dolphins into the future: on sea-faring isolation (not not fun)

good gravy.  i fear i might turn into some benign version of david icke listening to this.  clad in turquoise but not slavering about lizard men (who’re not jews, definitely not jews…).  instead slavering about cetaceans and rubbery dolphin love.  yup, something of the new-age about this.  certainly more explicit on this bugger than any of his other releases that i’ve heard.  but nope not the new age conspiracism of icke.  more the new age-ery of joan ocean and her dolphins into the future book:

this is the continuing story of a relationship that joan ocean has developed with a pod of 200 hawaiian spinner dolphins.  living with them for ten years and experiencing their births, their games, their mating, healing and communicative sounds, joan learns the secrets of entering dolphin consciousness and traversing multiple realms.  with the dolphins and whales as teachers, joan enters our future and brings back wisdom for the present

aye.

possibly drug addled nonsense.  but the belgian dude behind the musical dolphins, lieven martens, seems to take a lot of cues from this new agey possibly drug addledy nonsense.  whether as an amusing rockandrolla persona or because he really believes this mad twaddle.  either way it’s a much more pleasant listen than a read i’d imagine.  or as he says:

i create my music by automatic writing through my dialogues with the cetacean world and its sources of ultraterrestial information that is maybe in there.  my work stands both as a musical interpretation of the trancefers, a map of personal ways to the id.  i believe in this stage of our development, the visual and sensory sense are of paramount importance, so i hope i can reach you with this mere collection of tunes.  meditate on the concept of using the cetacean nation as a metaphor of what we could be and reach.

aye aye.

all this chuntering aside, what about the noise i hear you cry, greased and desolate, from the incestuous hell-cellar you call home?

well it’s actually quite pleasant and lovely in an occasionally meditation chamber, incense burning kindof way. whereas the last one of his i heard – voyage shopibo coast – was all skaters fug and mucky tape in amongst the exotica and the sound of gamelans engaged in fatal death match.  that had a kind of submerged swamped quality.  this is all afloaty and sundrenched.

been listening to it quite a lot during this horrible mini-heatwave that’s melting my skin and brain.  seems to fit in with the tropical aura i’m swamped with.  bit like ducktails in it’s merging of tapes and loops and easy listening ambience and gentle island/ marine murmurings while flirting with kosmische meandering.  all this played over a bloopy wash of echolocation tones and appropriated found sounds / field recordings of beachy tidal swishes and gull squawks.  like there’s some psychedelic robinson crusoe thang going on.

it’s odd stuff.  yet strangely normal.  has it’s own weird logic and flow, like some skull warping endless aquatic mobius strip. blissful stuff.  casual synths and wibbly sonar drones make a gentle swaying noise not unlike the ocean.  but cosmic and directionless.  or something.

if you dig the ducktails record (also on not not fun) or the more placid trance(ience) on james ferraro or monopoly child star searchers or vodka soap and all those other skaters offshoots (and i do) you’ll probably dig this.

if nautical nonsense be something ye wish, then drop to the deck and blub like a fish…

not not fun

hank iv: refuge in genre / little claw: race to the bottom (siltbreeze)

yow.  hank iv.  or hiv as they’re occasionally dumbbreviated to.  i’ll keep this as short and sweet (or dwarfed and bitter, depending on yr inclincation) like the record, as it’s not new but i just got the vinyl…

feels odd to listen to anything on siltbreeze not buried under an avalanche of muck.  but this is all clean and pristine.  like a souped up version of their debut third person shooter.  not a hint of four track hiss.  produced by fucking champ, tim green.  mastered by shellac man and sometime trumpeter bob weston.  not that it’s some shiny machine pop.  there’s still a fuckload of rawk skuzz.  just that compared to say yr eat skulls and psychedelic horseshits it’s distinctly hi-fi in it’s aural approach.

oh it howls and swaggers and roars.  it’s a kindof throaty blend of garage and full pelt punk that the dudes in volcano suns or pegboy used to batter out.  mixed in with the skeezy instigation of all that 70’s cleveland ohio shit i’ve been chowing down on recently.  chuck in the odd bit of bar band fun, melody and goddamit hard rock (and why the fuck have these things been rationed in the post-sub-underground whatever?) and you have a pitch perfect dual geetar snarl.  like if ac/dc met the saints met jim shepard and they all got hammered and boisterous.  all rhythm and strut and shout.  all barreling kinesis and gleeful menace.  and it’s all over quicker than jackson five reunion.  they jam econo.

