Octave Mirbeau and Nurse With Wound. The Last Post.

 

Octave Mirbeau - Un Homme Sensible

Nurse With Wound - Alienations [The Devil’s Interval]

Lenka Lente. Book + 3”CD

ISBN : 979-10-94601-34-1

Let me finish where it all started. With Nurse With Wound whose music I have been listening to for the last ooooh thirty five years or so. Late eighties maybe? Mid eighties? Memories lost in the fog of time. You listen to so much you lose track. What was my first Nurse With Wound album? Probably ‘A Sucked Orange’, maybe that collaboration with Hafler Trio that came out on Staaltape. ‘A Sucked Orange’ I found hilarious; I’m A Frayed Knot, Pleasant Banjo Intro With Irritating Squeak, Scrambled Egg Rebellion In The Smegma Department. I listened and thought to myself but aren’t Nurse With Wound supposed to be dark and scary? Somewhere lodged in the back of my brain was the cover art for ‘Chance Meeting ...’ and that leather clad dominatrix and the thought that only weirdos listened to Nurse With Wound and here was ‘Raymonde Fluffs It’ in which Raymonde fluffs his opening lines. Laugh? I nearly bought myself one. The split with Hafler Trio meanwhile, that truly fried my brain. I had no idea what was going on but I knew that I liked it.

Shortly afterwards I availed myself of twenty nine United Dairies cassettes via Ron Lessard and have proudly walked stride by stride with Nurse With Wound ever since, diving in to the back catalogue and buying new stuff when the chance arose. Until recently when the thought struck me that barring what Lenka Lente have released I haven’t listened to a new Nurse With Wound release for what must be over ten years. How did that happen? How did I manage to overlook what one of my favourite bands have been doing for the last ten years?

I decided to make up for lost time by drawing up a list of every Nurse With Wound release catalogued on Discogs and ticked off all those that I had physical copies of. I discounted the two Nurse With Wound MP3 discs I bought in St Petersburg in 2003 because a] I dislike the Russian and Chinese attitude towards copyright and b] MP3’s are a bit shit. I now realise that far from having everything Nurse With Wound had recorded from inception to the year 2000 and bits beyond I was the proud owner of quite a bit of it with several gaps that needed filling. To fill these gaps I need time and money so for the foreseeable the blog is being put to bed as I venture forth on the good ship Nurse With Wound proudly captained by Steve Stapleton and his crew. Whether I shall ever rouse it from its slumbers we shall have to wait and see. 

In the meantime I’m going to find out what Nurse With Wound have been up to these last ten years. I need to hear what awaits me within that decade and the gaps that lie beyond. I shall also paint and draw, read, listen to the radio, go for walks around Scholes, see out this sodding lockdown, survive the virus and hopefully emerge like a vaccinated butterfly sometime during the spring months. By then I will have listened to lots of Nurse With Wound. Lots. Masses. Hopefully I’ll have bought quite a bit too. Maybe I’ll sell off some stuff to make room for it. My very own dedicated Nurse With Wound shelf with a vinyl copy of ‘A Sucked Orange’ forever proudly on display.

My Lenka Lente/Nurse With Wound CD’s will also go there though the shelf will have to be a tad smaller to accommodate them. These three inch/five centimeter discs have been virtually my only portal to what Nurse With Wound have been up to recently. The last one that came through the door piquing my interest enough to having me seek out their Tusk set from 2017, which by the way in case you are interested and why shouldn’t you be is quite stunning and well worth your time. If only I was there. Woe is me etc.

‘Alienations [The Devil’s Interval]’ is a fifteen minute slice of a ‘sleep concert’ Nurse With Wound gave in Ireland also during 2017. Sleep concerts being eight hour long overnight shows where Stapleton DJ’s his back catalogue while mixing in live sounds [I’m guessing] as the audience chills out for the night on airbeds and sleeping bags. Somnolence and hypnogogia being the perfect state of mind in which to receive the slowly moving drones of say Soliloquy For Lilith. Whether Stapleton played ‘Chance Meeting …’ in its entirety at four a.m. isn’t recorded. You can achieve the same state of mind at home by smoking a big bifter and playing Soliloquy For Lilith on repeat while rubbing the rim of a glass bowl with a wet finger. Just don’t try it with ‘A Sucked Orange’ ... unless you’re an insomniac. The results will be very different. Fifteen minutes culled from eight hours of DJ’ing will have to suffice for now then and beautiful it is too with the merest hint of Aurelie Lierman’s vocals helping to lull you safely in to the droning arms of morpheus.

