twitching like a rope: joe henderson on marlo eggplant, dtub and bowditch

March 9, 2017 at 7:05 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: bowditch, dtub, fractal meat cuts, joe henderson, marlo eggplant, post-valentine

Marlo Eggplant – Callosity (Fractal Meat Cuts)

Dtub – Midi-Drum Compositions-1 (Fractal Meat Cuts)

Bowditch – Southend Objectified (Fractal Meat Cuts)

(Ed’s mumble…buckle up, buckle up readers for this first dizzying and deconstructed ear-report from our new bean Joe Henderson.)

FRACTAL MEAT POST-VALENTINE SPECIAL/Jan-March Streets Edition (Marlo Eggplant, Dtub & Bowditch)

First post. It’s a cold & drizzly Sunday afternoon. Listening to the radio.

The industrious Graham Dunning, head-honcho of Fractal Meat Cuts label, delivers a small-packaged bomb of audio pleasures (including his own limited edition, custom made, generation-loss cassette – which exists in another Universe as of now, and to be reviewed when time catches up with me – but can be perused via his catalogue).

First up, Marlo Eggplant. Baltimore-born, Midwich reporter & SPA. Title: Callosity. Edition of 40 cassettes.

The world turns in the right direction. Valentines Day. The most fucked up day of the year. It’s grim. It’s cold. It’s loveless. I’m dialing in Dr. Eggplant.

The ashy clearing; she strums it whilst the birds go low. Animals pitch in. Marked by their slow heavy breathing. Unseen but heard. It’s always cold, but in her warm cocoon. I get so introverted, listening to music like this. Opening drawers in corners of my psyche. I’m in a stupor. Dusty softly done. Expanse throbbing. Ray-gun echoes. Like a solemn hymn to a mutant future generation (what’s wrong with X-Men?). Moving the man-hole cover away. The street lamps are a way to see at night – don’t ever forget that. She snores from another life. The quality of being led with ones hands tied behind their backs down a corridor of gloom. Footsteps all around you. Music flickering in your memories, all around you – like crowds. Fake ghosts turned off and on. Hounding by a beated rhythm. Iron curtains coming down, repeatedly. Running into the horizon without a care in the world. A white bag flapping around you. You’ve lost your memories. You riffle thru them. Like old car tapes. Chewed and sticky. But enchanted. You just never quite know for sure what the Universe says of you. It’s your little old self and the entire realm of possibility. The end coming again, and again, and again. Dusting off a little time piece, found in the dirt. A microcosm of tiny delights. Ticking down the days. Moving the man hole again. Those adverts played on me. The ones for ghost writers. Lulling those. It’s fake news. Make you question your reality. Backwards rolling tongue thru two rolling pins. Imagine waking up to a forest. All the world is twisting like a rope. Glitching small primates handle mechanized wooden mallets. “Is it normal to lie there and cry?”

QVESTIONS:

What’s your favourite brand of light bulb?

Fake candle bulbs

How often do you regret your future?

Constantly and with insistence

What’s black and blue & red all over?

I believe the answer is a newspaper but arguably several tropical fish

Helicopter drifting with a broken wing thru the jungle

Love is not a tomb

The sky has been that torn yellow colour

For so long now, like alleys that never change

What burns hotter than the sun?

My looooooove

Where do the birds go?

To the moon and back

What is your favourite colour blue?

Midnight

What’s your favourite penny-sweet?

Licorice/Liquorice

Side 1
1. Roots
2. Cautionary
3. Distillation
4. Embers
5. Par

Side 2
6. Incident
7. Lines

8. Voice(d)
9. Songed

Format: Cassette & Download SOLD OUT

Want some more? Click on this beautiful beauty to watch Joe’s stunning video interpretation of Marlo’s track Embers.

Dtub

And then, Dtub. Electric drummer. Live album. Title: Midi-Drum Compositions-1. Edition of 60 tapes

Love this. I was lucky to see Dtub play at the Cowley Club in February on tour with Dunning & Eggplant. A self-contained motorized human-man, riding the unstoppable cycles of his beats, focussed on propelling the rhythms. Snippets of vocals samples woven into wooden timbre. A man engulfed in his unfolding creation. A train. Can’t stop, Can’t get off. Was reminded a week later of standing in the middle of London Road with Tom Roberts of Bolide & Aeolipile – cars driving ‘round us. The bar-maid offering me the choice of a pint or a jug of Cowley beer. Missed work again the next morning. Can’t remember what was on the news that day..

Clockwerk
2. Newbark
Faucet Dub
Bubble Freak
Pump-1989
Hi-Tec House
Jibber-Jabber
Warehouse Jam
Music By Numbers
16-Bit Funk Machine

Format: Cassette & Download SOLD OUT

bowditch

Bowditch. Likes to explore the mysterious and conflate it to highlight our cognition of place, experience, space. Prolific human. Title: Southend Objectified. Edition of 60 cassettes.

Sounds like thumbing a live cable. Juttery, jongery, galloping horses disintegrating, distinctly metallic in regions.

Stuart Bowditch appears inside his website wearing his field recording gear, in front of some stately home. There is horse, a man in armour and a man who has thrown his arms in the air and is hollering, dressed in medieval garb.

I begin to tap my fingers in time to ‘Bear pit’, unaware of myself doing this until I begin to write about it: “found some different tools and got to work on objects and recordings from my home town.”

What’s your favourite breed of pig?

Side A
1. Town Crier’s Bell
2. The Railway Hotel Gents’ Toilet Hand Dryer (Broken)
3. Kenco Coffee Tub

Side B
4. Flooded House
5. Bear Pit (Point B)
6. S.O.U.T.H.E.N.D.
(Sewage Outlet Under Thames Hides Even Nastier Discharge)

Format: Cassette & Download

Jan- Mars Streets Mix is as follows:

Ndolwane Super sounds ‘Umph’ahambe’, Steely Dan ‘Steely Dan God’, Amr Diab ‘Tamally Maak’, Radical Dance Faction ‘Borderline Cases’, The Fall ‘I am Kurious Oranj’.

Put yer listening devices here

Egyptian Dream Book says: “It is the duty of the kidneys to see that the blood keeps pure. Not to make pure blood – the food we do not eat does that – but to remove from the blood all the impurities it has gathered up during its circuit of the body”

“I know, Ben mumbled. “But I didn’t have a motive” – Pg. 17. Mystery Detective.

Over an’ Out Com’s xx

-ooOOOoo-