Independent Woman Records

Midnight Mines - Great Disturbances In Your Mind
I.W.R. CD005 2 x CD. 300 copies.

Fishschool - Live 1983
I.W.R. Cassette. 40 copies.

Witchblood - Maleva
I.W.R. Cassette. 30 copies.

Punctured Corpse
I.W.R. Cassette. 30 copies.

Chow Mwng - Mollip & Reptile
I.W.R. Cassette. 25 copies.






New Zealand label Independent Woman Records came in to view when I heard they were releasing a Ceramic Hobs single and then I found out that there was only going to be a 20 copies lathe cut job. A Peter King lathe cut job of tiny quantities that I have no chance of owning. Life goes on. While down in my cups I scanned more of their desirous items via the wonders of the web and found choice items by the likes of Smegma, The New Blockaders, Kleistwhar, 8 inch lathe cuts, 12 inch lathe cuts now all happily settled with owners who aren’t me. They also do cassettes in small quantities and CD’s of larger quantities which is where this lot came in. All the way from New Zealand in a Maori inked jiffy bag to West Yorkshire.

Biggest surprise of the lot is discovering that Punctured Corpse is your scourge of the south coast actual Jason Williams. My draw dropped a degree at the discovery of this fact. You have to assume that you’re in for some Head Down No Nonsense Death Metal Scribble Backed Denim Jacketed Mindless Boogie at the sight of such nomenclature but actually its all six foot thirteen of yer man doing what he likes to do best which is making an unholy racket. A good heft of it on show here too. A C55 filled to the gubbins with lots of short tracks that include lots of bottle smashing and general all out ear racket. Some of the live tracks are actually pretty stupendous with the chaos being greeted by much audience hilarity. During one live track it appears that the venue alarm went off and its to be assumed that none of the audience could decide for themselves whether it was part of the performance or not. Legend. 

Fishschool are a trio from where I know not who cant make up their minds whether they’re the Talking Heads, Slint or early Velvets. Still, it was 1983 so we can let them off. In 2019 it still sounds pretty good in an all over the shop kind of way and will prove vital fodder for those who seek out obscure bands from the early 80’s. Wherever they come from. Then I went for Witchblood which I thought might be more Head Down No Nonsense Death Metal Scribble Backed Denim Jacketed Mindless Boogie but is more aligned to what Charlemagne Palestine creates with the repetitive hammering of piano keys recorded in a lo-fi manner so as to create drones. With the addition of some much admired tape wobble I left feeling sated. Chow Mwng I’ve not listened to since risking my arm on a download a few months back and finding myself in raptures. Oh how I chastised myself and made promises not to be so harsh on the inbox. If memory serves what I got then were songs as recorded by somebody who only had access to the cutlery drawer and a bent acoustic guitar with two strings missing. This is maybe even more experimental, like something recorded in Hungary in the 1950’s by an electronic pioneer in a studio full of expensive looking equipment when in actual fact its Chow Mwng pulling sellotape, drilling imaginary holes and singing along to irritating squeaks all while surreptitiously recording his try outs in the Moog shop. Superb stuff. A man trying to make interesting sounds with whatever comes to hand and succeeding.

The release that's been played the most and the one that you are more likely to get your hands on is the double CD set by Midnight Mines. I know nothing about them except that there are two of them, Private Sorrow and Baron Saturday and that they’re described as ‘improv attacked with a primitive garage band mentality’. Apparently they record ‘spontaneous compositions’ before reworking them in the studio adding dubs, beats and the occasional synth slaver. I can vouch for their success. Disc One is a collection of their first three cassettes with Disc Two bringing unreleased material to the feast. Here you can chow down on all manner of guitar rawk beat box synth barrage burble with the occasional vocal going backwards. Like an early Ashtray Navigations going through more distortion boxes or a more rudimentary Ramleh [rock version obvs]. Vocals are few and far between and when they emerge they’re more like anguished wails than actual words which is fine by me. I found the cover intriguing; riot police breaking up a demonstration which judging by the haircuts and dress of the people involved must have taken place in the ‘70’s or ‘80’s. So why that particular image? It must have some significance for as riot police breaking up demonstrators goes its a fairly ho-um image. If you enter ‘riot police breaking up a demonstration’ in to an online image search the vast majority of returns are of recent unrest photographed up close by brave photographers not photographs taken from a building across the way like we have here. Then I saw what I think must be the reason. If you look very closely at the figure exiting the image on the extreme right they’re wearing white socks with sandals. Quelle horreur.


https://independentwomanrecords.bandcamp.com/

Neil Campbell.

Neil Campbell - Mirror Mania Ersatz Chamber
Cassette



I do admire a person who dubs their tapes in real time before sticking them in a hand daubed sleeve, sending them out snail mail with a greeting written upon the reverse of a very nice postcard. Mine was Genet’s cover of his Faber book The Balcony. 1950’s. It looks gorge dahlinks in that ‘we’re not trying that hard’ 1950’s kind of way. But this is 2019 kiddywinks. Put your iPhones down for a minute and take note. All that Whatszappening, Instagargling and Faceflogging is only going to get you so far. And while Zuckerberg makes billions from selling your data to all manner of dodgy, money obsessed scum you could be doing something like this. Making something. And not just noises made with an app on your phone. This is real. An actual thing. And not available on bandcamp. Yet. Maybe never.

Repellent Music did make it on to Bandcamp. This cassette came wrapped in a sheet of paper and was from the Campbell School of Noise. It sounded a bit like a stretched out electronic growl, someone making a low ‘ahh’ sound and treating it electronically for an hour. It morphs of course. All Campbell music morphs. There may be the faintest trace of where you began at its end but during that time you’ve visited at least three musical continents, ten musical genres, two different guitars, several effects, ten noise boxes, a KAOS pad rewired to sound like a melting star, three magpies and the pounding beta sound of several crates of dance records. Maybe in another past life he was just a frustrated bell caster?

I write this the day the tape came through the door [actually now yesterday]. Its the kind I like the best; a smooth white shell with Mirror Man written on one side and Ersatz Chamber on the other but hang on, one side is blank. Has Campbell forgotten to dub a side or did he just write the title across both sides of the cassette because he didn’t have a magic marker with a point fine enough to fit it all on one? Ah well. Let it sit there. I like it as it is.

To be honest with you I owe Campbell a review. I’ve probably not written one for over a year while he very kindly sends me things without pressuring for a review. I’ll swap this for the numerous emails I get from people who never read these pages and a week later follow up with a ‘have you had to chance to listen to my Greatest Thing Ever’. You lot can all go and shite.