strange that it’s a distinctly straightforward rock record yet sounds so utterly and wonderfully out of step with the kids.  bloody kids…

hank iv / siltbreeze / hook or crook

and to even the siltbreeze scales of noise new seven incher from little claw, race to the bottom.  with a sleeve that looks like it was designed by me drunk at four in the morning with a head full of medicine and my hands celltotaped to a broken felt tip pen.  two tracks with the overdriven guitar sound of an nice old pink telecaster being gently forced into the anus and guts of a broken amp.  some folk holler pop nonsense over the top of this distorto din.  it’s frankly fucking ace.  and the best silt 7” i’ve heard, oooh since the last bugger.  more stuff on ecstatic peace.  exclamation mark.

clawspace / siltbreeze / ecstatic peace!

kylie minoise: supersonic preview part four

kylie minoise.  a stupidly great name.  pricking the grimly serious bubble of pofaced noisesters and all their poseur dead eyed nihilisms in one absurd and humorous swoop.  i love this kind of violent abstraction.  i smoke the minoise brand.  none of the willful lack of humour.  none of the blacker than blackest black blackness, black so black it’s a comical nothingness.  too much of that engulfs a fair bit of thiskindofthing.  whitehouse were funny (were they not?) in a grim obscene kind of way.  frightening vicious bastards but with clownish greasepaint grins smeared across their chops.  proof that this music (and it is music) don’t need to be chock full of dudes who look like they’ve graduated from the hardcore school of hardcore.  like they’ve moved on from some faceless mirthless version of discharge to some facless mirthless version of discharge ‘cept slowed down sped up brutally buggered and amplified to skullfucking volume.  which isn’t to say i don’t dig the painful and the ugly and all that shit, the physicality, the mindbending cuntjuddering aggression and tension and release and cathartic howl.  cummingses aktions, busting with exclamation marks usually, have this in spades.  monochrome, monolithic, monomaniacal.  a strange pleasure anyway.

in terms of recorded output i’m a huge throbbing fan of kylie minoise fucking loves you!  i think mainly because he flirts with a teeny bit of structure and percussion and ambient drone.  haven’t heard (but have heard good things about) spank magic lodge as well.

liquorball with steve mackay: evolutionary squalor (rocketship)

so i’ve been imbibing this satanic cypriot (you know, from cyprus…) liqueur all weekend.  a bastard concoction somewhere between sherry and rum.  some sugary minbender that rots yr brain and skews yr teeth.  either way not only have my lips been numb for thirty six hours but i keep seeing shapes leaking like bitched ink blots into my peripheral vision.  white gloved and with simian.  the only fingernail not chewed to a nub is my right thumb.  haven’t quite worked out why it needs to be long and sharp; for weapon or guitar twanging or part of some sinister selfbiological conspiracy whereby the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing.  and for what nefarious purpose. i. do. not. know.  am i involved subconsciously in some fleshy revolution?  is one half of my cranial hemisphere seeking dominance?

jihad!!

fuck knows.  and anyways combined this with a teary joint tribute to swells and jacko and fawcett.  by this i mean i fucked lee majors, slept with some kids, bought a monkey and swore biliously and blindingly and effingly at any old thing that got on my tit end.

the soundtrack to this three day cracked satorial bloop?

why evolutionary squalor.  the new long player from liquorball.  the title’s either a statement on modern life or a description of the band the music the mess.  in terms of the leap from monoshock to this (with the bad trips colonically (but not chronically) somewhere in the middle?) it is some kind of transcendence, though not necessarily into squalor.  monoshock always seemed like a huge drunken fuck-up (in a good way) of a band, sprawling and howling and vomit flecked.  always lurching with intent, with a grim religious inexorability, teetering on the verge of collapse, dancing monged pirouettes on a cliff face.  that kind of music.  like black flag doing hawkwind.  which i s’pose gives you motorhead…. and since i’m pointlessly dropping names here i’ll cellotape flipper, butthole surfers, chrome and helios creed on.  fuck am i lazy and unecessarily wide of the mark…  think sonic youth’s cover of hotwire my heart amplified to buggery fuck.  and yr probably still nowhere near.

