Striate Cortex 49/54/55

Sapir Whorf - Phase 1: Preliminary Investigation
Striate Cortex SC49. 3” CDR 

Thossian Process - Impurities
Striate Cortex SC54. 5” CDR
  
Crimson Rainbow Facility - Unknown Strains
Striate Cortex SC55. 3” CDR



It was at a recent WC gig that I availed myself of a number of items from the merchandise stall. Somebody was having a sale and being in the market for a bargain I scooped up a handful of CD’s and paid the princely sum of one pound each for the lot of them. Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon having positioned myself in the Poang, I listened to all of them one after the other, all this whilst sipping numerous cups of tea and having my customary post prandial nod. It then occurred to me that on the night in question, when said items were purchased, I may have had the odd snifter and that my judgement in purchasing said items may have been clouded somewhat by this fact. I may also have been overcome with some sense of bonhomie and dived into said sale items with a oh-what-the-fuck-I’ll-buy-it-anyway attitude. And then I realised it was dark whilst this transaction took place and that I didn’t really know what it was at all I was buying and that I may have even been egged on to fill my pockets with such wares by certain members of the audience, and maybe there was a police raid, or the stripper distracted me, or Filthy Turd was waggling his gut in my general direction, I may have been perfectly sober and dreamt all this. Details are sketchy.

Soon after I hid those releases away from myself. I know that they reside in a cupboard or a box somewhere and that I should really take them to the charity shop so that they can reside cheek by jowl with Robson and Jerome’s Greatest Hits and Five Stars Single Collection and be bought by someone with a flair for adventure in sound who will forever wonder how it was that such a weird and ethereal item ever ended up in Cleck Oxfam.

I have to admit that some of those releases came from Striate Cortex. My memory has wiped the miscreants from my brain so I am unable to bring you exact details but the burning mental image of someone attempting the impossible by channeling Cocteau Twins through Throbbing Gristle via All About Eve has left scars on my cerebellum that will take decades to heal

I’m not about to criticise Striate Cortex though, doing so would be like slicing lumps off a cow in India, but there is now, within me, a sneaky suspicion that Striate Cortex are capable of turning out the odd clunker.

With a back catalogue now running to over 50 I dare say that amongst them there’s the odd release that SC head cheese Andy would rather have stayed in the in pile. But who amongst us isn’t tainted by some passage of our past that we’d rather forget? Maybe I’m wrong and he loves them all? Having listened to only a handful of SC releases though I have to say that my overwhelming feeling is one of absolute positivism. When you take into account the sheer amount of time and effort that goes in to each and every Striate Cortex release you have to tip your hat to the man and say that the effort is well and truly worth it. Take the 50th SC release Victorian Electronics which became an immediate collectors item not just because it highlighted the current resurgence in all things Leeds experimental but for the fact that it came with four 3” CDR’s in a box so cute you wanted to put it next to the cat and take pictures of it and put it on Facebook.

As with all SC releases its the handiwork that greets you first. The above array of imagery is about par for your average SC release in that theres a fold out booklet or some hand painted card or a piece of fibre glass cut into shape or a fold out sleeve, or multi-imaged insert. Its what lifts SC from the norm and makes it instantly recognisable. SC also forgoes the current trend for synching the labels website with downloads and for the most part you have to have the actual disc to hear the music [though in the case of this crop of releases Crimson Rainbow Facility have a Soundcloud page to peruse].

So what to make of this bunch? For the most part we’re in TG tribute territory. With Sapir Whorf its all early TG synth terror, with Crimson Rainbow Facility its their tribute to TG’s track E-Coli whilst Thossian Process do their bit to resurrect early English Industrial-ism by mixing shamanic bone rattling with deep sea diver breaths and sonar soundings.

Of them all I came back to Thossian Process the more often, mainly because there was more for me to get involved with. Coming in at just under the half hour mark these seven tracks capture the ritualistic elements of 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire whilst bringing in the more sparse elements of Mika Vaino and the Finnish Sähkö team. Bleak offerings with shortwave emissions that wash over you like the flapping last reel of Lynch’s Ersaerhead. Impressive stuff. Crimson Rainbow Facility’s work here is so near to TG’s E-Coli that I can’t believe that CRF made this work without hearing it. During several tracks of a themed pathological nature you can pick out the sampled voice of someone relating the dangers of various germs against a background of lo-fi noise. OK for one track but stretching it over several seems to be overdoing it. Which leaves us with Sapir Whorf whose synth noise blurts perhaps embodies the earliest works of Throbbing Gristle the best. The inner sleeve states ‘speculative electronic elements originating from archival ferric oxide media’ which probably means they made this from old Throbbing Gristle cassettes. If this was some uncovered archival relic from 1976 I know certain bald heads of noise who’d be beating each other senseless to get a listen but in 2013 I found it rather less enlightening.




Contact: http://striatecortex.wordpress.com/

Small Things On Sunday / ASC+Robert Horton

Small Things on Sundays - Searching For
Skrat Records. SKR011. LP

Neil Campbell/Robert Horton - Trojandropper
Zum. ZUM033. LP




It has to be said that a certain form of listening lassitude has made itself more than unwelcome here at Idwal Towers these last few weeks. In what would normally be a flurry of cassette and CD insertion there has instead been a sloth like scrape of knuckles upon floor in its place - a death like noise akin to the sound of a clubbed foot being dragged along behind a perfectly formed one. A stasis that has laid me low for three weeks now, mainly due to various ailments and moments of manufacture which when combined produce one great big stinking shit pot of unhappiness.

What has kept me going though is vinyl. Its the format I turn to when the chips are down, when the spunk has been sapped, when the limbs are weary and the head needs rest. For some unknown reason there’s been a flurry of TV activity in connection with vinyl in recent weeks with various talking heads extolling the virtue of the gorgeous groove. I’ve missed most of it and only half watched the rest but the gist is still as clear as polished glass; vinyl beats all other formats of music carriage into a bloody pulp. Its a total no brainer, for whilst whatever other format you prefer to praise may have its plus sides it will never replace the vinyl record as thee archival musical format of choice. Anyone who disagrees is wrong and deserves to be hit square in the teeth with a knotty stick.

So whilst there has been an almighty slow down in the listening stakes of late it hasn’t ground to a complete halt for somewhere amongst all the shit thats been flying I’ve taken succor from these two joyous platters.

