haunted oxide: luke vollar on culver / posset

November 18, 2014 at 8:49 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: culver, dictaphonics, drone, joe murray, lee stokoe, luke vollar, matching head, new music, no audience underground, noise, posset, tapes

culver & posset – black gash (tape, matching head, mh 207)

[Editor’s note: ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm radiofreemidwich welcome to our latest guest writer and potential new team member: Luke Vollar. Mr. V – family man, Jazzfinger obsessive, member of Lanterns and Castrato Attack Group – has apparently been itching to get involved for some time and when the tape above materialised he couldn’t help but lick his nib and get scrawling. As this release involves RFM staffer Joe Murray it seemed appropriate that it should be accounted for by someone ‘outside the fold’ so I’m delighted for this piece to be Luke’s calling card. He speaks thus…]

When I first heard of this collaboration between culver and posset I was naturally as curious as any self respecting no audience head would be.

Could go either way…

…I thought, smirking to myself as I imagined culver’s stern drones going up against posset’s ADHD dictaphone frottage. Well, I’m happy to report that it’s a resounding success, neither artist dominates proceedings and the end result is something wholly other: it ain’t culver and it ain’t posset, dig?

The first side (that I put on): wave interference, crunch of static, distress calls from haunted oxide. A water damaged micro tape of the final words of the captain from a long submerged ship describing something ghastly coming into view through the freezing fog. In my mind culver and posset think it would be seriously hep to jam in that creepy abandoned house that is rumoured to be built on an ancient Indian burial ground and has been empty and decaying since anyone can remember. Thing is they both get seriously spooked and make a bolt for the door, too terrified even to pack up their gear. What is left behind begins to slowly unspool into a heaving mass of black goop – pulsing, sparking, spreading. From this ectoplasm rises a figure, at first indistinguishable, slowly becoming human shaped – head bowed, arms outstretched, eyes begin to glow fiendishly. Its lips slowly draw to a grin revealing incisors that snap and crackle with electric menace. As the gelatinous figure takes its first steps forward the hiss, BUZZ and clank rises to a fevered pitch but the panic then ebbs away and I remind myself to cut back on the horror movies. The side fades out with a young girls voice, distorted and foggy. The mutant has come out from under the bed, the people are scared but really it’s nice.

The flip starts with what sounds like buried piano loops under undulating hiss, the slightly off-kilter-ness maintaining the disquiet of the previous side. I see a lighthouse, its light flashing rhythmically onto an indifferent ocean in the darkest night. This is followed by glassy, luminous heroin drone that morphs into a more complex rising and falling pattern: all musical, like. The pulse slows to a steady thump and all the unease seems to dissipate like smoke in the air. We’re now in drone nirvana heavenly nod out music that is over too quickly. Quite an exit gentlemen and quite a journey.

radio free midwich