mmm how odd. a noise record that’s all about the silence. dominated, as it is, by long uncomfortable tense creeps of it. like the dialogue at the start of lost highway. as much as what’s not said (or heard) as is. juxtaposed of course with clusterbombs of interference and harsh audio hallucinations.
s’pose on the surface you could consider silence the antithesis of noise. and strange then that while noise is considered (relatively) open and free and expressive, silence often comes with negative connotations; the tyranny of silence, the fascism of shutting up, making quiet, silencing. strange, given in music it’s an inherently antagonising quality. but yeah consider yves klein’s monotone-silence; consider john cage’s 4’33. think of these as the forerunners to noise as a musical concept. if you want to call it music. not silence as such, but where harmonic blanks are filled by the listener, by traffic noise, heartbeats, breathing, uncomfortable shuffling, the creak and rattle of performer. the question noise asks is, where do you draw the lines between music and ambience and sound and silence anyway?
urban disease sometimes isn’t there if you know what i mean. sometimes, reductively, there’s little to it. maybe there’s less/more substance here (depending on yr viewpoint) than the visceral sloganeering i know and love. compared to may08 this is a very different beast, aurally, aesthetically, personnel-y. there’s no sonic overload, much more sense of space. there’s no screed, just a note that’s as much about fashion (hey hipster, your hips is gone) as capital. i dig that fact it’s been built purposefully to annoy the noise rawk billy baoists. and i deliberately use the word built as i suspect this has been utterly tinkered with from top to toe.
this time round mattin and bao are joined by taku unami’s electronickerry and margarida garcia and barry weisblat’s string and electrick improv. the fact there’s an electric double bass on here should tell you something about the angle this shit’s being approached from. poking hardcore away with an abstract bargepole. a flicker of a smirk at the po-faced angry noisers. yes indeed there are moments of subtlety, of humour, of ambiguity at work here. it’s a violence that’s in flux betwixt cartoon misanthropy and political/art conceptualising.
the promo blurb makes reference to amon düül’s psychedelic underground. if it’s a joke, it’s a good ‘un. coz at times urban disease plays like a harsh cut-up version of that records peyote drum and chant jams, studio jiggerypokery and general psych-wonkiness. it’s a record that offers tiny bits of many things. from a two chord acoustic stumble and mumble flickering in and out of the foreground, disappearing and reappearing to hypnoretardo thumps edited into stuttering kraut crunch and grind. it’s a jarring, jagged meta-narrative offered up by industrial pointillists;
s’all good but the best of it resides on side b. twenty minutes sliced open with the kindof machine snarl found on the drunkdriver / mattin lp and bleeding into a jazz rock fusion that is so fucking not billy bao (grinned a huge damned grin on first hearing that) and bowing out with a sneering jackboot beat and grey martial synth. it’s got everything, like a communist-era soviet él-g, drunk on tribal drums, industrio hiss and screech, water and waves, bowed tones, lonely spastic handclaps; peppered with tiny slivered shards of audio shrapnel, incoherent, inchoate shrieks and feedback.
the thuggish cut-ups and unarticulated silences are disorientating; a collision of stuff that leads to occasional chuckles (it has been said that billy bao doesn’t believe in hypnagogia because he always sleeps with one eye open…) but mainly to dizziness and dislocation. a continual forty minute rewiring of the minds perception. maybe it’s a play on debords society of spectacle. or maybe it’s just a raped jazz fusion record. where’s those pesky lines again?
lovely piece of art & design by henry flynt and bill kouligas to boot.
oof. peaced is not a cure for the synapsefucker of a headache i have today (like the kind got jeff tweedy hooked on painkillers, like the kind got max cohen drilling brains out in pi). sounds like the result of a three a.m. jagermeister binge, armed to the green teeth with a young lady of questionable sexual hygiene, a rusted geetar, damaged tape recorder and some goofy/bad vibes. y’know when yr lips go numb and yr tongue swells and you can’t quite tell why yr knuckles are bleeding or whose blood it is and someone called evil dick keeps phoning and you know if you answer it all manner of things are gonna be explained that you don’t want explained. pretty much that kinda ambiance. it’s a throat-torn incantation, a plea to the swirling swollen heavens for some hiss-filled day-glo fog to smother us all. not so much played as disgorged, not so much recorded as acid scorched, not so much listened to as shouted at, wildly with spittledrenched foamflecked glee. like if someone smashed john dwyer’s noodlesack open on a table corner and recorded the ooze spilling out. like if flipper moved to texas and gangbanged don walsh. first thing you’ll notice, this is not roxy music. first thing you’ll notice, this is not well-heeled and girlish. rattling through five songs, each one stupider and uglier than the last, each one stupider and uglier than josef fritzl. they might well rehearse in some incestuous hell-cellar for all i know. remove the puns and it lacks any semblance of intelligence. i dropped iq points on first spin. starting with the first fingered discordia of fuzz, this is nothing more or less than a lolloping mess, a bellowed into and out of broken things mulch of religiously absurd babble, a gibberish paraphilia of nonsense car crash no-wave psych(e) guff. would i tell you to buy this? sure. if you have a spare seventeen minutes and enjoy a spot of ear-rape.
