Taming Power

Taming Power - Selected Works 2001.
Early Morning Records. EMR Promo CD 002. CDR.

Taming Power - For Electric Guitar and Tape Recorders
Early Morning Records. EMR 10” - 009.
200 copies.

Taming Power - Meditations For Radio
Early Morning Records. EMR 10” - 012
220 copies.

Taming Power - Twenty One Pieces
Early Morning Records. EMR 2 X 12” - 018
329 copies.



It was earlier this year that Campbell thrust a copy of Taming Power’s ‘Selected Works 2001’ into my hands. With an evangelical zeal not seen since the Methodist came to town he then recounted of how there was this Norwegian guy called Askild Haugland who’s this total outsider who’s been releasing his work for years and nobody has bought it because nobody knows who he is and its like the finding the motherlode of totally out there noise and drone and its just like … fuck.

Since then word’s got around a little. Here in West Yorkshire there’s a Taming Power Fan Club brewing. The Bearded Wonder over at RFM got the proselytizing treatment too and wrote about the aftershock as well as the six page letter that Campbell sent him detailing how he came across Taming Power and about just how amazing these recordings really are. Read it and feel that proselytizing power.

So here’s this guy from Norway recording for his own amusement sounds he makes with electric guitars, shortwave radios, cassette recorders, tape recorders, field recordings, singing bowls and ritualistic Tibetan instruments. A steady trickle of releases, mainly 10” and 12”, once or twice a year to total indifference and he’s been doing it since around 1987. And even though some of his stuff’s been released in editions as little as a 100 its all still available. Uh?

In hindsight ‘Selected Works 2001’ wasn’t the best place to start for me. I have to admit to wondering what all the fuss was about. A slim line CD case, the mere sight of which is enough to bring back memories of horrid noise crap from the 90’s. With no sleeve notes to go on bar the track titles, these being the dates they were recorded [all Taming Power track titles are the dates they were recorded] I was left wondering how Askild had created … what? Turns out this is tape recorder feedback. Which to start with is a mundane throbbing noise. By track seven though, after you have adjusted your hearing and come to terms with it, it’s mutated in to a spacey, rolling, head swaying out of body journey, by track eight it’s a shamans blessing. It was around then that the Taming Power light bulb went off in my head. I emailed Askild asking him if he had any Taming Power vinyl for sale especially that Twenty-One Pieces that both Hayler and Campbell were raving about. To which the answer was of course, yes.

Which is where my journey really started. Twenty-One Pieces utilizes all of that above instrumentation creating feelings of desolation, melancholy and morphine like bliss. Everything is played at a funeral pace as guitar strings are randomly plucked and swooned upon, spacey motifs are played out on Casiotone’s, there’s dingsha’s [Tibetan cymbals], Drilbu’s [Tibetan hand bells], singing bowls, a harmonica, a handsaw and Haugland’s own voice in there. These he treats [I know not how] to create works that, it has to be said, are simply stunning in their simplicity and execution. The slow pace at which these four sides unfold and the  atmospheres Haugland creates is down entirely to his distaste for digital recording techniques and digital equipment. This is what gives Taming Power its ‘feel’. This being a feeling that everything was recorded at the side of a frozen lake under an overcast winter sky in Tromsø. In whatever permutation he chooses [there’s a detailed list of which instrument appeared on which track] you’ll find that same eerie, detached atmosphere.

Haugland titles his releases simply so that you know what you’re getting, hence: ‘For Electric Guitar and Tape Recorders’ and ‘Meditations For Radio’. Amongst his back catalogue you will find, ‘For Electric Guitar, Cassette Recorders and Tape Recorders’ amongst numerous ‘Selected Works’ that span all the way back to 1987. Some lucky people will have the seriously limited cassettes that he put out and where Early Morning Records took its first steps into the world. 

Of the rest I have here ‘Electric Guitar and Tape Recorders’ sounds not uncannily like TG’s slide guitar moments with added tape fudge. The atmosphere is one of Lynchian dark planet surfaces, thick, dirty landscapes where the playheads have been slowed to a virtual stop their content released as a primordial breakdown of analogue sludge.

Meditations For Radio is as equally otherworldly with shortwave static giving way to a babble of voices.

What makes Early Morning Record releases even more esoteric are the handmade covers, the handwritten sleeve notes and the hand drawn record labels and actual photographs as taken by the man stuck on the sleeves as cover art that nobody is buying because nobody knows about him. Which hopefully wont be for much longer.


earlymrecords [at] yahoo.no

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted
Salon Alter Hammer & Anker. Gatefold DLP. 1000 copies and no repress in sight.

I was taken to task by a reader who said that my review of the Sleaford Mods second album Divide and Exit wasn’t their second album at all. He was dead right. There were five albums before Divide and Exit and its precursor Austerity Dogs exploded all over the broadsheets. Long before journos with shoulder length hair got whiff of Austerity Dogs and Divide and Exit the Sleaford Mods had released an album called Wank along with four others all of them appearing between the years 2007 and 2012. I first spied Wank on Underwoods coffee table in Notts. The word 'wank' superimposed onto a picture of a bag of chips. Yeah, funny I thought. That night at the Rammel Club I saw the Sleaford Mods live for the first time in what is now their current incarnation; Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn. Williamson in a t-shirt with a neck wide enough to get two people. Fearn bobbing about like he's loosening up for a limbo in his trackie bottoms.

