The Ceramic Hobs

Ceramic Hobs - OZ OZ Alice
Poot Records. Poot43. CDR. 148 copies.

Ceramic Hobs - The Best Of The Ceramic Hobs 1986-1989
Smith Research. SRV19 CDR. 50 Copies




It would appear that the further into the mire Blackpool sinks the more crazed, unpredictable and important do the Ceramic Hobs become. You can not help but tie the Hobs up with the grotty string that is their home town of Blackpool. The Hobs are now making music that is the mirror image of what Blackpool has become; a run down seaside  town full of shuffling zombies reliant on pharmaceutical crutches. Last week I was listening to these two latest offerings when I discovered that Blackpool is now the anti-depressant capital of Britain - a staggering 134,000 anti-depressant prescriptions for every 100,000 inhabitants. But if you believed the local tourist board or any of the thousands of day trippers that pile into the place year round you’d believe it to be a thriving palace of beer, sex and chips. The image I have in my head of Blackpool is of a rotting corpse upon which someone has stuck a big yellow smiley face. You don’t even have to scratch the surface anymore, its there for all to see.
Out of this psychotic mess the Hobs have somehow managed to release some of the most important music coming out of the country. Its all down to sole surviving member Simon Morris for the totally skewed spastic rock alley down which the Hobs now rattle. After years of teetering on the edge of psychedelic experimental rock it would appear that the Hobs have finally fallen in dragging with them the corpses of The Butthole Surfers, The Gerogerigegege, Wild Man Fischer and more bizarrely Deep Purple.

With Morris at the controls the Hobs have decided to bow out with a series of releases all called OZ OZ Alice. I think I’ve reviewed two or three of these [I’m easily lost and confusion seems to be a big part of the game] but this is the rawest of the bunch so far. Morris’s singing voice is one of the great unknown instruments and here its even more guttural and raw. He sings like an irate football fan, like he’s deliberately trying to ruin his vocal chords. That when he’s singing. Some tracks are monologues spoken to a background of washed out fuzz and band jams, endless riffs and TV samples - the more I hear of these OZ OZ releases the more I feel like someone trying to crack some kind of hidden code - samples of kids TV overlap each other, some tracks have two tracks going at once. All the tracks are untitled. The last two songs are covers of Deep Purple’s Child in Time and Black Knight, the first ending with Morris screaming out the chorus to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky with the latter ending with someone singing Starship AOR fodder We Built This City. Last track is found sounds; whistling, traffic, distant voices whilst the first is a song recorded straight from what sounds like a Christian TV channel via a condenser mic [all thirty seconds of it]. At its very heart lies a 13 minute riff of driven spazzed guitar, pumping drums and demented vocals thats as good as anything Faust ever did. In it Morris sings unintelligible lyrics, ridiculous over the top guitar solos come and go, monologues come and go, guitars crumble and die only to get back to their feet like dying monsters in the final reel, the wailing becomes more intense, sirens blare, gibberish is spoken, nothing ever settles.

The piece of A4 paper this disc comes wrapped in doesn't even mention the Hobs by name just some artwork and a list of starting points for conspiracy theorists [some of which I checked out and either don’t exist anymore or were never there in the first place].
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard some of this before but where I’m not entirely sure. Maybe these are tracks culled from tiny tape runs, hastily dubbed CDR’s on obscure labels, or demos that have found their way here via Hobs HQ? Compared to the last OZ OZ this feels like a mad rush, a desire to get it out of the system, a lancing of a particularly painful psychotic boil. The previous OZ OZ was a labyrinthine affair containing all manner of clues as to its existence, this is a coughed up lung oyster spat onto a piss ridden bus shelter wall, left to dry out amongst the discarded chip trays and anti PNE graffiti.  Roll on the next one.


The Best of 86-89 also contains material previously heard and found elsewhere but none [as far as I’m aware] that has come straight from Morris’s own Smith Research label. As Morris states in his sleeve-notes ‘We didn’t really know what we were doing … and the results were widely variable in style and quality’. He’s right of course but even here the seeds for what we’re hearing now are being sown. Skipping past the first few whimsical acne ridden starters brings you to Happy Hour where during eleven minutes of fucking around you kind of get the idea that the Hobs were never going to settle for a straight forward intro of ‘1,2,3,4’ for very long. There is indeed much whimsy here, track titles like Bob Holness Must Die and Patrick Moore Hernia Library being testament to such [and maybe taking something from Half Man Half Biscuit along the way?] but by its end and with tracks like Big Frog the guitars and the vocals are distorted to buggery.

When the Ceramic Hobs do eventually pack it in those early years may not be looked back on with the greatest of fondness - they really were just fucking around your honour - but go and listen to the last track ‘Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be’ with its squealing feedback, lumpen drums, wailing vocals and US government spokesman warning of the dangers of LSD - its all there just waiting to erupt.



