Did They Pay With Buttons

Coelacanth - Ghoul Town Tales
A5 chapbook.


After a series of Dictaphopne Gabba dispatches as recorded from the greasy cushion seat of a faded flammable sofa in Stoke on Trent, Dai Coelacanth has turned his talents to authorship and delivered to us a tale involving Suzi, Tony, Daphne, Geoff and maybe a sci-fi movie called ‘Pagan Satellites’. Expect lots of slugs, skulls, tins of scabs, Spanish milk and the mysterious ‘gheng’. Don’t expect structured sentencing, punctuation, capitalization, character development and anything at all resembling a plot. I left satisfied on all counts.

I’ve been reading a lot more of late. I feel I’m qualified to pass judgement on such work after picking up and putting down the novels of Samuel Beckett and a collection of William H Gass’s writing over the last year. I’m also finding the solitude required for reading what some might regard as difficult writing the perfect escape mechanism from Planet Shit Storm. There’s something to be said for sitting in a room for hours on end with only a book for company. Blaise Pascal’s dictum that “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” is one I’ve often aligned myself to and one I wish certain people with enormous ego’s who just happen to have the most important jobs in the world would too.

Its gotten to the stage where I now find myself searching not for record shops but bookshops. I find record shops rather tedious places [unless they happen to be in Japan where they become joyous emporiums of heavenly delight but thats another story]. They’re not even record shops anymore. They’re half coffee shops full of tedious blokes with beards and sleeve tattoos telling anybody within earshot just how important David Bowie’s last album was and how they got the see-through flexi disc version of which only 500 were made. Record shops tend to be badly laid out, have meagre stock that never shifts and racks crammed with records that you have to bust a sciatic nerve to sift through. Bookshops, and here I’m aiming mainly at independent bookshops are worlds of discovery run by enthusiastic bibliophiles. A good independent bookshop is a beautiful thing and worthy of your patronage. 

But back to D. Coelacanth and his Ghoul Town Tales which I never expected to have anything as mundane as a beginning, a middle and an end. What you get are a series of paragraphs that read like a cut up novel where people do curious things of an uncertain nature all written in a very readable language thats littered with some killer one liners. Its like Coelacanth wrote this on a PC then copy and pasted certain lines dropping them in at random so that they appear like mantras throughout the book; ‘the shemp had a market stall and all they sold was out of date glue’ is but one such example. So you read but you never really get a grip on whats happening or where its going because the sentences have all been cut and double spaced but you can read it and carry on reading it because the writing is kind of delirious and fascinating all at once:

‘look at the sky, what’s wrong with it  are you a growth  we just need to make it to tomorrow the computerized voice came from a small plastic skull on the shelf I’ve never been interested in it I pushed my hands in deep into my shoes  some of them were on fire  I’m feeling romantic’

Like the worlds biggest spelling mistake that is Finnegan’s Wake you can dip in and pull out sparkling words of imagination:

‘lung of the nightmare fruit’

‘her forehead a collection of exaggerations’

‘hyphen dippers’

‘on a sunny day rats love gravy’

‘the mayor was a giant slug eight feet tall’

We can compare to Burroughs and Gysin of course and thats not bad company to be in but did either of them do the Dictaphone Gabba shake?

You can sit and read this in a room on your own, or on a bus, or in the doctors waiting room as you wonder what will become of your lumps. It’ll take you about an hour. As you reach the enlarged, defiant and only full stop of the book your head will be full of strange imagery and the urge to bark stream of consciousness words in to a Dictaphone will be upon you. Ghost Town Tales is coolest thing since Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. I await the Faber and Faber volume with bated breath.




http://www.chocolatemonk.co.uk/nonmonk.html

Calder

House Sparrow Settle Back - Embla Quickbeam, Natalia Beylis & Neil Campbell.
Crow Versus Crow. CVC014
Cassette, A5 insert and badge/DL
100 copies.

A Crow Versus Crow tape appears and it coincides once again with the finishing of another Benjamin Myers book. This time its ‘Under The Rock’ and Myers move from London squats to Calder Valley and Mytholmroyd and eventually a house at the foot of Scout Rock. A looming presence that casts a near permanent shadow over those who choose to live under it.

Me and Mrs Fisher were up there the other day perusing the selections in Hebden Bridge’s independent book shop and afterwards for a mediocre meal and then to look for organic black pudding nduja with quinoa crumbs and hemp strands as hand made by the descendants of canal diggers. On the way there we sat in traffic for what seemed an age so as to accommodate the ongoing flood protection work ongoing in Mytholmroyd. Myers mentions the Calder Valley floods of Christmas 2015 in Under The Rock and the instance where he finds himself waist deep in flood waters, in the middle of winter trying to help out those stuck in their homes and meeting a wheelchair bound man in his living room up to his neck in water who sees Myers and says ‘I’ll be reet’.

Its a great book though I’m not sure of the poetry but then I’ve never been a big fan of poetry so don’t let that put you off. What I didn’t expect to find in it were mentions of Edward Wadsworth [born in Cleckheaton], Throbbing Gristle, Jimmy Savile or Harold Shipman but there they were in and amongst the ever present Ted Hughes. Shipman because he had a GP’s surgery up the road in Todmorden, Savile because he seemed to spend a lot of time in the area and Throbbing Gristle because Genesis P-Orridge and Monte Cazazza liked to drop in on Paul Buck to peruse his much coveted colour plated pathology manual. Buck, another Mytholmroyd resident is remembered for his 70’s literary magazine ‘Curtains’ and for giving a voice to emerging French avant-garde writers as well as Kathy Acker, Paul Auster and of course GPO. Some issues of Curtain came with cassettes that contained poetry and performance pieces and thus via a commodius vicus of recirculation back to back to Crow Versus Crow up in Sowerby Bridge and Andy Wilde's most welcome tapes.

