Cock E.S.P.

Cock E.S.P. - Historia De La Musica Cock [A Tribute to Experimental Music 1910-2010]

Split release between:
Little Mafia [LM078],
Breathmint [BM330]
SunShip [Sun56].
CD.


When coming across a Cock E.S.P. release the thought often occurs to me that they’ve never played the UK. They’ve played a few European dates but for some reason the UK has never experienced their absurd, abrupt, chaotic and some may say even pointless live shows. Continual sole member Emil Hagstrom is a big man who likes to put a comedy chicken head over his own and along with his fellow band members [a varying quota depending on who isn’t injured, in jail or in hiding] destroy whatever equipment they’ve got by hurling it at each other, the walls, the floor and the audience. Writhing about in pools of beer, blood, bar stools and broken glass they produce what can only be described as noise in its purest sense. Noise as a racket, an unstructured, ramshackle blast of spew from which only the fit and the lucky emerge unscathed. Its in the live arena where they really blossom but only very briefly. Most of their shows are done and dusted in under five minutes this being the amount of time it takes them to make all their gear inoperable or lame someone so badly that urgent hospital treatment overrides any quest for noise nirvana. For some they’re still the best noise band around; loud, stupid, fun and never taking themselves too seriously. Their releases [both audio and visual] add much needed dashes of absurdist humour to a genre not entirely known for its ability to raise a smile and their ‘songs’ like their live shows are usually very, very short. The Cock E.S.P./Evil Moisture 5” single contained 381 tracks, this on a format that holds about five minutes of music. Each ‘song’ was but a series of clicks, blasts, grunts and screams [at least thats how I remember it]. I doubt that there’s a Topographic Oceans of noise lurking in Hagstrom’s mind.

Pity the poor bugger then who has the unenviable task of tapping in to Discogs all the details to the 99 tracks that constitute ‘Historia de la Musica Cock’. Billing itself grandly as ‘A Tribute to Experimental Music 1910-2010’ these 99 tracks are a series of short bursts of noise related fragmentation. Its like someone threw a hand grenade down the hole at Hospital Records and captured the sound of the debris as it landed in the street. The longest track is 44 seconds in duration, the shortest about eight seconds, the CD is further broken up into ten separate sections each being given a title [We Are the Duchampions, 4.33 Inches, Anal Fausting, Immature Ejaculation …] but here’s the deal, each track contains Hagstrom working with other people. Most tracks were recorded live between 2009 and 2010 and judging by the amount of people he worked with he’s been a very busy chap. Eighty two collaborators I made it, a disparate bunch including Blowfly, Andy Ortmann, Leslie Keffer, Ceramic Hobs, Rat Bastard, Suffering Bastard [maybe a relation?] and lots and lots of other people I’ve never even heard of including Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck [a band who can surely only dream of seeing their name in lights].

But what of the release itself. 99 tracks in 38 minutes means that the sounds come at you in a relentless switch back of noise related spazz. Track one is of course a full on blast of ear wax dislodgement there to let you know that Hagstrom really can do full on noise bit [this time with fellow Cock Matt Bacon] from there on in its like having eighty odd artists all demand your attention in a short space of time. At the time of typing track 60 is playing; ‘Betley Welcomes a Very Good Stinky Arse Fuck’ a Joincey Bastard [?] related tune which not only tips a hat to Phil Todd but Smell & Quim at the same time. Track 62 is Froggy Mountain Breakdown a 47 second Costes madrigal with distorted guitar solo and rapid string pluck. Its exhausting trying to cross reference each track so its best just to let them run over you and in this respect it manages to stand on its own 99 legs. Track 83 is 33 seconds of shamans lament, 84 is 24 seconds of some seriously high end sax squealing, track 85 comes in two parts, one part Astral Social Club shimmer the other some thrash. Track 36 is titled ‘Medley’ and manages to incorporate 14 blasts of noise within its 25 second time frame. Its around this time I began to appreciate the sheer amount of work that must have gone into this release, each track has a name, each track can be cross referenced so you can see who was working with Hagstrom, the cover art is great, the packaging shiny and fetching, you could even frame em. I kind of um … loved it in a daft sod way. Its not everyday you get 99 track noise CD’s through the post. And did Hagstrom call it a draw at 99 track because 99 was the maximum number of tracks a CD player could handle? I’d be interested to know. 

Perhaps then, the ultimate noise album to give to your ADHD affected cousin? Lots of cocks, lots of fnarr fnarr track titles and if you look really, really closely theres even a knob on the back cover. Where would we be without knobs in noise.



