Kill And Eat

Kill and Eat - Green Bushes

Alright Now Records. ANR08 CD

Kill And Eat are a three piece that utilise piano, trumpet, drums and vocals to build three dreamy, drifty songs that depending on your frame of mind are a] the most relaxing thing you ever heard in your life or b] the most annoying bollocks you ever heard in your life.

At times they sound like a half drunk jazz outfit buggering about after closing time, at others a distracted Burt Bacharach working on a new song. Jim O’Rourke’s meandering offerings spring to mind most often as does something I once hear by Wim Mertens that worked an LP’s worth of stuff around some piano musing but overall these feel like half worked moments rather than anything fulfilling.

It all became too much for me during Green Bushes [Sketch] where the constant jazz like vocal scat refrain became ultimately annoying. I kill your moody song with my death ray gun and punk rock records. Of the three tracks the title track is the least offensive/most rewarding: an 18 minute stretch/sketch in which moaning vocals and plonky piano drift along before the keys start getting hit harder and the song BURSTS INTO LIFE. To be fair if I heard Pharoah Sanders doing something like this [and some of Green Sketches isn’t a million miles away from some of his Impulse! stuff] then I’d be salivating but ultimately this is just mood music. A bit of Sanders, a bit of Burt, a bit of Jim, a fiver when you need a tenner a missed bus, a cold cup of tea when what you wanted was a black Earl to go.

Kill and Eat have decided they don’t do artwork either as they want their ‘music to be judged on its own merit not by whether it comes with visual art or fancy/handmade packaging’. This, therefore comes wrapped in a piece of folded A4 paper with just the minimal information, which if anything makes this feel more throwaway than it already is.

Contact:

Alright Now Records, 1209, Wooster Road, Winona Lake, IN 46590, USA

www.killandeat.com

killandeat [at] gmail.com

www.alrightnowrecords.com

Ape Shit / Intravenous in Furs

Ape Shit / Intravenous in Furs

Split LP. No Label. No Contact details. 100 Copies.

When Jim MacDougall wasn’t smashing bank windows or getting himself sectioned [well, maybe he didn’t get sectioned but I’d be surprised if he hasn’t] he was sending me CD’s of his band Ape Shit. They couldn’t play very well and the quality control was non-existent but the urgency to get stuff down was there in its maladroit glory for all to see. Eight releases appeared in a manic flurry of inventiveness that was one year and one gig. Each release was as shambolic as the next; a drummer who tried to fit in too many fills, a bass player too high in the mix, a guitarist who really wanted to be in another band altogether and above it all Jim MacDougall and his Ian Dury on acid stream of conscious ramblings. Pro lunacy group Mad Pride persuaded them to reform for a one off gig a year down the road and some of that appears here. This being Ape Shit they’ve don’t sound anything like Ape Shit but instead like Lenny Kravitz singing I Like You, over and over again except its not Jim singing its the guitarist. In Jim’s world nothing is ever quite straight forward. Maybe he got a new band together for the reunion? This untitled side of vinyl can be seen as summation of all that Jim’s done so far. Hear Jim as stand up comic [What’s the difference between me and Bernard Manning? ... silence ... about eight stone]. Hear Jim read poetry dedicated to someone who threw themselves under a train [its rather poignant actually] but above all there’s Ape Shit playing as only Ape Shit can - a haphazard beat knocked out by people with only a vague grasp of how their instrument works over which Jim sings/talks his incessant, made up as he goes along diatribe. There will never be another band like Ape Shit. You really do have to be mad to make music like this.

Meanwhile in Blackpool Intravenous In Furs sound like The Doors meets Gong meets Acid Mother Temple only on cheaper drugs, cider and roll ups. The West coast is now Fylde not California and the crooner is Simon Morris [ex Ceramic Hobs] not Jim Morrison. Heavy Leather centers around an evolving piece of krautrock meets Finnish nodders Circle. A piece that goes from all out LA Woman to Pink Lady Lemonade replete with Theremin and growly vocals. Morris really can sing y’know and its a crime that his talents haven’t been more widely recognised. There’s samples of children’s TV, a gig announcer exhorting the kids to shout fuck off and a short spurt of something Ruins wouldn’t have been ashamed to put their name to. At the end of it all there’s even a version of Rolf Harris’s Sun Arise in which Morris gets to show off his vocal chords to even greater effect. To be honest I’m at a loss as to how best describe this floating piece of ROCK which is why you’ve got all those references there. At least we know where to go if the UK psychedelic rock scene kicks off.

