Taming Power / Early Morning Records

Taming Power - Selected Works 2000
Early Morning Records. EMR 007. 10”. 200 copies

Taming Power - For Electric Guitar and Cassette Recorders
Early Morning Records. EMR 010. 10”. 220 copies

Taming Power - For Electric Guitar, Cassette Recorders and Tape Recorders
Early Morning Records. EMR 011. 10”. 220 copies

Taming Power - Twelve Pieces
Early Morning Records. EMR 017. 10”. 525 copies




The story so far: Neil Campbell sends some Vibracathedral Orchestra records to Bruce Russell for trades and in return receives several Taming Power releases. Campbell is so blown away by what he hears that he gets in touch with Taming Power who turns out to be the solo project of Askild Haugland a Norwegian, who to the complete indifference of seemingly everybody except Bruce Russell, has been recording and releasing his work since the late 80’s, mainly on vinyl. Via his Early Morning Records label Haugland has compiled quite a list of recorded work and when Campbell asks him, ‘What you got left?’ Haugland says ‘all of it’.

Campbell raves to Hayler. Campbell bungs me a Taming Power CDR comp that's an unlimited Early Morning Records promo tool designed to whet your appetite but when I see its a slimline CDR with dodgy Gerhard Richter cover art my heart sinks a little. But you don’t dismiss Campbell recommendations lightly. Its when the vinyl arrived that the enormity of it all hit me.

Its not just that Haugland has been sat on this motherlode of abstract, drone and noise for so long, its the whole thing, everything; the hand drawn labels, the hand written track titles that are always the date on which they were recorded, the mundane photo’s for cover art which on early releases are simply glued to the sleeve [apologies for the scans by the way] and then the sounds themselves, the sometimes caterwauling howl of tape recorder feedback, the staggering intensity of a guitar going head to head with reel to reels’, the bleakness, the darkness, the emptiness, the feeling that you’ve stumbled across an entire genre of music that you never thought existed before. I’m still stunned as to just how esoteric, far out, weird and mind-boggling this all is and all the time Haugland just keeps on doing what he’s always done, recording  and releasing. To little fanfare. I’m pretty certain that all that's about to change. The West Yorkshire No Audience mob has picked up on it and the word is beginning to spread. If I was you I’d get in touch before all those low numbered runs disappear for ever.

You can read about that first Taming Power delivery here. You can read Campbell’s proselytizing letter to Hayler here, you can read Hayler’s thoughts on the matter here.

And one release at a time we have:

For Electric Guitar, Cassette Recorders and Tape Recorders: Filigrees of fluttering, distorted electric guitar notes put through a tornado. An unfurling blast of static and degradation which envelops both cassette and tape recorder until it eventually plateaus out into a blissful coda, the ringing guitar notes eventually appearing at its end.

Selected Works 2000: Tape recorder feedback. Painful stabs of dueling analogue equipment capable of disorientation and imbalance.

For Electric Guitar and Cassette Recorders: An electric guitar ringing like an old clock that's chiming wild hours. The B-side twists the form into more surreal shapes. A slowed down Terry Riley taffied into strained drones.

Twelve Pieces: Here Haugland lists all the equipment used; electric guitar, Casiotone MT-36, zither, drilbu, drilbus, dingsha, singing bowls, harmonica, metallophone, voice, tape recorder, cassette recorder/s and like the similar double 'LP Twenty One Pieces' the mood moves from an analogue church organ sparse [the Casiotone] to soporific gamelan, a Largactil infused tubular bell.

Everything here feels as if its been ingrained by dust, muck in the grooves, a film of dirt that covers everything creating a patina that gives Haugland's compositions a sound that makes them his own.


earlymrecords [at] yahoo.no

http://www.sonoloco.com/rev/emr/emrframes.html

Ø+yn

Ø+yn & False Sir Nicholas.  

Ø+yn - Tentaculeando a la Puna.

