow seems to be synced with a madman's screams while a whistling, screeching tornado of torment prevails throughout until the whole thing eventually sinks under its own weight. Impressive stuff.
There’s six of these split tapes in all with the other five featuring artists working in similar areas. Released to coincide with Record Shop Day 2011 they’re part of a wider scheme to get people to ditch their clicking on things mp3/buy it in Tesco’s habits and get them back in to record shops. I’m all for this of course but being an idle sod I rarely venture into vinyl emporiums, not that I’m tripping up over them in West Yorkshire. They were made available for one day only and you had to physically go in to the shop yourself to buy them but I got my copy sneaked out the back door. Judging by the small amounts that have found their way online I can only assume that it must have been a bit of a slack day on visit your local record shop day. But I digress.
On the flip we find Family Battle Snake in contemplative drone form. Battling Bill has produced some fine work of late. Most of what I’ve heard has been made using analogue technology; synths, reel to reel etc but what this has been made with I can barely make out. A one finger held down key drone folds out into some exploratory night sky soundtracking. Radar bleeps, shortwave blips and an oscillating waveform build up to a small tumescence of noise at the climax of which some kind of electronic violin like squawk rears its head. Both these tracks run to about ten to fifteen minutes though I didn’t time em boss. Tapes y’see. A cracking format and nice to see the The 7.17 From West Wittering surface again.

Agdam

2011-05-05T20:31:00.000+01:00

Agdam / Various Artists

Agdam Records. CD

Contact: [chortle, smirk, titter]

Agdam Records

PO Box 254

Agdam

Azerbaijan

It seems appropriate that a selection of obscure recordings charting the ‘English Underground Circa 1990 And Slightly Before’ should appear on an Azerbaijani label. Try Googling the Azeri city Agdam though and you’re greeted with images of a desolate place - its not exactly somewhere you’d want to go to on your jollies. Maybe they could twin it with Mirfield and send Neil Campbell out on a diplomatic mission to create greater understanding between differing cultures. You give us some Azeri oud players going at it hammer and tongs for an hour and we’ll give you Neil Campbell, two cymbals and a bottle of whiskey. Just a thought. Or maybe this is all some elaborate joke? Has anybody been foolhardy enough to send anything to Agdam? I bet they haven’t got anything back. Research reveals that Agdam is actually a ghost town its inhabitants having fled the Armenian army, looters doing the rest. Oh ... and Agdam is Turkish for ‘white house’. Draw your own conclusions. I sense much mischief but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The archives of ‘The English Underground Circa 1990 And Slightly Before’ [as we now have to legally call it] are ever so slowly beginning to see the light of day and not before time. They’ve been appearing in fits and starts but of late seem to be gathering pace. Agdam appears only weeks after the Walden brothers Strolling Ones lunacy hit these ears and with the press release mentioning several unreleased LP’s out there it would be logical to assume that plenty more of these kind of documents stand stage left awaiting their big day.

But its to the A Band that we are drawn. They appear to be emerging from their ever so slightly eccentric shell and why not. Its taken them a while but the clamor to hear more of their freewheeling, spontaneous music seems genuinely warm. They actually get invited to things these days. Maybe they really were ahead of their time? The A Band embrace non-conformity, improvisation and fun by having an ever changing line up and creating a different name for each performance. The A Band are the A Band but only in name and never on paper. Each live performance has to begin with the letter ‘A’ too and that's what the band’s called on the day. Too damned clever for me.

There’s dozens of A Band members scattered about the UK most of them crawling from the wreckage of the 80’s. Some of them, I dare say, supped from a fountain that spurted industrial culture, Krautrock, mad jazz, Fluxus, Japanese noise, Folk music and English comedy. Its no surprise to anyone at all that the results are akin to an explosion in a saucepan lid factory, a wild and uncontrollable ride through improv land unclassifiable to all but the likes of Dave Keenan and earnest scribes alike [as an aside this release won the coveted Dave Keenan’s Volcanic Tongue ‘Tip of the Tongue’ award. I’m a fan of alliteration though and wish Keenan would make use of the ‘K’ in his surname and give his reviews ‘K’ ratings like they do in Kerrang, which would make this a Keenan Klassik KKKKK].

Agdam begins in 1986 and ends in 2007 with a reformed [after 15 years hiatus] A Band performance and some of it is very good and some it is utter nonsense and a bit of it drove me to the drinks cabinet. But its the utter nonsense and its ability to annoy that I actually came to find the most appealing. The ability to annoy is all part of the madness of course. ‘Well Crucial’s track recorded in 1986 is a rolling snatch of two second 80’s synth pop sample intermingled with gormless DJ chatter and words spoken by Martin Walden. Its so annoying I actually began to like it for its ability to annoy. The other Walden, Stewart, begins proceedings with ‘Mmmmmorning’ a 1990 piece of Dada Casio plod in which Walden bemoans the fact that he cant stay in bed all day, all delivered in a convincing, yawning gremlin fashion. ‘Walden/Campbell/Plaistow’ don various hippy gear to run through an acoustic guitar tinged Ash Ra Tempel fling called Moron [‘its easy to have fun when you’re a moron’] with all three of them taking at once [about each other I think] over a gentle six string melody whilst a moan wanders around in the background, this in 1990. ‘Sepopeplel’ is Stewart Greenwood and Minty Cracknell captured at the 13th Note in Glasgow 1998 - five minutes of accordion wheezes and tunnel noise. Gay Animal Women dish out 23 minutes [oh naturlich] of PTV inspired cod reggae as recorded live in Nottingham in 1989. Cut from a longer hour long show its a genuflecting reverbed to hell pean to all things Genesis P Orridge and not something I found myself warming to despite numerous attempts. Filling in but two meagre minutes of space comes Neil Campbell with a snatch of live celestial shimmer drone from 2004, a period when his involvement with Vibracathedral Orchestra was coming to an end and his solo work with Astral Social Club was just beginning. All too brief.

The whole disc sits on its best track. A 30 odd minute A Band romp going under the title of Afterclap as captured live in Warrington in 2007. Twelve individuals took part including a certain 14 year old Megan Fletcher-Cutts who played in the last previous A Band performance as a six month old baby. Joincey also took part, a man whose own meanderings not only sound very similar to what Stewart Walden was doing in 1990 but who should be included on merit alone seeing as how he’s an equally peripatetic form who has several solo modes coupled to several band projects constantly on the go. A Band stalwarts Sticky Foster, Neil Campbell and Stewart Keith [nee Stewart Walden] join forces with Dylan Bates, Dave Higginson and Jon Larder amongst others for a rawk-fest that begins with the introduction of band members and ends with a twanging jaws harp. In between it somehow manages to sound like a dodgy metal band with a trumpet player instead of a singer deliberately doing it all wrong before collapsing in on itself in utter chaos and hilarity. I can hear swannee whistles [or electronic equivalents thereof], parps and squeaks, crap guitar solos, unidentified horns, vocal noise, strange strings being plucked, scraping. The first half is pinned to a barreling heavy footed thud stomp before it disintegrates into true ‘we don’t know what we’re doing but we’re enjoying it’ A Band style um ..mess.

Afterclap is a rollicking beast of musical insanity and for sheer freedom of musical expression its up there with the best. I loved it. More archive digging please.

Spon

2011-04-16T15:28:00.000+01:00

SPON
Dumb Cunt Comcs
A4 Zine. No idea of cost of trade status.

Contact:

Dr. Adolf Steg
1 St Hildas Road
St Annes-on-Sea
Lancashire
FY8 2PT

Two issues of SPON appear. One contains nothing but Dr Steg’s paintings, collages and montages some of which I’ve reproduced here. The reason I’m getting excited though is issue 3 which has an interview with the Ceramic Hobs main-man Simon Harris. For anyone even half interested in the Hobs this is essential. Harris’s deep understanding of serial killers, conspiracy theories, Phillip K Dick and Power Electronics are all brought to the fore whilst for long time Hobs fans there’s the chance to discover the hidden meanings in a number of Hobs releases and why Harris’s relationship with long time Hobs collaborator and guitarist Stan Batcow soured. The paintings aren’t half bad either. These publications may be slight - eight pages at most - but that doesn’t make them unimportant. Seek out.

TDOTEP

2011-04-15T19:27:00.000+01:00

TDOTEP - Force Feeding The People Locusts
Studio 5 Recordings. S5R 003. CDR. 50 Copies.

