guest post (sort of)! neil campbell on taming power

May 23, 2014 at 3:45 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: askild haugland, astral social club, early morning records, electronica, neil campbell, new music, no audience underground, noise, taming power, vibracathedral orchestra

Taming Power – Selected Works 2001 (CD-r, Early Morning Records)

That Neil Campbell is an inspiring chap, isn’t he? I had dabbled in noise and free music prior to becoming friends with him but he was one of a gang of outlaw preachers that baptised me in its torrent. Without him: none of this. His enthusiasms are infectious, despite occasionally being for the godawful, and his breadth of knowledge is impeccable. Not only has he heard everything, but he knows it off by heart and can usually recommend six albums that are even better. I’ve never known anyone radiate such joie de vivre, nor anyone who could translate that feeling so effectively into a delirious, psychedelic, nostrils-flaring, life-affirming racket. Well… I have to admit to not being a fan of his recent solo work as Astral Social Club (and I risked excommunication from the Church of Noise for expressing this heretical opinion in public) but his back catalogue, three decades wide, is a treasure chest bulging with exotic gems. He is also hilarious after a few drinks.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s (partly) guest written post. Our paths were due to cross recently but because of my brain-related medical adventures I had to knock it on the head (pun intended). Turns out that Neil was looking forward to the opportunity for a bit of face time as he was itching to tell me a story. Undaunted, he opened a bottle of wine on his return to Astral Towers and hand-wrote a six page letter. An edited transcript here follows. Over to Neil…

…waaaay back in the day when we released the Vibracathedral 10″ (1999? 2000?), and we had few places who would carry the record, one of the best places to unload it was Bruce Russell’s Corpus Hermeticum distro in New Zealand. Bruce was pretty select in what he would carry (i.e. what he liked/approved of) and upfront about being unable to pay any money for records: trade only!

Well, this was OK, cuz it meant we could pick up loads of Dead C and other NZ stuff for the price of posting a few 10″s across the world. Wondering what to use our Corpus Hermeticum credit up on, I took a punt on 3 10″s by a totally unknown Norwegian, Taming Power, who sounded interesting: self-released, tape recorder and shortwave feedback as only sound sources. Big package of stuff came back from NZ, we spread the records between the 5 of us and I kept the 3 x 10″s.

They sounded great: kinda rough, very singular, not tied to any stylistic thing (i.e. they were gritty and noisy but definitely not ‘Noise’ and had no truck whatsoever with ‘Industrial’ or Power Electronics, even though some of the sonics touched on this). The years went on, and every once in a while I’d dig the records out, give them a whirl, and always be utterly charmed by them. Towards the end of last year I did this again, and I must have had my computer on at the time, so I could (almost) answer the question “Whatever happened to Taming Power?”

I found out these 10″s were only the tip of a very intriguing iceberg: looked like he recorded constantly, had little contact with outside scenes, and every year or so would release a record or two (sometimes LPs, more often 10″s, sometimes even 7″s or tapes), to universal indifference, and they’d mainly gather dust in a cupboard in Norway. I looked at his discography: it was pretty big so surely he must have one or two items still available? I found an email address for Askild Haugland (for it is he!) fired off an email asking if I could buy any of his records. Got a reply the next day saying that ALL his records were still available (even though some had only been done in editions of 100) and that he’d really like to trade. Money, it seems, isn’t something that drives his desire to release records. But yeah, full circle with the trade thing…

I quickly grabbed everything that I could send him, posted it off and quickly got a HUGE parcel of new (to me) Taming Power 10″s. Then a few days later some LPs and 7″s. They all looked great, obviously the work of someone whose heart was totally in it: simple black and white sleeves with a photograph generally pasted on the front (often from Askild’s trips to Nepal) and colour photocopies on the back of always handwritten titles and credits. Simple ‘corporate’ look but you could get a real feel for the person just by leafing through these covers.

It was such a joy listening to these records too: most of them took one or two sound sources (mainly guitars but a few were just shortwave radio manipulations or tape recorder feedback) and gently, seriously probed them to come up with sounds that were simple, beautiful and intensely personal. I was floored. This was exactly the appeal of ‘underground music’ for me as a young man (an appeal that is hard to come by via a lot of current ‘underground’ music, which sounds like people with a script, a predefined notion): someone totally, confidently out in their zone. Nothing fancy, no gimmicks, doing it because they have to, no audience, no encouragement…

[Neil then explains that he would have made me a mixtape from the 20 or so Taming Power releases he’s gathered but his turntable is currently dismantled. Instead he passes on the CD-r above, three copies of which were sent to him by Askild out of the blue last week]

…I think this is real No Audience Underground stuff (with no good reason other than self-imposed isolation), right up there with Ian Middleton and Lee Stokoe (both of whom I think Askild’s music has much in common with). So hope you enjoy the CD-r: I do and it’s quite different from his much earlier recordings with tape feedback but, as you may imagine, it’s only a small part of The Big Picture…

Intriguing, eh? This is not one of those tiresome ‘I heard it first!’ bleats that make me want to give smug hipsters a good cock-punching. This is a beautiful example of the joy to be had in discovery and the unique appeal of outsider art – driven by a compulsion to create above all other considerations. With apologies to those releases languishing on the review pile, I hope you can understand my rush into ‘print’: this is what the no-audience underground is all about.

The CD-r is, to my relief, great. It’s pretty much exactly what I like: disciplined, thorough, obviously created with passion and intelligence. As Neil suggests, this is the sound of an artist really interrogating the source material. However, there is nothing aloof or academic about it – it has a lightness of touch and a robogroove that is engaging and fun. It is like a fan of coloured shadows cast by multiple, pulsing light sources all pointed at the same ebony block. I don’t usually offer algorithmic (‘if you like that then you’ll like this’) comparisons in my reviews but maybe a couple wouldn’t be inappropriate in the circumstances. Thus it reminded me a little of the steppin’ electronics of Dave Thomas’s ap martlet recordings or perhaps the smeared ur-music of blog faves The Piss Superstition. High praise.

Neil told me that another copy of this CD-r has gone to Uncle Mark over at Idwal Fisher and that he has also mentioned Taming Power in an interview with Phil Smith soon to be published in, of all places, Record Collector magazine. A flurry of publicity, relatively speaking, approaches. So hop to it, readers – this is clearly the ideal moment to drop Askild a line, say hello and secure yourself some of his back catalogue.

—ooOoo—

Email address for Askild Haugland of Taming Power / Early Morning Records:

earlymrecords@yahoo.no

Taming Power on Discogs

Early Morning Records (sort of)

Neil Campbell on Bandcamp

Astral Social Club on Bandcamp