Small Things on Sunday are new to me, despite several releases on various labels including the venerable Striate Cortex. A Danish duo in the shape of Henrik Bagner and Claus Poulsen they create some achingly beautiful atmospheres - with the aid of guitars, radios, violas, tapes, gadgets of an unknown source, the odd laptop but most importantly vinyl and its potential for ‘accidental and unexpected sounds’, they produce some wonderful and at times splendid gushing moments of experimental delight.

It would appear that both Bagner and Poulsen have got the noisier side of things out of their system and have now set sail for the far shores of ambient atmospheric calm so what we have here are six tracks of various melancholia that capture the radiant charm of Harold Budd, the Arctic wastelands of Biosphere and the guitar led misery of American post rock down in the dump-sters La Bradford. There’s drone too as witnessed in the last track ‘Two Instruments’ in which the chatter of Amazonian insects give way to a see-saw tussle between Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Riley in which our protagonists try to better each other in getting the most use out of a wheezing organ before everything crystallizes into the shimmering distance.

I found that ‘Searching For’s’ charm took a while to reveal itself which is mainly down to the opening track ‘Enceladus’ doing its best to resurrect the ghost of La Bradford [even if the guitars are detuned], an outfit with whom I had but the briefest of dalliance’s at a time when I must have been at my most vulnerable. But the slowly shifting beauty of the thing eventually appears, especially on second track ‘Liquid Mirror’ where the sound of crackling vinyl shifts under the weight of Sonny Sharrock going down the frets of his guitar with a horse hair bow. There’s a deep unsettling ambiguity to a lot of what happens on here which for the most part leaves the listener in a deep state of lost wonderment. Its a dense listen too, a many layered beast with which you’ll have to devote a lot of time and effort to should you require any goodness from it. With a lot going on beneath the surface there’s scope for this record to be played dozens of times with the chance that each listen will sound as fresh as the first. Its a hard trick to pull off but one that Bagner and Poulsen deserve credit for. The press release states that some of these tracks are culled from various improvisational live outings whilst others are ‘the product of hours of re-imagining and re-arranging’. Either way it did its bit in helping me lift myself from my cups.

As did Trojandropper. Which is a virus, which seems fitting considering recent ailments. Horton and Campbell wanted to create a disco album and failed miserably. Its no bad thing for what they did create is something much better, a dance album of sorts but the kind that necessitates the ingestion of the kind of drugs you can only get at the vets. You can certainly move your body to it but only in a ‘oh I think I’ve been tasered’ kind of way. Like on the ‘Panharmonicon Particle Radio’ which sounds like a Ukranian folk record speeded up or an off his tits George Formby thraping the neck of his ukelele until his fingers bleed. All the tracks have some kind of Casio beat underpinning them whilst some have samples lifted from [I’m guessing] 80’s pop songs. Head and out-of-body, euphoric moment of total joy comes on the last track ‘Utterly Free World Without God’s Curse - Multi-Sky Wave’ where our collaborators mash up [I think thats the term thats in use these days] a truly gorgeous soul beat whilst slathering on some Neneh Cherry violin which mutates into a hydra of bleeps beats and frantic bobbings.

Apparently Horton and Campbell have never met, this being a collaboration via the etherwaves. I have no idea what Horton has been up to before but having listened to plenty of Campbell I feel its safe to say that both of these artists like working with beats and the layering of different sounds upon them, be it a snake charmers reed, some glitchy electronics, spacey effluvia, spazzy guitar, fiddles, trumpets, tapes, piano, percussion … you get the idea.


Onward ever onward.



Contact:

smallthingsonsundays.dk
zumonline.com

BBBlood / Core of the Coalman / Ap Martlet

 

BBBlood - N 51°33' 0'' / W 0°7' 0''
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3”CDR. SLI 010. 50 Copies.


Core Of The Coalman - 12 Lines
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3”CDR. SLI 011. 50 Copies.


Ap Martlet - Pyrite
Sheepscar Light Industrial. 3”CDR. SLI 012. 50 Copies.



With Sheepscar Light Industrial running Striate Cortex close in the fetish item de jour stakes it comes as no surprise to discover that as physical objects these three little beauties all found homes weeks ago. But fear not sonic adventurer for the world we now live in means you now no longer have to bung your mate a Boots C90 and wait six weeks for him to get back to you. For you dear reader the task is but a simple one; a few clicks to the SLI website and there by the magic of the interweb aural gratification awaits.

OK, streaming quality isn’t the best in the world but high quality downloads are available in a myriad of formats; FLACS, OBS, 320’s, DOGS and CATS you name it. Its the shiny bright connected world we live and isn’t it all just amazing. After extolling the virtues of cassette tape in my last review I now find myself warming to the world of downloads. Well, warming might be pushing it but if I was to give these three releases ecstatic reviews and urge you to seek them out its not like you have to start rooting about on eBay, Discogs or digging about in a drawer for a blank tape is it?

And do you know what. I do feel like giving these three releases ecstatic reviews. Its the warmth I feel coming from SLI. The fact that its such a good label with a solid roster of reliable names on it, a generic packaging style thats easy on the eye and a steady trickle of releases [about three a month, all in one go] thats enough to keep you happy and eager for more.

I’ve seen SLI cheese Daniel Thomas at WC gigs, he’s a steady hand on the tiller, a reassuring presence, the kind of person who gives you a friendly smile as he blackens the back of your hand with a magic marker squiggle after having taken five pounds off you. His label reflects these qualities.

Ap Martlet and Core of the Coalman are both new to me. From these two offerings I deduce that they like to work in the drone arena. Ap Martlet with a spectral piece of drift that resonates with much clarity down my grateful shell-likes. A slight ringing buzz, a collapsing squeeze box pushed together and taken apart by someone with all the strength of a Netto’s value tea bag, a huge steel ball rolling around an empty warehouse. In its last dying five minutes things become quieter as a solitary tone threatens to disappear into the very centre of your soul. At twenty minutes its a perfect ride and I’d be amazed to find anyone for whom this kind of drone doesn’t work. Its clear, harmonious, comparable to Charlemagne Palestine’s work of a similar nature [not his old joanna banging of course], a sheer delight.