If you follow the river Calder for long enough it’ll take you past Campbell’s hometown of Mirfield so there’s some kind of synchronicity at work here. Where Embla Quickbeam and Natalia Beylis live I’ve no idea but I’m hoping it somewhere near the river too like Tod or Brighouse, Dewsbury even.

There’s two lengthy tracks here both featuring Beyliss in collaboration with the other two. First in with Quickbeam at a gig given at the now defunct [I think?] second hand clothing, book and record shop Magic City in Todmorden and lastly with Campbell at a gig recorded at Chunk in Leeds which is nowhere near the Calder.

The Quickbeam/Beyliss collab is the more floaty of the two. A gentle canal barge ride down the Calder and Hebble Navigation as someone breaks up a rusty coal bucket to the sound of birdsong and mumbled chatter. I’m thinking its Beylis who provides the samples here; self hypnosis guides, snatches of conversation that are treated and looped and cast into bucolic field recordings and electro-acoustic scratch and pluck so that at times it feels like you’re driving a barn owl to Bacup while trying to clear your mind of all thoughts thanks to a cassette you found in Hebden Oxfam. Meanwhile in Leeds the tempo shifts up a gear thanks to Campbell introducing various beats so that at times it feels like we’re almost in Ricky Lee Jones/Orb territory. But fear not for it soon passes. There’s samples of Native American rituals and livestock auctions as drones, pulses and swirls and noises fill the room. With both tracks approaching the half hour mark there’s plenty of time to get your head in to it so to speak. Plenty of room to stretch out your legs and enjoy the scenery. As the Leeds side develops into a collapsing tumble of rocks, drone and wind-chime clatter I wondered which Myers book I’d read next and if I’d ever find black pudding nduja in the Calder Valley.

Bandcamp

Hobocop

Hobocop - Hungry Freaks in the Data Mine
Headcleaner Records. Cassette/DL


Anything that comes in the post from America goes straight to the top of the review pile and it will always be so. Mainly because I feel deeply sorry for the person who sent it having to go into the Post Office to have the counter staff laugh in their face when they’re asked to hand over $14.25 to send a small plastic box in a jiffy bag weighing 42 grams across the pond. Using an on-line currency exchange convertor that works out to about £11. E-L-E-V-E-N P-O-U-N-D-S. If its come in the mail from America I’m in danger of beginning all reviews like this but £11? Really.

According to the j-card insert Hobocop are a duo comprising of Owen Long John ‘Cleaner’ Business Man and Cody Blanch Du Bois ‘Clam’ Jumbo Jack Flash. The link to why someone forked out $14 to send this to me may be Max Nordile who’s sent me things in the past and who gets a mention in the ‘special thanks’ section alongside Jhog Nobun, Henry Hal Lannan, Paddy O’Shaw, Will Sprot, Kephera Moonbeam, Pete Slovenly, Danz Z, Ben/Bto, Shannon Shmah, Nate Moman, Lillian Maringing, Bazooka Jah and Peroni Cloutier all wonderful sounding people and no doubt all upstanding members of the American musical community maybe, if my intuition is right, in Oakland California where there seems to be something going on outside of any parameters thats happening here in Brexit stricken Britain. Discogs is where I tracked down Cody Blanch who also goes by the name of Cody Blanchard who also aliases as King Lollipop who after deeper investigation turns out to be a kind of Jonathan Richman for people who like weird drugs, one man doo-wop and American kitsch. There’s a smart picture of him stood to startled attention in his braces, check shirt and black bowtie, a pencil thin mustache setting the whole ensemble off perfectly. Then there’s Shannon and the Clams who sound like they’ve spent a lot of time paying homage to 60’s girl guitar bands but this is going deeper than needs be. The label - Headcleaner Records appears to originate in New York and has no footprint on Discogs unless they’re hiding under the guise of a Greek Thrash Metal band. Facebook may get you there but thats somewhere you’ll have to go without me.

Pulling back from all that Hobocop themselves sound like the they’ve been digging around in the DIY punk racks of the late 70’s and early 80’s with maybe a hint of the quirkiness of The Residents and a heavy dose of Devo. Its all fairly lo-fi and urgent and punky with doubled up reverbed vocals that sound like the were recorded in an empty room and trashy guitars with more than a touch of The Country Teasers in them. Tracks like ‘Nauseated’ and’ I’m a Troll’ having the energy of a synth-less Devo, minor miracles of raspy punk joy ‘I’m a troll, no self control’. Slower tracks conjure visions of the Desperate Bicycles and when they up the sing-along quota The Homosexuals. ‘Ambient Abuse’ gets a mention because the title itself brought a smile besides having a killer bass/keyboard riff. Fourteen tracks in all. Just the thing you need to put a spring in your step. Go and buy it.
 
After discovering that Hungry Freaks in the Data Mine is available on Bandcamp my new found admiration for Headcleaner Records hit heights I’ve not reached since I got that 14LP box of records in the post two months ago. Which reminds me, I must be going.