The past was just that, from now on it would all be about the future.

 So there’s a year zero thing going on. Best to start afresh. Delete all the back catalogue and put the best bits of it on a double album. Can’t re-release all that back catalogue stuff mainstream because its chock full of samples that’ll see them in court, Sex Pistols and The Yardbirds and plenty of other punk and 60’s R&B bands.

Long before Jobseeker had a munt synth backing courtesy of Fearn it had The Yardbirds ‘For Your Love’ rolling along its length. The Mekon has the riff from ‘Pretty Vacant’ looping on and on and on. And on. And on. Williamson ranting over loops and samples of the musical past.



What you take from these four sides are Williamson’s observations, jokes and piss takes, the sex, the mundanity, the dole, the shit jobs, the coke and the Stella, the conversations. We are inside Williamson's head and its full of lager fumes, class A residue and confusion.

You look like Paul Weller
Fuck off

Wanking his bird off, wanking himself off, [Jason Stop Wanking], getting paid to shag someones wife on Trixie:

‘Trixie what are you gonna do, that double-ender’ll be the death of you’ all retold in an eerie high pitched speeded up voice that makes his revelation even more surreal.



First track ‘R&B Paul’ starts with a parody on Dre’s ‘The Chronic’

'This is dedicated to the wankers that were down from day one' and then ‘You’ve got some upduck in yer hair’. Upduck? Whats up duck?’ From American west coast gangsta rap to a Nottingham school yard in the width of a record band.



Then there’s the deadpan one liners:

The path to enlightenment doesn’t exist anymore, you’ve got to get the bus



Pearly pearls of wisdom. Four sides full of them.



Just as I was getting the nod from Underwood on the Sleaford’s I went digging around on Youtube and found ‘Double Diamond’. It blew me away. The promo for it was filmed in Nottingham city centre in a crepuscular light that showed Williamson in a three quarters length overcoat talking to who knows who swaying his arms to the loop of a soul track in which you get to hear a female vocal sung over and over again. The effect is hypnotic. Williamson gives one of his best performances screaming spittle into the face of a non existent drug dealer who wont bring him what he wants. Lost at first he thinks aloud, stream of conscious mutterings;

These early mornings just fuck me up ... I don’t like puddings ... I got a fish bone hanging from me gob like a matchstick mate ... I want a big bum hole to suck me up ... WHO GOES THERE! … I still don’t know what the fuck I’m on about duck ... Minimum cage, maximum cage.

Even with all that has passed since its one of his finest moments.



Not everything works though. Chop Chop Chop may contain Joycean leanings towards bowel movements, shagging, fighting and drugs but at just over eight minutes and with nothing but a chugging punk riff for company it stretches matters somewhat but this is small beer that needn’t be spilt over four sides of what has to be said is, a goldmine of Williamson gems. It did make me wonder whether this really is the best of the past or just a quick trawl that leaves further gems waiting to be uncovered though. 
I guess time will tell.


Retweeted has long since disappeared off the shelves and now goes for north of £50. Thats still cheap for what you’re getting. Retweeted also shows that the only thing that Williamson needed for the Sleaford Mods to achieve take off velocity was bumping into Andrew Fearn. On such happenstance greatness is made.



Aeolipile

Aeolipile - Glut/Paused Pregnancy
Foolproof Projects. 7”



The semi-detached house of suburban jazz has many rooms, but if you want to find the one with improv in it you’ll have to take a walk down the garden path to the potting shed whereupon you’ll find three people and their instruments squeezed in between the old paint tins and the smelly paraffin heater.

Having come across the Amazon jazz forum during my recent jazz tinged travels I came across a thread mentioning European Improv. Its the jazz sub genre, the mere mention of which, is sure to give promoters and certain jazz purists a sleepless night or two. It comes with a reputation you see. That of cold skronking jazz played in black and white television studios to an earnest looking, slightly bored looking audience attired in clothing that has only been in fashion once. Happily this has nothing to do with what follows.

Seeing as how we’re in a jazz mood here it seems sense to take in Aeolipile. A three piece jazz improv/skronk/parp outfit that features amongst its members, the towering presence [both figuratively and literally] of a certain Jason Williams. Jason is know to us and that we can be sure of. Jason Williams is agent provocateur for the south coast of England, a noise in search of a home. In Aeolipile, he plays sax, along with Andy Pyne [drums] and Tom Roberts [bass]. Together they make the kind of improv/skronk/parp jazz noise that you kind of knew they would.

And very good it is too. Not that I know anything about it as you’ll have gathered from the above. [Whilst typing this I’ve been listening to Frank Wright’s ‘Unity’ that's not a name drop its just whats been happening of late during the recent autumnal jazz period].