   

Contact:

Smith Research - http://smithresearch.blogspot.com/



POOT - gordon_fucwitt [at] hotmail.com



*PNE [Preston North End - arch rivals of Blackpool FC]

The Strolling Ones

The Strolling Ones - There Was A Terrible Ghastly Noise
Music Mundane. CDR



The Strolling Ones are Martin Walden and Stewart Walden who one day went to Richard Youngs house and inadvertently formed the A Band. Who never learnt to play their instruments but who became an important group due to the fact that they became a catalyst for many of todays UK experimenters. Including Neil Campbell whose Music Mundane imprint this appears on.
There Was A Terrible Ghastly Noise is a collection of early tape works [some of it unreleased] from the early to mid 80’s which on the whole could be described as just plain daft but if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing could also be described an English Dada Frankenstiens monster made from the bodies of Viv Stanshall, Monty Python and Spike Milligan and maybe, just maybe Throbbing Gristle
One track sounds like a Goons outtake [The Seventh Leg Society] replete with silly voices, ‘Arson’ is a Dennis Duck type stuck groove with the word ‘arson’ repeated for its 62 second duration, the last track ‘Music For Dead Zebras’ is 42 seconds of someone trying to screw in a light bulb before it cuts with the words ‘oh well, thats enough’. ‘Live in …’ at twelve minutes is by far the longest outing, over a background of jabbed keys, air horns and unidentified noises one of the Waldens ‘sings’ and I use the term in its widest sense, absolute nonsense in a heavily reverbed voice before dipping into White Christmas, for some reason I kept being reminded of Genesis P Orridge in one of his early TG outings.
‘Sock Eating Competition’ is a hysterical pair of Walden’s off their tits on something stronger than tea talking about a sock eating competition. ‘Crowd Scene’ is a straight recording of a group conversation in which several people are laughing and talking and laughing and talking of Dada and Mongolian armchairs. All at the same time. And on it goes. For 18 tracks and 50 lunatic minutes.

There’s no point in trying to make any sense of these 50 minutes. They are what they are - two people fucking about with a tape recorder [and a few tracks recorded with a Casio keyboard at Richard Youngs house] but having a great time with it. But what fine loam this is. Whether its worthy of repeated plays is a moot point. It is what it is. It has served its purpose.

Anyone reading this who has no idea what it was like to grow up in England in the 70’s and have to stay up until the middle of Sunday night to watch Monty Python or argue with their parents so as to watch Spike Milligan on one of his ‘Q” outings, [on one of the three channels available then] could do no better than listen to this. It could open up lots of doors, it could give you some kind of insight into the eccentric British psyche or it could just plain baffle you.

The last time I saw Stewart Walden he was throwing people around at a Smell & Quim gig. The time before that was at a gig in London where he’d turned up in a silver lamé suit carrying an ironing board. Not somebody you’d meet every day. What happened to his brother Martin Walden I have no idea.

Contact: http://astralsocialclub.wordpress.com/

Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin

Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin

No label. Self released C90 cassette.

When Joke Lanz left Berlin for Switzerland in the late 90’s he left behind Bye Bye Berlin as a leaving present.

Remarkably it seems to have disappeared from the records. No mention of it in Discogs or even the official Sudden Infant website. But here its, ninety minutes of found sounds, noise bursts, spastic utterances, sped up punk records, reversed tape, turntable abuse, schlager music, Nintendo noises, African drumming ... for the found sounds Joke Lanz spent a night wandering around Berlin with his tape recorder, at one time fixing it to a lamp post to capture whatever came past: footsteps, children playing, train stations, birds, beer bottles, whistling and someone shouting what sounds like ‘rape’ in a rather menacing fashion. Its all prime Sudden Infant material in other words but some years before an official SI release would ever appear. A full 90 minutes of it too.

I’ve been in touch with Joke and he’s happy for me to post this. He just about remembers releasing it and says it came in a plastic bag [which I don’t have] but apart from that and the fact that it was recorded all in one night details are few.

Part I

Part II

Top photo shows Joke Lanz recording Bye Bye Berlin in 1999

* schlager = ersatz pop music popular in Germany and many other European countries but not Britain.

Misery

Misery [all track titles in Russian]
Liniya Shuma. 23 Copies.
Originally released in 1999/2000


http://www.myspace.com/miseryrus




Not a review but the first in a series of downloads culled from tapes from my own collection that I believe deserve a wider audience.



I first heard of Misery back in the late 90’s via one of the Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers catalogues. Misery were from Russia and that intrigued me a lot. There were Russians making noises? Well, why not? They make it everywhere else. So I bought the tape and got in touch with the man behind Misery, a certain Andrey Ivanov. We kept in touch for a few years and then as usually happens we stopped corresponding.
Then last week a review of one of Misery's releases appeared on the MuhMur blog and that got me digging around. I have a few things by Misery but the one that I cherish most is a homemade cassette that ran to just 23 copies.
Now I’ve seen my share of home made cassettes but this one blew me away: laminates, glued on dried leaf, tiny squares of card carrying logo and info, a personalized insert and all of it housed in a sumptuous little flip top box all held together with knotted string. Even the cassette itself has been sanded down with the Misery logo etched into both sides. Exquisite.
But its not all fur coat and no knickers. Having reacquainted myself with this C60 I can honestly say that age hasn’t harmed it one bit and I don’t mean technically. Its bleak Industrial ambinece at its finest. Side one track one [there’s four in all and my Russians not up to much so forgive me] is pure desolation. There's squeaky gate hinges, a recurring motif that sounds like a bleak wind, then empty bottles rolling down a street. The second track is equally morose featuring distant fog horns, looped voices, disintegration. Both tracks create the same kind of atmospheres as exemplified by William Basinski, sadness, melancholy, unease. If I’m being honest, the second side is a bit weaker than the first but don’t let this put you off trying it.