I don’t know why I feel this way but whenever I listen to a TDOTEP release [an acronym for The Death Of The Enlightenment Project] I feel like a kindly uncle passing on pointers in life to a confused teenage cousin whose just experienced his first ejaculation. Maybe thats because TDOTEP releases usually arrive with a note saying ‘heres my latest piece of crap’ or somesuch and then you listen to them and whaddyaknow? theres a not half bad noise album lurking in there. Despite the self deprecation the last TDOTEP release that came this way [Temple of Wounds - Pumf] went some way to convincing me that TDOTEP was heading in the right direction but after feeding myself with the locusts I’m not sure if that gravity defying trajectory has gone all limp and is now terra firma bound with just a sudden bump waiting for it.

Maybe I’m being too harsh?

Things for:

There’s some good noise on here: First track [Underlying Resentment] kicks in with some Emil Beaulieau style looped lock groove treatments. Third track [Arcade Fire Helicopter Tragedy] kicks off in fine Incaps territory.

There’s no Charles Manson sample.

Kate Fear from the Ceramic Hobs appears on track two [though what she’s up to I couldn’t tell you].

Things against:

Comes in a half size DVD cases with art work that drops out and is ill fitting. This may sound pedantic but if you’re going to go handmade then make it handmade not some halfway house between handmade and made to look like it was bought in a shop made.

Segueing all the tracks into one long track and then printing the running times in chronological order.

Track three doesn’t end in Incaps territory, it ends with some horrible industrial death scream beats.

Track five [Of Shit Subliminal Message] sounds like a Slogun outing crossed with the Predator soundtrack.

Track nine [The Priestly Unit] Like Non gone wrong rather than the real Emil.

Yes, maybe I am being too harsh but these things need to be said. TDOTEP has greatness within itself its just that somewhere along the line its all going wrong.

Contact:

www.TDOTEP.blogspot.com

TDOTEP [at] gmail.com

www.studio5recordings.blogspot.com

Schuster

2011-04-10T11:16:00.000+01:00

Schuster - Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon
Adeptsound CDR. ADSCDR03.

Available now for pre-order. Release date: 18th of April 2011

[Also available via Licht Und Stahl in an extremely limited run of 20 cassettes.]

Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon is one of those highly polished Industrial Ambient outings where upon playback you start to count off the Industrial samples on your fingertips only to quickly realise that you’d need the hands of a dozen TG acolytes to finnish the job off properly. Within eleven tracks and almost an hours worth of material I was indeed transported and whilst sat crossed legged in the middle of my inverted star [thigh bone in one hand, fly whisk in the other] I was submerged into that familiar world of murderers monologues, house flies trapped in bottles, Paul McCarthy groans, bowl rings, vocals treated to sound like Darth Vader crossed with a Tibetan shaman, water bubbling underground, vinyl surface noise, machine blasts, sonar bleeps, reverbed vocals, astronaut chatter, street rioting … there they all were, waiting for me to check em off and write em down. Now where’s my I-Spy book of Industrial samples when I need it?

This may enlighten you further: Blac Flies name checks Rudolf J. Mund, an obscure member of an obscure Nazi occult outfit, Andrew McAuley who disappeared one day in his Kayak off the coast of New Zealand in 2007, contract killer Richard Kulkinski, reggae star Dr. Alimantado [?] and others too obscure even for Google. Here are some other things to think about: track four ‘Esbat’ isn’t just 30 seconds of insect chatter its also the name of the Wiccan full moon festival. First track ‘Bellerophon’ is also the name of a mythical Greek hero. Third track mentions “Sepharial’, the chosen name of English Occultist Walter Gorn Old. Seventh track; Blakk Bile, meaning, I assume melancholia, depression or maybe some kind of Masonic ritual. Wrap all these occult/pagan trappings into some bleak Industrial landscapes and you have yourself a damned good Industrial/Pagan/Occultist/Ambient workout.

But first lets go back: the previous Schuster release ‘Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion’ [also on Adeptsound] had the outstanding track ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’, a backbone track, a bleak masterpiece of desolation the likes of which gave you some idea of what it must be like to be dumped onto the barren surface of a dead and windswept lonely planet. This is what ‘Blac Flies’ is really missing, a solid twenty minute track that pins it all together. Too much is gone before it has time to settle. I personally wouldn’t have minded the 10th and best track on here ‘Giving’ expanded up to the twenty minute mark but after six minutes and 43 seconds its all too sadly gone.

You can’t deny the heritage though - English Industrial down to their [thigh] bones and no doubt sporting bad haircuts and a healthy dose of misanthropy to boot. A couple of releases in 1988 and then nothing for nigh on twenty years. I think I know one member. The Adept website mentions Dieter Müh and the sleeve mentions SC. Step forward Mr. Cammack. Discogs gives the rest away by naming Tim Bayes who I think I’m right in saying was a fringe member of DM in their formative years and is the man behind Adeptsound. But back to the music.

My big complaint of Blac Flies is that its hardly treading new ground. The mumbled vocal on ‘Sulk’ is so close to TG’s Weeping that its hard not to think of anything else whilst listening to it. The strings that see out ‘The Second Moon [Sepharial]’ could have been plucked straight from one of Arvo Pärt’s sacred minimalist pieces. The Industrial pummel on ‘Stubborn’ is Pan Sonic mutating into Paul MaCarthy grumbles and moans. The murders confession on ‘Giving [who I’m guessing is the afore mentioned contract killer Richard Kulkinski] plays out to a background of cicadas and distant ritual drums and whilst this is highly effective [‘the rats used to eat them’] it was almost as if I was half expecting it.

I now find myself in the curious and slightly embarrassing position of playing down what is obviously a classic piece of Industrial music - which probably says more about me than it does about Blac Flies. Having said that and put an ever so slight damper on it, I have to say in its defence that this is still a criminally good release made with perfectly weighted hands - Grade A Prime Industrial Ambience with a soupcon of ritualism and the occult thrown in for good measure. Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon may not be progress but neither is it Industrial music by numbers. Just don’t give Chris Bohn a copy.

Contact:

www.adeptsound.net

PO Box 3760
Success
Perth 6164
WA
Australia

http://lichtundstahl.blogspot.com/

Kali-Yuga Karma - The New Blockaders / Merzbow / aNoMaLi

2011-04-03T12:29:00.000+01:00

Kali-Yuga Karma
The New Blockaders / Merzbow / aNoMaLi
Hypnagogia CD. GIA05. 300 Copies.

Paul Coates is the quiet man behind Hypnagogia and the even quieter man behind noise project aNoMaLi. Hypnagogia is a spasmodic affair which since the early 90’s has released items of a discordant nature but which I think is mostly remembered as the home to some the best of The New Blockaders output - the apex arguably being the mighty 4CD anthology ‘Gesamtnichtswerk’. That’s not to treat everything else Hypnagogia has released lightly though. During 2003 and 2004 Hypnagogia released three ten inch platters that were Falten by The New Blockaders, Oumagatoki, a collaboration between TNB and Merzbow and Nitya-Baddha a solo aNoMaLi outing. Kali-Yuga Karma brings them all together and as an added bonus/dangling carrot/cynical marketing ploy [select which ever reasoning fits your preference] a track called Kali-Yuga Karma that is a 5 minute and 38 seconds collaboration between all of the above. Its best to start here ... with a cow mooing. It also ends with a cow mooing, apart from some almost insignificant squiggle that appears a second before the track ends which I cant for the life of me think has been put there except as some kind of listener test. After the first cow moo comes the playing of the last post and gun shots [probably lifted from a 50’s cowboy movie] and then a countdown from 5 to 1 before a full on face rubbing, ear pounding, head bashing swirling torrent of noise. It couldn’t have been anything else really and if it had I think I may have been a little disappointed.
Its not as full on as Oumagatoki though which is a slow to build beast featuring some lovely low end Merzbow wobbles and some close up decay ear fracture from TNB. Very similar to the Merzbow/TNB CD Ten Foot Square Hut which appeared around the same time and which no doubt came from the same sessions. Falten finds TNB in sparse decay mode - all needle fluff, scraping sledgehammers on concrete floors, galvanised bin destruction. Certainly one of their better outings and comparable to the best of their earlier work. Amongst these titans of noise we find aNoMaLi whose Nitya-Baddha sits between them like a naughty schoolboy with ink on his fingers. aNoMaLi achieves his sounds by mixing samples of North East dj’s and dart scorers cut off in their prime [ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT], Indian movie soundtracks, murky conversations, all of this loaded onto prime noise detritus: dentists suction pumps, buzzing noise drones, TNB like rain clatter, reversed church choirs, reversed vocals, 60’s pop. Its not a million miles away from that other TNB involvement Mixed Band Philanthropist in that it has humour at its heart whilst enlightening and rewarding the ear with a multitude of sounds. It’s a pity theres so little aNoMaLi about. Two releases as far as I can ascertain.
Paul Coates may be a reclusive figure in the world of noise but his label does release the occasional gem. And although this may be just a bit of archive gathering with a dollop of cream on top that doesn’t mean you should pass it off lightly. I’ve reviewed all these before upon original release, I enjoyed them then and they still stand the test of time now. A useful release for those who missed out on the original vinyl and those TNB/Merzbow nutters who must have everything.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer / Wicked King Wicker / Irr.App.[Ext]

2011-03-27T12:57:00.000+01:00

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer & Irr. App. [Ext.]
Skeletal Copula Remains
Gnarled Forest Recordings [GF42] / Errata In Excelsis [eie010]
LP. 500 copies. Comes with 18” x 35” poster and insert

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer/Wicked King Wicker
Gnarled Forest Recordings [GF43] / Noiseville 95
Split LP. 300 copies plus insert.

