shuffling huffer: rfm on cannon bone, ivy nostrum, penance stare, depletion and neil campbell
November 10, 2017 at 4:29 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: at a canter, cannon bone, chocolate monk, depletion, genuflection maps, house of bastet, ivy nostrum, lost signals, matching head, neil campbell, nice chapeau records, penance stare, think not of the glasses but of the drink, virgin prunes
Cannon Bone – At a Canter (Nice Chapeau Records)
Ivy Nostrum – Genuflection Maps (No Label)
Penance Stare – House of Bastet (No Label)
Depletion – Lost Signals (Matching Head)
Neil Campbell – Think not of the Glasses but of the Drink (Chocolate Monk)
Cannon Bone – At a Canter (Nice Chapeau Records) Vinyl LP and digital album
Om, Lightning Bolt, Ruins.
Rocking bass and drums duos are thin on the ground eh? So add another much-needed twosome to this proud duo-pile. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Cannon Bone.
Nottingham-based duo Daniel Murray (bass) and Rich Park (drums) reject the ubiquitous six-string and its ceaseless attention-seeking for a solid, dependable rhythm approach that still blisters like hot Szechuan pepper.
The riff becomes the king, repetition the queen and together they rule a land of lurid flexible strings and tightly wound skins.
Half instrumental / half traditional sung-song the ghosts of Roxy Music, Young Marble Giants and the aforementioned Ruins haunt tunes like ‘Seahorse’, ‘Is that OK?’ and ‘Progressive Dancing Shoe’ respectively.
Such an eclectic mix revels in the invention going back-to-basics requires so detail becomes focused on textures, the quality of the fuzz and the dry crack of a snare. It’s so easy to get lost in the canyons of fizzing electricity and compressed air each side plays in a sort of deceptive time-puddle. The more you poke your stick in the deeper it gets.
But all this is mere dressing to the powerfully muscular playing – a rigorous and elemental musical snarl as infectious as Darby Crash’s dental work.
The dynamics are indeed the key here so the punishing pounding is coupled with a delicate tom roll, the explosive bass-harmonix smother a melody that’s perfectly cherry, cherry.
Like a horseshoe in a boxing glove – K.O. to Cannon Bone!
Ivy Nostrum – Genuflection Maps (No Label) Lurid pink Cassette
Two side-long constructions pieced together by the fair hand of RFM scrivener Paul Margree.
The helpful sleeve notes say these pieces feature the autoharp (broken), domestic field recordings and free sound among other wonderful things. But what they don’t say is how damn lovely some of this is.
The autoharp pieces are bright and sunny; each broken pluck becomes a golden beam of light. The electronic bleats are neither too sharp nor too gritty and seem to be formed instead from fresh pink marzipan being all smooth and almondy.
Side B ‘We Weren’t Really Dressed for the Weather’ features some speech software rattling around like an embarrassed Orac in a ruptured poly tunnel until the autoharp make another Wicca appearance. Lo-impact movements clatter like Tupperware underneath some charming whistling.
But of course…like much musique concrète it’s the placement that makes the thing sing. I don’t know why a low undulating throb sits so perfectly with human-child chatter and bulbous metallic ringing. But it does…it most certainly does.
Not sure where you can even grab this pink tape – tweeting @PaulMargree might be a good place to start yeah.
Penance Stare – House of Bastet (No Label) Cassette and digital album
Ex-Etai Keshiki and Melting’s, ELN plays all manner of guitars, basses, synths, drum machines and effects boxes to create a super-dark compressed tablet of riffage on the mighty House of Bastet.
A true one-woman-black-metal-band she does what is seemingly impossible and makes a drum machine really swing on awesome closer ‘Bleaken’ as it well and truly admonishes the gas-bloated riffs. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
These four songs seem to blur the edges between industrial, shoegaze and black metal taking the most interesting elements of each and dousing it with lighter fluid. For an old duffer like me, who, although a fan, doesn’t listen to metal much anymore this is a breath of fresh air.
Opener ‘Persona Non Grata’ has the heft of Godflesh yet the brutal riffs are played with an almost funk sense of timing – it’s all about the accents and half-spaces; rejecting the 4/4 for a more freewheeling, loose attack. ‘A Lack of All Things’ and ‘Moon in Scorpio’ , are no-less heavy and feature ultra-disturbed vocals buried way, way deep in the mix so they sound almost like the wind rushing through nude branches.
This tape plays the same on both sides so before long I’m back to that killer fourth track ‘Bleaken’. And now I’m more accustomed to the black-grammar I can make out the faintest howls under that pulverising thrashing – squaring that circle, lighting the thirteenth candle.
Thanks – Andy Crow for extra journalistic brain-power on this one.
Depletion – Lost Signals (Matching Head) One-sided Cassette
Cold psychic disturbance from Depletion all wrapped up in black and grey photocopies.
Never one for pure noise-for-noise-sake Martyn Reid pitches his monochrome tones against each other creating deft occult harmonics.
The opener ‘Intra Muros’ sets up a warm baffling of feathered obstacles. The soft oily edges soon reveal sharp poisoned barbs but only after you realise your ankles are streaked with blood.
‘Elegy’ appears to be a gradually descending note made of brushed steel that’s being dragged down an underpass. The heavy throb of traffic makes the concrete rumble until all begins to vibrate in electric unison.
Machine thinking is captured on ‘Synthex 1’. Let’s be honest…it was never going to be the mechanical clanking predicted in the 1950s but more like this smooth logical curve – effortlessly coiling and unwinding picking up the stray debris of algebra and the universal language of mathematics. And what does that mean for ‘Synthex 2’? As this has an altogether more abrasive feel, toothed and barbaric in places even, I guess the machines have discovered capitalism.
The dramatic closer ‘Deaths Door’ finally seems to make sense of the cryptic dedication to Virginia Maskell mentioned on the sleeve. A shuffling huffer, there is no clean machinery or warm analogue here. This is the foul breath of an underground tube tunnel; meaty-moist and sweetly overpowering. The resulting shuddering shakes like a wet dog with arcs of spray as crooked as arthritic fingers.
Neil Campbell – Think not of the Glasses but of the Drink (Chocolate Monk) CD-r
When I was a young teen a dusty, many-dubbed tape circulated my group of friends. Handed down from an older brother or sister (I forget which) it contained songs by The Very Things, Alien Sex Fiend, Ausgang and The Virgin Prunes. For me this was a Rosetta Stone document. Being under 18 (and looking it) I had no way into the underground culture of clubs. Records were expensive and most zines I had access to ignored this fascinating middle ground between the chart pop I’d been brought up on and the weirdness I’d sniffed but couldn’t quite locate.
I’m guessing Neil Campbell had a similar moment but was obviously knocked hardest by The Virgin Prunes. Hard enough for him to claim them as his favourite band – and I’m sure you can all remember how important and considered that personal accolade is when you are a young person*.
But what does it all sound like? These are ‘re-imaginings and reactions to’ rather than straight covers I’m guessing. On ‘Political Problems’ Neil’s rich baritone voice intones a set of eldritch lines, at first reading like poetry and then slipping and sliding over each other to end up perilously looped ‘like a crazy singer in a band that’s lost for words’ over Neil’s signature wet electronic squelch.
Teasing us with an almost four minute fade-in ‘Red Metal’ conjures up micro-moments of guitar pick and electric squall in a lovely, lovely drift-piece. Gradually shifting like winter sunlight this warms up the bones like a good chicken soup and somehow makes me feel pretty darn Christmas-y!
The closer, a Bongwater-esque, ‘No Clouds were in the Sky’ is quite beautiful. A folk-tinged wriggle of acoustic guitar loops/looped vocals/spoken word/freak-out electricals all writhing like fresh chicks in a nest.
Innocent? You bet. And with innocence possibly one of the hardest emotions to get right in music I’m sure that Gavin Friday would be delighted.
*I’m assuming you are an oldster like me eh?
