Got Those Covid-19 Blues

 

Stuart Chalmers - The Heart of Contemplation

Tavern Eightieth. TVE. Cassette/CD/DL

Stuart Chalmers - The Heart of Instinct

TQN-aut. CD/DL 

Stuart Chalmers & Alan Courtis - Rtuals of Cmmon Lnguage

Steep Gloss. Cassette/DL

Neil Campbell - Perimeter Ghost Bloom

10” lathe/CDR/DL

Howard Stelzer & Neil Campbell - Their Crowning Achievement.

Chocolate Monk. Choc 485. CD

Excuse me while I linger a little longer within the Ashtray Navigations folds. It's been a hot week filled with restless sleep and tired days, evenings spent behind drawn curtains, evenings spent in darkened rooms too tired and listless to do nothing much but listen to music. 

To hand I have three drawers filled with CD's and cassettes. The bottom drawer is all Bob and Neil, the middle drawer is Mrs Fisher's; Bruce, The Beatles, Fardo, Flamenco and a smattering of those male troubadours who passed through in the 90's on their way to the small venues and an ever smaller fan base. In the top drawer lie numerous United Dairies tapes and all my three inch CD's.

I pulled out a handful of these three inchers and was surprised at how many had the words 'Ashtray Navigations' written on them. They must be breeding in there. This comes after last weeks digging around in the upstairs back room [IFHQ] where it came as a similar surprise to discover how many LP's and CD's of a five inch nature I had with the exact same words on them. So every weekday evening this last heatwave week I've been sat bereft of energy listening to Ashtray Navigations at a volume capable of being heard by me but not Mrs Fisher, who is sat at the opposite side of the room writing and is incapable of picking up high frequencies due to her hearing being buggered [only occasionally does her head pop up and swivel like an owls 'is there an alarm going off somewhere?'] as the still, humid air does nothing much but make us wish for rain and cooler nights. 

It felt good revisiting the musical past in such circumstances. It felt good sharing Ashtray Navigations with the darkening night and going to bed beneath thin sheets with a droning sound ringing in my head, wondering to myself as I tried to find sleep, why I hadn't played 'To Get Beyond Nihilism by Revaluing Combat' for fifteen years and that if I'd have been asked to contribute to Imaginary Greatest Hits this would have been it, a three inch CD of spacious, droney, Indian tinged, sawing violin, skittering  drums and shamanic LS6 groans that would have sat in the middle of the other four CD's like a big fat bullseye.

Somewhere along the line things turned up in the post and the inbox and then the weather cooled; Stuart Chalmers, Alan Courtis, Neil Campbell, Howard Stelzer and these slowly found their way into my Ash Nav perambulations. And as the weather changed so did my listening choices.

Stuart Chalmers has done the right thing and disappeared beneath ground, into the caves of North Yorkshire if memory serves. I remember seeing videos of him clambering around slimy subterranean rocks, muttering curses as his footing slipped while trying to find purchase for his equipment. I'm thinking he may well have taken the swarmandal down there and recorded the resonances provided by such natural surroundings before taking them home to add shortwave radio broadcasts and other effects. All of which produce some truly wonderful contemplative atmospheres. Intriguingly, we're told that these six 'Contemplations' [5,8,4,58,84 and 6] were 'improvised/recorded/edited B-I-W [which I'll assume is Burley-in Wharfdale] between the years 1979 and 2019. Whatever, some of these are beautifully constructed with Chalmer's meditative water drips and drones providing for blissful encounters. When Chalmers layers and dubs multiple wobbly swarmandals the effect is almost Disney Soundtrack-esque, like when you find the protagonists being serenaded by mermaids at  20,000 leagues beneath the waves all in azure blue and wavy lines. A release worthy of its title. Comes in an opaque cassette shell and printed card cover that's held together with transparent printed obi strip. For those who covet such things.  Me for instance. 