Headcleaner Records

Smell & Quim - The Yellow Album

Smell & Quim - The Yellow Album           

Total Black. Cassette + 5” single.
100 copies.


Its been a good year for Smell & Quim what with the release of the delightful Quimtessence, the reissue of Atom Heart Motherfucker and news reaching these ears of a first time vinyl reissue for Cosmic Bondage that most essential, quintessential, quimtessential [?] slice of mid 90’s Smell & Quim muck. Its the Smell & Quim release in its original format that I don’t have and there I was back in 1995 at my first ever Smell & Quim gig at the 1 in 12 Bradford and there they were on the merch table, a Barbie doll in bondage with a cassette tape hung around her neck. Why didn’t I buy one? Shame on me. There’s been an overseas gig too. Back in March a three piece Smell & Quim played Berlin and in December they’re going to the States for the first time and will be playing the all day/all night Hospital Fest in Brooklyn. Will our intrepid heroes ever return? They came back from Berlin, or at least I think they did, I’ve seen none of them in flesh since but words gets around, sightings in Lidl, propping up the bar in the Barge and Barrel, books published. Getting back from Trumpton Town could prove to be a stern logistical challenge involving unfamiliar underground systems, shuttle buses and taxis driven by Mexicans with no idea of where they’re going. A challenge, especially for those who have supped from the John Barleycorn cup. It could get messy as they say.

The best bits of that thirty minute Berlin gig appear on The Yellow Album in a perverted Stars on 45 medley stylee but thankfully sans clap-a-long 4/4 beats. The video for this unholy section of the North of England meets Germany via Graceland begins with a heavy bout of floor tom pounding before a tired and emotional Srdenovic replete with curly black wig collapses behind his table of gear after a vigorous bout of shaker shaking, only to wake, as if nudged by some inner mechanism towards the sets conclusion with a sloppy grin. Dressed in their Elvi Napoleonic collar outfits long running Smell & Quim members Gillham and Morris [for tis they] carry on the performance, Gillham pounding the floor tom while Morris screams into a microphone with that most remarkable voice of his. Lyrics include straight lifts from the notorious ‘I’m Jack’ letter that threw the West Yorkshire police services off the trail of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe for many a year and ‘I’m a dirty bastard, I’m a Shakespeare cockroach’. At its end Milosevic is thrashing away a version of Pig Stealing Man while the audience howls approval as Morris tries to explain to one of them that its ‘Doddy’s Cock’ he’s singing not daddy’s cock, ‘He’s a comedian from the North of England’ he bellows.

On the cassette there are four versions of ‘Twat Out Of Hell’ and ‘More Piss, Vicar?’ on one side and the live stuff and ‘THWAK! on the other. ‘THWAK!’ being some kind of perverts manifesto or the transcripts of an interview with Our Pete or some other misguided soul who isn’t getting enough and should have bought a copy of Razzle on the way home so as to better relieve their frustration. All this set to the sound of steadfast marching military feet no doubt a lift from some Leni Riefenstahl footage. There then follows the enigmatic ‘HH PP [Abuse Your Allusion] AOBTD’ which is all drum machines, weird beats and unexplained acronyms. Expect noise, the sound of pissing and the destruction of Gillham’s bathroom on the four ‘Twats’ with some exceptionally vigorous noise that slowly builds in volume and tension before more pissing. The sound of someone pissing into a galvanized bucket is a running motif here as is Peter Sutcliffe [last track is ‘Ripper Remix’], all famous [infamous?] Smell & Quim tropes and fingerposts to where you need to go if you like your noise low down dirty and smeared with grisly Northern humour.

What of the five inch single though. An unusual and rarely seen format due to automatic return turntables struggling to play them and the number of pressing plants willing to press them being rarer than blind art dealers. I did have but two in my possession; the one that came with Merzbow’s ‘Green Wheels’ and the Evil Moisture/Cock E.S.P. split that has an incredulous 381 tracks on it. Now I have three and with it the fifth installment of ‘Twat out of Hell’ and ‘Braun Stains’. Braun of the Eva kind, those are her knickers you can see on the cover as recently sold at auction to a ‘collector’. Two tiny tracks on a thick slab of die cut vinyl that contains about thirty seconds each side of the good work above. The last words you hear [depending on which side you play first of course] are the computerized Speak and Spell words detailing the soiling of ladies underwear. Twat-tastic.

      

Youtube clip

Soundcloud

Total Black

Vibracathedral Orchestra Meets The A64 and Junction 26 of the M62.

Vibracathedral Orchestra - Squeezes The Lids Through Coming Window
Oaken Palace Records. LP clear red vinyl.
300 copies.

Neil Campbell - Filthy Masters/Rainbow Vespers
Cassette/DL.
50 copies.




While driving I tend not to listen to my own choice of music preferring instead the comfort of the spoken word of R4 or the classic hit of R3 [as long as there no howling Brunhilde going at it] and if that doesn’t work there’s always the off switch and recurring thoughts about how the majority of people who drive high powered German cars are almost without exception absolute tossers. Daytime R2 is only there for the traffic news, R1 I never visit due to it being incomprehensible to me and local radio is the lunatic asylum full of moronic chatter about sports teams you don’t care for and Doris from Shelf complaining about her bins not being emptied. 