Cannon Bone Bandcamp / Cannon Bone World
-ooOOoo-
nostradamus, quill in hand: rfm on street beers, ali robertson, dopaminos, feghoots, wizards of oi and richard youngs
November 1, 2017 at 9:15 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: alex drool, ali robertson, chocolate monk, collette robertson, collette robinson, dopaminos, drew wright, dwindling correspondence, eran sachs, evp, feghoots, giant tank, manuel padden, number stations, occam's hairbrush, ourodisc, pete cann, richard youngs, shortwave radio, street beers, voice text converter, wizards of oi, wizzard, wot is not
Street Beers – Seriously Hot (Chocolate Monk)
Ali Robertson & Guests (Giant Tank)
Dopaminos – Occam’s Hairbrush (Ourodisc)
Feghoots – Dwindling Correspondence (Chocolate Monk)
Wizards of Oi – Wot it is Not (Chocolate Monk)
Richard Youngs – For Shortwave Radio and Voice Text Converter (Chocolate Monk)
Street Beers – Seriously Hot (Chocolate Monk) CD-r
Newish jaxx from conceptualist, comic-lover and one half of the mighty Usurper – it’s Ali Robertson’s Street Beers.
A brief two-parter featuring a host of voices (Karen Constance [whose 100-page eye gouge ‘Optic Rabble Arouses’ is currently ripping my retina – search for copies sucka], Tina Krekels, Elkka Nyoukis, Dylan Nyoukis, Collette Robertson and one silent and unnamed Ice Cream seller) this disc meditates on the very British notion of a summer hit by recording a vicious wind blowing into a condenser mic and adding repetitive spoken word riffs via the synthetic marimba parts in Frank Zappa’s Jazz from Hell? Just like Whigfield did.
A German-speaking / English language / Scottish dialect text piece takes in mentions of Castle Greyskull and the Eurovision Song Contest in a stream of everyday observations glimpsed from beneath a heavy curly fringe. Powerful images are run through a clutch of mouths adding the particular emphasis and personal inflection that makes us all individual humans. It ain’t what you do eh?
In equal parts baffling yet academically vital this cleverly orchestrated confection is interrupted by one of the world’s greatest sounds – a ruler twanging off a desk – that somehow apes the massive and bassy reverberations of Sunn O))) or something.
It’s looped into abstraction. Captured chatter and accidental singing whirl through the massed ‘bbbbrrrrrrrrr’ in a dense fog.
Who needs dry ice with sounds so gaseous?
Ali Robertson & Guests (Giant Tank) CD-r in a greetings card-style package and free digital album
Three no-star jamz in exotic locations with erotic personnel.
First up it’s a sixteen minute table-top affair from Ali with heavy-hitting guests Alex Drool and Eran Sachs. Various gentle clutter-movements, simple tape-gasps and the presence of little mouths make this an almost ASMR-style listen. The crinkly crackle, busy pace and full-spectrum scrape are filling my tiny ears with tiny sounds but top-up my tiny brain with big, big pictures. Like staring at the Grand Canyon through a polo mint – the detail exists around the fragrant edges.
The cream in the sponge comes courtesy of our host with Manuel Padding and Collette Robertson. Without any of the oddball yuks this is a beautiful tape/performance piece of gentle clicks and solitary word play. The whirr of the tape engines adds a 100 tog warmth to the creaks, recorded footsteps and groans. Each word (Dutch possibly? I dunno) are spoken with the world-weariness of a sleep-deprived parent. Kindly but devastatingly hollow. Exactly the sort of thing slow radio was made for. CLASSIC!
The final hectic jam is a marvel of chunter and small talk. Pub bantz, motor racing raspberries and inane local newspaper junk is run through some form of goosey phone app by either Mr A Robertson or Mr Drew Wright (take your pick) to create a 5 min melange attempting to answer – ‘what are men actually for?’
Dopaminos – Occam’s Hairbrush (Ourodisc) CD and wee booklet and digital album
This mysterious disc was slipped into my hand at TUSK festival by a furtive shadow.
Warned, “It’s a bit of a one off.” I dropped this one into the playing slot as soon as was decent.
These eleven brief tracks of sketchy synth pop are pretty much all formed on some vintage YAMAHA PSS-570 machine found in the back of a leaky cupboard. This disc takes pre-sets to a new level of ‘fuh’. Digital noise clouds intrude on the bop-a-long rhythm settings, a ‘tiss…tiss…tiss’ snare sound and the ravaged mumble of some laid-back ‘singing.’
But what’s clear is the vision. A singular approach to wringing all that is good and great out of crappy equipment. Pushing at the boundaries of what is possible, probable and generally tasteful.
Examples? ‘Bosch in Crayola’ is a 9 speed-metal pianola on digital time. ‘Esoteric Voice Research’ could be the ultra-unknown Co Durham bedroom-band Guns R Great, ‘Primordial Soup Exotica’ the weed-drenched wobble of a teenage Ween. ‘VWL RMVR’ is undeniably attention-deficit rumba. But things become perfectly formed on ‘More Confident’ as it gets down and dark with hypnotic self-help tapes battling a twig-dry beat and the sound of men crying. The ludicrous melody quivers like tangerine jelly melting over hot chips.
File directly between Robert Ridley-Shackleton and Keyboard Money Mark.
Feghoots – Dwindling Correspondence (Chocolate Monk) CD-r
New booty from horror film aficionado and noise-music abbot Pete Cann.
For those expecting dramatic fuzz and explosive squeal you need to re-calibrate your lugs as Feghoots trades in small-scale weird.
Opener ‘Alif Showcase’ features the microscopic wrench of rubber gloves. Elsewhere a peanut is dropped into a decorative Turkish beaker as Pete opens and reseals one of those stiff Amazon cardboard envelopes (Let Down Hair).
A shifting polystyrene crunch forms the base layer of ‘Shy Vein’ making this the noisiest offer but with owls hooting in harmony over the top any fist-pumping gets strictly Autumn Watch… it’s as mesmerising as lumpy frogspawn sculptures.
Analogue breath clicks through dry lungs on ‘Stirrup Residue’ while your roommate cleans the toaster of congealed cheese slices. The ill-tempered scrape soon melts into antique electronics and domestic field recordings.
The penultimate piece ‘Tenderloiner’ features the lightsaber sparkle of Atsuhiro Ito with the timing of a bird in the hand. The flickering and flighty splutters mimic a barista’s recurring dreams of hot steamed milk. At one point I swear a double bass makes an entrance and I realise I’m getting randy for Feghoots and John Edwards to collaborate. We gotta make this happen my well-connected readers!
A finality is reached on ‘Adze Rotor’ which may or may not be the digital processing of foul water sounds captured in both Leeds and Bradford. The gently swinging coda sweeps away any unpleasantness to focus on the slow rush of oncoming sleep.
Add a notch – Feghoots makes me nod like a Moorhen.
Wizards of Oi – Wot it is Not (Chocolate Monk) CD-r
There’s something about this disc that makes me think of the much-missed kings of otherness Reynols.
Possibly they share the murkiness and free, looseness of that mind-bending crew but what do I know? It just sounds wonderfully slack to me.
While it is important to mention W.O.O are only two small bears (who ably manage to handle drums, trumpet, swanee-whistle, dirt-guitar, Wurlitzer and gloomy vocals between their four little paws) the songs are studio-enriched with foul chicken drippings.
Effects are fully ladled on to these jams landing exactly between Teo Macero and King Tubby so even the straightest opening ends up in a double valley of rainbow-reverb. Just try ‘#Trumpets of Jericho’ or ‘#Metal Gardening’ if you doubt me.
But delicious difference is the order of the day with the too-brief ‘#Cool Pizza and a Beer’ sounding like the birth of Ska replayed by Renaldo and The Loaf in a grain silo.