Sharing a similar title and maybe being some part of a series of related releases comes The Heart of Instinct. Recorded under the same circumstances only with a heavier leaning towards African rhythm, drone and analogue beat. As in 'Instinct 2' which has a low end riff that's not a million miles away from some of Pan Sonic's heavier moments and Instinct 3 & 4 which build into  hypnotic rituals that aren’t far off Konono No1 territory. Replace swarmandal with thumb piano and you have some idea.  

Theres no sign of any heatwave on the Chalmers and Courtis collaboration which has a cover of an unwelcoming landscape as taken through a rain lashed window. For some reason this collaboration took two years to find a label seeing as how these four tracks were put together during the autumn and winter of 2018. Theres certainly something autumnal in what they've created; open vistas of a bleak nature where chilly winds constantly drone while being suffused with radio static, treated field recordings, the rubbing together of metal things and death. Courtis's guitar doles out distant churning chords before being cut, replaced by the amplified motor hum of a dodgy Walkman and muffled tape going in reverse. There are drips and the distant sound of fire and a feeling of dread. Chalmers swarmandal is reduced to gentle frottage, clicks, pulls and rolls. Somewhere in there is the beginning of the winter solstice and Christmas carols. Ugh.

[This also a good time to remind you that the entire digital Chalmers back catalogue is available for a measly £20, a ridiculously low price for what must be one of the best back catalogues on Bandcamp].

In another part of Yorkshire Neil Campbell is running up that hill as part of his daily exercise. The view from the top is quite stunning, we passed it in the car last week, and you have to pinch yourself that you are indeed still in West Yorkshire and haven't been transported to the Carpathians through some rip in the space time continuum. Which may be a leap of logic too far but these are strange times and you are allowed these thoughts. After all me and Mrs Fisher haven't been much further than Cleckheaton of late so our Sunday morning runs in the car up past Kirkheaton have been gaining added importance.

Campbell as last seen in the pages of Wire magazine extolling the virtues of having his mind concentrated by the lockdown and how the discovery of an empty farmers shed/teenager shag shed/drug taking barn led to en plain air impromptu recording sessions. If the results went in to Perimeter Ghost Bloom, which judging by the results I'm pretty sure they did, then the leg ache was entirely worthwhile; a pastoral suite of six segued tracks the last and lengthiest being the one you'll want to buy a hammock for. Heres where chifchaffs and magpies mingle with tinkling toy xylophones, where spectral zithers disappear in to crystal clear skies, where between between station shortwave radio static lies a gently plucked acoustic guitar that rings out the purest of notes. I've listened to plenty of what Campbell has recorded over the years and this has to be one of his most serene and affecting releases. A release that could only have been born out of these strange times. A paean to the natural world, which if you haven't noticed is still going about its business. When winter arrives and the days shorten and the sun disappears for days on end and if I don't go out of the house again between now and proven vaccine time, I will always have this to remind me that there is a wonderful world out there. [The first four tracks are available on a lathe cut 10” with squashed flower artwork as available from the man himself, while a CDR and the DL contain the much longer sixth track].

Back on the street there's a Campbell/Stelzer collaboration. Stelzer as known for his tape manipulation work, if thats what you'd like to call it. A man for whom a 40 year old Demis Roussos tape isn't just a 40 year old Demis Roussos tape but the germ of new ideas. I haven't seen him since I was on Facebook years ago, last seen selling all his CD's which he’d stacked into a huge cube about the size of a small family car. I've not heard anything of his for a while so it was good to reacquaint myself over this hour long drone. But where does Campbell start and where does Stelzer start during these several subtle shifts in drone dynamics? I hear Campbell's starkly rung electric guitar notes, randomly struck cymbal and the barely audible honks of someone practicing the saxophone three floors up and two blocks down, this must be Stelzer, out recording in the street and alleyways building up his work until its becomes something else entirely. An ominous drone that groans with the hum of machinery and spanners dropped on cold stone floors, a drone that swells and throbs and like all good drones carries you away until it's inevitable conclusion. 