Aeolipile aren’t Borbetomagus, the configurations wrong for a start. Neither are they sonic terrorists. They’re jazzers. Perhaps a derogatory term but it will have to do. Jazzers of an 'out there' nature coming in somewhere between Albert Ayler and New York New Wave. On ‘Glut’ Tom Roberts bass sounds ‘chunky’, the drums and the sax do battle gamely. On ‘Paused Pregnancy’ they do the same. Jason Williams sure does make that sax honk, squeal and whine though. At times he makes it sound like a dog being strangled, others it just blows a guttural deep honking sound as a series of rapid notes splutter and splatter. There’s no doubting that these guys have the ‘chops’ as someone once said.

The bigger question here is, is there space in this world for a seven inch jazz improv/skronk/parp single? For which the answer is a positive yes. Why not? We may not be breaking new ground here but its fun to hear and no doubt fun to play and whats wrong with that?



 http://www.foolproofprojects.co.uk/

Early Hominids

Early Hominids
Self Released. CDR.

Early Hominids - Palpate
Zanntone 000. CDR.

The great musical journey continues. As ever this is mainly down to friends recommendations and as is the mode via travels around the internet. Whether Apple’s ‘Genius’ works I know not and care not but if you want to put your musical edification in the hands of algorithms then thats up to you. I prefer friends recommendations preferably in the pub after a few ales accompanied by exclamatory remarks such as ‘I have to do a copy of it for you its fucking unbelievable your brain will fucking melt I shit you not’. Or something along those lines.

[Which is where I have to declare an interest here. I should declare an interest in all the releases I review where I know the artists personally but thats pretty much all of everything I review so it seems a bit pointless].

Early Hominids are Paul Walsh and Neil Campbell and it was with these two I spent last Friday evening in a busy Flower Pot talking bollocks whilst sinking a few cherry Timmermans [Me, Neil] and Duvels [Paul]. Its usually around halfway through the evening when the vocal chords have been lubricated that William Burroughs [Paul] name crops up and then, eventually and welcomingly Jazz [not for Paul though, Paul hates Jazz]. After Miles Davis’ name came up I admitted to owning two of his albums, one is Kind of Blue and the other is On The Corner, two Miles albums that are as far apart on his creative spectrum as its possible to get without going into the finer details. I bought On The Corner after someone told me it was the most fucked up Miles record there was [it isn’t, try listening to his two live in Japan releases Agharta and Pangaea], I bought Kind of Blue because its one of the best selling jazz albums ever and even if it does turn out to be the jazz worlds Dark Side of the Moon its still a thousand times more satisfying.

So Campbell tells me he’s winging some Miles my way as I’d like it and for good measure an Ornette Coleman comp thats sure to blow the fug from my brain and send me straight to Planet Jazz. And I think OK I’ll give em a whirl because when Campbell recommends something you know its going to be good.

Then I remembered I had a copy of Colemans ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’’ and I didn’t like that one either but thought it best not to say anything at this stage.

Its not that I’m a jazz Philistine. I take great delight in looking upon many an LP and CD of the great and the good of the jazz world here at Idwal Towers its just that the wilder sides of Miles and Ornette hadn’t made that good an impression on me and I’d thus dismissed the pair of them. All of it. What a stupid thing to do.  According to Wiki, Miles has 48 studio albums and 36 live albums to his credit. According to Discogs Ornette has a combined total of 53 albums to his name. I’ve heard but a thimbleful of what they’d recorded and I was dismissing them out of hand. What a stupid thing to do.

So here comes the Miles. ‘Big Fun’, a double LP from the early 70’s and ‘In a Silent Way’ a slow and loose limbed release that was his goodbye to the 60’s before diving headfirst into Planet Rock leaving an army of jazz critics stroking their chins in bewilderment. This much I know.

What happened next was quite extraordinary. Had I now grown old enough to appreciate Miles and Ornette since my last dabblings? Had I forded the great river of maturity and emerged soaked on the other side my jazz tastes now in check? I guess I had an epiphany of sorts. I played Big Fun all night on repeat and ripped all the CD’s for transportation purposes. I spent the next night listening to In ‘A Silent Way’ on repeat whilst flicking about the internet looking at Miles releases wondering why I didn’t have these masterpieces on vinyl. I went on to the official Miles Davis website where I discovered you can buy Miles Davis box sets that come in trumpet cases and contain dozens of CD’s and cost hundreds of pounds. I watched videos of Miles performing at the Isle of Wight Festival and Berlin in the 70’s. It was like a new world had appeared before my eyes. And then I thought I could become one of those jazz bores. I could give everything else but the jazz to Oxfam and concentrate slowly on building a jazz library that would be the envy of the Wharf Chambers. I’d work on my pointy beard and buy a hand knitted skull cap from someone who once went to see Charlie Parker at Birdland. I’d take to smoking thin, hand rolled cigarettes with exotic substances in them whilst scattering my vocabulary with words like ‘cat’ and ‘motherfucker’ and then I thought it’d be best just to sit back and enjoy the music and not get too carried away with myself.