Core of the Coalman is the slightly unusual moniker as taken up by the multi talented  American composer, musician, designer and artist Jorge Boehinger. According to various Wikibits his instrument of choice is the viola, though he’s known to dabble in the electro-acoustic field as well as using his voice and ‘various other instruments’. On 12 Lines I’m guessing he’s using both the viola and gadgets of an electric nature. Here again a deep and sonorous 20 minute blow, a vibrating, humming thing that ebbs and flows and hits new key shifts to lift and heighten the experience. Another rewarding twenty minutes worth.

Meanwhile, back at the Barons cage we have Paul Watson keeping the capital alive with his highly rewarding noise constructs. Its a pity there hasn’t been more of BBBlood through these gates for what I hear impresses me - this isn’t all head down, thumbs through belt loops, shoulder swinging, hair swaying drongo noise y’know, there’s a great deal of thought goes into what he does and it shows. During ‘Marseille’ I’m treated to the sound of an oak tree being snapped in half, the splinters ripping across my skull in all its panned glory. I’m sure there’s field recordings in there too, especially on the first track ‘Obscurantism’ which sounds as if it was recorded on the buffet car of the London to Leeds East Coast express. An all out blast appears in due course and when it arrives you know about it but its the way in which Watson arranges his sound that impresses me most. He’s an erudite chap and his compositions show and yes I did mean compositions. The way in which these two tracks are structured, the way in which various elements appear and disappear, the continuous flow of ideas and sounds all point towards a daring and highly enthusiastic mind. I dare say that the Baron has laid his offerings at the TNB alter too for there is the scrape and a rusty bike wheel being slowly spun, its rotations coming to an end with an ear squealing orgasm. Factory hum, that glorious wood tearing .. I believe we may have some kind of mini classic on our hands here. To the downloads.





Contact:

SLI

Inverted Nepal / Panelak / Mouth Worker

Inverted Nepal - Unverted
Waterpower. WP030. C40 Cassette. 50 Copies.

Panelak - Arnica Eyebright
Crater Lake. CL002. C30 Cassette. 50 copies.

Mouth Worker
LF. LF027. C30 Cassette. 10 Copies.



I think just about every tape review I do these days is prefaced with a few words regarding how cassette tapes shouldn’t actually exist in 2013. But here they are still living and breathing and defying the digital age with all their tight wound, capstan sticking, little felt pad disappearing charm.

To someone who’s never seen a cassette tape they must seem like relics from a bygone age. Tell your friendly neighbours teenage offspring that cassettes can only hold about 90 minutes of music [C120’s seem to be truly a thing of the past] are inherently unstable and take up lots of room and they’ll probably point to their palm sized gadget of choice and its unlimited application capacity and think you’re some kind of simpleton. Who in their right mind would truly want to keep something as ancient as cassette tape alive?

These people obviously.

I’m still a fan of cassette tape. I still have a cassette player in the car and will happily buy them in chazzas usually to find that Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits plays both sides at once until eventually sticking halfway through ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’ going one way and ‘Witchita Lineman’ going the other. But what do you expect for ten pence? Some of them do play though and I often find myself being nostalgically taken back to the time when department stores had huge racks of them on display. The mere sight of a Black Sabbath cassette is enough for this to happen. Back in the early 80’s Vallance’s in Bradford must have had thousands on display. Never mind that your cassette version of Monty Pythons ‘Instant Record Collection’ didn’t fold out into a box or that Led Zeppelin’s ‘In Through The Out Door’ cassette had a plain j-card insert whilst the LP version came in a brown paper bag, five different inner sleeves and an inner, inner sleeve that you could dab water on so that the colours came out. There were drawbacks but people still bought them.

These two releases are unlikely to get the continued use that resulted in the death of many a cassette back in the day. That's not to be unkind to any of the people involved in the production of these releases, its just that I’m unlikely to play Panelak’s cassette as many times as I did the one that Gavin Walker did for me in 1975 that had Led Zeppelin ‘III’ on one side and Thin Lizzy’s ‘Jailbreak’ on the other [I still have it]. Today's cassette based label, noise artist cum sonic adventurer use cassettes as aural marking posts, statements of intent and are quite happy to post links to the digital version but would much prefer you to buy the actual item and experience for yourself the charm of the antediluvian plastic shelled beast - unless you are semi-Luddite like Waterpower [there are plenty others] who only post teasers of their work online or [for the truly hardcore] no web presence or online identity at all [Matching Head we salute you].

So what of these three? Inverted Nepal is the work of Pete Cann and Paul Walsh, the dad and lad of the Leeds noise scene whose spastic outbursts of teeth rattling noise bring to mind the kind of tumult that used to come regularly out of Japan before the introduction of affordable CD burners. The dynamics are dulled by the format but that comes with the territory. Its a full on head down no nonsense mindless noise boogie of course. Whistling eardrums at dawn territory. Whistling up the garden path territory. About as subtle as a house brick through the window and as cultured as a Millwall fan at chucking out time on a Saturday night.

More noisy Leeds based shenanigans come courtesy of Pascal Ansell, a suave, debonaire good looking and enthusiastic young chap who rattles about on campus at Leeds University with the drummer Paul Hession making a bit of, what I can only describe as, a racket. The cassette format works its magic once more reducing Hession’s drumming to that of the sound of mice with clogs on running down a flight of wooden stairs and Ansell’s electronics to submerged squiggles. Its still a short fun ride though with Ansell introducing German spoken word samples, twanged open string shapes and a spot of vocal howling for good measure. Its all a bit unfocused if truth be told but I’m here to encourage and if he buys me a pint next time I see him I’ll say he’s the next Stockhausen. You never know.

I should really save Mouth Worker until I review all the LF releases I got sent but it seems to fit with what has passed already, so here goes … and what do we have ... but more noise of course. Only ten copies though so you better get moving. And will you be wanting to track this down in twenty years time to reissue it on your resurrect long forgotten noise cassettes on 180 gram vinyl double gatefold sleeve label? Probably not. But don’t let me put you off. If blunt, muddy synth noise on ridiculously limited cassette runs are your thing then be my guest. Short examples are digitally available but you cant beat the real thing.


Which leaves five cassettes from Johnny Scars Mantile label, but that's for another day.