i returned to music through machines. the difference is that the machines are clean, and the machines are not corrupted. what i create here cannot hurt people, but you can bring an impure musician to play in your studio and create your own doom. my brain represent the bass, an’ if an evil man is playing on my brain, it’ll cause me trouble as he’s trying to chip away at my brain. and if an evil drummer is playing my beat with an evil thought, i think he can hurt my brain by playing a dreadful drum. but the machine cannot play a dreadful drum, and the machine cannot play a dreadful bass.
said lee scratch perry.
the kinda quote that could neatly summarise the whole dub experience for some. y’know psychedelic machine music orchestrated by brain-addled alchemists. a goofy science peddled by wonky / scary fellas in a murky smoke-filled lab. a sound dripping with mental vagaries and plumes of weed reek.
but then he’ll wheeze out something like:
i’m a miracle man, things happen which i don’t plan, i’ve never planned anything. whatsoever i do, i want it to be an instant action object, instant reaction subject. instant input, instant output.
which makes him sound less like a paranoid man-mental and more like derek bailey…
anyway getting to the subject at hand, proper eats (a titular semi-homage to the slightly loopy lee perry record, roast fish collie weed and corn bread) by we like cats chows down on the best parts of both these philosophies. offering up a right old smorgasbord of food, dub and felines. a semi-lucid dream of cats, space cats, basketball cats, fine home cooking and high-quality local/organic/sustainable restaurants, lee perry, king tubby, malcom mclaren, horace andy, sister nancy, augustus pablo, alpha & omega, sade & rob walmart
yeah the press release reads like a hipster piss-take (the perfect music for your next vegan pot luck or cat dance party, or for totally chillin’ with your favorite feline companion after yoga practice!). ever so slightly tongue in cheek one imagines. it’s a record that’s quite light and oddball and goddamn a bit fun, more of a psych-tinged and outward looking beast, rather than the oppressive, gruff, grubby, sweaty male shiz i’m used to. a record that could happily sit amongst the baked doyens of the not not fun label.
and despite the skirting-with-ridiculousness concept underpinning it – y’know the peculiar cats/basketball/food bent (rainbow slam dunks, cats that are hungry for pineapple meat…) – it’s a record clearly in love with the dub.
recorded on two sizzlingly hot summer days, tapes buried in dirt through the rainy season, properly saturated with the deepest filth of soul fire dub juice, cooked in an oven on low heat, strung back up in the studio, versioned, dubbed and mastered for thickest possible vibrations. and now it’s here for yr aural delectation.
i spoke to the parties involved – adam forkner (beats, airhorns), honey owens (voice, keyboards, visions quests) and eva salens (voice, keyboard, samples).
adam: all of this happened quite spontaneously last summer. honey and eva approached me to record a “reggae record” for them at marriage studio where i engineer. we just set up and recorded for two days. i made some beats, they laid down the vox, keyboards and various devices. we did most of it live improvised. it was really natural. we have all played music with each other in the past, so it was surprisingly comfortable to do. we all just sank into working together quite naturally.
which is how it sounds from speakers to ears. full of blissed-out lazy sunshine vibes and half asleep in park staring at cloud shapes zonked on whatever yr endorphins of choice are hypnagogia. hell, this is a great summer record (course it’s positively vomiting rain here just now). playful. which i s’pose is kinda unusual given their generally more serious day-jobs: forkner as white rainbow, owens as valet, saelens as inca ore.
so why dub?
adam: because reggae can be fun and joyous and i think we were all wanting to make something less serious as people tend to take our solo stuff. its great to share the music making with friends, reggae is a universal. it let us work with a certain loose theme in mind so we didn’t have to be stuck in our solo artists’ heads. and it’s a big influence on me in terms of production, vibe, culture, remix, versions, re-use and recycling of beats, sound systems, echo, synths, psychedelia, funkiness…
eva: soul shine is powerful in dub music. it’s a genre that gives the permission to give out so much soul radiance, without too much self-seriousness. i liked rewriting my creativity within the dub music vibe.
honey: i agree with adam and eva..it’s true there is a warm, streaming of pure light/love that shines on the heart and skin. a jah sweater that wraps around you when u hear the beats and feel the dubs. dub feels like a natural progression when dealing with electronics. king tubby is a major influence on these feelings. when i was young and living in sf in the early 90′s, i worked at this co-op, rainbow grocery. i met these rad dj’s/musicians who turned me onto dub, on-u sound system, african head charge but at the same time, miles davis and the orb. i nursed on these mixtapes that were handed down to me, rode in their dub cars to their nite of jamaican oldies and learned the ways.. it’s definitely a mediation, a scripture, a portal to relaxation and understanding, praise and rejoicing the good feelings. also, it’s just plain old trips that i like about it.