I’m pretty sure Andrey was using analogue tape at this time but as with all great works you’re never really sure how he creates his sounds. As far as I can remember most of his work was of a similar nature. I’ll have to dig deeper and reacquaint myself further.

I’m no longer signed up to Myspace so if someone could pass this on for me I would be eternally grateful.

A shorter version of track two side one can be found on the Myspace site.

Two other things: I can’t seem to rid myself of some kind of interference when transcribing these tapes [I’ll crack it honest - I think its the phone]. It is very low level though, barely audible and in no way detracts from the listening experience. Next up: Sudden Infant - Bye Bye Berlin.

SIDE ONE

SIDE TWO

Kylie Minoise

 

Kylie Minoise - Sid Vicious Occult School Of Motoring
Kovorox Sound CD. KOVO-053



Its been my pleasure to follow Lea Cummings career since its inception [I think]. Firstly with the Solmania like guitar noise group Opaque, then through Kylie Minoise and more recently under his own name producing drone works of outstanding natural beauty. Lea keeps Kylie Minoise interesting and worthwhile which takes some doing in a world full of noise. I genuinely look forward to each new KM release like a kid at Christmas, seeing as how KM are one of the few noise acts who seem to genuinely push the genre in new directions. Its a testament to Lea’s hard work on the live front and his creative force as a noise artist that he’s stuck with what I consider to be such a ridiculous name. Its probably cost him plenty of serious minded noise listeners. More fool them.


Sid Vicious Occult School Of Motoring sits cheek by jowl with that other fine Kylie Minoise release Spank-Magic Lodge, same laser eyes, same kind of artwork only this time the bird’s Di not Myra. Nice touch.
The first eight tracks of Sid Vicious race by in a clatter of styles. Typical KM material in that you never really know whats coming next: a mix of distorted beats, blitz noise, layered swathes of wash and plenty of scumminess. Things kick off in fine style with ‘You … Fetishist!’ [all tracks come complete with standout exclamation marks] a garbled treated vocal mashed into a distorted rock standard. Nigel Joseph used to be very good at this - like hearing a worn out Led Zeppelin record played with a stylus that has a fifty pence piece stuck to it for ballast. Avant-Gore Nudist Asylum! takes that trademark Whitehouse mind bending squeal and hits you over the head with it. ‘There Is A Policeman Inside Every One Of Us Who Must Be Killed!’ is a slowed down distorted Rallizes stomp where you can just about make out some inebriated vocals - it sounds like Mizutani singing down a tunnel after too much saki got into his system. All the tracks are segued so that when you arrive at the two twenty second tracks your full on noise melts into an eerie Eraserhead like soundtrack moment. ‘Cocaine Addict Hooked On Cock Pills!’ is a pounding PE like pulse over which there could be violin strings. ‘Wizard Puke In The Crypt Of Dark Secrets!’ is apocalypse survivor soundtrack. ‘Explosive Kundalini Awakening!’ sounds like the amplified Red Army march on Berlin played out to a background of old gramophone record distortion. At nine minutes in duration its the second longest track on the album but its the last and longest track that I’ll remember this release for. Tipping the scales at just under the half hour mark ‘Princess Diana 13th Pillar Ritual Sacrifice To Reptilian Hectate! is a noise triptych that builds from a moody slowly shifting Muslimgauze like ethnic start to a noisy middle before descending through some treated Gregorian chant into mill pond bliss. Its the drone ending that brings to mind some of Lea’s solo work and its pure bliss. For those that made it through it is anyway.

Contact - www.kovoroxsound.com

 

Early Hominids

Early Hominids - Alkali / Dilate
Total Vermin cassette. Total Vermin 38



Now that Campbell has ditched mywasteofspace and started his journey into blog-land I can reveal the inner workings of the Early Hominids work cycle; they drink beer and shove pizza down their necks. And then, over the course of an evenings experimentation, sounds appear that would be equally at home in Mirfield’s Panache [long gone 80’s cheesy disco - plasma on draught, punch in the face on leaving] and a Berlin art space. What appeals to me is the fact that Early Hominids are now beginning to find their feet. Their first release [Metatarsal] sounded more Mego than Mirfield, the second [Batley Bathz] more art space than spacey, this is the one that clicks - Campbell’s Astral Social Club vibes and dance/pop head bobbing enthusiasm fits foot in sock with Walsh’s gadget box glitches and oscillations. Layering noises and waves onto looped dance backgrounds of varying BPM’s was always going to be a winner with me. And its filled too. Filled out, fleshed out, full of everything all going off at once delirious and loose like an epileptic on whizz having a fit in front of a strobe light.