A couple of years ago I hit heavy traffic on the M62 while driving to Manchester airport and turned on R2 only to discover that Steve Wright in the Afternoon, a man for whom the word ‘annoying’ had been invented had been playing Edgar Winter’s synth funk prog monster ‘Frankenstein’. I caught about the last minute of it and wondered if we’d driven though some kind of black hole over Saddleworth Moor. As I looked at the slowly moving traffic and the sodden bleak moors around me I thought to myself Steve Wright is playing Edgar Winter. Steve Shite in the Afternoon is player Edgar Winter and I’m in danger of missing a flight. Annoying Steve Shite in the Afternoon is playing Edgar synth slung around his neck Winter? Life is full of surprises.

On Friday afternoon I dropped Mrs Fisher off in York and having the drive back on my own and not wanting to listen to Steve Wright in the Afternoon just on the off chance that he might play a ten minute prog epic I took the above two discs. I know, I know but I was in the mood and felt that I’d been neglecting the review pile of late. So I thought throw caution to the wind and blast some Vibracathedral Orchestra on the return journey and to hell with Edgar Winter and the afternoon play on R4. Listening to drone at a high volume while in the car on your lonesome can be an exhilarating experience and its one I don’t often get the chance to experience. So why not. At this point you have to bear in mind that I don’t drive a Bentley equipped with a NAIM audio system. I drive a small hatchback with a whatever it is audio system that doesn’t sound too bad but is never going to overcome the road noise generated by a 1.2 liter car doing 70mph on bog standard tyres and springs. Then you have to factor in that I’ve been having a bit of ear trouble. The left ear to be precise. I’m not sure whats causing it but after having poured various chemist bought unctions down it it has cleared up somewhat but I’m still suffering from random deafness. It come and goes and I’m hoping its one of those things that goes away on its own me not wanting to burden an already burden NHS with a ‘oh I’m having a bit of a problem with this ear here and can you stick your torch down it and see if you can see anything’ complaint.

Ten seconds after dropping Mrs Fisher off at York University Exhibition Centre I stuck in the Vibracathedral Orchestra disc and let it rip all the way back home. Ten seconds after inserting the disc my ear went all funny again. Then I hit the A64 and put my foot down. All this while blasting Vibracathedral Orchestra as loud as I could stand it. I reckoned that I could take this volume all the way home which I’m proud to say I did. A journey of about forty miles that I concluded before the fifty minutes of this disc had elapsed. And then I got to wondering how long I’d been listening to Vibracathedral Orchestra and reckoned it must be twenty years now. Can they have been going that long? I may even have been at their very first gig which was in a gallery space in Leeds where Smell & Quim played one of their worst ever gigs. Once upon a time you couldn’t go to a gig in Leeds without Vibracathedral turning up. Noise gigs, drone gigs they’d usually be half a dozen of them leant on the bar with their equipment round their feet, toy pianos, electronic gubbins, drums and shaking things, electric guitars and fiddles. All of them looking for a gap in the bill or a no-show and off they go sawing and fiddling and banging and crashing and moaning and shouting like people possessed. Its quite a sight. And sound. 

By now I’d passed York Racecourse and my ears were starting to buzz. The left one at a slightly lower hertz tone. What happens to Vibracathedral Orchestra at 70mph on a busy road with the sun hitting you in the face on a Friday afternoon is that any nuance is replaced by a piercing whistling noise. Listening back at home under normal circumstances I realized that this was in fact a treble recorder [or some such similar instrument of torture] being played as if by a drunken busker on the Edinburgh Mile. Its not all like that of course. There’s a moment on the first track that sounds like a police siren  and someone clapping two halves of an empty coconut together but then again this might have been the conditions under which I was listening. Which caused me a moments worry but no fear.

‘Squeezes The Lids Through Coming Windows’ is a two track album, ‘Squeezing The Lids’ on one side and ‘Through Coming Window’ on the other’. Its an LP but I have a burn thanks to Campbell who knows I like to be kept abreast of such things. The first track, depending on your mode of listening, is the grittier one, the one that sounds like Vibracathedral Orchestra at the back end of the night when they’ve had too much beer and its all falling apart. In a good way of course. I’m pretty certain its a live track too and if not live then live to tape. The second track hits the tarmac running and soon comes together with various bits of Eno-esque synth droning and those coconuts halves. This is where they find their ecstatic groove. The groove that cant be written down or taught or noted. That groove is a joyous thing full of moans and groans and bashing and twanging and electronics that squiggle and blurt swirl all of it coming together and lifting and falling. I guess you just have to listen to it yourself. Or go see them. They’re still kicking round.

Meanwhile, back at the the ranch, I took in the Campbell disc under conditions that I’d consider more suitable to audio pleasure. Though I did once spend a week in Corsica with the glovebox of the hire car stuffed with Astral Social Club discs and used them as aural calm while the locals did their best to run me off their mountainous roads. Where Astral Social Club ends and Neil Campbell begins is something you’ll have to ask the man himself though because I have no idea. I find that his work under his own name is much more freeform, less beat orientated, more organic, more open to experimentation. Take ‘Rainbow Vespers’ in which Campbell transforms loops of some rock drumming and a grungy arm swung electric guitar chord into a rolling mass of turmoil that eventually opens out into something far more beatific. A rolling wave of crashing drums and a never ending guitar chord thats forever dissolving into something else until ultimately it becomes a gently plucked acoustic guitar that drops off the edge of a ledge with a silent plop. The flip has more in common with Terry Riley Poppy Nogood era than sampled rock riffs and after one of those synapse bursting starts where a tin plate is hit with a spoon and a table full of electronics explodes into firework like bursts, there’s piano and hand drums and a thing that goes TWANG before it all opens up into droney bliss land and oh well you know delight and all that.