Theres only so much you can do with a guitar tuned all the way down to ‘e’. It’s a great sounding doomy chord but If you want to further explore the deepest corners of doom and desolation then you need something else to get you there. I guess thats why bands like Wicked King Wicker and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer exist. Taking the premise that dark is good, noise is good, death is good, destruction is good and all things black are good they take that darkness mix it with a noise aesthetic and create whole new worlds of sonic nihilism and swirling vortexes of despair into which the likes of Earth and Sunn O))) get sucked only to be spat out the other end with with their monks cowls torn and dripping wet.

To be honest I never got my head round those early doom heavy bands - wave after wave of ululating low end hum, dry ice and expensive double albums - if I wanted something heavy to listen to then I’d dig out an old Sabbath album. I remember seeing a John Fahey interview in which he said he’d been experimenting with tuning all his guitar strings down to e and hawking the results round various shops and labels only to be told that the genre was called doom metal and was already quite popular. Listening to the odd doom related album does me no harm though. I theoretically place my back to the wall, turn up the volume and get down with the low end vibes. Its mutating though and mutating into something far more interesting.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer have graced these pages before, their collaboration with The Nihilist Assault Group went down well here. It was an interesting construct with both artists striving for the same result whilst coming from different angles of the noise spectrum. Sadly I feel it doesn't work with Irr. App. [Ext.]. Irr. App. [Ext.] come from a background linked with Nurse With Wound not doom and destruction. Skeletal Copula Remains feels like a case of too many cooks too. Throw in the guitar of Mason Jones and the synth of John Lukeman [albeit on one track] and you can almost feel the claustrophobia. Theres four tracks with the titles giving you clues; ‘Subterranean [Insurgence]’, ‘Brennschluss --> Extinction’, ‘Crawling Eruptions’ and the side long ‘Glutton’. Couple all this to the black and white art work of viscera, bones. ethereal creatures and the enormous fold out poster and you have somebody going all out to make a big impression. And then you play it and it all seems a bit messy. Death, doom and destruction are there in spades but it feels like everybody involved here tried to cram in every one of their nuances and it makes for an unbalanced listen. Starting with a gong crash the three tracks on side one do their best to create symphonic death ambience with hyenas tearing flesh apart and the squealing noise guitar of Mason Jones [which comes at you like a thousand squeaky gates all banging together at three in the morning] but it never quite gets off the ground. The side long ‘Glutton’ works best but spoils itself by introducing actually introducing those low e tuned guitars when it would do better to dispense with. Thrum thrum thrum thrum slow steady droney thumps and then a suction pump stuck into the open gut wound of a dying alien, stalking music, guttural wolf growls, limbs being twisted apart, cartilage popping, it gets louder then cuts to the sound of animals chewing, zoo screams, someones shooting all the parrots whilst someone else plays with a squeaky door. Door shuts. Record ends. Its hard to engage with much of this with one sound being replaced by another before it has chance to make an impression. The second half of Glutton contains some genuinely ear teasing sounds though but all the posters and fancy art work in the world doesn’t make up for the fact that is only half way there.

The split LP proves to be far more rewarding. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer’s ‘March Of The Damned’ is like being stuck halfway down a subway tunnel with the cars hurtling past two inches from your nose. Its Earth crossed with the low end rumble of a Merzbow gig. Sunspots erupt, Howler monkeys scream, demented souls are tortured for eternity, as it ebbs away slowly rotting bodies swing on charred tree limbs. The shorter ‘Into Nothing’ is even more sublime, it captures desolation perfectly; cold iron on stone, creaking boat timbers, dying breaths, distant bombs.
Utilising bass guitar and noise Wicked King Wicker create walls of noise doom. Its the next step up the evolving noise ladder with doom metal at its heart but with noise treatments giving it the room to unfold into ever more fractured and discordant patterns. On ‘Now That We’re Dead To You’ tumbling chords of ultra distorted bass guitar and noise gadgets create a claustrophobic atmosphere that builds to a wayward crescendo. Bass notes become muffled screams, noises become ever more disorientating the whole thing rupturing revealing its component parts on ending. Given a side each and left to their own devices both BSBC and WKW produce far more cohesive works. I think I may be a fan.

Contact:

http://gnarledforest.blogspot.com/

http://www.noiseville.com/home.html

http://www.myspace.com/irrappext

Midwich

2011-03-27T10:26:00.000+01:00

Midwich - Months, Years
Midwich - Raised Ironworks

3” CDR. 50 copies each. No label.

The first time I met Rob Hayler was on the door of a Death Squad gig about ten years or more since. It was a Termite Club gig so there were only about ten people there, most of them Americans, but Rob was doing his bit for the cause by taking peoples money and flogging some of his newly pressed Fencing Flatworm Recordings releases. Rob was one of those people you find incredibly easy to get along with; softly spoken, infectious laugh, a ready grin, intelligent and for the next few years I saw a lot of him and his label. Then, as so often happens, he disappeared.

A few years passed and then out of the blue Rob reappeared, this time via a blog. He’d had problems with his head, or with the world or a mixture of the two [I’m not telling you anything you shouldn’t know here - he writes about it fluently and matter-of-factly himself] he’d got married, lost his job, found another, his wife lost her job, things were happening in his life. I discovered he supported Farsley Celtic and my heart burst with pride because I always kind of knew that if Rob supported a football team it would be a lower leagues three men and a dog set up. But most importantly he was back and being creative once more.

Rob likes his drone which was reflected in FFR and his solo work under the Midwich moniker. Besides his own material he released work by Andy Jarvis, Neil Campbell and Klunk along with a few others. His diffuse cassette label OTO ran to fifty releases and gave all manner of oddballs there day out in the sun; The Bongoleeros, Killy Dog Box, The Ceramic Hobs, even old Unky Thurst chipped in. Then there was the FFR night at the Brudenell. My first encounter with laptops in a live environment. I was sat there chatting away only to be told ten minutes into the sounds appearing from the PA that this was it. But theres nobody on the stage said I. Thats because he’s playing a laptop from the side of the mixing desk came the reply [this probably because there was less chance of it being knicked].

So Rob came back and started his blog and told us all how his head was getting better and how he was meeting people once more and going for a pint now and again and enjoying his married life and heres some old stuff I thought would never see the light of day but the urge is upon me to put stuff out once more. And why not.

Midwich produce very dainty drones by holding down various keyboard keys [I’m guessing] and little else. To my best recollection Midwich drones were slightly flecked in their purity. Throbbing, aching, pulsing things with little motifs flitting in and out like the fish that used to adorn the early FFR covers. Some were short lasting less than a minute whilst other set themselves adrift up into the 20 minute mark. I quite liked the shorter stuff which is why I like the last track on ‘raised ironworks’ a perfect piece of two phase drone with the one playing off the other, each coming back to reinforce its beginnings like some clever piece of work by Steve Reich, it could go on much, much longer and I doubt I would tire of it. As for the rest, well, its drone. Simply done, effortlessly put together, maybe slight but who cares? ‘ months, years’ is one 21 minute piece [also its title] and theres three others on ‘raised’ but it would take a far more brazen heart than mine to criticise either of these releases. If they were the biggest turds fished out of the beck this year I may drop a hint but theres no need. They may be slight but its what they signal that is far more important.

http://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/

Tony Conrad – Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain

2011-03-21T20:43:00.000Z

What normally happens is this: I listen to what I’m reviewing through the week, thinking up thoughts and ideas about what I’m going to write and come Saturday the words magically appear on a white rectangle and I save them and post them on my blog. Except for this week when I was struck by a hideous malady. An illness so henious and insensitive in its effectiveness that it had the impertinence to appear on Friday morning and clear up on Monday morning [just].