It’s immediately followed by ‘#Thunderbird Glossalia’; a study for squeezed rodent and the Wurlitzer in the sort of time signature that would make Moondog honk. When the dust clears super-distorted voices chant insistent curses while the boys sharpen their knives on sopping calf’s liver.
There’s no mercy! When stripped back to basics (guitar and drums) like on ‘#Crayolish Oisters’ it kicks no less brittle. As if 10 Years After lost their fingers in a blues-related accident – this is the sound of the milkman ruefully cleaning up.
Closer, the intricate ‘#Free Jatz’, couples carefully controlled amp-fritz/saxophone bink with a snare-less drum snatch. All the better for the boom!
Possibly contains a Volcano da’ Bunk or something placing this firmly on the creaking essential pile.
Richard Youngs – For Shortwave Radio and Voice Text Converter (Chocolate Monk) CD-r
Richard Young’s work has been a kind of shadow that’s floated around my head for about 25 years. Every time I think – that’s it – that’s the definitive Youngs he comes out with another idea to top the last. A chocolate fountain of a man he’s spewed out another rich brown mess too tasty to resist.
I guess this is what some beards would call a process piece. So RY follows his own instructions…
- Record a shortwave radio. I used anywhere on the dial that sounded pleasing.
2. Imitate the sound of the shortwave radio into a voice to text converter.
3. Cut and paste the resulting text into a text to speech converter.
4. Press play and record the result alongside original shortwave. Stretch to fit.
5. Repeat.
A clever approach for sure but snazzy brains don’t always make great music yeah? (see Brian Eno).
This is of course marvellous. Like the freakiest number stations or creepiest Electronic Voice Phenomena this exists in the limbo between found sound and dream logic.
Disembodied voices speak an almost-language, part-words form some yet-to-be-unencrypted dialect they pinch a brain node but leave any meaning wanting. Sweeping from ear to ear they sound like they are warning me of something and make me scratch my pate like Nostradamus, quill in hand, hot to translate.
The shortwave pulses flutter as a jammed signal – pitchy whoops and spelks high in my hearing range.
Imagine a ghost captured on camera but then you find out the ghost that’s been deliberately summoned.
How does that make you feel? How does that make you really feel?
-ooOOoo-
The RFM tag team special: Chrissie Caulfield on Vera Bremerton and Joe Posset on Stuart Chalmers and Three Eyed Makara
September 3, 2017 at 8:20 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: chocolate monk, chrissie caulfield, crow versus crow, loop phantasy, moonmilk roof, songs of apostasy, stuart chalmers, three eyed makara, vera bremerton
Vera Bremerton – Songs of Apostasy EP (Self Release)
Stuart Chalmers – Loop Phantasy No 4 (Chocolate Monk)
Three Eyed Makara – Moonmilk Roof (Crow Versus Crow)
Vera Bremerton – Songs of Apostasy EP (Self Release) CD and digital album
I first encountered Vera Bremerton when I was looking for people to play a gig with my band CSMA in London a couple of years ago. Vera’s submission was an early one but I knew at once she’d got the job. Here was someone with high-end musical skills in composition and performance, and theatricality in spades.
The performance she gave that day was electrifying (I heartily recommend the video I made of it) and I was sorry that she didn’t have anything recent on Bandcamp for me to review for the good readers of this blog. There were releases on her Bandcamp site, but they all dated from quite a bit earlier than I was writing for.
Well now she has a new EP out. And it’s as amazing as I’d hoped, though sadly it’s only 3 tracks long. The solution to this is, of course, to play it twice.
Tracks 1 and 4 open with a quiet industrial beat which draws you in gently before hitting you flat in the face. It’s total distorted headbanging stuff, and this is before the vocals have even started. Once they do, the two voices (both Bremerton of course) provide a fascinating and disturbing narrative. There’s the powerful, diabolical alto voice and the gently, tortured soprano who disappears from the song totally, and disturbingly, in the middle.
The thing this most reminds me of is Schnittke’s Faust Cantata. The tonality is of a similar style as is the two opposing voices being played off against each other – sadly the great man was not so much into industrial beats. The double-voice effect is something Vera does amazingly well live as you will have seen if you took my advice and watched the video I mentioned above.
This is Amy Winehouse teamed up with Björk in Scrapheap Challenge (don’t ask me who they’re playing against, probably Bananarama, who stand no chance) and it’s utterly glorious.
Tracks 2 and 5 are a less frenetic affair. I do love the opening to this, to me it sounds like a household object being tortured. This eases you gently into the main body of the track, but the rattle of the opening comes back to ‘rattle’ you at regular intervals (sorry, couldn’t resist). The distorted beats of the first track are still there but they provide more of a menacing ostinato for Vera to sing a longer line over. The words here are less distinct (though that might just be my ear infection playing up). Regardless, I don’t think there are any until around 2 minutes in [subs: please check this].
A version of the rattling from the beginning brings the track to a temporary halt around 2:40, it’s a lovely moment of potential calm as the reverb tail dies away, but then the whole thing comes back in, harder than ever. More layers are added to both the vocal lines and the beats, with that terrifying knocking coming back harder than ever. Sit tight in your seat for this one.
Tracks 3 and 6 have a much longer, calmer opening. Though ‘calmer’ is probably not the right word. Yes I chose it … and now I regret it. Sorry. Spooky would be much nearer. There’s a gentle synth drone with occasional punctuations from what sounds like an infernal machine winding up to perform some terrible function. The lyrics “Do what you will ….” increase the discomfort until the track explodes into ultra-violence at around 2:10. Despite the re-occurrence of the ‘spooky’ section after this and the words ‘mangled and torn, my body …’ there IS more violence to come. Luckily for the listeners, we only get torn apart emotionally.
The track’s coda is an almost normal-sounding drum beat that dissolves into the final verse that sounds as though it’s supposed to be more optimistic, but really you’re not so sure about that, I suspect it’s more ‘death as final release’. An extract from a Dido’s Lament for the 21st century.
In short – (and this EP is too short) I’m totally in love with this music. There’s sensitivity and subtlety even in the more violent sections. You can hear the care that has been taken over the production, even on laptop or phone speakers the intensity is enough to ensnare you and pull you totally into Vera’s amazing world.
More please.
Stuart Chalmers – Loop Phantasy No 4 (Chocolate Monk) CDr and digital album
Fantasy jam indeed!
At first I thought the King of the Loops was creating an homage to veteran loopers: Terry Riley, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. An audacious loop experiment bringing old beards up-to-date and squealing back into the Underground after years of Sunday Supplement worship.
But no…not a note, fizz or drone comes from these id-wrinklers. This is a total Chalmers jam and even more the special for it.
Imagine shifting colours of sweet sparkle or the greasy swoop of a bird’s wing. That’s ‘Rainbows Dancing in Your Head’ a sound so perfectly concave it mirrors the chilly impression made by a neat ice cream scoop. Cup your palms together to visualise the roundness of sound. Place them over your ears to hear the sea-shell-sloshing. It’s a celebration of all things wave-like and flowing.
Naked loops, complete with old-school tape-stutter, starts off ‘Flying Dervishes of the Recycled Choir’ – the mid-note cut-off forms a spooky base over which pumping organs throb warm, wet air. The choir moves from baritone to soprano (probably) with the novel swivel of a pitch wheel. Upping the creepy ante – is this the new music for The Omen?
‘Bedroom Hypnotica’ takes a single point of shining metal (a captured droplet of cymbal crash?) that is pushed and pulled into a <><><><><><><>< shape. Opening and closing – it’s a grown up tinkle…like glitter had a noise. A disco ball seen through mediaeval stained glass: a million points of light reflecting from across those dark centuries illumining the very human need for elevation.
Phew!
After all that sparkle things get gritty on, ‘Yorkshire Folk Song Played and Sung by the Cloud Forest Nomads’, uncovered field recordings of nasal bamboo flutes played in God’s Own Country. The reedy wheezing soon becomes part of the Chalmers palette to be spread thick with supple knife and greasy fingers. A double-loop quality makes this bounce like a basketball with a rich orange resonance. The coda darkens the edges of the frame with an unknown quality, a pensive ‘what’s going on?’ that balances the lightness perfectly.
