The New Blockaders

Various Artists - Changez Retravaillé
Ricerca Sonora. RS7. 3 x CD

The New Blockaders - The Pulp Sessions
Menstrual Recordings. LH17. LP on clear vinyl.
250 copies.




Changez Retravaillé is the three CD, thirty track compilation that pays homage to The New Blockaders first and most influential 1982 album ‘Changez Les Blockeurs’. Its also the one that Howard Stelzer took displeasure with in a review that appeared via Vital Weekly. Stelzer’s unhappiness stemming from the fact that we’ve had enough TNB tributes already and that some of the contributions either sound too much like the original source material or too much like themselves, Nurse With Wound being the biggest culprit for offering up a contribution, hot on the heels of an an entire LP’s worth of the same, that to his ears sounds exactly like the original.  Stelzer has a point but only up to a point and this is certainly not a ‘pointless’ release. I’m not sure what the remit was here, maybe it was just to ‘retravaillé’ that being to rework or maybe there wasn’t a remit at all but we all know why we’re here, even if it doesn’t mention it on the sleeve, this is a tribute.

Then you have to remember that some of those contributing can punch their weight; Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, GX Jupitter-Larsen, this isn’t ‘My Best Mates and his Best Mates Knocked Together in Three Weeks Tribute to Changez Les Blockeurs 3 x cdr Wrapped in a Beethoven Symphony Manuscript Box Set Limited to 50 copies Chucked Together Piece of Shite’ and while not everybody has a slot on a shelf in Tower Records Shibuya all are respected artists. Talking of which I quite like the fact that Thurston Moore’s five minutes of string scraping and musical box twanging is one of the best tracks on here but that doesn’t mean I don’t like Nurse With Wounds track any the less for it not being a mind bending slice of outré sonics thats the best thing they’ve done in thirty years. Chances are that if you like any of the 30 artists/bands appearing here then there’ll be very little that disagrees with you.

For my own amusement and self satisfaction I divided these 30 tracks into four loose categories:

1 - Those that sound like the original recording.

2 - Those that sound nothing like the original recording.

3 - Those that sound like the original recording has been worked in to the contribution.

4 - Those that try to recreate the original recording.

That means that The Prestidigitators offer up a haunting track of leather oar strap twisting, groaning and contracting materials that would be a ‘4’ on the list. The New Movement [obvious TNB acolytes and a shoo in for this comp] who I reckon had thee most wonderful time trying to recreate the sounds of ‘Changez ..’  in their own inimitable style, i.e. lots of junk getting chucked around. Another ‘4’. [That nobody has yet to ascertain the true ‘instrumentation’ used on ‘Changez …’  and that nobody has yet managed to recreate its disturbing, fearsome sounds is something to ponder here]. K2, Toshiji Mikawa, Veltz and Merzbow are all saved for an ear splitting finale that sounds just fine and dandy to these ears. Daisuke Suzuki sifts through a wooden box full of knitting needles while those weird howling sounds from ‘Changez’ are heard in the distant background. Veltz’s contribution of atonal scraping and noise is undeniably Changez ...’ like but its been percolated through a few decades of Japanese noise and whats wrong with that? And where would noise in Japan be without ‘Changez …?’  We’ve just come to pay tribute maaan. Arigato gosaimasu.

A tri-fold out sleeve on textured card with an insert full of glowing reviews and praise, info on TNB and an interview that first appeared in C/U/N/T magazine a couple of years back in which it is revealed that ‘Changez …’ was indeed recorded in a garden shed may go some way as to explain why Italian label Ricerca Sonora had difficulty in getting this out there. For this reviewer at least it was well worth the wait.

Derek Jackman is a name sadly missing from ‘Changez Retravaillé’ but through Organum and his label Aeroplane Recordings we have a single that has become almost, if not ‘as’ influential as ‘Changez’. A collaboration between Organum and TNB the 1984 single ‘Pulp’ is a more mystifying slice of what was going on back then. I don’t have a copy of course. No surprise there and what they’re asking on Discogs for copies it seems it will remain that way but I was once in a room where a copy was produced and as Tristan Tzara is my witness I swear that people drew breath at the sight of it.

‘The Pulp Sessions’ are the extended workings from which ‘Pulp’ was realised. The results being not that far removed from ‘Changez Les Blockeurs’, in that we have two sides of constant churning, clanging, squeaking, stamping, shuffling and destroying sounds of an indeterminate nature that could have been recorded with various items of metal junk in a shed in the North East of England during a rain shower some time in the early 1980’s. Though whether Jackman ever made the trip to that shed in the North East or TNB visited Jackman’s shed is unknown to me. These are more austere recordings, denser with Organum filling out the sound. But with what? Who knows. Maybe whats missing is the shed itself. ‘The Pulp Sessions’ wont carry the same gravitas as ‘Pulp’ which we can put down to the passage of time but these two twenty minute tracks are still a reminder that way back in the early 80’s a brave few were making noises that’s still reverberate today. 





Menstrual Recordings

Ricerca-Sonora on Discogs




  

Posset/Ulyatt

Posset/Ulyatt - A Jar Full
Crow Versus Crow. CVC012.
Cassette/DL. 70 copies.



Back in the 18th century the bleak moors that run out of Halifax along the Calder Valley were home to the Crag Vale Clippers. A group of men who ‘clipped’ coins of their gold to mint new ones. A bit like an 18th century version of Bitcoin carried out by hardened men in remote, windswept cottages with one big exception, back in those days you could expect to get your head in a noose for your troubles. These moors are the bleakest of the bleak, the kind where grass struggles to grow, inhospitable places where according to legend even Satan feared to tread. An area then populated by people who saw themselves as living apart from the rest of society and who chose to ignore the laws of the land when it suited them. Coiners cottages were deliberately set apart on the very tops of the moors the better to spy unwanted arrivals, farm animals would disappear into their soggy black bogs, people got lost never to be seen again and bags of shiny, newly minted coins were secretly buried.

Benjamin Myers novel Gallows Pole is as bleak as the moors its set on and tells the story of King David Hartley, a rough and ready Robin Hood like character, the leader of the Crag Vale Coiners, a hardened drinker, a man of the land who needs no clock or learning book. His descendants still live in the area and may even use ApplePay or contactless. How times change. The moors themselves are just as inhospitable but now there’s restaurants with tasting menus up there, holiday cottages to rent, along the valley bottom lies Hebden Bridge, a veritable tourist destination with one of the best live venues in the country, up the road in Todmorden you cant help but trip over vegan cafes and people making things out of dried sticks, Heptonstall attracts those wishing to find Sylvia Plath's gravestone while decrying Ted Hughes birthplace just down the road in Mytholmroyd while in Sowerby Bridge we find Crow Versus Crow.