but having never heard the previous liquorball lp’s (fucks the sky, hauls ass, live in hitlers bunker (not a bad title among them and all a statement of intent)) due to limited pressings, vinyl only releases, distribution by drugged dwarves randomly shooting them out of a fedex plane cannon at various points around the world predetermined by where some chronic masturbators jizz landed on a spinning world globe, i have no real frame of reference.

what i do know is that walk to the fire is a unhinged hulking bugger of a record.  one of those that got passed from person to person like a secret masonic handshake.  i gots me a copy and still play the shit out of it but it was the last piece of recorded music i gots from grady runyan.  julian cope does a rather natty handy biog of their pre-squalor output here.

so they’re back.  like arnie.  or tuberculosis.  it’s a live ‘un.  either one thirty six minute song split or two separate shroom enhanced improvised rain dances.  it has steve mackay (yes that fucking steve mackay, the steve mackay that whupped reeds on funhouse) tooting sax on it.  it’s not free jazz but it kindof is.  it’s not a huge squall of jiggered garage rock moves but it kindof is.  it’s not motorik no wave blare and bluster but it kindof is.

there’s an eloquence and elegance to this.  honest to christ.  it unfurls.  like demented ribbons of silky barbed wire.  it unravels.  like the mind of michael jackson.  it unfastens itself from that grubby safetybelt we call sanity and flutters away with the bruised grace of a butterfly on ketamine.

mirrors: something that would never do (violet times)

big muff big muff big muff!  no not a typed ode to the joys of fuzzy oral pleasure.  but another about-fucking-time psychey garagey protopunky resissue.  and further proof that nothing bad came come of a band indulging in the big muff.

born of that weirdy scene in seventies cleveland ohio that also threw up rocket from the tombs and electric eels and pere ubu and the dead boys, mirrors most exemplified the post-vu pre-punk shenanigans kicking off.  sounding as they did like lou reed with a sense of humour, dylan without the reliance on rhyming dictionary, rftt with a bit of songwriterly polish, the kinks all fucked up, the modern lovers without the arched eyebrow

a seven inch, compilations and the odd banrupt label proper release has been pretty much the extent of it since 197entywhatever.  until now.  with this lovely proper old vinyl release.  which collects fifteen tracks off the hearthan single, those were different times cleveland comp and a bunchof others.

they exist(ed) somewhere between the sixties and seventies, with artschool and garage moves and psyche glam prog.  so you get the mad jiggered fuzz-out groove of she smiled wild.  which has that ugly ramshackle quality of a siltbreeze or woodsist record.  sounds utterly modern with it’s unhinged vocals and spastic fuzzed lead and velvet underground chug.  i could draw you a line between mirrors and psychedelic horseshit.  it’d be a fucked squiggly monged line.  but a line nonetheless.

swells is dead…

so farrah fucking fawcett to give her her full name pops her clogs, then jacko comes along and hogs that particular corpse limelight, steals her deceased thunder and it takes me till now to find out that swells has bitten the goddam dust.  he was the only only only good thing ever to appear in the nme.  and i realise that’s faint damned praise.  but it’s not meant as such.  he was the kind of bugger that’d make you want a record so bad you’d fuck an aids monkey unprotected just to touch it’s polythene sealed hem.  or hate something so much you’d jam blunt knitting needles into yr earholes so you never never never heard morrissey again.  if it wasn’t for him i’d never have coined the term cunt-trumpet.  but then again if it wasn’t for him i wouldn’t have wasted three quid on the occasional magazine…  he made me laugh like a fucking drain and occasionally i’d want to smash his head in but all in the best possible way.  he was a bilious foul mouthed bastard.  he was swells.

always worth a read be it in metal hammer or the guardian or the philidelphia weekly.  his cancerous columns for the latter are things of honest to god truth and beauty… 

my fluid-filled legs look like telephone poles, so i sleep and watch tv with my feet up.

what happens next is horrific.

the fluid flows into my already swollen ball bag, making it enormous. this is something they don’t show you on er.  it gets so big that i have to carry my balls around the house in my hands when i’m not wearing underpants. seriously.

and when the fluid drains out of your scrotal sac, guess where it goes next?  can you?