and why cats?
eva: the cat influence wasn’t premeditated, it just emerged from improvisations. honey and i cavorted like kitties over the beats, playing keyboards like we had playful paws. i am influenced by animals and their weirdness, way more than the beatles or some common musical touchstone.
like a kindof animus lee perry thing, dub is the ghost in him coming out, ‘cept with felines i suppose. what’s clear is that goofing aside, all three clearly dig the genre. so what draws them to it?
eva: it’s loose. eccentric characters and producers abound. dub bucks off the droll influences of self-conscious euro musicality. so much music just seems unneccessarily straight-laced. when i am having a dub dance session, i feel like i embody a character who is not all wrapped up in babylon worry mind – instead, grooving on an eternal hip pop.
it’s a fine concoction of old and new, a blend of anachronisms that (reductionally) dates back to the adam and steve of dub’s genesis – lee perry, king tubby – using old machines and new tech, blurring science and magic and art, using the studio as an instrument. it sounds playfully modern and decades ancient at the same time. a studio record, cooked down like an ital stew, playing around and trusting every idea, says eva
honey: the studio is important on the level of feeling the sounds through the speakers. it needs to boom and echo in the room. not only sit in the stereo field of a headphone mix. also, i really like the improvisations that going to different studios have. the marriage studio is a great place to make a dub record because it’s underground like the lee perry tapes : ) also, there are a zillion rob walmart keyboards lying around ready to be thrown in the mix.
that the three would be drawn to dub is hardly surprising given their previous work. and i hear (or imagine anyway) bits of it in bits of some of all their records. seem to remember picking up on ruff ridin from the last inca ore album and nudge and rob walmart. maybe just the processing changes – more echo, more reverb, more air horn. but it’s still vibrations and layers and explorations and electrickery, sonic sleight of hand. carving out four dimensions from sound and silence and what’s inbetween. loping around the dense syrup and hazy soup of broken beats and mumblemouthed vocals.
consider all three as the cats on no ordinary dub that need to scratch things and make some loud noises.
adam: i don’t think its as big of a stretch for us musically as some might think. we all make psychedelic electronic music. dub reggae is psychedelic electronic music. it is mixers and turning knobs and echo..not too far away after all.
and that said, it’s still human, still flesh, still organic. so despite the oniony layers and mixing board complexities, it should transfer from the studio to the joyous sweat blood and tears of the stage.
eva: we did play it live for the first time last week, and it was a success! i equally enjoyed both the live and studio setting, which is rare but that’s how free the whole endeavor is of the babylon stress structure.
my own music over these years has been really stressful to me at times. in a live setting, i am all fretting about mixer knobs and keeping the attention piqued in a quiet room. but when we played our first we like cats show, my concerns were incinerated by the dub beams and rays and i was just smiling and rocking and contributing with fun energy. it was so liberating!
live, adam built the structure of the songs out of some kind of glowing button machine and honey and i contributed our meows and instruments like icing.
honey: yeah, i was surprised at how well both environments work for us. both were completely playful and light hearted. some experiences of group dynamics can be oppressive on the ego and/or logistic level so this was a very refreshing and confirming experience that music bursts forth from the place of love and freedom. i am now truly dedicated to continuing the exploration of this music with these people and others like them.
so an ongoing concern then?
eva: we are concerned that people of our world need to massage their souls with dancing so it is on-going.
aye, soul massages. consider food, consider music, as a communal celebration (or as honey owens puts it: reggae music is the food of the soul). something from the cosmos, for yr outer space and inner space it’s all very *cough* positive. which ain’t something i hear too often…
eva: my strongest influence is exploring the idea of what a human can be creatively by observing and referencing music and behavior before these neutering globalizing forces. listening to 78-era international music is exciting in terms of boundary breaking. observing a cheerful and carnal kitten is inspiring in terms of shaping life force into joyous and abstracted forms.
and these motivational missives from forkner:
my m.o. has always been have open ears. listen to all types of music. see if you can figure out how it was made. taste all the tastes. if you like something, find more things like it. understand the cultures that music spring from. don’t get stuck in one scene. don’t be afraid to seem uncool. keep digging, be honest with your ears, trust your opinions, but let them change on a whim. never stop listening. never stop exploring. search and you will discover wonderful things.
i really only consider myself a musician dedicated to the craft, joy and art of making music as well, as much and as long as i possibly can.
and on that life-affirming note i’ll wrap this rambling up. you can get the proper eats album from marriage records. the vinyl version comes with mp3 download and 4 extended bonus dub versions.