[I'm reliably informed that there is no Paul Hession presence on the Panelak release whatsoever. An oversight on my part that I am more than happy to correct]

Contact:

Waterpower

Panelak

LF

Small Cruel Party - An Accident Of Substance

Small Cruel Party - An Accident Of Substance
Harbinger Sound. Harbinger053. 3CD.



If only there were more people like Key Ransone. Who, after about ten years or so of releasing material under the Small Cruel Party banner, decided that a career in French cuisine was more up his cul de sac. Bye bye Small Cruel Party, hello legumes.

Its still a sizeable body of work, maybe ten albums, the last of which saw the light of day in 2002 plus a smattering of singles and comp contributions. An Accident Of Substance collects these singles and comp tracks putting them in chronological order over three CD’s so that you can hear the transformation from the ten minutes of found sound building site brick abuse to the delightful one minutes worth of a bucket full of water being hit with a stick.

Of course I have no idea how Ransone came to create any of these 27 tracks and I’m all the happier for it. The melancholy drift of the second track ‘Some Movements’ appears to include a lonesome two note bird call, two tons of ceramic tiles being dumped a mile away and a raging forest fire. Its at once The Haters, Fransisco Lopez and John Cage. ‘Wind On Jets’ sounds like a sniffer dog searching for drugs inside a vast tumble dryer. ‘Micromelistmata’ is a simple humming drone. ‘Seminal Brainpan’ is built around the sound of a reversed once hit kettle drum, rummaging noises, scattered timpani and Evil Moisture epidermal squiggles leaving you with Nurse With Wound circa Merzbild Scwhet and another huge ‘what the fuck’ moment. And you’re still only halfway through the first disc.

Any serious sonic adventurer could do a lot worse than to begin their journey here. If you’ve ever been turned on by fridge hum then start here. If you like the sound that underground trains make when entering a station start here. Rain, mud, underground reservoirs, traffic, running water, buffeting winds, drums rolling down a hill, birds, vocal tics made close to the microphone, wind chimes, a drinking glass being ground into a stone floor … they’re probably all here too. In all kinds of combinations, permutations formulated for the sheer joy of hearing pure sounds. Then there’s the feel of it all. The screaming, whistling, atonal scrape of ‘12 Breaths On Shore’ aside the rest of the material gathered here appears as if from a moist hole in the ground. This is an ethereal, calm and mysterious body of work, captivating and grand, enlightening and joyous all at the same time.

Most tracks are made of but a few elements. Maybe three at most. Most tracks begin and end in the same fashion. A few introduce new elements during their course. There's little in the way of stylistic shift from the first disc [which begins in 1992] and the last [which ends in 2001]. That there isn’t a duff track [nay, a duff second] anywhere on these three discs is a testament to Ransone’s ear for sound and his ability to compose sounds from a non musical origin.

Dip in anywhere and you will find delight. After you’ve done that start making a list of those who you’d wished had done the same as Ransone and quit whilst they were at the top of their game. It’ll be a long list.

A Band / sepopepLel / The Y Bend / CK Dexter Haven / Usurper/Nyoukis/Greenwood

The Y BEND/CK Dexter Haven/Usurper - Live Cuts
No label CDR. 50 copies

sepopepLel - Viking Soul Music
No label CDR. 200 copies

The A Band - Greatest Hits 1990-2000
Must Die Records - 2xCD
MDR 024



After listening to the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble all last week it seemed only natural to extend the experience by reviewing this lot. Plus it gives me the chance to see how many ex-members the A Band have amassed since the last time I looked. Must be about 50 by my reckoning.

One of them is Stewart Greenwood who along with Karen Mitchell is a member of sepopepLel and there he is playing with Usurper and Nyoukis on one of them there 'Live Cuts'. He’s also there on The Y Bend because thats him introducing himself [I think?] and I have no doubt that he’s a part of CK Dexter Haven too. So he plays on everything then.

But what does he do? Make a lot of noise is, I suppose, the easy answer. Its what A Band members do best. In a nice terribly British way of course. Perhaps the noisiest example of his work is that as captured live in Edinburgh on the the 29th of March 2012 in which a farting low hertz rasp [as conjured from an analogue synth maybe?] rumbles along aided by some whispy swirls for the best part of a quarter of an hour. Plain and simple noise.

The same venue pays host to The Y Bend (A Band, Y Bend, geddit?) who start out all TG bass fuzz before bringing in squeaking doors and a wheezing accordion. But its the 22 minute Usurper, Nyoukis and Greenwood collaboration thats the best thing on here. As you’d imagine its a stumble about the stage, scrape and thump, someone going mad on a typewriter while a cuckoo clock goes off at clocking out time at the tin whistle factory electro-acoustic fest, Nyoukis gets to moan, the Usurpers to parp and frot and Greenwood … well I’m not sure what he does but it all works wonderfully.

Viking Soul Music kicks off in tremendous fashion courtesy of a wild track involving lots of things being smashed, a little like a wild night in a Greek taverna recorded on to a dodgy Boots C120. Here we have Greenwood and Mitchell going under the aliases of Stewart Griftwood and Mint Kracknell. After getting the crockery/glass smashing out of their system theres a rather ropey 20 minute live track from 2004 [their last apparently] which involves lots of bell ringing and a muffled roar. The rest of the tracks are self explanatory: ‘Bells and Tap Dancing’, ‘Derelict Piano by the Sea’, ‘Organ and Button Accordian Duo’, ‘Hair Drier, Spoons and Bongo Drums’ all of which are rather lovely and listenable in a ‘isn’t that the sound of someone tap dancing to the sounds of hand bells being rung’ kind of way. I became a fan of ‘Derelict Piano by the Sea’ and the Cage like way in which it was tackled but ‘Wine Glass and Humpty’ put my teeth on edge. I have no idea who Humpty is either [the soft toy from Playschool perhaps?]. There’s 80 minutes of the stuff to go at too, thats a double album in old money, a tad exhaustive but worthwhile.


The A Band need no introduction of course. Already guaranteed a place in the English Underground Music Scene Hall of Fame all they have to do now is sit back and wallow in the glory.  As ever with the A Band everything is not what it seems; ‘20 Greatest Hits’ only contains nine tracks with tracks 5-15 of the second disc being taken up with excerpts from an interview given by two members of the band for a French radio station [OK there's some musical interludes but nothing is named] and I’m pretty sure that Richard Youngs '171 Used Train' Tickets never saw the light of day until 2004 although it may have been performed earlier than that.