And Joe Posset and Charlie Ulyatt. Posset works with Dictaphone and tapes but you knew that already. Charlie Ulyatt is new to me. He improvises on the cello. They did something crazy and met up two hours before a gig to collaborate in the live situation having never previously met or collaborated before. This meeting took place at The Angel pub in Nottingham and is what you can hear on side two of this most excellent release. Its like Keith Jarrett at Cologne when he turns up knackered and the gigs late in starting because the venues being used for another performance and the pianos not the one he’s been promised but some out of tune workaday thing and despite the adversity something magical happens. I’m not saying that ‘A Jar Full’ will go down as the improv Jarret live in Köln but its not far off. A seemingly unworkable coming together of two disparate entities makes for an absorbing listen. Ulyatt’s frotting, shaking and rubbing of the cello and Posset’s deft tape manipulations are suitably at ease with each other. A little like an austere Webern string composition into which someone has sneaked the gargling ultra squeak of tape voices and tape squelch. It last but a mere fifteen minutes but is tense and rewarding and no doubt seen by all involved as an unqualified success.

What surprises me is the depth. You’d think that two people, one working a Dictaphone and the other a cello would run out of ideas pretty quickly but that isn’t the case. On side one you find three tracks that were recorded after the event with each improvising over the others work without further editing. Here Posset slathers on the tape wobble as his fingers deftly feather the Dictaphone keys producing an ever changing vista of interrupted voices and tape squiggle, Ulyatt draws long drones, random raspy staccato attacks and at times there’s silence, each letting the others work stand alone for your delectation.         

Tape labels releasing tape/cello improv don’t feature in Gallows Pole. I suppose Myers found it hard to work it in, especially seeing as how only the cello bit had been invented. Still, its a gripping read. Crow Versus Crow meanwhile have once again chosen wisely. A quality release all round. Find it on the moors. Or through Bandcamp.

         

Crow Versus Crow

Psych.KG

Arme Nüss Volume 1
Bladder Flask / Kommissar Hjuler
Psych.KG 477. LP

Arme Nüss Volume 2
Bladder Flask & Broken Penis Orchestra / Kommissar Hjuler & Family Fodder
Psych.KG 485. LP

Arme Dornröschen
Bladder Flask & Broken Penis Orchestra / Wolfgang Kindermann & Magda Starwarska-Beaven, Dino Felipe & Kommissar Hjuler und Frau.
Psych.KG 483. LP


Three LP’s of mind boggling Fluxus, Dada, Improv, Sound Art and cut up queasy lunacy as culled from anywhere between the early 80’s and the present day has just landed and its like nothing else matters anymore. Put down your puny instruments of normality and breath in the frenzied fungal spores of Bladder Flask of Family Fodder of Kommissar Hjuler, of Broken Penis Orchestra of Wolfgang Kindermann & Magda Starwarska-Beaven where one speaks in German while the other translates into English to a soundtrack of found sounds recorded from a busy street window.

This gets complicated but bear with me: ‘Arme Nüss Volume 1’ is Bladder Flask’s ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’ which was a track that never made it as a United Dairies release [long story]. On ‘Arme Nüss Volume 2’ you have a reworking of ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’ by Broken Penis Orchestra and on ‘Arme Dornröschen’ a Broken Penis Orchestra reworking of Bladder Flask's ‘One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling’ [originally issued as an LP by Orgel Fesper Music in 1981]. Got that? I think I have. Just. My mind is fried after all this. You try descending into this world and leaving it with your senses intact.

What works for me is the coupling of Dada-esque Bladder Flask cut ups with the Fluxus improv of Kommissar Hjuler. The Kommissar has been off my radar for a while but appears to have spent the intervening years releasing material at a rate that makes Merzbow look a slouch. Hjuler, whether solo or mit frau are artists, multi-media artist and by that I don’t mean they use crayons and watercolours on the same bit of paper. Performance artists, sculptors, makers of anti-turntables, improvisers, provocateurs. Just look at those covers, looks like Hjluer’s work, Lego people watching a Kiss cassette concert, dismembered Barbie dolls [Arme Dornröschen translates as ‘poor sleeping beauty] covered in melted candle wax, Arme Nüss [poor nut] and cashew nuts strewn among the Barbie limbs. I once saw Hjuler und Frau play Colour Out of Space with a performance that made  most of everything else that weekend seem like stale ready salted crisps in comparison.
 
This is the world of German label Psych.KG where Fluxus meets Dada meets Anti-Art on a Hans Belmer landscape shaped from bits of twig and frayed bits of string. Take the coughing fits of ‘Groping Fingers …’ here we have the mysterious sound of out of tune pianos, French dialogue and from Broken Penis Orchestra the introduction of American spoken word samples and with it an intensifying of the general weirdness that the work generates. Listening back to back to the original for comparison what we now have is a far heavier, much weirder drug trip, an old zinc top Parisian bar where the punters are stoned and slumped, where the gaslights emit ether fumes and the accordion wheezes a sad lament, an unsettling atmosphere cut and edited to achieve remarkable levels of unease. Out of tune pianos are a common theme here appearing as they do on ‘One Day I Was So Sad …’ along with snatches of dialogue, fierce kazoos, clackety-clack machines, parping trombones, spooling tapes and uncontrollable bagpipes.

On side two of ‘Arme Nüss Volume 1’ Kommissar Hjluer thrashes around on a forest floor while trying to cut his binds with a junior hacksaw, reducing himself to sobbing piteous tears as he does so. On ‘Das Streben Nach Aberkennung’ it sounds like he’s taking his kitchen out using a lump hammer. Rhythmically. ‘Blue Orchid’ is a White Stripes cover banged out on an upright piano with two voices one of which is a deranged Pee Wee Herman the other being an officious German. All recorded to condenser mic. ‘Jazz Stuck’ is improv of the rawest kind, piano and sax with cut edits of the same put to tape and squelched to death. When collaborating with 70’s freaks Family Fodder we get six tracks of piano tinkling while someone chops up wood, pipes are clanged down deep mines, theres female French spoken word to the accompaniment of electronics, traditional French folk tunes squeezed out of accordions and on ‘The Kommissar Will see You Now’ a track that has an almost Residents feel.

Unfamiliar to me are Wolfgang Kindermann & Magda Starwarska-Beaven. Starwarska-Beaven describes herself as a ‘multi-disciplinary artist’ who works mainly in sound. Wolfgang Kindermann is an Austrian poet. ‘Who/Wer’ is the audio taken from an installations of Starwarska-Beaven in which she translates the text read by Kindermann to the sound of passing cars and general street noise and on ‘Daswessender’ manipulates vocals to the sound of angry machines.

Now for the bad news. All these highly desirous LP’s are pressed in small numbers. If I’ve got this right there’s only 48 of each with the 48th copy made in to an unplayable art edition. No downloads of course. What were you even thinking. There are copies available but be prepared to dig deep. 

News reaches these ears that Steve Stapleton is reworking Bladder Flask material as I type. This could complicate that second paragraph even further.

 
 
All three releases available here.