As for Octave Mirbeau, I vaguely remember buying a copy of his ‘The Torture Garden’ when I was going through a very expensive and steep transgressive reading curve. If I had all the money returned to me that I spent on books of a transgressive nature I’d have enough to buy a good chunk of the Nurse With Wound back catalogue on original vinyl, in mint condition. Needless to say I was wholly unprepared and underwhelmed by Mirbeau’s satire on the brutality of humankind wanting and expecting something of a far more base nature for my money. I left Mirbeau and much of transgressive literature behind around the same time. Maybe I should go back now that I am older and wiser? Now that I have more time on my hands. Now that I’m reacquainting myself with Nurse With Wound. The perfect partners perhaps? I could translate all of ‘Un Homme Sensible’ while listening to ‘Automating Volume Three’. I’m sure that it would be time well spent.

Lenka Lente

Josh Peterson - Collected Voice, Text and Tape Work

 

Josh Peterson - Collected Voice, Text and Tape Work

adhuman adh001 CD

If Amphetamine Sulphate did audiobooks then I’m sure that they would sound like Josh Peterson’s audio works. Steering a path somewhere between the uneasy vibe of early Whitehouse releases, Basinski like decay and with heavy doses of manipulated Power Electronic vocals for delivery, his lo-fi, grainy, Dictaphone sound worlds are peopled with those who have fallen between the cracks of society; the lost souls, the victims of sexual abuse, the dispossessed, the lonely, the mentally ill, those that flit between casual sexual relationships of either sex, itinerant workers, drug addicts, those tied to menial work and reliant on benefits, the nameless, the sad, the hopeless. Here we have someone capturing the quotidian despair of those on the margins of life and all set against a backdrop of utter grimness.

Josh Peterson began life as a sound artist using spoken word and sound collage in his compositions. He’d make up cassette tapes of his work which he passed around friends. Four of these tapes, all recorded between 2018 - 2020 are what make up this double CD release from Duncan Harrison’s new label adhuman. Several of his books have also been published by Amphetamine Sulphate and though I’ve not read any of them I’m guessing they’re of the stripe that has you showering afterwards.

 

Peterson’s deliberate, mostly slurred narration is a largactil induced drawl, a suitably drugged blur that is at one with his subject matter. The constant background of lo-fi hum, emptiness and general decomposition is littered with TV news reports, cheesy lounge jazz, static, shop counter talk, seriously out of tune acoustic guitars, footsteps, machinery, rain, cassette tape abuse, children playing, church bells ...

 

On ‘(report & recital)’ theres the track ‘Questionnaire’ that begins with a Whitehouse like high pitched feedback whistle and this:

‘Are you often tired and listless for no reason?

Would you describe yourself as moody? 

Would you take unfamiliar drugs …?

Do you think insurance schemes are a waste of time?

Did you tend to dislike your parents?

Do you sometimes tease animals?

He was also seen walking back and forth at the side of a highway near the motel ….’

Peterson’s voice then disappears in to an unintelligible sea of distortion and is eventually replaced by a sombre piano melody. 

‘Dry, Itching Sensation’ sounds like it was recorded in a roofless factory where the rain comes down and a warbling operatic falsetto emerges from a shellac disc. Its one of the few tracks where Peterson’s voice is left untouched and where he even whispers and for this reason sounds even stranger and more sinister. Its like being whispered to by someone about to slit your throat. 

Whether his characters are real or imagined I know not. I suspect Peterson may be taking inspiration from real life, newspaper reports of missing persons, pharmaceutical information sheets especially in relation to side effects, canteens at break times, clock out machines at clocking out time. I know nothing about Peterson except that he’s American and that he’s trawling some heavy duty seas. His is a world that some would like to pretend doesn’t exist but is very real. Thats what makes these works so disturbing. Real or imagined they’re some of the most unsettling I’ve ever come across.

https://adhuman.co.uk/

 

 

 

 

  

Research Laboratories bring you The Rebel and Sexton Ming

 

The Rebel - I am sorry about my hair beneath the planet of the apes Golidlocks + the bare porridges smoke trak cigarets G 4 F-ort Bring out yer Dead

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 25 copies

Comes in plastic bag with A4 insert

Sexton Ming - Fuck Your Freedom

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 30 Copies.

Comes in plastic bag with artwork pasted to cardboard.