Probably one of the most uncommercial slabs of vinyl to come this way for quite some time and thats saying something.

Link

Look at me, I got my first link to review.

All you have to do is click on the link, download the file, open it up, burn the songs to a disc, print off the art work, cut it into CD size shapes, insert CD and art work [glue the artwork onto the disc too if you want to get really carried away] fit all the pieces into a CD jewel case and before you know it you’ve got you very own Infirm Individual release.

Except I did none of the above. OK, I downloaded the file and opened it up but after listening to two minutes of mashed up doom metal, lecture samples about atoms and poncey keyboard stabs I wanted to kill myself so I thought it’d be better if I went into another room away from the computer and read a book or watched an old episode of Dad’s Army or something. Anything but subject myself to the misery of actually giving up my precious spare time to someone who thinks that sending a link in emails is a good way to get something reviewed.

Emails were a good idea once upon a time but that was before the spam merchant’s and serial forwarders got hold of them. Now your inbox is more than likely to contain all manner of shite and very little of worth. The above link falls into the shite category of course.

I’m no Luddite though. I think that in general computers are a good idea. I also think that records and CD’s and cassettes are a good idea and a better way of expressing yourself and getting someone’s attention than links in emails. Links in emails are tenuous portals into the murky world of MP3 where everything is available for the price of a PC and an internet connection. Give me vinyl, give me CD, give me cassette, give me something tactile and tangible, something that will still be around in x years time, something I can pick up and look at with [hopefully] fond memories, something I know came from an individual who cared so much about what they were doing that they took the time to press it up, put it together and put it in the post along with a little bit of themselves.

Begon foul link and darken my door no more.

Coming next; the memory stick review.

http://www.load.to/PbfqVZ9eag/Infirm_Individual_-_The_Great_Variety_Of_All_Possibilities__2009_.zip

[please note - this link is dead]

Culver

Culver - They Killed Suzie Carter

Hyster. Hyster 07. Cassette

Re-Clip - Notes

Hyster. Hyster 08. Cassette.

Smear Campaign - Constipated Albion.

Total Vermin #26 cassette. C26

A Jarvis / Moral Holiday.

Total Vermin #27 cassette. C20

Bad Orb / Plum State

Total Vermin #28 cassette. C20

MPO/LERM - OZ OZ Alice 1

Total Vermin #29 cassette. C43

Servants Of Culture, Drinkers of Pearls Volume 1

Total Vermin #30 cassette. C40

Total Vermin’s unstoppable, drone, fluxus, nether regions UK underground documentation process shows no sign of abating and with this batch proves that if you need to know whats happening beneath the Wire radar you need to be getting in touch. Total immersion over the last few days coupled with a real under the skin session on a wet and dank November Saturday afternoon had all the benefits of drug overdose without any of the side effects. Listening to whats left of the Ceramic Hobs in their MPO/LERM guise is a startling experience and fills me with the kind of hope for music I once had back in ’78. Leaving Stan Batcow to his own devices the drink seems to have taken hold of the rest of them and in OZ OZ Alice 1 they carve out a rock seam that fits in somewhere between the Velvet’s The Gift and Nurse With Wound circa A Sucked Orange. Morris’s spoken word delivery makes Charles Manson sound about as scary as a the speaking clock, add in juxtaposed and ill fitting samples [cheerily sung Christmas carols and Wurlitzer organs?] and you have probably the only group in the UK worth following. There are songs on here the spines of which are a thudding bass plod or a chugging riff but each becomes buried under some detritus or other whilst Morris sings/talks through a series of diatribes that coalesce into something that could be termed a ranting manifesto against normality. They left the cake out in the rain alright. Maybe the drugs are stronger in Blackpool or the beer is cheaper or they have too much time on their hands but something is definitely happening on the Fylde coast and it needs to be heard. This is the first in a series of 11 OZ OZ Alice release, the rest are eagerly awaited.