I see the weathers turned.

https://wormholeworld.bandcamp.com/album/the-heart-of-contemplation

https://stuartchalmers.bandcamp.com/album/the-heart-of-instinct

https://stuartchalmers.bandcamp.com/album/rtuals-of-cmmon-lnguage

https://theneilcampbell.bandcamp.com/album/perimeter-ghost-bloom

http://chocolatemonk.co.uk/Index.html

Ashtray Navigations

Ashtray Navigations - Greatest Imaginary Hits

VHF Records. 4 x CD + LP

All our lives have changed since the middle of March and mine is no different. Not all of it has been detrimental though. With Mrs Fisher now being furloughed and staring redundancy in the face my evening routine has changed and its all for the better. Pre covid my evenings would have consisted of a couple of hours on the computer with an aim towards writing a few words about whichever release it was that just happened to tickle my fancy that week. In reality this meant buying shit I didn't really need on eBay, including books I'd never get around to reading for two years and shirts that would get worn once before admitting to myself that they didn't really fit before shoving them in a drawer where they'd become quickly forgotten only to re-emerge at a much later date as a reminder to how wasteful I was with both my time and money. Then there's the sirens lure that is YouTube and its promise of unseen videos lurking around every corner and oh doesn't that look interesting a man on a train in Belarus drinking vodka with the locals. In other words a mass of distractions from the main aim of the evening which was listening to music and writing about it. I totally get why Will Self still writes on a typewriter.

To disappear and leave Mrs Fisher bereft of company for the evening, after she'd spent all day in the house alone, would be an act of selfishness to which I could never bring myself. So now we spend our evenings sitting together, reading, talking and listening to music and isn't this how it should have been all along? My music of course. And If there's no lyrics there's no distraction for Mrs Fisher and the writing and reading of her books. This means that six hours of Ashtray Navigations can be listened to in total comfort over the course of a few weekday evenings as I catch up with the weekend papers and bat back mumbled replies to questions such as 'did they really say, 'for you Tommy the war is over' in old films about the war? Because there are no words or lyrics with Ashtray Navigations only hours of the most wonderful, blissful, out there droning sonic churn you could ever wish to become acquainted with.

Whilst playing Greatest Imaginary Hits I had a dig about in various boxes just to see how many Ashtray Navigations releases I’d amassed over the years. There must be quite a few, thirty or forty maybe. I don’t know exactly because I have a lot of boxes and I’m not very organised. I know for sure that I don’t have every Ashtray Navigations release because there are more Ashtray Navigations releases than there are holes in the road in Stoke-on Trent or stars in the firmament. Once upon a time, somewhere around the mid 90’s a new Ashtray Navigations release appeared about once a week, or at least thats what it seemed like. When the Toddmeister was doing his bit for supplying us with all manner of weirdo, experimental, noise and drone joy via his Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers label/distro outfit they came out with unnerving regularity. I still miss those A5 Betley booklets full of wonder and pithy Phil descriptions, a true labour of love. Betleys was one of the great early Noise labels too, remembered fondly as much for its sometimes ridiculous packaging as the actual contents with Todd raiding many a pound shop for take-away cartons and sponges with which to furnish his releases.

When Phil and Mel gave up Stoke for Leeds Betley became Memoirs of an Aesthete which was soon joined by Mel’s Smokers Gifts label. They gave the dead on its feet Termite Club a final boot up the arse before breathing life in to new venues and ventures. This they did by turning up at virtually every gig of a noisy nature in Leeds and if not playing then stood in the crowd be it as Ashtray Navigations or with Mel’s solo project Ocelecelot or the Target Shoppers or Green Monkey or Dogliveroil or Chunga Canaries or … the list is very long, I swear blind I once saw Phil play a noise set at The Fenton under the Czech Nymphs moniker though my memory isn’t what it used to be. I saw the Target Shoppers at the Wharf play a set that was shorter than this sentence, it might have been even shorter. I dare say that the walls in Phil and Mel’s house has seen many a memorable jam session too, witnessed only by those sitting down and grooving along. They’ve been an integral Leeds cog since arrival and without them there’d be a big silent hole and lots of people wandering around in shock. If they upped sticks and decided to move back to Stoke I dare say that several individuals in Leeds would probably move with them. In other words; indispensable, creative beyond measure, influential and as much a part of Leeds as Alan Bennett, owls and Harvey Nicks.  