that’s right, for about a week i sport a huge, fluid-filled fringe under the head of my penis, making it look like some weird skinhead gila-lizard from hell.  i tell every male i meet about this.

they are all, without exception, appalled.  one says:

“cancer victim or not, if you don’t shut the fuck up right now, i’m going to punch you.” 

richard youngs: beyond the valley of ultrahits (sonic oyster)

last time i saw richard youngs he was klanging and fizzing his way freely through some moaning wailing noise set with heather leigh murray.  so it comes as well nothing of a surprise (given his fondness for genre bending switchery) to find him indulging his pop whims.  and it comes as nothing of a surprise neither to find it’s a giddy bloody delight of an album.

youngs is one of these fellas who annoyingly have that alchemic touch where everything they touch turns to musical gold.  be it that flying nun style lofi, or the wyrd folk, or the progasmic flourishes of ilk, or the improv and electronic.  all with that kind of peculiar english eccentricity.  no matter what he’s turned his hand to it is almost certainly worth a listen.

if this is the result of a dare (and jeebus bless whoever put him up to it) and even though it’s uber-limited, there’s nothing throwaway about this bugger.  seems to be as much effort went into this as anything he’s put out on jagjaguwar.

it’s pop.  for sure.  not in the way leona lewis or coldplay or green day is.  but in the way bjork or brian wilson or the zombies are.  there’s nothing of the shiny machine quality, ultracompressed spew, radio playlists aurally rape you with.  it’s an odd combination of bowies acidic quirk (on summer void, or is that just me…) and robert wyatt and fairport convention folk-rockerry and gorgeous beach boys overdubbed harmony.

open strings: early virtuoso recordings from the middle east v/a (honest jon’s)

only just now found the time to give this beast the full attention it so deservedly deserves.

four lps, stylishly sleeved and contained in a rigid slipcase.  the artwork all monochromatic loveliness, woodcuts by katharina immekus.  beautiful in every fetishy packaged way possible.  lovely to look but to listen to?

a freaking joy.  mastered at abbey road.  all cleaned up and frequently sounding brand spanking new.  hard to believe that some of this is ninety years old.

so it’s another trawl through emi hayes 78’s archives for honest jon’s.  this time turning their wayward ears to the middle east; iraq, iran, egypt and turkey.  this time drawing parallels between stringed improv back then and the modern made-up exotica of yr sir richard bishops and michael flowers and six organs of admittance, featuring as it does these fellows alongside mv & ee and steffan basho-jungans and others offering their take on the old world.

reverend beat-man: the bonnevilles: the coyote men: les bof!: the bucky rage: eruption: halt bar: glasgow

sweet jeebus.  the gods did smile upon me on saturday.  all the indicators were there.  i fell in love as i always do with the girl behind the bar (a dancing vision in blue).  i drank all day enough to be nicely toasted but not to next day regret excess.  i saw a shitload of loud music.  and it was all for free.  free by christ!  cheers fella.

i am speechless.  lost for words.  here it is briefly:

the bucky rage.  the new slim line rage.  diet rage.  rage-lite.  no sugar, all violence inducing alcosyrup.  lean mean and tight.  like a lumbering prizefighter dropping down a weight.  nimble and fleet of foot.  like a sixteen year old albanian prostitute armed with a knife and pleasant smile and a vicious history.  she’ll pleasure but best watch yr wallet and back.  y’all know i like these fellas.  don’t believe me?  see one of my favourite blog things here…

les bof!  there’s not been much french in my life, musically anyway (i dig/loathe the country in equal measure).  sloy.  cheveu.  jacques dutronc. now these partially gallic charmers.  all dressed to the nines, not a faded t-shirt to be found.  indulging in all my garagey kinksian francais fantasies.  on s’eclate!  one of them was in the thanes i think.  saw them once.  i liked.  this?  this i liked also.

the bonnevilles.  ah the electrified slide geetar wail.  the uberinthereddistortoblooze.  like if the immortal lee county killers came a-drunk and a-hollering from belfast.  not belligerent drunk mind.  just merry. either way it’s fucking beautiful.  like if somehow mississippi john hurt had grown up listening to motorhead.  if i was stuck on a desert island i’d have them as my band bitches, playing old skip james songs at top volume until the madness consumed us all.  part one of the three way tie for greatest live show.  i saw.  on saturday.