Dragging myself away from such dementia is hard but the drone must go on. Phil Todd’s solo project Moral Holiday sounds like Popol Vuh meets Smell & Quim. Andy Jarvis, a long time favourite here reappears for the first time in a long time and comes over all wailing electronica built around a hacking guitar refrain. Smear Campaign as you would surmise is a collaboration twixt Filthy Turd and Smear Campaign resulting in the soundtrack to a Friday night kicking on the hard, damp streets of Stoke. Imagine you just spent fifty quid getting pissed in the worst bars in Stoke and you wake up in the morning with a two day hangover and your jeans are stained with piss and you have bruises on your face that you don’t remember receiving and you’re bent over the toilet bowl retching green bile into the abyss, well thats Filthy Smear. About as ugly and deformed as its possible to get inside a plastic shell. Bad Orb is looped mumbled vocals, whiny squeal, tinkly toy piano creating a spacious drone. Plum State is a hum of sorts in which a vibrating string hits the rim in spaghetti western Morricone style. The Vermin comp Servants Of Culture, Drinkers of Pearls finds Littlecreature Courses Thorough Content in Ribald Constance rubbing shoulders with easier gobfulls such as DK720, Dead Labour Process, Shareholder, Plum State and Sindre Bjerga. DK720 fill the room with emetic bass end noise farts the rest lies somewhere between leaning on a keyboard with your forearms and radio signals picked up by orbiting manned space modules.

After the day-glo shells and colour sleeves of Total Vermin its back to Hyster’s monochrome vision and recycled cassettes. Culver fit in to the monochrome ideal well seeing as how Culver’s main home is Matching Head, another tape label with a black and white philosophy. Culver fans wont be disappointed with these two tracks; one a murky trudge round an underwater cement factory, the other an ohm drone, a burbling range of notes that if stretched across a hundred years would be worthy of Cage.

Re-Clip’s Notes is a 16 track comp spanning the last ten years of their existence. It’s a slightly trippy slip and slide mix of hypnotic broken analogue beats, field recordings and spacey ambience thats hardly original but still listenable. I’m not averse to such working but on recycled cassette the finished product is lost in a midden of muddy mid range.

All the above are cheap, welcome and come in editions of 50.

Contact:

Hyster: plaa [at] pcuf.fi

Total Vermin: http://www.totalvermin.blogspot.com/

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär - Asylum Lunaticum

Intransitive Recordings. INT033 CD

Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bär have been quietly releasing a constant stream of Dada-esque experimentation since around 1999. Somewhere down the line they turned their hand to art and have since become recognised and prolific artists with Kommissar Hjuler sculpting chopped up Barbie dolls a la Bolus and Belmer and his missus Mama Bär turning out paintings that come on like an even more sick and twisted Paula Rego meets Francis Bacon. Originally describing themselves as ‘experimental musicians’ their ridiculously limited edition outpourings of hand crafted cassettes, CDR’s and acetates have long since been gobbled up by a swelling army of fans eager to get their hands on some truly startling work. A mundane CD then seems the perverse and perfect portal for mass consumption and a good a gateway as you’re going to get into their incredible workings without having to fork out plenty of euros for their art or waiting patiently in line for the next ultra-limited release.