Ø+yn & Uton - Sacred Geometry and the New Mental Order


You know that thing I said about downloads? Just forget it. Ø+yn gets in touch. He’s from Argentina. Plays lo-fi, folk psych, musique concrète, drone, sitar abuse, a southern hemisphere Filthy Turd with bent swannee whistles and songs gone wrong. A demented Penguin Cafe Orchestra with Simon Jeffes off his tits waving his fiddle in the air like he just don’t care. Man.

I get confused with downloads. I never know where I am with them. Give me something I can get my hands on and take down the chazza when I’ve done with it. But I’ve got to bend and go with it. Just go with it. Listen for a while. Its no big deal. Delete and move on. Save some shoe leather. Give the guy some exposure because he deserves it.

And he’s not Mikka Vaino and someone whose initials are YN collaborating. I have no idea what that’s all about.

These three albums are a low key Vibracathedral Orchestra rattling bin lids and tree trunks, theres India in there somewhere and those grinding low key drones that sound like they’re coming out of a box that has a handle on the side thats almost a Klaxon. ‘Los Músicos Ciegos de Cuzco’ from the ¨Tentaculeando a la Puna¨ album is banjolele Greek Rebetiko attack as the march of a thousand bazoukis do battle in the background. ¨Tentaculeando a la Puna¨  is the best of three. It has adventure in its step, shamanic rituals played out on wastelands, scraped strings, an air of desolation, the odd moan, things going round your head aswarm as Ken Dodd blows down a six foot piece of four inch downpipe. 

Some of these came out on cassette. You can work it out by following the links. Its what I did. Its what you have to do in the crazy world of instant download. Good stuff.

1

2

3

Readers Digest Audition Discs.

A recent dig in the seven inch bin in Cleck Oxfam unearthed 15 flexi discs that some poor sod had carefully collated and inserted into the sleeve of a promo for the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's the Encyclopedia Britannica, which for anyone under thirty years of age was the 24 volume leather bound stripped down Wikipedia, which if you lived nowhere near a library, was what you looked in if you wanted to find out what Iceland did. That's if you could afford the six months wages that it cost to buy them. The Encyclopedia Britannica wasn’t just an encyclopedia it was furniture, an heirloom, something to look at when there wasn’t anything on the telly.

Flexi discs are a rare sight these days. Lyntone, who used to produce the vast majority of flexis in the UK shut its doors in 1991. I did hear of a pressing plant in America run by proselytizing Christians who used flexis to spread the message, but I never did find them. Apparently some people within the noise world used them, no doubt leaving many a transubstantiating God botherer wondering if he’d just screwed up the pressing.

If you ever see any flexi’s, buy them. If you see the Readers Digest flexi’s give ready money there and then and take them home where with any luck you’ll get to hear Max Bygraves tell Brian Matthews that people are fed up with rock n roll and all they want is a nice tune before playing a medley of Max tunes including the obligatory Me and My Shadow. You’ll hear Christopher Howell tell you in his ever so slightly posh, plummy RP English accent the exciting news that there’s a six LP box set of light classics awaiting you as a scratchy ten second burst of Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba erupts from your farty speaker. Or you can hear Humphrey Littleton trying to be as enthusiastic as he can about yet another Glen Miller box set. And on it goes.

Readers Digest flexi’s were promo tools [RD called them ‘Audition Discs’] for their hulking box sets. These leviathans of the box set world would often run to ten LP’s. I’m guessing that most of them ended up in the chazzas because their arthritic owners could no longer pick them up. Titles like ‘Wonderland of Sound’, ‘Golden Hit Parade’, ‘Music For You’, ‘Wonderful World, Wonderful Music’ contained selections of Classical Music’s greatest hits, vast swathes of easy listening, musicals, country and western, some if not all of it performed by Percy Faith and his Orchestra whose version of ‘Please Release Me’ would accompany us on Reggie Drakes Sunday afternoon mystery tours [that’s another story].