So; ex-members of Smell & Quim produce noise dance shocker. Or ex-members of Smell & Quim lay it down phat and noisy after supping ale and shoving pizza down their necks. Or I could dance to this if I’d had enough to drink. Either way I always wanted more dance orientated noise crossover releases and this is definitely one of them. There’s two tracks on here but there’s essentially six segued tracks, one of which feels like it was the plucked from the middle section of an intense jam when A somehow managed to slot into B and the head was right and the body was right -  a perfect piece of unscripted experimentation - that's the epileptic on whizz. There’s slower sections too where it feels like you’re trying to make your way across a muddy field in divers boots but even these feel unctuous and warm like drowning in a lava lamp, you’re a small glycerin bubble being warmed and cooled to the sound of weld spatter hitting a wet floor and bits of Rihanna. Well, almost.

Total Vermin meanwhile, carries on its good work. Ignore it at your peril.



Contact:

earlyhominids [at] hotmail.co.uk

http://totalvermin.blogspot.com

http://astralsocialclub.wordpress.com/

Night Science IV CD

V/A CD that comes with Night Science IV magazine.
500 copies.

Magazine reviewed elsewhere - here’s the CD review.



Features:

Hum of the Druid
Raionbashi
Golden Serenades
Kazamuto Endo
Dieter Müh
The Haters
Halthan




I have a theory that a CD stuck to the front of a music magazine will either have one great track or be a huge pile of one listen only shite. And as the amount of magazines with CD’s stuck to their covers grows larger by the month it seems the less interesting the music contained within them [or the more useless the software if you’ve just bought PC Almost The Same As Last Month monthly]. When the British weekly music press was in its prime, [that would be when guitar based music was actually worth bothering with] an issue that came with a free single or cassette usually carried something worth hearing. The NME’s C86 became a landmark release in its own right, heralding the death of post punk and the birth of jangly angular guitar angst. Now that the music weeklies have been replaced by the nostalgia music monthlies it feels almost obligatory to stick on a loudly praised but poorly executed cover mount. A friend lent me about half a dozen of these things which at first sight looked immensely appealing but on closer inspection revealed nothing more than a series of shoddy live tracks and various nobodies doing cover versions of their wet dreams b-sides. The Wire joined in the fun too, I sat and listened to the first 15 of their Wire Tapper series before retaining a handful of tracks and eBaying the lot. Social Networking and the availability of peer to peer software have further diminished the impact cover mounts have but thats never going to stop the music monthlies using them as customer bait.

Whether the disc accompanying Night Science IV becomes a touchstone for future listeners remains to be seen but even if it doesn't its still a great stand alone release. For those already familiar with Industrial, Noise, PE and experimental genres you’ll no doubt be familiar with most of the acts here but if you’re not its great gateway.
Dieter Müh’s Burning Bodies is a fire crackling pean given added eeriness with the introduction of two female voices, one moaning, the other a prim 50’s BBC voice intoning the words ‘you are burning people’. Chilling stuff indeed. Raionbashi’s sub four minute contribution contains all manner of organic sounds, ranging from an executioners swinging axe to slurped water to a bell that rings so clear that it seems to resonate into infinity. The Haters track ‘Spinning Spade is nine minutes of radio static, hum and swirling noises which if I’m correct was made using an antique turntable and a toy spade. Haltham provide the PE element with a well executed stretch of grinding despair whilst Endo and Golden Serenades both chip in with quality noise tracks, the former encased in a treated Japanese junk noise arena whilst the latter ends up in a more freeform, high-end European firmament. Which leaves Hum of the Druid. Teetering between brilliance and mundanity would imply that HOTD are still a sound in search of maturity. The last thing I reviewed by Hum was a bold array of electro-acoustic sounds that bore comparison with TNB and Mark Durgan. It also had some crap on it. The same thing happens here - given two tracks to elaborate with Hum confound and delight. The first track contains the exquisite sounds of steel pins being rolled down distant concrete steps coupled to a ghostly drone whilst the second is a piece of ordinary noise rumble, OK in itself but in the light of whats gone before hardly thrilling. I’m still holding out for Hum of the Druid to come up with something really special though.


I’m sure all these tracks are exclusives too.