I’ve often wondered if Ben Wallers is the only person to ever write songs that reference the cricketers Alec Stewart, Jimmy Anderson and Brian Lara and also call for the death of all humanity? Wallers songs about the extermination of human existence was a common thread that ran through a lot of what he wrote while fronting the Country Teasers but is he really in to cricket? Well that is something because I’ve just spent the last six hours listening to Joe Root take on the Sri Lankan spin attack only to get run out in the last over of the day with a superb piece of fielding by leg slip. This after a shaky start where the openers Sibley and Creepy Crawley blew it once again in their battle against left arm spin. And theres me wondering how I’m going to start this review of The Rebel’s “I am sorry about my hair beneath the planet of the apes Golidlocks + the bare porridges smoke trak cigarets G 4 F-ort Bring out yer Dead’ when it was staring me in the face all along; Ben Waller, The Rebel, Country Teasers, cricket, race, sex, misanthropy, misogyny, death, hate, fear, nationalism, blind patriotism and all of it gathered up in humour darker than a miners pocket and delivered via a sound thats been to Nashville via Edinburgh and certain London suburbs while taking in The Fall [an often quoted comparison but one thats never sat easily with me], the Carter Family and the sodding Smiths. In essence all of the above, the fact that Waller’s uses a crippled swastika as a logo and that he calls his music publishing company IWASFUCKINGYOURDAUGHTERSOLONGANDSOHARDIFORGOTTOSORTOUTANYPUBLISHING is just my way of saying that Ben Wallers is and will in all likelihood, remain not just a great songwriter but also a total enigma to me. 

Its one of the reasons I’ll happily run in to my burning home to recover all the Country Teasers albums and more than likely several The Rebel releases too. It would be worth suffering a few flesh burns and some smoke inhalation lung damage to rescue what I consider to be a small run of essential albums and singles all made by a person whose never yet got the rewards he’s deserved. 

I’ve watched numerous interviews with Waller and marvelled at his almost shy demeanour and erudite conversation, his camo gear twin set, stetson hat, shirt and tie attire and his wire framed Deirdre Barlow spectacles. His obvious intelligence, softly spoken voice and contemplative ways seeming at odds with the subject matter of his writing. As ‘The Rebel’ I’ve watched video of his one man gigs as performed in a Mexican restaurant in Australia where he’s shared the stage with a babies high seat chair and sang songs of misery to an audience of bemused diners most of whom are wandering back and forth from the bar in obvious disinterest. Watching him deliver the blistering Point of View at the Windmill in Brixton is nothing short of shocking and exhilarating all at the same time; stooped over his guitar, shirtsleeves rolled to elbow and with what looks like deep scratches on his arm, a beatbox pumps out the beat while he picks a few chords on his electric guitar and in his flat delivery gives us this: 

Zyklon-B was a terrible gas

'Cause it killed off all those jews

That's why it made such a good gas

From Hitler's point of view

Points of view

I like Obey by the Brainbombs

And lots of you do too

But Sarah Payne's poor mum and dad

Can't share that point of view

Points of view

The bombs in your bag, it kills fifteen

But it also kills you

You must have been very serious

About your point of view

Points of view

'Kill all the Pakis!' rings out again

In the pubs and football stands

That's a point of view which can be very

Hard to understand

But humans have hot red blood

They like it on their hands

Men kill men kill men kill men

Till not one human stands

Fries are free

Toast is free

Kisses are free too

Your granddad killed a lot of niggers

To buy those free things for you

Now a bunch of Pakis wants to

Take them away from you

What color face deserves what

Depends upon your point of view

Personally, I think, and this is

Just my point of view

All human life must be destroyed

Here I have to admit that after the Country Teasers eventual and predictable implosion I let Waller and The Rebel drift in my attentions. Such was my Waller like lassitude I even failed to turn up for a gig of his at the Wharf Chambers. What a damned fool I was. LP’s I bought none, the occasional single yes. Wallers releases a lot of material and somewhere down the line it was one release too many and I took a turn in the road and never went back. Until now.

Thanks to Research Laboratories I’ve been cursing my reticence and have spent a week catching up and with increasing incredulity wondering to myself why it is Wallers still languishes in cult status territory when his songwriting is of such import. I sure as hell hope he doesn't go to his grave without wider recognition.

Wallers solo work as The Rebel bears distinctive marks; the lugubrious sing/talk delivery, a trebly electric guitar plucked with spidery fingers, beats delivered from a programmed beat machine, a small keyboard capable of producing catchy riffs all of this fed into a four track mixer to which he adds samples taken direct from tv, the BBC World Service, tuneless whistling, Star Trek dialogue, his own dialogue, typewriter clatter, washing machines. The results benefiting from being suitably lo-fi and distorted so as to make the finished whole sound like its been dubbed and re-dubbed on to a forty year old Boots C120.