Psych.KG

Smell & Quim - Atom Heart Motherfucker
Wonderland Media. LP

Smell & Quim - Quimtessance
Total Black. Cassette.






Two Smell & Quim releases that originally appeared on Juntaro Yamanouchi’s Vis a Vis Audio Arts label in editions of ten. Yes, ten. Unless you are Juntaro or Milovan Srdenovic or married to him or are someone very lucky you don’t have a copy in your house. Which is a pity as I consider Atom Heart Motherfucker to be one of thee best Smell & Quim releases. Up there with Jesus Christ in the Quim canon as far as this humble scribe is concerned.

I reviewed Atom Heart Motherfucker via a download that Lawrence Burton made available on his most wonderful Ferric Archeological website. Thanks to some incredibly astute American people person with superb taste in music we can now wallow in an 180 gram vinyl version. It really is the very thing, a thick black slab of black heavyweight vinyl capable of lopping off toe joints should you drop it. Juntaro may have a cassette copy with a poo smeared man on it but I have it on 180 gram vinyl.

In case you missed it Atom Heart Motherfucker is piss and shit pub toilet noise as narrated by someone with a thick West Yorkshire accent who isn’t Peter Sutcliffe. That would be Milovan then. ‘Fuck it, kill it, eat it’. The Quim war cry. A madman let loose on a hotel reception desk bell. The noise is deliriously powerful and wonderfully wrong in all the right ways, ‘Wrong Hole in One’ is a blistering re-entry into the West Yorks environs with a pint of Websters Green Label in each hand, there’s Michael Gillham destroying his bathroom in ‘Careful with That Axe Michael’ and the new mantra ‘Bucket Fulla Piss’ which has Milovan and Simon Morris screaming ‘BUCKET FULL OF PISS’ until their lungs rupture. Listening back to it again you cant but marvel at Srdenovic’s technique in putting all this together. Smell & Quim make noise albums that aren’t just one play shelf fillers, they’re some of the best noise records you will own. You can read the original review here.

Quimtessence arrives in one of those folded A5 pieces of card that has a cut and paste collage cover showing a grainy picture of someone having a good time/suffering for their cause. A form of release that I haven’t seen in many a year and produced in me not exactly a Proustian Madeleine moment but certainly a small twinge of nostalgia. All this thanks to German label Total Black who judging from their Big Cartel page may have already sold out. Or maybe they just haven’t got around to putting it up there? No info on how many of these exist but I’m guessing there’ll be more than ten. 

Here we have four essential Smell & Quim tracks with a blistering live version of Bucket Fulla Piss as recorded in Lisbon 2016 in which Morris and Srdenovic take it in turns to make the words ‘bucket full of piss’ sound like someone trying to exorcise demons. The bladder emptying frolics continue on side two with the sound of a bucket filling with piss and god knows what else [Pissypoo] while both the title track and ‘Noize on Feel The Cum’ are the kind of full on grinding noise blasts that do you actual good.

All this Smell & Quim activity had me digging around YouTube where I found their most recent Berlin gig and the band still in fine, chaotic, drunken form. Gillham, Morris and Srdenovic in Elvi suits, cock and balls strapped to the fore, Srdenovic collapsing to the floor where he spends the rest of the set behind their set up until he eventually surfaces, alone on the stage, with the most euphoric grin you’ve ever seen. Long may they reign supreme. 


Wonderland Media


Total Black






 

 

Simon Morris - Watching The Wheels
Amphetamine Sulphate.
84pp. Perfect bound.
ISBN 978-1-7337567-3-0




The accompanying blurb on the back cover of Simon Morris’s latest Amphetamine Sulphate publication compares Morris to Philip K Dick and Thomas Pynchon. Dick I’m not so sure about [I’m no big fan to be honest] but Pynchon? That’s a big claim to make. He’s been cropping up with unnerving regularity of late. Pynchon that is. I was in a pub in Halifax a few weeks back, a gathering of the Bald Heads of Noise, when Morris walked in and dropped on the table Christopher Hitchens memoir ‘Hitch-22’. ‘If anybody wants this they can have it’ he said and being partial to a bit of Hitchens I took it home and read it. In it Hitchens mentions Pynchon in relation to the ‘Rushdie Affair’; Pynchon rings Hitchens, confirms that it can be only he and a conversation ensues. At the conversations end Hitchens asks Pynchon if he can have his number to keep him updated to which Pynchon laughs down the line and hangs up. No 1471 in those days.

After I’d finished reading ‘Watching The Wheels’ I picked up my dropping to bits Penguin Classics Deluxe Version of Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ with its deckled edges and V2 artwork to peruse a few lines of the mans most difficult book. That was this morning. I read a few lines and marveled once again at how a writer could even begin to put together such a tome. A few hours later I found myself stood in Mirfield Co-op in need of sustenance and after exiting the check out stood perusing the charity book sale where Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ sat there looking like a fish out of water. I have to admit that no small amount of pleasure ran through me at this point and wondered if ‘dark forces’ were at play. This for a book that I’ve already read. Its not like the mans keeping Dan Brown off the chazza shelves is it?

Pynchon appears twice in Watching The Wheels. In the final chapter ‘Putting The Record Back In The Sleeve: Greatest Hits USA Edition’ Morris admits that he’s feeling deadline pressure ‘for his next book’ and gives us a minute by minute account of how his evening is panning out, including the temptation to hit Lidl for a bottle of gin and cancelling the gardener [?] all while entering in to an online conversation with someone who asks him;

“Tell me a favourite writer of yours. And be honest if it’s fucking Rowling. I enjoyed one of her Galbraith crime novels.” 22:45

“Thomas Pynchon.” 22:46

“Fuck, you serious?! Have read every word. Many of which I didn’t understand fully but I tried.” 22:47


Copying and pasting online conversations in to your manuscript when deadlines loom is never going to get you a contract with Faber and Faber but in a non linear work like this it fits like a stiffy in a featherlite. And is entirely in keeping with the way Morris writes. I get the feeling that Morris spends a lot of time on online forums; sex forums, Queen forums, G N’ R forums, conspiracy theory forums and forums where only the bravest [or desperate] dare tread. 

This is the fourth book of Morris’s to have appeared through AS and like the previous volumes weaves Morris’s existential angst, suicides of past friends, drugs, relationships, both sexual and platonic and childhood years in to the back catalogue, not of Guns N’ Roses this time but Queen. Starting with their ninth studio album ‘The Game’. Which was recorded at Musicland in Munich, a building linked to many suicides. Blackpool, Hoylake, Liverpool, Manchester and Bolton go toward making up an anarchists ‘A’ of a leyline of sorts. Hoylake being a one-horse town on the Wirral peninsula where Morris is convinced this is all going to end one day. Somehow this all mirrors with the movements of Mark Chapman in the run up to the murder of John Lennon. Lennon used to holiday in Blackpool as a child and married Cynthia who came from Hoylake. You see?