And don’t forget to tell Readers Digest whether you want the mono or stereo version and don’t let the crackles on this flexi disc put you off as the records you’ll be getting are of a much higher fidelity.

More aromatic effluvia came in the way of a double sided Faces flexi as given away with the NME and a six inch blank faced flexi that came with 70’s Hot Car magazine. This contains a stilted, well rehearsed conversation between Murray Walker and Anthony Lanfranchi before Lanfranchi drives an F1 Car round a track telling us what gear he’s in and which corner’s coming up next.

Meanwhile back at the Encyclopedia Britannica Michael Aspel is asking Phil and Sheila Barnsby why they thought buying 24 volumes of soon to be out of date information was a good idea before setting us an exciting quiz on the b-side. The 70's really were that shit.
 

One Direction

I don’t normally make new years resolutions but after careful thought and consideration it became obvious to me that the Idwal Fisher blog needed a shake up. Well, obvious to me at least. So how better to usher in this shiny new election year than with a clean sweep of the old thought process. Out goes the ‘I review everything I get sent’ mantra of the last six years and in comes a more laissez faire attitude.

From today if I do get something sent I promise I’ll listen to it but I wont promise I’ll review it, so yes the review gates are once more open but please don’t expect a quick response. I have been known to sit on things for over a year before cogitation took its natural course.

From today I will review whatever takes my fancy be it something I bought in Oxfam or the new Pynchon novel. I used to like reviewing the odd chazza LP so why not bring those days back and if that Vomir release has to go in the opposite direction then so be it. Bring on the Round The Horne LP and that flexi disc that came as an Encyclopedia Britannica promo with the Michael Aspel quiz on the b-side. Derek Bailey playing with David Sylvian? Why not. And that Ethiopian jazz CD courtesy of Awesome Tapes From Africa that’s been doing the rounds the last few weeks now, I feel it needs a post. And Super Noise Penis, the Smell & Quim/Cock E.S.P. 7" I’ve just dug played for the first time in donkeys. Smashing.

I shall still champion the underground [even if Dave Keenan’s has had it locked in the naughty cupboard for the foreseeable future] as this is where I feel most at home. Things will be a lot zippier round here too, not so much time spent pondering over structure [not that I ever did that much in the first place] and seeing as I’m on FB now in full blown Idwal Fisher mode, for better or worse, there’ll be some cross pollination there.

I have a little more time to myself these days and I always get more done in the winter months so expect a spurt. Or maybe not. All this could change come the summer and Test Match Special [always a distraction] but for now this is it. This thing that your looking at. It will continue.

I’ll be linking this to the contact and submissions page so it doesn’t get lost.




@idwalfisher

idwalfisher [at] dsl [dot] pipex [dot] com

Basil Athanasiadis - Stray Cat’s Dream

Basil Athanasiadis - Stray Cat’s Dream [Intimate post-Fukushima Meditations].
Sargasso. SCD28077. CD + Booklet.



Wabi-Sabi is a complex and hard to define Japanese principle that roughly translates as the finding of beauty, simplicity, emptiness, economy and humility in natural objects and processes. There’s a lot more to it than that but spending half this review explaining it would test both your patience and mine. Better perhaps that you go to Japan and find a small tea bowl that makes you go ‘ahh’. That’s wabi-sabi. Mrs Fisher’s a big fan. Or you could read Mr Athanasiadis’ more eloquently detailed explanation in the accompanying booklet.

Basil Athanasiadis gives himself the task of trying to capture the essence of wabi-sabi in a series of compositions that range from Cage like prepared piano works to the inclusion of traditional Japanese instruments and the voice of his Japanese wife. I’d say he’s done it such is the lightness of his touch on pieces like ‘Youki’ an eight minute composition for piano that contains clusters of delicately struck high notes and the equally light Utakata in which the 20 stringed Koto plays foil to a more traditional violin.