On ‘I’m sorry …’  there are thirty tracks [including a hidden extra track] and covers of songs by Chaz and Dave, Rod Stewart, Paul Young, Timbuk 3 and Spaceman 3, there are songs of quotidian existence containing gonzo keyboards [In a Polski Slep 4/4] and how Cafe Oto could be improved by being converted in to a McDonalds [McDonalds Dalston Jnctn], there are instrumentals where the keyboard goes all swirly Robert Wyatt, there songs plucked from seriously out of tune acoustic guitars, there are songs where Wallers bangs the keyboard with his fist or at least thats what it sounds like, found sounds are included that are the result of leaving the tape recorder running while making a cup of tea with the radio on in the background. What there isn’t is much in the way of what you might call verse chorus verse structure [unless you count the cover versions] but there is plenty of experimentation, extemporization I dare say and ideas a plenty. I imagine Wallers mind being a seething, boiling sea of ideas and most of his waking moments filled with the realizing them. 

Track titles include:

DAY 1 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

DAY 2 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

DAY 4 AT THE SUBMARINE RACES

LECKING BLACK COCKS & SUSTAINED BASS NOTES [a natural history program tv sample about black cocks which is then mixed in to a sample of how Prince used sustained bass notes] 

CLOWNS DON’T LIKE 2B LARFTAT

IM SORRY ABOUT MY HAIR

MIDNIGHT LAY HAT RUN

FLIDAY POLEM

What happened to ‘Day 3 at The Submarine Races’ is not recorded. And there at its almost end is Wallers singing ‘bring out yer dead’. Perfect.

Thirty one tracks of keyboard blurts, found voices, noises, part songs and a Chas and Dave cover might lead some to wonder as to whether this is Wallers at the Finnegan’s Wake stage of his career or whether this is just a continuation of what he’s been up to for the last twenty odd years. What the hell do I know?   

Meanwhile, somewhere down on the south coast Sexton Ming has abandoned his porridge van and picked up his cudgels in the fight against police brutality. How we got here is anybodies guess, my exposure to Sexton Ming being a limited one from when he had his porridge van and released stuff that sounded like him doing the washing up as he sang opera. A strange one for sure. An outsider artist of a certain stripe and so far off the no audience radar as to be living in a suburb of Yemen.

Mings eclectic, some might say scattergun approach towards sound collage and erm ... song construction has taken a serious turn to the left with the inclusion of ‘The Beating of Kelly Thomas Mix’. Thomas, an unarmed, schizophrenic homeless man was beaten by six police officers for resisting arrest and died of his injuries five days letter. Sound familiar? This was California nine years ago. Its a harrowing listen with Ming adding lo-fi buzzing to the police audio of the event, an attack that saw zero persons get any jail time. 

Elsewhere Ming swings his piano from jazzy cocktail, to silent movie to vaudeville, all samples of course, then there’s proto PE noise, pub chatter and more bizarrely vocals in which his voiced is sped up to resemble Smash aliens. On ‘Forced to Eat His Flesh’ he goes the full Andrew Liles and chucks in tortured souls, clashing cymbals and the wails of the damned. There are tv samples, bird sounds, funereal dirges delivered in a Nick Cave style manner and some neo folk industrial ambience. Someone shouts ‘shut up you old bag’, an acoustic guitar riff … endless it is and not to everyones cup of tea but perfectly fitting into the Research Laboratories ethic of providing us with music from the outer reaches of wherever this is.  

 https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

 

  

The Last of the Lockdown Diaries. The Final Entry.

 

Friday 15th

It started snowing yesterday morning and didn’t stop for nigh on ten hours. Then the temperature dropped and overnight froze in to place all that had fallen. We watched it falling while making ominous statements like ‘this lot looks set in’ and ‘I bet the buses have stopped running’ the kind of comments English people like to make when faced with such horrors. After lunch we decided that a bit of snow shouldn’t put us off our walk so spent thirty minutes donning suitable clothing before setting out into the thick of it. At the bottom of the road we were met by the sight of an articulate lorry that couldn’t make it up the hill because of a car coming down it sideways. Dotted about were various abandoned vehicles, some of which bore the scars of slight collisions. There were people with snow shovels doing there best to keep their drives and the road clear, and a policeman in a van trying to keep things moving. There was also no shortage of four wheeled vehicles, the owners of which were no doubt on essential journeys which could in no way be put off until the roads cleared, all of them driving like twats spraying snow and slush around like it was the best thing ever. 