Oaken Palace

Campbell Bandcamp

VCO

(((vlubä))) - A-Mu-Kia (fur Future)
Nashazphone. NP-29. LP. Green vinyl.
300 copies.



I have no idea how to pronounce it either. Maybe ‘flubber’ with a thick Slavic accent? Why don’t you practice saying it now ... floobar. It came from Argentina via Egypt that much I do know and that I don’t have the luscious green vinyl itself but a download file which has me slightly baffled as the first track, the title track itself, a crazy cosmic drone where Alejandro Jodorowsky meets Phil Todd after two toots on a bifter and six halves of barley wine, is a thirty minute mind melter that by rights shouldn’t fit on one side of vinyl. Has Nashazaphone chopped it in two? Have they let it run over two sides. I cant tell you. I can tell you that it burnt my neurons to frazzled black lumps and that the hairs in my ear canal are now cheerleaders for all things wonky. But then weren’t they always. 

(((vlubä))) are a long running project with 45 albums to their name. All of them released without me knowing of their existence. Müriscia Divinorum and Aphra Cadabra, for it is they, are composting [on this outing at any rate] the kind of out there unidentifiable, uncategorizeable, genre defying leaf mulch from which grew the seeds of Nurse With Wound. It must be quite some feat to get 45 albums in and still sound as fresh as that.

That momentous title track, that thirty minute monster ticks all the cosmic drone boxes you care to mention: reverb-ing chains of gadgets, tick, wheezing shruti boxes, tick, sawing violins, tick, tinkly bells, double tick and this is just the start, from here ‘A-Mu-Kia’ pulls over to the side of the road and picks up all kinds of weirdos including the guy who mumbles, the person who begins to scratch quill on parchment, the hand drum banger, the ringer of tiny bells and the whistling tuneless treble recorder player. As the ride picks up miles and dust and dead bugs on the windshield someone opens a bottle of something that must be stronger than Mescal and takes a stiff drink. This is the point where you start to wonder if the person in control of this vehicle [in this case two people - Divinorum and Cadabra] are the same kind of people who take hitchhikers home to get drunk. When you wake up in the morning the sound you hear is of someone trying to get ketchup out of a bottle by thumping it with the flat of their hand. Indeed.

The other four tracks, if nowhere near as long or mind-bending are equally as weird; ‘Flower Vimanas’ is another spacey drone of sorts filled to the brim with squeaky pipes and scratchy electric guitar, ‘Grape Nation’ is a floating in aspic song sung by someone with a years supply of Largactyl in them, ‘DlenQnnerv Ffwd!’ is a lolloping, locked groove in which a crisply struck finger cymbals is an accompaniment to someone extracting juice from a melon. ‘Mü Camel’ is Martin Denny for bad drug people, a subterranean Tiki bar crawl through a swamp full of people looking for their bamboo xylophone, a voice ‘sings’ like a witches ghost and casts spells that turns eyeballs into runny jelly and ears in to dried banana.

Flubber.



Nashazphone  





  

Chocolate Monk

Richard Youngs - Bad Words
Chocolate Monk. Choc 436

Blood Stereo - Two Drams
Chocolate Monk. Choc 437

Dan Fröberg - The Common Error of Ordinary
Chocolate Monk. Choc 438

Mike Dilloway - Any Old Time Tastes
Chocolate Monk. Choc 439

Todd W. Emmert - A Serpentine Summer [2019]
Chocolate Monk. Choc 440

Laugh Stains - Gaze Into The Drain
Chocolate Monk. Choc 441

Mr. Duke Pinch - Mud Hen, Prick And Green Belt
Chocolate Monk. Choc 442


Music comes in lumps these days. Like rice in Japanese restaurants. Seven albums from Chocolate Monk that once transferred to playable form got so jumbled I became a tad confused. And some people say that it makes things easier for them. At least the Richard Youngs tracks were easy to spot seeing as how the titles all came in caps and had swear words in them: FUCK IT, HE’S A BASTARD, PISS_FUCK_WONK [and no thats not a spelling error] and my favourite GOBSHITE [EXTENDED VERSION]. A track that goes on for what seems like three days but is in fact a tad shy of the twenty five minute mark. Whats happening here is that Mr. Youngs, a man whose penchant for testing the limits of his listening publics patience has recorded himself swearing. ‘Bad Words’, should you have the stomach for it, is a constant pitch tweaked multi-tracked babble of profanity that should not be played within hearing distance of a vicarage or sheltered accommodation. Smell & Quim fans will love it.

Chocolate Monk has been one of the most eclectic, out there UK labels for many years now, constantly pressing out ur skronk of a standard that makes other labels look like they aren’t even trying. Plenty of it defies categorization. How to describe five tracks of Easy Listening Pop classics knocked out on what sounds like either a tiny player piano or a zither courtesy of Mr. Duke Pinch? I have no idea. When Mr. Duke’s imperious version of The Last Waltz started it was all I could do to stop myself getting to my feet and cod waltz an imaginary partner. These schmaltzy classics [Crazy, Quando Quando Quando are my other faves] are the last thing I’d expect to hear from Chocolate Monk but that makes me like the label even more. And there’s only five tracks which leaves us all [well me at any rate] begging for more. Todd W. Emmert meanwhile has eleven tracks of far out repetitive, ramshackle, mainly acoustic guitar, keyboard instrumentals that are some kind of crazed Amon Düül outtakes. Work that one out.