Contact: www.cockesp.com

Hyster

Various Artists - Second One
Hyster. Hyster09.
C60 Cassette.
100 copies. €2



I must admit to having rather a soft spot for Hyster. A tape only label for whom the word prolific has no meaning. Eleven releases in ten years. All of them on recycled cassettes and all of them damned cheap. Some people may assume Hyster to be a lazy bastard mustering the energy but once a year to spit out whatever it is lurking in the cassette deck whilst others may think ‘oh how quaint’. I fall into the latter category. Even the website is bog standard, a one page homage to basic HTML with no picshas or nuffink. One of their first releases was a live Dieter Müh affair which was damned near one of the bands best outings - I quite like the perversity in finding what could be a bands best work lying in obscurity on a recycled cassette. Besides Dieter Müh and the mighty Culver much of what appears on Hyster is a mystery to me - all of it [or at least all of what I’ve heard] seems to carry with it an air of loss and solitude, an atmosphere aided an abetted of course by the decaying nature of recycled cassettes they appear on. The last Hyster tape I reviewed was the 2009 Re-Clip affair, a slightly messy release it must be said with analogue beats escaping like loose GMT time signals, all of it dubbed onto a particularly dodgy tape - it comes with the territory I suppose.
The prosaically titled ‘Second One’ though is a real winner, a far more upbeat affair for the most part with some fine head bobbing moments and a classic track from the ever groovy Crank Sturgeon. Five tracks on one side and a side long outing on the other. Aiko kick things off with some sample madness and what sounds like photocopier noises layered on to amp buzz and a gently strummed acoustic guitar refrain. Cleavage pump out eight minutes of murky heavy duty arms out straight, jab em into the keys Emeralds like synth throb. Crank Sturgeon provides some garbled Schimpfluch lunacy in which un-synced hand claps and Dada verbals mix with someone trying to talk whilst drinking and having a piss at the same time. Re-Clip meanwhile appear to have morphed into some kind of Mego tinged slow analogue beat machine. Not bad in a swaying, meditative Midwich kind of way. Which on side one leaves Hiss Nausea and almost four minutes worth of distorted to buggery gabba beats.
This comp would have been just about perfect had it not been for the last ten minutes of the Varropas track ‘Moln pa Drift 1978’. A gorgeously fragile side of crumbling drone in which a small and recurring wobbly hit string motif is pulled through a landscape of wheezing machines and outer space burbles. Even the deterioration in tape quality at the onset adds to the all round ambience, as it continues upon its wavering path it grows in volume until the tape runs out.  If it had carried on with its miserable start to the very end I’d have been happier but you can’t have everything can you?


Contact:

plaa [a] pcuf.fi
http://www.pcuf.fi/~plaa/hyster.html

You Are Playin' Like A Fuckin' Pub Band

Smell & Quim / Family Battle Snake
You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band.
Split Tape
The 7.17 From West Wittering Is Late Again.
30 Copies.



On a recent sojourn up the North East coast I found myself in Newcastle. Its one of those places that feels to me like it didn’t really like having its face scrubbed. There’s still plenty of guano covering the supports on the Tyne Bridge but all those tapas bars and bits of fancy new architecture look like they’ve been stuck there deliberately in a bid to make the place feel a bit more European, a bit more cosmopolitan, a bit more Biarritz than brown ale. There’s still a few decent pubs left [and no visit to Newcastle is complete with a jar or several in the Crown Posada] but I always leave feeling like I’m glad I don’t have to live there. Not that where I live now is anything special of course. The recent spate of stabbings [including the death of a local drug dealer] does give Cleck a certain piquancy I’ll admit, but I’m still quite happy here thank you very much.
I mention the North East as on my way back I passed through Middlesborough. A place made out of six inch piping, pumps and gantries. Its another place I wouldn’t choose to live but Michael Gillham seems to find himself there. After listening to the Smell & Quim track on You Are Playing Like A Fuckin’ Pub Band, I can only conclude that theres not much else to do there except smash things up. I’ve seen Gillham ply his wares with Smell & Quim and with his own band Snotnosed and Its an impressive sight; a tall scary bloke with a shaved head and piercing eyes wrecking pubs and venues with hammers and whatever else comes to hand. ‘More Tea Vicar?’ is a twin assault with Srdenovic laying on the industrial sludge beats and Gillham destroying all things metal and domestic. The end result sounds like a free for all with a sledgehammer in a pan lid factory. Every assured blow seems to be synced with a madman's screams while a whistling, screeching tornado of torment prevails throughout until the whole thing eventually sinks under its own weight. Impressive stuff.
There’s six of these split tapes in all with the other five featuring artists working in similar areas. Released to coincide with Record Shop Day 2011 they’re part of a wider scheme to get people to ditch their clicking on things mp3/buy it in Tesco’s habits and get them back in to record shops. I’m all for this of course but being an idle sod I rarely venture into vinyl emporiums, not that I’m tripping up over them in West Yorkshire. They were made available for one day only and you had to physically go in to the shop yourself to buy them but I got my copy sneaked out the back door. Judging by the small amounts that have found their way online I can only assume that it must have been a bit of a slack day on visit your local record shop day. But I digress.
On the flip we find Family Battle Snake in contemplative drone form. Battling Bill has produced some fine work of late. Most of what I’ve heard has been made using analogue technology; synths, reel to reel etc but what this has been made with I can barely make out. A one finger held down key drone folds out into some exploratory night sky soundtracking. Radar bleeps, shortwave blips and an oscillating waveform build up to a small tumescence of noise at the climax of which some kind of electronic violin like squawk rears its head. Both these tracks run to about ten to fifteen minutes though I didn’t time em boss. Tapes y’see. A cracking format and nice to see the The 7.17 From West Wittering surface again.