rain’s falling. endless fat tears. whorls of wind clawing notsogently around this lumpen thing dreamwalking itself elsewhere. a sibilant clap slowly drowning in noise harsh and soothing, crushed glass in brandy, beak in carrion. i think of the crow, the raven, of news not wanted and sanity uncoiling; the trickster; the creator of life, of light; odin’s huginn and muninn, thought and memory, the mind. i hear the discordant beat and black arrhythmic adagio of a thousand wings at once, a choir of feathers simultaneous microcosmic gleam and ruffle, amplified into one macrocosmic (w)hole. into the sound of the sea, the sound of space, the sound of caves buried deep beneath feet, beneath awareness. an austere obliterative scouring of the land and air and water around us. i hear voices inchoate sighing, gently spectral gasps, creaks and low low moans; a wheezing pneuma informed, huffing around skull, flowering, seeding, blossoming. the songs they speak of thresholds and doorways, of currents and flow, of detachment and transcendence. inbetween moments passed, a blinked epoch peckpeckpecked at by fields of bloodfaced birds with needles for teeth. the sun’s hung like a bruise in the sky now, an opium-lightened murk, woven amongst the electric thrum and hum and occasional lull, pausing for air for composure. stars rise, planets fall. the opposite of movement, the anti-spastic frequency. a wash of reverberating monotheism. a sink of textural swamp. an ascending sonorous drone. it’s not a revealing, like the removal of. more a step back forward sideways, realising that there is so much everything there is nothing.
having previously released two sold-out cassettes on the new york tape label period tapes, this is the first time london-based these feathers have plumes is available on cd.
using double bass, glass, accordion, voice and field recordings, the album unfolds over five extended piece, casting an otherworldly spell of drone and dissonance. the aptly-titled ‘portal’ opens the album, layers of low-frequency reverberations slowly erupting, before a distant voice emerges from the maelstrom. meticulously constructed, this piece sets the tone for the rest of the disc, shimmering and pulsating drones that beguile and bewitch the listener.
available in a beautiful two-colour screenprint in custom tartaruga packaging, this is produced in a run of just 100 numbered cds.
packaged in usual tartaruga style, this releases features stunning artwork from louis caldarola. a two-colour screenprinted card sleeve in black and purple is stitched together with green thread.
john fahey went insane in nineteen sixty four and died shortly thereafter. he spoke to me in his last minutes on his dying bed and said: “take down my old guitar and smash it against the wall so i can die easy.” i did so and he passed away with a chthonic smile on his face.
not just a musically contextual quote but one that echoes the themes (one assumes…) of mortality, death, time, remembrance on shawn david mcmillen’s new record – y’know, walking home at the end of the night, no time left in this place, a morning with dead friends.
and while old fahey may have bitten the big one corporeally, his silky snakelike digits continue wriggling under the skin of all these modern day string-wranglers and geetar alchemists.
exemplified by the near-peerless tompkins square. one foot in the past, one in the future and one toes deep in the underground betwixt the two. yup a frazzled lovecraftian three-legged beast, based in new york, with tendrils snaking out here to texas and california. it’s a label i love for its confusingness. sure the beyond berkeley record gets all takoma on our asses and there’s plenty dusty old blues tropes creaking out of dead friends, but there’s also schmearings of tape klank and instro-mangling mandalas, like greaseless gear changes among the simplicity of fingers, steel and wood.
the remainder of my textual fumbling can be found here
consider this a sloughing off of old skin. a way of looking forward by looking back, of saying this is who i am, but no more. it is not a comeback. erickson didn’t stop writing as much as he disintegrated, dissipated into the holes in his head. while the rubin produced johnny cash records slipped on occasion into clumsy sentimentality or worse downright morbid cynicism, true love… does not. it is not an attempt to conclude a legacy. it is not an old sick man singing the top ten songs you’d like to hear an old sick man cover before he dies. roky erickson is alive and if not fully well, then at least living well.
which brings us to the fella’s first proper album since 95’s all that may do my rhyme. it’s not a huge leap from there to here, but if yr only familiar with the 13th floor elevators or his b-move hard rawk from the eighties (though john lawman is roky of yore) then the mainly hazy country vibe fluttering from speakers may confound expectations. produced by will sheff, and featuring the okkervil river band, the emphasis has been placed on a kindof straight forward singer / songwriter storyteller vibe, giving erickson the air of an odd, lysergic townes van zandt or gram parsons. reminds me of skip spence’s oar, but in reverse, where it’s not so much the documentation of an unraveling but of a stitching back together.
the remainder of this chuntering can be found at earz mag
it’s all in the nearly-glimpsed and maybe-imagined, the snatches of sound through next door walls, the dusk/dawn uncertain certainty of half-asleep and half-awake, the aimless chitter chatter of made-up kid stories. call them naifish if you will, pejoratively or not, but child-like approximates what cocorosie are, musically at least. the name, the voices, the toys used for sounds, the wonderfully amateur dress-up. existing in a world that’s as much peter weir’s picnic at hanging rock (all dreamy ether and haunted sensuality) as it is dark crystal (another world, another time, in the age of wonder…). definitely exhibits the same oddball puppetry wyrdness, the same sense of childish faerie and folk – as intricate as it is nonsensical at times. so tapes of cherokee singing and woodwind litter glitchy across undertaker and it’s semi-stream of conscious gaiman-esque storytelling.
