Reynols - Gona Rubian Ranesa
Outlier Communications. LP/DL
Jake Blanchard - Morass
CDR
Friday morning started like many other Friday mornings in that I got out of bed and went food shopping but when I got back things took a very different turn. Mrs Fisher had received an email saying would it be possible for you to drop off some of your books at Salts Mill? This brought on a mix of emotions ranging from mild terror to nervousness to wild joy. Neither of us had been inside a bookshop for a good eight months. Apart from supermarkets and one visit to Oxfam I don’t think I’ve been inside a public building with other people since March. Mrs Fisher hasn’t even been to the supermarket. Or Oxfam either come to that. Before shit came to town visiting a book shop on a Friday had become a regular thing for us; locate a book shop within reasonable driving distance, drive there, buy books, have lunch, go home, open bottle of wine, read books all while giving thanks to everything thats good with the world. And now I stood with a box of rolled oats in one hand and a tin of adzuki beans in the other while being asked if we could do that which was once so natural. Today even. Why not go after lunch I said ? Which is what we did.
We drove there, put on our masks and after scanning the NHS app in at reception we were once again inside one of the best book shops in the country. If you’ve not been I highly recommend it. If you live in a small village or town the chances are that Salts Mill will be bigger. It is huge, vast and only part of it is open to the public, the rest awaiting development and a return to everything not being shit. It has a couple of very good, common sense, reasonably priced restaurants, an art supply shop, several antique shops, outdoor clobber shop, a home-wear shop where you can pay £50 for a lemon squeezer and buy things for putting things in that come from Italy and of course a book shop. A flagstoned floor book shop with books laid out on tables and enormous windows with views up on to the hills on one side and the village of Saltaire with its close terraced streets on the other. They have the biggest collection of Hockney’s in the country too, all of it on permanent display and just being there makes you feel better about yourself. Even if you’re wearing a mask and have to leave your details at reception. Needless to say the book shop is also huge with plenty of space to move around in which is just as well under the current circumstances. They like to promote local authors too which is where Mrs Fisher comes in and unusually for a book shop they seem in no hurry to shift anything with discounting seemingly a dirty word. Some of Tony Harrison’s books have been there that long that they’re starting to yellow, others curl at the corners but its all part of the appeal. Its the sort of place that sees you leaving with that huge compendium of Oulipian literature or the compete dramatical works of Tony Harrison or the recently republished Ariel with that wonderful wood print cover even though you’ve already got two copies at home. People leave weighed down with books, pens, brushes, craft paper, £50 lemon squeezers and bulging stomachs all of them swearing blind that they’re coming back next week if not sooner.
The hardest part of the outing wasn’t the mask wearing or getting home and worrying if the covid app was going to start bleeping but at having to endure the lousy traffic in and out of Bradford. I’d sort of forgotten how spectacularly awful and dispiriting it is driving in heavy traffic, and not because it was particularly foul that particular afternoon. The drive in and out of Bradford is as depressing and dangerous as it gets, a cross between Wacky Races and Death Race 2000 as undertaken by suicidal bus drivers, deranged taxis, local youths in souped up VW Golfs all taking place between nondescript industrial buildings selling brake pads and carpet remnants, boarded up pubs, forgotten churches with smashed windows and those hideous modern brick buildings surrounded by out of control weeds that are the headquarters for vehicle breakdown companies and debt recovery outfits. The mere sight of them sucks the life out of you. I’m glad I don’t have to do it every day.
I bought a book of course, its impossible to leave Salts Mill without one. Having an enormous reading pile I decided to buy lightly and purchased a copy of Yukio Mishima’s ‘Star’. One of those Penguin Modern’s that cost a couple of quid and can be read in an hour or so, which is what I did Friday evening. Then my long delayed copy of Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season’ turned up and my book reading world got shoved up against a wall and had its nose flattened. Its the kind of book that I thought didn’t exist anymore; a genuinely shocking and deeply disturbing book and one that refuses to leave you. It’s set in the small nondescript town of La Matosa, Mexico and interweaves the lives of several desperate, lost and shiftless people. People for whom life has little meaning beyond drugs, drink, casual violence and even more casual sex. After I’d finished it I realized I needed to read it again, and for the first time I can ever remember I turned from the last page to the first and started reading again. If you like your fiction dark and unsettling I couldn’t recommend it any higher.