‘Unfurl’? Classic Frippertronics being fed through the most agreeable Metal Machine Music filter: sounds pop and warble, meshing as tight as fibers becoming colourful felt.
But this sweet Phantasy is brought to a close with the strident ‘Refuseniks Austerity Levitation’, an interrupted drum loop submits to the treatment building extra arms and legs, kicking and punching like Prince Paul hired Hal Blaine for a De La/Chalmers jam.
And if that’s not swollen your pocket I’m giving up! Carve these letters on a laurel leaf and place firmly behind the ear – S.C. K.O.T.L.
Those in the know will wink their glazzies for sure.
Three Eyed Makara – Moonmilk Roof (Crow Versus Crow) Cassette and digital album
Collective wood-music from a travelling band of hoiks and bawdy villains!
This honk, clatter and scrape feeds directly into my spine hole pushing out all the bad-vibe juice and letting a fresh-flowing sunlight course though the bones. It’s a liquid loving that nourishes and warms me. A marzipan manna that fills my soul and sweeps the bitter tears from my eyes!
I hear you…get back to the typewriter man for some sensible descriptions of what the devil is going on.
Strictly speaking I’d file this under group-think free improvisation with contributions (this time) from:
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh – Viola
Djuna Keen – Saxophone
Natalia Beylis – Mandobird & Electronics
Willie Stewart – Snare & Floortom & Gong
It steers a path that’s well beyond the jazz zone and creeping into something far more rootsy and dew-scented. Like silver-edged ferns these pieces untangle themselves from tightly coiled buds and shudder into rude life – proudly standing tall among the scrabbling weeds.
The mixture of primitive and modern is deftly balanced. Open-throated sax honks battle the drumming menace on ‘Half Blind Valley’ in a jam that could have graced a crusade (or something).
But ‘Oolite and Pitch’ sounds like the Company Week crew took the whole darn show out of the city and into a mushroom circle to play for the assembled fire-sprites. A manic sawing is the thing that swings, loosening my rivets, as I duck and swerve the brass knuckles and soft drum implosions.
It’s a dance of familiar textures but sewn together in a new way, a patchwork if you will, that can be comforting and saucily intimate. It turns hollow around the 11 minute mark. All that bluster and howling, all the defiant bomb-like snare work begin to shuffle round a tree stump like sodden campers. The final minutes are shrouded in electronic mist (lost White Noise tracks discovered in an old tin can?) that makes each rattle and bleat glow like menacing eyes viewed through a grimy window.
Before I know it the moss is growing through my toes…
Stuart Chalmers Bandcamp / Chocolate Monk
Crow Versus Crow Superstore
-ooOOoo-
vintage segs: rfm on binnsclagg, dayglow exploding super infinite, dr:wr and katz mulk
July 30, 2017 at 6:16 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: binnsclagg, bring back hanging, chocolate monk, dayglow exploding super infinite, dillusion.dot.dot.dot, dr:wr, husks, karl m v waugh, katz mulk, our shadow days, singing knives, thf drenching, verity spott, weightless and everywhere
Binnsclagg arranged by THF Drenching – Bring Back Hanging (Chocolate Monk)
Dayglow Exploding Super Infinite – Weightless and Everywhere, Drizzled in Honey (disillusion.dot.dot.dot)
DR:WR – Our Shadow Days (Eps 1 – 3) (No label)
Katz Mulk – Husks (Singing Knives)
Binnsclagg arranged by THF Drenching – Bring Back Hanging (Chocolate Monk) CDr
Operatic junk-melt from two salty coves is stirred by a third with a runcible spoon.
Beard, Karl M V Waugh & non-beard, Verity Spott have cooked up a shot of pure Binnsclagg and injected straight into Drenno’s eyeball. The last flickering spasms from the Council of Drent’s most celebrated son register on some sort of Beaufort scale (for skronk) and gets marked-up in felt tip ‘fresh gale – twigs break off trees, cluttered sounds smudge gravity.’
Clear enough yeah?
Sense-valves are squeezed firmly from the middle to let the chum squirm rudely out, forming foul brown pyramids:
rhythmic pulses throb like a sore thumb,
granulated ripping precedes a spoken word interlude,
old coins are rubbed on a vintage slate,
the TV chatter is tuned to the Mr T show,
lobbying voices blabber and honk,
synths are employed as security guards,
overloaded sections create vital grab-zones to ponder and chew bitter herb,
ghostly organs invoke the dark heart of Blackpool; pure shredding
six-handed – with a swingers firm grip
A mess? Of course not.
Bring Back Hanging aches like the tight tangle of poetry.
Dayglow Exploding Super Infinite – Weightless and Everywhere, Drizzled in Honey (disillusion.dot.dot.dot) cheap-o digital album
This accidental-static, fluff osmosis is exactly the kind of sound The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and their foul type have tried to scrub out of existence, stomp into history, for years
The exact moral opposite of Anthony, Flea (and the other two) this rotten, fluttering pop crackles in my ears like a dry cotton bud chasing a rogue insect for about 37 minutes.
There’s no funk or no punk in this energetic splutter; indeed there is no jazz or blues either. But this is unmistakably rock n’ roll, the closing moments of ‘Collapsing Droplets’ as badazz as Link Wray’s low-down Rumble; greasy D.A. aloft and flick knife tucked into his waistband.
If all else is true the lengthy ‘Once we Considered Surrender’ is surely the ballad, a slow dance of chittering typewriter keys and radio interference. Somehow wetter than its companions the spitting sonics play out more like a garden hose being repeatedly stepped on-off-on-off in a herky-jerky dance.
Uncomplicated, but of course vibrating with coded meanings only the in-crowd can decode.
A whop-bam-a-loo-bop-a-whop-bam-boo!
DR:WR – Our Shadow Days (Eps 1 – 3) (No label) gratis digital album
A tone-desert as barren as Catterick Lorry Park
Oily loops of reverb’ed somethings snake in sinister circles; a gentle rumble is the slowest drummer – like yeast picked up the brushes. ‘Dream Pollutants’ feels like some Replicant code-patch to increase anxiety and paranoia – take it slow Skin Jobs.
Lazily shifting shapes tip on hidden hinges to reflect a sooty light on ‘an attempt at exhuming nowhere’. The see-saw effect makes this a meditative piece suitable for a trek in Nepal or charity shopping. Those times when you need to make peace with your creator (whoever she is) and open yourself to the bounty of the universe. The final five minutes introduce giant’s steps plodding through the bog; slow and steady.
A thoughtless ohm thrown down a dark corridor? ‘Prebranded Features’ invokes Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves ‘ with its eerie voicing’s that seem to endlessly descend into some unknowable horror. Compact and neat this piece never stalls or chokes. The layered lines lay as thick and deep as velvet; both opulent and oddly cloying.
But is it as bleak as the famed garrison town? Give me answers dear reader.
Katz Mulk – Husks (Singing Knives) laser cut and risoprint booklet of performance notes with digital album
Three fine brains (Kearney, Morris, Knight) take a bunch of recordings made in public and private and wrap them up in a galactic stew with extra lashings of arm and leg movement.
This really is an arresting listen. Each element: processed sound, voice and dripping percussion exists in a separate timeframe that I have to punch through sideways. Viewed this way, along three separate planes, an extra dimension is revealed – a swooping movement that is felt like warm breath on the cheek rather than simply being seen or heard.
Like a velvet glove inside an iron fist…or should that be the other way around? Heck…either way this disc demands attention. I’ll settle for the ‘kid’s rattle full of dead wasps’ analogy; a sting in reverse, a memory of potential discomfort.
‘Temperament’ spills like wet chrome. Including a cheeky reference to the band rather than the metal a future face presents itself – handsome in profile.
