Jinglish

I have an old t-shirt that at the time of purchase I thought was adorned with Japanese characters, which upon wearing instantly transformed my thirty year old self into a cool dude who was down with the kids. When I bought it I knew not of the Japanese alphabet and had no inkling that the written Japanese language consists of three alphabets; one borrowed from the Chinese [Kanji], a basic language that everybody learns when they start school [Hiragana] and the one used to translate foreign words and names [Katakana]. The t-shirt I bought had characters on it that I now realize looked like Katakana but weren’t. Katakana are the characters you see on those exotic looking OBI strips that Japanese import LP’s and CD’s have wrapped around them. I discovered my t-shirt wasn’t true Katakana when I wore it to the MOMA in New York one summer and the girl on the desk, who happened to be Japanese said to me ‘You do know that the writing on your t-shirt is meaningless don’t you?’ I admitted that I’d bought it because I thought it looked good and that it transformed my thirty year old self into a cool dude who was down with the kids and that no I didn’t know it was twaddle and thank you very much and excuse me while I adopt an expression that conveys bemusement, forced jollity and grateful thanks.

The reason I mention this is because the Japanese do the same with their clothing. Walking Japanese streets is made all the more enjoyable by reading what it says on peoples clothing.

And its not like these things just got lost in translation which is easy to do. With the Rugby Union World Cup and the Olympics arriving in Japan in the not too distant future the authorities are now realising that a lot of their English signs make no sense at all and are reassessing them - ‘lost and found box’ as The Forgotten Center anyone?

So people wear clothes that have things written on them that make little or no sense at all but which at the same time are slightly surreal and endearing. Things like;

Remember The Name
Happy Life With Little Pop
Hair Make Angelica
Nothing Behind
New Entries, Older Entries
The Opening of Course

And my favourite from this latest trip;

Advice Below

This jumbled English isn’t just the preserve of items of clothing though. The following are actual names of retail emporiums:

Episode of Custard Pudding
The View of Untitled
Rope
Patisserie Tooth Tooth

I’ll leave it to you to work out what they were selling and no Rope didn’t sell rope, it was a female clothing store.


This mistranslation and surreal juxtaposition of English words by Asian countries is well documented and shows the difficulties in translation and how easy it is to be misunderstood. If all you have to rely on is online translation software or people who think they’ve mastered a second language but have yet to grasp the finer nuances of it there's always going to be something not quite right. Still, until the software becomes more accurate or people do we still have the enjoyment of seeing some of the following:

[PS That top picture isn't mine I nicked it off the internet though it does give a good example of what you can expect to see]

Salford Electronics

Salford Electronics - Destruction
Hospital Productions. HOS-608-COL
12” clear vinyl. 300 copies.


In 2004 the BBC decided to move its Northern services to Salford. I heard the screams from here. Worried hacks who had never been further north than Watford in their entire lives began to wonder if this was some elaborate joke and hoped beyond hope that Salford might be a forgotten suburb of South London. It’s not. Its a suburb of Manchester if you didn’t know and it’s as Northern as black pudding and Les Dawson.

I was there recently and purely by accident. This due to getting shunted off the M62 thanks to late night road works as me and Campbell made our way back from a Sleaford Mods gig in Liverpool. Me thinking I could make it without the sat nav but having to dig around for it in the glove box while parked up in an industrial estate at midnight, both eyes on the surrounding area wondering whether we were going to be set upon by the ladies of the night or drug dealers. The sat nav eventually took us home through Prestwich which at midnight was still lively but showing no sign of Mark E Smith who was then very much still with us.

Those BBC employees now firmly grafted into Salford will have hopefully had their fears allayed and found plenty to recommend it. Those BBC employees who may once have thought Salford to be the bum hole of the North may have been surprised to discover that the Salford Quays, where they’re now based, does a passable resemblance of Dusseldorf’s own redeveloped dockside and while I’ve not found any Frank Gehry architecture on my online travels there’s more than enough shiny new buildings and restaurants to keep even the most home sick Londoner interested. That’s not to say that Salford is all £15 cocktails and tempura tripe but at least it shows that that it isn’t all cobbled streets and cars on bricks.