Contact: http://www.iheartnoise.com/cipherproductions/

Pre-Dating The 13th

Pre-Dating The 13th - Drifting Away

The Way - Station Between Ecstasies


Contact:  kdogbox [at] hotmail.com



It takes a special kind of person to call themselves Morbid. Steve, Joe, Fred, Michael, Wayne, Ian and Kenneth are all workable names but I’m assuming Morbid wanted a moniker that stood out. He really is called Morbid too. Lots of people change their names of course, there's nothing hard about it; Derek Dick didn’t like his given name so he changed it to ‘Fish’ and started Marillion [although I’m not sure which name is the most embarrassing and why change one embarrassing name for another?] John Cleese’s father changed the family name from Cheese and Eric Clapton just doesn't have the same guitar God ring to it as Eric Clapp. So I wonder what given birth name lies behind Morbid? Maybe an obscure Biblical name like Ezekiel, a name lumbered on someone by over zealous Zionists parents perhaps or maybe its plain old Jack or Alan or Mohammed? Who knows. I used to correspond with Morbid back in the 90's and I seem to remember that he became fixated with an obscure Romanian artist called Victor Brauner and then maybe he changed his name to that. He started a band and called it Killy Dog Box and then we discovered we shared a passion for early Genesis. Not the early, early Jonathan ‘my lovely boys’ King Genesis but the stuff that started with Trespass. He wrote and printed a zine called Navigator which ran to a few issues and was full of trips to the coast and other ramblings and then as sometimes happens, we drifted apart.

Until last week when an email arrived from Morbid and on the back of it a download to Pre-Dating The 13th’s eleventh album. Now I may have been getting my Pre-Dating’s and  my Killy Dog Box’s mixed up but I’m pretty sure Pre-Dating is a collaboration with someone unknown to me and that KDB was Morbid all on his own - but I could be wrong. I seem to remember KDB being all dark ambiance but I could be wrong on that count too. There was a tape on Rob Haylers OTO label but nothing much more than that plus a few home spun jobs. I dare say I had some Pre-Dating in my hands around then too but the mists of time play tricks with my brian, I mean brain.

Drifting Away is an hours worth of segued tracks no doubt intended to induce some kind of altered state. Whilst listening to it I tried to think of what it sounded like and I came up with the following list; Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works’, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’ and  everything I heard by La Bradford in the early 90’s. There’s also bits of Ennio Morricone - which turn out to be the best bits. The worst bits are when the moaning vocals come in and then I got very angry. The Morricone bits are scraped strings, twanged strings, simple but effective. The opening is churning bass and seagull swoops of electric guitar, so much like La Bradford that I nearly swallowed my mentholated pastille. Great things are coming I thought but it wasn’t to last for Drifting Away is [fanfare of trumpets] a bit of a curates egg. At times the music does carry you, there’s a swarming over-driven buzz around the 50 minute mark that almost drifts into C.C.C.C. territory but these highlights are few and far between. With a bit of spit and polish though [and some judicious editing] Morbid could have this down to a decent enough 20 minute piece but as it stands its a wandering assemblage of moods and ambience that only rarely engages the listener. Well, this one anyway. I dare say that if you spend lots of your hard earned giro at Cold Spring then this may just have enough in it for you.

I forget where The Way came into things but if you want an hours worth of really bad Tangerine Dream, wounded vocals, thrumming bass guitars, tortured cattle and distorted twangs blasted out over a frozen plateau then get emailing. 

I like you Morbid I really do but sometimes your music just doesn’t do it for me.

Zines - Niche Homo/Hiroshima Yeah!/Night Science

Night Science IV
A5 zine + CD. 136 pp. 500 copies.

Niche Homo
Issue 4. A5 zine. 80pp approx

Hiroshima Yeah!
Issue 72. A4 zine. 6 pp.





I used to write a zine. Lost days spent with your head in a pair of sweaty headphones listening to CD’s with your finger on the fast forward button. It was Simon at the [still] famously Luddite DDDD zine who pioneered this approach and when time is against you I can honestly say it works - badly dubbed home made CDR’s with scribble on them can be despatched in a matter of seconds. The only hard part is thinking up words to say about them afterwards. And then eventually one day you wonder why you’re bothering and out come the Art Garfunkel LP’s and the Genesis LP’s and you think to yourself why, this is much more pleasant.

I’ve been reading Chris Donald’s book about his 20 years as editor of Viz. Chris Donald took Viz from a 100 run comic hawked around the pubs and clubs of Newcastle into a publishing phenomenon that at its peak sold over a million of every issue. It made him and a few people around him very rich. It also lead him to clinical depression. Because thats what zines can do to you. They take over your life to such an extent that instead of having a life you find yourself at home in a dark room with a pair of sweaty headphones on trying to think up interesting things to say about a piece of kak from Zagreb. It all starts as a bit of harmless fun; the joy of getting free music, seeing your work in the hands of others, people talking about it, some of them even liking it and then comes the down side; the queues at the Post Office, the teetering review pile and then the letters and emails, why do you hate my music when its so obviously the best thing ever and you missed one of the ‘t’s’ out of my band name and when’s the next issue out and can you do this and that and blah blah blah and you’re looking at the clock and thinking I could be doing so many other things with my life and then one day you wake up and realise you just don’t have the time to do it anymore and you stop and you write a blog instead.

Zines are a great way of filling spare time and finding an outlet for your passion. If you’re on the dole and you’re of a creative bent then zines are good way of killing dead time. If you’re working a regular job then kiss your spare time goodbye. Hello zine, goodbye life.
Which is why I really do appreciate zines, even if the interviews are slightly banal and predictable or the writing is a tad poor because more often than not if the hearts are in the right place it’ll work - enthusiasm can conquer many obstacles.