Agdam

Agdam / Various Artists

Agdam Records. CD

Contact: [chortle, smirk, titter]

Agdam Records

PO Box 254

Agdam

Azerbaijan

It seems appropriate that a selection of obscure recordings charting the ‘English Underground Circa 1990 And Slightly Before’ should appear on an Azerbaijani label. Try Googling the Azeri city Agdam though and you’re greeted with images of a desolate place - its not exactly somewhere you’d want to go to on your jollies. Maybe they could twin it with Mirfield and send Neil Campbell out on a diplomatic mission to create greater understanding between differing cultures. You give us some Azeri oud players going at it hammer and tongs for an hour and we’ll give you Neil Campbell, two cymbals and a bottle of whiskey. Just a thought. Or maybe this is all some elaborate joke? Has anybody been foolhardy enough to send anything to Agdam? I bet they haven’t got anything back. Research reveals that Agdam is actually a ghost town its inhabitants having fled the Armenian army, looters doing the rest. Oh ... and Agdam is Turkish for ‘white house’. Draw your own conclusions. I sense much mischief but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The archives of ‘The English Underground Circa 1990 And Slightly Before’ [as we now have to legally call it] are ever so slowly beginning to see the light of day and not before time. They’ve been appearing in fits and starts but of late seem to be gathering pace. Agdam appears only weeks after the Walden brothers Strolling Ones lunacy hit these ears and with the press release mentioning several unreleased LP’s out there it would be logical to assume that plenty more of these kind of documents stand stage left awaiting their big day.

 

But its to the A Band that we are drawn. They appear to be emerging from their ever so slightly eccentric shell and why not. Its taken them a while but the clamor to hear more of their freewheeling, spontaneous music seems genuinely warm. They actually get invited to things these days. Maybe they really were ahead of their time? The A Band embrace non-conformity, improvisation and fun by having an ever changing line up and creating a different name for each performance. The A Band are the A Band but only in name and never on paper. Each live performance has to begin with the letter ‘A’ too and that's what the band’s called on the day. Too damned clever for me.

There’s dozens of A Band members scattered about the UK most of them crawling from the wreckage of the 80’s. Some of them, I dare say, supped from a fountain that spurted industrial culture, Krautrock, mad jazz, Fluxus, Japanese noise, Folk music and English comedy. Its no surprise to anyone at all that the results are akin to an explosion in a saucepan lid factory, a wild and uncontrollable ride through improv land unclassifiable to all but the likes of Dave Keenan and earnest scribes alike [as an aside this release won the coveted Dave Keenan’s Volcanic Tongue ‘Tip of the Tongue’ award. I’m a fan of alliteration though and wish Keenan would make use of the ‘K’ in his surname and give his reviews ‘K’ ratings like they do in Kerrang, which would make this a Keenan Klassik KKKKK].

Agdam begins in 1986 and ends in 2007 with a reformed [after 15 years hiatus] A Band performance and some of it is very good and some it is utter nonsense and a bit of it drove me to the drinks cabinet. But its the utter nonsense and its ability to annoy that I actually came to find the most appealing. The ability to annoy is all part of the madness of course. ‘Well Crucial’s track recorded in 1986 is a rolling snatch of two second 80’s synth pop sample intermingled with gormless DJ chatter and words spoken by Martin Walden. Its so annoying I actually began to like it for its ability to annoy. The other Walden, Stewart, begins proceedings with ‘Mmmmmorning’ a 1990 piece of Dada Casio plod in which Walden bemoans the fact that he cant stay in bed all day, all delivered in a convincing, yawning gremlin fashion. ‘Walden/Campbell/Plaistow’ don various hippy gear to run through an acoustic guitar tinged Ash Ra Tempel fling called Moron [‘its easy to have fun when you’re a moron’] with all three of them taking at once [about each other I think] over a gentle six string melody whilst a moan wanders around in the background, this in 1990. ‘Sepopeplel’ is Stewart Greenwood and Minty Cracknell captured at the 13th Note in Glasgow 1998 -  five minutes of accordion wheezes and tunnel noise. Gay Animal Women dish out 23 minutes [oh naturlich] of PTV inspired cod reggae as recorded live in Nottingham in 1989. Cut from a longer hour long show its a genuflecting reverbed to hell pean to all things Genesis P Orridge and not something I found myself warming to despite numerous attempts. Filling in but two meagre minutes of space comes Neil Campbell with a snatch of live celestial shimmer drone from 2004, a period when his involvement with Vibracathedral Orchestra was coming to an end and his solo work with Astral Social Club was just beginning. All too brief.