Mirror Mania Ersatz Chamber Jean Genet’s The Balcony Could Be On Two Sides Of A Cassette But I’m More Than Happy With One visits several continents and the insides of the Fripp/Wilcox household where Toyah bangs away on a toy xylophone as Robert winds up the acoustic guitar for some serious head down stunted riff work. Yes it morphs. Of course it morphs. And layers. And layers. And layers. I’ll rewind it once more and tell you all about it because its new and its exciting. Yes. Exciting. While it was rewinding I started listening to Repellent Music [via Bandcamp] and got caught up in that again The whole hours worth. I should visit this page more often. There’s not much more you need really. What I really need is a cassette player that plugs in because I’m burning though batteries what with this tape only being on one side and me not having the patience to rewind it with a pencil [someone please explain this to younger readers who only have smartphones to access music]. I’m in an Alpine meadow and all the cows have bovine spongieform. Hang on. This is different. Have I only reversed halfway and pressed play. Have I got my sides mixed up? You cant see in to the cassette. Sodding white cassette shells. Now there’s some carnival music. A Parisian Merry Go Round. Now the pace is considerably slower. I’ve been sucked in to the Campbell space-time continuum where your senses are not what they were when you first entered. My mind has been taken over by Campbell. An even slower pace now, an African sounding stringed instrument gently, hypnotically plucked to an effervescent background of electronic fireworks. It does have two sides. Sodding tapes. What was I doing? Whats happened? Can I go now? I think there’s a dog barking somewhere. This is blissful. I think I’m tripping. Up.   

https://neilcampbell.bigcartel.com/
 

Laica

Laica- You Keep All Future Sunsets
Totes Format. TOTFORM#33
CDR/DL 20 Copies.


Excuse me while I fawn over this sleeve for a while; a laser cut, laser etched sleeve on hand painted, recycled cardboard thats been machine stitched to a clear plastic backing. Reverse of sleeve has rubber stamped info and there’s slight charring from the laser cutting giving it a worn, aged look and feel. The planetary like design fits in well with the title and sounds therein and if I think about its greatness for long enough my neck goes limp and I fall over through lack of oxygen.

A sleeve is nothing if the contents don’t match. Natch. So you can adopt all manner of packaging gimmicks to make your release stand out but if its covering a pile of poo the packaging is the only thing people are going to remember. See Merzcar, anything with bits of melted plastic on it and that Betleys release that was a cassette tied to a domestic sponge.

Mr Totes Format or GRMMSK to give him his proper name lifts all his releases from the ordinary in such ways; etched cassettes, recycled materials, handmade cassette sleeves  all in limited quantities and most desirous. The obvious limitations of the limited run then offset by making the release available for free via download.

Laica are new to me. It could be Mr. GRMMSK working under another project name or it could be someone else entirely. I know not. The Lacia website is of no use as its a single page with the letters of the name all linking back to the home page, an elaborate joke perhaps? Again I know not. It matters not. After spending most of Saturday afternoon with this on repeat as I did battle with the Guardian cryptic crossword I decided to listen to it on headphones at a decent volume. Which I’m glad I did as the experience was enhanced no end. You Keep All Future Sunsets is a single hour long track that is a forever collapsing in on itself wall of noise drone, wave after wave of roaring helicopter throb that at times engulfs you, that at times peaks at such a rapture that you think you cant possibly take anymore.  

The silence that follows is equally as rewarding.




Totes Format

Lacia
  

Viviankrist

Viviankrist - Morgenrøde
Cold Spring. CSR68CD
CD/DL




For my troubles I end up on the Cold Spring promo list. I indulge briefly to see whats going on in there which is hard on the peepers due to it being pitch black. It doesn’t look a happy place to be. Maybe this is where I really should be though. Listening to an 80 minute Dark Folk release that was recorded in a Swedish forest at three in the morning by people with names like Cragnomort all while trying to make sense of the current uncertain global political situation. Cold Spring does tend to lean heavily towards the darker side of life but its not all doom and gloom. There is Noise and Power Electronics to cheer you up while for night lovers there’s Dark Ambient, Ritual and all those live Psychic TV albums to indulge in once more. Their website is an enormous one stop shop for all the dark things in your musical life and if so inclined and finding myself in a deeply moribund mood I could spend a lot of time there.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was in the miserable godforsaken hell hole that is the Cold Meat Industry website. A place I haven’t been to for donkey years. I was surprised to see it at all until I discovered that the label died a death a few back and that what I was seeing was maybe a storefront of some kind. I used to listen to a lot of miserable music back in my [brief it should be noted] CMI days, lots of bands with Latin names whose releases were often described as being the very darkest Avant Garde Dark Ambient Folk Ritual that money could buy. At that time and feeling that Schloss Tegal could only get me so far I gladly soaked up lots of what Cold Meat Industry and Cold Spring had to offer and then I bought some razor blades and ran a hot bath. Thankfully I didn’t go through with it and decided instead to cheer myself up by going to the pub and starting a fight with a total stranger who was much bigger than me.

Of the promo’s that have been arriving from Cold Bath I mean Spring over the last few months nothing has really grabbed my attention but this did. It might have been the word Japanoise in the press blurb that swung it. Which this really isn’t at all. It is recorded by a Japanese person though, Vivian Slaughter or Eri Isaka if you prefer. Once of Gallhammer, a three piece ‘grating black metal’ outfit and wife of Mayhem vocalist Maniac. Both residents of Norway where its bollock freezing for much of the year. When Gallhammer went the way of all flesh Slaughter decided to pass the interminable bollock freezing Norwegian winters by disappearing in to the Slaughter/Maniac basement to record music on an analogue synth. These sessions eventually begat Morgenrøde which to these ears sounds more like Klaus Schulze than K2. There may be some ultra distorted vocals on there and some noise [last track ‘Pleasure of Confusion’ is the nearest we get to all out noise] but for the most part this is pure analogue synth burble. Tracks like ‘Cactus’ are the kind of off kilter thing Aphex Twin did so well on Selected Ambient Works while ‘Higher Minded’ is a sped up all over the shop Moroder. The title track is an eight minute minimalist head nodder, ‘Spite Spits’ all distorted beats. That time in the basement was well spent. 




Cold Spring




   

MK9/Rusalka/The Rita

MK9 - Solid Waste
3” CDR. 113 copies.

The Rita / Rusalka / MK9
Neural Operations. NO 11
Cassette. C30. 126 copies.

Rusalka / MK9 - Separate Anxieties
Neural Operations. NO 16
CDR. 200 copies.


Michael Nine is one of the few active American ‘noise’ artists that I know of still making the yearly trip to European shores. While everyone else has laid low or decided to stay at home to concentrate on ousting Trump, Nine packs up his gear, prints up a few releases to sell along the way and gets on a plane. Usually in Winter which may be for masochistic tastes or may be just because he likes the feel of cold European weather. This year MK9 and Rusalka [Kate Rissiek] did the whole tour which covered the whole of November with Sam Mackinlay of The Rita dropping in for several dates along the way. And while they played three UK dates; Leeds, Birmingham and Gateshead there was no London date which I heard was due to some stink with the locals thinking they were all Nazis or some other bullshit.

Unfortunately I had to miss the latest tour due to attending ‘The Wedding of the Year Not Harry and Meghan’. Something I mentioned while reviewing the essential, also sent by Nine, four DVD box set ‘The Pain Factory’. The above is what you saw on the merch table if you happened to make it to those shows or any of the many others they played in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy or Sweden. Except for the last show in Helsinki which was also cancelled but not for them being mistaken for Nazis. This time I think it was the airline that let them down.