The first nine tracks are a series of compositions called the Book of Dreams where prepared piano and flute create atonal atmospheres of the kind heard only on late night Radio 3 programmes. This is Webern played as if Webern had lost his sturm and drang and instead found his arigato goziamsu. The edges have been softened and even me, someone with a virtually pathological hatred of the flute [Ralph Hutter in early Kraftwerk days aside] can find the stark beauty in such work.

‘Little Songs of the Geisha II’ finds Athanasiadis’s wife Shie Shoji adding her delicate voice to the sho and the violin and as you’d expect the results are an austere collection of four song/poems that lie halfway between a geisha house and one of John Tavener’s more minimalist works.

Although not mentioned by name in the press release or the lengthy booklet, John Cage looms large here as evinced on the ten minute plus title track ‘Stray Cat’s Dream’ where a slightly more lively version of Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ stands there for all to see. Its one of my favourite pieces of Cage’s and the one you go to when you get into arguments about how Cage couldn’t play or compose. Its beauty lies in its simplicity which is of course one of the concepts of wabi-sabi.



http://www.basilathanasiadis.com/


www.sargasso.com

Song From The Forest

Song From The Forest - A film by Michael Obert. Selected Recordings of Bayaka Music by Louis Sarno.

Gruenrekorder. Gruen 150. CD + booklet.



Let us venture into the Central African rainforest which is where Louis Sarno found himself after hearing the music of the Bayaka Pygmies playing on his radio one night. And off he goes on what must have been an exciting and daunting journey. Twenty five years later Sarno is an accepted member of the community and has a son called Samedi. The film ‘Song From The Forest’ recounts how Sarno brought his son back to New York, from one jungle to another. What we have here is the soundtrack and but a small representation of the 1,500 hours worth of recordings that Sarno has made of the Bayaka Pygmies unique music.

And they do like to make music. When they pass a gooma tree they slap its exposed buttressed roots, when the women bathe they slap the water to make water drums, when they go into the forest they mimic chimpanzees in mock gorilla hunting games, they play flutes, bow harps, they sing laments, greetings and farewells and by the sounds of it have a good time in the process.

Listening to Song From The Forest you are struck by the purity of it all. An hour of this CD will cleanse your mind of years of commercial radio. Its the purity that William Bennet speaks of when he says that the sound of two African’s banging rocks together has the same intensity of a Whitehouse performance. You can hear that in the tree drumming where the driving polyrhythms are joined by a female vocalist who’s breathy utterances give the piece an air of [probably unintended] menace. ‘Earth Bow is another remarkable piece in which a sapling is bent with a piece of twine thats then plucked, a rainforest double bass, as ever accompaniment is in the shape of hand made percussion. ‘The Flutes We Hear No More’ is the sound of two duetting flautist, the flutes now destroyed and gone forever. The CD is bookended by both a greeting and a farewell. The Yeyi-Farewell is a haunting dirge that showcases the Bayaka’s penchant for polyphonic vocals, in-between the coughs and the cicadas emerges a lonesome and yearning voice.  

As well as the Bayaka there are pure forest recordings and dialogue from Sarno recounting the story of someone he knew who could walk into the forest and live like a king on the food he caught and gathered. An amazing adventure and an amazing story. Makes not to self to see film.

Gruenrekorder

MK9 - Anhedonic Ideations / Death Squad - Out Patients

MK9 - Anhedonic Ideations
Neural Operations 2014 NO 12. 2 x 3” CDR, 1 x business card CDR, 1 X button badge that reads ‘ERROR’ and booklet. 125 copies.

Death Squad - Out-Patient
Neural Operations 2011. CDR 100 copies.