Having three zines land on me in the space of a few weeks also goes to prove that the internet hasn’t entirely slaughtered them either.  What alarms me most though is the fact that Niche Homo got to issue four without me being aware of its existence, even though its produced in nearby Leeds and covers bands and acts I care about. Niche Homo is in classic zine territory; band interviews [with issue 4 you get Ramleh, The Homosexuals, The Pheremoans and Thee Oh Sees] and articles including the diary of a local swimmer, a three-way mix tape discussion, an odd piece on record collecting and something called Geocaching in which you spend £50 on a gadget that helps you locate film canisters with 50p’s in them on canal banks in London - at least you get plenty of fresh air I suppose.
Its a zine, the quality is up and down, the interviews could do with editing but its put together with much love and attention and that’ll do for me.

Night Science IV has been kicking around for a few years now and during that period has established itself as a serious weighty tome. Due to its sheer volume its going to take me a while to get through it but at least for now I can recommend the accompanying CD [in fact the CD could merit a review of its own - I’ll post one at a later date]. Sole editor and writer Chris Groves has my utmost admiration in putting out a zine that runs to a 136 pages and contains over 200 reviews which as far as I can see have all been penned by his good self. In fact with its prefect bound spine and high standards you could argue the case that this is as good as a small book. Chris interviews Kazumoto Endo, Halthan, The Haters, Dieter Müh, Golden Serenades and Raionbashi and then puts them all on to a CD for your listening delectation [all exclusive tracks I believe]. There’s also two live reviews featuring Dave Phillips and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock along with KK Null. With Chris living in Tasmania I guess the opportunity to witness much in the way of noise and experimental behavior is hard to come by but this doesn’t stop him taking K.K. Null to task for being predictable. Which is some indication of how critical Chris can be. Chris’s writing can be a little clinical at times but there’s no denying he knows his stuff.

One quality that all true zines should exhibit is regular availability. The only way to go with a monthly zine is to make it cut and paste and go with what you’ve got come the deadline - which is exactly what HY does. I’ve been with HY since its inception and its monthly deliverances are welcome missives. HY works because both of its contributors come from different musical backgrounds; Mark Ritchie lives in Glasgow and likes singer songwriter stuff, his live reviews begin when he wakes up then take in all the food he ate, all the buses he caught, all the pints he sank and all the Glasgow pubs he sank them in with the band sometimes getting a mention in the last sentence. His reviews of everything from John Martin reissues to books and films are short and precise. At the other end of the spectrum comes Gary Simmons. Simmons London based misanthropic rants mixed with Whitehouse lyrics aren’t to everybody's tastes but when he gets on a roll he’s unstoppable. In issue 72 he reviews Pendercki, Gorecki and Charles Manson then gives us a blow by blow transcription of a text war he had with fellow HY reader Jimmy Little which ends with Little being arrested by the London Met. HY is a crude, photocopied, few pages of cut and paste A4 stapled in one corner zine and its perfect. If the writing is good enough cut and paste will suffice.



[HY is available for the cost of a few stamps though I suspect that hard cash wouldn’t go amiss - email for contact details as Ritchie tends to move about a bit. Niche Homo has no cover price whilst Night Science IV is available via the Cipher website for $15 Aus/$16 US plus postage]





Contact:

Night Science
℅ Cipher Productions
PO Box 169
Newtown
Tasmania
7008
Australia

iheartnoise.com/cipherproductions cipherproductions [at] lycos.com


Niche Homo
www.weirdoguise.co.uk


Hiroshima Yeah!
donbirnam [ay] hotmail.com

Penus Rectus

Penus Rectus 1997/Penus Rectus 2010

Dead Mind Records - CD + 7”

Ever wondered why black rap artists never refer to their manhood as a ‘cock’? According to Peter Silverton and his fascinating book ‘Filthy English’ it may have something to do with the fact that female African slaves called their fannys ‘cocks’. Quite why a euphemism for manhood came from a shortening of the name Richard though I don’t know, the same goes for why female African slaves should call their fannys cocks - some things just get lost in the midsts of time. But then dicksucker just doesn't have the same impact as cocksucker does it? Same goes for dick off, not nearly as effective as cock off and whilst dickhead is eminently more user friendly than cockhead I find cocktease or pricktease far more user friendly than dicktease [which is too near to striptease to be of any use as a good swear]. Apparently early English puritan settlers to America were so worried about overuse of the word ‘cock’ that they did their best to rid themselves of it by adopting the Dutch word ‘roost’ - hence ‘rooster’ rather than cockerel. Its why Americans call faucets faucets and not stop cocks [an English English word for ‘tap’] and why weathercocks and cockroaches become weathervanes and plain old roaches. 

Which brings me to Penus Rectus and the age old obsession of noise and penises. [Actually Penus is latin for painful which explains nothing whilst rectus is latin for straight. I’m nothing if not well researched]. Peni abound on the artwork to both these releases of course. Indeed various inserts and artwork are covered in all manner of phallus. Maybe its there for just in case you forget what one looks like or maybe they just like drawing big knobs? Whatever. 