There’s lots on here to admire and I’m a huge fan of surreal outings like ‘TV Sets From Winter’ and ‘Walkmans for Precious Antiques’. The former coming across like a collaboration between Sun Ra and Vivian Stanshall; a rambling, sprawling mess of a track with marching drums, squeaking sax and a vocal that just never stops. The latter is someone retelling the tale of a traveler who swapped his Walkman for you know what as a shambling band of twanging out of tune guitars wails away, plus lots of smashing and bashing things of course.

In ‘171 Used Train Tickets’ Richard Youngs reads out the last 171 train tickets he’s used which means lots of trips between Beeston and Nottingham. Performed in front of a lively audience the joy comes from Young's rapid delivery and the way in which he involves the audience, getting them to not only guess the next destination but to applaud the mention of Sheffield. One of the most memorable of A Band tracks and a piece of English sound poetry cum performance art worthy of comparison to Bob Cobbing.


Long serving member Stewart Keith holds things together with a distinctive voice that appears on most of the stuff here, the shopping list of 'Washing Powder', the spoken word duet on a 'TV Sponge King' - a fifteen minute track in which swanee whistles, melodicas, trumpets, hand bells (Greenwood again?), bongos and twangy strings provide a soundtrack to a Gilbert and George like twin recitation of various oddball statements e.g. "the sponge king comes from my house actually".

For me the A Band’s appeal lies in their spontaneity and the way in which they channel surreal British [English?] humour through a musical form in which very little in the way of humour exists.

The last 15 tracks are where you really want to start if none of this has made any sense so far. In an interview with a French radio presenter two members of the A Band Give a potted history of the band explaining a lot of the mystery that will forever be associated with them. There's clips of various tracks too but well worth hearing just for the reaction of the interviewer when she realises exactly what Anusol is. Much hilarity ensues. Its a big part of what the A Band is all about. Having fun.




www.mustdierecords.co.uk

[Apologies for not having any contact details for Y Bend and sepopepLel, I'm working on it]. 

Bren't Lewiis Ensemble / Blood Stereo

Blood Stereo - Palatine Arches/Tape Hiss for Brainwash/The Gither
Chocolate Monk CDR. choc.224

The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble - Time Lady Rangoon
[The Well Spliced Breath - Volume 2]
Chocolate Monk CDR. choc.241
60 Copies. Sold Out.

The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble - Out Paitence
BUFMS33. CDR.





Dylan Nyoukis may have got involved with the Albert Hall and all things John Cage centenary celebrations but I still cant shift this image I have of him singing like a Saturday night drunk at last years Rammel weekender. Someone should have recorded it and stuck it on a Chocolate Monk release. Maybe they already have? The passers by certainly liked it and it would have sat nicely with the first track on this here collection of Blood Stereo rarities; ‘Drawl of Lund’ sounds like it was recorded in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden where the moans of the dying hung in the damp air. The sight of a drunken Nyoukis stumbling through the mud and the blood singing into a Dictaphone would have been a sight for sore eyes and what if Seymour Glass had been there to join in? Think of the possibilities.

Out Paitence has been kicking around for a while here. It turned up last year with a package that included the memorable and sadly overlooked Glands of External Secretion double album ‘Reverse Atheism’ [and if you haven’t heard that little beauty then you really are denying yourself a major treat].  Recorded at the Bell Memorial Union building California in 1984 it captures the sound of Lucian Tielens, Tim Smyth and someone going by the name of Gnarlos picking up various objects and dropping them to the floor. There's also the sound of them playing a pinball machine, spouting gibberish, plunking toy pianos, smashing pie tins, dropping wrenches, whirling ribbed tubing, wheezing into harmonicas, whistling, chanting, singing and probably about three hundred and two different things besides whilst constantly moving around an echoing huge airy hairy space. Its a sprawling listen of course but not one without merit or significance. Tidbits of this have appeared before but now we have it in all its 47 minutes continuous, ramshackle, chaotic, glory.

Gnarlos and Tielens, [along with several other participants including Lindy Lettuce, Amoeba Man, Common Eileen and Sidney Africa] turn up on ‘Time Lady Rangoon’. This being a collection of early works pulled from a late night 1983 radio show and a backing tape that was used by The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble during their headlining set at the 2011 Colour Out Of Space fest. Its all madness of course but immense fun with it. On ‘My Down Booties Were Eaten By Pat’s Dog’ someone repeats the title whilst a pianist plays various pieces including the funeral march and the wedding march back to back over the sound of a party in full swing. ‘Hand Satanizer’ is a collection of vocal tics, poetry and random words mixed with TV noise, Herb Albert’s trumpet and a 50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll radio station that keeps losing its signal. Someone recites dialogue in a voice that would lead you to think that there was a definite absence of testicles and then there’s the screams, the political speeches and is that the sound of someone being strangled? ‘Palsy’ [also recorded in 1983] sounds like it was recorded in a lunatic asylum whilst a Hammer Film flickered away to the inmates. Small dogs bark, a baby cries and a female soprano wails away in reverse on a loop. The new stuff remains true to to the old. Almost thirty years may have passed but we’re still in Palsy territory with ‘In Search of Christy Bacon’. You can’t beat a bit of quick editing to quicken the pulses. Think Mixed Band Philanthropist, Broken Penis Orchestra but way more freeform and loose. I dare say the odd beer was consumed.


Blood Stereo meanwhile float in a kind of genre defying sac of amniotic fluid. Here we have electro-acoustic twiddle, fiddle and scrape, mong voiced moanings and heavy breathing as captured during an outre cottaging session in Brighton town center.  On ‘The Bland Miller’ [from Palatine Arches] there’s baby singing, baby gobollalia and an ethereal female voice going ‘whooo whooo’ through the wet trees of a dense Scottish forest while the chickens settle down for the night. Think of Constance channeling Jay Clayton through a haze of wine and fag fumes whilst Nyoukis watches on like a proud Cage-ean father. Its that weird.