This then to let TDOTEP, Hypnogogia, Rob Hayler, Stan Reed [I’m assuming its Stan but if its not then thank you to the person who sent me the two LP’s from the States featuring BSBC etc ..] and Hyster Tapes that their work is here and has been played. The words are in my head floating about. Its getting them onto the white rectangle thats the hard bit.

Here then, in place of my usual weekly ablution, a review from about five years ago. At the bottom you will find a link that will enable you to replicate this experience, if only for about three minutes.

Tony Conrad – Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain
Leeds City Art Gallery – April 3rd April

See that saw Tony? Saw it good. Take that violin and saw the saw, saw that fucker into little pieces in your Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain journey. Saw it up your arse and never come back and haunt the dark streets of Leeds ever, ever again. Nothing personal of course. Maybe I should have got stoked on some decent whiskey like Campbell. I could see his baldy head bouncing around down the front. I was sat at the back had been up since 5.30 that morning and had little sleep the night before. I wasn’t in perfect condition for an arduous ninety minute drone-a-thon so this review is somewhat tainted.

Maybe I should have got ripped on some appropriate drugs, spent all day in the Duncan or maybe stayed in bed a little longer the night previous. Whatever, I was beyond tired and had only really gone to see Kyle who had come all the way from NYC so I had to make the effort. We made small talk outside the venue whilst he doled out vegan sandwiches to his family, I could just about make out his accent from underneath his big bushy beard, his kids were cute and impeccably behaved, we should have gone to the Victoria instead.

It was a sell out. All of us sat there in rows with a four paneled screen to the fore. Each screen slightly angled. The violin began its sawing and the right hand screen flickered with a grainy image of black and white alternating strips. The one violin was joined by other instruments. I couldn’t tell which was which as the players were behind us but one of them made big boinging sounds like when you pull out the bottom ‘e’ of a bass guitar as far as you can and let it go with a massive TWANG. There was some kind of instrument that made nice resonating sounds that could have been played by a Japanese lady but I only got glimpses of them after the dust settled so I can’t be sure. And then another of the screens came to life with another jumping around black and white grainy image. The woman in front of me was beginning to fall asleep. I became more transfixed on her slowly descending nodding head as I was the flickering screens. Eventually all four screens were filled with jumping around black and white stripes. My back ached and I shifted around trying to kill the numbness in my arse cheeks. I resisted the temptation to look at my watch fearing that only ten minutes had passed and hoping that it was more like eighty five. I lost all track of time. I eventually noticed that the four images were slowly moving into each other. Maybe when all four screens merged into one the whole thing would be over and I could go for a pint before heading back home. I shut my eyes and could feel myself falling asleep. The sawing continued. I felt as if I was tripping, as if I was having a bad dream, as if I was trapped. Some people were walking out but how long had they stood it before realizing they could take no more. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to take it much more. My back was stiff. I moved my legs and watched the nodding woman for a bit more. Eventually the sawing and throbbing and TWANGING slowed to a halt. People applauded, some whooped and whistled but I think most people were just glad it was all over.

I eventually made it to the Victoria. Wire scribes propped the bar, copy already running through their heads, pints at elbows nodding knowingly to TC when he appears in his pensioner’s coat and bend in half shoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yCHstLAChs

The Ceramic Hobs

2011-03-13T09:35:00.000Z

Ceramic Hobs - OZ OZ Alice
Poot Records. Poot43. CDR. 148 copies.

Ceramic Hobs - The Best Of The Ceramic Hobs 1986-1989
Smith Research. SRV19 CDR. 50 Copies

It would appear that the further into the mire Blackpool sinks the more crazed, unpredictable and important do the Ceramic Hobs become. You can not help but tie the Hobs up with the grotty string that is their home town of Blackpool. The Hobs are now making music that is the mirror image of what Blackpool has become; a run down seaside town full of shuffling zombies reliant on pharmaceutical crutches. Last week I was listening to these two latest offerings when I discovered that Blackpool is now the anti-depressant capital of Britain - a staggering 134,000 anti-depressant prescriptions for every 100,000 inhabitants. But if you believed the local tourist board or any of the thousands of day trippers that pile into the place year round you’d believe it to be a thriving palace of beer, sex and chips. The image I have in my head of Blackpool is of a rotting corpse upon which someone has stuck a big yellow smiley face. You don’t even have to scratch the surface anymore, its there for all to see.
Out of this psychotic mess the Hobs have somehow managed to release some of the most important music coming out of the country. Its all down to sole surviving member Simon Morris for the totally skewed spastic rock alley down which the Hobs now rattle. After years of teetering on the edge of psychedelic experimental rock it would appear that the Hobs have finally fallen in dragging with them the corpses of The Butthole Surfers, The Gerogerigegege, Wild Man Fischer and more bizarrely Deep Purple.

With Morris at the controls the Hobs have decided to bow out with a series of releases all called OZ OZ Alice. I think I’ve reviewed two or three of these [I’m easily lost and confusion seems to be a big part of the game] but this is the rawest of the bunch so far. Morris’s singing voice is one of the great unknown instruments and here its even more guttural and raw. He sings like an irate football fan, like he’s deliberately trying to ruin his vocal chords. That when he’s singing. Some tracks are monologues spoken to a background of washed out fuzz and band jams, endless riffs and TV samples - the more I hear of these OZ OZ releases the more I feel like someone trying to crack some kind of hidden code - samples of kids TV overlap each other, some tracks have two tracks going at once. All the tracks are untitled. The last two songs are covers of Deep Purple’s Child in Time and Black Knight, the first ending with Morris screaming out the chorus to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky with the latter ending with someone singing Starship AOR fodder We Built This City. Last track is found sounds; whistling, traffic, distant voices whilst the first is a song recorded straight from what sounds like a Christian TV channel via a condenser mic [all thirty seconds of it]. At its very heart lies a 13 minute riff of driven spazzed guitar, pumping drums and demented vocals thats as good as anything Faust ever did. In it Morris sings unintelligible lyrics, ridiculous over the top guitar solos come and go, monologues come and go, guitars crumble and die only to get back to their feet like dying monsters in the final reel, the wailing becomes more intense, sirens blare, gibberish is spoken, nothing ever settles.

The piece of A4 paper this disc comes wrapped in doesn't even mention the Hobs by name just some artwork and a list of starting points for conspiracy theorists [some of which I checked out and either don’t exist anymore or were never there in the first place].
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard some of this before but where I’m not entirely sure. Maybe these are tracks culled from tiny tape runs, hastily dubbed CDR’s on obscure labels, or demos that have found their way here via Hobs HQ? Compared to the last OZ OZ this feels like a mad rush, a desire to get it out of the system, a lancing of a particularly painful psychotic boil. The previous OZ OZ was a labyrinthine affair containing all manner of clues as to its existence, this is a coughed up lung oyster spat onto a piss ridden bus shelter wall, left to dry out amongst the discarded chip trays and anti PNE graffiti. Roll on the next one.

The Best of 86-89 also contains material previously heard and found elsewhere but none [as far as I’m aware] that has come straight from Morris’s own Smith Research label. As Morris states in his sleeve-notes ‘We didn’t really know what we were doing … and the results were widely variable in style and quality’. He’s right of course but even here the seeds for what we’re hearing now are being sown. Skipping past the first few whimsical acne ridden starters brings you to Happy Hour where during eleven minutes of fucking around you kind of get the idea that the Hobs were never going to settle for a straight forward intro of ‘1,2,3,4’ for very long. There is indeed much whimsy here, track titles like Bob Holness Must Die and Patrick Moore Hernia Library being testament to such [and maybe taking something from Half Man Half Biscuit along the way?] but by its end and with tracks like Big Frog the guitars and the vocals are distorted to buggery.

When the Ceramic Hobs do eventually pack it in those early years may not be looked back on with the greatest of fondness - they really were just fucking around your honour - but go and listen to the last track ‘Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be’ with its squealing feedback, lumpen drums, wailing vocals and US government spokesman warning of the dangers of LSD - its all there just waiting to erupt.