A processed whispering infects ‘Yes like a Cheetah.’ Below the chanting it squats waiting for the echoing ‘clack’ balancing the freezer burn amp-huffing on Andrea Kearney’s perfectly timed Cuban finger clicks. High on rum I feel gloriously wasted.
Slushy-sound, slow like a glacier with levels of engagement pinned between the gritty ice? I’m picking up much, much more than ‘A Leaf, A Gourd, A Sack’ anyways. The tap-dancing of Ben Morris (on vintage segs if I’m not mistaken) chatters like joke teeth, running this track out into a leaky void.
Moving furniture around an electricity sub-station seems to be the basis of ‘Y Gang’. Ben Knight’s voice is a hyena chorus – savannah cackling and bone-crushing moans. The floor flexes making way for a living tarmacadam demon!
That secret lemonade drinker, Beyonce Knowles, is clearly heard on title track ‘Husks’ her high-tech and passionate R’n’B blunted via discarded garden chairs and blackened disposable barbecues.
The full twelve minute masterpiece ‘Meat Stories’ continues the dripping theme. I’m stuck in a time cave! My mind is an echo chamber. A discomforting shift occurs, like a muscular tick you’re trying to suppress when the silken sound shimmer suddenly turns sickly. Like an overdose of mustard you can’t get the yellow whiff out of your hair for days.
Katz Mulk revel in the uneasy space between healthy concern and full-blown paranoia.
-ooOOoo-
a yeasty upstairs room: rfm on blood stereo, stuart chalmers & neil campbell, rlw & dylan nyoukis and the custodians
July 23, 2017 at 3:42 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: blood stereo, chocolate monk, dylan nyoukis, gukuruguh, in the vicinity of the reversing pool, neil campbell, ralf wehowsky, stuart chalmers, the custodians, the grape that takes no prisoners, where there's raw grace in garbage
Blood Stereo – Where There’s Raw Grace in Garbage (Chocolate Monk)
Stuart Chalmers & Neil Campbell – In the Vicinity of the Reversing Pool (No Label)
RLW & Dylan Nyoukis – Gukuruguh (Chocolate Monk)
The Custodians – The Grape That Takes No Prisoners (Chocolate Monk)
Blood Stereo – Where There’s Raw Grace in Garbage (Chocolate Monk) CDr
The wet-slippage of malfunctioning MP3 files or possibly a functional electronic sound – say the alarm in an overloaded lift – starts this single 37 minute grunt.
Over the course of the next half hour there are more than a few moments to treasure…
- Cannibalised spoken word overlaps a low moaning (licked forefinger rubbed over smoked glass coffee table?) in perfect sympathy…a ghostly parrot chatters the syllables in strict timing.
- 10cc’s tape loops hijacked for the ‘oooooooo’s’ and pulled through Kolkata in a handcart.
- “What is this shadow in which we come?”asks an inquisitive voice.
- A brief movement scored for plastic packaging materials, ring modulator and rain on a tin roof.
- The matrix recording of coins dropped into hot syrup is re-mastered with a Joe Meek mind.
The sink gurgles and psychedelic reportage are kept to a minimum though to concentrate on rhythm in all its forms, for this is Blood Stereo’s most spacious record yet.
Dry, echoing ‘clonks’ and ‘squarks’ are placed carefully into the mix – but not with a dictator’s swagger stick. Rather the gardener’s crisp carrot! These, sounds are encouraged to grow, swell and bloom. The fullness of the harvest is a testament to this pair of green-thumbs, nipping and tweaking, composting and watering their bumper crop.
But fear not goofs! It’s not all serious trousers – there are still yuks in this mix. The family (sound) portraits and the occasional snot-nosed sniff make an appearance before the truly beautiful, final movement of antique telephone engaged-tones and exotic hot breath-waffles.
Blood Stereo’s statement is clear…from the trash I create diamonds, from the unheard and unloved I fashion unique listening flaps.
Aye. That’s the grace all right.
Stuart Chalmers & Neil Campbell – In the Vicinity of the Reversing Pool (no label) CDr and digital album
Two monarchs ruling together in the kingdom of the Reversing Pool.
This super-sick collaboration takes the idea of loops and propels it into the negative zone where all laws of physics are crudely tippexed out.
That’s not to imply it’s lumpen. No way! There’s a real delicacy to these swooping spirals, like a collection of rare ceramics spinning in a vortex. You catch the occasional blurred pattern, a hint of Royal Doulton perhaps, that you can hang your hat on but your brain is mostly taken up with the sheer majesty of complex, cyclical movement (deep in the reversing pool).
‘Star Camera’ must be a J-Pop K-Hole. The baffled drum loop, a soft beat, slipping in and out of reality as our avatar (probably dressed as Sailor Moon) squawks an electric fudge.
The whirling, swirling miasma doesn’t let up quickly. Even the slurred vocal starting ‘Slipping Slipping’ is part of a greater orbit. A sort of cosmic churning taking in smears of electric guitar and fizziling keyboard washes.
A reprieve is served on ‘Detitrus on Old Bank’ and ‘Migrating Dirge’. They are looser for sure but spinning just as fast creating sparks that ‘zip’ off my xylophone and makes me ring my bicycle bell with abandon. By the final minute ‘Detritus…’ has turned into solid jam. ‘…Dirge’ jingles like pennies in a sock; a curious bank or preparation for the borstal breakout?
A joyful noise unto the creator – you bettchya sweet cakes.
RLW & Dylan Nyoukis – Gukuruguh (Chocolate Monk) CDr
Stone-cold classic tape-werks from wonk-central: Chocolate Monk.
(adopts HBO voiceover pose)
“Previously on Chocolate Monk…
Dee Nyoukis shifts his spittle at the Nefertiti Jazz Club, Gothenburg six or seven years ago and pledges the live tapes to one Ralf Wehowsky, legendary thinker and doer who unleashes several gallons of whup, whup all over them.
The result is an interchangeable reality sauce, or something. “
The Nyoukis-vox tapes are a shadowy presence and tend to inhabit the corners and dado rails of this mix while RLW slathers on huge scoops of itchy sound. At times it’s a fine violin, a recognisable sound fragment that adds a kind of sign-post, indicating the way.
At others it’s a deep abstract scribble. Like an IRCAM-heavy squall the sheets of sound are utterly alien and yet comfortably retro-fitted. Before you can polish your specs a granulated ripping peppers things, spicing lengthy tracks ‘Left Shoe’ and ‘Right Shoe’ up hot!
Sounds tend to whizz more than I am used to filling up my room with blank swoops or popping-mud farts. Dylan’s strangulated vox get pinched further via squealing Ralf-manoeuvres; pitched up through your appendix scar and out via your nostril. A silver thread seems pulled through me aching Gulliver scrambling my mind eggs.
Can I mention Varèse in this punk-ass blog? Eek! I guess I did. Well some of the ‘Right Shoe’ movements are percussive clatter-boxes – part Ionisation part Goldie’s Metalheadz crew but all bookended with damp squelching like a thick milkshake being sucked.
A disc for damn voyagers and heroes.
The Custodians – The Grape That Takes No Prisoners (Chocolate Monk) CDr
Top-quality brain-scrape from double-saxed trio with added Bohman power!
If you were to do a google image search for ‘Englishness’ I’m sure the old clichés of well-oiled cricket pitches and fluffy cream teas get fetched up before long*.
But for me…nothing seems more English than a ragged mess of electronics/objects balanced on a pub table in a yeasty upstairs room.
Imagine the very polite anticipation as we stand around waiting for some beard (Adam Bohman) to rummage about in the confusion and wrench out an antique-shop clattering. Picture the sympathetic tones coaxed out of some saxophones (Adrian Northover & Sue Lynch) – but not too loud mind!
And in this way The Custodians are the most English of groups. Perhaps it’s the practice habitual orderly queuing creates that explains the space each player leaves making this an altogether charming listen.
But how do these Toby Jugs come together, what’s the chatter yeah?