‘Non Wretched Drone, No Blooze’ [from ‘Tape Hiss’] loops a church bell ring onto a field recording in which Nyoukis tries to pull a cheap anorak over his head. There could be an army of small people moving bricks about in a pit, there could be a box of pot dogs being loosely carried, it rains, it fizzes but only ever so quietly, it definitely drones and there’s Dylan dragging a gammy leg through the damp leaf mulch. When the violin scrape comes in at the halfway mark my eyes rolled into the back of my head and I found myself uttering invocations to the drone gods, ‘Please let this continue a while longer’. When it suddenly cuts and stops I felt as if I’d been robbed. ‘The Tape Has Natural Voice’ is all snore edits, guttural gurgles, deep sea diver breaths, amphibian croak. ‘The Gither’ writhes about in an analogue bath of Kagel like making, all bubbles, burbles and babies, tape gone mad, tape out of control, tape wound round Brighton sea front balustrades blowing in the salty breeze.

Nyoukis, Constance, Glass, The Butte County Free Music Society, The External Glands of Secretion and the Common Eileen’s of this world make our lives richer with these releases. That these have been pulled from obscurity is a blessing. That they will be reach a wider audience remains to be seen but these are gems that need polishing, nuggets that need discovering, drinks that need imbibing. A fine way to start the new year.

Two last thing; I’m still no wiser as to why The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble releases have those four black squares on them and where’s Dylan’s beard gone? I still miss it.



Contact:


Chocolate Monk

Bren't Lewiis Ensemble

Hiroshima Yeah! 94/ Turbulent Times 9 / Spon 22+23+24

Hiroshima Yeah! #94/December 2012
A4 zine

Turbulent Times #9 - The Mid-Life Crisis Issue
A5 zine

Spon #22 - The Animal Poetry Issue
A5 zine. Dumb Cunt Comics

Spon #23 - The Apathy Issue
A4 zine. Dumb Cunt Comics

Spon #24 - The Ceramic Hobs - OZ OZ Alice
CD




Those of you with long memories will remember that the first ever paper edition of Idwal Fisher contained a number of reviews written by Gary Simmons. In a style heavily influenced by his passion for Whitehouse, Sci-Fi, space travel, Heavy Metal, GG Allin, Clockwork Orange, transgressive cinema, punk, Jap noise, cheap cider and avenues of a more risque bent he sent many a missive containing reviews that immediately singled him out as having a unique voice - like a cross between Alex from Clockwork Orange meets the Marquis de Sade at closing time in the Manowar pub Fleet Street. His review style meant that he usually meandered off course or even ignored the object of review completely, he used expletives in virtually every sentence [usually in upper case]. His main weapon was misanthropy which when coupled to a healthy disdain for mainstream culture meant that his targets regularly got blasted with heavy doses of his ultra sarcastic realism. And he certainly knew what he was talking about. I know of few people with anywhere as near an encyclopedic knowledge of the early English Power Electronics scene as himself and then there was the moon landings, the space race, NASA and probably plenty of other passions with which he could talk eloquently and write rabidly about.

I met him a few times whilst in London for gigs and once memorably bumped into him and his then Spanish girlfriend Maggie at the Tate Modern. A coincidental occurrence that inevitably ended in a drunken Sunday afternoon trawl around the pubs of Soho. The way he dressed [think big hair HM/punk cross over] and his propensity to give as much as he got often got him into trouble so I can’t say I was entirely shocked to learn that he’s now doing time in Pentoville Prison for the crime of GBH with intent.

Before his incarceration he wrote for Hiroshima Yeah! In an ongoing column entitled ’13.7 Billion Years Of Hell - Selected Dispatches From An Unwilling Player In God’s Little Game’ he ranted and raved about releases that fell within the noisy end of the spectrum usually attaching some of his own scans of related noise releases or the cover of a Brian Aldiss novel that for some reason just had to be in there.

Needless to say things have been quiet but in issue 94 of HY! he’s back. With a column now entitled “1.5 Years Behind Bars: Selected Dispatches From An Unwilling Contestant Of The British ‘Justice’ System’s Little Game” he gives us but six short paragraphs relating to life on the inside; the boredom, the routine, the lags, the screws all of it written in Gary’s own unique style. Lets hope that there’s more to come.

And lets not forget Mark Ritchie who has been manfully holding the reins of HY! solo fashion in his absence. I’ve mentioned HY! before but its worth mentioning again as its one of the few zines I know of that publishes regularly. A copy turns up at least once a month, most of them being but two pieces of A4 stapled in one corner. Think copy and paste, think gig reviews that mention drink more than the bands, think Ceramic Hobs, Glasgow and reality. Available for trades or stamps or maybe even a nice letter.




There were plenty of people at Extreme Rituals walking around with copies of Turbulent Times in their mitts. Most of them had smiles on their faces too, for Turbulent Times manages to pull off that rare trick of combining noise with humour. I’ve been told that humour and noise don’t mix but whoever said that never witnessed live shows by Emil Beaulieu, Evil Moisture, Gerogeregegege, R&G [think spaghetti] or Smell & Quim. And they never read Harsh Noise History in TT9. OK its pulled from Eraciator’s blog but lets not start getting all churlish here - this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read regarding noise and it deserves a wider audience; 

‘The European experimental music scene suffered badly during the economic recession of the eighties. In the UK, Live Actions became scarce when local councils zealously enforced the Harsh Noise Abatement Act. The extortionate price of photographic medical journals and army surplus clothing made it impossible for those without rich parents to continue’.

‘At exactly the same time John Coltrane and Albert Ayler invented free jazz in the new country of America for a bet’.

‘Japanese acts such as Merzbow (“Shit House” in English), Gregory Gegge, Hijokaidan (roughly translates as “ear wax sound”) and Hannah Trash (actually a Frenchman named Claude) produced vast quantities of noise cassettes and also surprised Western listeners by releasing their work on compact disc before the medium had been invented’.

Like all good zines TT9 wears its editors style on its sleeve. Healthy doses of cynicism abound as does some of the best gig reviewing I’ve ever read including top jobs on this years Broken Flag bash, a Consumer Electronics gig in London, the We Can Elude Control show at Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion [featuring Helm and Russell Haswell amongst others] plus a bizarre event suffered by the editor at the hands of Nuclear Medicine, a gig in which he was tied to a table in a room and left to his own devices for half an hour, this after having taken two tablets as prescribed. There’s interviews with Nocturnal Emissions, GX Jupitter-Larsen, the Libbe Matz Gang, someone called GRMMSK and an all too short review section.