I’ll always have an ear for what Michael Nine, MK9 and his label creates. This is the work of a serious thinker, someone capable of making you think, someone capable of unsettling an audience and not just by pulling out a loaded shotgun and pointing it at their heads. One of my favourite MK9 shows was a few years back now in Leeds where Nine showed a video of someone digging a hole in their back yard while Nine prowled the floor shouting unheard words in to a mic, except the camera had fallen over and it was all filmed sideways on so we had to watch it with bent necks. This lead me to believe that this was a clandestine recording of someone burying body parts when in fact it was just someone digging a hole. Or was it? I still think about this. Then there was the Gulf War video footage of Americans blowing up their own troops. Oh we all went home laughing that night. Not.

Of the three releases here I’m guessing that Solid Waste is the new one and the one the kids were scrabbling to get their hands on at the gigs. Solid waste might be an unintended pun here, solid waste being not only the shite you can see fly tipped on the sleeve art but the term medical staff use for the stuff that comes out of your backside. Either way its unpleasant. This is another Nine trip in to existential territory ‘we are just …’ with the dumpster showing the words ‘solid waste’, ‘what is it that separates each one of us from the other, most often nothing …’. Four tracks of ultra gloom electronics with one track ‘Tired Acceptance’ a drone with spoken word addition taken straight from either a self help book or a psychiatric report. ‘Sounding Wall’ is a rapid stream of electronic data, ‘Same’ is ninety seconds of disturbance.   

The Rusalka/MK9 split from 2016 has its highlights too with MK9 giving us the darker more contemplative moments to the comparatively noisy outbursts of Rusalka which are heavy on the reverb and at times sound like a squadron of Lancaster bombers heading out to sea. Sadly for me I only got to play one side of the split tape before it seized up, my aging Walkman's defiantly refusing to turn the spools. This may be what happens when you lay The Rita on tape. After trying to loosen it by various tried and tested methods I decided it too was tired of struggling to make sense of life and gave it up as a bad job. With no downloads that I know of this is one instance of the physical format fail. Life goes on. Or does it? Ask Michael Nine and Rusalka. 



MK9.org

Neural Operations

Rusalka.org

The Rita

Somewhwere where you may be able to get hold of this stuff other than Neural Operations.

Mattin

Mattin - Songbook #7
Munster Records. MR 386. LP/DL


A concept album about the Russian Revolution? Well, I could do with a heads up on that subject. Imagine having to study it though? Jeez, you could be there a lifetime. What do I know about it? About as much as I know about Mattin. I’m glad he sent me this record though as it gives me the chance to gen up on both of them. So after half an hour with Wikipedia getting my brain fried I learnt that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was actually two revolutions. Its complicated. Basically it makes Brexit look like an argument at the check out in Tescos.

It inspired Mattin to make Songbook #7 though. Mattin is anti-copyright, pro free software and ‘against the notion of intellectual property’. His label ‘w.m. o/r’ [which on perusal has plenty to tempt the tastebuds] encourages sharing and copying. He’s from Bilbao. He’s into noise and improv. He’s my kind of guy. But still I know little of him. I do know that he’s been active since the beginning of the 2000’s and that he’s collaborated with the likes of Junko, Philip Best and Tony Conrad. He’s a very busy man.

The blurb for Songbook #7 says at its very end that ‘this is a strange record’. Which after a first listen were my thoughts exactly. A collaboration between Lucio Capece, Marcel Dickhage, Colin Hacklander, Faranz Hatam, Moor Mother and Cathleen Schuster as recorded live at the Digging the Global South Festival in Cologne at the back end of 2017. Which is almost a hundred years to the day since the second Russian Revolution of 1917.
Its seven tracks all commemorate the first seven months of the Russian Revolution and are named after the months. All of them are of about the same running time [seven minutes] except for July which clocks in at just over ten minutes. While on the cover we have the defiant stare of the anarchist Germain Berton who in 1923 murdered the director of the French far right group French Action League.

Instrumentation ranges from clarinet, drums, electronics, computer, samples and various texts spoken in German and English. The first words you hear are ‘nineteen seventeen’, presumably spoken by Mattin and from there on in its a full on weirdfest with blasts of noise, cyclical clarinet drones and computer chatter being the cracker upon which treated spoken word samples are smeared thick and heavy. Its like Kraftwerk and Costes made a noise improv album with their mates while reading tracts from books on the Russian Revolution as they got into their groove. Thats the best I can do. Its pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. Which is a good thing.

There are revolutionary chants ‘There is no freedom in a normative vacuum’, the sounds of crows and garden birds, in June we get to listen to a conversation between the group; a female voice says ‘you have nothing to say?’, ‘It makes me feel really sick to see so much fascism around’ comes the reply. There are long gaps of silence between question and answer. July comes with an ever increasing volume ration and Mattin shouting ‘ELECT, ELECT, ELECT’ over it.

Each track stands apart from its neighbour giving the album a structured, songbook feel while also making it an album you’ll want to return to at a later date, if only to try and fathom it out or listen once again to the various sampled texts that litter it. Its been spun here several times, each spin revealing deeper nuance and text. ‘June’ apart its one for the noise connoisseur.

How much of this is improvised I know not. I find it hard to imagine that they took to the stage that night with out any preparation at all but then what do I know? What would Lenin have said? True revolutionaries do it noisy improv style. ELECT, ELECT, ELECT. Perhaps.



Bandcamp

Munster Records

Mattin Website

Mattin Label   

I Put my Glass of Wine on a Wobbly Mushroom

Small Seeds

Steve Beresford

Kelly Jones

David Velez

Small Seeds. Huddersfield 24th January. 2019


Small Seeds is the kind of quirky venue you'd expect to find in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin or the Harajuku district of Tokyo, a Hobbit's hidey-hole of shrubbery and half timbered walls with an incongruous tree trunk sitting jammed floor to ceiling. Strings of bare light bulbs hang from branches, a giant carved wooden eagle adorns the bar front and the tables all look like they were made by Robinson Crusoe. I trust they have a well maintained sprinkler system. Upstairs you'll find a popular pizza shop and bar, there's flyers for yoga classes in the gents and the sound system is this side of shit hot. Here we are then, at a venue that would never have existed in this somewhat dour Northern city ten years ago, all friendly and warm with my glass of red wine on a sloping wooden mushroom.

Actually not that warm. Steve Beresford keeps his winter coat and scarf on during his entire performance and I too am feeling the nip and thus keep woolly hat firmly on head. At least we won't go hungry as David Velez and [I think] his wife Lina María Velandia Pizón are cooking actual food on the actual stage. I was lucky enough to experience a Velez installation at Huddersfield University early last year, a pitch black room full of speakers playing the sounds of kitchens, mainly noisy Far East kitchens where woks are bashed with steel spatulas and cooks shout over the din, the experience a disorientating one as the sounds come at you from different angles as your eyes slowly become accustomed to the darkness. Here he's boiling a kettle as Pizón fires up the hot plate and fries some plantain. Things fizzle and pop as Velez introduces field recordings of domesticity. The queue for food at its conclusion is lengthy and takes some time to go down but everyone seems happy with what they get and retire to eat it at tables that have never entered the thoughts of IKEA designers.