“under what spell the guarding light betook the undertaker / under his gaze did fall such evil blunder / characters of flaming eyes eager to burn the wooden castle / eager towards the paper heart of children birds.”
that said, grey oceans isn’t as gossamer and gauzy and gawky as previous records. the addition of gael rakotondrabe on piano – and not a broken, dust-smeared one neither – brings a backbone to the sepia skeletal of old, using keys in much the same way mark linkous forged spine from six strings. i always thought of them as a kindof sparklehorse for girls anyway… so while they still sound like an old transistor radio chewing on memphis minnie’s ghost, they also slip into a simple regina spektor voice and key refrain once in a while. which offers some balance, something to cling to amongst the knots of kitten-string and tangled victorian lace…
don’t get me wrong, while like fellow feather-wearing goof devendra banhart, they’ve cleaned up for proper big label release, grey oceans is still not pop, and those irritated by them before are unlikely to be won over by the addition of some piano klingklang and reigned-in affection. actually scratch that. lemonade frankly is a pop song. or an approximation of one, that seems to belong to at least three other decades. it takes a minute to get going, wanders along with minimal plink then some brass swans in, and some fuzzy analogue squelch, and some nineteen thirties vox. it’s downbeat, it’s sad and seductive, it chimes with jazzy intent. it confuses and befuddles me.
but i guess that’s what i dig about them. it’s is the same thing i dig about michel gondry and kafka and clouddead. and when that dreamy unreality, that absurd (de)logic clicks with the firing synapses in hazy brain it’s a rather lovely sea to sink into. creaking with centuries-aged electroniks and woozy hiphop beats (it’d be quite comfy amongst the anticon alumni), harp and analogues, music-box ballerinas, beats and bedroom taped opera. consider grey oceans as chamber music for electric seances; a soundtrack for walking to field and forest through wardrobe doors.
sweet lysergic lord this shit is heavier than pig champion’s coffin. three tracks of tectonic plate shift articulated by ten legs of teetering thuggery. pushers of death-row inertia, of death-rattle anticipation. feels like the fear of falling, of collapse. let’s call it glacially paced, ponderous; rewarding patience with a warm bongwater bath; rewarding patience with zen frottage, rubbing gently, teasing. no rush, no race, no finish. just a continuum of juddering hypno-heaviness that moves me to a state beyond bliss, beyond beyond. a mesmeric thrall of repeato-riff, five chord progression. a relentless electric march into the viscous tar-black core of doom. primitive. elemental. unfurling and unfolding in skullshuddering sprawl. a relentless slo-mo binary vocal fug and percussive thud. a narcotic heart thumping in beat with theta waves of loping low-end buzz, synchronous with thick bloody blood through veins and arteries glooping right to my pleasure points. you’d do well to immerse yrself in this blackpsych ooze, this molasses morass of vibratory om. i’m waving. and drowning.
farewell and adieu to you fair spanish ladies, farewell and adieu to you ladies of spain, for we’ve received orders for to sail back to boston, and so nevermore shall we see you again.
croaked old quint in jaws. and now dear readers it’s time for me to take out my teeth, flash my scars one last time and go hurtling knife in hand towards the gaping maw of that deadly great white…
interesting as this writerly venture has been (mostly…), consider it somewhatofa psychological barometer of the past few years. for me anyway. for you generally a badly / oddly written mp3 blog. but now for now oh words i grow somewhat lackluster in yr presence. i have nothing to say to you anymore oh words. nothing new at least. so we must part. the interior monologues must stop.
it’s been nothing but amusing bemusing, to think that thousands of people clicked on this shit every week. truly. a few of you warmed the cockles of my black heart, some of you amused / entertained / provoked and a fair amount of you were just transient fuckwits / borderline retards. a statistic i think that reasonably covers the digital community.
so adieu it is then. i am still contactable. and those not privy to this sacred email address can say hello here. or click on my face on the main page or tweet. the site remains, not particularly coz i like the scribblings but just coz i dig the name. and maybe maybe maybe i’ll come back…
i am continuing freelance with muzak reviews, blurbs, witterings and suchlike so if you require some semi-literate noun adjective verbage drop me a line.
and finally as a way to occupy my sparebraintime there will be visual clumsy fumblings for compound eyes (and an occasional handfulla words and music) on this monochromatic tumblr thang.
he had a long life. he had a good life. and he was loved. which is all we can really ask from life.