I have a great deal of respect for Michael Nine. In the sometimes murky world of Power Electronics his live shows are never anything less than gripping and what I’ve heard of his recorded work either under his own name or that of his previous outfit Death Squad has always led me to believe that we're dealing with a serious player here. With Death Squad I once saw him play a Termite gig where blood was let as scenes of mass rioting were projected on to a whitewashed wall. Of the several solo gigs I’ve seen under his MK9 guise every single one has left me feeling inadequate, baffled, angry and ashamed. Nine’s ability to make us face up to the inanities of this world; the pointless wars, the wasted lives, the lying governments, the senseless hatred is both humbling and profound. And then here, his own self doubt. A bout of Anhedonia, this being the term used to describe ‘a state of mind where one no longer enjoys the things that used to be enjoyable’.

In Anhedonic Ideations Nine examines a bout of self doubt brought on by a year long struggle with something a bit more complicated than a creative block. During this period Nine kept a diary in which he recorded his thoughts and observations. Some are mundane, some are acutely personal whilst others dig deep into his psyche asking himself questions he can’t answer playing both psychiatrist and patient. Cuttings of this diary, along with black and white images of urban spaces and his own contorted face make up the considerably dense booklet. 

Of the two three inch discs the silver one contains a series of audio recordings that Nine made daily over a six month period, each track representing one week. Here we have short blasts of white noise, shortwave interference, static and amp hum. The five tracks on the black disc are Power Electronics in its purer sense with Nine’s slowed vocals going through the distortion machine to a background of electronic disturbance. Here we find more recognisable PE tropes but its Nine’s delivery and his slowly measured American accent that [even through the static] lifts this from the ordinary. On track three his voice comes at you through a distant howling wind. On track four that distant wind is joined by a crackling frequency distortion that goes deep into the depths of the ear canal. On the last track he recites from what I presume is an Afghani schoolteachers account of the effects of US drone strikes, all this to the sound of heavy rainfall and an oscillating low hertz drone. The effect is both haunting and deeply affecting.

The square disc [as its described on the insert] finds Nine reading a paragraph of his diary entry with each disc being unique.

The amount of work that's gone in to this release is staggering, there’s even a typed two inch square piece of paper folded into the side of the square CD that probably came from Nine’s own diary. As a way of working yourself out of a creative cul-de-sac its quite something, as an insight into the mind of an artist working within the Power Electronics genre its probably unique. Either way its an outstanding release.

Out-Patient finds Nine in is his now defunct Death Squad guise. Here we have inmates of psychiatric institutions being interviewed by their doctors, admissions from desperate drug addicts, straight lifts on the benefits of ECT as extolled by the medical profession and cop abuse all daubed with ominous, gestating electronics. There’s also a live track as recorded in Denver in which Nine’s shows his ability to hold down a sustained rant. Impressive stuff.

Nine’s work is disturbing, gripping, personal and the product of a mind that never stops questioning the often seemingly obvious observation that all of humanity is off to hell in a squeaky wheeled Wal-Mart trolley.  

Power Electronics has its detractors but they’re usually of the kind that hasn’t listened to any in over twenty years. A dousing of Michale Nine goes a long way towards re-balancing that misconception.



http://mk9.org/
   

Sleaford Mods - Chubbed Up + / Tiswas

Sleaford Mods - Chubbed Up +
Ipecac Recordings. IPC162CD/LP/DL

Sleaford Mods - Tiswas
Invada Records. INV138LP. 12”/DL [Yellow and Orange vinyl]




I got the call from Underwood. The Sleaford Mods were in town supporting The Specials and there’s a triple A gold plated back stage pass waiting for me. All I have to do is drag my weary bones the ten miles to Leeds. Not easy after a weekend of debauchery in Dusseldorf supping in bars frequented by Joseph Beuys [who once got chucked out of the Fuchsen for refusing to take his hat off] where at five on a sleepy Sunday afternoon I realise that I’m half cut and have to get a flight and then drive home.

Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Long Plastic Corridor’ is laid bare for my delectation. Five types of cheese and a selection of crusty breads, vegan choice on the menu and bottled beers and water in the green room. We nip out for a pint and when we get back we can’t get in the venue because security doesn’t know who we are. ‘Have you checked all your gear in’ security says by way of small talk as we await recognition. Me and Underwood look at each other ‘Yeah, its all in’.

In the real world the Academy is filling up and after a group of teenagers dressed like The Byrds have done their bit the Sleaford Mods walk on stage plug in the lap top and let rip. The audience is mainly bald, mainly white, mainly Fred Perry polo shirts and braces, mainly middle aged, mainly Dr. Marten’s, one of whom knows every word to every Sleaford song. Not only does he know every word he’s jumping around on the balls of his feet, two, three feet in the air, pushing himself up on his girlfriends shoulders until there’s a circle of space around him, head going from side to side, tongue out, off his tits and loving every second of it. Williamson has developed a furious tic which involves his right hand moving in rapid motions between his hip and the back of his head. He leans into his microphone flicking sweat off the end of his nose, rubbing and ranting, walking a few paces in a circle when theres a gap. Fearn is his usual loose limbed vertical limbo dancer, beer in hand jumping forward to press play after a sometimes brief discussion about which songs next. When they’ve done Fearn unplugs his laptop shoves it into his backpack and they’re in the car and gone before The Specials open up with Ghost Town.

After thirty years time the country was crying out for another Ghost Town. That it took two forty year olds to deliver it while a group of Byrd look-a-likes jump around to Green Day tunes irks me somewhat. And then there’s that cut and shut ginger nut from Hebden Bridge churning out middle of the road radio friendly pap in the now days of food banks, austerity measures, out of control borrowing [both governmental and household], delivery drivers being made redundant on Christmas Day, bankers bonuses, zero hours contracts, tax dodging mega-corps and Kim Kardashian’s fat fucking arse. I anoint myself with cheap whisky and hammer shut the doors.
 
Jobseeker is Ghost Town so is Tiswas and Tweet Tweet Tweet or any other song you want to pull off these two releases, [or, come to think of it, anything they’ve released since Austerity Dogs] all of which are becoming the grumbling dissent in the background of a country whose cosy two party politics are being given the ice bucket challenge by a velvet collared clown who likes to pose with a pint and a fag and tell everybody how in touch he is with the common man. All this while wringing his cap in the presence of his future media bosses and trying to forget he once set up an off shore trust fund in a bid to avoid paying tax on his rainy day money. 

I heard Jobseeker on Radio 4 last week. This is how far the Sleaford Mods world has changed since I saw them play a freebie gig in a crummy Blackpool boozer at the fag end of 2013. Williamson held forth on why he had to write songs that mirrored todays mire because no bugger else was doing it. I try to keep the car on the road my mind reeling from the fact that a band on Harbinger Sound are on a Radio 4 news programme. 

Chubbed Up + collects five recent singles with a couple of unreleased tracks chucked in just keep the completists on their toes. Tiswas has four new tracks with ‘Bunch of Cunts’ being the ugliest and bleakest and perhaps some indication as to the direction the Sleaford Mods are traveling. In it an unchanging sparse beat allows Williamson to give us another verbal salvo with ever more out-there stream of consciousness weirdness, ‘in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion’s off his nut’. ‘The Mail Don’t Fail’ speaks for itself while lame London-centric soft rock stars are the target in ‘The Six Horsemen - The Brixton’s’, ‘They’re so outrageous, they’ve been doing drugs for ages’, definitely the only song in which you’ll hear Johnny Borrell being called a cunt. Worth buying just for that. ‘The Demon’ picks up a sixties funky Blaxploitation vibe over which Williamson rants a virtually non-stop stream of spat out words, a man ridding himself of a brain blockage, ‘din bin din tin tin fuck off min’. The depth is phenomenal. Try listening on repeat. The infectious beats, the words coming at you like a hail of bullets, the laconic delivery on the Six Horsemen, the punk as fuck bass on The Committee, the two minute rattlers, the whomping horns on Fear of Anarchy.