Asylum Lunaticum contains seven tracks that give you a good idea of what the Hjuler & Bär ethic is; audio verité, absurdism and tape cut ups wrapped in a Dada/Fluxus blanket of freeform experimentation. On ‘Lauf in Eine Herde’ Hjuler runs into a field of cows waving a red shirt the audio result of which resembles someone recording a blustery moor top walk. ‘De Nye Rigspolitichefen’ is Hjuler reciting text dealing with the Dutch police which somehow transforms itself into a Punch and Judy show hosted by a maniac whose arguing with the puppets whilst banging on a toy piano. Its one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. ‘HJCVGrimmelhausen is voice cut up, in which Hjuler follows each word with a deep breath the end result being a disorienting array of vowels and vocal tics. The real star of the show though is Bär’s 25 minute epic ‘Ehrfurcht’. Described as a ‘recording by M.B. while having a bicycle ride together with her son Cy Hjuler, the complete ride with a tape recorder at the bike. M.B. singing’. Ehrfurcht begins with a reversed, slowed down vocal in one channel backed with a house alarm in the other to which we find Mama Bär singing in a whimsical daydream non-word style. A style that carries on for much of the track in which we meet passing traffic, footsteps up stairs and at one stage what seems to be a fight with a spring loaded five bar gate in a windy and muddy field. Bär continues to sing even though its obvious she’s out of breath which only adds to the already unsettling affect. Her voice drifts in and out of earshot, the tune becomes more embedded, you feel as if you’ve been captured by Danish aliens and forced to listen to their strange sing-song language. And to think this little masterpiece only saw the light of day on a CDR that ran to six copies.

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär are much akin to Gilbert and George in that they are their own inspiration. It will take a better art critic than this humble scribe to make sense of it all but I feel greatness coming on and it needs to be heard and seen.

Anybody with a free afternoon should seriously consider checking out their website which contains vast galleries of their handmade album covers, sculptures and artwork as well as a smatter of sound and live action videos. Their myspace site may still contain the greatest video ever; Hjuler playing a bicycle pump.

Grey Park

Grey Park

Planned Confusion 10 CD

I’ve probably spent more time with this than is natural. But such is the quest for impartiality and truth and honest-to-goodness down home plain talking that it has taken me a month to come up with what it was exactly that was bugging me about this release.

Because I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Grey Park, I reviewed some of their earlier cassettes [ten years or more ago] and was impressed by their showing on a comp called Halogen Ball. Their sound was pliable, open to lots of influences, one minute coming all over Scandinavian Column One, the next a scrapyard field recording session with busted banjo strings and tin can bongos. They don’t release that much either and when they do its usually short run cassettes or three inch CDR with bizarre packaging [one item coming in an inside out coffee bag] - there is therefore a certain amount of genuine excitement when their releases arrive here at Idwal Towers.

So imagine my surprise when faced with a cross between John Michel Jarre, Cluster with knobs on and early Kraftwerkian shortwave plunder. For their first ‘proper’ CD outing Grey Park has manifested itself into a pastiche of 70’s keyboard ambience and I’m not sure if I like it one bit. On paper it should work, the production is great: ray gun blasts panning your speakers, shortwave swizzle, huge throbbing helicopter landing pulses, the odd vocal and musical sample thrown in but still ... and yet. With the recent upsurge in interest in bands like Emeralds who are so obviously wearing their 70’s synth influences on, not just their sleeves but lapels, gussets and lining too, you’d think that this would be a shoe-in for instant success but these three tracks leave me feeling oddly cold. I’ve scratched my head for long enough. Its time to put Grey Park away and see which direction they take next.

Contact:

planned.confusion [at] gmail.com

http://lowfidelity.org/~nosfe/grey_park/

Grey Park

Grey Park - A Final Exam For A Agent

267 Lattajjaa CDR. LTJ 76

Beguiling Finnish out-there unclassifiable drone skronk noise shortwave etherplasm merchants Grey Park have been baffling and entertaining me for quite some time now. Trying to pin down their sound is nigh on impossible such is their ability to switch sides mid stream and A Final Exam is no exception. There’s spazzy guitar, shortwave illuminesence, hip-hop samples, Van Morrison samples, Eno-esque ambient burblings, someone hitting a tom-tom very s-l-o-w-l-y and patiently against a background of IRCAM dabblings and even a Matti Nykanen cover. Former ski legend Nykanen is Finland’s favourite tabloid fodder due to his penchant for getting pissed and doing stupid things, so covering one of his songs [he’s a part time entertainer too] seems logical for a Finnish experimental outfit. And to prove they have a sense of humour theres a sample of Tanita Tikaram’s Twist In My Sobriety stuck on the end.