Ashtray Navigations is now solidly Phil and Mel but it wasn’t always so. For a long time it was Phil’s solo project dotted along the way with several like minded souls. At times a loose collaborative affair that sometimes morphed in to actual band territory with actual drums, at times noisy, at times celestial, droney because drones are good for hanging things on and beautiful, dreamy, gutsy, filled with soaring guitar solos because Phil is a very good guitarist, sometimes with gentle piano chords because its not always noisy, sometimes with a raspy harmonica, sometimes with washing-over-you gorgeous synths. Trying to nail Ashtray Navigations to a genre mast is futile, don’t waste your time. File it between Noise and Drone and everything in-between. You still wont be near. 

A few years back they appeared on the cover of Wire magazine and found themselves appearing on Radio 3’s premier out there experimental showcase programme Late Junction with a live set from the South Bank. A recognition of sorts for the body of work that Ashtray Navigations have been building for the last twenty six years. I doubt it brought them offers of soundtrack work for Spielberg or envelopes stuffed with tenners but it did put them on the map.

As does Greatest Imaginary Hits with four Ashtray Navigations superfans/close friends/aficionados being asked to submit their favourite tracks for a best of sort of thing. These people being Neil Campbell, Rob Hayler, Pete Coward and your man Henry Rollins. These are the four ‘Imagined’ CD’s with the LP given over to new material. Thats about 50 tracks and nearly six hours worth of music and is as far as I know the first time such a thing as happened. Not a tombstone as feared in the sleevenotes by Phil, not a 10LP box set  from Vinyl On Demand with hardback book, hand signed reprints of gig flyers and artwork on archival paper all ready for framing, not a 100 CD box set either because thats what you’d probably need, just a taster in a gatefold sleeve of why people appreciate Ashtray Navigations.

Which has me digging around like I said, which has me reassessing Ashtray Navigations and being more appreciative of them, which has me grooving once more to Phil’s orgasmic guitar, a guitar that will forever have its neck wrung, shoved and pulled as it drips, spills and sprays lava notes and chugging riffs, as it’s replaced by keyboard, by noise boxes, by weird looking synths of which only ten were made in 1975 and tablas and Alex Neilson’s skittery drums as seen on A Monument to British Rock a double CDR that morphed into a full blown triple LP on Smokers Gifts and a tongue in cheek title lifted from a late 70’s various artist comp and Ashtray Weeks, a collection of unreleased tracks which you could only get with the single that came in a film can. Its to Ashtray Navigations credit that none of those chosen to select tracks picked the same ones and that of the first three CD’s I listened to only several tracks were familiar to me. Theres still so much more to explore. 

Campbell goes back to the mid 90’s where all is drone and murk, Rob Hayler picks ‘The Final Hit’ from ‘Cloud Come Cadaver’ which is eleven minutes of boiling guitar and Popol Vuh-ey keyboards. From the same era Pete Coward picks ‘The Jewel Backlash’ from ‘Spray’ with its laid back riffs and searing guitar notes. Rollins picks nothing later than 2010 and goes even further back than Campbell with a track taken from 1994’s ‘Bicycle Glue Blues’  which is all subterranean tape wobble and spacey echo and theres me thinking he’d go for the all out droney guitar stuff when its his CD thats full of ultra-murk tape wobble.  

Todays Ashtray Navigations is solidly Phil Todd and the newly crowned Melanie O’Dubhslaine with a beefed up synth/guitar heavy monster rock sound thats somewhere between the muscular beef of a 2020 Mountain’s ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ as played by Neil Young backed by Emeralds, except when it sounds like a stoner version of Zappa’s The Illinois Enema Bandit with some serious heavy head nod throb as laid down by a whacked out Ryuichi Sakamoto trying on his new rig. Third track ‘What Next?’ opens with some rapid tabla before those shimmering golden guitar notes come raining on down once again.

