brb>voicecoil, Palestine and the clouds above Outlane.

brb>voicecoil - Occupation by Killers

Muzamuza. MM24

One sided lathe cut LP + inserts/DL

22 copies.

With one of any number of current shit-storms to choose from its not surprising that the current situation in Palestine has been shoved off the agenda to some degree [though I do remember reading yet another story of an unarmed Palestinian being shot at a border checkpoint the other week]. What can I tell you about the Palestinian situation? Not much. I know that once upon a time they had some land and then they had it taken off them and since then theres been nothing but trouble. Whoda thunk that one eh? Oh and the British were involved of course. We just love trampling all over countries and then handing them back in worst state once we’ve done with them. Its what made this nation great.

Its a situation I feel I’ll never have a full grip on. I find the Northern Island ‘situation’ hard to fathom too. Once you realize that it all stems from Henry VIII deciding he fancied giving his first wife the Spanish Archer [El Bow] you have to think to yourself, surely you’ve sorted this one out already? Thats Henry VIII, the 16th century’s Donald Trump who is himself Hitler in an orange skin. Which brings us nicely around to todays surreal situation, something that involves a killer virus, statues to slave traders, racial equality, the environment, Brexit, police brutality, JK Rowling and whether Americans can make a cup of tea using a microwave. 

Did you see the idiots in Parliament Square yesterday? I’m still trying to find out what they were doing there in the first place? Maybe its because the footballs off and it was a sunny day, perfect weather for spitting on people having a picnic in Hyde Park, pissing up against memorials to police offers killed in the line of duty and having a ‘row’ with the riot police. Someone said they were there to protect ‘our monuments’ but seeing has how most of them had been covered up anyway it would appear the authorities had already done that job for them. I have the unfortunate pleasure of having to work with such people, the kind who get upset that Doctor Who’s a woman and that a meals not a meal unless it involves a huge lump of meat, the kind who will quite happily spill Stella down their Stone Island zippy top while pledging death, hate and destruction to anything that even sniffs of the continent.

I escape by reading and listening to music. Theres been much more of the former than the latter of late. I don’t know why this should be so. It goes in circles. The review pile is a quite healthy one but I’ve been putting it off, much preferring to retrace my Bennett, Bukowksi, Burroughs, Ballard, Beckett and Kelman steps [notice how most of my favourite authors have surnames beginning with the letter ‘B’? I tend to spend most of my time in secondhand bookshops near the door where bookshop owners eye me nervously no doubt thinking that I’m going to do a runner with an old paperback copy of Murphy].

‘Occupation by Killers’ pulled me out of the loop due to it arriving in stunning translucent blue vinyl. A single sided lathe cut thing of magnificence that hugs the sides of my turntable to absolute perfection. No label, just a twelve inch slab of wax with some grooves on one side. If you want digital then fine, you can have it, you can get the entire MuzaMuza back catalogue for a pound less than what this will set you back but then you’ll have digital and I’ll have a thing of beauty, a release that will probably never leave these four walls until I either move house or die, something that will remind me of the day Trump struggled to drink a  glass of water with one hand and the weekend we drove up to the moors above Huddersfield for the first time in months only to discover the views were obscured by low cloud past Outlane.

brb>voicecoil is Kevin Wilkinson, a long time ‘environmental audio manipulator’ from Newcastle whose label MuzaMuza releases sounds of a similar bent and in similar limited, most desirous editions. The twenty minutes of ‘Occupation by Killers’ originally saw the light of day in 2009 when issued as a three inch CDR on Muzzedia Verhead but is now forever encased in blue vinyl, or white, or clear or red depending upon your choice. All sounds are sourced from moulded plastic on wood and crushed tin on concrete the results being a masterclass in sound manipulation where you’re never quite sure what you’re hearing, a sound-world full of material stresses and tensions, the friction between surfaces creating an energy that dissipates slowly as the track reaches its conclusion. Its a termites nest or its Pan Sonic gigging from heaven. I know not. 