The whole disc sits on its best track. A 30 odd minute A Band romp going under the title of Afterclap as captured live in Warrington in 2007. Twelve individuals took part including a certain 14 year old Megan Fletcher-Cutts who played in the last previous A Band performance as a six month old baby.  Joincey also took part, a man whose own meanderings not only sound very similar to what Stewart Walden was doing in 1990 but who should be included on merit alone seeing as how he’s an equally peripatetic form who  has several solo modes coupled to several band projects constantly on the go. A Band stalwarts Sticky Foster, Neil Campbell and Stewart Keith [nee Stewart Walden] join forces with Dylan Bates, Dave Higginson and Jon Larder amongst others for a rawk-fest that begins with the introduction of band members and ends with a twanging jaws harp. In between it somehow manages to sound like a dodgy metal band with a trumpet player instead of a singer deliberately doing it all wrong before collapsing in on itself in utter chaos and hilarity. I can hear swannee whistles [or electronic equivalents thereof], parps and squeaks, crap guitar solos, unidentified horns, vocal noise, strange strings being plucked, scraping. The first half is pinned to a barreling heavy footed thud stomp before it disintegrates into true ‘we don’t know what we’re doing but we’re enjoying it’ A Band style um ..mess.

Afterclap is a rollicking beast of musical insanity and for sheer freedom of musical expression its up there with the best. I loved it. More archive digging please.

Spon

SPON
Dumb Cunt Comcs
A4 Zine. No idea of cost of trade status.

Contact:

Dr. Adolf Steg
1 St Hildas Road
St Annes-on-Sea
Lancashire
FY8 2PT





Two issues of SPON appear. One contains nothing but Dr Steg’s paintings, collages and montages some of which I’ve reproduced here. The reason I’m getting excited though is issue 3 which has an interview with the Ceramic Hobs main-man Simon Harris. For anyone even half interested in the Hobs this is essential. Harris’s deep understanding of serial killers, conspiracy theories, Phillip K Dick and Power Electronics are all brought to the fore whilst for long time Hobs fans there’s the chance to discover the hidden meanings in a number of Hobs releases and why Harris’s relationship with long time Hobs collaborator and guitarist Stan Batcow soured. The paintings aren’t half bad either. These publications may be slight - eight pages at most - but that doesn’t make them unimportant. Seek out.

TDOTEP

TDOTEP - Force Feeding The People Locusts
Studio 5 Recordings. S5R 003. CDR. 50 Copies.



I don’t know why I feel this way but whenever I listen to a TDOTEP release [an acronym for The Death Of The Enlightenment Project] I feel like a kindly uncle passing on pointers in life to a confused teenage cousin whose just experienced his first ejaculation. Maybe thats because TDOTEP releases usually arrive with a note saying ‘heres my latest piece of crap’ or somesuch and then you listen to them and whaddyaknow? theres a not half bad noise album lurking in there. Despite the self deprecation the last TDOTEP release that came this way [Temple of Wounds - Pumf] went some way to convincing me that TDOTEP was heading in the right direction but after feeding myself with the locusts I’m not sure if that gravity defying trajectory has gone all limp and is now terra firma bound with just a sudden bump waiting for it.

Maybe I’m being too harsh?

Things for:

There’s some good noise on here: First track [Underlying Resentment] kicks in with some Emil Beaulieau style looped lock groove treatments. Third track [Arcade Fire Helicopter Tragedy]  kicks off in fine Incaps territory.

There’s no Charles Manson sample.

Kate Fear from the Ceramic Hobs appears on track two [though what she’s up to I couldn’t tell you].

Things against:

Comes in a half size DVD cases with art work that drops out and is ill fitting. This may sound pedantic but if you’re going to go handmade then make it handmade not some halfway house between handmade and made to look like it was bought in a shop made.

Segueing all the tracks into one long track and then printing the running times in chronological order.

Track three doesn’t end in Incaps territory, it ends with some horrible industrial death scream beats.

Track five [Of Shit Subliminal Message] sounds like a Slogun outing crossed with the Predator soundtrack.

Track nine [The Priestly Unit] Like Non gone wrong rather than the real Emil.