All in all Grey Park cover in forty minutes what six other experimental musicians do in six albums such is their multi directional approach. All of this rendered meaningless though as I’ve just discovered that this is already sold out.

Contact: www.dlc.fi/~hhaahti/267lattajjaa/

Dilloway/Emeralds/Family Battle Snake

Family Battle Snake - Optimistic Suburbia

Chocolate Monk. Choc 182 CDR

Emeralds/Dilloway - Under Pressure

Hanson Records CDR

Aaron Dilloway - Chain Shot

Hanson Records CD. HN207

Aaron Dilloway - Chain Balled

Turgid Animal 7” TA396

Aaron Dilloway - Face Mask

Turgid Animal 7” TA396-1

In a recent bout of self indulgence I withdrew with ‘The Golden Hour of the Future’. A release in which the proto Human League screw around with home made synths and ‘associated peripheral devices’ producing a sound that had me going all soft in the neck, eyeballs rolling into the back of my head as if in practice for my recently injected junky scene in the latest Lynch flick. It’s the kind of music that immediately puts you in a time and place, i.e. a grotty, broken, industrial late 70’s England where Embassy Number 6 and Webster’s bitter ruled in ubiquity. Those who think the Human League were just silly haircuts and synth pop sing-a-longs will be surprised to find more similarities here with Throbbing Gristle rather than Depeche Mode. I for one delight in all manifestations of the analogue synth and ‘associated peripheral devices’. Homemade, Moog, beat up and scratchy, if it produces sounds like this then all is well.

The analogue synth has seen a resurgence of late, Emeralds being the most notable protagonists but others have been indulging too, including Berlin resident Family Battle Snake. Coupled with a reel to reel tape [and no doubt many another piece of obscure kit] FBS has here constructed two tracks of such blissful cranial drift that its been a hard choice between The Future and Optimistic Suburbia all week long.

For want of a comparison both untitled tracks fit somewhere between the spacier moments of Edgar Froese and the industrial wastelands of Steve Stapelton’s more recent spacial offerings. But thats just to give you something to work on for these are two busy tracks gently going about their business evolving whilst keeping the ears entertained, drawn in, cajoled and surprised. Its this constant development that sets Optimistic Suburbia apart from meeker, more mundane offerings. All too often you hear a release where drone merchant A settles for plan B, sets a course for C and stays there until the batteries run out. From the almost sci-fi like helicopter whoops at its start to the barely audible mutterings and monkey chatter during track two, its 40 minutes of cranial drift thats as good as anything I’ve heard so far this year and in that statement I include Emeralds ‘Solar Bridge’.

Aaron Dilloway now spends his time cajoling sounds out of eight tracks, tape loops and field sounds, so I was somewhat apprehensive as to how all that would fit in to an Emeralds release. Thier sound is so pure that you feel that any kind of dilution will lead to a weakening of it. It kind of works although the second track [all untitled] is the weakest and this is the one that seems to have the heaviest Dilloway hand with a loop of an echoing, degraded vocal running through its core. The sublime third track, which begins in such delicate fashion that it takes about two minutes for the drone to emerge, is another killer slice of Emeralds head float with long notes taking an age to mature against lake edge guitar shimmers. Dilloway is here in the shape of an approaching storm; steel sheets beaten in a distant tree, an incoming subway car. Its sublime material yet again and one I never tire of listening to.