The CD is a bit of a curates egg. Its a collection of tracks that appeared on a 1997 three cassette comp called [of course] Penus Rectus. The original cassette release carried about 30-odd tracks but here they’re whittled down to twelve, the frustrating thing being ... no track info. The insert says ‘this selection taken from …’ and leaves it at that. Having discovered the original release on discogs it seems a shame that Dead Mind haven’t taken the time to at least give us some detailed info or stretched it further by re-releasing the whole thing. Without a track listing I’m lost. It all sounds like decent mid nineties noise to me, meaning its fairly uncomplicated, muddily recorded and delivered with a sometimes naive honesty but with no info comes no detailed review. Just for the record, track 11 was my favourite [I’m guessing Macronymhpa].

At least the single is marked up. A track each from Prurient, Odal, Smell & Quim and Streicher. Odal is the only artist who appeared on the original cassette release and while Smell & Quim and Streicher were certainly around at that time they didn’t. That leaves Prurient to kick things off with a huge swaying lopsided pan-attack of holistic noise. A far cry from his feedback workings and well worth hearing. No doubt the Prurient completists will already be taking notes. Odal is a short blast of static and buried screaming whilst Smell & Quim work over a track call ‘cuntsocket’ [presumably included so that the other half don’t feel left out]. Its a classic slice of degenerate Quim with [I hope] porn outtakes amid a miasma of swirling muck. Which leaves Streicher. Perhaps one of the most enigmatic and controversial artists ever to release work in the Noise/Power Electronics arena. Listening to this contribution will leave you no wiser though - a straight forward blast of decent if not earth shattering noise. Which gets me to wondering as to whether the single contains material originally earmarked for the cassette release? The label that released Penus Rectus in 1997 was Dutch, Dead Mind is Dutch, there’s a link somewhere.

Contact: www.blutistzeit.nl

Peter Silverton/Filthy English http://tinyurl.com/4h4t3rs

[after many weeks the CD artwork appears]

The New Blockaders - Live At Hinoeuma

The New Blockaders - Live At Hinoeuma

Hypnogogia. GIA04. CD 300 Copies.

For about five all too short years the Red Rose in London was the best noise venue in the country. Hinoeuma and Harbinger Sound put on plenty of quality shows there. For us Northerners it was easy to get to too; two hours on the train, two stops on the tube and out in to the wilds of the Seven Sisters Road past the former Rainbow Theatre, the dodgy pubs, the 24 hour continental deli’s, the grease outlets, the muggers and the shady looking locals. Its gone now of course, the last I heard it was a pool hall, but for those few short years it was perfect. Front of house was a regular pub, usually frequented by dwarf Turkish bin men and alcoholics - it was like the Duncan transported to Finsbury Park. Compare it now to The Grosvenor, allegedly the best noise venue in the capital, with its hike to Stockwell, [sarf of the river], its no tubes after midnight and only night buses and taxis to fight over and endure. The room at the back of the Red Rose was huge with a good sized stage but perhaps most importantly of all it was run by a guy who really didn’t give a shit about what you got up to so long as you drank lots of beer. 

One of the most memorable events at the Red Rose was the night TNB headlined. It was also the night Emil Beaulieau played his UK debut. Merzbow, Putrefier and various Shimpfluch members also found there way on to the bill, an impressive line up by anybody's standard and one not likely to be repeated. On that night The New Blockaders were so loud they drove me from the venue. This has been documented before and I feel no shame in repeating it here. Two or three times I sought the sanctuary of the front bar with its dwarf Turkish bin men only to return moments later to be met with … silence. It was so loud TNB kept blowing the fuses and all the owner did was dig out some new ones, run up a ladder and replace them ... only for them to blow again. I think they blew two or three times and each time the two Blockaders sat stock still and waited for the power to return and for the onslaught to begin. TNB delivered their set at a murderous level of sound. It was unyielding and unforgiving and its still the loudest thing I’ve yet to experience in a live environment. To stand in that room when it was in full sway was like having someone take a swing at the back of the your knees with a billy club. It was a volume you could actually feel.

A few years back this momentous event was commemorated via a RRRecords picture disc and as is usually the case with TNB material its short run disappeared pretty quickly. You can still get it, at a price of course, but for those who missed out this Hypnogogia repress is particularly welcome. 

Listening back now I’m met with the same predicament I had when listening to the vinyl; is that what they really played? The passing of years and no doubt the amount of beer I consumed that night have played tricks with my decaying brain cells. For me it was wall noise before the term was coined, an unrelenting barrage of sonic distortion designed to engulf, destabilise and overwhelm the listener to such an extent that it drove out any kind of thought process or rational engagement. And on the disc? Two 17 minute tracks of slowly unfurling, instantly recognisable TNB motifs … but no wall noise. There’s slow hums, creaking leather straps, ball bearings being dumped into a galvanized dustbin, chains, rattles and plenty of what I like to call noise churn, that lovely low end rumble that seems to fit snugly somewhere between your biorhythms and and a recess somewhere deep in your brain.Some elements I detect from previous TNB releases, what appears to be a primitive machine gun and then theres the slime slurpers, the release the bats experience and the bit that sounds like all the windows just blew in in the midst of a force ten hurricane. 