Bandcamp

Website

             

  

         

Dai Coelacanth, Vile Plumage and the Burselm Community Radio Players

Vile Plumage - Three Sisters Lost in the Darkness of the Banbury Seam

Invisible City Records. ICR60. Cassette 

50 Copies.

Vile Plumage - The Amnesiac Experiences The Vortex As If She Were An Eel

No label. CDR

Dai Coelacanth - Someone Needs to Stop Them.

No Label. Cassette.

Hows the lockdown going? If you’re already thinking the Netflix subscription was a waste of money you could always try to block out the real world by submerging yourself in the mysterious world of Vile and Dai. Its what I did yesterday and it worked a treat. Cast away on an island of cassette noise, surreal messages and radio plays put together by disparate voices, I luxuriated, sunk deeper within the Poang, looked out on privet and sparrows, bees and dust motes, the sun shone. All was well with the world. Except it wasn’t.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but this country, this sceptic isle, this Eden, this Aldi with the queue outside is being run into the ground by a lying, feckless, lazy, serial shagger, a man who thinks morality is for mugs, a vainglorious buffoon who has to employ an ideas man because he has none of his own, a stuttering waffler, a joker, a man with many deaths on his hands, someone who boasted of shaking hands with people in an hospital containing Covid-19 patients and who then got it himself, an idiot, a liar who employs liars and thinks nothing more of it than you or I would in deciding which shopping bags to take with us to our socially distanced supermarket. These are not good times.

I’ve been on holiday this week. Mrs Fisher is still being furloughed. Having no desire to go anywhere with our new found government sanctioned catch and spread the virus freedoms, we pass our days quietly at home. Mrs Fisher writing, me painting stood up in the kitchen with the sunlight and a gentle breeze flowing through the house. The weather has been glorious. Hose pipe ban next up. Car washes shut down just after they’ve been re-opened. I listen to the World Service and the afternoon concert on Radio 3, if its to my liking. This week there was a very strange Polish opera based on the works of a Romanian poet that sounded like something Kurt Schwitters could have penned. What the neighbours thought of it I have no idea but I think they think we’re a bit bonkers in here anyway.

These three arrived yesterday and I dug straight in. Poang, cassette player, headphones, pen and paper. I was in for the long haul. The Dai Coelacanth tape is a recycled TDK C90, spray painted black. Once I entered I had no idea when I would leave. This could be a ninety minute job. If you’ve ever had the chance to experience a ninety minute Dai job then you’ll have some ida of the situation I was getting myself in to here. I was trapped, carried away, stuck in on full volume [Mrs Fisher told me after my journey that the leakage from my headphones had given her a good appraisal of the release too]. Its probably the most deranged Dai release I’ve heard yet and thats saying something. His, being the world in which a thousand Dictaphone edits are Jackson Pollocked onto magnetic tape to create visions of 21st Century hell. This collision of commercial radio samples, shitty 70’s pop music, First Aid techniques, found Burselm street sounds and all-round general shitty noise are interspersed with the utterances of the man himself. As if giving out maxims of deep importance he emerges tourette like in periods of calm to deliver his maledictions:

I was a putrid human

Shopping for lamps always disappoints

Cut price paranoia

Don’t get any of it on your shoe

Do you love car parks?

The only thing you find here is bastards

One million worms

Always the worms. I think the man is obsessed. All these bon mots are worth memorising, try them out on your neighbours or the person two meters away from you in the supermarket queue. It’ll do wonders fro your state of mind. Maybe these snippets of Stokie wisdom are all taken from one of Dai’s novels in which the cut-up techniques of Burroughs and Gysin are deployed with debilitating effect? You could ask the man but you’d have to track him down first. The last time I saw him was in Greece. A chance encounter with a slippery character.

The trip was taken from me when the cassette stopped and automatically flipped. I prepared myself for the other side [not literally, though with Dai tapes you can never be sure where you’ll end up] and was met with heavy vocal loops, local radio and a perma-cheery DJ announcing The Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ which is what it ran out on shortly afterwards. Listening intently to tape hiss for a few moments I eventually realised that I was getting no more and tried to reassemble my thoughts. 

