scunnered, holding a pickle: joe murray indulges with chocolate monk

February 27, 2015 at 12:57 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: blood stereo, chocolate monk, dylan nyoukis, improv, joe murray, karen constance, new music, no audience underground, noise, vocal improvisation

Dylan Nyoukis – Scunnered at Breakfast (CD-r and text inserts, Chocolate Monk, choc.299, edition of 50)

Blood Stereo – Rid Raw (tape, Chocolate Monk, choc.300, edition of 20)

Dylan Nyoukis – Scunnered at Breakfast

This booby is 25 mins long and formed of two waxy-cream hemispheres. Dylan kicks off in balls-out Holy-Mystical-Roller mood with a lulling and lowing, slightly shifting, accordion loop that puts a stoner nod on your basic livestock (goats, cattle, llama etc).  Cud-scented breath busily excites the brittle reeds with a ‘whhuuuuuuhhh – whuuuuuuuhhh’.  Gosh!  It’s like accidently tripping over some classic organ piece; Psych Mouldfield’s Tubular Balls or something as eventually flutters of speech and slivers of stomach-ache gas right in through the swollen yellow belly.  I’m goofing off over the stretching that’s going on here and it takes me right back to a fragrant memory-bomb: thinning bright oils with stinky turpentine, just like it was yesterday.  After approximately 8 minutes of kneading this pale wash a whole bunch of crispy characters get an invitation to the dusty rodeo.  Familiar faces rub their paws together with some names new to me.  So (koff koff) on the mike, it’s head-cheese from…

Hitomi Arimoto, Marco Cazzella, Seymour Glass, Paul Kirk, Ludo Mich, Angela Sawyer, Norman Shaw and Erkki Sinnemaki

…all magi-mixed with a steady hand on the capstans.

Scunnered.  The guest’s sounds turn to speech, words fracture meaning.  Scunnered.  Slowed talking stories from assembled heads, multiple-layered voices, pinched taped squall.  Scunnnnered.  Placement plays with sense & non-sense; reptilian repetition leaks into my gut.  My brain (eager to please) takes these sleazy pieces and stitches together a map with key designed by Flavor Flav and Sen Dog.  Skunnn-nered.  I follow the contours and with the handy charts supplied work my way through the (SKUNNE’RRD) text,

…flurr

flutchy

fluther

fluze

flype

flyrd

foal

foarrie

fob

foachel

fochen

fock…

mouthing along with the international word-set, puckering my lips in a dry whistle and filling my neck pouches with greedy air to bellow a long and low mewl. That thing happens when sibilant hisses all come together like an MC5 jam, riffing on the chord, and building intensity around a single abstract moment.  The source doesn’t matter so much…it’s the heart with which you execute the exercise.  Scuuuuunnnnnurrreeeeeddddddd.

Phew.  My Kelman-flaps flicker.  Let’s get this shit on the National Curriculum, eh?!

BTW…the random Radio Free Midwich quality check suggests that while I score high on gonzo it’s far too low on eyeball-scrape.  I’m all about the soundz (man) so often forget to mention the rusty packets this shit gets sent in.  No more!  Attached are pics of this whole goofy package.  You can sing–a-long my friends and gaze at our knighted host.  See…I listen!

Blood Stereo – Rid Raw

This ruby red tape holds the accolade of being Chocolate Monk 300.  Think about it.  That’s Three Hundred soft-tissue missiles delivered on target.  Three hundred brain-pans re-tuned and soured.  And three hundred beautiful objects to line up and believe in when you’re up against the mundane cruelty of early 21^st Century life.

Blimey…I’m getting all emotional…I better just talk about the music eh?

It’s tape in two parts right?

(a) futtle-the-pin It goes “Kuff, Kuff.”  There’s street noise and lavatorial water-gurgle.  This is pieced together like a Junk Opera where two layers of sound overlap each other, two layers of consciousness leak into one omni-strata.  The arresting ordinariness of some of the sounds – cat’s crying, bird song and distant traffic ‘shooosh’ play like a new exotic into the Dr Who tape melt.  Then a slammed cell door makes this a dub and I understand the dread that runs beneath this whole side.

(b) outen-under starts with strange kissing cousins: a violent choking and Chinese flute that’s just about the most uplifting sound ever.  A strange under-the-duvet recording of deep lungs wraps itself up in a gentle clanking (the mechanism for a dry dock pumping out oily water perhaps) like a sweet spring roll; crispy on the outside, gelatinous within.  The Chinese theme continues, tinting the air in my dank writing corner, refreshing and fragrant as freshly picked jasmine with the insistent electronic bubbling adding a splash of vinegar!   Then the weird gets spread about like tick-cream and the lost voices/spooky keys/frog-goff starts to resemble a future dream I might have tomorrow –   faceless bodies hum and vibrate, hair sprouts out of palms.  An old horse-drawn carriage clip-clops down the forest track, led by nuns lashed to the bridle.

Sick of reading my shit yet?  You wanna one-liner eh?  It’s the best bloody Blood Stereo side for ages man…go find it doof!

Oh yeah…I made a promise to mention the art.  The cover art seems to be penned by the same hand as Scunnered with thick, black lines carving out an image that would have fit nicely into 2000AD’s Cursed Earth landscape.  Their Muties were genuinely disturbing man…and this bugger’s holding a pickle.

—ooOoo—

Chocolate Monk

[Editor’s note: alas, both releases now sold out – frequent visits to CMHQ recommended to avoid disappointment.]