TT9 does what all good zines should do; entertain and inform - to be honest I never knew dub noise existed before I picked this up but I do now and if I so choose I can pick from several examples of the genre all of which have been sat though and rated for my listening pleasure.

And its a proper paper zine, you can pick it up, read it, shove it in your pocket and when you’re done with it you can give it to someone else and help spread the word. Judging by the copies that were flying off the merch stall at ER there’s still plenty of life left in the noise zine yet. Lets hope that it doesn't take another fifteen years for the next issue to come out.




Meanwhile over in Blackpool Dr Steg’s Spon continues to baffle and amuse. The ‘Apathy’ issue has a cover with nothing on the inside except 16 blank pages. I think I’ll scribble something on them and mail them back to Steg. Its what he would have wanted. Spon 22 [The Animal Poetry Issue] has eight pages of Dada-istic gibberish. Hugo Ball would have loved it.

Steg also sent me some copies of the Ceramic Hobs CD release OZ OZ Alice all with different covers that becomes SPON 24. If anyone out there would like one then please get in touch. There was a Fes parker CD too, the one that came out on Mental Guru [I think], but it seems to be evading me at the moment.


And then out of the blue I received a painting by Dr Steg. Upon a golden background were stenciled the words “I’VE NEVER BEEN SEXUALLY ABUSED BY JIMMY SAVILE’. Its awaiting a permanent home but for now it sits at the top of stairs and every time I pass it I smile quietly inside. Gary Simmons would love it.



Contact:


Dumb Cunt: dr23steg [at] yahoo.co.uk

Hiroshima Yeah! - donbirnam [at] hotmal.com

Turbulent Times - http://www.uncarved.org/blog/

Eraciator - http://eraciator.tumblr.com/


Gary Simmons
21.11.59
A6127CQ
HMP The Verne
Portland
Dorset
DT5 1EQ

Angus Carlyle / Rupert Cox / Roland Etzin

Air Pressure - Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox
Gruenrekorder. Gruen 094. CD.


TransMongolian [6 Acoustic Portraits of Russia, Mongolia, China, South Korea and Japan]
Roland Etzin
Gruenrekorder. Gruen 103. CD.


If you’ve ever bemoaned the fact that you live in a noisy part of town spare a thought for the Shimamura family. Since the late sixties the Shimamura’s have farmed the same few fertile acres of land right at the end of Narita airports runway B. That’s Narita in Tokyo in case you don’t know. 300,000 flights a year passing over the Shimamura’s heads at a height of 80 meters. The airport wants to expand its runway, the farmers want to stay put, protest groups make their voices heard. Over the deafening roar of those 300,000 planes a year vegetables grow, hens cluck and pigs squeal. Life, somehow, goes on.

During a couple of working visits over a period of two years Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox spent time there gathering sound and film footage eventually creating the installation Air Pressure. What interested them was the effect that this continuous barrage of noise was having on the farmers health and that of their farm stock. Mr. Shimamura, the head of the farm, suffers from a hardening of the neck muscles caused by involuntary spasming. He no longer hears anything. The farmers eventually got the airport authorities to build them a soundproof room in which his family could sleep. They had to fight for it but they got it. Now the airport wants to extend the runway and a farming family going back generations faces the possibility of losing their land and way of life.

There’s ten tracks on here [the last is a compression of some of their recordings designed to capture the entire experience in one go] that give you some idea of what living and working at the end of a busy runway is like. It’s a no-brainer of course which is where I start to feel uneasy with the audio side of this project. For the art installation the audience were ushered into a space to be faced with two huge screens doing their best to represent the Shimamura’s suffering. At home with my headphones on I’m hearing the sounds of the farmers going about their work, birds, the odd bit of chatter, rain, wind, radio or TV and every other minute or so the god almighty teeth rattling roar of a plane going overhead. Its something that doesn’t take that long to get the message across.

Carlyle and Cox have done a sterling job in highlighting the farmers torment, as have Gruenrekorder in issuing this CD in a book that carries plenty of text relating to the project plus an array of wonderful photographs but when it comes down to actually listening to it I found that after about two tracks I’d had my fill and thanked myself I was just glad I didn’t live at the end of Narita’s runway B. This is to take nothing away from Carlyle and Cox’s work or to make light of the Shimamura family’s position but I feel that what we have here audio wise is encapsulated in those last ten minutes.






TransMongolian meanwhile is a far more listener friendly release. Traversing the 4,500 miles between Moscow [I think?] and Japan, Etzin captures the sound of wheeltappers at work in train sheds, noisy Pachinko parlors, sleepy train carriage rumbles, the creaking of leather straps on boats, the smooth whoosh of the Shinkansen, the chirp of nocturnal insects and cheery fairgrounds ... I could go on, the variety of sounds recorded by Etzin seem almost without end.

The defining pleasure to be had from this release is the way in which it captures the slow process of travel itself. The enclosed booklet contains pictures drawn by Etzin’s traveling companion René Seifert and none of them show planes or airports so I’m guessing this was an over land and sea trip? Water, rail and feet feature heavily: the crunch of gravel underfoot, the clank and groan of a train carriage, the lapping of the water against the side of a boat and then there’s the weather, hard to capture sunshine on sound but rain and wind make their ever fateful appearance, all of it adding to the ambience and the feeling of actually slowly moving from one place to another.

Deep down I was jealous of Etzin and Seifert and the fact that they had the time to make this trip. I doubt my more humble travels would return such rewarding material but you never know. I’m taking my digital recorder to Northumberland next year just in case.



Contact: http://www.gruenrekorder.de

Petals

Petals - Where Textus Became Textus, And How I Operated Within.
WGGFDTB. CDR.

Petals - Thread Dome
Hairdryer Excommunication. Cassette. C36. 11 copies.


Although listening to Art Garfunkel on Christmas Day evening 2012 may not lead you to think I had Petals at the forefront of my mind, you’d be wrong. After a rather heartening and I must say superb pair of biryiani’s at the Eastern Spice this afternoon me and Mrs Fisher now sit relaxing in front of a roaring log fire listening to Art singing his ultra smooth cover of The Flamingo’s “I Only Have Eye’s For You” only for the thought to come upon me that even though this is the season to do not very much bar eat and drink to excess I still have Petals [and the rest of the review pile for that matter] at the forefront of my mind. There might not be much going on on the surface but underneath the cogs are
still whirring.