Contact:

Smith Research - http://smithresearch.blogspot.com/

POOT - gordon_fucwitt [at] hotmail.com

*PNE [Preston North End - arch rivals of Blackpool FC]

The Strolling Ones

2011-03-05T12:20:00.000Z

The Strolling Ones - There Was A Terrible Ghastly Noise
Music Mundane. CDR

The Strolling Ones are Martin Walden and Stewart Walden who one day went to Richard Youngs house and inadvertently formed the A Band. Who never learnt to play their instruments but who became an important group due to the fact that they became a catalyst for many of todays UK experimenters. Including Neil Campbell whose Music Mundane imprint this appears on.
There Was A Terrible Ghastly Noise is a collection of early tape works [some of it unreleased] from the early to mid 80’s which on the whole could be described as just plain daft but if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing could also be described an English Dada Frankenstiens monster made from the bodies of Viv Stanshall, Monty Python and Spike Milligan and maybe, just maybe Throbbing Gristle
One track sounds like a Goons outtake [The Seventh Leg Society] replete with silly voices, ‘Arson’ is a Dennis Duck type stuck groove with the word ‘arson’ repeated for its 62 second duration, the last track ‘Music For Dead Zebras’ is 42 seconds of someone trying to screw in a light bulb before it cuts with the words ‘oh well, thats enough’. ‘Live in …’ at twelve minutes is by far the longest outing, over a background of jabbed keys, air horns and unidentified noises one of the Waldens ‘sings’ and I use the term in its widest sense, absolute nonsense in a heavily reverbed voice before dipping into White Christmas, for some reason I kept being reminded of Genesis P Orridge in one of his early TG outings.
‘Sock Eating Competition’ is a hysterical pair of Walden’s off their tits on something stronger than tea talking about a sock eating competition. ‘Crowd Scene’ is a straight recording of a group conversation in which several people are laughing and talking and laughing and talking of Dada and Mongolian armchairs. All at the same time. And on it goes. For 18 tracks and 50 lunatic minutes.

There’s no point in trying to make any sense of these 50 minutes. They are what they are - two people fucking about with a tape recorder [and a few tracks recorded with a Casio keyboard at Richard Youngs house] but having a great time with it. But what fine loam this is. Whether its worthy of repeated plays is a moot point. It is what it is. It has served its purpose.

Anyone reading this who has no idea what it was like to grow up in England in the 70’s and have to stay up until the middle of Sunday night to watch Monty Python or argue with their parents so as to watch Spike Milligan on one of his ‘Q” outings, [on one of the three channels available then] could do no better than listen to this. It could open up lots of doors, it could give you some kind of insight into the eccentric British psyche or it could just plain baffle you.

The last time I saw Stewart Walden he was throwing people around at a Smell & Quim gig. The time before that was at a gig in London where he’d turned up in a silver lamé suit carrying an ironing board. Not somebody you’d meet every day. What happened to his brother Martin Walden I have no idea.

Contact: http://astralsocialclub.wordpress.com/

Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin

2011-03-04T20:26:00.001Z

Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin

No label. Self released C90 cassette.

When Joke Lanz left Berlin for Switzerland in the late 90’s he left behind Bye Bye Berlin as a leaving present.

Remarkably it seems to have disappeared from the records. No mention of it in Discogs or even the official Sudden Infant website. But here its, ninety minutes of found sounds, noise bursts, spastic utterances, sped up punk records, reversed tape, turntable abuse, schlager music, Nintendo noises, African drumming ... for the found sounds Joke Lanz spent a night wandering around Berlin with his tape recorder, at one time fixing it to a lamp post to capture whatever came past: footsteps, children playing, train stations, birds, beer bottles, whistling and someone shouting what sounds like ‘rape’ in a rather menacing fashion. Its all prime Sudden Infant material in other words but some years before an official SI release would ever appear. A full 90 minutes of it too.

I’ve been in touch with Joke and he’s happy for me to post this. He just about remembers releasing it and says it came in a plastic bag [which I don’t have] but apart from that and the fact that it was recorded all in one night details are few.

Part I

Part II

Top photo shows Joke Lanz recording Bye Bye Berlin in 1999

* schlager = ersatz pop music popular in Germany and many other European countries but not Britain.

Misery

2011-03-03T21:44:00.002Z

Misery [all track titles in Russian]
Liniya Shuma. 23 Copies.
Originally released in 1999/2000

http://www.myspace.com/miseryrus

Not a review but the first in a series of downloads culled from tapes from my own collection that I believe deserve a wider audience.

I first heard of Misery back in the late 90’s via one of the Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers catalogues. Misery were from Russia and that intrigued me a lot. There were Russians making noises? Well, why not? They make it everywhere else. So I bought the tape and got in touch with the man behind Misery, a certain Andrey Ivanov. We kept in touch for a few years and then as usually happens we stopped corresponding.
Then last week a review of one of Misery's releases appeared on the MuhMur blog and that got me digging around. I have a few things by Misery but the one that I cherish most is a homemade cassette that ran to just 23 copies.
Now I’ve seen my share of home made cassettes but this one blew me away: laminates, glued on dried leaf, tiny squares of card carrying logo and info, a personalized insert and all of it housed in a sumptuous little flip top box all held together with knotted string. Even the cassette itself has been sanded down with the Misery logo etched into both sides. Exquisite.
But its not all fur coat and no knickers. Having reacquainted myself with this C60 I can honestly say that age hasn’t harmed it one bit and I don’t mean technically. Its bleak Industrial ambinece at its finest. Side one track one [there’s four in all and my Russians not up to much so forgive me] is pure desolation. There's squeaky gate hinges, a recurring motif that sounds like a bleak wind, then empty bottles rolling down a street. The second track is equally morose featuring distant fog horns, looped voices, disintegration. Both tracks create the same kind of atmospheres as exemplified by William Basinski, sadness, melancholy, unease. If I’m being honest, the second side is a bit weaker than the first but don’t let this put you off trying it.

I’m pretty sure Andrey was using analogue tape at this time but as with all great works you’re never really sure how he creates his sounds. As far as I can remember most of his work was of a similar nature. I’ll have to dig deeper and reacquaint myself further.

I’m no longer signed up to Myspace so if someone could pass this on for me I would be eternally grateful.

A shorter version of track two side one can be found on the Myspace site.

Two other things: I can’t seem to rid myself of some kind of interference when transcribing these tapes [I’ll crack it honest - I think its the phone]. It is very low level though, barely audible and in no way detracts from the listening experience. Next up: Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin.

SIDE ONE

SIDE TWO

Kylie Minoise

2011-03-01T21:05:00.001Z

Kylie Minoise - Sid Vicious Occult School Of Motoring
Kovorox Sound CD. KOVO-053

Its been my pleasure to follow Lea Cummings career since its inception [I think]. Firstly with the Solmania like guitar noise group Opaque, then through Kylie Minoise and more recently under his own name producing drone works of outstanding natural beauty. Lea keeps Kylie Minoise interesting and worthwhile which takes some doing in a world full of noise. I genuinely look forward to each new KM release like a kid at Christmas, seeing as how KM are one of the few noise acts who seem to genuinely push the genre in new directions. Its a testament to Lea’s hard work on the live front and his creative force as a noise artist that he’s stuck with what I consider to be such a ridiculous name. Its probably cost him plenty of serious minded noise listeners. More fool them.

Sid Vicious Occult School Of Motoring sits cheek by jowl with that other fine Kylie Minoise release Spank-Magic Lodge, same laser eyes, same kind of artwork only this time the bird’s Di not Myra. Nice touch.
The first eight tracks of Sid Vicious race by in a clatter of styles. Typical KM material in that you never really know whats coming next: a mix of distorted beats, blitz noise, layered swathes of wash and plenty of scumminess. Things kick off in fine style with ‘You … Fetishist!’ [all tracks come complete with standout exclamation marks] a garbled treated vocal mashed into a distorted rock standard. Nigel Joseph used to be very good at this - like hearing a worn out Led Zeppelin record played with a stylus that has a fifty pence piece stuck to it for ballast. Avant-Gore Nudist Asylum! takes that trademark Whitehouse mind bending squeal and hits you over the head with it. ‘There Is A Policeman Inside Every One Of Us Who Must Be Killed!’ is a slowed down distorted Rallizes stomp where you can just about make out some inebriated vocals - it sounds like Mizutani singing down a tunnel after too much saki got into his system. All the tracks are segued so that when you arrive at the two twenty second tracks your full on noise melts into an eerie Eraserhead like soundtrack moment. ‘Cocaine Addict Hooked On Cock Pills!’ is a pounding PE like pulse over which there could be violin strings. ‘Wizard Puke In The Crypt Of Dark Secrets!’ is apocalypse survivor soundtrack. ‘Explosive Kundalini Awakening!’ sounds like the amplified Red Army march on Berlin played out to a background of old gramophone record distortion. At nine minutes in duration its the second longest track on the album but its the last and longest track that I’ll remember this release for. Tipping the scales at just under the half hour mark ‘Princess Diana 13th Pillar Ritual Sacrifice To Reptilian Hectate! is a noise triptych that builds from a moody slowly shifting Muslimgauze like ethnic start to a noisy middle before descending through some treated Gregorian chant into mill pond bliss. Its the drone ending that brings to mind some of Lea’s solo work and its pure bliss. For those that made it through it is anyway.