The walk turned in to a soggy nightmare of sorts. After slipping and sliding about for half the journey we decided to take the short cut home through the a well travelled footpath only to discover that the snow had turned to mud in places and at others into ankle deep lakes of melting snow. As Mrs Fisher sauntered through in her wellies I prayed that my walking boots were still waterproof and even though my feet went a shade of blue my socks were still dry upon return.  

This morning the frozen slush is so thick and permanent that it resembles a frozen Bering Strait, the pavements an uneven, irregularly, corrugated ice spectacular where only the brave and the foolhardy dare to tread. This means the weekly food shop will have to be deferred and being bereft of comestibles and in need of nourishment I set off in to town on foot, over the frozen slush and using bits of road when there was no traffic about. I soon caught up with a man wearing plimsolls who was having trouble staying upright and wondered as to the suitability of wearing Dunlop Green Flash in such weathers.

Sunday 17th

Thats it. Back to work tomorrow. I cant say that I’m that enthused with the thought though I dare say there’ll be no shortage of those for whom the return will be a return to normality of sorts. Strange people with whom I have little in common. I’ve developed new routines over the last month and I’ll be sorry to see them go; the quiet mornings listening to Radio 3 while doing the Guardian crosser on my phone, the endless cups of tea, making meals for Mrs Fisher, the daily walks. I’ve cleared the review pile, not died of the virus, read what books I wanted to read and poked about in old boxes of cassettes, yesterday I sat listened to an old Sigillum S cassette and followed it up with Nurse With Wound / The Hafler Trio. The things you don’t normally do but enjoy immensely.

 

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles

 

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles

Cheeses International. CI15. LP. 

320 copies

Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome

Chondritic Sound. CH-363. CD

Smell & Quim/Mama Baer - Wooden Nail Pony

Carpenter Prod. USA. HOM-Inc boot 12. LP

40 copies

Latex Days - A Tribute to Awkward Geisha

Love Earth Music/Harsh Noise Movement LEM234. 2 x CD

Coming away from a Smell & Quim album singing Bobby Shafto wasn’t what I was expecting but when the needle left the groove there I was:

Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea

Silver buckles at his knee

He'll come back and marry me

Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe

Its the last thing you hear on side two, Simon Morris singing an English folk song before the solemn clang of a church bell and the return of the stylus. And sing it he does, in a resonant, trembling voice like he’s auditioning for Steeleye Span. The result being the raising of the hairs on the nape of the neck and the recurrent thought that he’s not around anymore. A year has passed since he was put to rest and there’s still a big gap where he should be but performances such as this, on a record such as this are reminders not just of himself but of just how good a voice he had. I’m told that these were the last recordings he ever made and it seems apt that they should appear on a Smell & Quim record, a band that he was a major part of for what must have been twenty five years.

Cuntybubbles arrives via the crazed locked down brain of Milovan Srdenovic who has been using his enforced time to create a Smell & Quim lockdown classic that will be seen as one their best. Surely a miracle of our times created out of the unlikely triumvirate of death, plague and pestilence. Let us all rejoice though for out of such darkness emanates a stone cold beauty. Then there’s the rebirth of Cheeses International, a label I’d long assumed defunct and with it the reappearance of the forgotten man of noise Steve Fricker. His website may be next to useless but there you go, thats yer man right there.  

As ever Milovan has crafted his sound using a connoisseurs eye, venturing to places where other bands are either fearful or sane enough not to tread. Dark places, Bobby Shaftoe places. Thus we have Stewart Keith reciting the story of the Wicker Thing [a wicker cock that is Smell & Quim’s take on The Wicker Man] his words delivered as if by a pungent Gandalf with deranged bagpipes and buggery as accompaniment, there are porn film climaxes, flapping flywheel belts that make a syncopated rhythm, military drums, snatches of live action as laid down in Birmingham and Leeds, theres Milovan intoning the words ‘mouth, crop, gullet, bladder, bowel, vagina’ over and over again and that these are the only words to this song makes perfect sense. We have pissing in a bucket because we must have, looped samples of an indeterminate nature wail away until stripped back to reveal further layers that may just be the man himself shaking that noise shaker thing, an instrument that looks like a purloined buddhist prayer wheel riven with nails, bottle tops and ribbon. Opening track ‘Cleopatra Frankenstein’ has a loop of Stewart reciting a story which settles on the words ‘a very beautiful maiden must hold the bough while a man from behind has anal intercourse with her’, ‘Old Spunker’s lengthy rhythm stride derives from sexually congressed thigh slaps and moans before dissolving into a military snare drums rattle, ‘Jimmy Savile - Timelord’ is a short clatter of samples; Tarzan yodeling, Milovan and Morris giving us Savile’s catchphrase ‘as it ‘appens’ and the word ‘nonce’ repeated with growing gusto. ‘The Quim Reaper’ has Morris singing the words ‘and now we’re gonna die’. This being probably the most profound track Smell & Quim have ever given us.