From here on in you get the impression that we’re back in Kansas or at least somewhere near Brighton. It goes without saying that there’s some twisted tape manipulations in here, thats Blood Stereo’s name you see up there ain’t it? But first Laugh Stains who swing from electronic gabba to all out Faust with a stunning track called ‘Scanning Bulbous Ruminations’, think tortured howling vocals over slave boat thump and howling sax. ‘The Rhubarb Man’ is someone telling the story of The Rhubarb Man, a local weirdo by the sounds of it, to a background of a wind-up street organ and someone hitting empty milk bottles with a stick.

Dan Fröbergs composition ‘The Common Error of Ordinary’ steers us towards calmer waters with a gentle 47 minute long melding of collaged drones that weaves into its weft a gentle piano and a recurring organ blast that sounds like Keith Emerson’s been at it with a carving knife. Tapes go in reverse, loops are built from stuck records and the mood, despite the stabbed organ is one of serene melancholy.

Further in we find Mike Dilloway and two ten minute tracks of similarly edited sound collages. One track is a weird Eraserhead like loop of muted, oscillating tubular bells, cymbals crashing in reverse and plasterboard being riven from walls with a claw hammer. The next is all ultra lo-fi res underwater burble and lonely piano with taped vocals going v v v v slowly backwards, a decomposing tape fest of sizeable proportions. Mike Dilloway is a collaboration between Aaron Dilloway and Mike Collino. So now you know.

Blood Stereo’s release ‘Two Drams’ is, in another world, a cassette. And a badge. The Richard Youngs release has a badge too. It has the words ‘Fuck It’ on it but then it would wouldn’t it? The Dan Fröberg release comes with a book. I only know all this because I’ve been looking at the Chocolate Monk website which is where I should have been at the start of this trip. I also now know that some of these are sold out. Tough busters baby. I don’t see no Bandcamp page. ‘Two Drams’ is two ten minute truffle hunting tracks of rattle, parp, squidge and moan. This is a squeak. This is a firework display. That is a sneeze. Those are two empty milk bottles getting knocked together. There’s the walk home from the pub at midnight and all the voices and scrapes and shuffles. This is a an alter boy recoding his heavenly voice in an underpass. This did happen. This is weird even by Blood Stereo standards.

All that remains now is for you all to buy a £6 pint of Brighton beer and raise it aloft intoning the words; ‘without Chocolate Monk this world would be a sadder place’. Repeat ad nauseum, record it and send it to them. You never know.



Chocolate Monk

 

   
    
     

Lenka Lente

Pierre Loti - La Chanson des Vieux Époux
Quentin Rollet & Vomir - Vengance
Lenka Lente. Book + CD.

ISBN : 979-10-94601-30-3


Describing Pierre Loti as obscure author may be doing him a disservice. The French government did afford him a state funeral after all. He was born in the 1850’s and joined the navy as an officer. No doubt to pass the long hours at sea he began to write novels, short stories and essays on his travels. He married in to wealth and had opulent tastes. His house in Rochefort [now a museum should you ever be in town] was decorated in the style of the many places he’d travelled and contained a fountain surrounded by the coffins of five desiccated corpses. You don’t see that in Laura Ashley do you?

His most famous work his Madame Chrysanthème which pre-cursed Madame Butterfly and Miss Siagon as a novel regarding Japanese relationships and manners. La Chanson des Vieux Époux [The Song of the Old Couple] is a short story about an elderly vagabond Japanese couple called Toto-San and Kaka-San. He’s blind and she cant walk so he pulls her along behind him on a small cart that holds all their possessions while silently begging for food. My schoolboy French isn’t needed to interpret the moral of the story but [spoiler alert] it doesn’t end well.

How this relates to Quentin Rollet and Vomir you’ll have to ask Lenka Lente. All you need to know for now is that Vengance is an eleven minute Apollo 5 take off noise blast that mutates in to a shamanic honk and howl session courtesy of Rollet’s not inconsiderable honking skills. The way he flays those notes around suggests that he struggled to keep both feet on the floor at the same time while recording this and that he was knackered afterwards, Rollet having done all the lung busting hard work while Vomir [Romain Perrot - known for making walls of noise with a black bin liner over his head] stooped over a table belting the shit out of some noise boxes.

Its perhaps only through Lenka Lente that you will find an obscure French author, a Wall Noise artist and someone who has blown sax with the likes of Nurse With Wound and Eugene Chadbourne all in one small CD and book combo. Its this kind of juxtaposition I like. It keeps Loti’s name alive and gives curious readers the chance to indulge in some all out avant skronk noise that they would otherwise be unaware of. Win win.

     

http://www.lenkalente.com/


 

Goan Chill Out.

Anne-F Jacques & Tim Olive - Tooth Car
Intomena. int020. CD
200 copies.

Doreen Girard/Tim Olive - Boro
845 Audio. 845-12 CD.
100 copies.

Tim Olive/Martin Tétreault - Faune
845 Audio. 845-11 CD.
100 copies





I like to think of listening to electro-acoustic sounds as the aural equivalent of looking down a powerful microscope, the revelatory detail becoming more apparent the deeper you go. But this is the important bit, you have to pay attention. I know I’ve banged on about this before but what we have here is the perfect antidote to too much commercial radio and inane DJ blather this is your go to genre for escaping from the chaos of the modern world. Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and Montiverdian vespers have their part to play just forget all that Goan Chill Out Volume 6 the Panjim Mix shite and Classic FM Relaxing Moods CD's, get yourself some improvised experimental electro-acoustic sounds. Its the place to be.