Processing a Dai tape and trying to encapsulate the experience is akin to making sense of Pynchon. Don’t go there. If you like Burroughs and noise and whisky and the sound of litter blowing around Stoke gutters, all at once, all together, then this is for you. There is nobody else comes close to creating such chaos. Hold him dear to your hearts. 

Vile Plumage is Duke Burnett and Peter ‘Bunny’ Cropwell, though you may know them by other names and voices that may sound familiar to listeners of the above. Its them two you can see on the cover leant over a table with hoods up and horror masks on. Here be 21st Century ‘bring out yer dead’ chants, a world of ultra-murk and Wicker Man style tape sacrifice where boxes of scruffy 80’s chart cassettes are mulched down to Kagel fodder before being set alight. Where the wastelands of Stoke sit cheek by twittering jowl with budgies and grinding gears, where dust is the clog in the machine, a machine that keeps going long after everybody else has clocked off and gone home for fried eggs on toast. Horror voices, EVP’s culled from shut down Burselm bingo halls. The horror, the horror. 

Burnett and Cropwell, along with The Burselm Community Radio Players are also responsible for ‘ The Amnesiac Experiences …’ a radio play assembled from dialogue spoken by persons of an invited nature as set to a soundtrack of various sounds and noises. Several of these radio plays exist but this is the first I’ve come across on actual disc. Maybe the lockdown has provided the ideal opportunity for such a project? People stuck at home, connected by the internet, speak the magic words into your phone and send them to Burnett and Cropwell who weave their magic.

What makes these radio plays so enjoyable is the way that different accents, delivery of lines and found spoken word audio sits easily within a soundtrack that at times seems like a warm up for a TNB gig. Lines of dialogue hang in the silence as if looking for somewhere to settle, lines that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Hammer Horror film, dialogue taken from interviews with housebound people talking about their own personal history, people talking to themselves wondering if the window cleaner’s coming today or not, Cropwell words come at a steady stream, delivered in a measured tone as as traffic trundles up and down a nearby motorway and ducks fly overhead, disembodied voices appear like ghosts, then more silence and the creak of doors, care home sing-alongs, street walking Jesus bother-ers, drunken folk songs and rocking chairs. Imagine Jac Berrocal telling you a nightmare bedtime story while acting all the parts.  Lets all move to Stoke-on-Trent.

Invisible City Records

Burselm Crypt

http://helicotrema.blauerhase.com/radiophrenia/

http://crowversuscrow.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-crow-versus-crow-radio-show-105.html

 

 

   

Life's a Gas, the Chocolate Monk People and James Kelman.

This is it then. Get used to it. Queueing to get in to the supermarket, your hair cut by the missus with scissors bought off eBay, back door surveillance, holidays in Britain where a pint of shitty lager costs six quid and the beer garden is patrolled by the distance police [all food and beverage brought to your table by a member of staff after you’ve ordered it via the app, no loitering in the toilets either and ultraviolet lighting to show that you’ve washed your hands properly], the avoidance of A&E for minor injuries, the avoidance of people in the street, joggers that kill, Face Time chats, online gigs and everything brought to your door by overworked, underpaid, stressed out delivery workers. At least nature is getting a rest from us. Airline travel? Forgeddubout it, who wants to sit in a metal tube at 30,000 feet for hours on end breathing recirculated germs all washed down with a tin of G&T, that’ll be ten pounds please and payment by contactless only. Just wait until winter comes around and next years gas and leccy bills start dropping through the door. Its still all a bit of a novelty for some I suppose, BBQ’s every day, sitting in the garden until you’re pissed and nipping out to the Co-op fifteen minutes before it shuts for another four cans and a half bottle of own brand brandy just to see you off. The future certainly looks anything but bright.   