Kelly Jones kneels and pours water from one metal bowl in to another. Rather sloppily at times which is a little disconcerting as she's mere inches from her laptop and other electrical gear. She pours from one to the other then clinks them together, slops some water over herself, the floor and then gets up to give someone in the audience a rock or is it a crystal? After a manipulated spoken word emerges from the laptop she begins to process the sound of rock on slate, scraping while producing powder and atmospheres that swing between dreamy and Industrial hellish. Some of the bass tones are so deep and violent that at least one audience member clap his hands to his ears, when one sustained blast actually got louder when you thought it couldn't actually get any louder I thought the PA would blow. But it didn’t. As much a ritual as sound exploration.

There's an upright piano at the side of the sizeable tree trunk with its maintenance panels removed and in front of it a table full of cheap looking machines that look like they'll make cheap sounding electronic sounds. Which they do. Beresford starts his short set with a bout of chair shoving [a bog standard chair with steel frame not one made by Robinson Crusoe] which makes you realise that all those years at school shuffling chairs around on polished floors was you making drone sounds. He then improvises on the keys, flying up and down the keyboard like Cecil Taylor in a winter coat before going in to the guts of the thing jamming the hammers in to the strings and plucking them like an recalcitrant harp. Then the table gets it. A proper table. Various noise making things held up to two mics, a mini bullhorn which he squeaks in to and places machines to. A maddening cacophony of gibbering gadgets. A radio is turned on and plays something Mendelssohn like. Things that hum are placed on the piano keys. A ghost like glowing dome makes a 'woo' sound. A tin mouse with a rasping wire tail is brought in to the action. That is 'Part 1'. We know this because Beresford tells us its 'Part 1' at its conclusion. Then he tells us that what's coming up next is 'Part 2' which is a short work using two machines that again make all kinds of peculiar sounds.

This is the first night of two from AME both celebrating a book launch showcasing their two years of putting gigs on in the town. Except the book hasn’t made it back from the printers. AME is the acronym for ‘Art Music Experiment’. Its also the Japanese word for rain, those four little raindrops you see in the middle of the ‘m’ are from the Kanji character for rain. Outside it is cold and the streets are weirdly deserted. Huddersfield is no Harajuku. I’m glad AME are putting gigs on in the town though. The more the merrier and its quicker for me to get home from Huddersfield than it is Leeds. I can’t make it for the Friday show which is at 21 Market Place. I think I’ve been there before. I’m pretty certain I saw Adam Bohman there. It has tables that aren’t sloping mushrooms.




http://amespace.uk/

Left Hand Cuts Off The Right

Left Hand Cuts Off The Right - Purge
Fractal Meat Cuts. Cassette/DL
70 Copies.

Released 28th of January

There’s plenty of shit flying around these days and the times they are indeed a turbulating but it could be worse; you could have had your head staved in which is what happened to Robbie Judkins. So while Trump tweets his childish tweets and Rees-Mogg does his best Softy Walter impersonation and the world turns to liquid shit around your ankles you can count yourself lucky that your head is still the same shape it was yesterday. How it happened I know not but as Judkins says in the blurb, Purge was ‘an album created during a time of reflection, recovery and listening following a severe brain and skull in injury in December 2017’ so while we were all wondering what to buy Timmy for Chrimbo Judkins was doing his best to stay alive. A sobering thought.

What I’ve heard of his work gives rise to much pause and thought. Ambient if you’d like to call it that but not of the structured Eno variety, this being more improv sounding with radios, field recordings and broken electronics seeping like a heavy mist among somberly struck lower register piano keys. Imagine Keith Jarrett on Largactyl improvising sadness with his left hand while his right tries for some throbbing oscillating sounds all recorded in the basement of an abandoned Detroit theatre during a full moon. That's not far off.

Purge has five tracks, some more sombre than others all of them guaranteed to put you in the place where Softy Walter’s fizog fades from view. I write this before its released because it fits in with a lot of the piano music I was listening to at the back end of 2018, Debussy, Glass, Greig, Satie. Second track Doubt & Worry has a subtle Eastern tinge, the two chord low register playing bass to a reflective upper register fling as a throbbing drone builds and builds eventually leaving all behind it. ‘Keppra’ is a minimalist two distant melodies looped slightly against each other, the sound degrading Basinski like as it progresses. ‘What Now’ is shorter, a reverberating Blackpool organ. The title track the most somber and bleakest of all. Purge will indeed purge you.


Bandcamp 

Bladder Flask

Broken Penis Orchestra and Le Scrambled Debutante Play Bladder Flask
Orgel Fesper Music/Twin Tub & Beaver.
CD. 100 copies.

‘One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met And Everybody Thought I Was Whistling’ was the splendid title Bladder Flask gave to their one and only 1981 release leaving all those who heard it [including a seemingly awe struck Steve Stapleton] flat on their backs. Its two 24 minute sides of collage combines the sounds of hammered piano keys, strummed out of tune guitars, sci-fi bloops, tape splurge, crappy preset keyboard beats, guitar noise, train whistles, spoken word samples, rattled cutlery drawers, clockwork toys being wound up, wheezy melodicas, tuneless treble recorders, clanging steel pipes, flies being swatted with rolled up newspapers, records spinning at ridiculous speeds, honking saxophones, people shouting, people going mad, spoken word samples, atmospheres of utter strangeness and beguiling entropy. A sound world that up until 1981 I doubt barely existed. All of it the work of Richard and Philip Rupenus, all of it still in possession of every ounce of its vitality. 

In 2018 The Broken Penis Orchestra and Le Scrambled Debutante poked about in the cardboard box of bits that is ‘One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met And Everybody Thought I Was Whistling’ and gave us their interpretation of it. On ‘Plays … ‘ there’s also two re-workings of an unreleased Bladder Flask track called ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’ which was intended as a United Dairies release but for some reason never saw the light of day.

Broken Penis Orchestra I’m familiar with due to their semi prolific burst of activity sometime ten years or so back where a splatter of releases left their mark on me [one due to sleeve art showing a hairy testicle in a egg cup] all of them of the painstaking cut and paste sound collage school. Cut and paste sound collage being the aural equivalent of ‘stop go’ animation the kind of work that take hours, weeks, months, lots of patience and plenty of skill to put together. Saying that its all probably done on computer now, a luxury the Rupenus brothers didn’t have at the time. Le Scrambled Debutante is Allan Zane of whom I know nothing.