The beauty of it only becomes apparent with much concentration. With extraneous sounds banished. I prefer headphones and a little above normal volume settings. I’m not advocating booking an hour at your local universities anechoic chamber, just pick a quiet time of day when your mood should suit and prepare to have your ear channels filled with all manner of fascinating sounds. I’m not advocating full on Fransisco López immersion here either [though maybe that would be no bad thing] just stick your head in the bag and inhale deeply now and again. Its good for the soul.

The Anne-F Jacques/Tim Olive collaboration came courtesy of a kindly soul who realised I didn’t have enough Tim Olive collaborations in my life. Tooth Car arrives on a Russian label that's new to me and comes in a splendid fold out slip case designed by St Petersburgh noise maker Ilia Belorukov that's covered in the striking black and white lines of the notorious/infamous Canadian comic artist Julie Doucet. Anne-F Jacques is credited with ‘rotating surfaces, objects and mastering while Olive is of course on his ever present magnetic pickups. Its two tracks are taken from live performances as recorded in 2015 in Washington and Boston, its where magnetic pickups working with rotating surfaces and objects makes for an ever revealing listen, its like having an army of ants crawl all over you as slowly melting glaciers grind up giant granite boulders. Gentle loops of degradation weave in and out of the grime and there's tension and within that tension calm and if that sounds like a contradiction then so be it. The second outing is much more subdued with tiny scratching and scraping though this is no less gripping and there’s gaps, yes actual gaps, silence that slowly becomes filled with the looping sounds  …. of what? Who knows? Thats a major part of the appeal.

Tooth Car was released a couple of years back but according to the Intomena website is still available. Please feel free.

The two releases on Tim Olives 845 Audio label are more recent and still available via Bandcamp and hopefully in hard copy. I urge you to investigate but only if you have the time and patience. Yes, yes, yes, I know, shut up with the patience thing. We know we’re not here for a beery sing-a-long. This time around Olive collaborates with Martin Tétreault and Doreen Girard, or vice-versa if you prefer. Tétreault working with turntables and electronics and Girard on prepared tsymbaly, that's a dulcimer in case you were wondering [I was].

On Boro’s single 26 minute track this results in a wash of scraping, droning, twanging, frotting, tink and howl as Girard tugs, shoves and maybe for all I know breathes across her strings creating a crumbling world of zings and crashes. Faune [recorded in 2013] is full of skree, tiny machine sounds, throbbing drone. Loops from Tétreault’s turntables speed up and slow down, gentle knocks and rumbles and through all this Olive works his magnetic pickups, strings are pulled through guitar strings, tiny wire brushes are deployed, coils, violin bows, tuning forks maybe circuit boards from dusty PC towers were crushed between weighted palms? All marvelous.

So why the collaborations? Why not fly solo? I suppose the answer to that is to see what happens when two [or three or more] get together and start making sounds that have never been heard before. These are collaborations of pure improvisation of course. Its alchemy on the hoof and extremely rewarding.



Intonema

845 Audio

Royal Hungarian Noisemakers & Fixateur Externe - Split
Unsignedlabel US060. Enhanced CDR.
50 copies.

Dai Coelacanth - A Condemned Debtor Does Not Recognise The Horse
Staaltape. Cassette.

Gallooner-Chlorine
Crow Versus Crow. CVC013. Cassette/DL
50 copies.

Art That Came From The Artist Chandor Glöomy Who Runs The Coma Kultur Label.

Venusian Death Cell - Holycaust
CDR


Attila Vlad is a portmanteau name that like Marylin Manson and Fred Boycott sounds better than the names it was derived from. Sort of. I imagine Attila Vlad to be the sort of person who signs fan autographs with a quill dipped in red ink. Maybe he signs important documents in the same way? Ah Mr Vlad so pleased to see you, we have a few papers for you to sign, I see you’ve brought your own quill how marvelous. Maybe Attila has another name, a name that he was born with that doesn’t fit within the framework of a noise project and he decided to change it to make himself sound harder? Maybe his real name is László Moholy-Nagy and he didn’t want to be confused with the Hungarian artist of the same name. These things happen.

Attila Vlad is all over the Royal Hungarian Noisemakers & Fixateur Externe release as is Rovar17 [real name Marcel Lajos Breuer]. This being a multimedia release we have an MP4 video showing a reel to reel deck and lots of ants doing what ants do to a soundtrack of noise and vocals that may well sound like Fred Dors doing what Fred Dors does best, or was it Diana West? I forget. What these mangled vocals and searing noise blasts do sound like is Costes. A Hungarian Costes then. Sort of. The first three tracks are all versions of ‘Anyu: kád = ki-o-káá’ and these are the three noisiest tracks on the disc. Not bad either with that lunatic vocal getting stretched, looped, slowed down and Daleked over various elements that include clanging metal and machine gun noise. For whatever reason the last three tracks take a detour into more sinister territory ‘Der Hund’ has a low volume thump covered in distant voices, radio comms delivered at a barely audible level, ‘Elég Volt A Látomásból’ passes in a similar style and sounds like the conversations heard in the control room at Chernobyl just as all the dials started going full melt. Last track ‘Isten Szeme’ is almost Faust-ian with a distant honking sax and Hungarian voices slurred into one big Goulash. All tracks recorded live. Unicum may have been involved.