I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that Henry Rollins is an Ashtray Navigations fan. I mean I shouldn’t be that surprised, theres no earthly reason why Rollins shouldn’t be an Ashtray Navigations fan, no more than maybe he’s a fan of light opera, Leo Sayer and Wham but still, Ashtray Navigations. It takes some getting your ahead around. Imagine being Phil and Mel and waking up to that email; ‘Hi there Henry Rollins here, just dropping you a line to say that I’ve been digging your sounds for a few years now and have slowly been filling some gaps in my Ash Nav collection, I wondered if you still had any copies of Four Raga Moods kicking about? I really need that one, keep up the good work HR. p.s. is paypal OK?’ Like what the actual buggering fuck. More head warp to contend with.

I fear I might have taken Ashtray Navigations too lightly in the past. After all, they've been around for over a quarter of a century now, as much a part of the family as pets and peeling wall paper, but this most magnificent release has changed all that. Far from being a tombstone this is a celebration. Please feel free to join in.

  

Ash Navs Bandcamp

Ash Navs Wordpress

VHF

       

 

Twang Zumb Tumb

Garbage Pail Kids - Garbage Pail Kids

Steep Gloss. Cassette/DL

Free Magic Show - Motown

Steep Gloss. Cassette

Electrolarynx - Electrolarynx

Steep Gloss. Cassette/DL

Labas Krabas - Der Tsar Home Et Bomba

Base Materialism. BSM 024 Cassette/DL

Royal Hungarian Noisemakers - Le Roi Est Mort

Unsignedlabel US069 CDR/DL

25 Copies

RibaStuka

Unsignedlabel US065 CDR/DL

25 copies.

I’m quite certain that I suffer from some kind of word blindness. Not full blown dyslexia but something along those lines, something that makes me write words not as how they are but as how I perceive them. While writing I constantly confuse words with double vowels in them, like the ‘ua’ in ‘guardian’ or ‘guarantee’ which I always think should be written ‘gaurdian’ and ‘gaurantee’. I know it looks wrong but something deep within the soggy grey mush tells me that its right and to leave it as be. I blame the ie/ei police. Spellcheck saves me such horrors but it couldn’t save me from referring to Newcastle outfit ‘Voicecoil’ throughout a recent review as ‘Voicecall’. Because I get whole words mixed up as well. I do it often and while its not the end of the world it does make my toes curl with slightest of embarrassments. This means I have to be extra vigilant with releases like the Garbage Pail Kids cassette which has sleeve text that looks like its been printed offset in 3D and Hungarian releases that come in French. At least I have the internet to help me in the right direction. 

Steep Gloss joins Research Laboratories and Base Materialism as UK labels that are fairly new to me. All of them releasing prime weird, experimental musics in small runs with digital as back-up for those who prefer to buy their music in chunks of zeros and ones. They join an ever increasing roster of labels that show what the Bearded Wonder would term ‘The No Audience Underground’, to be a continuing, ever growing, thriving, vibrant nexus of like minded people. People who since lockdown and the closure of live venues have spent their weekends preparing online gigs, making cassette sleeves while recording fridge hum and coffee grinders just because you can.

I watched a few of these online gigs as the lockdown kicked in until regular FaceTime dates with friends took precedence. The name Territorial Gobbing cropped up on a number of tweeted flyers [along with plenty of others that I need to explore] and its here too on the Garbage Pail Kids release. This being a collaboration between Leeds based ‘cartoon improvisors’ Territorial Gobbing and Basic Switches, who jammed some sounds before locking tables in the live situation just before Christmas last year. At an undisclosed location but most likely Chunk, a bout of festive noise buggery took place that involved, amongst various noisemaking boxes, gadgets and Dictaphones several kiddies sing-along records. Two people having a wild time with a Bontempi organ upon which the opening of George Michael’s Last Christmas stutters into life before being killed off again and again and again only to be resurrected for an audience sing-along finale. This admixture of cheezy pop song, kids singing aye-aye-yippy-yippy-yay, Michael Finnegan and scuzzy noise makes it a certified winner. All recorded to phone for added lo-fi vibes.