So what does a band thats one half jazz enthusiast, one half jazz hater sound like. Noisy of course. We’ve been here before with the Early Hominids. A meeting of minds after a meeting on Mirfield train station platform where an incredulous Neil Campbell walked up to Paul Walsh and said ‘Are you Paul Walsh’? By some bizarre act of geography two ex members of Smell & Quim had found themselves living but not a couple of miles apart from each other whilst sharing a train to Leeds most mornings.

Early Hominids sound like one half Astral Social Club and one half Foldhead which are the respective solo projects of messers Campbell and Walsh. As if you didn’t know. ‘Palpate’ also sees the eventual arrival of Walsh’s Zanntone label [my moneys on a WSB reference].

As you would expect things get quite noisy quite quickly with Weevils spiraling out of control throwing starburst fireworks into the air as all manner of pedals and Kaoss pads get prodded and poked. The two tracks on the untitled piece are live cuts as laid down at the Wharf Chambers the latter ‘No More DT’s’ proving to be the spacier more ‘out there’ of the two which ends with a loop of a harpsichord stuck in a rut and some shortwave static.
Palpate has ten tracks and runs to an albums length 44 minutes. Here tracks like Tang, Melt, Roc, Lift and Teet jump about the improv noise scene like a kid given half of Tandy’s on xmas morning. Early warning systems are sounded, things buzz, fart, rasp, detonate and pulse in many and wild a manner. Gape does all of this while carrying you off on a bed of neurotransmitter blip and data overflow. Its all good, transcendental in its own spasmodic kind of way.

The Ornette Coleman comp blew my tits off too.     

Mantile 26 + 27. Stephen Cornford and Culver

Stephen Cornford - SWF
Mantile 026. Cassette/DL 50 copies.

Culver - Prophecy of the Black Spider
Mantile 027. Cassette. 50 copies.



Johnny Scar said to me ‘Give em a spin. See what you think’. Not at a gig but in an email. Just give them a spin and see what you think. But of course I can’t but help write about them. Not just because they’re good listens but because its my lifes mission to champion labels like Mantile thus saving the world from drowning in mediocrity.

Labels like Mantile are tape only labels that release esoteric noise, drone, experimentation, electro-acoustic outings anything of that bent with little in the way of fanfare or sought out recognition. They know that what they’re doing is good and worthwhile and they don’t need to shout about it. The people in the know know and if they know then nobody else needs to know. You know. If you get my drift.

Like all good labels Mantile has a strong aesthetic; stiff card inserts of a tactile texture coming in varying pastel hues litho printed [I think], sometimes in deliberately obtuse ill contrasting colour-ways as is the case with this Culver release - black print on purple card that you have to hold up to the light at a certain angle to decipher. Its a perfect fit. Not just for Culver but for anyone that ventures on to Mantile.

Lee Stokoe’s Culver needs no introduction. Its drone. Here its drone. It will always be drone.  Listening to ‘Prophecy of the Black Spider’ is like sitting on the wing of a prop plane as you fly across the Atlantic late at night for hours on end until the drone from the engines propellors has embedded into your skull to such and extent that when you get off the plane you can still hear it for hours afterwards This is what Culver does and everybody likes it and don’t say they don’t. Both side virtually identical except for a slight deviation at the start of one side. Perhaps. Perhaps I too had succumbed to the prop plane drone syndrome. Things happen in a drone. Not just Culver drones any, drone.

Stephen Cornford is new to me. He likes shortwave patterns. Here he gives us two twelve minutes tracks of ‘unprocessed stereo recordings of shortwave interference’, the results sounding like an early Grey Wolves outing minus the shouting. As any fule no the shortwave bands are a treasure trove of found sounds, not just static but exotic foreign radio stations all of them continually shifting and fading. If you’re really lucky you could come across a ‘number station’ or the cops or military communication, radio hams having conversations about plum brandy. Or if you’re Stephen Cornford you could use the static to make some rather interesting noise.

Having listened to SWF I turned my trusty Roberts Traveler on and spent a happy hour flitting around the ionosphere. I should do it more often. So should you.



Mantile

[In true antediluvian Culver fashion 'Prophecy of the Black Spider' is available as a cassette only release and is not available to download].

Dave Phillips, YOL, Aming Liang. Wharf Chambers, Leeds, 3rd October, 2014

Its not often I leave the Wharf Chambers shell shocked but I did on Friday. What began quietly with me being the first punter there ended with the audience leaving slack jawed and stunned after witnessing Dave Phillips remind us all just how dumb an animal humans can be.

Somehow I’d managed to put to the back of my mind just how visceral Dave Phillips is when he's in this mood and had a feeling that we’d get something totally different from what we saw in Birmingham last weekend. There he flattened us all with some all out noise whilst his erratic movements triggered motion sensors that briefly lit up the pitch dark room. When the projection screen behind him goes blank at the end of tonight's second and final set he disappears behind the left hand PA stack to let everything sink in and the audience doesn’t know whether to applaud or lay siege to the nearest MacDonalds.

But first to Aming Liang who’s soundchecking his guitar. I ask promoter Pete Cann where he found him. 'Busking' he says. I assume he's joking. If he does busk then he's just become my favourite busker of all time thus beating hands down the asinine Oasis/Simply Red/Bob Marley regurgitatators who clutter Leeds shopping thoroughfares with their felt hats and jokey banter. A wet weekend to them all.