My abiding memory of that night is seeing Phil Todd’s anti-performance. Sat stage front at a table with his face covering balaclava and its defiant ‘X’ he drank from a bottle of wine. It was performance art and anti art rolled into one but above all it was nihilistic and  destructive - words with which The New Blockaders have become synonymous. 

On a different note, the CD image depicts a decaying building in modern day Detroit. In case you weren’t aware Detroit is crumbling and Polidori’s been there to document it. 

Polidori documents decay and destruction - TNB compose the soundtrack.

Polidori images:

 http://tinyurl.com/4bzf4az

Michael Esposito/Kevin Drumm

Michael Esposito/Kevin Drumm - The Icy Echoer

Fragment Factory 7”. FRAG16. Clear Vinyl. 300 copies.

I have this vision that in the distant future you’ll be able to have a file containing every note of music ever recorded surgically implanted straight into your brain. Everything. Everything ever recorded starting with Eddison’s wax cylinders right up to what popped out of itunes five seconds ago shoved on to a chip and stuck into your head at birth. And with regular updates it would be but a small job to connect yourself to a PC and download al the new stuff thats been made available. For a small fee of course. Wouldn’t it make life so much easier? And then just think of a piece of music and it appears in your head. No more need for portable music appliances or storage devices. Think of all that saved space. Devices will be made available for those wanting to share music in social situations of course but for when you’re on your tod all you’ll need is a single thought.

Except that wouldn’t be very good at all would it? Where’s the fun to be had in just thinking of a piece of music and having it pop into your head? What about the bigger picture? The way the artist wanted their work represented? The album sleeve? The inner sleeve? The run off grooves? The subtle messages hidden in reversed record grooves? [Rob Halford would never have had to defend himself from inserting hidden messages onto his records if he’d have released Suicide Solution on an MP3 download only single now would he?]And what about different coloured vinyls? Picture discs? Locked grooves? Double grooves? Clear vinyl? Shaped discs? Interlocking discs? Vinyl so heavy you can actually feel the weight in your hands. Who remembers the albums that came out during the oil crisis in the late 70’s? Albums so thin and flimsy they were almost like flex-discs older brother? Ah yes, flexi discs. What about seven inch singles? Ten inch singles? Five inch singles? Records that play 33rpm on one side and 45 rpm on the other. Records that play from the inside out? Maxi discs. EP’s. Double A-sided singles. Triple LP’s. Gatefold sleeves. Records with more than one centre hole. Juke box singles with the centre punched out. Acetates. Dub plates. 16 inch transcription records. Records made from glue. Records with only a finite life span.Transparent sleeves made to look like bags of sick. The Sergeant Pepper album cover. Anti records designed to destroy your stylus. Duchamp picture discs designed to induce hypnosis. 78’s. 16’s all the lot consigned to the dustbin of history replaced by something the size of a babies little toenail.

Which is why vinyl is still so vitally important. Now more than ever. Its heyday may have gone but in the hearts of people who still love music its still there, a format worth fighting for in a world slowly sinking into a digital sea.

Which brings me to Fragment Factory who have nailed their intentions to the mast with their first foray into vinyl. Let me start by saying that I know little about Kevin Drumm and even less about Michael Esposito. The latter I may be forgiven for but I suppose admitting to not knowing much about KD is a little like admitting you’ve never heard of Captain Beefheart. Well, at least in the circles I move in it is. Esposito is different. Research tells me that he’s involved with Electronic Voice Phenomena - the capture of voices from beyond the grave. For The Icy Echoer they use field recordings taken from a cemetery coupled to EVP files, found sounds and Drumm’s [I assume] prepared guitar. What it all sounds like is five short tracks of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds and one longer track of rummaging around in a plastic bag sounds. Some tracks have pulses running through them, some don’t. On some you can hear voices and on others you can’t. One track has a slight guitar melody to it over which you can hear crows. If this sounds glib its not meant to. I have listened to this record many times and have still to make my mind up as to whether its an important EVP document or just a straight forward piece of music concrete/field recording composition with a bit of guitar chucked in. I suppose being the worlds biggest sceptic makes me the wrong kind of person to be evaluating a record that has EVP at its core. If there are ghosts out there trying to talk to us they appear to be going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for us to capture their rare utterances. One mans snip of ghostly speak is another mans wind in the trees. Having said all this I did enjoy listening to the groans and the static and the doom laden backgrounds plus its made me curious to further explore the worlds of Drumm and Esposito. Job done. Most importantly of all its a record I shall look forward to reacquainting myself with. And it is a record. A small clear piece of plastic with sounds on it and for that we should all give thanks.

www.fragmentfactory.com