I can tell you little about Free Magic Show other than they are based in Edinburgh and comprise of Joe Coghill and Michael Fundowicz. One utilising radio and tapes the other computer. Two twelve minute offerings of an electro-acoustic sounding nature that at times exhibits a cinematic feel, samples such as helicopter chop, muezzin call to prayer and aircraft taking off might not win any originality prizes but they do fit. Side two is the livelier of the pair and drifts into noisier territory with all manner of strange voices joining pots, pans, pianos, and gutted tape gubbings. When listened to on trusty headphones this provided me with all manner of delicious ear tickle. There is a slight case of too many samples spoiling the broth here and even though some of them might be well worn I wouldn’t have minded hearing some of them investigated in longer workouts.     

Electrolarynx sees ten ‘vocal artists’ collaborating with the noises made by each others domestic sound sources. Thus you get YOL’s retched quotidian observations regarding empty vodka bottles coupled to the unidentified whirring sounds submitted by Jonny Marks. At least I think this is how it goes. They’re all paired up with each other anyway with Dada-esque gurgles, murmurs, throat clearings, whimsical hums and the sound of children running around finding homes amongst the dripping water, chopped vegetables and crackling chip fat. This juxtaposition works and to some extent the differing sounds are complimentary. Take Toxic Chicken making childish poopy, farty friendly lion noises to the accompaniment of extractor fan hum, or Bryce Galloway slapping jaw tightened cheeks to YOL’s boiling kettle. An interesting experiment and one that undoubtedly works.  

These vocalization techniques are all over Labas Krabas whose song like improvisations [voice, electric guitar] nestle between all out noise tracks and a Thin Lizzy sample. Labas Krabas are Newcastle’s answer to Sonny and Linda Sharrock, only if they had gotten into much more noise and Thin Lizzy. Last seen sitting on a porch picking like The Haze and screaming like Bjork with her knickers full of wasps, our intrepid pair of improvisers wail and spray and pluck and twang in a homely fashion that has me almost teary. Last track ‘Blueberry Mountain II’ is a thing of rare beauty and makes you wonder why they bother with the noisy stuff at all; a breathy 14 minute ride with vocals ranging from Betty Boop twee to Junko scream, to Linda Sharrock’s fluttering ululations and with frotted electric guitar accompaniment to suit. As it fades to nothing but a slowly plucked bass string, the vocals become ever more ethereal and deranged. Marvelous.

        

I wonder how many small experimental labels there are in Hungary? There must be more than Unsigned. The Turd played a gig there once so there must be more happening than I know about. Le Roi Est Mort is yet more belt and braces Noise Industrial from the Hungarian collective [whose motto is ‘God Save The Noise! Noise Save The God!’]. They like it noisy for sure but the best track on here is a vocal heavy one; ‘Ráááz, with vocals  courtesy of Zopán Nagy who moves from Ursonate like zangs and tumbs to all out scream as a subdued Whitehouse throb festers below.

Perhaps the pointer as to what’s going on in Hungary lies with the collaborative work that is RibaStuka. Ten tracks composed by several Unsigned artists with all vocals and words performed by Xabi N. If you’ve been following Unsigned reviews some of these names will be familiar but there’s new ones to explore should you wish to expand your Eastern European Industrial Noise Knowledge. All tracks are segued giving for a seamless fifty minute performance of slurred Hungarian monologues and conversations to which are added Industrial ambience, subdued pulses, shortwave fizz, heavenly voices and found sounds. Some of these monologues are slowed to sludge others come through a vocoder, some sound like confessions to a past crime given in a seaview hotel as seagulls scream overhead. This babble of voices becomes at turns eerie and quite disturbing. Tracks are given titles like; Fehér Öltöny, 3 Kívanság, Eldobható Eldorádó and rather bizarrely George and Gerry. Last track is called Rámköhögi which is Hungarian for ‘coughing on me’ which is either a deadly fetish or something that happened after a friend walloped down a big glass of Unicum unaware of its kickback properties. 

