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.

been digging into the whole cleveland ohio thang recently with the mirrors reissue, playing all those old rocket from the tomb songs, skronking out to electric eels and the pagans and pere ubu.  and there’s a wonky path from there to here but the impatiently pleasurable econo- slop has been bludgeoned into something unfettered but strangely focused.  dilated pupils aimed at some grey dot on the horizon.  it’s thomas jefferson slave apartments grinding three chords for infinity.  it’s the fuzzy clatter of bardo pond full of bad vibes and miles davis aneurysms and waaaaaaaaaaah.  chuck in another saxamophone some harmonica and a violin and you have yrself an all round sense juddering enlightened delight.

anyway here’s a bit of a live jam for yr earholes…

and there’s a monstrous radio set at archive.

tripspace / thebadtrips / gradysrecordrefuge