Yes, maybe I am being too harsh but these things need to be said. TDOTEP has greatness within itself its just that somewhere along the line its all going wrong.





Contact:

www.TDOTEP.blogspot.com

TDOTEP [at] gmail.com

www.studio5recordings.blogspot.com

Schuster

Schuster - Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon
Adeptsound CDR. ADSCDR03.

Available now for pre-order. Release date: 18th of April 2011

[Also available via Licht Und Stahl in an extremely limited run of 20 cassettes.]


Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon is one of those highly polished Industrial Ambient outings where upon playback you start to count off the Industrial samples on your fingertips only to quickly realise that you’d need the hands of a dozen TG acolytes to finnish the job off properly. Within eleven tracks and almost an hours worth of material I was indeed transported and whilst sat crossed legged in the middle of my inverted star [thigh bone in one hand, fly whisk in the other] I was submerged into that familiar world of murderers monologues, house flies trapped in bottles, Paul McCarthy groans, bowl rings, vocals treated to sound like Darth Vader crossed with a Tibetan shaman, water bubbling underground, vinyl surface noise, machine blasts, sonar bleeps, reverbed vocals, astronaut chatter, street rioting … there they all were, waiting for me to check em off and write em down. Now where’s my I-Spy book of Industrial samples when I need it?

This may enlighten you further: Blac Flies name checks Rudolf J. Mund, an obscure member of an obscure Nazi occult outfit, Andrew McAuley who disappeared one day in his Kayak off the coast of New Zealand in 2007, contract killer Richard Kulkinski, reggae star Dr. Alimantado [?] and others too obscure even for Google. Here are some other things to think about: track four ‘Esbat’ isn’t just 30 seconds of insect chatter its also the name of the Wiccan full moon festival. First track ‘Bellerophon’ is also the name of a mythical Greek hero. Third track mentions “Sepharial’, the chosen name of English Occultist Walter Gorn Old. Seventh track; Blakk Bile, meaning, I assume melancholia, depression or maybe some kind of Masonic ritual. Wrap all these occult/pagan trappings into some bleak Industrial landscapes and you have yourself a damned good Industrial/Pagan/Occultist/Ambient workout.

But first lets go back: the previous Schuster release ‘Breaking Down Into His Own Oblivion’ [also on Adeptsound] had the outstanding track ‘I Am Living In My Own Corpse’, a backbone track, a bleak masterpiece of desolation the likes of which gave you some idea of what it must be like to be dumped onto the barren surface of a dead and windswept lonely planet. This is what ‘Blac Flies’ is really missing, a solid twenty minute track that pins it all together. Too much is gone before it has time to settle. I personally wouldn’t have minded the 10th and best track on here ‘Giving’ expanded up to the twenty minute mark but after six minutes and 43 seconds its all too sadly gone. 

You can’t deny the heritage though - English Industrial down to their [thigh] bones and no doubt sporting bad haircuts and a healthy dose of misanthropy to boot. A couple of releases in 1988 and then nothing for nigh on twenty years. I think I know one member. The Adept website mentions Dieter Müh and the sleeve mentions SC. Step forward Mr. Cammack. Discogs gives the rest away by naming Tim Bayes who I think I’m right in saying was a fringe member of DM in their formative years and is the man behind Adeptsound. But back to the music.

My big complaint of Blac Flies is that its hardly treading new ground. The mumbled vocal on ‘Sulk’ is so close to TG’s Weeping that its hard not to think of anything else whilst listening to it. The strings that see out ‘The Second Moon [Sepharial]’ could have been plucked straight from one of Arvo Pärt’s sacred minimalist pieces. The Industrial pummel on ‘Stubborn’ is Pan Sonic mutating into Paul MaCarthy grumbles and moans. The murders confession on ‘Giving [who I’m guessing is the afore mentioned contract killer  Richard Kulkinski] plays out to a background of cicadas and distant ritual drums and whilst this is highly effective [‘the rats used to eat them’] it was almost as if I was half expecting it.

I now find myself in the curious and slightly embarrassing position of playing down what is obviously a classic piece of Industrial music - which probably says more about me than it does about Blac Flies. Having said that and put an ever so slight damper on it, I have to say in its defence  that this is still a criminally good release made with perfectly weighted hands - Grade A Prime Industrial Ambience with a soupcon of ritualism and the occult thrown in for good measure. Blac Flies Resplendent On Blak Moon may not be progress but neither is it Industrial music by numbers. Just don’t give Chris Bohn a copy.



Contact:

www.adeptsound.net


PO Box 3760
Success
Perth 6164
WA
Australia



http://lichtundstahl.blogspot.com/

Kali-Yuga Karma - The New Blockaders / Merzbow / aNoMaLi

 

Kali-Yuga Karma
The New Blockaders / Merzbow / aNoMaLi
Hypnagogia CD. GIA05. 300 Copies.