 

   

Unsigned

Steep Gloss

Labas Krabas/Base Materialism

   

 

Virgin Inflation Cult

Jean Louis Costes - Stop Music No Good

Research Laboratories. Cassette. 30 copies

Don Mandarin - Take Me To Cape Town [Mary Visits Elizabeth]

Research Laboratories. CDR. 20 copies

DN0 - Inflation Now!

Paisley Shirt Records. Cassette/DL

I don’t know how it happened but in the middle of last year I came across the Costes youtube channel and I made a bet with myself as to how long I’d have to wait before I saw a lump of shit. It wasn’t a long wait. Costes was jumping about in a field in France with his electric guitar, probably singing about how useless American Noise bands are, and then he shat on it. Not that you saw him actually shit on his guitar but there was what looked like a very loose stool being dropped on to an electric guitar.

About fifteen years ago me and Walklett went to see Costes at the Brudenell where he was touring his play Holy Virgin Cult, a play apparently based on his own childhood that was some sort of critique of religion that involved Costes and his female cast of two stripping knacker bare before pissing on each other and then, au naturel, shitting on each other. I happened to be at the bar when the pissing started and watched the barmaid’s jaw fall ever lower as the pint she was pulling got fuller. It was about the time that the shitting started that someone in authority appeared and pull the plug, telling us all to go home and do something far more sensible and civilised instead. Not having a ringside seat I inquired among the dispersing audience if it actually was shit they were dropping on each other only to discover that it was chocolate sauce they’d carefully loaded their bowels with pre-performance. Still, what a night eh?

Apart from the accidental Youtube sojourn I don’t think I’ve listened to anything by him since that gig so to see something by him drop through the door came as a bit of a surprise. Apart from triggering a few happy memories it meant that I could dig around on his website and see what he’s been up to to. This leads me to discover that he’s been adding to his book and film portfolio like a beast. Costes isn’t a man to stand around, I reckon he records something everyday, setting his preset rhythms on his drum machine before singing songs about the size of his cock and how useless American Noise bands are, all sung in English in a very strong French accent with lots of reverb. His books now include the tome ‘Underground Hitler’ the cover of which shows him in a distressed state doing his best Hitler impersonation and, it goes without saying Viva La Merda. None of them available in English alas*.

The eight tracks on Stop Music No Good are pretty much as I remember him, a full on exploration of the Costes psyche as put on tape and spat out using synths, loops and vocal effects to help aid digestion. His lyrics can be quite funny, especially on I Met God and Papa Dick where he gets to sing about his dick. As with the youtube session I wondered as to when the shit would appear and there it was, about the second line in, the word ‘merde’, I felt at home.

Papa Dick is the one you can sing along to and I feel we all should. A eurobeat synth pop song thats a pean to his penis, all the places it goes and all its foibles 

Papa Dick is too big

Papa Dick Is too huge 

Papa Dick is so strong 

Papa Dick is the king

...

Poop poop on the clit-o

Poop poop on the cack-o 

It doesn’t get much better than this. 

The leap from Costes to Bert Kaempfert is a huge one but it is one that must be made if we are to untangle the inner workings of the other Research Laboratories release laid before us. For it is Bert Kaempfert’s foot tapping easy listening classic Afrikaan Beat thats the backbone of a Basinskie-esque opener from Don Mandarin. Not that its a foot tapper anymore. Slowed down to less than half speed and drowned in a lethargic steel mill rhythm it becomes something else entirely, a lava lamp stoner trip for heavy eyes and them who likes to take heavy drugs. The other three tracks move in a similar fashion albeit one of them for just twenty seconds; underwater communications, submerged wanderings, Eraserhead murk and drones, ultra tape sludge extraordinaire. 