Liang sits hunched over a black semi bodied electric guitar and at times plays it with a violin bow processing the sound through various pedals that sit on a chair opposite. Strings are pulled and open chords are rung out making for some seriously heavy noise. It’s not Solmania but it’ll do for a quiet Friday in Leeds. Not having heard guitar abuse for some time the results are spectacular to my shell likes with deep visceral lunges parrying high skree and at times almost silence as Liang tickles the strings with his fingers. That he coaxes so many different sounds from his guitar during his short set leads me to believe that this is a deep well of talent. As his set ends he stands his guitar against the PA only for it to slide off making a hideous clanging sound. We all cheer.

Dave Phillips first set sees him channeling his own field recordings through a mixer. Mainly insect sounds and frogs with flies buzzing and growls and snarls and thunderstorms rumbling away, pure field recordings with volume giving them an impact. Phiilips field recordings are precise renderings and all enveloping. As the final buzzing sounds hang low in the air he rises from his chair to distributes important information to every single person in the audience. When he gets back to his seat he flicks a switch and then silence. Its the first part of his message. The second wont be as easy to digest.

Yol gives Phillips some breathing time with a cathartic set made from but the barest instrumentation. That's if you could call a galvanized steel mop bucket an instrument. Amplification isn't needed. Doubled up over his mop bucket he rattles the handle and scrapes it across the Wharfs tiled floor making a hideous racket whilst ranting common banalities about the weather and supermarket value lines. The jangle of a string of closed bells and the scraping of a fork and a razor blade onto the inside of the bucket adds to the scope of the sounds but its the rabid, veins sticking out on the neck intensity of Yol's performance that grips. And its all over in less than ten minutes. Rarely do you get to experience such an intense and personal performance, its brevity only adding to its impact.

When Dave Phillips takes to the stage for his final set the projection shows a close up of an elephants eye that then leads on to images of rivers clogged with garbage, gulls covered in crude oil, dead seabirds whose rotting bodies display discarded plastic debris. When you see the overhead shot of a nuclear bomb being detonated the accompanying sounds reflect it. Phillips mixes almost subliminally quick snapshots of slaughterhouse abuse and distressed lab animals with stark thought provoking messages [‘A clever virus never destroys its host’, Truth is invented by liars’] and lightning quick bursts of noise which he triggers through various pedals and handheld devices. He paces the stage manically jabbing at pedals and flicking his wrist and arms as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. As his set goes deeper and deeper in it gets louder, distressed animal sounds enter the mix and the accompanying sequences get longer until a final sickening ending and a stunned into silence audience. When applause does eventually begin its almost apologetic and embarrassed.

Its shock tactics all right but far more effective than sitting in a circle singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ or listening to Bongo telling us all how fucked up Africa is. Another Wharf Chambers evening that will live long in the memory.



 

Shards of Ordnance / Ashtray Navigations 20th Anniversary Gig

Shards of Ordnance, Wagon and Horses, 
Birmingham September 26th, 27th.

Friday:
Astral Social Club
Helm
Dave Phillips
MK9
Brut
Khost
Interlard

Saturday:
JK Flesh
Control
Smell & Quim
Con-Dom
S.T.A.B. Electronics
Shift
Family Patrol Group
Cities Prepare for Attack!
Ouroboros Collective
Am Not
Mort the Sonic
Colossloth
Transitional


Ashtray Navigations 20th Anniversary Gig
Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds
September 28th

Ashtray Navigations
Hysteresis
City Hands
Shemboid
Core of the Coalman
Castrato Attack Group


Duck and Drake, 
Leeds, 28th September

The Glamrockz



That a weekend of sonic entertainment should culminate in me and Mrs Fisher propping up the bar in a sweaty Duck and Drake listening to The Glamrockz playing Bay City Roller’s covers was, in hindsight, the perfect end to what was a memorable three days. ‘Shang-A-Lang’ may not be on my Desert Island Discs list but it was what I was singing on the bus home full of pizza and wine with the thoughts of what had just passed swimming through my head, the joyous memories already taking shape, the stories about what had passed already forming.

Those stories would include standing in a room full of blokes in total silence as Sonia Dietrich of BRUT stood totally naked surrounded by four other blokes with black sheets over their heads as the sound guy checked out what it was exactly that was blowing the fuses. Then there’s the one about the sound guy going home to feed his dog whilst we all waited for him to come back so MK9 could start. Or those Saki afternoons, or the styrofoam balls bought in Poundland that would later be used in the Smell & Quim lottery, or the long walk from Leeds bus station to the Hyde Park Picture House in glorious autumnal sunshine arriving knackered but happy to see more friendly faces, or the sight of a homeless guy asleep outside the Tory Party Conference media tent [slogan: ‘Securing A Better Future’], Stewart Keith’s alpaca burger squeezing out the side of his mouth covering his whiskers in gunk, Stewart Keith hugging a cosplay student until she said ‘enough now’ in a slightly worried voice, the guy with nothing on his feet walking down New Street, the brutalist architecture, the half built train station that will forever be half built, the drunk guy from Wakefield who looks like Sideshow Bob, the kid at Tyseley Station with a gold plated low rider push bike playing reggae on a bright Sunday morning, the sun hitting me full in the face on the train back to Leeds as Soft Machine’s Third filled my ears.