I’m doing my best not to annoy the delivery workers by not buying anything. I know that this will eventually ruin the economy but for now I’m getting more of a kick out of revisiting older material. The insatiable urge to buy and consume new product, to discover new sounds and writers has hit a rock, lost three wheels and now lies in a ditch gasping for air along with all the dust gathering at Wall of Sound.

I find myself rereading books that have sat on my shelves for 25 years and LP’s that haven’t seen the light of day in decades. Last week I read James Kelman’s 1985 novel ‘A Chancer’, a book I read in the early 90’s but couldn’t for the life of me remember a single detail of. I knew that I enjoyed the book but the passing years have wiped every trace of it from the memory banks. So why not read it again. Which is what I did. After which I realised that I had lots of books on my shelves that I’d read and was of the opinion that they were truly worthy of my time and that I needed to revisit them, especially the Bukowski Black Sparrow Press originals, so why not re-read everything I already own? Pull up the drawbridge on literature, foot the brake on music, withdraw in to my own personal cultured world like I’ve withdrawn from the outside world.  

Having said that Dr Steg recommends that I should get hold of a copy of Charles Platt’s notorious sci-fi sex novel The Gas, a novel in which a gas leak turns the normally staid British masses into raving sex maniacs. Its a books that I’ve been getting around to getting for years and now may be the time. £4 via Kindle or read it via Google books? Mmmm. Then there’s Kelman’s The Bus Conductor Hines, another of his early 80’s novels which I’ve never read. Mmmm, £4 via eBay for a ‘like new’ copy including postage . Alright then once more for old times sake. Old habits die hard. Carry on now. Nothing to see here.

Robert Ridley-Shackleton - Cardboard Sane

Chocolate Monk 476

The self styled Cardboard Prince brings you his ‘back from the brink’ album. An album of two halves divided by a message to his fans informing them that he’s not going to commit suicide as he’s turned a new leaf, those days are behind him now. Where once stood Aladdin Sane now stands Cardboard Sane. The rebirth album for the No Audience generation. Whether this is all part of the Cardboard Prince schtick or a genuine outpouring of feelings I know not. I don’t know him that well you see, to be honest I don’t know him one bit. I’m not that familiar with his music either though some of it has found its way through these hands, but not for some time.

After listening to the gig that makes up the second half of Cardboard Sane I’m kicking myself that I never got to see him perform at the Sage during a recent Tusk fest. That would have meant being in close contact with someone who never stops talking though, whose audience never stops talking either come to that. The boundary between performer and audience being non-existent to the point of the audience actually being part of the performance. If ‘Saturday Night’ is anything to go by there wouldn’t have been much in the way of music either just Ridley Shackleton having a conversation with himself in much the same way a deranged Papa Lazarou would if he’d been told to warm up a Vic and Bob crowd, stream of consciousness words and sentences spat machine gun like and often ending in loud screaming, shouting and hollering as if the brain has come to some sort of impasse and the only way to unblock it is by shouting in frustration tourettes stylee. 

He is funny though especially when telling the audience [some of which he appears to be on first names terms with] to shut up because he’s performing. 

His songs, four of which you get before the I’m not going to commit suicide track are built around programmed synth beats and keyboard solos Sun Ra would have been proud of. A bit like Suicide for Twitch subscribers. The opener ‘Call Me’ pays no tribute to either Blondie or Astrud Gilberto but is instead an appeal to person or persons unknown and sets the tone for three tracks of misery all delivered in Ridley Shackleton’s sing-songy spoken voice. At least you can dance to this one. The beat is indeed infectious maan. ‘I Can’t Stand Me’ is more frenetic with Ridley Shackleton swinging between evangelistic preacher in hot mode, Michael Jackson going ‘whoo-hoo’ a lot and defeatist groans. The twelve minute ‘Opera’ muses on how shit the world is. 

I hope the lockdown isn’t having an adverse effect on the Cardboard Prince [cardboard being his preferred medium for carrying his Twombly-esque art, so I’m informed] nothing that would make him go back to where he was before Cardboard Sane because this has been fun.   