Dai Coelacanth. Half Welshman, half prehistoric fish. The last time we met was on a Greek Island. It all seems so long ago now. I found the tape at the side of my pillow in the morning. A delivery from the Milk Tray man of Dicta-noise. There was a piece of paper inside the cassette box that said ‘greasy space’, the words were written in pen twice over and then again with orange highlighter. A piece of paper inside the box said ‘don’t lick it’. Glued to the inside of the insert were scraps of a found shopping list [swoon], the cassette itself had once belonged to Earl Hines but had been recycled which is a must for Dai or Canthy as he’s known to his mates. It was indeed a greasy space. But is it a he? Or a She? Or a them? We have a thousand dodgy Dictaphone edits each one half a second long and culled from outdoor situations where the bleed through of buffeting wind sounds like a fireman's hose directed straight in to your ear canal. Snatches of words appear and budgies and announcements in foreign tongues, radio broadcasts are destroyed, conversations between people with middle England accents come and go, whistles and oh the madness. On yet another piece of paper there comes a type written story in which Nancy at Wiggly Green gets a ray gun or something. My brain was fried by now. That Radio 4 New Weird Britain programme never called at Dai Coelacanth’s door. A missed opportunity for both parties. Maybe they just couldn’t find him. Her. Them.

Gallooner I like to think of as a mild form of derision, as in ‘you gallooner’ something you get called when you’ve spilt egg down your shirt, a little bit like ‘you fucking gloyt’ which is the one I use at work. Gallooner is Gateshead based Graeme Hopper and is charged with constructing ‘heavily layered and complex sonic evocations and excavations’, words, which after listening to Chlorine, I agree with wholeheartedly while simultaneoulsy nodding my head ever so slowly. Where to begin? There’s Industrial Techno Noise and wide open spaces filled with dry strummed electric guitar, delightful tape squelch, Nurse With Wound creaky oddness, dogs barking and me trying to think up words to describe this disparate release. Apart from the rather abrupt ending of track one which made me think that this was edited with a machete to fit this is an engaging and eclectic gathering of sounds that leads me to believe that Mr Hopper has yet to find the groove he feels most comfortable with. This is no complaint. The long honking repetition of ‘Confessions of a Broken Temperament’ had me returning many times.

What of Chandor Glöomy [would that be one umlaut or two sir?] who sends me paper from the Netherlands that includes a little A5 black and white art book full of treated photographs, a small plastic bag with an all-seeing eye and a two inch button badge containing a geometric image that looks like Bridgette Riley’s take on the Stars and Stripes and decals [stickers to you] but no music so I go searching his Bandcamp page and find a Glöomy/Paul Harrison project called Hairs Abyss and an ep called ESP which is the first thing I’ve heard from Paul Harrison in quite some time [and if you’re reading this Paul I still have ALL those CD’s you bunged me that time in Dirty Dicks in Halifax that time and I swear to god I’ll listen to them all one day]. Mr Glöomy is an artist, a net label and a zine printer. He’s a busy Netherlanders by the looks of things and has collaborated with all manner of people including Adam Bohman, Andy Jarvis, Smell & Quim and lots of people I’ve never heard of. The Hairs Abyss ep is all subatomic electronica with patients in American hospitals being interviewed by their doctors which is no doubt taken from a disturbing 1950’s documentary about the effects of LSD. A definite retro noise feel which is no bad thing.

Last but definitely not least comes David Vora with Venusian Death Cell’s latest pean to all that is black and ungodly; ‘Holycaust’. This is where Irish Heavy Metal meets Hasil Adkins meets Wild Man Fischer meets whichever outsider one man project you care to mention. David’s been releasing his idiosyncratic brand of Heavy Metal for what seems like a very long time now (twenty five years at least) and I’m honored to have been there all the way and to witness how little his sound has altered during that period. VDC is David and a drum machine and sometimes real drums and samples from horror films, David’s vocals which are sometimes ‘vokills’ and David’s electric guitar which for the most part thrashes about like a mad thing but on ‘Holycaust’ appears to have taken on an almost Derek Bailey-esque turn. Heavy Metal Derek Bailey style played directly into the condenser mic of a 1970’s Hitachi cassette/radio and on to a wafer thin Boots C120. I’m quite sure that David hasn’t been dipping in to the Incus back catalogue but there it is at the back end of the opening track ‘Curse’ a song written in response to an unkind email, all twanging and wanging and sounding like no other guitar I know. He puts himself into his lyrics too, you can read them on the hand written insert. ‘Revenge of the Witches’ almost goes full on experimental as the drum machine goes drunken Robby the Robot as Vora’s guitar goes all tremolo-y and out of control. ‘Popeslaughter’ leaves me thinking I need not add anymore ditto ‘The Inverted Cross’. ‘No Human Cross’ is a mini classic of existential angst and a search for inner peace. They tend to be over and done with rather quickly these VDC releases and this is no different, eight songs all done and devil dusted crusted inside twenty church hating minutes. The covers are hand drawn as they always have been as are the lyrics. This time around I even got a hand written press release. I feel honored. This is the 32nd Venusian Death Cell album.



Unsigned



Staaltape


Crow Versus Crow


Coma Kultur


davidvora10 [at] hotmail.com

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