Paul Coates is the quiet man behind Hypnagogia and the even quieter man behind noise project aNoMaLi.  Hypnagogia is a spasmodic affair which since the early 90’s has released items of a discordant nature but which I think is mostly remembered as the home to some the best of The New Blockaders output - the apex arguably being the mighty 4CD anthology ‘Gesamtnichtswerk’. That’s not to treat everything else Hypnagogia has released lightly though. During 2003 and 2004 Hypnagogia released three ten inch platters that were Falten by The New Blockaders, Oumagatoki, a collaboration between TNB and Merzbow and Nitya-Baddha a solo aNoMaLi outing. Kali-Yuga Karma brings them all together and as an added bonus/dangling carrot/cynical marketing ploy [select which ever reasoning fits your preference] a track called Kali-Yuga Karma that is a 5 minute and 38 seconds collaboration between all of the above. Its best to start here ... with a cow mooing. It also ends with a cow mooing, apart from some almost insignificant squiggle that appears a second before the track ends which I cant for the life of me think has been put there except as some kind of listener test. After the first cow moo comes the playing of the last post and gun shots [probably lifted from a 50’s cowboy movie] and then a countdown from 5 to 1 before a full on face rubbing, ear pounding, head bashing swirling torrent of noise. It couldn’t have been anything else really and if it had I think I may have been a little disappointed.
Its not as full on as Oumagatoki though which is a slow to build beast featuring some lovely low end Merzbow wobbles and some close up decay ear fracture from TNB. Very similar to the Merzbow/TNB CD Ten Foot Square Hut which appeared around the same time and which no doubt came from the same sessions. Falten finds TNB in sparse decay mode - all needle fluff, scraping sledgehammers on concrete floors, galvanised bin destruction. Certainly one of their better outings and comparable to the best of their earlier work. Amongst these titans of noise we find aNoMaLi whose Nitya-Baddha sits between them like a naughty schoolboy with ink on his fingers. aNoMaLi achieves his sounds by mixing samples of North East dj’s and dart scorers cut off in their prime [ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT], Indian movie soundtracks, murky conversations, all of this loaded onto prime noise detritus: dentists suction pumps, buzzing noise drones, TNB like rain clatter, reversed church choirs, reversed vocals, 60’s pop. Its not a million miles away from that other TNB involvement Mixed Band Philanthropist in that it has humour at its heart whilst enlightening and rewarding the ear with a multitude of sounds. It’s a pity theres so little aNoMaLi about. Two releases as far as I can ascertain.
Paul Coates may be a reclusive figure in the world of noise but his label does release the occasional gem. And although this may be just a bit of archive gathering with a dollop of cream on top that doesn’t mean you should pass it off lightly. I’ve reviewed all these before upon original release, I enjoyed them then and they still stand the test of time now. A useful release for those who missed out on the original vinyl and those TNB/Merzbow nutters who must have everything.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer / Wicked King Wicker / Irr.App.[Ext]

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer & Irr. App. [Ext.]
Skeletal Copula Remains
Gnarled Forest Recordings [GF42] / Errata In Excelsis [eie010]
LP. 500 copies. Comes with 18” x 35” poster and insert

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer/Wicked King Wicker
Gnarled Forest Recordings [GF43] / Noiseville 95
Split LP. 300 copies plus insert.


Theres only so much you can do with a guitar tuned all the way down to ‘e’. It’s a great sounding doomy chord but If you want to further explore the deepest corners of doom and desolation then you need something else to get you there. I guess thats why bands like Wicked King Wicker and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer exist. Taking the premise that dark is good, noise is good, death is good, destruction is good and all things black are good they take that darkness mix it with a noise aesthetic and create whole new worlds of sonic nihilism and swirling vortexes of despair into which the likes of Earth and Sunn O))) get sucked only to be spat out the other end with with their monks cowls torn and dripping wet.