Dilloway’s solo material is a mass of destroyed loops, crushed pigeon coops and ethnic field recordings. It’s also another fine example of taking whats now deemed obsolete hi-fi equipment [8-track] and working it into something unrecognisable. Much as I admire the tape manipulations of Howard Stelzer and Scott Konzelmann [Chop Shop] I now admire the work of Aaron Dilloway. Capstan heads are squeezed, spools slowed, contact mics chewed, tape loops spill, reinvention is the key. Chain Shot sounds like it does contain the sound of a chain being pulled, a draw bridge being drawn up, it also contains the loop of some seriously damaged lungs or it could be the wind whistling over the top of a bleak moor at 4 a.m. Both Chain Shot and the following Execution Dock are 15 minute outings suggesting that these may have once belonged on a C30 and once again we’re drawn into ancient technology - but all for the good. What’s billed as a bonus track on Chain Shot is the meat though: Medusa is 28 minutes of a deep sea divers heavy breathing, escaping air bubbles and low industrial moan. Peeling away the layers reveals running water, a looped churn and the sound of the Indian army doing 6 a.m. star jumps.

Contact:

www.chocolatemonk.co.uk

www.hansonrecords.net

http://www.mutant-ape.co.uk/

Father Murphy

Farther Murphy - And He Told Us To Turn to the Sun

Boring Machines CD

Contact: onga [at] boringmachines.it

Xmas and New Year descended upon Idwal Towers like a heavy horse blanket muffling all sound and making movement impossible. I lay there like a coma patient, eyes shut wanting to make it all go away and for normality to return. Eventually, days later, I turned on the computer and stared at my junk mail, I walked for hours in the blinding winter sun trying to get the circulation going, I watched TV and I spun some 45’s that I bought in Oxfam. I read my book, I read the Radio Times, I did the crossword, the washing up, I made meals, I hung a picture, I lit the fire and eventually escaped to Bruges for three nights of heavenly beer drinking - except that the three best bars in Bruges were shut and the only portals of escape were a crammed tourist bar off the main square and a hostel bar where cigarette smoke hung a foot off the egg yellow ceiling. In the end I did lots of things that didn’t involve listening to music.

On return I was hoping that Father Murphy would drag me from this lassitude but their quirky, off kilter, Italian prog pop as recorded in a church eventually left me feeling baffled and annoyed with myself. Annoyed because I should like this but I don’t. It has lots of things going for it; nine short tracks over thirty five minutes, Beefheart like structure, toy keyboards, guitars that sound like they’ve been wound down an octave, medieval drums, male and female vocals and some quirky songs and yet and yet and yet after many a listen I find that these songs are still strangers to me. Its like picking up a decent looking pint only to drink it and find it tastes of nothing. It could be the avant garde Smashing Pumpkins approach, the spaghetti era Morricone musings, the Sonic Youth lite dabblings at one remove I thought I heard glimpses of Belgian outfit dEUS [although this was a long time ago your honour and I was very bored - wrings cap tightly in hands whilst walking backwards out of the room]. Maybe I just don’t get it any more. Ten years ago I’d have thought that Father Murphy were bold and edgy, a door to rooms full of other great sounding bands and now I think that they’re just an interesting sounding band, one of probably hundreds all with a song to sing and a story to tell. For all I know they could be grooving to this down the cat walks of Paris and Milan and New York but to these ears it just sounds, well, quirky. But if you like quirky and records recorded in churches where the strings twang and cymbals bosh and the singers sing in weird [English] voices then this may be the one for you.

Stratvm Terror/Human Larvae

Stratvm Terror - This Is My Own Hell

Reverse Alignment/Existence Establishment 1000 copies. CD digipak

Human Larvae - Home Is Where The Hurt Is.

Existence Establishment 500 copies. CD digipak

After tormenting myself for a whole week on these two discs I began to question my own sanity. Why do I write these reviews? Here I am trying to decide whether I like Stratvm Terror and their ‘atmosphere of pure desolation’ or not while two feet away from me lies a dozen other more palatable and entertaining platters. John Peel used to say that it was the records he wasn’t quite sure of that he liked best and this has always been something I can relate to but after sitting through This Is My Own Hell this last week I decided to get down off the fence and tell it as it is. It occurred to me that what we have here may be just about the most formulaic piece of crud to pass through these hands since the last Merzbow by numbers CD.