The Wagon and Horses is still there. I hope its there for ever, untouched. Some would call it a run down boozer on the edge of town whose best days are past but to me its a proper boozer with real people in it be they local couples out for a Saturday night drink or heavy metal fifty somethings returning from a gig for a few last pints before trying to find home. When events like Shards happen there’s usually an upsurge in people in black clothing and those discs that you put in your earlobes. Added to the mix this year were the Ouroboros Collective one member of whom looked like an extra from El Topo. The bald heads were there too of course for a noise gig isn’t a noise gig without a bald head or two.

Friday night was easy. Just the one room to negotiate. One band has already dropped out making it even easier. Saturday night would see more drop out but there’s still plenty to go round. So we start with Khost a twin guitar doom metal affair of which I’m no fan. Its a theme that runs through the weekend with various bands and various members, current or past, of Godlfesh doing things that include striking particularly heavy sustained guitar chords to a background created from drum machines, synths and laptops. The nadir comes on Saturday night with Transitional who despite having lots of expensive guitars can’t get one of them to work. Phil loves them as he does JK Flesh who I only manage five minutes of just to say I’ve seen them.

The talk is of whether the noise scene should have its own Spinal Tap, this after the fuses have blown ten seconds into Brut’s set. We stand in silence for 15 minutes wondering what will happen if the sound doesn’t come back on. There’s some schoolboy sniggering but Stewart Keith later says that he actually liked that silence and he has a point, total silence before the gig, 15 minutes worth, it helps clear the mind, build anticipation. To Sonia Dietrich’s eternal credit shed does nothing but stand stock still, eyes shut, contact mics covering her neck and hands, her naked body covered in mysterious scribbled runes and words. When the sound does appear she slaps and scrapes her body to the accompanying noise. The four black sheet covered males sit still with laminated messages around their neck which I don’t understand. The backdrop film shows suffering, be it animal, human or nature. She smears herself with soot and then what could be blood, she lifts the black sheets to reveal male hands into which she puts some flowers which she furthers smears with blood. A ritual and a very effective one.

MK9 makes us all feel insignificant and worthless. Michael Nine’s sets are brief affairs but have an impact which belies their brevity. He screams at us to tell us how pathetic we all are for doing nothing with our lives before bowing out with some American military comms in which an obviously panicked operative goes into mental meltdown between bursts of deafening radio static. The silence that follows is a heavy one with all of us staring glumly at the floor before deciding that drink would be a good way of cheering ourselves up.

Dave Phillips performs in the dark his body lit up by camera flashes showing him in various degrees of animation. As his noise builds to dangerous levels a strobe gets turned on and he runs around the venue throwing flyers in the air as women scream. My senses duly disorientated I sit down and try to get my balance. Which is where I stay to soak up Helm. The upstairs room of the Wagon and Horses is a far cry from the Howard Assembly Rooms of the Leeds Grand which is where I last saw Luke Youngers project. The Howard Assembly Rooms PA is state of the art, the Wagon and Horses one isn’t. The middle sounds muddy but as Helm’s analogue driven landscapes unfurl, overlapping and flooding in to each other its forgotten. I have my back to the wall, eyes shut drifting off into the oblivion of it all.

Campbell says he’s been told to go on last to clear the room. He’s had a few and some of his gear’s not plugged in. When it is theres cables going everywhere. He’s having a conversation with the sound guy and getting his guitar out which he plays with a stone. ‘I’m the pop and rock act for the night’ he says before eventually getting his stuff to work which when it does erupts. He jabs at it until its making a noise to his satisfaction then picks up his guitar and slides the stone up and down its neck. He does this until he gets bored and then chucks it down and turns to his table on which various blinking boxes are pounding away. He touches one and it makes a godawful ‘BLUUUUUURGHHH’ which anyone in their right mind would pass off as a mistake but such is Campbell’s genius he actually uses it to his advantage and within two minutes we’re all grooving to the sound of ‘BLUUUUUUURGH’. When I’m told later the next day that he did this for over 45 minutes I’m amazed. We were transported.

Saturday day I spend eating Japanese food, drinking saki and G&T’s whilst Stewart Keith writes the numbers 1 to 48 on styrofoam balls in an old pub on Digbeth Road. Various lewd and abusive and comments like ‘Suck my cock for £20’ are written on the reverse.

At the venue some more bands have dropped out but I’ve only come to see Smell & Quim and Con-Dom so its no big loss for me. Its an upstairs, downstairs evening with the fire escape that links the beer garden and the upstairs room both in use. The evening is a living Escher diagram of various drunken figures in black except for the chap out of Ouroboros.