In Watching The Wheels Morris writes about his childhood, his drunken parents, looking up girls skirts and losing his virginity. He takes one of his fathers sleeping pills just to see what would happen [he falls asleep], there’s a flirtatious encounter with an aunt, a fetish for nylon is revealed, inspired by punk he forms childhood bands using ice cream tubs for drums and drawing pins for studs, fire extinguishers are let off. Blackpool landmarks the Magnolia Cafe and The Purple Penny arcade are frequented, a cherubic young Morris is chatted up by gay men on Blackpool seafront. A whole childhood of novelty joke mugs, pale ale, orange crush and sexual frustration scattered among the Queen back catalogue.

At the beginning of book Morris admits that:

‘Sex is just something I don’t understand, swear to God’

A sentence that not only encapsulates Watching The Wheels but the entire Morris oeuvre. Sex. And death. The big two. They haunt Morris’s work. And madness of course. True madness. Not just a bit bonkers madness but madness madness, the stuff that drives people to drink and drugs and sexual humiliation and suicide. The casual references to drugs and porn are still here and continue to unnerve but at its core Watching The Wheels is Morris looking in to his childhood for answers. 

The comparisons to Pynchon are relevant in that both he and Morris litter their work with numerous characters but then so did Charles Dickens. I think Morris is far nearer to Brett Easton Ellis in style and delivery and while that particular author appears to have left his best days behind him, this one seems to have his best ones in front of him. Like his other books its not an easy read. Not if you’re squeamish or easily offended that is. His matter of fact writing style, openness and erudition bely the fact that for years he fronted the Ceramic Hobs, probably the most unstable band in Britain. Now that The Hobs have gone the way of all flesh [after thirty odd years - we can forgive him] we can only hope that Morris continues with the pen. Or the copying and pasting. I'd be more than happy with either.  






Amphetamine Sulphate

Dieter Müh

Dieter Müh - Mutus Lieber
EE Tapes. EE40. CD
200 Copies.

Dieter Müh - The Bjørn Tapes
Force Majeuer. Force009. LP. White Vinyl.
320 copies.



Dieter Müh were one of the first bands, if not thee first band that I got to know personally - the mists of time can play tricks on the brain but they’re definitely up there if you don’t count the scroats I used to knock about with in pubs when I left school. The first time I met them they were playing the Fenton on a Sunday night when I had to be up at 4.30am the morning after to start a new job [I turned up to work half pissed, hungover and had to endure a tedious and never ending twelve hour shift but it was worth it]. I once went to London to see them play a gig in a church and missed them because I’d got my dates mixed up. That one still hurts. I saw them play a pub in Manchester with Con-Dom and The Grey Wolves and was one of about three people who’d paid to get in. I may be exaggerating there but we were thin on the ground. I once drove to Lincoln, where they were then living, and spent a memorable sunny summer Saturday getting slowly pissed in crap pubs, talking music, books and films. All memorable days and gigs. They’d once been a trio but by the time I got to know them they were down to two and then Dave Uden did a Reggie Perrin leaving Steve Cammack at the helm. He’s still there now with almost thirty Dieter Müh years under his belt. Tempus Fugit and all that.

Back in the mid 90’s I was soaking up any kind of ‘weird’ music I could get my hands on. I’d just discovered Whitehouse and had a thirst for the noisy and weird stuff that my bank balance took a battering for. One thing led to another, a flier here, a meeting at a gig there and before you could say RRR 10LP Box Set I began to get know the people who made those noises. Happy pre-computer days where letters and jiffy bags came on an almost daily basis and where every night was a night spent playing tapes and discovering new music. A new world.

I took to Dieter Müh because they provided me with a link back to Throbbing Gristle. In another life I’d have pursued my TG likings and met Dieter Müh side on so to speak and not at a crossroads having spent many a year listening to music that I now realise was very much of its time and is best left there. This was all part of ‘The Great Immersion’. A year zero of musical taste when pretty much all that had gone before was consigned to the chazzas and new battle lines were drawn. Which is where Dieter Müh come in.

If you’re in your mid twenties and you don’t have parents that are in to Ritual Industrial Ambient Noise then there’s a every chance you haven’t heard either of these. Both of them are reissues which is OK by me as I don’t have Mutus Liber and this is the first time for The Bjørn Tapes on vinyl too, sumptuous white vinyl at that. Mutus Liber contains work from the early 90’s and was given away as a cassette in 1995 to like minded souls, The Bjørn Tapes originally appeared on Yasutoshi Yoshida’s superb Xerxes label in 1999. Those where my Great Immersion years.

I’m not sure if Ritual Industrial Ambient Noise is actually a ‘thing’ but its the words I’ve been using to describe Dieter Müh’s sound over these last … gulp ... twenty years. Proudly wearing button badges of an obscure nature they took all the dark bits of TG and SPK and made them their own. Heavily electronic with occasional bass and samples they create a music that is sparse, repetitive, ritualistic, disconcerting, certainly Industrial and forever unsettling. As the years went by they refined these qualities but Mutus Liber especially captures them at first flush when they still had that rawness about them. Tracks like ‘Ibrukin’ sound like they were recorded in empty grain silos, the droning and brooding live track ‘Introjection’ [the only track to feature original member Tim Bayes on tape machines] is a low down dirty drone that teeters on the abyss of an overloaded bass guitar. In later years sampled voices became more prominent and were used almost as rhythm but here they linger mainly in background as on 'Introjection' where a school playground is barely audible as the track enters its dying stages. Fast forward a few years and we find The Bjørn Tapes and  Dieter Müh live in Nottingham where their sound has already become sparser, more ritualistic, more subterranean - if it could be such a thing. The highlight here is the side long ‘Aghor’, a transmission from somewhere deep within a Cold War bunker where information is given out over small wall mounted speakers as the echoes of small electronic machines bounce off the concrete walls. A bass riff of P-Orridge like proportions tries to escape these confines all while trying to carry you off to an uninviting, lonely, dark place where empty rooms contain broken wooden chairs and the evidence of torture. On the flip we have ‘Low Feed’ and a dense vortex of distorted military comms and Herma. All grist to my fevered mill.

Everybody now, those were the days my friend ...




Contact:


http://www.nuitetbrouillard.com/


Info [at] eetapes




muhmur.radio [at] gmail.com

Consumer Electronics

Consumer Electronics - Airless Space
Harbinger Sound. Harbinger 200. CD/2LP




With the prospect of quiet solo Saturday night ahead of me I decided to spend it taking in the new Consumer Electronics long player. After visiting the wine cellar and making a suitable choice for the evening I pressed play and settled down to what the fuck was I thinking of? This is ridiculous. After four tracks I couldn’t take it no more and turned it off. Taking a long slug of what turned out to be a rather sumptuous Gewurtztraminer I began digging around for an Art Garfunkel album whilst cupping my ears to check for damage. I’d made the mistake of taking Consumer Electronics lightly. You don’t do quiet nights in with Consumer Electronics. You have to prepare yourself. Its like inviting the Stasi round for tea. Is it one lump or two and excuse the mess, we’ve been busy hiding the typewriter. Oh shit.