the coyote men.  on a bar.  dancing with punters.  on the floor, wandering. sometimes on the stage.  yup, the worlds first bucky rage tribute act.  ho fucking ho.  rather the worlds greatest tag team garage punk combo.  good enough to appear on estrus.  and have jaime hernandez do a cover for them.  i fucking dig love and rockets.  the comic.  not the band.  i fucking dig the coyote men.  the band.  not the comic.  those masked bastards…  part two of the three way tie for greatest live show.  i saw.  on saturday.

and so bringing us to a filthy climax, overspilling (erupting one might say) down white knuckles with religious wrongness and a dirty satorial ejaculate, the reverend beat-man (with the bonnevilles on geetar and drum).  a genuine (well in spirit anyway) spitting snarling hellfire preacher from the wrong side of switzerland.  born of the monsters.  the monsters!  he changes his persona like a tax dodging exile.  now he’s a man of god.  with his geetar and foot operated drum, ranting and raving about the incest and the rape and the atomic bomb and beat-man way.  he supposedy fucked his gerbil.  he did righteously fuck my earholes with his peculiar trash and primitive blues stomp.  he’ll make your back crack, your liver quiver, and your knees freeze. i’m told.  now that lux is gone, i have a new seedy hero.  raise a glass to the rev. ladies and ladyboys.  slainte!

xasthur: all reflections drained (hydra head)

christ this is a bit of a creepy record.  so in recognition this wordspew is dedicated to the crazed bastard(s) (can there really be more than one of you sick enough to want these jpegs?) searching for hazel blears upskirt pictures…

righty.  new album , or rather a cd reissue, from scott conners’ one man (well two if you include mark hunter on vox and ambience…) misanthropic misery machine.  defective epitaph was a gnarly bugger of a record, this takes those ideas and fucks with them further.  not even sure malefic’s making black metal (not my label y’understand) anymore.  the only commonalities seem to be the still amusingly illegible writing that’s scrawled all over the genre and the recorded in a wet cardboard box production values.

not that it matters coz the four track hiss suits this new mangled shit so much better.  occupying the fucked squalor of a nomansland where postrock meets noise meets doom meets black metal meets ambient.  it sounds strangely disconnected, like it was recorded live in the room next door to where he’s vomiting up his charred racket, like when fog screws with yr aural perception, like the spektral elektricity and discombobulating delay down long distance telephone wires.

what vocals there are, are buried way down in the mix, all strangled whispers and hell-cellar shrieking.  anonymous and isolated.  like the man himself.

like the musics insidious smother.

which is a blurred braindamaged orchestra with smears of muffled symphonies, damaged percussion and nofi six string and cello thrash.  unsettling pretty folk harmonies bleed in and out of the evildrone, almost pastoral fuzz and off-kilter tones and textures.  it’s not so much a fucked folklore and thick forest ambiance that engulfs this record.  more the emptiness of broken cities and industrial ghost towns.

the thermals: stereo: glasgow

so contrary bugger that i am i had a last minute change of heart and chose to go see the thermals instead of throbbing gristle.  not much of a difference… maybe it was the ticket price, the overindulgence of noise recently, the fact i have an embarrassing crush on kathy foster, the need for thrashed out tunes, the fact that peter christopherson’s threshold houseboys choir show was so bloody good.  i dunno.  i was heading to the tramway.  and then i wasn’t. 

if it was awesome tell me.  je ne regrette rien.

a reminder anyway, proof, if proof were needed, that three people, two guitars and minimal drum setup can still create a glorious wild wired racket, with fingers full of chords, a way with words and a gutbusting amount of ooomph and feverish zeal.

so we got the many highlights from the body, the blood, the machine and a bunch of songs off the new john congelton produced record now we can see. there may even have been some unpolished old school garage-punk thermals gems (did i hear it’s trivia? or no culture icons? maybe…) but the whole set was such a mad fucking rush (in both senses of the word) that i forget.

blank dogs: under and under (in the red)

goddamn have in the red been on a hot frickin roll recently.  another belter here, slightly behind schedule with this one (and a few others…) but been waiting like a sweaty end of days obsessed millenist around 11:59 31/12/99 for the expanded vinyl and it’s certainly worth chucking out some belated words about.