These re-workings start out comfortably enough, the first Le Scrambled Debutante track kicking in with a scratched to buggery easy listening Ray Conniff/Mantovani swooning strings record over which detritus is liberally smeared. So far so like ‘One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met And Everybody Thought I Was Whistling’ and then we get the two re-workings of the unreleased ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’ and with it some clue as to why it might have given Stapleton an attack of the Heebie Geebies. I give you a dentists suction pump and the hacking smokers cough of a Selby miner combined mercilessly until you die. If you thought you could punish yourself by playing 90’s Merzbow at volumes designed to deafen have a go at the same volume with the last two tracks here. I double dare you. Broken Penis Orchestra ease you in by mixing in some French street sounds, warbly melodica, plinky piano, a lost Frenchman shouting through a Parisian fog and that coughing. The last track of all, a Le Scrambled Debutante 25 minute epic of endurance begins benignly enough with a loop of a newsreader corpsing over the story of someone launching a firework from their arse but slowly becomes one of those trapped in claustrophobic listens from which your only escape is the end of the disc or your own trembling finger upon the stop button. The sound of Hell is someone coughing up lumps of lung butter for eternity. This crept up on me at first and its only now after several listens that I’m fully able to ride this out. I have become attuned to its hideous deformities, like a prisoner who gets used to his gruel and daily thrashings I bore its weight with a stoic’s sense of duty.

When I recovered I went back to the beginning and Broken Penis Orchestra and its clatter  of broken pianos, busted springs, badly played harmonicas, monsters eating people and lost dogs and then back to ‘One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met And Everybody Thought I Was Whistling’ to marvel once more at its myriad juxtaposed sounds, the sheer unbridled joy of it all. An intriguing and delightful experience which at times is an unsettling one. A Stapleton fave of course and as fresh today as it was in 1981.

Lets hope that ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’ eventually sees the light of day. I want to hear that coughing in its original state. We deserve nothing less.

Grey Park

Grey Park - Olic banquet
Hyster Tapes. Hyster26.


Its been a while but here’s another release from Grey Park on the ever reliable, open to trades, analogue only, recycled Finnish cassette label Hyster Tapes. I’ve just been perusing their rudimentary, two page, not changed since the year dot, perfectly formed website and most of the reviews on it appear to come from me and the Bearded Wonder with a smattering of Vital Weekly and Tape Gods thrown in for good measure. This made me realize that I write a load of old shit at times and repeat myself ad nauseum. Hey ho.

Grey Park releases have been passing through these hands for many years now and I’ve never heard one that disappointed me. Packaging has always been a highlight with one release arriving in an inside out coffee bean bag, the artwork stenciled in red onto the shiny once inner, now outer surface. Olic banquet arrives in a slip of white paper with the twelve track info typewritten in glorious not computer font old typewriter font. The cassette is of course recycled and runs through most of one side most of what is, I’m assuming, a C90 before the news in Finnish kicks in. The flip is still blank and there for you to use should you choose to.

We find Grey Park on the Experimental Industrial Ambience floor of the Sound Building of Life, their sound that of someone sweeping the floor of an abandoned factory while listening to a distant 1940’s German shortwave radio thats had its last working speaker kicked in. This is best captured on the second track, a ten minute live outing from 2013, a succinct and oddly beautiful trawl through dead frequencies but let Olic banquet wash over you and you will find yourself subjected to; Chinese language tapes being stretched over capstans, the neighing [and trotting] of a horse looped in to rhythmic structures, the click of a run-off groove buffeted by lo-fi rumblings as a female voice drifts in to the ether, the clang of a dead steel triangle hit metronomically as a record is spun backwards at a ridiculously fast BPM. And on and on. A veritable panoply of odd sounds, murk and delight.

Todays news revealed that cassettes sales have gone through the roof, mainly thanks to certain popular artists making cassettes part of their release schedule. From being the dominant format 27 years ago they now account for a paltry 1% of total physical sales. Tiny numbers that will no doubt stay tiny long after a new generation of people who cant quite believe two plastic shells holding sellotape with iron filings on them can actually carry sound, has long since worn off. A part of me still likes cassettes though. I have a great affection for them and despite their obvious flaws that will remain so. And while Kylie might shift a few of her latest on cassette I find pop music a total flirt capable of living quite happily on any format with mobile phone being perhaps the mode of choice these days. In contrast, I find experimental music thrives on cassette. Find a cassette player with automatic reverse play and you can listen on a loop, the gentle click of the tape swapping side your only reminder of the outside world. Let it ever be so.


Hyster Tapes 



 

See You Next Tuesday

See You Next Tuesday #2
A4 zine w/CDR
100 copies

See You Next Tuesday #3
A4 zine w/CDR
100 copies


In the strange days between Christmas and New Year I bought three Kate Bush CD’s in Oxfam in York which turned out to be the most played music over the 2019 festive period. Me and Mrs Fisher played them in the car while coming home from York and while coming back from Scarbados a few days later. At home we sang ‘rolling the ball’ to each other while rolling our ‘rrr’s’ and theatrically mimicking Kate’s rolling of the ball as seen on Top of the Pops circa some time in the 1980’s. Oh what fun. After the 2017 festive period was written off due to both of us coming down with the flu, all we hoped from 2018 was that we both stay lurgi and hangover free and enjoy what time we had reading, listening to music and making our way through the second series of the Handmaid’s Tale. And lo it came to pass. I read Anna Burns terrific novel Milkman over the first few days, not an easy ride but a novel that makes plenty of other contemporary novels appear mundane by comparison and then I started in on my William H. Gass ‘Reader’. A man for whom Finnegan’s Wake provides light reading.

Its back to work tomorrow so I might as well gird the loins and return to the coal face by relating what happens within the pages of the above. The above being the house organ of Loxley Tapes as found in Blyth in the North East of England. I think I recounted my drive though Blyth when issue one of the above landed earlier this year [or last, as it is now] and told of the joys to be found within the North East Vibe and how the North East of England has the best people and the best countryside and the best coast in England.

Of particular interest to readers of these pages will be the TNB bootleg recording of their Termite Club gig of 2003 as recorded by a certain Michael Gillham - which you will find in issue 3. The official release of this gig - 20th Antiversary Offensive - came via Hypnogogia and sounds very different to what we have here. Which is bereft of any nuance and sounds like it was actually recorded outside the venue with the recording device held deep within the inside pocket of someones duffel coat. This does not mean that this recording is without its merits for there is something to be said in the defence of the poorly recorded noise gig, the main one being that it recreates the feeling of having gone for a piss halfway through the set as you seek respite from the onslaught.  Issue 2 contains an interview with Richard Rupenus and an appreciation of TNB’s first release Changez Les Blockuers. Not something you come across everyday.

Issue 3 contains an interminably long interview with Manchester band Cabbage and more pertinently to these pages Xazzaz. Issue 2 contains an interview with the guitarist from original Sunderland punks The Rebels whose rare as rocking horse shit single is to be found on the accompanying CD alongside a single called Drunken Christmas by a band called Red Alert which actually isn’t that bad and is definitely going to be the last Christmas single I hear until around the end of November when no doubt the opening chimes of Slade’s So Here it is Merry Xmas once again chokes the airwaves. The highlight for me has to be the three tracks by Posset that shine like shiny baubles on a xmas tree bereft of needles. Alas, due to a big gouge on the disc I was only able to rip two of the three Dictaphonic mini-classics tracks to mon computer. Quelle horreur. The CD with issue 3 also has a number of tracks by Fowl who sound not entirely dissimilar to Idles.