In sunny California its important to get DN0’s name right, thats DN-oh. Inflation Now! I get the feeling that the exclamation mark is important too. Whether this is instruction or warning I know not. What I do know is that DN0 are a trio made up of Max Nordile, Ian Dugas and Steve0 and that this cassette is the distillation of a four hour improv session. I once sat through a three hour improv jam at Install in Glasgow, Don Dietrich, Mikawa, Keenan and others I cant recall all going full bore until inevitable tiredness kicked in. As it did with me. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep and when I awoke all players were virtually on their knees, the kora player looked absolutely done in. But here its just the three of them and for the most part its all suitably loose in a drunken Fall session kind of way with Dugas’s drums doing a good job of skittering around and keeping quiet when need be as the twin guitars of Nordile and Steve0 go part Magic Band part pull the strings off the neck TWANG. Nordile sings like a Saturday night drunk and a fine thing it is too, Tom Waits trying to do an angry Chet Baker, a depressed Youtuber telling his subscribers that he hates them all. Things go wild on a couple of cuts but these are rare outburst from a trio who seem happier exploring their spatial awareness. Space baby, its the final frontier.     

*  Many thanks to those who have pointed out that the mighty Amphetamine Sulphate has published Costes in English [The Last Crusade] and has Underground Hitler waiting in the wings.

Amphetamine Sulphate

Paisley Shirt

Research Laboratories

Costes

Pumf

Godspunk Volume Twenty-One - Various Artists

PUMF. PUMF 798. CD

Quougnpt - Wear And Tear of the Thrust Bearing

PUMF. PUMF 805. CDR

Several weeks ago I received an email from someone offering up a copy of the new Godspunk various artists release for review. I replied that Pumf supremo Stan Batcow had long stopped sending me the Godspunk series after I rather ungraciously gave one a kick in the guts rupturing its appendix in the process. This due to the good to bad ratio being becoming seriously out of kilter, something that had been happening for a while and [most crucially] that there were always too many tracks by UNIT on them. A band I’ll never come to terms with. Besides, I was way too busy sealing up every draught in the house in an attempt to make it Covid-19 proof all while bleaching the three hundred face masks I bought on eBay and making a sign that said KEEP OUT! POSTIES AND DELIVERY DRIVERS EXEMPT. And then Stan goes and sends me one anyway. 

So what to do? Do I burn my ears once more with the ridiculous UNIT a band so deliberately obtuse they make Yes sound like Status Quo doing Derek Bailey, do I roll my eyes across the words The Large Veiny Members and wonder who the fuck would ever want to be in a band with a name like that? Oh and heres the taurus board who seem to prefer lower case and Stan’s own project Howl in the Typewriter who sound much better stripped down but thats hardly ever. They’re all still there bursting with energy and pride all of them waiting to unleash their music on me and I have about as much enthusiasm for this as a Hermes driver on overtime. So I thought I’d give it a listen. What harm could it do? Its not like my calendar’s bursting with social engagements these days and then theres always the urge to see if UNIT have got any better. Spoiler alert, they haven’t. If you like bands that in one song can go through ten key changes, twelve genre changes, five shifts in tempo and have a singer who sounds like the kind of person waiting to pounce on you in the pub so that he can tell you about his run in with the pigs at the CND rally in Hoxton then this is the band for you. If not avoid. 

As for the rest; Johnny and the Kaprikorns are a straight up and down shit kicking country band, Satanik Seagvll Sekt starts out all electro/punk and ends anthemic on seagull sounds, Harsh Noise Movement loop sounds to hypnotic effect, the taurus board is all digital reggae and The Large Veiny Members make Orb sounds for Glastonbury stoners. Saving my ears from total torment are Lettuce Vultures with some decent Yankee rawk thrash and Nil By Nose whose trip up north for a funeral [presumable Simon Morris’] is a spoken word piece of some significance with observations from his journey put to a soundtrack of synthy electronica. There’s a fridge magnet and booklets too, Stan puts a lot of work into these releases but as before, they’re just not for me.

By way of added torment came the unpronounceable Quougnpt. Here be seven tracks of mainly film, TV samples and pop singles all put together in a fashion so as to create new atmospheres. Plunderphonics I believe its called. Actually not that bad in places especially with the young lass reciting Spike Milligan’s the Ning Nang Nong. 

I came, I listened, I went back to bleaching my masks. 

PUMF