I might have seen Colossloth but I couldn’t be sure as I’ve been drinking for a few hours. I do see Smell & Quim who are having a lottery to win some Postman’s Legs. Jimmy Savile overlooks them as they go about their filthy work. Milovan has a baby strapped to his crotch, not a real one of course and when he shakes his hips in a suggestive manner it makes the baby jiggle about making a shaking, rattling noise which runs through the whole set. He picks up those skull maracas which were last seen entering fellow Smell & Quim member Simon Morris’s arse in Manchester and bashes them together. Kate Fear whips the audience. Stewart Keith goes in for some groin screaming and gets hit on his head for his troubles. An audience member is given a microphone and screams into it. An audience member pulls Stewart Keith’s boots off. Stewart Keith tries to force a pigs head mask onto someone. A galvanized bin gets abused and played with a violin bow. Milovan is now bashing together two thigh bones that were last seen on a cow. A head appears with fake giblets dripping off it. Simon Morris has a Dr. Steg mask/helmet on that looks uncomfortable from under which he screams/sings. A walking stick appears from nowhere and gets used to stir the contents of the bin which now include the cow bones, a plastic toy violin and the head. It all starts to go quiet and they sing ‘When a Child Is Born’. Stewart Keith does the lottery and I’m amazed to see people checking their lottery cards which they’ve been given on entry. Someone wins the Postman’s Legs, someone else wins a Shannon Matthews t-shirt. I pick up a polystyrene ball. It says has the number 28 on one side and ‘Minge’ on the other.

I have a conversation about Power Electronics and the merits, or otherwise, of such with Luke Younger. This after STAB Electronics has performed a PE set that is PE down to its obligatory black t-shirt. Then something unusual happens; STAB Electronics is hit over the head whilst he has his back to the audience and doesn’t seem to know how to react. He’s actually shocked that he’s been abused and he’s showing a film of a cowboy shoving his arm up a blokes arse. The vocals are clipping and some say the sound is crap but perhaps thats the way its meant to be.

Things are much more animated upstairs where Mike Dando dives straight into the audience and punches the guy stood next to me in the shoulder sending him spinning. Con-Dom’s ultra-bleak minimalist PE pulses are the perfect soundtrack to an out of focus close up of someone sucking a limp dick. He then punches someone else sending them spinning before screaming ‘Suck this!’ and pulling heads on to his sweaty man tit. Its probably the loudest set of the night with those particularly painful Con-Dom frequencies causing untold trouble to my hearing.

Earlier the Ouroboros Collective provide light relief from the noise with some improv rock/drone. Two guitars, a drummer and someone on violin hit some peaks but are let down by a drummer whose just come from a Van Halen audition. If they can tame him they may be a match for the Vibracathedral Orchestra.

And thats all I remember. My legs ached as did my head. I retired to the bar to stroke the cat and join in some drunken conversation until it was time to avoid Sideshow Bob on the way to the taxi.

Two cities in three days, three venues, trains, buses and taxis and lots of walking about including a long hike up to the Hyde Park Picture House whilst catching up on whats been happening with Mrs Fisher. We’ve missed the first two acts but I’m happy just to sit and soak up the atmosphere in a velvet backed chair.

The main benefit of the Hyde Park is its cinema screen which all the artists make use of. Shemboid makes the best film but maybe not the best sounds. Starting with ambience and clouds he moves on to some noise, guitar frills and all out beats, the highlight of his film being a closeup of his own fizog on the big screen mouthing noises which Shemboid plays from the stage. The shots of Leeds reflected in shop store glass and bus stops late at night remind me I still have some way to go before getting home.

We’re then given a talk on the merits of ten pin bowling by the man behind City Hands. He makes some decent lo-fi noise utilising ten pin bowling samples but the picture of him holding a bowling bowl with a star in his eye as used as a a backdrop eventually freaks me out and I have to shut my own and meditate for a while.

Hysteresis sees that south coast provocateur Jason Williams find a new willing female partner to create havoc with. They make a decent racket, first with Williams on sax before playing an electric guitar with a sheet of glass that gets smaller the bits getting chucked into a spin dryer. Female collaborator [whose name I’ve forgotten, sorry] writhes around on the floor before chucking things into a kitchen sink. Yes, they’ve brought a kitchen sink along. Williams stands to his full height and drops a pile of cymbals into it before turning on the spin dryer which makes a lovely churning sound. They leave the stage and turn off the spin dryer in passing, when it eventually stops the performance comes to an end.

Which leaves Ashtray Navigations. Twenty years in existence. From Crewe to Leeds via fuck knows how many labels and releases. Its just Phil and Mel tonight but in the past there’s been many who’ve come and gone, I wonder if they’re all here today? Phil plays his guitar, Mel an analogue synth all to the sight of thousands of starlings wheeling away in LSD drenched Technicolor day-glo. They play three numbers, the last being a fine trip that gets a rousing reception. Tears are in eyes. People are happy. Phil raises a hand and thanks everybody for coming. We’re out the door and the suns still beating down.

After pizza and wine its time for a swift one in the Duck and Drake. The air is fetid and sweaty and noisy and is packed with those who’ve been out for several pints too long. Glamrockz are in the other room and they’re playing Bay City Rollers songs. All together now SHANG-A-LANG!