Someone called Arthur Peverell contributes an endless supply of stories and poems to both issues all reproduced in his own handwriting as written on lined A4 notepaper. Here’s  an example:

I was taking a bath it was raining,
My bathroom tiles are creme
The radio was playing ‘doctor Feelgood’
I couldn’t decide ‘the colour of the steam’
‘undecided by the colour’
I was looking at a fanny magazine
   
There is a lot of this and a lot of Cabbage and a lot of photos of Cabbage on stage and back stage and in the pub. There’s also a photo of a shady character stood outside a menswear shop in Amble besides lots of other stuff that I may have passed by while flicking for truth be told I found these two issues a bit of a trawl. These are big fat things, a hundred pages or more, held together by a staple in the top left hand corner. 

Now here’s the weird bit; you can only buy them through eBay. I have no idea why this should be so. Search for eBay seller mich6greg though and you will find a page where you can buy both copies of these zines, that for some inexplicable reason come with a complimentary/compulsory box of tea bags, for £11.50 each plus £5 postage.

Happy New Year.

As an aside; although the TNB recording is a bootleg it does have official status.





 

Max Nordile

Max Nordile - Grey Material
No Label. Cassette.

Max Nordile - MONK/Solstice
Independent Woman Records. Cassette.

Vol - 2
No Label. Cassette.

Nothing Band - Descension/Digestion
Decoherence. DECO-09. Cassette/DL

Nothing Band - Anarchy 99
F 32. Cassette.

Breeze - Fresh Whiffs/The Guilty Baby
No Label. Cassette.

Uzi Rash - We Live on Trash
Freedom School Records. 12”

Uzi Rash - Coreless Roll Can-Liner
1234 GO! LP/DL 
 
Wet Drag - Work Drag
Wacky Wacko. WW08. 7”



Arriving just before Christmas 2018 this pile of goodies from Max Nordile may not only be the second best Christmas present I got it may be the reason I keep this blog from turning in to a digital mausoleum.

Yes, while in my cups I have intimated to those close at heart that 2018 may well be the last year that Idwal Fisher continues in its present format. I’ve been doing it for ten years now and will soon hit 500 posts and while I still enjoy hearing new music I was becoming just a tad bored of spending the start of most evenings politely responding to emails containing press releases and links to Drop Box saying thanks but no thanks. A part of me will forever be Old School and all that digital gubbins is nothing but whisps of smoke and ephemeral mirrors. Its there but its not there and besides I fancied putting some ideas down on paper and writing me some fiction. One problem; I have no ideas and to be a writer of fiction you need ideas. I’ll leave all that up to Mrs Fisher who seems to be doing quite well with it.

Six cassettes, an LP, a 45 RPM 12” and a seven inch single, in a box, from California at an eye watering cost to Max Nordile of nearly $40 blows all those Drop Box links into last weeks food waste bin. Nordile has done this to me before but never at such a cost and so extensively. I feel humbled and rejuvenated. For now the fiction’s on hold. Here comes more weird stuff.

Another big plus is that Nordile just sends his work out of the blue, no email before hand [which I’m sure he has access to] or dreaded Drop Box link, just a dashed off hand written note explaining what he’s sending and that's about it. It doesn’t get any simpler. Press play, enjoy.

So instead of ruminating about whether to jack the blog in I spent the days between Christmas and New Year, those indeterminate, indistinct days where the quality of daytime television improves only ever so slightly and no bugger knows what actual day it is anyway, soaking up the Nordile vibe.

All of the above contain Nordile in some shape or form, from Uzi Rash and Wet Drag [both on the verge of mutant punk like emissions and defunct since 2012/13] to his now more recent solo experimental/improv explorations and collaborations. Solo stuff like Grey Matter which is Bailey-esque scratchings and MONK/Solstice [the Solstice side being a live recording from earlier this year], pure experimentation and improv par excellence with guitar, sax, shakers and tin cans all getting a look in, the atmosphere being a mesmeric one of constant rolling guitar trash flux, jitter and roll. Weirdly engaging.

Vol. is Nordile sparring with Morrison Magic with two live sets of guitar/sax improv the length of each bout on the Burlington side determined by the setting of a kitchen timer that goes off regularly at around the sixty second mark much to the amusement of those gathered. The Live at Octopus side is more of a full on shriek-a-thon with added shouting but no kitchen timer.

Breeze is Nordile collaborating with Jackson Blumgart with Blumgart adding deeply busted and buried rhythms and TNB like scrapings to Nordile’s blustery sax. All this recorded to one very far away condenser microphone. That’s Fresh Whiffs, The Guilty Baby runs to two sides and appears to be a live track again recorded to a single mic this time kept under a thick woolen blanket for the occasion. Here spacey vocals and theremins find themselves wandering into all out noise territory and all to good effect.

The Nothing Band is actually Nordile alone but under a band moniker. Why not? On Anarchy 99 he ups the sax skronk with some truly wondrous vibrations while filling out the sound with trumpets and saucepan abuse not forgetting the slide and swipe of his electric guitar. Its that sax sound on side two that shows Nordile really getting to grips with the thing producing squeals within the notes that somehow sound unreal. And the sneezing. Nordile [or someone in there] sneezes a lot. Whether this was intentional or not [or maybe it was whiplash] I guess I’ll never know.

All this growing from the ashes of Uzi Rash who appear to have been some kind of floating collective that started out [at least on this evidence] playing tribute to Doo-Wop, the Monks and Jonathan Richman before morphing into a harder edged ur-punk outfit and an LP on Oakland punk label 1-2-3-4 GO! Records [the first side of which has the most dead wax I’ve ever seen on a record - a good half at least]. There’s evidence on Youtube of Uzi Rash playing sweaty twenty minute sets that end with Krautrock like versions of The Doors ‘Break on Through’, this when Uzi Rash were down to three; a drummer, bass player and Nordile on nasal-y vocals and mini keyboard. The pick of the two here is ‘We Live on Trash’ from 2010, an A4 insert for cover and six tracks with titles like Turn on Yr Love Lamp, I Saw U, Maypole and I’m a Trash Bag, some of which may be covers such is their likeness to 50’s and 60’s vocal groups and erm The Country Teasers. ‘Coreless Roll Can-Liner’ is what you might call more normal. Nothing wrong with that but a testament to how far Nordile has come in his mission to break free from the shackles of structured musics in to more experimental and improvised areas.    

Tracking this stuff down is the hard bit. Nordile has a Bandcamp page:

Nothing Band

And a Big Cartel page:

Max Nordile

He could be on Facebook. I’m not.

You can find the New Zealand label Independent Woman Records here:

Independent Woman Records

And Decoherence here:

Decoherence

Discogs has a few copies of the We Live for Trash 12" going for a very reasonable few bucks. But then there's the postage. Steel yourself.

Discogs


In the meantime I’m still here. Post number 498.