now, as i write this, on a gray winter day by the fireside, i can almost feel her light tread, moving from my head and my heart down through my fingertips to the keys of the typewriter. people may surprise you with unexpected kindness. dogs have a depth of loyalty that often we seem unworthy of. but the love of a cat is a blessing, a privilege in this world.
hands up who’s fed up with me chuntering on about john carpenter? tough. coz as much as the mans movie light’s fading under the harsh gaze of decades-old genius and hideous reboots the soundtrack stuff continues it’s seeping creepy (or should that be seepy creeping?) influence.
latest highpoint lowlifers rare villains have just released new disc embezzlementals. i s’pose you could call it instrumental hip hop. personally i find that all kinds of oxymoronic confusing. like if someone came up with a capella metal. or wordless opera. but it is what is. and what it is, is a collection of beats and synth lines with a real exploitation bent to it all. part carpenter score, part east coast clack and squelch.
nurse with woundwas an experimental project formed in 1978 by steven stapleton influenced by a number of musical genres including krautrock, freewheeling jazz improvisation and musique concrete. stapleton’s fondness for dada, surrealism and absurdist humour are demonstrated in much of nww’s output, whose influences range from cabaret to cage, forging new and surprising soundscapes. this aesthetic is fully represented in the surrealist films created by stapleton which accompany the group’s performances on stage. tramway will host a number of participatory art works and events in the lead up to the evening’s performance with nurse with wound, including work by adam bohman, luke fowler, lee patterson, torsten laushmann and tom scholefield with neil clements. other highlights include music by cult dj’s optimo throughout the day and a pop up stall hosted by the glasgow based underground record shop and label volcanic tongue. this event is a co-production between tramway and optimo.
been a while since i last visited the ever-reliable black metalish eccentrics at paradigms recordings (the jarboe seeress 7”, wraiths plaguebearer and snowdrift albums since you ask). so popped in again (electronically) and stumbled away with a bunch of beautiful randoms in my sweaty fists.
firstly the new unpronounceable kid in town -krügers medbragte – with their equally phonetically baffling debut album, den sindsyge broders bøn. but hell, music is a universal language. so i’ll reduce it, y’know reductionally, to fifty six minutes of acoustic doom and pseudotango. it’s all lovely and wooden – crash boom klanged out on upright bass, guitar, saw, banjo, accordion and the bandoneón, the south american tangoers concertina of choice. all instrumental, in a deliciously odd cabaret kindofway, like yann tierson steeping in glutinous nordic liquer, or tom waits’ swordfishtrombones carved from dry timber instead of rusted scrap. it’s decidedly tobacco warm and gloriously dark, smeared in smoke and scorned love and dust like a norwegian jesse james soundtrack. dark and black, and mahogany red as blood in the moonlit forest. chamber music for ghost towns. lovely stuff, though i keep thinking of the wheezing jazzy three piece that plays in the nightmare before christmas…
secondly the much appreciated two syllable’s of swede laptopper and guitarrer ondo. mahavishnu isn’t new, but a corker of an album anyway. eight tracks of blackened drone, existing in some bermuda triangle where type and 12k put out harsh metal records, where fennesz and machinefabriek occupy the same charred territory as khanate. dunno whether it’s namechecking the mahavishnu orchestra or the great unknowable hindu deity. i like the idea of combining them both into an inscrutable jazz rock absolute… what this gibbering might get across is the vastness of the sound on display here. built up as previously mentioned on a laptop using electrified strings and fields recordings and processed noises. it’s beautifully textured, meticulously put together. if not mondo harsh at points it does stray into the same kindof doom and metal tones that maybe campbell kneale (when not changing his name) scatters throughout his brooding sonic children. swamped in tarry nighttime haze and dripping with thick murky fuzz. all my favourite nocturnal brain-wanderings are soundtracked by this.
thirdly and finally on this journey into the dark heart (oh the humanity…) of europe comes germany’s ekpyrosis. another name with connotations of hugeness, of cosmology, and according to my half-arsed derivation something to do with being born of fire. yup, mensch aus gold is metal, black metal. but with a kindof progressive twist. one song. half an hour long. although to be fair it is broken down into sections i s’pose. i always the dig the trance-inducing transcendental of really long pieces of music. not in a swooshy psychedelic way, more in the ritual marches and repeato riffing. the production doesn’t have that recorded in wetshoebox vibe, relying more on the big budget clarity and harmonic snarls of satyricon. surprisingly subtle despite the preconceived bluster and i like a nice lull amidst all the chaos. reminds me of ulver in places. hell it reminds me of entombed in places. triple hell the fellas talk-sing mumble reminds me of mark e smith (yes, really). so yeah it pays its dues to tradition with blast beats and tremolo while nodding (vaguely i might add) in a post-punkish direction. whatever. it’s fucking ace. Read more »
this would have been bloody wonderful to see. street of crocodiles is probably the best thing on their collected short film bfi box set. and one of my favourite bits of animation. with a nice bit of orchestral hum from bleeding heart narrative too. beautiful rusted ballet it is…
okay this is an interesting step back in time. i remember ages ago when there was a slew of glasgow bands indulging all their favourite angular geetar, skewed rhythm and feral melody fantasies. i’m bloody well loving this. not nostalgically, though this stuff was my early nineties bread and butter and i do still have a soft spot for thiskindofthing, but because i don’t get sent much in the way of rawk (disjointed or otherwise) or much from my part of town.