Press release mentions a certain Peter Andersson and my hackles are raised. Same Andersson who manages to find time to front several ‘dark ambient bleak industrial sit and listen in a dark room for full effect call them what you will outfits’ the most recognisable of which is Raison d’etre. I’ve listened to Raison d’etre and some of the stuff that leaks out of the Cold Meat Industry label and I find it too formulaic for my tastes. Trying to recreate the sound of everlasting hell seems to be their thing and once you’ve heard it, you’ve heard it and you don’t want to hear it again. Ever. It’s boring, repetitive, cold, un-involving, shiny on the outside dull in the middle ambient pap for people who think that music getting louder is scary. I like to think that Andersson has some kind of ‘bleak industrial sound’ software running where you can drag and drop the elements that constitute such a record; say clanking steel, anguished vocals, church bells and layer them on top of droning machinery and ritualistic drums. Make sure that each track begins at a barely audible level before getting louder and more TERRIFYING before disappearing into oblivion and you get the general idea. You need the artwork to go with it too don’t forget, hence a pastiche on Hieronymus Bosch which is yet another box ticked off. Call me a miserable cynic but I’ve had more rewarding listening experiences in supermarkets.

You could aim the same arrow at Human Larvae except that what we have here is made with so much more feeling and contains so much more passion that it makes Stratvm Terror sound like Burl Ives. Yes its a power electronics/Industrial ambience album and yes it contains plenty of PE clichés but its all done with such professionalism and with such care that you just cant help being impressed.

This is Human Larvae’s first full length release and there seems to have been a great feasting on classic PE albums. Track titles such as “I Do This Because I Love You’, ‘A Loss Too Great To Bear’ and ‘To Hide In Her Uterus And Hopefully Suffocate In Absolute Tranquility’ reveal a deep thinker at large thus elevating this from being just another misogynistic, misanthropic outing. Home Is Where The Hurt Is also contains some genuinely unsettling moments. The sound of a womans terrified screams on the aforementioned ‘I Do This ..’ is enough to bring comparison to darker Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock moments. My only complaint is that a lot of these tracks tend to outstay their welcome. There’s nine tracks here spanning an hour which, given the material and subject matter is heavy going. Still, crank up your stereo, get out your snuff mags and indulge in some solid PE. It sure beats replicating hell in your living room.

Contact: www.reverse-alignment.se www.existest.org www.myspace.com/existenceestablishment

Evil Moisture + Hantarash

Evil Moisture + Hantarash - Fat Anarchy On Air Tube

2x12” test pressing

Harbinger Sound 033-12

Being a diligent researcher I decided to unearth the CD version of this monster that appeared via Harbinger and Tochnit Aleph a year or so ago so that I could cross reference, take notes, compare, contrast and re-listen ... except I couldn’t find it. I did come across a rather obscure release of Evil Moisture’s called ‘Sausage Tunneling With Fuckwhittakers Drape Curler [Live]’ a shabby affair comprising two shitty Chinese C60’s held together with a hair curler and a scrap piece of paper for a cover. But after listening to nothing but hiss for the last hour or so I deduce that this was a live show so brief as to be virtually non existent. Either that or the sounds on here have degraded into nothing-ness courtesy of the sub standard strips of Sellotape scattered with iron filings that passes muster for Chinese cassette tape or that this was the only time Evil Moisture ventured into John Cage territory.

In a review I wrote at the time I mentioned that this was earmarked for a double vinyl excursion and so it would appear. Or does it? No sign of it on the horizon as yet and If this stays at a 15 run test press it will no doubt become extremely collectible [sealed bids to my email address please].

According to the Evil Moisture website five copies of this test press have been inserted into hand made covers and will become available soon, so a tiny amount is out there. If it does appear then you will get a remixed version of the CD and something almost entirely new. Sort of.

Expect the manic of course; quiz bell buzzers, revving mopeds, the Eye of the Tiger, a never ending cascade of screams, gurgles, cartoon endings and Amiga bleeps going in 45 degree angles in an attempt to run over its all tail. Its a dodgem car ride on acid, 20 years of noise chopped up into tiny bits, thrown into the air and glued back together at random whilst reading Finnegans Wake after no sleep.