can i get through this without mentioning joy division?  can i hellfire.  without meaning it in the pejorative the whole record sounds like joy division’s more -punk than post- numbers.  there’s no point hiding it with vague allusions to monochrome, monotone, factory town grey crunch post-punk manchester via brooklyn shite.  i won’t lie to you.  not unless they pay me.

anyway there’s been fuckloads of releases now on various formats.  none dissimilar to this but certainly there was more distorto muck being spread around previously, grimy electronics and muffled vox underneath the vaguely garagey new wave geetar.  still distinctly unhi-fi but not entirely lo-fi.  been thinking of a middle ground.  mo-fi.  more fidelity?  nah…

more tarnished pop than anything else.  the electronic sludge and homemade guitars all cardboard boxes and electrified rubber bands have been scrubbed clean like fresh meat in prison.  that said, the cheap synth, skuzzy effects and hiss of mangled four track recorders isn’t entirely gone.  and the likelihood of his anonymous mug appearing in heat magazine remains unlikely.

pink priest teenage wet dream #4

one time, a while back, i glanced a snatched mirror glimpse of something, something i didn’t understand, couldn’t grasp, something so simple and complex, so essentially vast so meaninglessly small, so recognizable yet utterly other, it caught me capriciously with clutching damp fingers round throat, wrung the breath like ragwater from my tar-browned lungs and i realized, in that one monotonously fleeting(eternal) second that everything, ev ve er ry yt th hi in ng gg, the word vibrating, a dreaded om, is hideously inconsequential, that everything i’m aware of, blank-eyed and knowing.  is.  just.  nonsense.  a pointless construct, a plastic skeleton, a feeling, simultaneous, with narcotic glee and feverish fucked gloom, and during that satorial blip in such a timeless timeline i knew, knew why people cling to something, anything, be it kittens or bottles or gods, and while the moment passed, a blinked epoch peckpeckpecked at by fields of wetbeaked crows, that wheezing pneuma informed, huffing around my skull, flowering, seeding, blossoming, i remain forever unsettled by the minimalist act of existence, so that each time, just before opening a door there’s this glitchy wet panic that when i do there won’t be anything beyond or when i’m moist and mumblemouthed in slumber i’ll never wake or when i swallow i’ll choke slackly on the gob-filling mulch or try to move, spastic straining, and i can’t, so i stop opening doors and eating and sleeping and moving, for fear of discovery, the enveloping inertia of paranoia that every lump or ache or pain is some insidious disease or terminal symptom, how we’re all cockhungry and cuntwet for ignorance really, you know this idea that understanding is the same as mastery, that explanation eases the fear of the unknown, like being told you have cancer lumps whispering in yr chest is any better than wondering why you’re struggling to catch yr breath, so i stopped eating eggs because i panicked every time i cracked one that there’d be a thumb-burst foetus inside and i stopped praying in case someone was actually listening and i’d hear noises and the noises would be like frostbitten bliss, like grime smeared pornography, like harsh drugs and overdriven emotion and the noise would pupate and then images, licking lightly caterpillar tongued on retina, images and images, revelatory, and i’d see snow and bloodletting and hearts breaking and i’d see the insect wings and the fat lonely suicide’s creaking rope and i’d see love, smothering and destroying, and i’d see the sad orgasm of hate and the slow rust of machines, i’d see the bruised melancholy at the heart of it all, tempered by gluey cruelty and the crummy, eager tape hiss of fifth generation vhs copied sadism, and since i stopped speaking i’d paint pictures of flags and folksongs and deserts and vultures, of plagues and childbirth and ghosts dripping with the semen of every unused ejaculation, of neatly arranged lines of sunbloated dog corpses and piles of damp dank dresses torn clinging from the bodies of drowned girls, of mortuary rituals and swollen things filling bathtubs but in amongst the voices and inkstained delirium i’d be aware of the ecstasy of my new found unevolving, of my deknowing, of my reignorance, the comforting certainty of futility, and i’d see see see how all all all is same same same, everything is nothing, that as the pink priest said abandonment and transcendence are one, that life isn’t circular or linear, and i’m reminded of something i read once that offers neither hope nor pity just a gentle reminder of what it is to be, briefly, and i read one time a while back, from my rotting body, flowers shall grow and i am in them and that is eternity.