while not quite steve albini-esque it does have that tough brittle feel of pj harvey’s rid of me, y’know vocals mixed slightly low, six strings scratchy and bleeding. one of thee best production jobs ever, fuck all you haters. he’d have given the drums here more whump though… not that i’m complaining mind. nope. maybe even mention john congleton too coz i’m lazy like that and the oddly threatening offkilter piano plink and crash on sycamore makes me sweaty uneased, filled with dread. just like the paper chase.
anyway some fella by the name of alastair chivers made and recorded this with help from various pvh’ers and copy haho’s. it’s a whole muss of punchy post-punk jostling, pleasing harmonic tones and nicely contrasting bow and scrape and klang on various things (synths, metal, flute, melodica, cello, violin, samples, mic’d bowls).
the word undulating appears on the press release (not often i’ll read those…) and hell i’ll agree. robert is a pleasant slinky and snaky and wiry introduction. squirrel and the fox gets a bit fugazi-ish, swaying like nightbusdrunk from not very fuzzy gibson chug to chamber music string screech. and in amongst this there’s some hurtles into jagged bursts of skree and vicious postrockisms on every superstition shall be removed and there is a diagram for this, both of which i’ve finally realised remind me of the late lamented and much missed cat on form. disappointed i could only squeeze in two alliterations there…
i wrote this in a suitably drunken haze, as some kindof love-letter hate-mail to this ugly city of mine. someone used it (and a few other bits) as an introduction to a russ meyers / john waters / herschel gordon -esque west of scotland romp. i’m quite proud of it’s spiteful stupidity. though if anybody wants to make a short film about an old man alone on a post-global suicide pact seaside town get in touch. i’d be innerested…
listen sons and daughters, i’ve been fucking two headed romanian orphans since god was a boy. when youz were knee high to jimmy krankie ah was pumping yer maw and yr sister. you want tae know about the inside of my head? my heads like a bad seed magic roundabout where everybody’s fucked on cheap cider and dubious amphetamines. when you’re all fannying about wae yr paper mache cocks and fringes and river city dreams i’m pissing in alleys and eating henry healys flung out stale rolls and paying tramps that look like glen michael to fondle me in the street. the endtimes are forever a-knocking at my door, sordid and well hung and stinking of semen and ozone. me? i’m slick, like sperm on gold teeth, like scabs on a hooers knees. pray ladies and gentlemen to whatever non-god humanist cunt you pray to each and every rainy day, ugly and unblessed, pray for the black hole worm hole, pray for that gravity bitch intense and unthinkingly cruel to tease us with her giant apocalyptic lips before vaccuuming us all to oblivious fuck. slide off yr wheelchairs and come see me in my most engorged erect dreams and tell me it ain’t, tell me it is, tell me the true truth. tell me the fiction, that everything’s cool and everything’s hairless smooth and then rub me sensually with yr grim knowledge, the tragedy of inevitability and self-awareness. tell me it’s all gloriously fucked and i can sleep better through all of it undoing. tell me, please, that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. there is no light at the end of the tunnel. for you. who am i? i’m cock and cunt my dear. i am the book of genesis, revelations and kingdom come. i’m a perfect tumour skulking in yr tar brown lungs. i’m the tingling down the indian inked tattoo on yer left arm. i’m a broken-tooth smile. i’m the taste of square sausage and irn bru and buckie and fake fags fae the barras and the daily record and heroin babies and sydney fucking devine and sports socks three for a pound. i’m a drunkdrunk woman in a shortshort skirt. i’m dodgy lighters fae china and a pouch overflowing wae golden virginia. i’m cracking an egg and finding a chicken fetus inside. and that fetus is skinning up, maaahn. i’m blood and vomit and spunk and piss and shit. i’m a tracksuit wearing cunt with a knife for a prick and only six fucking words in mah heid. fuhken mehntahl being two of them. i’m an asymmetrically haircutted stuck up bitch with a coke habit, an accent that don’t fucking exist in this fair town of ours and nothing but nicotine and water in my pissweak bloodstream. i’m the sky falling. i’m a council house on fire with the dole scrounging family inside. i’m the best greasy orgasm of your malnourished goddam lives. i’m everything horrible and glorious about being human and alive and sick and dying. i’m the whole clever dumb smart stupid beautifully ugly fucking endorphine fueled dog and pony show. i am man. i am woman. i am glasgow. Read more »
first thought: sweet billy christ, what is that? that being the brendan mccarthy cover dry-humping my eyeballs, leering at me like sexually depraved neon vomit. that being a fella strapped to an electric chair, whilst behind him the lurid contents of timothy leary’s head melts in spectacular fashion down the page. that, right there, was the narcotic hook.