If you put Andy Bolus [English noise mangler resident in France ergo Evil Moisture] and Yamantaka EyE/ƎyE/eYǝ/aye/aye [Japanese noise god resident everywhere ergo Hanatarash] together then your going to get fireworks and this is what you have here. Tape hiss it is not.

Contact:

http://www.geocities.com/xevilmoisturex/xevilmoisturex.html

http://www.myspace.com/doomation

Aaron Dilloway, Nate Young, Mutant Ape, Ashtray Navigations

Aaron Dilloway, Nate Young, Mutant Ape, Ashtray Navigations

The Common Place, Leeds. Thursday, April 9th 2009

Underwood’s in town and wants to meet up in The Duncan but since the smoking ban The Duncan now exudes the kinds of air that makes you think the whole place is an undercover experiment into how long people are willing to endure the smell of putrid body odors and stale beer. Besides that, your elbows stick to the tables and the stuffing from the long saddle beneath your arse sprouts like mushrooms creating some surreal scene of Blue Meanie proportions. It’s not exactly the most welcoming tavern in town. There is also the fact that at 7.30 on a Thursday evening the tables will be covered in sticky beer residue and damp beer mats. It will also be dead seeing as how the majority of its clientele get all their drinking done between the hours of 9 am and 6 pm. So it’s to The Duck and Drake - one small step from the Common Place and the sight of Timothy Taylors pumps and wooden floors. The smell isn’t quite as keen but the jukebox is worth it for the bizarre mix of wartime sing-a-longs, hip-hop and David Bowie.

Across the road and down a cobbled street lies The Common Place; a non profit, smash the state collective run by volunteers who flip tops off Sam Smiths bottles for a reasonable price and have a projector suspended from the ceiling, cradled in a plastic supermarket bread basket. The floor is cracked tile and stone, the PA is pretty good and everybody disappears outside for a smoke in-between sets. There are no scenesters, people are there for the music and a goodly few have turned out rather than go to Brid for their Easter holidays.

It’s a night of table top gadgetry noise, drone and psychedelic guitar fuzz with local heroes Ashtray Navigations turning in a fine psych fuzz performance. The Toddmeisters guitar is the spring from which sprouts many a psychedelic note, all of them designed to fizz into your skull and explode in a sun like fashion. Abetted tonight by the Melster who plays a purple toy trumpet through what must be some kind of effect, they layer masses of head drench onto a buried thump that towers into Timothy Leary territory. That explains the smell of skunk coming through the door. Beats the smell of piss in the Duncan I suppose. Mutant Ape appears to have matured since I last saw him kick his toys out of the cot on a TNB bill. There’s some high end ear popping that sounds like a zillion Chinese New Year crackers coming at you but the lack of an all out noise assault makes for once makes a refreshing change.

Nate Young has some initial trouble with his equipment which isn't surprising seeing as it all looks like it was made in 1971. His tapes are swelling apparently but once he finds one that isn’t he works it into some dense loops which judging by the sparse vocals could be called songs. Dilloway’s tape loops spill everywhere and one loop box has a transparent section so you can see them wriggle. He finds a groove, builds on it to deafening levels and then brings it down. He finds a frequency from somewhere thats of such painful dimensions that one punter who has already got his ears stuffed with ear plugs finds himself having to push his fingers in on top of them. Mid set he sticks a contact mic in his gob and really pushes for it, this only makes things worse/better depending on your bent and with an 8-track augmenting things it always leaves me wondering how they get all that gear over the pond and through customs. The only lap top in sight is someone checking their emails. Lets keep it that way. The sight of analogue equipment getting an airing lifts the soul. Once upon a time it looked as if lap tops and email checking performances would become the norm, with people like Young and Dilloway to the fore there’s no need of them.

I missed the first set but arrive just in time to catch the next - an outfit unfamiliar to me. Three huddled over a table full of gadgets, bits of metal that get scraped, little boxes that get talked into, snippets of shortwave radio, all very austere and reminding me of the Bohman set from last years Colour Out of Space fest and even though it doesn't travel any further than its original boundaries it’s meditative enough to warrant a few silent nods of approval during its course.