A double-barrelled approach divides performances into either:
- thin sax tones floating over industrious sawing and dry chitter / picture Ronnie Scott’s after closing time with the roaches skittering around brass holes or…
- bi-narratives/tri-narratives weaving sense in, out and around both my pink ears like the dusty graveyard where radio plays go to die. These talking pieces make the tired old brain work HARD. It’s almost like there is a loop of text that keeps getting manipulated live between Adam, Adrian and Sue as painterly touches of soft-round brass spread buttery glee. No mercy!
The audacious tri-narrative; ‘King and Queen-Traction and Wine’ squeezes my head-sponge good with its three-fold reading text-loops, pitched squeal and wonderful steam train noises making it all tip-top and tally ho!
A real Babel is unleashed on ‘Tlotm variations’ where our three friends are joined by linguaphone tapes running backwards / forwards / sideways pressing all sense though a reality sieve until all that remains is a flapping jaw and soft wet tongue.
*don’t bother to check the validity of this – in reality a Google Image search for Englishness is predictably awful
Neil Campbell Big Cartel / Stuart Chalmers Bandcamp
-ooOOoo-
pick-up truck vocabulary: joe murray on crow versus crow, faniel dord, stefan jaworzyn/dylan nyoukis/seymour glass, the tenses & bren’t lewiis ensemble and the viper
March 17, 2017 at 8:37 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: bren't lewiis ensemble, bufms, chocolate monk, crow versus crow, crow versus crow editions, dante's ashtray, donk, dylan nyoukis, faniel dord, fonk, joe murray, seymour glass, skronk, stefan jaworzyn, the tenses, the viper
Crow Versus Crow – States (Crow Versus Crow Editions)
Faniel Dord – Faniel Dord (Dante’s Ashtray)
Stefan Jaworzyn, Dylan Nyoukis, Seymour Glass – My Disgusting Heart (Chocolate Monk)
The Tenses & Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble – Daughter of the Boot (Chocolate Monk)
The Viper – Art for Pain’s Sake (BUFMS)
Crow Versus Crow – States (Crow Versus Crow Editions) 3 inch CD and 20 page art-zine photo booklet
This beautiful package comes sandwiched between plain grey heavystock card; the sombre plainness a reaction to the vibrant colour inside perhaps?
I’ll start with the sound. The disc contains 17 minutes of the real Americana collected by Andy Crow on his 2016 road trip to southern states of the USA (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia – fact fans). As you’d imagine there is a rejection of any field recording cliché – this is pure extraction music with no toothless fiddle or Grand Ole Opry in sight.
State/states/state…
It’s a subtle and slow movement for sure: the opening static crackles makes way for a woven pattern of cicada’s rhythmic rustle and the liquid whoosh of passing cars. An occasional maraca-shake could be a deadly rattlesnake. The ‘tich-th’ of the owl a hi-hat sizzle that reeks of baked desert heat and sonic shimmer. But rather then present this slack-jawed and unexamined the mix builds a hidden momentum through increasing the thread count and rippling the fabric with a deft thumb.
The final movement drags lazy ears into unapologetic high-performance mode. A lonely buzzard calls out across the valley – the sound of the air around the recorder fizzes with unknowable purpose. An excitable preacher (my guess is via battered radio rather than a gaudy TV) adds the sort of paranoid verbals African Head Charge favoured era Songs of Praise.
It is of course a suggestion piece – with no literals to hang your baseball cap on the imagination picks up tiny clues and builds a personal narrative from the crumbs. My reality is not Mr Crow’s but what we now share is a gas station dream, a pick-up truck vocabulary.
States/state/states…
But as well as his ears he’s brought his eyes. Eyes that spy detail in the trash and the unloved, beauty in the unused and plain old decrepit.
It’s almost impossible to look at the booklet without adding today’s awful political charge and context but a deep breath helps to remember a time before this extra ladle of madness soup soured what was the American dream.
People are absent, but the hands of the hardworking and decent, the just making do, are all over these gorgeous images.
As Crow’s lens is drawn to the weather-beaten and well used the inference is communal – we are joined by the codes of work and play. And even when the work has gone and the players drifted home the traces we leave are still good. Not necessarily grand or initially impressive but honest and modest and well-intentioned.
Railway tracks vanish to a point, exposed brickwork bakes in the sun and corrugated metal rusts like soft brown blooms. A single word ‘sorry’ is inked onto a door frame.
States shows a land waiting for interpretation, a mythology waiting to be written.
Faniel Dord – Faniel Dord (Dante’s Ashtray) CD-R
The Scouser Sun City Girl deals us a full-deck of deranged approaches on this tasty self-titled release.
Micro-songs are played on dodgy keyboard, beer-stained piano and battered guitar then dripped though a lo-fi studio set up that adds a delightful scruffy edge to these enigmatic pieces.
Some arrive fully-formed; dripping with sarcasm and uncomfortable political questions like a Mersybeat Porest.
Others riff –out a tune that has always seemed to exist somewhere behind my ear until the mighty Faniel has just shucked it out with a blunt knife (for evidence see My Bowl of Skulls).
The shadow of Edward Lear inhabits Dord’s world in both word and deed. A lover of scatological shock and the innocently odd – both ends of the stick are jammed in the jellyfish mouth until the protoplasm pops.
But of course it’s not all yuks, ‘Zaidida’ concludes in deep Rembetika sorrow after a frantic three minutes and ‘Medusa’s gone Digital’ warns the Gorgons and their ilk the dangers of modern life – something I don’t think we do quite enough of.
Fans of Derek and Clive take note and click.
Stefan Jaworzyn, Dylan Nyoukis, Seymour Glass – My Disgusting Heart (Chocolate Monk) CD-R
Shock!
I never expected Jaworzyn, that long-haired, six-string Ascension/Skullflower wire-wrangler on this kinda gob-jaxx (see Nyoukis) / tape-huss (see Glass) melange. But more fool me eh? The iron banjo adds some rich, metallic DNA to this most lovable of three-ways.
Stunning!!
Opener ‘Frozen Tombs of Siberia’ is a medium-sized panic attack; part elephant seal growl, part rattling coffin nails, but all Skippy the Kangaroo incidental music. As you’d expect from these experienced heads the pace is stately, elements of bubbling vowel or chopped-to-john-o-groats guitar placed in a sonic Battenberg with a similar marzipan roughness. The closing seconds of this jam re-imagine a Tardis’ asthmatic ‘whump-whump’. Calling all BBC commissioning editors – get these lads in – you’ve been warned!
Astonishment!!!
Song title of the week is well and truly won by ‘Dirty Owl Teat’ and works like one of them Scandinavian open sandwiches.
- (rye cracker base) slow-mould guitar wrench, harmonic pimples and drumlins, a yeast of amp hum…
- (smoked herring topping) an expression of joy hissed through side-mouth bibbles, coughs and spaniel-like panting. Occasional v-words are the glace cherry.
And the Smorgasbord analogy still holds for ‘Slowest Emergency Team’ with oodles more tape-frot.
But it’s the closer ‘Gang-related Sneezing’ that really quivers my liver. This modest track is a stop-start-stop-start wrecking ball of un-sense tape-slivers. Neatly delivered in finely measured bursts that defy any conventional rhythm; pretty soon my arms and legs are tied up in Twister-esque contortions.
A test-card for the mind or an essential document of new solutions?
Whisper your answer in my hot pink shell.
The Tenses & Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble – Daughter of the Boot (Chocolate Monk) CD-R
Two long, long, long pieces of near psychic jam make up this extra-value 60 min disc.
A whole platform of players (note ‘em: Oblivia, Ju Suk Reet Meate, Lucian Tielens, Sylvia Kastel, Leroy Tick & Gnarlos) strike bowls, press buttons, crank up turntables and rattle cutlery in an infinite variety of ways. The label says…
‘spontaneous sound collage, bent improv, non-musical weirdness’
…and who am I to argue?