Saboteuse / Total Vermin / Joincey

Saboteuse - Death, Of Course.
Poot Records. CDR

Wasteroids Bazookass
Total Vermin 79. Cassette

Jointhee & Thee Acrid Lactations - TOE
Total Vermin 80. Cassette


I got some funny looks for comparing the last Saboteuse release ‘Harsh Whelm’ to Whitehouse. Whitehouse. Yes, that Whitehouse. Joincey and Jarvis doing Whitehouse. Well, not quite. There was definitely some feedback skree in there and whilst they weren’t singing about cocks and shit whilst flat arming Wasp’s some of it did have a feel for early Whitehouse. On ‘Death, Of Course’ they outdo themselves by sounding like early Smell & Quim.

Yes they do. ‘Yearning Rosebud’ is all noisy guitars, homemade instruments with bottle caps nailed to them and pain. If ever invited on to that Invisible Jukebox thing and played this I’d put the house on it being Smell & Quim.

When Joincey and Jarvis come together as Saboteuse they write songs. They write songs and record songs but not the kind of songs you’d find on a jukebox.  Its Joincey’s voice that sets them apart. It appears in many guises from softly spoken to mumbling to singing. Singing? A sort of singing. A monotone drone. An instrument of its own. When he sings he can make Jandek sound like Frank Sinatra. Here he sings in a stream of consciousness style [‘egg timer, glass albatross, egg’]. On the second track he’s recorded his singing voice and used it as a backing track in which he speaks over it. ‘You, Holding My Breath’ has some deep fried electronics on it and then we’re into Sun Ra territory, ‘Blackening Fool’ is Egyptian jazz, a Stokie Sun Ra with sleigh bells and harmonium keys. By the time we get to ‘Encapsulating Yourself Like a Celestial Bird Has a Captive Beak [Down Like a Celestial Bird]’ we have a Joincey in each channel and four minutes of wheezing scrape. The good work continues.

Joincey, in case you were unawares, is the voice and the person that links all three of these releases. His solo projects, side projects, collaborations and labels give Discog completist migraines. He gets around. Its hard to keep up.

Stuart Arnot’s mainly tape based Total Vermin label has given fringe players like Joincey a home for many a year now. I like them. It. Them. All of them. All of it. I’ve never heard a Total Vermin release that didn’t interest me in any way. When I get a Total Vermin cassette I know I’m getting something that's as far detached from what goes on in iPhone world as its possible to get. And this I like.

Jointhee And Thee Acrid Lactations sees Joincey go for the Pavarotti audience with a lung bursting falsetto on first track  ‘Halitosis is ..’  I don’t think I remember him ever stretching himself like this and after what’s gone before this seems even more remarkable. A more Fluxus approach on ‘Acid Mother Tongue/Swallowed My Swazzle’ sees Joincey joined by various bods adding animal noises and gibberish to his talk/sing voice the results being annoying/amazing dependent upon your bent/frame of mind. This Fluxus approach extends to several tracks where pots, pans, kitchen sinks and anything with a string on it gets chucked at a wall whilst singers both male and female join in the general ‘lets have a party’ vibe. Absurdist to the nth degree and wholly delightful.

My favourite of the three is Wasteroids Bazookass mainly because it was yet another Total Vermin surprise.  Another Joincey project in which he sings/talks over loops of pop songs that are going either backwards, forwards or sideways at varying speeds and in varying states of decomposition. After an opener in which the voice is replaced by a mash of differing pop songs all mashed up to provide a looping new whole Joincey finally gets into his stride with a series of songs in which he’s either singing with a hankie over the mic to a slow thud or mumbling incoherent words over ukelele strings. Taken as a whole the results are hypnogogic and masterly with Joincey’s vocals disappearing into a slurry of tape muck and melodica dirge only to emerge at intervals to utter lyrics whose meaning I know not what. One of the best things he’s ever done.


 

       
Total Vermin


Poot

SSPPPOONGG 1

Postcard from Dr. Steg

SSPPPOONGG 1
A4 Zine



Dr. Steg’s previous mode of expression’ ‘SPON’ died. When it was alive it came in many different guises, from the jawbones of dead animals to boxes with filled with detritus to zines covered in marks left by mechanical toys. Actual zines with drawings in them were there too of course as was the ongoing [presumably one way] spat with Judge Dread artist Brian Bolland. Steg’s original letter to Bolland appears on page two of the first issue of SPON’s successor SSPPPOONGG, a cut and paste sketch book that Steg put together with fellow traveler Andy Paciorek. The cover’s been updated to take advantage of the never ending conveyor belt of celebrity pedophile action which appears to be a permanent Steg fixation. Inside there’s Gary Glitter, Hitler, Iggy Pop, lots of kittens. Hunter S. Thompson, David Beckham, Steve Buscemi and a cast of hundreds all disfigured in some way so as to make them fit better in to the Steg/Paciorek world. 

SSPPPOONGG 2 [or some variant of the spelling I imagine] will no doubt feature the next batch of odious public figures found to have pasts they’d rather keep hidden or a used curry carton. The possibilities are endless.  



www.worldofsteg.co.uk