Howl in the Typewriter

Howl in the Typewriter - Manifest [A Universal Declaration of Indespendence]
Pumf. Pumf 777. CD


I like Stan Batcow. I really do. I have lots of reasons to like him one of them being that he managed to survive a stint in the Ceramic Hobs which, when you learn that Stan never touches a drop of John Barleycorn is nothing short of remarkable. He’s quietly run the Pumf label for many, many years now with little in the way of recognition and he used to send me his Godspunk compilations until he either a) got fed up of my negative reviews of them or b) got fed up of me. I haven’t heard from him in a very long time and thought that maybe he’d fallen out with me which, with hindsight and knowing Stan a tiny bit, is very un-Batcow-ish of him. How silly of me. Howl in the Typewriter is Stan’s also long running with little in the way of recognition solo project. I remember listening to a Howl cassette on a train going somewhere a long time ago and marveling at Stan’s ability to weave samples of TV commercials and humdrum conversation in to his songs, something that he’d bring with great effect to at least two Ceramic Hobs albums.

After listening to Manifest I now realize that me and Stan have even more in common; a genuine loathing of advertising, consumerism, Capitalism and greed. For Manifest is Stan’s rock opera cum concept album regarding the nefarious ubiquity of advertising, consumerism, Capitalism and greed and probably lots of other things too. The way such things pervade and sully our quotidian experience, the way such things reduce everything and everybody to a marketable commodity.

Advertising is hard to ignore and easy to hate. Personally it makes commercial radio and television unbearable for me, it makes news media websites a pain to load and while technology has led to more tailored and specific advertising I still think all those hours of having sat through Tampax and Head and Shoulders adverts are hours I have wasted and could have spent more creatively. Top of the Grinding My Gears List comes car advertising. Do people really see an advert for a car and think to themselves ‘you know what I think I’ll go out tomorrow and spend 15K on the new Golf’ and why do adverts for cars always show happy people driving around deserted streets on their way to the shops or pulling surf boards off the roof rack in deserted coves when the reality is the roads are full of potholes and psychotic meatheads trying to overtake you in a 30.

I’m sure Stan feels the same way. Over the last several years he he’s been compiling all the songs that make up Manifesto and has finally in 2018 put it all together into one big long track. And while I applaud his sentiments entirely I found sitting through this hour long magnum opus a bit of a tough listen. This mainly due to all manner of people contributing what becomes the theme of the release; the of repeated mantra

We don’t fucking want
What your trying to fucking sell
Shove it up your fucking arse
Then fuck off and go to hell

Which is hardly Bob Dylan but you get the sentiment. Stan’s guitar playing is all buzz and saw, many tracks are built on a drum machine pattern and are littered with samples of mundane television adverts for breakfast cereals, detergents, fabric softeners, buy one get one free offers, he sings/talks about the uncaring nature of big business and every heartfelt bit of it resonates with me but as an item of listening pleasure I found it tough going.

Stan’s biggest problem is that without advertising he’s struggling to spread the word. Oh the irony. I’m here though and I’l tell you that for £5 [including p&p] you get a delightful gatefold CD sleeve with booklet and two stickers one of which is a picture of a burning cigarette with the word ‘idiot’ running through it. Stan’s next project perhaps?

http://www.pumf.net/

The Crazy World of Post Office Counters

On Saturday morning I entered a deserted Brighouse Post Office to post two items one of which was a jiffy bag going to the Republic of Ireland that Mrs Fisher had entrusted me with. I approached one of two female counter staff who were sat next to each other and was asked to put my first item on the scale, this being the local weekly newspaper that I send my mother. This passed with no remark. It wasn’t until I placed the package bound for the Republic of Ireland on the scale that I entered a bizarre nether world where commonsense has been replaced by random dice thrown diktat dreamt up by persons unknown who no doubt command large salaries and have never sent a package to the Republic of Ireland in their lives.

Counter Staff Person 1: What’s in the package love?

Me: I’m not sure. Some earrings I think.

CSP 1: If you’re not sure we can’t post it.

Me: They’re definitely earrings.

[CSP 1 now begins to feel package with both hands kneading it like its putty in need of restoration before passing the package on to CSP 2 for her opinion. Whilst all this is going on I offer to ring Mrs Fisher and ask her whats in the package. My call goes straight to message].

CSP 1: You see love if its jewelry you cant post it to Ireland.

CSP 2: [While doing the putty revitalization thing] There’s two boxes in here, it could be earrings.

[Package now goes back to CSP1 who picks up the hand held slot device that determines whether the package for posting is a letter or a parcel. The package fits through the letter slot.]

CSP: Put it back on the scale love I’ve forgotten the weight.

[I put it back on the scale].

CSP: Because it goes through the letter slot it can go letter rate so it doesn’t matter whats in it.

Me: This country is fucked.

The Pain Factory

The Pain Factory
Influencing Machine Records & Spastik Visuals.
4 x DVD. 350 copies.



Thanks to Michael Nine Christmas has come early this year. I may have had to miss his Leeds show with Rusalka due to attending the wedding of the year [clue: not Harry and Megan] but this 4 DVD, 13 hour trip down memory lane [and several other releases that I’ll come back to later] has more than made up for it.

The Pain Factory was a public access TV Noise show and the work of Michael Contreras. It described itself as ‘A Live Experimental Noise Television Program’ and was broadcast out of the San Fransisco Bay Area area from 1995 to 1997. For me these were the golden years of noise. A time when I was getting in to noise in a big way, soaking up as many names and releases I could get my hands on. Lots of those names appear on these discs.

Calling it The Old Grey Whistle Test of Noise, Industrial and Experimental music wouldn’t be too far off the mark; a couple of live performances in the studio with the odd [literally] experimental film, footage of live performances, band videos and idents that feature the words The Pain Factory cut into a forearm with a razor blade. No Whispering Bob though, for that we can only be thankful.

Because these were the days when noise came all wrapped up in anything death, sex, blood and violence related we have bands like The Amputease, a trash noise group whose live set is littered with all the gory bits from once banned video nasties and Nihil one member of whom gets his bare back whipped raw by a dominatrix, then there’s the clips of Harvey Kietel shooting up in Bad Lieutenant, or autopsy footage. Flyers for The Pain Factory contain images of severed heads. Those were the days.

Not that I’m familiar with every single project/band/noise artist on these discs. Plenty are unfamiliar to me but when I see the words Killer Bug my knees go weak and even weaker at the sight of a very young Kazumoto Endo working a table top of noise boxes, whipping himself into a frenzy while doing so. There are so many highlights its hard to know where to start and seeing as I’m only halfway through this set there will be plenty more to come but so far we have; Macronympha destroying everything in sight with one half naked female band member visibly distraught at the process and having to leave the performance, The Haters doing the stapling CD’s to a car tyre thing, Crawl Unit using cassette tape and radios to make some wonderful noises, Fin with an aerosol can taped to his foot and masking tape over his mouth, Rotten Jesus an improv noise band making a hell of a racket with a drummer wearing a ‘Kill Everyone’ t-shirt and an as ever unsettling Death Squad video with a straight lift from some Gulf War military comms where an armed helicopter pilot kills his own troops. Most enlightening for me is the first sighting of long running San Fran pranksters and anti-art visionaries Bige City Orchestra with a puppet show noise set piss take complete with a talking cassette guide.