Contact - www.kovoroxsound.com

Early Hominids

2011-02-20T20:16:00.000Z

Early Hominids - Alkali / Dilate
Total Vermin cassette. Total Vermin 38

Now that Campbell has ditched mywasteofspace and started his journey into blog-land I can reveal the inner workings of the Early Hominids work cycle; they drink beer and shove pizza down their necks. And then, over the course of an evenings experimentation, sounds appear that would be equally at home in Mirfield’s Panache [long gone 80’s cheesy disco - plasma on draught, punch in the face on leaving] and a Berlin art space. What appeals to me is the fact that Early Hominids are now beginning to find their feet. Their first release [Metatarsal] sounded more Mego than Mirfield, the second [Batley Bathz] more art space than spacey, this is the one that clicks - Campbell’s Astral Social Club vibes and dance/pop head bobbing enthusiasm fits foot in sock with Walsh’s gadget box glitches and oscillations. Layering noises and waves onto looped dance backgrounds of varying BPM’s was always going to be a winner with me. And its filled too. Filled out, fleshed out, full of everything all going off at once delirious and loose like an epileptic on whizz having a fit in front of a strobe light.

So; ex-members of Smell & Quim produce noise dance shocker. Or ex-members of Smell & Quim lay it down phat and noisy after supping ale and shoving pizza down their necks. Or I could dance to this if I’d had enough to drink. Either way I always wanted more dance orientated noise crossover releases and this is definitely one of them. There’s two tracks on here but there’s essentially six segued tracks, one of which feels like it was the plucked from the middle section of an intense jam when A somehow managed to slot into B and the head was right and the body was right - a perfect piece of unscripted experimentation - that's the epileptic on whizz. There’s slower sections too where it feels like you’re trying to make your way across a muddy field in divers boots but even these feel unctuous and warm like drowning in a lava lamp, you’re a small glycerin bubble being warmed and cooled to the sound of weld spatter hitting a wet floor and bits of Rihanna. Well, almost.

Total Vermin meanwhile, carries on its good work. Ignore it at your peril.

Contact:

earlyhominids [at] hotmail.co.uk

http://totalvermin.blogspot.com

http://astralsocialclub.wordpress.com/

Night Science IV CD

2011-02-20T17:59:00.000Z

V/A CD that comes with Night Science IV magazine.
500 copies.

Magazine reviewed elsewhere - here’s the CD review.

Features:

Hum of the Druid
Raionbashi
Golden Serenades
Kazamuto Endo
Dieter Müh
The Haters
Halthan

I have a theory that a CD stuck to the front of a music magazine will either have one great track or be a huge pile of one listen only shite. And as the amount of magazines with CD’s stuck to their covers grows larger by the month it seems the less interesting the music contained within them [or the more useless the software if you’ve just bought PC Almost The Same As Last Month monthly]. When the British weekly music press was in its prime, [that would be when guitar based music was actually worth bothering with] an issue that came with a free single or cassette usually carried something worth hearing. The NME’s C86 became a landmark release in its own right, heralding the death of post punk and the birth of jangly angular guitar angst. Now that the music weeklies have been replaced by the nostalgia music monthlies it feels almost obligatory to stick on a loudly praised but poorly executed cover mount. A friend lent me about half a dozen of these things which at first sight looked immensely appealing but on closer inspection revealed nothing more than a series of shoddy live tracks and various nobodies doing cover versions of their wet dreams b-sides. The Wire joined in the fun too, I sat and listened to the first 15 of their Wire Tapper series before retaining a handful of tracks and eBaying the lot. Social Networking and the availability of peer to peer software have further diminished the impact cover mounts have but thats never going to stop the music monthlies using them as customer bait.

Whether the disc accompanying Night Science IV becomes a touchstone for future listeners remains to be seen but even if it doesn't its still a great stand alone release. For those already familiar with Industrial, Noise, PE and experimental genres you’ll no doubt be familiar with most of the acts here but if you’re not its great gateway.
Dieter Müh’s Burning Bodies is a fire crackling pean given added eeriness with the introduction of two female voices, one moaning, the other a prim 50’s BBC voice intoning the words ‘you are burning people’. Chilling stuff indeed. Raionbashi’s sub four minute contribution contains all manner of organic sounds, ranging from an executioners swinging axe to slurped water to a bell that rings so clear that it seems to resonate into infinity. The Haters track ‘Spinning Spade is nine minutes of radio static, hum and swirling noises which if I’m correct was made using an antique turntable and a toy spade. Haltham provide the PE element with a well executed stretch of grinding despair whilst Endo and Golden Serenades both chip in with quality noise tracks, the former encased in a treated Japanese junk noise arena whilst the latter ends up in a more freeform, high-end European firmament. Which leaves Hum of the Druid. Teetering between brilliance and mundanity would imply that HOTD are still a sound in search of maturity. The last thing I reviewed by Hum was a bold array of electro-acoustic sounds that bore comparison with TNB and Mark Durgan. It also had some crap on it. The same thing happens here - given two tracks to elaborate with Hum confound and delight. The first track contains the exquisite sounds of steel pins being rolled down distant concrete steps coupled to a ghostly drone whilst the second is a piece of ordinary noise rumble, OK in itself but in the light of whats gone before hardly thrilling. I’m still holding out for Hum of the Druid to come up with something really special though.

I’m sure all these tracks are exclusives too.

Contact: http://www.iheartnoise.com/cipherproductions/

Pre-Dating The 13th

2011-02-12T15:46:00.002Z

Pre-Dating The 13th - Drifting Away

The Way - Station Between Ecstasies

Contact: kdogbox [at] hotmail.com

It takes a special kind of person to call themselves Morbid. Steve, Joe, Fred, Michael, Wayne, Ian and Kenneth are all workable names but I’m assuming Morbid wanted a moniker that stood out. He really is called Morbid too. Lots of people change their names of course, there's nothing hard about it; Derek Dick didn’t like his given name so he changed it to ‘Fish’ and started Marillion [although I’m not sure which name is the most embarrassing and why change one embarrassing name for another?] John Cleese’s father changed the family name from Cheese and Eric Clapton just doesn't have the same guitar God ring to it as Eric Clapp. So I wonder what given birth name lies behind Morbid? Maybe an obscure Biblical name like Ezekiel, a name lumbered on someone by over zealous Zionists parents perhaps or maybe its plain old Jack or Alan or Mohammed? Who knows. I used to correspond with Morbid back in the 90's and I seem to remember that he became fixated with an obscure Romanian artist called Victor Brauner and then maybe he changed his name to that. He started a band and called it Killy Dog Box and then we discovered we shared a passion for early Genesis. Not the early, early Jonathan ‘my lovely boys’ King Genesis but the stuff that started with Trespass. He wrote and printed a zine called Navigator which ran to a few issues and was full of trips to the coast and other ramblings and then as sometimes happens, we drifted apart.

Until last week when an email arrived from Morbid and on the back of it a download to Pre-Dating The 13th’s eleventh album. Now I may have been getting my Pre-Dating’s and my Killy Dog Box’s mixed up but I’m pretty sure Pre-Dating is a collaboration with someone unknown to me and that KDB was Morbid all on his own - but I could be wrong. I seem to remember KDB being all dark ambiance but I could be wrong on that count too. There was a tape on Rob Haylers OTO label but nothing much more than that plus a few home spun jobs. I dare say I had some Pre-Dating in my hands around then too but the mists of time play tricks with my brian, I mean brain.

Drifting Away is an hours worth of segued tracks no doubt intended to induce some kind of altered state. Whilst listening to it I tried to think of what it sounded like and I came up with the following list; Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works’, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’ and everything I heard by La Bradford in the early 90’s. There’s also bits of Ennio Morricone - which turn out to be the best bits. The worst bits are when the moaning vocals come in and then I got very angry. The Morricone bits are scraped strings, twanged strings, simple but effective. The opening is churning bass and seagull swoops of electric guitar, so much like La Bradford that I nearly swallowed my mentholated pastille. Great things are coming I thought but it wasn’t to last for Drifting Away is [fanfare of trumpets] a bit of a curates egg. At times the music does carry you, there’s a swarming over-driven buzz around the 50 minute mark that almost drifts into C.C.C.C. territory but these highlights are few and far between. With a bit of spit and polish though [and some judicious editing] Morbid could have this down to a decent enough 20 minute piece but as it stands its a wandering assemblage of moods and ambience that only rarely engages the listener. Well, this one anyway. I dare say that if you spend lots of your hard earned giro at Cold Spring then this may just have enough in it for you.