To be honest I never got my head round those early doom heavy bands - wave after wave of ululating low end hum, dry ice and expensive double albums - if I wanted something heavy to listen to then I’d dig out an old Sabbath album. I remember seeing a John Fahey interview in which he said he’d been experimenting with tuning all his guitar strings down to e and hawking the results round various shops and labels only to be told that the genre was called doom metal and was already quite popular. Listening to the odd doom related album does me no harm though. I theoretically place my back to the wall, turn up the volume and get down with the low end vibes. Its mutating though and mutating into something far more interesting.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer have graced these pages before, their collaboration with The Nihilist Assault Group went down well here. It was an interesting construct with both artists striving for the same result whilst coming from different angles of the noise spectrum. Sadly I feel it doesn't work with Irr. App. [Ext.].  Irr. App. [Ext.] come from a background linked with Nurse With Wound not doom and destruction. Skeletal Copula Remains feels like a case of too many cooks too. Throw in the guitar of Mason Jones and the synth of John Lukeman [albeit on one track] and you can almost feel the claustrophobia. Theres four tracks with the titles giving you clues; ‘Subterranean [Insurgence]’, ‘Brennschluss --> Extinction’, ‘Crawling Eruptions’ and the side long ‘Glutton’. Couple all this to the black and white art work of viscera, bones. ethereal creatures and the enormous fold out poster and you have somebody going all out to make a big impression. And then you play it and it all seems a bit messy. Death, doom and destruction are there in spades but it feels like everybody involved here tried to cram in every one of their nuances and it makes for an unbalanced listen. Starting with a gong crash the three tracks on side one do their best to create symphonic death ambience with hyenas tearing flesh apart and the squealing noise guitar of Mason Jones [which comes at you like a thousand squeaky gates all banging together at three in the morning] but it never quite gets off the ground. The side long ‘Glutton’ works best but spoils itself by introducing actually introducing those low e tuned guitars when it would do better to dispense with. Thrum thrum thrum thrum slow steady droney thumps and then a suction pump stuck into the open gut wound of a dying alien, stalking music, guttural wolf growls, limbs being twisted apart, cartilage popping, it gets louder then cuts to the sound of animals chewing, zoo screams, someones shooting all the parrots whilst someone else plays with a squeaky door. Door shuts. Record ends. Its hard to engage with much of this with one sound being replaced by another before it has chance to make an impression. The second half of Glutton contains some genuinely ear teasing sounds though but all the posters and fancy art work in the world doesn’t make up for the fact that is only half way there.


The split LP proves to be far more rewarding. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer’s ‘March Of The Damned’ is like being stuck halfway down a subway tunnel with the cars hurtling past two inches from your nose. Its Earth crossed with the low end rumble of a Merzbow gig. Sunspots erupt, Howler monkeys scream, demented souls are tortured for eternity, as it ebbs away slowly rotting bodies swing on charred tree limbs. The shorter ‘Into Nothing’ is even more sublime, it captures desolation perfectly; cold iron on stone, creaking boat timbers, dying breaths, distant bombs.
Utilising bass guitar and noise Wicked King Wicker create walls of noise doom. Its the next step up the evolving noise ladder with doom metal at its heart but with noise treatments giving it the room to unfold into ever more fractured and discordant patterns. On ‘Now That We’re Dead To You’ tumbling chords of ultra distorted bass guitar and noise gadgets create a claustrophobic atmosphere that builds to a wayward crescendo. Bass notes become muffled screams, noises become ever more disorientating the whole thing rupturing revealing its component parts on ending. Given a side each and left to their own devices both BSBC and WKW produce far more cohesive works. I think I may be a fan.



Contact:


http://gnarledforest.blogspot.com/


http://www.noiseville.com/home.html


http://www.myspace.com/irrappext

Midwich

Midwich - Months, Years
Midwich - Raised Ironworks

3” CDR. 50 copies each. No label.



The first time I met Rob Hayler was on the door of a Death Squad gig about ten years or more since. It was a Termite Club gig so there were only about ten people there, most of them Americans, but Rob was doing his bit for the cause by taking peoples money and flogging some of his newly pressed Fencing Flatworm Recordings releases. Rob was one of those people you find incredibly easy to get along with; softly spoken, infectious laugh, a ready grin, intelligent and for the next few years I saw a lot of him and his label. Then, as so often happens, he disappeared.

A few years passed and then out of the blue Rob reappeared, this time via a blog. He’d had problems with his head, or with the world or a mixture of the two [I’m not telling you anything you shouldn’t know here - he writes about it fluently and matter-of-factly himself] he’d got married, lost his job, found another, his wife lost her job, things were happening in his life. I discovered he supported Farsley Celtic and my heart burst with pride because I always kind of knew that if Rob supported a football team it would be a lower leagues three men and a dog set up. But most importantly he was back and being creative once more. 

Rob likes his drone which was reflected in FFR and his solo work under the Midwich moniker. Besides his own material he released work by Andy Jarvis, Neil Campbell and Klunk along with a few others. His diffuse cassette label OTO ran to fifty releases and gave all manner of oddballs there day out in the sun; The Bongoleeros, Killy Dog Box, The Ceramic Hobs, even old Unky Thurst chipped in. Then there was the FFR night at the Brudenell. My first encounter with laptops in a live environment. I was sat there chatting away only to be told ten minutes into the sounds appearing from the PA that this was it. But theres nobody on the stage said I. Thats because he’s playing a laptop from  the side of the mixing desk came the reply [this probably because there was less chance of it being knicked].