When the Boomkat blurb promoting ‘Destruction’ appeared you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Salford was indeed a post apocalyptic, rubble strewn wasteland. A grim North, a land filled with boarded up pubs, shabby shopping arcades and shuffling drug addicts, feral kids in fear of no one and random graffiti. The discovery that this is not entirely true means that the black die cut sleeve that this record comes in represents either the blackest of Salfordian black holes or the close up of an inside of a pie. Its your choice.
 
After a CD release and much activity on Bandcamp we now have a first time appearance on vinyl for Salford’s finest exponent of dark electronica. There’s a case to be argued here for establishing a new genre; ‘Grim Electronica’. Coming from someone steeped in the North and working out of the ashes of The Grey Wolves it feels right. The mood is a decaying industrial Ballardian one, concrete landscapes littered with run off groove fluff and creepy menace, pummelling urban beats over distorted military communications and the sampled voice of someone telling you to ‘think for yourself, question authority’. There are smoother rides and layers of synth wash but you still feel like you’ve spent all night on that industrial estate. The remixes are pumped up versions of the title track, maintaining the spine of the original while chucking in all manner of sonic detritus. Thank you Vatican Shadow and Ancient Methods.

Mood music is a derogatory term but one I find useful. If your mood should mirror that of crumbling social housing, poverty, intimidating tower blocks and patched up tarmac roads then Salford Electronics has the soundtrack for you. Just don’t play it to BBC employees.

https://salfordelectronics.bandcamp.com/

Craven Faults

Craven Faults - Springhead Works
Lowfold Works. 12”/DL

Craven Faults - Netherfield Works
Lowfold Works. 12”/DL


Once in a while I’ll check out the Norman Records website to see if I can be induced into going wild with the Paypal shekels. More often than not I manage to keep a hold of them what with most of whats on offer being reissues I originally bought thirty years ago and still have, or new stuff by people I don’t really care about. The main reason I don’t buy anything is usually down to me being in a continual ‘can’t be arsed buying new music’ mood. I’m in one of those ‘can’t be arsed buying new music mood’ phases at the moment. A lack of time, a lack of space [I don’t buy digital ya numpty] a feeling of buying something just to listen to it a couple of times before putting it in the rack with the rest of the stuff.

The last time I went to see Norman I came face to face with the Craven Faults release ‘Springhead Works’ and below it a Youtube video of ‘Intakes’ which is one of the two tracks on it. The magical words ‘pulsating vintage synth to soundtrack journeys across the post industrial landscapes of West Yorkshire’ roused me from my normal lethargy and had me sat ramrod straight. That bleak, black and white cover image, the minimalist design. I went all nostalgic for walks up Stoodly Pike and Greetland. I clicked ‘play’ thinking I’ll give it five minutes and twenty minutes later I’d bought both records and have been playing them almost constantly ever since.

Being a sucker for vintage synths and having an interest in anything of such a musical nature coming from the environs of West Yorkshire my interest was of course piqued. While waiting for the records to arrive [very promptly and well packed by Norman as ever - I do recommend them] I went searching for more information but came back a frustrated empty handed person. The Craven Faults website is a single page with a subscription box. No joy there. Norman talks about ‘a cloaked Yorkshire based producer’ which I’m guessing doesn’t mean the person involved goes around dressed like Batman. So at least they know a little something. Which is more than me and more than any internet search engine you care to mention. I did find an interview with the cloaked Yorkshire based producer where he/she talks about their instrumentation and how its all put together but when the talk turns to gates and sequencers and LFO’s and envelopes I’m soon fast asleep. I know the synth world is a nerdy one but for the listener it doesn’t have to be. Just put the record on, sit back and prepare to enter a world created by machines. Everything else is superfluous. 

These four sides [all one track apiece] are the spiritual home of Michael Hoenig, Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, mini symphonies of a classical synth nature where the sounds are introduced to other sounds to compliment and augment before either leaving the fray or bolstering it. My favourite track of the four is the one I first listened to with Norman; ‘Intakes’ from ‘Springhead Works’. On its first hearing I was wondering whether its gentle beat would morph into something wilder or drums would be introduced spoiling the whole thing and leading me back to my Fred Dibnah videos on Youtube but no. I was gripped. I was swayed. I was swooned and intoxicated. I was carried away on a cloud of synth bliss where far below I could see paler synth dabblers making not much but humdrum weak and insipid, easily forgotten synth music. I was in synth heaven. I was taken back to the days of my youth when the intro to Chicory Tips ‘Son of My Father’ rattled my very bones [only much later did I find out that this was a Moroder composition] and where Jean-Michel Jarre and Tomtia could be heard on daytime radio. Not that Craven Faults have that much in common with any of that lot.