Philip Best says that he thinks this is the best Consumer Electronics release to date and there’s me thinking that Consumer Electronics previous outing Dollhouse Songs [also on Harbinger] was that perfect amalgam of disquiet and bang up to date late 2000 and teens electric fear and loathing. What impresses most during playback of Airless Space is that Best is probably right. Consumer Electronics go from strength to strength. While his previous partner in chime Mr Bennett fleshes out his CV with almost danceable tosh we take pride in the the fact that one of the original purveyors of Power Electronics [now aided by Sarah Froelich and Russell Haswell] still manages to create songs that are a rusty dagger to your guts.       

Its the twin prong attack that gets you. Best delivering his lines with malevolent relish while Froelich does her best to rupture her vocal chords. Hers is a delivery capable of reducing nuns to tears. They ease you in, if thats ever the right phrase, with a vocal track each. Each track built around a stripped down beat, each track equally unsettling. On the opener ‘Body Mistakes’ Froelich’s deranged vocal delivery gradually dissolves into a sea of digital static while on next track ‘Carnage Mechanics’ Best delivers his spoken word lyrics in an increasingly fevered state while reveling in his favourite subjects; self harm, drug abuse, emotional instability, exhibitionism, war zones, death, sex ...

'Would you act differently if the cameras were off?'

As the beat morosely and relentlessly thuds on.

The thirteen minute long ‘Murder of JJ’ has Best’s vocal coming at you as out of the ether, as a ghost, a cipher with an accentuated emphasis on each word, again the spine is a relentless dull thud beat and when Froelich emerges she’s singing about ‘living down here with the dogs’ and then Best comes in and the pair of them are delivering the weirdest of harmonies as Best goes to the floor frothing at the mouth singing ‘its love and light and its forever’. In some ways it could be a love song.

Sitting through an hours worth of such derangement is like sharing a therapy session with a group of emotionally damaged people charged with making music out of broken synthesizers. Its like reading a repulsive book thats doesn’t make much sense but which you find morbidly fascinating. Its like putting your hand in to a dark hole and feeling something cold, mushy and wet. Unsettling is the word that keeps coming to mind and I’m all for that.

Russell Haswell’s production gives Airless Space exactly that but within that vacuum lies a dark malignant growth that no amount of Alsace’s finest could ever make cheery. Some people just like it that way.

This release is Harbinger Sounds 200th and as such deserves a special mention. Let us all raise a well charged glass in Mr. Underwood's general direction.

[If you can please do buy the double album so as to get the lyric sheet. This will enable you to not only follow the lyrics with your finger but to better understand the inner workings of the Best/Froelich partnership].




 
 


  

Astral Social Club + Grumbling Fur

Astral Social Club + Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra - Plasma Splice Trifle
VHF Records. VHF147. LP



Released 7th June





Soundcloud has its uses but the comments people leave during certain points of track playback make me think that its users have vocabularies that aren’t shall we say, overdeveloped. ‘Nice’ and ‘#poetry’ are two that pop up during Grumbling Furs collaboration with Charlemagne Palestine. An album with a ridiculous title that I shan’t reproduce here and could only have been created by someone sitting on a keyboard. And by that I don’t mean one you’d find on a Bosendorfer.

I don’t do much Soundclouding what with Bandcamp stomping over everything Godzilla like but Campbell’s been raving about Grumbling Fur for years now and to be honest the name put me off, a bit jokey, a bit proggy, a bit Blodwyn Piggy. I’m sure that the duo who make up Grumbling Fur; Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan are the loveliest of people alive and help old ladies across the road whenever the opportunity arises but I’d never heard a single second of what they’ve ever done because I’d been put off by the name. My bad as the kids say. And seeing as I’m as familiar with what Campbell does as the pot holes in the roads around here it would be unfair to delve in to this collaboration without first hearing what it is exactly that Grumbling Fur sound like.

So I went to their Bandcamp page because that's where Godzilla goes. This is where they’re flogging/promoting their latest album Furfour. You can leave comments here too but instead of Bay City Roller fan vocabulary you get more considered opinions, maybe from Wire readers. Those opinions having Grumbling Fur in the Brian Eno vocal compositions camp which after a few tracks of Furfour I totally get; twin vocal harmony pop for grown ups with lots going on in the background showcasing the duos talent for mixing and overdubbing. I like Brian Eno, I like Brian Eno’s singing, I like Grumbling Fur and Furfour. Forget Blodwyn Pig.

Plasma Splice Trifle has harmonies and vocals and spoken word and when they appear its like a dreamy Dream Machine with pretty pictures flickering against your shut eyelids. Patient reader I was transported. The four tracks as a whole flow seamlessly. I was at one with the bob. I was grooving with the VHF crew. I imagine the VHF crew rolling a fat one [on the already printed LP sleeve of course] and DM-ing all those involved immediately upon hearing the results of their labour with a series of cap locked YESSES. I’d have done the same.

Grumbling Fur and Astral Social Club are a match made in, not heaven exactly that would be too corny but maybe somewhere in the Eno-sphere. Campbell’s sawing violin is there as is the electronic staccato shudder and the pumping beats. The sawing violin is no wild, folksy, moth eaten jumper, cider reeking mad jig either, its a beautiful soaring thing that lifts you cloud-ward, all this as on second track ‘Three Years Apart’ but first we have Campbell reciting from what we have to assume is a book or a poem, something about sperm and going back to the egg, all this over a muezzin call, a small child calling and shortwave static. As an entry to the album it draws you in and is soon followed by trademark ASC head bob beats and further multi tracked Fur/ASC jaw jabber thats buried deep, deep, deep within the mix.

The cherry on the cake is ‘Ozone Antifreeze Intelligence’ and a beatific, melodic piano riff thats the floaty ying to the vocals of the three of them’s yang. Grumbling Fur vocals drift in and  out and under as Campbell speaks, electric guitars hold back feedback and things burble and bibble as the piano chimes its funereal chime. The riffing bass on last track Toejam Boxdrum is the riff to carry you all the way back to its intoned beginning.

I get the feeling that all parties involved are chuffed to mint-balls with what they’ve created here. Plasma Splice Trifle is a work of great depth created by two parties which I imagine have a lot of common ground between them. The more you listen the more it gives. I’ve had it clamped to my head for the last few days and now that I’m totes familarz with it I’m getting all evangelical. I’ve no idea what that covers all about though. Looks a bit Blodwyn Piggy to me.



VHF Records










 


   

Max Nordile

Preening - Gang Laughter
Digital Regress. LP/DL

Max Nordile - Got To Sleep, Fool
Digital Regress. DR29. Cassette

Dolphin - Breezebather
Cassette.