Chlorine & Possett - Ultra Fluff

Chocolate Monk 477

What a time to be in a band called Chlorine. Just take the recommended dose, usually a 99% dilute solution, intravenously, once a day while singing hallelujah and all your virus doubts be banished. Guaranteed peace of mind. Just ask the Orange Baby Man if you don’t believe me. He’s getting his most senior medical advisors to look in to it so expect results any time soon.

Word has it that the Chlorine and Posset met up pre Covid-1984 to jam the jam, to get wiggy with the wires, check the chakra, clang the clang, Chlorine with percussion electronics, Posset with Dictaphone and megaphone vokills. 

The 54 second opener pulls your ears wide open and shits in huge dollops of electro-acoustic speaker damage before taking you by the well washed hand into a cordoned off area where you will be met by a representative in full hazmat suit and explained as to what it is electro-acoustic music is all about. This being one of the three Zoundroom Blues that are to be found along your way. These several Zoundroom Blues being fingerposts to TNB territory; a compendium of holy howl and metal scrape with plenty of those life affirming ‘thumps’ that flatten your ear drum. Must be a North East thing.

All sounds being re-edited, remixed and reworked from hours worth of jam material, all boiled down to the very essence of juicy ear joy. Its not all clunk and clatter though, expect  

electro jazz skitter, industrial skreech, dominoes being shuffled, circular saws going through stubborn tree knots, Jenga towers collapsing. At ten minutes in length and the longest track of the twelve is ‘Cruize Clips Doo Boil Bricks’ which gives us the chance of greater inspection and introspection with dying cassette tape and rubbed violin sitting two meters apart from plonked European piano and African Kalimbas. Depth a-plenty lies in wait for the intrepid listener. Bravo sirs.

Dylan Nyoukis and Seymour Glass - No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake

Chocolate Monk 479 

Another crucial pairing and a solid thirty minutes worth of audio gobble from two men who’ve probably been singing happy birthday while washing their hands for the last thirty years.

Howler monkeys, stretched plastic, newspapers a-flutter, cello’s being broken for scrap, murdered bagpipes, sea birds, toy pianos, sheets of tin as soundboards, the lost call of the last Dodo, bridge strings, parping, grunts, the intro to Hamburger Lady edited down to five seconds and sampled in to a one second bite, harps, guillemots, shortwave burble, Duncan Harrison, heavenly choirs, a computer from a 1970s James Bond film going batshit, voices, log xylophones, more parping, swimmers suddenly realising that they’re sharing the water with sharks, raspberries [made with the mouth], things made of metal hitting things made of metal, underwater jazz, made up languages, sci-fi synths, burbles, The Clangers, green wood being chewed, small dogs asking to be let out, someone going ‘ahah hehe’ on a loop, a parrot, squeaky pet toys, a cough, left ear cooing and all of it put together into a complete audio experience for the delectation of sonic explorers everywhere.

http://chocolatemonk.co.uk/enter.htm

Stay Outside. Beat the Queues. Smell & Quim. The Last of the Covid-19 Diaries.

I went to work on Monday and I came home knackered. Not just a bit tired with being up since 5.20 tired but bone achingly knackered. Not because I’d overdone it in the exertion department but because I’d been on my feet for most of the day in boots that weren’t as comfy as carpet slippers or Merrell walking shoes and that was something I hadn’t done in a month. At work the talk was of nothing much but the virus and what people had done with their furloughed time [decorate, walk the dog, light a barbecue, mow the lawn, watch tv, drink beer] and after that conversation fizzled out, nothing. Thirty nine hours of tedium followed by three days off with nowhere to go is my foreseeable future.

Workday evenings are normally spent trying to write while listening to music and on those night when I’m too knackered for that, I watch people on Youtube mend shoes. Mrs Fisher is being furloughed though so thats not happening. Instead I sit across from Mrs Fisher in my Poang, then I fall asleep and when I awake I read a book while Mrs Fisher taps away words on her laptop telling me all about who she’s fallen out with on Twitter and Facebook. For the most part silence reigns. This too is the foreseeable future.