I forget where The Way came into things but if you want an hours worth of really bad Tangerine Dream, wounded vocals, thrumming bass guitars, tortured cattle and distorted twangs blasted out over a frozen plateau then get emailing.

I like you Morbid I really do but sometimes your music just doesn’t do it for me.

Zines - Niche Homo/Hiroshima Yeah!/Night Science

2011-02-06T11:25:00.001Z

Night Science IV
A5 zine + CD. 136 pp. 500 copies.

Niche Homo
Issue 4. A5 zine. 80pp approx

Hiroshima Yeah!
Issue 72. A4 zine. 6 pp.

I used to write a zine. Lost days spent with your head in a pair of sweaty headphones listening to CD’s with your finger on the fast forward button. It was Simon at the [still] famously Luddite DDDD zine who pioneered this approach and when time is against you I can honestly say it works - badly dubbed home made CDR’s with scribble on them can be despatched in a matter of seconds. The only hard part is thinking up words to say about them afterwards. And then eventually one day you wonder why you’re bothering and out come the Art Garfunkel LP’s and the Genesis LP’s and you think to yourself why, this is much more pleasant.

I’ve been reading Chris Donald’s book about his 20 years as editor of Viz. Chris Donald took Viz from a 100 run comic hawked around the pubs and clubs of Newcastle into a publishing phenomenon that at its peak sold over a million of every issue. It made him and a few people around him very rich. It also lead him to clinical depression. Because thats what zines can do to you. They take over your life to such an extent that instead of having a life you find yourself at home in a dark room with a pair of sweaty headphones on trying to think up interesting things to say about a piece of kak from Zagreb. It all starts as a bit of harmless fun; the joy of getting free music, seeing your work in the hands of others, people talking about it, some of them even liking it and then comes the down side; the queues at the Post Office, the teetering review pile and then the letters and emails, why do you hate my music when its so obviously the best thing ever and you missed one of the ‘t’s’ out of my band name and when’s the next issue out and can you do this and that and blah blah blah and you’re looking at the clock and thinking I could be doing so many other things with my life and then one day you wake up and realise you just don’t have the time to do it anymore and you stop and you write a blog instead.

Zines are a great way of filling spare time and finding an outlet for your passion. If you’re on the dole and you’re of a creative bent then zines are good way of killing dead time. If you’re working a regular job then kiss your spare time goodbye. Hello zine, goodbye life.
Which is why I really do appreciate zines, even if the interviews are slightly banal and predictable or the writing is a tad poor because more often than not if the hearts are in the right place it’ll work - enthusiasm can conquer many obstacles.

Having three zines land on me in the space of a few weeks also goes to prove that the internet hasn’t entirely slaughtered them either. What alarms me most though is the fact that Niche Homo got to issue four without me being aware of its existence, even though its produced in nearby Leeds and covers bands and acts I care about. Niche Homo is in classic zine territory; band interviews [with issue 4 you get Ramleh, The Homosexuals, The Pheremoans and Thee Oh Sees] and articles including the diary of a local swimmer, a three-way mix tape discussion, an odd piece on record collecting and something called Geocaching in which you spend £50 on a gadget that helps you locate film canisters with 50p’s in them on canal banks in London - at least you get plenty of fresh air I suppose.
Its a zine, the quality is up and down, the interviews could do with editing but its put together with much love and attention and that’ll do for me.

Night Science IV has been kicking around for a few years now and during that period has established itself as a serious weighty tome. Due to its sheer volume its going to take me a while to get through it but at least for now I can recommend the accompanying CD [in fact the CD could merit a review of its own - I’ll post one at a later date]. Sole editor and writer Chris Groves has my utmost admiration in putting out a zine that runs to a 136 pages and contains over 200 reviews which as far as I can see have all been penned by his good self. In fact with its prefect bound spine and high standards you could argue the case that this is as good as a small book. Chris interviews Kazumoto Endo, Halthan, The Haters, Dieter Müh, Golden Serenades and Raionbashi and then puts them all on to a CD for your listening delectation [all exclusive tracks I believe]. There’s also two live reviews featuring Dave Phillips and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock along with KK Null. With Chris living in Tasmania I guess the opportunity to witness much in the way of noise and experimental behavior is hard to come by but this doesn’t stop him taking K.K. Null to task for being predictable. Which is some indication of how critical Chris can be. Chris’s writing can be a little clinical at times but there’s no denying he knows his stuff.

One quality that all true zines should exhibit is regular availability. The only way to go with a monthly zine is to make it cut and paste and go with what you’ve got come the deadline - which is exactly what HY does. I’ve been with HY since its inception and its monthly deliverances are welcome missives. HY works because both of its contributors come from different musical backgrounds; Mark Ritchie lives in Glasgow and likes singer songwriter stuff, his live reviews begin when he wakes up then take in all the food he ate, all the buses he caught, all the pints he sank and all the Glasgow pubs he sank them in with the band sometimes getting a mention in the last sentence. His reviews of everything from John Martin reissues to books and films are short and precise. At the other end of the spectrum comes Gary Simmons. Simmons London based misanthropic rants mixed with Whitehouse lyrics aren’t to everybody's tastes but when he gets on a roll he’s unstoppable. In issue 72 he reviews Pendercki, Gorecki and Charles Manson then gives us a blow by blow transcription of a text war he had with fellow HY reader Jimmy Little which ends with Little being arrested by the London Met. HY is a crude, photocopied, few pages of cut and paste A4 stapled in one corner zine and its perfect. If the writing is good enough cut and paste will suffice.

[HY is available for the cost of a few stamps though I suspect that hard cash wouldn’t go amiss - email for contact details as Ritchie tends to move about a bit. Niche Homo has no cover price whilst Night Science IV is available via the Cipher website for $15 Aus/$16 US plus postage]

Contact:

Night Science
℅ Cipher Productions
PO Box 169
Newtown
Tasmania
7008
Australia

iheartnoise.com/cipherproductions cipherproductions [at] lycos.com

Niche Homo
www.weirdoguise.co.uk

Hiroshima Yeah!
donbirnam [ay] hotmail.com

Penus Rectus

2011-01-22T18:05:00.002Z

Penus Rectus 1997/Penus Rectus 2010

Dead Mind Records - CD + 7”

Ever wondered why black rap artists never refer to their manhood as a ‘cock’? According to Peter Silverton and his fascinating book ‘Filthy English’ it may have something to do with the fact that female African slaves called their fannys ‘cocks’. Quite why a euphemism for manhood came from a shortening of the name Richard though I don’t know, the same goes for why female African slaves should call their fannys cocks - some things just get lost in the midsts of time. But then dicksucker just doesn't have the same impact as cocksucker does it? Same goes for dick off, not nearly as effective as cock off and whilst dickhead is eminently more user friendly than cockhead I find cocktease or pricktease far more user friendly than dicktease [which is too near to striptease to be of any use as a good swear]. Apparently early English puritan settlers to America were so worried about overuse of the word ‘cock’ that they did their best to rid themselves of it by adopting the Dutch word ‘roost’ - hence ‘rooster’ rather than cockerel. Its why Americans call faucets faucets and not stop cocks [an English English word for ‘tap’] and why weathercocks and cockroaches become weathervanes and plain old roaches.

Which brings me to Penus Rectus and the age old obsession of noise and penises. [Actually Penus is latin for painful which explains nothing whilst rectus is latin for straight. I’m nothing if not well researched]. Peni abound on the artwork to both these releases of course. Indeed various inserts and artwork are covered in all manner of phallus. Maybe its there for just in case you forget what one looks like or maybe they just like drawing big knobs? Whatever.

The CD is a bit of a curates egg. Its a collection of tracks that appeared on a 1997 three cassette comp called [of course] Penus Rectus. The original cassette release carried about 30-odd tracks but here they’re whittled down to twelve, the frustrating thing being ... no track info. The insert says ‘this selection taken from …’ and leaves it at that. Having discovered the original release on discogs it seems a shame that Dead Mind haven’t taken the time to at least give us some detailed info or stretched it further by re-releasing the whole thing. Without a track listing I’m lost. It all sounds like decent mid nineties noise to me, meaning its fairly uncomplicated, muddily recorded and delivered with a sometimes naive honesty but with no info comes no detailed review. Just for the record, track 11 was my favourite [I’m guessing Macronymhpa].