Droppings #29
Zine

Droppings #30
Zine





Out of sheer curiosity and having nothing better to do with my life for the next 90 seconds, I decided to check out what was happening in the UK Top 40 these days. It’s been a while. About twenty five years give or take a year. The singles charts are now as irrelevant to me as adverts for tampons, TV channels selling jewelry and shampoo. When singles were just that, small rounds of vinyl with a song on each side, they carried a certain weight. Now they are literally weightless. Since 2005 the Top 40 has included downloads and brought streaming under its aegis in 2014 [to qualify as a streaming single its length must not exceed 15 minutes and cost no less than 40p. So now you know].

In 1981 Laurie Anderson got to number 2 with ‘O Superman’, an eight minute single of an avant garde nature featuring electronically manipulated repetitive vocal phrasings that paid homage to Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid. At the time I was living in a pub and after consultation with the people who put the records on the jukebox it was decided that in everybody's sanity it was best left off and given to me. I still have that copy. O Superman was denied the top spot by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin with their cover of ‘It’s My Party’. Thats the same Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin who played their part in the Canterbury scene via Stewart’s band Hatfield and the North. Whats filling the top two spots now? I can hardly bring myself to defile these pages with the words but I give you Ed Bieber, Justin Sheeran with some collaborative guff that you file under ‘had to happen’, and Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X, I’ve just discovered, being famous for his crossover country rap breakout single Old Town Road. Country Rap. Maybe Mel Brookes can use it in his Blazing Saddles remake. I know that this is going to make me sound like an old curmudgeon but to be honest I'm far past caring.

So when exactly did mainstream music become so teeth grindingly dull? There’s always been dull music in the charts of course. At least up until I stopped listening. But the dull stuff was clustered around interesting stuff.

Here’s another chart from 1981:

1 - The Specials / Ghost Town

2 - Stars on 45

3 - Bad Manners / Can Can

4 - Imagination / Body Talk

5 - Whacko Jacko / One Day in my Life

6 - Motorhead / Live EP

7 - Tom Tom Club / Wordy Rappinghood


So I’ll keep 1, 6 and 7 and you can melt the rest on your three bar electric fire in bedsit land. Its still a decent return and that's just from the top seven.
 
Seeing as how most of the charts are now full of people I’m unfamiliar with I’m assuming that they’re either mediocre singer/song writers, bands with a modicum of talent stretched so thinly that you can see their genitals, female singers who think that howling like an ululating hyena will get them compared to Janis Joplin and country rap crossover stars. Its all v v v v  depressing and something I care not to linger on. So without further ado I give you Oakland California’s Max Nordile whose been invading these pages with his improv skronk for the last couple of years now.

Nordile also prints zines that are black daubs opposite hand written upper case musings:

SOMEONE WHO IS DEAD
THEIR MEDIA PROFILE
BOOMING OUT FROM UNSEEN
SHIT

Issue 30 is described as an ‘Art and Humour’ publication with the art being there for everybody to see and the humour being buried somewhere deep in Nordile’s mind.

Which is all well and good and a decent outpouring of creative activity and while the improv skronk tapes are most welcome [‘Dolphin’ is yet another Nordile improv attack vehicle while ‘Got To Sleep, Fool’ is Nordile wandering around in his own soundworld] it was the LP that blew me away this time. Last time it was via Uzi Rash and a couple of 12 inch platters that sat astride the Country Teasers horse only with more whisky and a liking for The Doors. This time its a 12 track 45rpm knock you sideways, I didn’t think people were making music this good these days, pure shot of mezcal straight in to the cerebellum, instant classic. Its like Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band made a record with some Ethiopian jazzers in a New York basement circa 1977 before they went out and blew The Ramones off stage at CBGB’s because they weren’t zeitgiesty enough. This is the music of the future coming from the past via all kind of jazzy, punky, improvisational wormholes that is like a lot of what I’ve heard before [all the best bits] baked into a cake and covered with glistening dark joyful listening cherries. It is life affirming stuff.

Preening is Alejandra Alcala, Sam Lefebvre and Max Nordile. Theirs is a stripped down sound with Alcala’s bass running wiggle worms around Lefebrve’s post-punk drums as Nordile skronks and honks in and amongst. Nordile and Alcala do vocal call and response harmonies like Don Van Vilet arguing with The Raincoats and all of it sounds like nothing I’ve heard in years. Opening track ‘Dogtown Top Ranking’ is a tumbling James Chance like rawk with the chorus nicked from Althea and Donna’s greatest hit. ‘Flotilla’ has that Egyptian vibe and its here where you get to hear Nordile’s vocals disappearing into a higher register yelp before collapsing in on itself. Put it down to too much sunshine. ‘Slabs’ is Preening paying tribute to Albert Ayler. ‘Work Policy’ is a song about dress codes. ‘Red Tape’ is an instrumental with guest laughing, people laughing like lunatics as guest cornettist ErAl does the Ornette Coleman thing. The title track is a piece of improv featuring Alcala on piano and then gamelan and the sounds of cars as heard through the open window of wherever they recorded this open heart surgery on my musical lassitude. I could do the whole dozen like this but you really need to hear it for yourself.

There was a time when you could just wait for the next musical genre to come along and give your jaded tastebuds a car battery like jump start; out with the Punk in with the Post-Punk, out with the Indie in with the Rave. Now everything in the mainstream seems like so much mush. Corporate mush at that. Unless you get digging of course. Digging is where you get to find the real gold. Preening are unlikely to ever bother the likes of the Top 40 but that means you cant dig. Dig? 


Digital Regresss



Max Nordile




   

The New Blockaders - Live at Sonic City

The New Blockaders - Live at Sonic City
Cold Spring. CSR261CD. CD + DVD



The most astonishing footage of this forty minutes and exactly no seconds bout of TNB destruction comes at its very end; as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata escapes from a very battered and out of tune piano we get a slow-motion close up of [presumably] that very same instrument. A claw hammered finale that is a slow blow after blow after relentless blow that disintegrates the key cover into plumes of dust and countless fragments of wood. Its a controlled performance but no wild, smash it to bits bout of pissed up artistic indulgence on someone else’s expense sheet. This is The New Blockaders slowly and methodically going about their work, banging out a head syringing noise with a hammer in each hand, feeding a cement mixer with self made detritus, sawing and hammering and generally reducing everything in sight to splinters and misshapen metal.

Using several cameras and overlay effects you get to see the dust vibrating out of that upright piano, the cement mixer being fed with a gramophone horn as the gramophone itself plays records in a way that its makers never intended it do. The backdrop shows the flickering static as created by a blank VHS cassette with TNB instruction words like ANTI, NOTHING, REJECT, appearing. A table contains a mixer and small metal boxes that have turning handles on them. One Blockader studies a small reel to reel recorder with an intent that's almost disturbing. The resultant noise is of course suitably intense, destablazing to the senses and offensive to those of a weak nature. 