jazzfinger: blood stereo: the hunter gracchus: towering breaker: cca: glasgow

right.  this shite’s going to be boringly linear i’m afraid (yet all over the goddam place).

first up were towering breaker.  i liked the tape destruction and reeltoreel abuse, i liked the use of walkman and tables spaghettied with wires and boxes, i liked the skaters style fug and klang of metal.  yr chocolate monk man dylan nyoukis seems to love them (which is good enough for me).  i was a bit distracted by a) the zonked yodeling (only hank williams gets away with this shit in my book) and b) the dudes goofy way with a xylophone.  so good it seemed a bit like paul mccarthy’s painter reimagined by zoviet france.  or the chuckle brothers musically directed by david lynch.  not in the pejorative you understand.

next, the hunter gracchus.  sacred object of the yiye people is a pretty ace album.  it’s jammy (not the preserve kind) and percussivey and noisy in a way that for a wee change doesn’t sound like it’s being made feeding old zx spectrums through an industrial shredder.  it’s all organic and real and proper sounding, like it was made on strings and wood and skin (which it probably was).  a bit balkan, or a bit araby, a bit psychey, a bit noisy.  i can’t decide.  anyway there’s smidgens of jazz and a kindof fucked folk and (not enough of) the aforementioned world shit going on.  the set had some awesome shruti box action going on, and if i closed my eyes and overmedicated myself it could almost be like some weird alien voiced semifolkish version of the pop group shit going down.  or that particular brand of finnish free jazzy pastoral shenanigans that occasionally rubs me the wrong way with all the childish bashing and petulant percussion and larking about in pyjamas and elf hats and squawking andandand…  but in a good way y’understand.

the rats: intermittent signals (mississippi records)

alrighty.  second rats reissue on mississippi.  i’ll keep it brief.

it’s like the first one but souped up in every department.  got a bit of beef, steroided muscle, to it’s brittle bones and sinew.  and sam henry from the wipers replaces rod rat on bashing things with sticks this time round, apart from animal, the stooges apocalypto sax freakout catharsis that closes the record.

kindof like the missing link between three chord bubblegum garage stomp and the j-j-jerky fizz of television and patti smith and all that seventies eighties (post/pre)punk from across the pond.  strangely (why strangely?) reminds me of mission of burma in places.

cheveu: triple school: mono: glasgow

en s’eclate!

so cheveu.  another of my ss records favourites.  saw them ages ago supporting man man and was transfixed by their strange mix of korg blues jibbering.  tonight was no different.  one guitar, a table full of stuff with wires and a singer with three mics and some plinky things.

sweaty, twitchy and slightly zonked.  existing somewhere between chrome and suicide and the velvet underground and all those fucked kindofbutnotreally garage bands cluttering the siltbreeze and ss records rosters.  the kind of frazzled blues shit you might get from some post-whatever french version of blank dogs or nothing people or eat skull.

there’s melody, psyched out thrum and repetitive squall, but tunes nonetheless.  there’s the machinemusik thump and woozy klang of drum machines and synths and pedals.  there’s the junk addled punk and reverbed buggered blooze.

the vibe: slightly unhinged.  vaguely hedonistic.  kindof sleazy.

a singer: who screams, jabbers, grunts, moans, wheezes, whatevers into his triple mic desk of narcotic racket.

a guitarist: (cross mogwai’s stuart braithwaite with seinfelds george costanza) who plucks the keith richards raunch, maintains and tempers the chaos with rhythm (and blues).

a dude: who mans The Table Of Things, machine gunning the beats and addled fuzzpunk bleeps through wires and e-lec-tric-it-y direct to our dancedancedance neurons and jiggered synapses.

the records are things of wonky beauty (the split with tyvek, the s/t on born bad, everything generally…) but live they seem to make that extra bit of unsense.  if you squint it could be pop; see the skewed bloop of dog (video below).  they make you want to choreographically slide m’self all loose limbed and floppy free around the room.  a mess of effortlessly wasted french elegance that is always on the verge of collapse but staggers on with wonderful butthole surfers style insouciance.

emeralds: solar bridge (hanson)

okay let’s rewind a year almost and pretend that, hey this’s just come out.