always had commitment issues, not with women or pets or cereal brands. nope. with ongoing comic series. with few exceptions i’m hardly ever able to hitch my goddam wagon to one. fear of the missing issue, knowing that at some point it’ll get tired or needlessly revamped or i’ll lose patience and be stuck with a pile of unloved and unwanted paper. i dunno. pre- my mccarthy epiphany i’d read 2000 ad from it’s toilet paper days and continued to do so till i was over-old, till it became too shiny for my liking and ezquerra went all cgi. and until (praise ditko!) fleetway alumni peter milligan came along and rebooted shade the changing man i was adrift amongst one-offs, miniseries and an incomprehensible sea of story arcs i’d dig briefly mid-series.
it was one of those deliciously synchronous moments where all the burgeoning interests of my barely-teenage life came together in eye-frotting glory; y’know, serial killers, psychedelia, transcendentalism, the kennedy assassination. and later, lesbians, surrealism, rimbaud, joyce, hemmingway, jim morrison, transgenderism, etpetercetera. so yeah milligan and mccarthy to me then were like some sexed up cannon and ball, like a lysergic kylie and jason, like gilbert and george with their ties off and top button undone.
shade was originally steve ditko’s baby back in the year of our lord (and my birth) nineteen seventy seven. a typically wonky absurdist mélange of aliens, dimensions, authoritarianism, mechanical monsters, madness and vests. why there haven’t been reprints (have there?) i’ll never know. but milligan, mccarthy, bachalo, pennington and vozzo came along twelve years later and gave it a right good seeing to.
after the first aborted attempt to trade paperback the series a few years ago, there are two collections out now, with the third due in summer. relatively speaking (well relative only to what follows) this earlier shit ain’t quite as good. but then as far as i’m concerned very few comics come near the skullbuggering majesty of the season in hell issues. but it’s particularly interesting to see where the strands were all slowly teased from. the usual milliganesque conceits are present and correct – metaphysics, identity, gender, reality, sanity, sexuality. y’know that telling line ‘no, i’m almost positive we’re real now’.
yeah what starts as an exploration of america’s psycho-geography, that idea gets tempered somewhat when lenny shows up in the second book and the series becomes as much character driven as conceptual. but in the beginning there was the scream and the scream was with shade and the scream was shade. a kindof brain-addled phantasmic journey through the iconography of america at it’s pulp fiction (but not y’know pulp fiction) best; the result of an interdimensional outbreak of madness, spreading like memetic syphilis, whereby the kennedy assassination and height ashbury and hollywood and suburbia devour the land that spawned them. and into this, at war with the craziness is shade; the poet, body in dimensional limbo, consciousness projected, wearing on earth, the skin of a serial killer, traveling with the daughter of his last victims. at war with the craziness, at war with himself. it’s all a bit clumsy and trashy at points but hell that’s what i like about it. that and the nods to larkin’s aubade. and the ditko oddball humour.
there are only brief flashes of bachalo and penningtons burgeoning pencil and ink scratchy scruffy mad beauty, instead it’s a fairly straightforward style employed at first, but one schmeared in all kindsof grubby lo-fi hallucinogenic filth. i guess maybe vozzos grubby mitts at work? but oh lord those mccarthy covers. brendan. not to be confused with the bix bartoning jim mccarthy. hideous streaks and blobs of colour, thick and glottal. pink heaven that you painted black. open my face it is a poets door. kill kopter kill krazy. fuck it hurts just thinking about them. at one point lenny asks, have we just walked into a francis bacon painting or what? sometimes i wonder…
why morrison and gaiman got so many goddam plaudits while this little polished gem was so overlooked i’ll never know but i figure vertigo’s resigned to seeing the reprint through to the bitter end this time. and for that i’m grateful. Read more »
okay gotta buncha stuff from neato baltimore label environmental aethetics afuckingageago and have spurned the buggers ever since. well no more. the time has come for me to squeeze some words out of my brain sphincter…
and if that particular image ain’t put you off, first up is blastoids. big spectacular splatters of pop, glitchy neon psych schmeared in lovely warm synth jam and explosions of huge hum and beautiful clatter. this shit makes me all happy, clasps me to it’s fuzzy bosom with grubby paint-stained hands and says why hello fella we are blastoids and here is our big gay nonsexual love. there’s a multitude of sins being enacted here using brass and distortion and analogue things and wild prog freakouts and drums that pound with live techno euphoria. all wrapped up in that joyous communal thang that the animal collective did, that elephant 6 did, and now that these owlhead buggers do. reminds me when things are grim and life is stinky that out there, there is light and fun and jumping and hollering needlessly at the sky. i need this right now.