The biggest benefit from having this live footage is that you can get as close as the front row did without having to inhale the dust or suffer hearing damage. It also shows how in control the performers are. This performance being enacted by two Blockaders, a Rupneus and a Niemand, though which Rupenus remains unexplained or Niemand come to that. Each methodically going about his work; rubbing metal on to that cement mixer, throwing metal rods in to a galvanized rubbish bin, hammering said galvanized bin in to a useless shape.  

The CD part of the package is the soundtrack to the DVD. While on the DVD the soundtrack doesn’t match the action on stage. This leads me to believe that the audio may have been put together in the studio. Moonlight Sonata is not seen being played either at its beginning or its end, there’s also audience chatter during the rare quieter moments which seems hard to believe and synth-like sounds, none of which you can pick out in the DVD. This detachment gives the visuals an arty, cinematic feel.

Of the live footage that exists on the internet none compares to what we have here. That live show at the Broken Flag Festival? A drunken riot. I’m guessing that The New Blockaders wanted something that truly represented what its they’re trying to achieve. This is it.  


Cold Spring

Duncan Harrison

Duncan Harrison - Nothing’s Good.

Index Clean. IC-011. CD

Duncan Harrison - Preamble to Nihil

Cassette

Duncan Harrison - Life Is Not A Succession of Major Events

Cassette

Duncan Harrison - Something Approaching Zero

A5 zine.

I’ve never met, spoken to or otherwise had anything to do with Duncan Harrison but I still feel I know him. Not that I’m in constant contact via the DM’s or the PM’s. Such is the social media world we live him his name crops up all the time and I think I may have even seen him play live in a charity shop once as part of the Colour Out Of Space fringe. After visiting his Soundcloud page I can adjudge that he’s a vegetarian who works in a vegetarian restaurant in Brighton, this because the first two tracks on his Soundcloud page are of Harrison phoning his local radio station to talk e-coli in salad and how to spot when an avocado’s ripe. I’m making an assumption here, he may be a meat eater who works in a vegetarian restaurant, this is Brighton after all. Then again … no.

The fact that the fist two tracks on Harrison’s Soundcloud page are of him phoning his local radio station to discuss food related issues impresses me immensely. That another track on there is a drunken recording of himself and Dylan Nyoukis wandering the streets of London looking for alcohol is another ten pound sledge-hammer through the floor of common sense. Its saying ‘yes I have a Soundcloud page [and a Bandcamp one too obvs], doesn’t everybody, but the first things you’re going to hear is me and ultra charm local radio DJ talking e-coli in salad and then me having a good time in the Cafe Oto toilet with Mr Brotzmann. Not like that you’ll understand, just a little bit of good time gurgling and skronking. Put that in your organic pitta bread halloumi wrap with chia and cress and shove it where the monkey shoves its hickory smoked almonds.

The real dirt comes from the hands of the man himself; an A5 booklet containing prose and poetry, two cassettes and a CD that you could easily put into the hands of someone wanting to know more about where noise is at in 2019 and say ‘here you go, it’s all there, just apply brain and go enjoy yourself’. If I were to place these on an Olympic finishing podium ‘Life Is Not A Succession of Major Events’ would get bronze, ‘Preamble to Nihil’ the silver and the CD ‘Nothing’s Good’ the clear winner with the awardee reciting words from the ‘Something Approaching Zero’ while putting on all three gongs on a hopping about Harrison head.

In Harrison’s sound world ‘Life is Not a Succession …’ is the one where he records the Rupenus brothers taking his house apart while he sits at the top of the bare staircase throwing cricket balls through the front door and out into the street as seagulls squawk and cars go by. ‘Preamble to Nihil’ meanwhile is where things become a little more eclectic, where amongst a myriad of other sounds, he impersonates a dripping tap, skronks on a horn, blows wildly down a tenor recorder, chops up tape edits of his own voice, loops clanking noise and offers up field recordings of church bells and church organ music that had me in such a melancholic mood that I had to keep telling myself that this was the same person who started the tape. There was noise too, noise that sounded like it was recorded at an expensive, totally exclusive French recording studio with Iannis Xennakis at the controls.

By now we not only know that Harrison has intimate knowledge of e-coli in salad ['wash, wash and wash again'] and the toilet at Cafe Oto but that his world, his soundworld, encompasses everything from Dictaphone-iste gabber to full bore noise works. Thanks to these few tapes and his website [whose first page shows a photo of Harrison outside the gates of Strawberry Fields in Liverpool but turned 90 degrees left and chopped so that you only see half his head] we can also deduce that he’s quite happy listening to Sergeant Pepper as he is knocking up vegan wraps as he is getting drunk with Nyoukis while extolling the virtues of the sound glass marbles make while rolling them around the palm of your hand.

Which is what you get to hear on ‘Nothing’s Good’. Three very different tracks that feel like total compositions in their own right. The first of which involves the detail to be found in Dictaphone mouth squelch, the second, a lo-fi noise movement of sorts where a rusty bucket passes for a Tibetan drone bowl before all the crockery left over from the jumble sale gets smashed to pieces in it, and then all the keys on the keyboard held down while moaning a Brighton mantra before chipping out with a hacking cough. At times it sounds like Harrison is firing a high pressured jet of water into that rusty bucket while expertly manipulating the sounds so that they sound like mini stars exploding and reverberating into the English Channel, like TNB with a vegan vibe. The final, shorter track is book-ended by Harrison reading his poetry whilst in the middle of it all appears a gentle drone made from stuck stylus fluff and a gentle looping. All this thrown under the wheels of a microphone struggling to cope with the noise generated by a blizzard.   

Harrison is one of those people for whom sound is found everywhere. It’s the John Cage quote about the world having an abundance of free music, you just have to stop and listen to what’s around you to appreciate it. Harrison adds to this soundworld by recording himself moaning about his neighbours constant playing of Metallica, by recording marbles going around in his hand, by blowing wildly into a treble recorder, by listening intently to the barely audible click of a stuck needle in a run-off groove. I bet he makes a mean bean burger too.

https://www.duncanharrison.co.uk/

Vukovar & Rose McDowall



Vukovar & Rose McDowall - Live in Inverness
Constant Shallowness Records. Cassette



A cassette surreptitiously shoved into my hand in a pub in Halifax yesterday lunchtime accompanied by a sotto voce ‘you didn't get it from me alright and don’t mention the ….’ I don’t do drugs but I should imagine plenty of drug deals go down like this; a minimum of talk, a passing of goods and then a parting. I shoved it in my pocket promising to give it a listen and not mention whatever it was that I wasn’t supposed to mention which I can’t remember anyway because I’d had a few glasses of vino by then, which whilst not my normal lunch time tipple had the great benefit of making Halifax appear welcoming.

A Bald Heads of Noise convention in what was once Dirty Dicks, a half timbered pub that has now reverted back to its original name of The Royal Oak, which is what it would have been called when Peter Sutcliffe drank there. And there’s Pete’s Pisser just inside the main door. Pissing up against the same wall as a serial killer. How many more of you have done the same and not realised it? How many gallons of piss have gone down that urinal porcelain hole since the day the pub opened? How many of us have nipped outside for a fag and been offered coke and ket? On a Saturday lunchtime? Yes your honour. Not me you realise. It’s just a rumour that was spread around town.