king tupou v is crowned as the 23rd monarch of tonga.  there’s a total solar eclipse.  north korea declares sweden its enemy.  somali pirates!  barrack obama!  hurricane gustav!  bombs in baghdad!  earthquake in china!  the leader of malaysian opposition anwar ibrahim is formally charged with sodomy.  the olympics arrive and usuain bolt runs, and michael phelps swims, reallyreally fast.  the economic crisis worsens.  pervez musharraf resigns.  and solar bridge comes out.

the reason i bring this up a year on is solely because i held back buying the cd (like some sweatytense stand-off between my gary cooper urge for delayed gratification and my frank miller gang desire for instant pleasure) and i’ve finallyfinallyfinally managed to get a hold of the vinyl.

still my favourite of their numerous releases (together or solo).  think it’s the brevity that attracts me.  two tracks.  twenty six minutes.  too much of thiskindofthing gets drawn out to the point of inertia.  this is like hardcore short, like circle jerks short, like minutemen short.  you could put this on one side of a c90 tape and still find room for ten black flag songs.

i love it like i love laphroig or amy hempel or prostate massages.  the problem i’m having with this “review” is that when i saw the buggers live last year i pretty much said everything i had to say in one fell swoop of an explicit yet hazy paragraph:

loren connors: the curse of midnight mary (family vineyard)

the story goes: mary hart (the titular midnight mary) way back in the day in conneticut, collapses, passes out, and on presumption of being deceased, is buried by her husband.  mary’s sister has a nightmare about her being buried alive.  queue her freaking out, the body gets exhumed and there lies mary, her hands torn to shreds trying to claw through the coffin, an expression of exquisite terror etched forever on her face. 

the inscription on her tombstone reads: the people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away.

fast forward to 1981: a man, a guitar, a tape recorder.  evergreen cemetery.  the resting place of mary hart.  midnight.  as the legend warns, stay past twelve and you’ll be dead the next day.  thankfully mr connors stayed, played, recorded and survived to tell the tale.

fast forward to now: the tape has been found, dormant, forgotten and foosty for years, somewhere, but now free and rattling it’s ghostly chains.

mixing up some blues seance, some graveyard acoustic field recording, some gospel abstractions (chants three and six spin out variants on amazing grace, unfurling a brittle spiritual vibe among the angular fingering) into one groaning spectre of a record.  all it is, reduced, essentially, is thirty one minutes of improvised delta sketches.  all it is, is so much more than that.

sonic youth: the eternal (matador)

sonic youth in decent new album shocker.  more at ten…

alasdair roberts: stereo: glasgow

i once facetiously described alasdair roberts’ music as occupying some bastard bermuda triangled no-mans land between shakespeare, the corries and will oldham.  none of this meant in the pejorative you understand.  i love the mans music (and wordsmithery).  all’s i was getting at was the clash, the coming together, the mix and matching of the traditional with the contemporary.  something he does pretty damned well.  he creates worlds, own tiny worlds within songs, esoterica and historical exotica, with their own language and arcane history, rooted in the real real past and the mad mad fables of the elizabethan.

spoils is his third/fourth? album for drag city.  it certainly ups the instrument quota from his brittle bare bloody bones earlier work.  the record and the new all-singing no-dancing live band setup seems to have moved him back into appendix out territory.  spoils features dulcimers and hurdy gurdy.  the live show’s yr standard fiddle, guitars, percussion set-up.

s’not even recognisable as what folk recognise these days as folk.  you know, some earnest young ‘un with a knack for fingerpicking and gwyneth paltrows’ diary.  but folk it is.  of the most intricate baroque styling.  wordplay that’ll melt yr mind and a way with time signatures and tunings and a story and a song and the past present and future.

what’s that… oh yeah anyway there was a gig i was at.  but it was many many beers ago.  it was pretty damned good from what i recall.  carousing got the rock-out fuzzed-up six organs of admittance treatment.  it was (like his records) at once whimsical and brutal, genuinely beautiful yet visciously ugly.  see the creepy medieval grindhouse slasher movie aesthetics of long lankin:

where’s the little heir of this house? said long lankin.  he’s asleep in his cradle said the false nurse to him.  we’ll prick him, we’ll prick him all over with a pin and that’ll make my lady to come down to him.  so he pricked him, he pricked him all over with a pin, and the nurse held the basin for the blood to flow in…

and then the wholesale slaughter begins.