‘Eller Ghyll’ from the earlier ‘Netherfield Works’ release is a bubbling sequencer feed, ‘Tenter Ground’ from the flip is Neu! after spending a month in Macclesfield, a brooding composition with a slinky bass guitar straight out of the Hook Book. Think grim tower blocks, burnt out cars and grubby kids in star jumpers playing out in their mothers court shoes, something makes a Roxy Music like sax solo except its not a sax and maybe a sampled sax, Philip Glass like two note fills filter through but always that doom laden bass. The more recent ‘Springfield Works’ is where the sound becomes purer and with it the glory of the head bobbing, driving, pulsing ‘Intakes’ and lastly ‘Ings’ with its foreboding ur-stomp over those bleak, heavy clouded moors.    

All four tracks, all four sides of these two records have rekindled my love of synth and the glory of sound itself. I look on these two records not so much as records but as children I never had. Thank you Craven Faults. Thank you Norman.
   
Bandcamp

http://cravenfaults.com/

Interview

Active Denial

 
Active Denial - What Dreams Are Made Of
Outsider Art. OA024. Cassette/DL



Its impossible to write a review of a Power Electronics release without referencing the original pioneers of the genre. Thus lots of this sounds like, this feels like and oooh remember that gig at the [insert name of crap venue in London that died decades ago] when the police were called and the bottles started flying.

If you’re reading this you probably have a favourite PE group or two or three and have a stack of releases that you go back to when the mood suits, I know I have. I also know its a genre that I revisit less and less frequently. One of the main reasons being that there’s only so far you can push PE before it folds in on itself and finds itself back where it started. In other words it can become staid very, very quickly. So while there may be female artists working within the PE spectrum [big cheer] there will always be those for whom the classic PE sound is where its at.

That sound being a bloke screaming over a pulsating synth throb about sex, death and Nazis his voice disguised by various electronic means so as to make it sound as if you’ve been physically assaulted. Put it in a cassette with a bit of far right politics or a grainy black and white image of a suicide on it and away you go.

Doing your best to put the dodgy politics to one side early PE produced some memorable bands, some memorable labels, some memorable music and became incredibly influential. No PE no Japanese Noise. Without Sutcliffe Jugend no Incapacitants or certainly not what we have today. Perhaps many others too. But this is 2019. 1982 is a long way away. We’ve been there and those who weren’t [me for one] have the internet and reissues to help them discover these original recordings. It’ll be there for future generations to find too which is probably where Active Denial come in. 

Who have supped heavily from the Ramleh cup to such an extent that they have become drunk upon it and have given us What Dreams Are Made Of. Burcorvos Leadbeater and Jack Knife being the protagonists delivering their homage to early PE from the environs of the English South coast. My money being on Brighton. After a few listens and giving this the benefit of the doubt I dare say that if I heard it in 1982 I would be suitably impressed. It has all the hallmarks of classic PE and there’s not much more to add to it than that. Best track is the slower Wish Harm and the shared vocals are actually pretty clear with either Leadbeater or Knife having the far superior delivery. Just the four tracks; Black Sontag, Smoke, Wish Harm and Myth of Madness. Chuck in a couple of samples and away you go. Lets party likes its 1982.


Active Denial

Simon Morris / Ceramic Hobs

Ceramic Hobs - Use Your Illusion III
Independent Woman Records. CD 010. CD + Booklet.
100 copies.


Simon Morris - Sea of Love
Amphetamine Sulphate


I’m thinking Simon Morris statue on Blackpool Prom. I’m thinking statue draped with used condoms, crushed and empty packets of Embassy Regal bottom half of cellophane still attached, low birthweight warnings, Ceramic Hobs song titles graffitied on to bare chest, pages torn from the works of Kathy Acker and biros with chewed ends left at the base Jim Morrison stylee, fans from around the globe arriving on the Fylde Coast in all weathers [but mainly rain] to pay their respects and have a pint in the Spoons across the road that might one day carry his name. The Simon Morris serving [eventually] bored drunks glasses of Australian brandy and non european lagers. Later a yearly festival of Hobs inspired music where singer-songwriters extrapolate Cupcakes in shutdown shop doorways while ropey bands on drugs and Lidl alcohol try to make sense of 33 Trapped Chilean Miners all this as people recite passages from Morris’s books in a mock Lancashire drawl.