So goodbye Art’s ethereal choirboy vocal Johnny Walker Radio 2 puff piece and hello Petals scrape and drone tape experimentation. Welcome to my world. While the rest of the UK sits cabbaging in front of the Dr Who Christmas special I do my best to keep you up to date with all that's happening within the West Yorkshire noise environs and while Leeds may be the city de jour when it comes to all things noisy round these parts, its to Huddersfield, about ten miles away, that we find Kevin Saunders doing his Petals thing.

By sheer coincidence two Petals releases arrived within the space of a few days - neither could be further apart in construct; one a plain dubbed TDK CDR with a black and white paper wrapper, the other an A4 box called ‘How To Use A Law Library’ containing 80 slides and a cassette telling you how to use a law library - it was borrowed twice from Huddersfield Polytechnic library before becoming Hairdryer Excommunication fodder. It was given to me by Saunders at a recent WC gig at which moment an amused onlooking Undermeister was heard to have said ‘thats excessive by anybodies standards’ and indeed it is. Now all I have to do is find a home for it.

On the ridiculously named “We’re Gonna Get Fucking Drunk Tonight Boys” label we find Petals pushing the 40 minute barrier with a track that moves between the noise howl drone of “I Saw The Sun Shine Behind The Clouds” [the last Petals release to come through these hands] and the kind of free flowing noise experimentia that leads me to believe we have here someone who likes to dabble. During its 40 minute course we find ourselves being dragged along by a rolling thunder and an overhead plane that disappears into the distance, its a piece that in parts floats upon a bed of agitated polystyrene balls kept in place by the constant whirr of several servo motors, motors that are plugged directly into the national grid, a grid fluctuating in intensity depending on whether or not the nation has just got up to make a cup of tea during the ad break on the Corrieknocker Christmas special. A shifting noise drone that peaks and dies only to emerge in the final act amidst a sea of analogue data transmission.

Both sides of Thread Dome are murky affairs, shifting noises of an indeterminate nature some of which sound like they were recorded in Saunders kitchen where an AK47 was assembled against the dim background hum of a Korg synth. On the flip we find chattery drones, the sound of a TV, some mild TNB squeak and scrape, mumbled talk, rattling milk bottles and finally some tape bleed-through of a school choir singing with merry gusto. At its end more murky whirring and a long die out of melancholic proportions.

So what genre label do we stick on this kind of work then? The only one that will truly fit is experimental but that seems to be upsetting people these days. I’m happy to go with it though. I feel Saunders is trying things out, finding his feet, testing and ultimately, bravely experimenting. Hats off to that then. Great name for a label too. No not that one.


[Only 11 copies of thread Dome exist but downloads are available from the HE website. WGGFDTB available for not many pennies via their website.]




Contact:

WGGFDTB


HE

AMFJ - BÆN

AMFJ - BÆN
Evil Talk. CD.


I’d been thinking for quite some time now about how I’d begin this review. You see AMFJ [or to give him the name his parents gave him  Aðalsteinn Jörundsson] is from Iceland and whilst its easy to begin your Icelandic review by mentioning Magnus Magnusson, Bjork and unpronounceable volcanoes that spill ash everywhere I thought I needed something a bit cleverer and then on Friday morning I got. Exiting the house at 6am on route to my daily grind I made it about three steps from the back door when I ended up flat on my face. Black ice in its most lethal form had descended upon West Yorkshire and I was amongst its first victims. Never in all my life have I witnessed such viscous black ice. It seemed to cover every surface, tarmac, cars, walls, cats, grass and me. As I lay sprawled sporting a gashed knee, ripped jeans and dented pride I made various quick mental body checks and ascertained that nothing was broken. I carefully made it to my feet and slid to the car Bambi fashion, still clinging to my bag and what was left of a 2 liter milk bottle that I had filled with hot water so as to defrost the car lock. It was while safely sat in the car with throbbing knee waiting for the windows to clear that I wondered to myself how people who have to live in far worse conditions than these cope. But they do and then they make some noise.

That cold Icelandic weather may go some to explaining why AMFJ’s sound is so bleak and unflinching. Moaning away in his Icelandic tongue to Industrial pummel you get the distinct feeling that he’s at one with the long Icelandic winter nights.  The whole thing begins with a babies wail and ends with a mock cathedral organ blast, along the way PE hallmarks are dutifully stamped but crucially, and for me thankfully, the results are a long way away from the days when your average PE release came with compulsory badly photocopied gruesome crime scene/porno shock/serial killer art.
Its the variety of sounds on offer here that are the most welcoming - there are passages [and tracks] where the vocals give way to eerie landscapes of shuffling speaker wobble, low Hertz pulses left to freeze and die on bare Icelandic plains, some tracks morph their way through various phases most effectively on the last track Húsið Andar where a rolling pummel of a beat finds Jörundsson multi tracking his voice so that it sounds like a Franciscan monks evensong backed by Ministry with some Theremin doodling thrown in for good measure.
I find myself leaning towards PE as comparison because as soon as somebody starts ‘singing’ where noise is concerned thats about the only place you can go but this has far more to it than that to warrant such lazy comparison. The title track itself features no vocals but manages to convey bleakness by the bucketful, after treating us to the sound of someone clanging away on some frozen overground gas pipes a TG inspired rhythm takes over, simple but very effective. Opening track Útburður Umskiptingur mutates a babies wail into a seething vortex of wailing noise, second track Öldungur does for Iceland what Mika Vaino did for Finland, a stark pounding beat with Jörundsson singing a Viking lullaby from inside a vast echoing church.

What I find most remarkable is that Jörundsson composed most of this with some free software - PE mutates thanks to something called Buzzmachines - whodathunkit. Comes in a groovy trifold CD wallet too with lots of blurred photos of Jörundsson. He likes moving about a lot, presumably to keep warm.

More AMFJ material is available through Gogoyoko including the first album which on first listen would seem to be more up your death metal street. Long may he mutate.



Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/amfj

Twitter - @A_MF_J

Gogoyoko - http://www.gogoyoko.com/album/Baen

Free software - www.buzzmachines.com