Of course it’s the group-think that makes this disc hover in an unnatural manner. The linkage of brown ideas and soupy ingredients interweave in an effortless stew.
And where ‘Authentication of Ancient Chinese Bronzes’ is a pointillist pin-prick on tightly ruled graph paper ‘Heroic Armor of the Italian renaissance’ is more of a flexible lake or a fake puddle. The difference is startling yet understated, like putting sugar in the salt cellar.
As I lay back and let ‘the music take me’ I picture several conflicting images: emoji torture, dry goods being bagged, the gritty feel of a military mess kit. But that’s just me! You may picture the red stone of Bologna or the broad green leaves of Portland but that’s the point innit? From a base of gentle tinkles and sound-scurf we make our own reality.
And at this point I start to doubt the sanity of reviewing such a subjective sound environment and ask you to point your finger here to listen to an extract and write your own damn review.
But, dear reader that wouldn’t be the RFM way eh?
Another couple of spins in different environments (making dinner, jogging through the park) reveal the onion layers. The surface complexity is really a carefully constructed chicken-wire framework to hang the softer, more feather-light sounds.
So…the clear-edged ‘clonks’ and ‘smaks’ punctuate the more ghostly ‘heshhh’ and ‘vumpf’ until, before you realise it a thousand bicycle bells are ringing you through The Arc De Triomphe.
Sacred Blood!
The Viper – Art for Pain’s Sake (BUFMS) CD
Vintage tape experiments from one Mr Richard Sterling Streeter and his long-suffering family and friends.
What strikes me first is the application of the universal language of mucking about. You know what I’m talking about; that finger heavy on the play/pause button, that snotty ‘la la’, the classic chopstick-on-margarine-tub click.
Are these early tape experiments (made between the years 1978 to 1982 according to my terrible maths) any less worthy for that? Well of course not. As a listener I’m humbled to be let in to this world and nostalgerise my own (now thankfully lost) juvenilia.
But before I get too comfortable and misty-eyed our old friend progress rears its head and the later tracks (for all are arranged chronologically) dig deeper into the heart of echo, reverse reel-to-reel wonk and real-live violin scraping.
Music Concrete is an old maid on ‘Ollidarma’ an infectious riot of bright stereo blossoms. Raw sound becomes the source itself as it whips though the tape heads smeared by speed or plummets down a wormhole of creepy reverb. I’m treated to a whole dossier of tape wonk with added ‘accidentals’ that seem to come from the 1940’s via a haunted dancehall and a coffee-jinxed auctioneer until the white-coated engineers start pulling chunks out the Revox machine creating whirring thrums and empty pings while George Harrison wheedles away his yolk-less omelette in the main studio.
The almost traditional instrumentation of ‘In a Garden’ makes be bark like a dog. Piano, bass, shuffling snare and lonely violin tug on those melancholic heartstrings like a Midnight Doctors jam. Pure longing and loss gets bowed out across the cat-gut until hot tears snake down my cheek. Crikey!
‘Dreams of Glipnorf’ the energetic closer starts rough-hewn like a callous but ends up boogieing like that Canned Heat out-take where Blind Owl really starts to lose his mustard.
Don’t fear the Viper!
-ooOOoo-
similarly introverted/greasy feathers: joe murray on final seed, troy schafer, termite acropolis, michael barthel, kent tankred, body morph, matt krefting, jon collin, f ampism and final seed again!
March 14, 2017 at 2:04 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: beartown records, body morph, chocolate monk, f. ampism, final seed, joe murray, jon collin, kent tankred, matt krefting, micahel barthel, round bale recordings, soundholes, termite acropolis, troy schafer
Final Seed – S/T (Round Bale Recordings)
Troy Schafer – Untitled No4 (Round Bale Recordings)
Termite Acropolis – Dedication in Vinegar (Round Bale Recordings)
Michael Barthel – Randradau (Chocolate Monk)
Kent Tankred – Organ 1 (Chocolate Monk)
Body Morph – Keep Still and be Devoured (Soundholes)
Matt Krefting – Danger (Chocolate Monk)
Jon Collin – Sky Writings (Early Music)
F Ampism – The Resolution Phase (Beartown Records)
Final Seed – Untitled (Chocolate Monk)
Final Seed – S/T (Round Bale Recordings) Very rare tape or download
Rejoice in this super-subtle tape nothingness.
Side A is a perfectly timed 10 minutes that weaves the sound of background hiss-radiation with brief leather-necked gulpings and pre-language garrotte. The sound of the sound of the recorder whirring dumbly is captured in startling clarity. A round off in the cavern of the delay bounces a single blank tone off the squash court wall.
Side B is similarly introverted. What was once a throaty wolf-man roar is pitched right down and super low into a substratum of broken sea-foam. It warbles quietly, paying no mind and, like pouring thick glue over an uneven floor, the sound pools in places making deep ripples, skims the surface in others as light as a pond skipper.
The sense of purpose and dedication to a dream makes this a supremely confident release and an important exercise in listening to the sort of chuff we often ignore, gloss over and palm off.
Read no further and click here for evidence.
Troy Schafer – Untitled No4 (Round Bale Recordings) Ultra rare lathe cut 7inch or download
Round Bale describe this as a ‘brain-scrambler’. After listening I’m feeling poached and fried to boot!
Side A. Sepia piano recordings run through a wood-chipper.
Troy’s fingers may nudge the occasional keys gently but his feet hit the pedals with force sending those white and black notes ricocheting through tin and bronze filters that wreak the pretty and gasp with giant violence. What else am I getting (like a wine taster – that’s me!) a lung-rattling wheeze, half-song and memory. You know what? I’m just a sucker for a solo piano. The final 11 seconds promise a new beginning with that build up of blocked, harried notes that rudely snip off. Oh yeah…distinctly classy.
Side B starts with a grunt and then something orchestral is wrenched back and forth through a pinhole. The dry wooden click of a cello (perhaps) mimics a poultry convention; angry clucks and gobbles, that red wattle vibrating with the rough string attack. I hear a woman’s laughter and then Troy launches into more grappling with the horsehair. A dramatic friction. Like looking down a sound-microscope that magnifies each textured sound-bundle a thousand times until it bursts like a turgid cell – spouting information into your lucky earhole.
Crikey Troy!
Termite Acropolis – Dedication in Vinegar (Round Bale Recordings) sold out tape and download
What an apt name for this ant-city investigation. Miniature tunnels are bored through the hard red earth and filled with dark cardboard clunks and billiard hall knockings.
Powerfully restrained recordings of process with little ornamentation. This is: a bell, a dropped coin, a handful of pocket fluff.
But that’s not to say these are overly simple. Sounds are doused with a gentle condiment (or indeed pickled) until they slush about like a rotting medical exhibit (see: Caricature of the garden) in the bottom of a demijohn.
While massive machines are imagined in ‘Lardworks’, brass pistons pumping and levers floundering in a polished wooden way, it is left to ‘Extinguish the light’ to hurl us into the modern age; a symphony of gates opening and shutting to the beat of the Bontempi.
Title tracks often tell us a little about the intention and drive behind a record or artist. In this case I’m guessing the closer, a nine-minute brining, is a powerful psychic calling card. It’s subtle and refined, relaxed but with a steady guiding hand on the reigns. Delicate and simple tones and clunks rattle around the bagatelle that mirrors your own dainty cochlear. It’s easy to get lost in such dwarf loops as they occur again and again, melting over each other in polite collapse. At around the four-minute mark a constant high-lonely-moan is redoubled turning that sweet milk into smoked cheese marking the start of a watery, pale beauty.
Waiting room music for the hep, hep cats.
Michael Barthel – Randradau (Chocolate Monk) C20 Cassette
Insider bone scrapings and economic scribble.