Recorded at last years Tusk Festival in Gateshead Use Your Illusion III is the best live Hobs release to pass through these hands. I was there. A band that everybody was more than ready for after a day and a half of chin rubbing and musing. Morris stamped around the stage bare chested, displaying a gut of some considerable size [‘all paid for’ you used to hear down the pub while the owner of said gut stuck it out even further and patted it proudly like a man would a prize marrow].  When not sticking his gut out Morris planted one foot hard in front of the other and made as if for one killer head-butt thus helping expel his words at hurricane force. His voice is remarkable, a gnarly growly shout, his face a twisty tormented thing, his gut sticks over his black jeans like a mutant pregnancy. Rock ‘n’ Roll mate. After warbling the opening bars of a Star is Born and covering what they say is Alice Copper’s first single from 1966 [‘No Price Tag’] they fly into Shaolin Master which is still the best song about coach-potato machismo ever written [I’ll kick yer arse mate - I’m the last of the invisible white ninjas]. There’s a couple of new tracks one of which they finish with [Dog One] which is encouraging and all the hits from the ’80’s, 90’s and 2000’s’ as Morris laconically informs us. There was a new band member too, a female one playing a keyboard. The guitarist played dead when everybody else had left the stage. The rest of the band look at him as if he was daft. He probably is. When we get to ‘This Sore and Broken Blackpool Legacy’ the mood darkens and along with it a much slowed down pace. Its their longest track of the set and maybe the nearest the Hobs will get to a ‘Freebird’ or a ‘Hurricane’ except its probably about deceased band members and the putrid pull of Britain’s sleaziest seaside resort. Not that there’s ever going to be any guitar noodling here just Morris growling a moribund ‘endless’ as the funereal march makes its way down the promenade. Thirteen tracks including a killer thirty seconds worth of White Noise. Overdubbed intro includes Cheap Trick playing Dream Police [paranoia?] and an outro of what sounds like the kind of record football clubs used to make when they got to the FA Cup Final. A booklet of lyrics makes for interesting reading.

The sleeve and title are nods to Guns N’ Roses of course, a Morris obsession that  provided the framework for his previous book ‘Civil War’. It being a critique of every GNR album and album track with throwaway sex and violence accompanying each review. ‘Sea of Love’ is divided in to chapters that cover the first eight James Herbert novels, except Morris has done away almost entirely with any notion that these chapters will be about James Herbert’s first eight novels, each novel being dismissed in a sentence or two before embarking on the matter of Morris’s many sexual relationships. All of who remain nameless and most of whom appear to be married except for the cute singer in the boy band who drunkenly asks him ‘are you going to fuck my face then?’ Which came as a bit of a shock as I never knew Morris was bisexual. Or is he? Are we in fact or fiction land? Does it matter? The opening tract [pre Herbert] is a very thinly veiled attack on a well known Irish experimental film maker that is very much not fictional. I can only assume that this is Morris being antagonistic, maybe even spiteful. An interlude checking the first eight Stephen King novels describes a visit to a prostitute who specializes in domination amongst other meetings of mind and flesh. Fun, fun, fun it isn’t.

As we pass through each relationship and the drink and the drugs and the endless cigarettes and the crap pubs and the very good Spanish cafes that go with them its Morris’s mind that we get to know more than anything else. On the final page he says goodbye to his Spanish girl at the airport:

‘she holds me tight and sings Sea Of Love in my ear one last
time and she likes seeing me cry but it’s so deep it’s hurting and I look
into her kind eyes and feel the softness of her breasts and her scent
against me one last time before I go through and do the shoe and bag
scan thing, and she is stood there and we can see each other and I just
stand there for a long time and so does she, staring at each other
across the distance and sometimes waving and the tears are still
falling and she says she loved it that I was just stood there like a creep
staring and eventually I have to go and find my gate in this huge
place and we made plans for another visit each way but she knew I
would find someone else and I knew she would never leave that man …'
In and amongst all that casual sex and alcohol is Morris trying to make sense of the death of one time Hobs member Calum Terras. Its a short passage but its central to the book. All that sex and alcohol is just stuff that happens. This books central theme feels as if its more concerned with death than sex and booze. That he can write with such tenderness in and amongst all this nihilism makes the book even more depressing. Like Morris’s previous Amphetamine Sulphate publications Civil War and Creepshots [apparently an ongoing Arthouse sequence], Sea of Love is a slim tome but one that carries much weight.