So Rob came back and started his blog and told us all how his head was getting better and how he was meeting people once more and going for a pint now and again and enjoying his married life and heres some old stuff I thought would never see the light of day but the urge is upon me to put stuff out once more. And why not.

Midwich produce very dainty drones by holding down various keyboard keys [I’m guessing]  and little else. To my best recollection Midwich drones were slightly flecked in their purity. Throbbing, aching, pulsing things with little motifs flitting in and out like the fish that used to adorn the early FFR covers. Some were short lasting less than a minute whilst other set themselves adrift up into the 20 minute mark. I quite liked the shorter stuff which is why I like the last track on ‘raised ironworks’ a perfect piece of two phase drone with the one playing off the other, each coming back to reinforce its beginnings like some clever piece of work by Steve Reich, it could go on much, much longer and I doubt I would tire of it. As for the rest, well, its drone. Simply done, effortlessly put together, maybe slight but who cares? ‘ months, years’ is one 21 minute piece [also its title]  and theres three others on ‘raised’ but it would take a far more brazen heart than mine to criticise either of these releases. If they were the biggest turds fished out of the beck this year I may drop a hint but theres no need. They may be slight but its what they signal that is far more important.



http://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/

Tony Conrad – Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain

What normally happens is this: I listen to what I’m reviewing through the week, thinking up thoughts and ideas about what I’m going to write and come Saturday the words magically appear on a white rectangle and I save them and post them on my blog. Except for this week when I was struck by a hideous malady. An illness so henious and insensitive in its effectiveness that it had the impertinence to appear on Friday morning and clear up on Monday morning [just].

This then to let TDOTEP, Hypnogogia, Rob Hayler, Stan Reed [I’m assuming its Stan but if its not then thank you to the person who sent me the two LP’s from the States featuring BSBC etc ..] and Hyster Tapes that their work is here and has been played. The words are in my head floating about. Its getting them onto the white rectangle thats the hard bit.

Here then, in place of my usual weekly ablution, a review from about five years ago. At the bottom you will find a link that will enable you to replicate this experience, if only for about three minutes.

Tony Conrad – Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain
Leeds City Art Gallery – April 3rd April

See that saw Tony? Saw it good. Take that violin and saw the saw, saw that fucker into little pieces in your Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain journey. Saw it up your arse and never come back and haunt the dark streets of Leeds ever, ever again. Nothing personal of course. Maybe I should have got stoked on some decent whiskey like Campbell. I could see his baldy head bouncing around down the front. I was sat at the back had been up since 5.30 that morning and had little sleep the night before. I wasn’t in perfect condition for an arduous ninety minute drone-a-thon so this review is somewhat tainted.

Maybe I should have got ripped on some appropriate drugs, spent all day in the Duncan or maybe stayed in bed a little longer the night previous. Whatever, I was beyond tired and had only really gone to see Kyle who had come all the way from NYC so I had to make the effort. We made small talk outside the venue whilst he doled out vegan sandwiches to his family, I could just about make out his accent from underneath his big bushy beard, his kids were cute and impeccably behaved, we should have gone to the Victoria instead.

It was a sell out. All of us sat there in rows with a four paneled screen to the fore. Each screen slightly angled. The violin began its sawing and the right hand screen flickered with a grainy image of black and white alternating strips. The one violin was joined by other instruments. I couldn’t tell which was which as the players were behind us but one of them made big boinging sounds like when you pull out the bottom ‘e’ of a bass guitar as far as you can and let it go with a massive TWANG. There was some kind of instrument that made nice resonating sounds that could have been played by a Japanese lady but I only got glimpses of them after the dust settled so I can’t be sure. And then another of the screens came to life with another jumping around black and white grainy image. The woman in front of me was beginning to fall asleep. I became more transfixed on her slowly descending nodding head as I was the flickering screens. Eventually all four screens were filled with jumping around black and white stripes. My back ached and I shifted around trying to kill the numbness in my arse cheeks. I resisted the temptation to look at my watch fearing that only ten minutes had passed and hoping that it was more like eighty five. I lost all track of time. I eventually noticed that the four images were slowly moving into each other. Maybe when all four screens merged into one the whole thing would be over and I could go for a pint before heading back home. I shut my eyes and could feel myself falling asleep. The sawing continued. I felt as if I was tripping, as if I was having a bad dream, as if I was trapped. Some people were walking out but how long had they stood it before realizing they could take no more. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to take it much more. My back was stiff. I moved my legs and watched the nodding woman for a bit more. Eventually the sawing and throbbing and TWANGING slowed to a halt. People applauded, some whooped and whistled but I think most people were just glad it was all over.

I eventually made it to the Victoria. Wire scribes propped the bar, copy already running through their heads, pints at elbows nodding knowingly to TC when he appears in his pensioner’s coat and bend in half shoes.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yCHstLAChs

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