The Pain Factory ran to 13 episodes all of which are here barring episode eight which was a straight showing of the notorious [supposedly] Japanese snuff film ‘Flower of Flesh and Blood’ which brought the station the not unexpected torrent of complaints, something they appear to have reveled in. According to the blurb Michael Contreras is the only person on earth with extant tapes of The Pain Factory and has spent the last two years digitizing it. Apparently none of this has appeared on the internet before making seeing this for the first time like coming across the mother lode of noise and weird shit. I love it. If only I could have picked up The Pain Factory in West Yorkshire. My life would have been complete.

This being the mid 90’s the studio special effects are primitive compared to today's technology, blue screens and two cameras giving us overlaid images of burlesque dancers, Chinese martial arts films and gore but if anything this only enhances the feel of the period and despite the rare horizontal hold/VHS flicker the picture quality is superb. Contreras’s work has not been in vain. I for one take my hat off to him and you should too.

Half way through disc three I got to wondering what a 2018 version of The Pain Factory would look like? It would no doubt look very different. Times have changed considerably in Noise World and while there’s still plenty of people making weird noises the transgressive and sometimes confrontational nature of Noise [and with that I’ll lump in Power Electronics] has all but disappeared. We live in more enlightened times, your autopsy footage is old hat and belongs in the past, your footage of a vet giving a horse a nasal probe is meaningless [this courtesy of Dr Crystal Mess ... yes, me neither]. Female Noise/Experimental artists are thin on the ground over these four discs [I think I’ve counted three so far] but much more common now. Go to a live experimental/noise gig and the chances are that half the performers and half the audience will be female. That doesn’t mean we cant enjoy what has gone before. There’s over 13 hours worth here to explore and explore you must, whether its as a nostalgic or as someone curious as to what was happening in Noise in the mid 90's.

After all this I’m getting that itch again. I might even dig out some Macronympha and give that a whirl. The ideal Christmas present as they say at this time of year.







http://thepainfactory.info/

 

Candura

Candura - /I
Grensun Records. GSR032
Cassette/DL.
100 copies.


Me and Mrs Fisher were in Lisbon in October watching wheezing American pensioners coming to terms with Lisbon’s ridiculously steep and narrow streets while in search of custard tarts because there’s nothing more rewarding than a custard tart in the sweltering heat. We stayed in an apartment near the Gulbenkian where we went one night to hear Mahler’s First Symphony being performed. We ate salt cod, drank excellent Douro wines and watched Happy Valley on a big fuck off telly because we could. I love Lisbon.

I mention this because today I’ve been sent an email by Pedro who is one half of a band called Candura. They’re from Lisbon and they describe themselves as 'Black Metal/Noise' and while I’ll not normally go anywhere near anything with ‘Black Metal’ in the title I will if its got ‘Noise’ in it. So while I caught up on my emails Candura droned on in the background and then in the foreground as they caught my attention.

Is it ‘Noise’ or is it ‘Black Metal’? This was the thought going through my head as I typed up catch up emails. Or is it another Sunn O))) tribute band? Sunn O))) and their ilk do nothing for me and if I ever want my flares flapped by waves of infrasound for three solid hours while standing shoulder to shoulder with lots of long haired males doing the slo-mo head bob I’ll let you know. But this intrigued me.

I have to admit to not listening to much Metal these days, in whatever shape or form it comes in but when its been mangled to sound like its halfway to a noise/drone set then I’m all ears. Of the two tracks on this cassette/dl I much prefer the longer almost half hour workout which is a guitar climaxing over a constant wash of fuzzy noise. With lots of screaming/anguished wailing that in itself becomes part of the constant wash of fuzzy noise. But is it Metal or is it Noise? And does it really matter? Comparisons with Ramleh [in either PE or Rock mode] wouldn’t be wide of the mark either. So maybe that’s why I’m drawn to it.

Whether I’m supposed to listen to this while typing catch up emails or laid naked on a black granite slab with a recently dead chicken on my chest is another question altogether. 

 





https://candura.bandcamp.com/releases

http://greysunrecords.storenvy.com/products/24281667-candura-i-gsr032

Robert Ridley-Shackleton

Robert Ridley-Shackleton - Stone Cold Crazy
Crow Versus Crow. CVC010
Cassette/DL 50 copies.



I saw Robert Ridley-Shackleton at Tusk and yet I didn’t see him. I saw him because you can’t miss him, he’s like a night shift Dave Lee Roth in Versace. I didn’t see him because he performed in one of those little pod things that can only fit five people in with any degree of comfort but I did hear him. I was having a cup of tea in the foyer when over a violent blast of electronic noise I defined the odd ‘fuck’. By all accounts [The Bearded Wonder’s] his performance was one of those life enhancing experiences that makes you see the world differently from there on in but that might have been the tea or the view or the camaraderie which were there in abundance. I’ve heard some of his work before; wonky songs sung into a Dictaphone, lots of scuzzy lo-fi noise, lots of stream of consciousness and lots of cardboard. Why the cardboard? I have no idea. Its his thing, that's why they call him The Cardboard Prince. He sent me some of his cardboard once and it was very cardboard-y, torn bits with Cy Twombly dashes on them. I liked it/them. I liked the spontaneity of it/them. I like the spontaneity of Robert Ridley-Shackleton. He’s very prolific dontcha know. Bits of cardboard with Cy Twombly dashes on and noise. Its a winning combo.

On paper he’s the Filthy Turd trying to get his head around a song as heard through a gramophone horn playing a very scratched and cracked Edison cylinder. The six tracks on Stone Cold Crazy are all mini classics of a sort in a Robert Ridley-Shackleton world where there’s lots of Robert Ridley Shackleton to go around. Stand out track is ‘Bury Me’ with its Harlem Shuffle Honky-Tonk piano which is probably a toy piano getting the one finger on each hand hammer treatment amidst a blizzard of white-ish noise. Not all is sung though, not all is Prince [via the cardboard]. At the start of ‘Yol 4 President’ [best song title this year] you get a sarky ‘pardon me for bloody well breathing’ and a one sided conversation about video games, all to a background of whirring noise and cutlery drawers being rummaged.

While I don’t doubt that The Cardboard Prince does write actual songs I’m more than happy living with what I’m assuming are reams of stream of consciousness lyrics/thought processes pinned to noises generated by broken bits of electronic gunk, V-Tech’s and Dictaphones. Its a winning combo.

How much of this you cant take in one go is up to you. Its not exactly easy listening but it does involve you. You cant help but feel you’re a part of someones world when hearing this. A cardboard world full of Cy Twombly dashes and songs to make your ears ache.




https://crowversuscrow.bandcamp.com/

http://crowversuscrow.blogspot.com/

https://cardboardclub.bandcamp.com/