The only way to make this years looming general election anything like bearable is to turn down the volume on your TV and play some Sleaford Mods. With any luck they’ll be using carefully edited bits of Jobseeker as the soundtrack to various politician being pelted with eggs. I’m here waiting.










 

Xanntone Zmas Party

Xanntone Zmas Party
18th December 2014. Wharf Chambers, Leeds.
Ihsorak, Daniel Thomas, Astral Social Club.



Dave Keenan’s article about the death of the underground in the recent year end Wire has caused much debate in and around and amongst the bald heads of noise. Its the treading water idealist who leans over a table full of pedals making noises to a group of people who are mostly friends or friends of friends or Facebook associates or Twitter followers and the  critics who are no more than the ‘defanged boosters of their favourite musicians’. Its the everybody knows everybody scenario, the chummy bon honomie, the fist popping clique-ness of certain groups of music making individuals who retweet each others successes to the nth degree that appears to stick sharpest in Keenan’s claw, that and the tables. Get thee behind me oh table of foulness says DK, give me real instruments and real people, people who run free with the wind in their hair and lager down their shirt front and needles sticking out of their arms. Proper artists with no fixed agenda or prerecorded cassette sets.

The first Zanntone curated event at the Wharf Chambers would have satisfied Keenan on some fronts but failed on others. There were tables and thinning pates but there was also drums and guitars and nakedness too. In December. Nakedness in December in the not noted for its red hot venue space Wharf Chambers. So I wander around in my big coat counting the punters and it appears that we almost qualify for the  #realnoaudienceunderground hashtag by virtue of there being but a dozen people in attendance, some of whom have been at the John Barleycorn since the office shut early for Xmas and are now slobbering on about ducks in Wetherby. Some of those who are showing signs of being full of the festive spirit are the performers themsleves. Including Paul Walsh whose night this is. He’s the one on the left of the photos with the table full of gadgets thus putting him on DK’s hit list, behind him is John Cylde Evans on drums, Neil Campbell on side drum and whatever Evans isn’t and is hitting and stage right Pascal Ansell with various gadgets and, later on, no clothing.

Like the last gig I attended at the WC where Campbell and Clyde Evan’s hit the shit out of stuff for 40 solid minutes under their UK Muzzlers guise, this gathering of minds, that goes by the name ‘Ihsorak’, appears to have been formed with the full intent of making nothing but a godawful racket. For 23 minutes, obvs. They claim they are playing songs, Walsh signaling the end of each ‘song’ by switching off his equipment turning around and waving his arms at Campbell and Clyde Evans like a shipwreck survivor trying to get the attention of a passing ship. When they eventually see him [Campbell has his back to him for the entire set] they finish and then immediately start again making much the same racket as before. Which was all good fun in a pre Xmas lets bash the shit out of some gear kind of way. At times they did hit a Boredoms groove but just as it was getting interesting Walsh did his shipwreck survivor bit and they stopped. And started. And stopped. Somewhere amongst all this chaos Ansell left his gadgets and strapped a guitar to his frame before pulling off his boxer shorts thus rendering him knacker bare. A brave man. I felt the cold and I had an overcoat on but then I’m about thirty years older and have no hair.

Sophie Cooper has had to cancel because of illness which is a shame as I was looking forward to hearing her off kilter songs for the first time. Daniel Thomas does play and eventually drowns out the chatter with a simple but effective evolving synth throb piece, the likes of which I could happily nod away hours to. Whether this was ‘Extraction Music’ ™ I know not, Rob Hayler wasn’t playing out so I couldn’t get a definitive answer.  

I’m away before Campbell treads the boards in what is enigmatically billed as the last Astral Social Club gig ‘for a while’. I’m in the car and the sight of all this jollity and the groovy tunes from DJ HO HO HO make me pine for liquor, the likes of which must not pass my lips in case of contact with Plod.