Anyway, never mind all that, Reynols are back. Back with their first new studio album in seventeen years. Seventeen years. Where does all the time go? I remember hearing about Reynols when they emerged in the late nineties and the word was that they were making thee most out there psychedelic music you ever heard in your life, most of it driven to the pumping beat of their drummer who has Down Syndrome and then when you actually got to hear the music it was like a slow nod of appreciation growing in to full blown, wide eyed, wide smiled, head nodding, fist pumping, ejaculatory, exclamatory yes! They were indeed totally mind blowing. One of my favourite Reynols listening experiences was with the Betley release ‘-------’. The Toddmeister shoved a copy in my hand during a Saturday afternoon drink in the Duncan and me being a lightweight in the drink department fell asleep upon getting home and woke up early the next morning. Six o’clock Sunday morning if memory serves. If you want to know what weird feels like try listening to ‘-------’ when you’re wide awake at six o’clock on a dark winters morning. Imagine a psychedelic record as recorded in a concrete block in the desert by people who for whom the norm was a forgotten four letter word. Then I saw the documentary about Reynols [Buscando a Reynols] and it all started to make a little bit more sense. Reynols just liked to have fun. They loved to make music. They loved putting out albums and over a short period of time between the end of the nineties and the beginning of a new millennium they pumped it out in a frenzy of creativity. During this peak of creativity they were booked to play a gig in London but were denied entry for not having the correct paperwork [or something like that] and decided to spend their time in immigration custody making a new single using only photocopies of the paperwork that had been given them which was released as a single one side ‘Don’t Cry For Me England’ the other ‘Cry For Me Argentina’. Did I mention they come from Argentina? I bought more Reynols stuff along the way including a CDR that was an hour long drone, they fried my mind and now they’re back.
I have no idea why theres been a seventeen year hiatus in all things Reynols but I’m glad that its come to an end. Even if its been for this one release its been worth it. For this is prime Reynols, dig in and and don’t hang back. Highest possibles etc ... Spread over two sides of vinyl [green vinyl if you’re quick] this is where Reynols meet Neu! via the shamanic rituals of a peyote chief all of it covered in Tomasin’s ever enthusiastic shout and call vocals. On the opener ‘Cameso Cator Sitero’ he sounds like he’s leading a chaotic line dance, shouting out instructions as a wild jamboree of chugging guitar and a never ending swirly solo does the rounds, ‘Lintiri Tepe Roli’ is a much slower Apocalypse Now Doors themed The End with equally spooky keyboard runs and backing vocals straight out of a Sun City Girls soundcheck, ‘Acotan Silago Foli’ is as equally drowsy while the albums closer ‘Corlo Sattru’ sees Reynols push the Komische buttons and set the controls for the heart of a kiddie playground where the entire Reynols ensemble pick up their instruments and follow a tuneless military flute before the whole things collapses in a glorious heap. Welcome back my Argentinian friends. Lets hope you stick around for a while.
Closer to home by a margin of around 7,000 miles comes Jake Blanchard. He of the Tor Beers and The Tor Fest and the magic pen with which he doth create thee most wonderful works. He drew fifty individual ones for Morass and glued them to the fold out card sleeve and sent them out in to the world [maybe even Argentina, who knows?] where they were held close to the hearts of people who were heard to mutter the words ‘Weird West Yorkshire Psych’ or ‘mines a lambic’. That sort of thing. He being one of those fine upstanding human beings keeping the West Yorkshire freak flag a-fluttering by turning his house into a studio and filling it with electric guitars, synths, tape recorders, mixers, every instrument in the house perhaps and doing it in fine style too if this is anything to go by. No doubt influenced by those other furry freak brothers Campbell and Todd, Blanchard throws himself into a stinking hell hole pit of psych and comes out smelling of things in eternal reverse, of sporadically hit bits of drum, of droney electronica. Here comes some motorized Egyptian synth thrash as bashed out on the back of a six bottle frenzy on Friday night , betcha didn’t see that one coming and if I’m not out of the poang doing the jasper jig, up and down, up and down I’m up the bloody tree. Don’t stop me now folks.
https://jakeblanchard.bandcamp.com/
https://outliercommunications.bandcamp.com/
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