No more diary for me then. I don’t want to write about the safety boots I bought at Screwfix and of how we saw The Timid Lady on the walk [which we still do Friday, Saturday, Sunday] and the squirrels in the park [they’ve had babies], the queue at Tesco, how useless certain members of the government are and Trump’s latest act of lunacy

Instead I shall concentrate on the music.

Smell & Quim - Cosmic Bondage

Hospital Productions

DLP.

Smell & Quim / Harsh Noise Movement - Jenny Lives With … 

Love Earth Music. LEM216

CD

I’ve become a lot more receptive to the digital release of late, the pretend lockdown has played a part, but I’m unlikely to ever become a flag waver for the format/s. Since MP3 and several of its likeminded comrades began to appear I’ve gone from a seething, loathing mentality to happily taking such things in my stride. As has been noted on these pages many times before, where digital wins when it comes to time, space and money it can also lead to confusion, as a recent exchange of emails with Regional Bears proved, when it was deemed that if I’d have had the actual releases in my hands, instead of digital files, my digital based thoughts would have been of the much more enlightened kind. Its a fair point and another reason that the format/s will continue to be nothing more than access points on certain devices that I own.  

Then I get Cosmic Bondage in the post. The 1995 Smell & Quim classic that originally came as a Barbie doll with a cassette hung around its neck and then as a CD and then as a cassette in a ludicrous edition of ten as issued by Vis-Vis Audio Arts. Finally, finally after twenty five sodding years it gets the vinyl treatment from Hospital Productions, a double album that comes housed in a transparent slip case no less, a limited number of which have been delivered in opaque neon pink vinyl. I have the neon pink. Do you know how happy this makes me feel? Does it make me feel happier than if I’d have bought it from iTunes? Does it make me feel like I’ve escaped viral infection and found ten grand in used notes on the same day? Yes it does. Lets forget digital for a moment.

Mid nineties Smell & Quim finds Milovan Srdenovic at the point where Nonnen had gone and D. Foist had yet to appear so Cosmic Bondage is credited to Srdenovic and Jack Shit with guest appearances by Hakim Tubbitz and Ibrahim Ibrahim on North African lung pipes. Crazy days with Smell & Quim pumping out miasmic gas like ‘Vaginal Clackers Will Drive You Crackers’ and ‘Bou Jeloud’, a near fifteen minute call and response between those rasping lung pipes. This being the mid nineties its hard to escape the gay porn and thus you’ll need to turn the volume down at the end of Vaginal Clackers unless you want your neighbours to hear a man in pain screaming ‘fuck my ass’. ‘Anthem of the Quim’ republic with its cartoon like gong bash and parping march turns up as parts of ‘I Can’t Wait To Get My Tongue In Those Yummy Earthling Brains’ which runs to just over a minute. This will do me. ‘Fleet Enema’ is sixty plus seconds of studio tape sludge, ‘Rectoplasm’ is ten minutes of clacking groan, ‘Cosmic Bondage Club’ opens out in to an ungodly howl with various voices screaming from the wreckage. It doesn’t get much better than this. 

At the other end of the scale a humble CD, but still as warmly received. ‘Jenny Lives With …’ has within its surface the full-bore pummel that is Quimtessence. A track which until last year could only be found on another of those ludicrously limited Vis a Vis Audio Art releases until German label Total Black did the right thing. Its a fearsome racket of course, much more in keeping with recent Smell & Quim material. As is the track ‘More Teabagging, Vicar’ where long running UK Noise outfit Harsh Noise Movement find time to incorporate the old Tetley tea bag advert as voiced by gruff northerner Brian Glover, all this before splattering everything in sight with a similar fifteen minutes worth of full on roar.  Whether this is homage to Smell & Quim or a reworking of an obscure Smell & Quim track I can not tell you.

Tracking either of these releases down will be have to done via the wonder of Discogs seeing as how neither label has them within their online walls. A curious affair.