At least the single is marked up. A track each from Prurient, Odal, Smell & Quim and Streicher. Odal is the only artist who appeared on the original cassette release and while Smell & Quim and Streicher were certainly around at that time they didn’t. That leaves Prurient to kick things off with a huge swaying lopsided pan-attack of holistic noise. A far cry from his feedback workings and well worth hearing. No doubt the Prurient completists will already be taking notes. Odal is a short blast of static and buried screaming whilst Smell & Quim work over a track call ‘cuntsocket’ [presumably included so that the other half don’t feel left out]. Its a classic slice of degenerate Quim with [I hope] porn outtakes amid a miasma of swirling muck. Which leaves Streicher. Perhaps one of the most enigmatic and controversial artists ever to release work in the Noise/Power Electronics arena. Listening to this contribution will leave you no wiser though - a straight forward blast of decent if not earth shattering noise. Which gets me to wondering as to whether the single contains material originally earmarked for the cassette release? The label that released Penus Rectus in 1997 was Dutch, Dead Mind is Dutch, there’s a link somewhere.

Contact: www.blutistzeit.nl

Peter Silverton/Filthy English http://tinyurl.com/4h4t3rs

[after many weeks the CD artwork appears]

The New Blockaders - Live At Hinoeuma

2011-01-22T15:34:00.000Z

The New Blockaders - Live At Hinoeuma

Hypnogogia. GIA04. CD 300 Copies.

For about five all too short years the Red Rose in London was the best noise venue in the country. Hinoeuma and Harbinger Sound put on plenty of quality shows there. For us Northerners it was easy to get to too; two hours on the train, two stops on the tube and out in to the wilds of the Seven Sisters Road past the former Rainbow Theatre, the dodgy pubs, the 24 hour continental deli’s, the grease outlets, the muggers and the shady looking locals. Its gone now of course, the last I heard it was a pool hall, but for those few short years it was perfect. Front of house was a regular pub, usually frequented by dwarf Turkish bin men and alcoholics - it was like the Duncan transported to Finsbury Park. Compare it now to The Grosvenor, allegedly the best noise venue in the capital, with its hike to Stockwell, [sarf of the river], its no tubes after midnight and only night buses and taxis to fight over and endure. The room at the back of the Red Rose was huge with a good sized stage but perhaps most importantly of all it was run by a guy who really didn’t give a shit about what you got up to so long as you drank lots of beer.

One of the most memorable events at the Red Rose was the night TNB headlined. It was also the night Emil Beaulieau played his UK debut. Merzbow, Putrefier and various Shimpfluch members also found there way on to the bill, an impressive line up by anybody's standard and one not likely to be repeated. On that night The New Blockaders were so loud they drove me from the venue. This has been documented before and I feel no shame in repeating it here. Two or three times I sought the sanctuary of the front bar with its dwarf Turkish bin men only to return moments later to be met with … silence. It was so loud TNB kept blowing the fuses and all the owner did was dig out some new ones, run up a ladder and replace them ... only for them to blow again. I think they blew two or three times and each time the two Blockaders sat stock still and waited for the power to return and for the onslaught to begin. TNB delivered their set at a murderous level of sound. It was unyielding and unforgiving and its still the loudest thing I’ve yet to experience in a live environment. To stand in that room when it was in full sway was like having someone take a swing at the back of the your knees with a billy club. It was a volume you could actually feel.

A few years back this momentous event was commemorated via a RRRecords picture disc and as is usually the case with TNB material its short run disappeared pretty quickly. You can still get it, at a price of course, but for those who missed out this Hypnogogia repress is particularly welcome.

Listening back now I’m met with the same predicament I had when listening to the vinyl; is that what they really played? The passing of years and no doubt the amount of beer I consumed that night have played tricks with my decaying brain cells. For me it was wall noise before the term was coined, an unrelenting barrage of sonic distortion designed to engulf, destabilise and overwhelm the listener to such an extent that it drove out any kind of thought process or rational engagement. And on the disc? Two 17 minute tracks of slowly unfurling, instantly recognisable TNB motifs … but no wall noise. There’s slow hums, creaking leather straps, ball bearings being dumped into a galvanized dustbin, chains, rattles and plenty of what I like to call noise churn, that lovely low end rumble that seems to fit snugly somewhere between your biorhythms and and a recess somewhere deep in your brain.Some elements I detect from previous TNB releases, what appears to be a primitive machine gun and then theres the slime slurpers, the release the bats experience and the bit that sounds like all the windows just blew in in the midst of a force ten hurricane.

My abiding memory of that night is seeing Phil Todd’s anti-performance. Sat stage front at a table with his face covering balaclava and its defiant ‘X’ he drank from a bottle of wine. It was performance art and anti art rolled into one but above all it was nihilistic and destructive - words with which The New Blockaders have become synonymous.

On a different note, the CD image depicts a decaying building in modern day Detroit. In case you weren’t aware Detroit is crumbling and Polidori’s been there to document it.

Polidori documents decay and destruction - TNB compose the soundtrack.

Polidori images:

http://tinyurl.com/4bzf4az

Michael Esposito/Kevin Drumm

2011-01-15T15:43:00.001Z

Michael Esposito/Kevin Drumm - The Icy Echoer

Fragment Factory 7”. FRAG16. Clear Vinyl. 300 copies.

I have this vision that in the distant future you’ll be able to have a file containing every note of music ever recorded surgically implanted straight into your brain. Everything. Everything ever recorded starting with Eddison’s wax cylinders right up to what popped out of itunes five seconds ago shoved on to a chip and stuck into your head at birth. And with regular updates it would be but a small job to connect yourself to a PC and download al the new stuff thats been made available. For a small fee of course. Wouldn’t it make life so much easier? And then just think of a piece of music and it appears in your head. No more need for portable music appliances or storage devices. Think of all that saved space. Devices will be made available for those wanting to share music in social situations of course but for when you’re on your tod all you’ll need is a single thought.

Except that wouldn’t be very good at all would it? Where’s the fun to be had in just thinking of a piece of music and having it pop into your head? What about the bigger picture? The way the artist wanted their work represented? The album sleeve? The inner sleeve? The run off grooves? The subtle messages hidden in reversed record grooves? [Rob Halford would never have had to defend himself from inserting hidden messages onto his records if he’d have released Suicide Solution on an MP3 download only single now would he?]And what about different coloured vinyls? Picture discs? Locked grooves? Double grooves? Clear vinyl? Shaped discs? Interlocking discs? Vinyl so heavy you can actually feel the weight in your hands. Who remembers the albums that came out during the oil crisis in the late 70’s? Albums so thin and flimsy they were almost like flex-discs older brother? Ah yes, flexi discs. What about seven inch singles? Ten inch singles? Five inch singles? Records that play 33rpm on one side and 45 rpm on the other. Records that play from the inside out? Maxi discs. EP’s. Double A-sided singles. Triple LP’s. Gatefold sleeves. Records with more than one centre hole. Juke box singles with the centre punched out. Acetates. Dub plates. 16 inch transcription records. Records made from glue. Records with only a finite life span.Transparent sleeves made to look like bags of sick. The Sergeant Pepper album cover. Anti records designed to destroy your stylus. Duchamp picture discs designed to induce hypnosis. 78’s. 16’s all the lot consigned to the dustbin of history replaced by something the size of a babies little toenail.

Which is why vinyl is still so vitally important. Now more than ever. Its heyday may have gone but in the hearts of people who still love music its still there, a format worth fighting for in a world slowly sinking into a digital sea.

Which brings me to Fragment Factory who have nailed their intentions to the mast with their first foray into vinyl. Let me start by saying that I know little about Kevin Drumm and even less about Michael Esposito. The latter I may be forgiven for but I suppose admitting to not knowing much about KD is a little like admitting you’ve never heard of Captain Beefheart. Well, at least in the circles I move in it is. Esposito is different. Research tells me that he’s involved with Electronic Voice Phenomena - the capture of voices from beyond the grave. For The Icy Echoer they use field recordings taken from a cemetery coupled to EVP files, found sounds and Drumm’s [I assume] prepared guitar. What it all sounds like is five short tracks of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds and one longer track of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds. Some tracks have pulses running through them, some don’t. On some you can hear voices and on others you can’t. One track has a slight guitar melody to it over which you can hear crows. If this sounds glib its not meant to. I have listened to this record many times and have still to make my mind up as to whether its an important EVP document or just a straight forward piece of music concrete/field recording composition with a bit of guitar chucked in. I suppose being the worlds biggest sceptic makes me the wrong kind of person to be evaluating a record that has EVP at its core. If there are ghosts out there trying to talk to us they appear to be going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for us to capture their rare utterances. One mans snip of ghostly speak is another mans wind in the trees. Having said all this I did enjoy listening to the groans and the static and the doom laden backgrounds plus its made me curious to further explore the worlds of Drumm and Esposito. Job done. Most importantly of all its a record I shall look forward to reacquainting myself with. And it is a record. A small clear piece of plastic with sounds on it and for that we should all give thanks.