Cuntybubbles is a built around the long track on side two, itself an amalgam of several shorter tracks; The Cuntybubble Variations contains ‘The Theme From Cuntybubbles’, ‘Pissy Tights’, ‘Cannibal Adderley Street’, the literal ‘Mouth, Crop, Gullet, Bladder, Bowel, Vagina’ and last but not least the pounding Wank Engine’ before Stewart Keith tells us all the story of the ‘The Wicker Thing’ and the beautiful town of Bell End and its deadly tradition.

This is up there with Jesus Christ, Cosmic Bondage and Stephen Hawkins Butt Plug and which ever other Smell & Quim release it is that you hold as your favourite. A ribald mixture of collective voices culled from beyond the grave and the Outer Hebrides where Jimmy Savile sits aside old spunkers and wicker cocks, where the full regalia of the ‘Wank Engine’ compliments the noise dance of ‘Cleopatra Frankenstein’, where filthy noise meets people pissing into buckets. 

In some ways I see it as a tribute to Simon Morris. His presence is there throughout and finally and most memorably with a sodding folk song. Was it ever anything else but madness in here?   

Its been a busy year for Milovan. Not only a new album but new material via a split LP with Mama Bär, a track on the Awkward Geisha tribute Latex Days and a reissue of the 1998 SPITE cassette Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome. So not all doom and gloom then.

The Awkward Geisha tribute comp is well worth getting, not only for the Smell & Quim track Dolphin Cunt but for the truly eclectic gathering of the other twenty-two participants, lots of whom are new to me; Ghostskull, Kenji Okamoto, scum2.1, Bloody Shiv, Drifter, Prize Fuckup, Dead in Japan … I have no idea. The latter being me not another band name. As you’d expect there’s lots of noise but much else in-between including a truly memorable version of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ by Gimp Gash. Eugene Chadbourne teams up with Harsh Noise Movement for seven half minutes of noise called Kojak is Dead that draws things to a close. I shall now show my ignorance by admitting to never having heard of Awkward Geisha so how these tracks compliment/balance/showcase their work I couldn’t tell you. If you go looking for one of these I hope you have more luck than me.

On the Mama Bär split LP ‘Wooden Nail Pony’ the Smell & Quim side contains a full on noise storm called ‘Filthy Cunt’ a track that ebbs in and out of various bowel and bladder movements but at only 40 copies there’s not going to be many getting to hear it. This brings us to the reissue programme and with it the fact that lots of Smell & Quim releases reside on ultra limited, hard to track down lathe cuts and cassettes, especially a lot of the earlier stuff. The reissue of Pushy Gothic Gnome highlighting the fact that somebody needs to put all these together in one place so that they can be easily accessed, Youtube cuts will not suffice though at the moment they’re better than nothing. A double CD of rarities and joy, a treasure trove of obscure but delightful  noise. It needs to be done. Whether the cover from Wooden Nail Pony is included depends on how brave the publishers are, even the Discogs jpegs are pixelated. 

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome features the late 90’s line up of d Foist, Holly Hero and the Syrup of Love Unlimited Orchestra. Its the line up that existed for a couple of releases and some memorable Bradford 1 in 12 performances. Here Milovan adopts a speeded up broad Yorkshire gnome-y voice ‘I’m from Bradford in West Yorkshire’ before channeling his inner Elvis as d.Foist sprays everything in sight with his splatter beat electronics, I have the feeling that some live material may have been incorporated too. Interesting to hear what would become Astral Social Club tropes in and amongst the turmoil. What the Syrup of Love Unlimited Orchestra contributed is not recorded but I bet it involved drink and was an integral part of what eventually develops into a total noise burn out on side two.  

All together now:

Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea

Silver buckles at his knee

He'll come back and marry me

Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe

Cheeses International

Carpenter Prod

Chondritic Sound

Love Earth Music