Rose McDowall was one half of 80’s polka dot popsters Strawberry Switchblade. Maybe she still is? My contact with the ongoing nature of pop music is virtually non existent. Vukovar I thought were called Vvkovar but that was just the font confusing me. I think they like black clothing and have offered up endless pints of chicken blood at shrines dedicated to Nick Cave and Ian Curtis. I once saw Nick Cave in Brighton, he was wearing an expensive looking powder blue cashmere sweater, sensible slacks and black boots, an outfit that looked like it’d been bought in Italy from shops whose prices exclude mere mortals. Then I  saw him again the other week in ‘Wings of Desire’, Wim Wenders filming him and his band in a run down East Berlin hotel, Cave turning in a blood curdling performance. There must be a law that says you can’t escape the pull of Nick Cave for more than two weeks. Maybe that’s no bad thing.

A true tape bootleg sound with lots of audience chatter during the quieter parts, muffled bass that still sounds great, drums that sound like they’re made from Tupperware, where McDowall’s voice floats like ethereal flotsam, an undulating ephemeral ghost-like wail wrapped in tattered Nottingham lace, spiders webs and too much reverb. Male Vukovar vocalist doing guttural low register Elvis like Ian Curtis drawls. I imagine him hunched over the mic, clad in black leather, a young Alvin Stardust with a shiny chromium chain hanging from his back pocket. The band are bass heavy, military medium, face the front, straight ahead pace hardly shifting thud thud thud Gothbusters meets Joy Division. Last track is Mutiny in Heaven because it has to be.

A part of me liked it and a part of me reminded myself that I hardly listen to such music anymore because I find little joy in it. Maybe I’d like them if I saw them live, maybe I’d like to see Rose McDowall live too with or without Vukovar or her other Strawberry Switchblade half. At least this cassette did me the favour of reminding me how great a pop band Strawberry Switchblade were, this after I ditched the cassette and fell down a Strawberry Switchblade Youtube hole. Birthday Party next.

If you follow the link below you will discover that this cassette costs an eye watering £13. The price of fame perhaps but with only a handful of the 88 copies left they must be doing something right. You can have my copy for nothing if you can answer the following question correctly:

How many bald heads were there in the Royal Oak yesterday?


    A]    1

    B]    2

    C]    3



Answers via idwalfisher [at] gmail [dot] com

Vukovar Bandcamp

845 Audio

Lyall/Olive - Lowering

845 Audio. 845-9. CD

Tim Olive and Yan Jun - Brother of Divinity

845 Audio. 845-10. CD

About a month ago I received an email from someone asking me if the reviews I write are tempered by the fact that I know the person. The posit being that most of the music I write about is made by people I know and would I give someone I know a bad review thus jeopardizing the relationship. The short answer to which is ‘yes I would’, with the caveat that most of the people I know aren’t sensitive wallflowers who take to their bedrooms should someone say boo to them. A review is just that. Its a review of the music. I don’t write character assassinations or use reviews as a vehicle for slander, unless I can work in Trump or the Tories of course.

What about if that person lived in Japan and you just happened to be passing through the city they lived in and you dropped them an email saying ‘Hello I’m in town and it would be really nice to meet up and thank you for all that great music you’ve sent me over the years’ and they said yes and they took time out of their schedule to meet up with you and show you some parts of the city that you’d have never found under your own steam like the greatest Jazz cafe that you’ve ever been to in your life and at the end of it all they bunged you two discs of their own music. What would you do then if it was rubbish?

Me and Mrs Fisher were passing through Kobe and I thought I’d drop Mr Olive an email to see if I could coax him out of his electro-acoustic lair. I’m happy to report I did and after meeting us at our hotel and being ever so genial and pleasant he took us to that never to be forgotten Jam Jam, a basement Jazz cafe that has a listening side and a conversation side and was blasting something like Dexter Gordon at a volume that just about made conversation possible [all this on a Wednesday afternoon]. He also pointed us in the direction of Motoko Town, a narrow alleyway of shops under the JR line that had not one, not two, but three record shops all within spitting distance of each other, every one of them a sprawling, chaotic jumble of vinyl and CD that had long ago outgrown the confines of the shop and were now happily spilling into the narrow passageway. Each one of them a full days worth of digging and exploration and there’s us with only four nights and only one of them left.

At the end of the day a yellow plastic bag was handed over. The bag originated from a musical instrument shop called Miki Gakki whose strapline in fabulous strangled Japanese/English read ‘Super sensibility for sound. We are sound riders. Really?!’ and out came the two CD’s you see before you. Are they rubbish? Will I have to give a sledging review to someone who showed me around his home town and bought us tea? No chance.

I don’t know why Tim Olive originally picked me out to send his music to, there must be plenty of other people deserving of his creations. But arrive they did. In recycled card sleeves and vegetable ink stamps, permanent designs and ones that are always going to win me over. He doesn’t release that much, maybe ten releases since 2012 which leads me to believe that quality is winning out of quantity. In the early days of reviewing his work I plead guilty to too many over comparisons to Bernard Parmegianni but that’s just me being lazy. I feel I know his work better now and can leave those lazy comparisons behind.

As with all 845 Audio releases these are collaborations. Last time around we discovered Jin Sangtae, a South Korean who eeks sounds from computer hard drives and a live recording with Olive joining Frans de Waard and Takuji Naka in a basement in Europe somewhere. This time it’s Cal Lyall a fellow Canadian expat now living in Tokyo and Chinese resident Yan Jun who between them contribute to two compelling releases.

‘Lowering’ moves from a juddering noise opening into a submarine drone courtesy of Lyall’s hydrophones with Olive employing magnetic pickups, electronics and a Bohman-esque scrape, this making for a submarine sound like they were working away on sensitive instruments at 20,000 leagues under the sea. The work eventually plateaus into a cycling drone with Olive’s electronics dancing like microtonal insects upon its body.

‘Brother of Divinity’ sees Yan Jun’s radio swirl enter the fray. Here, both Jun and Olive employ electronics making for a highly detailed work with much chatter, burble, clank and tink of spring and buzz of bare circuit and metal. At times a background of restrained fuzz tricks you into thinking there’s a noise beast waiting to unleash itself and at times I thought I was halfway down the garden path to a TNB shed but the mood remains a constantly restrained and a deeply satisfying one with much of what’s going on reaching you at sound levels that teeter on the edge of audibility. The reward for the astute listener is a work rich in detail. Like an audio Joe Coleman painting but not half as bonkers.

No rubbish here then. Far from it. Not only do I have two rather excellent electro-acoustic releases I have two reminders of a memorable day in Kobe. Cheers Tim.

845 Audio