Amphetamine Sulphate




Independent Woman Records

Mark Wynn - Normal Tea

Mark Wynn - Normal Tea
CD + Zine/DL
Desert Mine Music



We left Mark Wynn supporting Sleaford Mods at the Leeds Irish centre in what must have been 2016. A couple of Harbinger Sound LP’s crammed with Wynn’s punk-ish musings on life spurted on to the scene around the same time and then not much since. Those two LP’s, ‘Singles - But They’re Not Really Singles I Just Sent Them To The Screen And Said They Were Singles - Singles’ and ‘More Singles - But They’re Not Really Singles I Just Sent Them To The Screen And Said They Were Singles’ and that particular gig were one of the highlights of the year - I recall a bare chested Iggy thin Wynn, a grape eating Wynn, a tiny tot tiara wearing Wynn, an all over the stage one man band Wynn who sang along to a cassette player and went down well with the ‘what the fucks he on’ eager to get to the front Sleaford Mods fans.

Wynn’s one man punk-ish journeys encapsulate all that was good about the original punk scene and those lonesome troubadours who wrote songs about chip shops, ill fitting shoes, girlfriends whose breath smelt of parma violets and existential angst. And here it is in the 21st century your direct route back to when people just went and did that without worrying about what they’d look like in HD and which hashtag to use. In a world where my inbox fills to overflowing everyday I herald the arrival of a Wynn zine/cdr combo as much as I would an abandonment of Brexit.

Normal Tea [Normality?] is another one of Wynn’s self released hand written zines with a CDR stuck in the back except this one has printed lyrics to most of the songs and not much in the way of pictures of Wynn pratting around in a park in York somewhere with a parasol while gurning funny faces into the camera. All that has gone and with it the songs about girls he fancies in Age Concern and Bobby Gillespie. The set up is as before; raspy guitar, overdubbed drums or tambourine, added vocals or spoken asides, one track sounds like it was recorded by an actual band but its easy to be mistaken in Wynn World where he does a lot of talking to himself anyway, oh and the songs are bit darker. Out go the songs about charity shops and Battenburg and in comes some introspection. The songs can be equally as raw with ‘Cashmere’ apparently invoking the wrath of the digital distributor who declared it unlistenable [‘I don’t know what they’re talking about I’ve listened to it hundreds of times’]. The one real catchy tune with a recognisable Wynn like plucked chord progression is ‘Speel-Berg-Shrugs-Agen’ with much of the rest being filled with plenty of strummy guitar buzz. All twelve songs chip in at just under the twenty self explored minutes mark. 

Signs that the times they are a-changing come on ‘Bent Heel Shoes’. Wynn has a conversation with a barman who asks him why he isn’t drinking ‘Markie, what’s with all this abstinence thing going on? Will it be lasting long? Any Problem? And then in ‘Normal Tea’ ‘Would you like a drink?’ ‘I don’t drink. Thanks for asking though. And I hope you didn’t read that bit in the lyric to Bent Heel Shoes’ and then ‘I want some herbal tea, I’d like a peppermint tea’. So that’s Wynn off the booze then. Perhaps the most revealing is ‘The Centre of Which is Not Here’ which has these added lines which aren’t actually in the song ‘Must I defend myself in this way? If not why am I writing this? Am I still trying to unlock me? Why have I stopped answering my questions?

His song writing is as strong as ever, as his delivery, a spoken word sing-talk thing with just the hint of flat northern vowels. Thankfully his humour and spirit lives on as with ‘Delicious’ which is a song about someone daring him to write a song with the word delicious in it. ‘No, My Love is Like a Bad Medicine’ reveals a finger picking spoken blues which reminds us that Wynn is actually a very good guitar player who has long since left that gig behind deciding instead to be Yorkshire’s Ray Davies. On tea.





Mark Wynn Bandcamp

Desert Mine Music

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.