Side A runs for about 9 minutes and places micro-pieces of clean and energetic German-sounding spoken goof with psychotic milkman-whistle and hissy-Dictaphone-grottage. Oh yes! Michael barks stern his instructions. These blocks of meaning lock as tight as Duplo bricks but instead of the obvious primary colours this is an altogether mistier proposal.
You what?
So…rather than tan the glitches Mr Barthel exercises all the edges of his palette. The lion indeed lies down with the lamb with the final few minutes mimicking aching layers of lazy sediment.
Side B starts with off-radio, wrong-phonics and some glorious sepia glossolalia. A hum and whirr of the taping device is left to whittle away adding a tambour-like drone for an amateur age. Gloriously smeared sound leaks like straw-coloured plasma from a bad burn. Oily as balm; dressings are changed for the finale of woollen moans and an almost vaudeville reading of sparse and strangulated word blooms.
It’s a hectic world for sure, but listening to this made me dawdle like a child. Damn…listening to this tape made me a better person. You NEED some!
Kent Tankred – Organ 1 (Chocolate Monk) C40 Cassette
These ultra-heavy organ manipulations weigh as much a chubby whale loafing about in the viscous and dark brine.
A presence piece that you can, and should, project your reality on to: this is perfect travelling music.
Each organ foldback-loop and full –throated gas-roar is like a cold sun flickering through autumn leaves or watching the savage juxtaposition of a ripped billboard layered with contrasting messages.
Other observations?
- Large pumice boulders skin your elbows and the dead skin falls like dry sleet.
- A microphone is lowered into a crimson oubliette.
- Running into the wind with your mouth open wide until your breath gets caught behind chilly teeth.
This hissing bustle plays well obnoxiously loud and pasty-necked quiet.
Oof!
Body Morph- Keep Still and be Devoured (Soundholes) C60 cassette
This tape is an exercise in long-form rustage.
True! Tones from a dying crab get hoofed through the murky, mystic mix at points but mostly it’s a 1000 yard stare of slowly crashing gears.
On side one I’m picking up cheap-casio keys gummed down under years of tape-varnish & mould-hiss. I’m hearing a smeared gossamer touch akin to greasy feathers.
Side two gets all lo-maxxed on a horn of some sort; mournful and cool as the night air. Armenian Jazz Sorrow? The sound of occasional suffocation?
A true listeners tape, this is no ‘slap it on and do the ironing’ cassette. It demands full attention and for this thorough investment you are amply rewarded with layer upon layer of ear –silt clogging yr golden wax deposits.
Matt Krefting – Danger (Chocolate Monk) C15 Cassette
Ultra-core tape jaxx.
Super-indefinite and lost imaginings.
It’s the softest breath kissing carbon paper; that most delicate and faint purple image as tender as an early morning bruise.
Memory slides smooth as a trombone made of smog and brass fittings.
Half-formed but fully realised. The magic happens in that grey blancmange as you use natural electricity to link the un-linkable, paint the un-paintable.
Matt leaves us mortals a few clues – popping candy in a giant’s gob and infrared tinfoil. Apart from that you’re on your own pal!
Polite yet essential.
Jon Collin – Sky Writings (Early Music) C15 Tape
If I’d got my finger out this tape would have made the 2016 ‘best of’ lists for sure and will no doubt be top 10 material in sunny 2017.
Fahey, Rose and Nugent fan boys/girls must listen…this tape is so charming I coughed up a cream tea and a cheeky goodnight kiss. This tape made me a damn loving fool!
In the old definition this is a fucking splendid tape (shine, be bright) that warms up my cold heart and makes me smile like reading Nicholson Baker details and footnotes.
A real human-sounding solo acoustic guitar probe the damn nostalgia nodes to conjure up an imagined picnic in a cornfield. The colours are vivid. The corn is the creamiest yellow, the sky the brightest blue. Our blanket the deepest red.
The melodies trip some switch that bursts crisp cornflowers out my chest and replace my blood with silver helium bubbles.
Spiritualised? Do me a favour eh? I’m really floating in space here mate. The strums and pickles are complex as spiderwebs but simple as nursery rhymes. The untitled tunes are as familiar as pins and needles and get under my skin in a similar restless and itchy way; it’s like I’ve always known them as they slip out of reach skidding like a deer on ice.
Oh my! Such elegance with chipped nails and calloused hands. The perfect beautiful happiness of aching heart.
F Ampism – The Resolution Phase (Beartown Records) CD
A tasty CD that I’m now re-imagining as a vinyl EP pressed onto seven inches.
“But why format transfer boy? You may ask.”
Because this is a disc of two halves, that’s why doubter. An ‘A’ and a ‘B’. My ‘This Side’ twinned to your ‘That Side’ is strongly suggested to my oatmeal mind.
Let me explain…
A jungle lushness drips through the recent work of Mr F Ampism. Thick and green, waxy and water-resistant each micro-collage is rich beyond our feeble senses; ethnic percussive loops wobbly like belly fat, environmental recordings gurgle as algae-thick rivers, electronic squirts gush tessellated digital foof. It’s a sound you can smell and that smell is pregnant and full.
The first three tracks, ‘Monaestry and Math’ to ‘Straight Brains’ are alive with exotic Toucan ‘caws’ and Howler hoots. The middler ‘The Joint Capsule’ replays Balinese rhythms among the creaking boats, the lapping waves and call of villagers selling shrimp-based snacks. Gradually a soft tone bubbling erupts in my pocket. Copper pans are dropped overboard and ‘boaab’ drunkenly in the mud-coloured water as they slowly fill, sway, and sink beneath the waves.
All of a piece these three realised constructions suggest organic life with a face tilted towards a red, red sun.
‘Shabada Transmission’ bucks the trend by laying down heavily in the rumpled bed belonging to Detroit Techno – the synthetic strings and xylophone tones as future facing as jet boots and holidays on Mars. And in doing so Ampism revels a new destination and we are already deep in ‘Side Two’ territory.
‘Inner Eyelid’ is made up of spare parts, a lone creak, a dropped calliope yet is patched up in the most un-Frankenstein manner. No flat head no sir! Bolts through the neck? Forget-about-it. Think more like a slim ankle glimpsed or thick auburn curls just begging to be tousled.
The jazz, in all its hot boiling majesty, infests ‘Thrown Jam 1 and 2 ‘ with Pazuzu sitting in on traps while Regan hams on the vintage synth. This duo/solo gets ripe!
And, as all things must, this disc ends. But with a juddering, flustering loop so perfectly placed those plunderphonic dingbats blush crimson and sweat.
Final Seed – Untitled (Chocolate Monk) C30 Cassette
Witness the drunken bowling alley vibe on this damp-chiller from Final Seed.
Like a diary opened at random one passage might reveal children squeaking, another, the fumbling fingers of a defective chord-organ.
Dark percussive knocks form a rhythm interuptus ladled on thick like broth. Slack-mouthed and slurry, a voice gnarls on with steaming feet. Wonked-out keyboard extrapolations all bothered with hot-electric butter. Broken cassette ghost-capture.
Neat eh? But all the while this is undoubtedly gush from the same mush. Oh my!
This is serious stuff…like the abstract soundtrack to the sound of making a soundtrack each perfect formula of tones, field recordings and manipulations delight by being both utterly novel and head-scratchingly familiar. So while the diary analogy still holds I’m darting from love-sick boy-teen to worried mother to toddler rocking on their plump heels. It’s got charm in punnets, invention in spades!
The best album that chump Eno never made. DEMAND A RESSIUE!!!
-ooOOOoo-
the sweet jelly is in the deft cut: joe murray on david birchall/nicolas dobson/javier saso, dylan nyoukis & friends, plastic hooligans and acrid lactations & gwilly edmondez
March 3, 2017 at 6:00 am | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | 1 CommentTags: acrid lactations, chocolate monk, david birchall, drugs, dylan nyoukis, fae ma bit tae ur bit, gwilly edmondez, javier saso, joe murray, nicolas dobson, plastic hooligans, skronk, soundholes
David Birchall/Nicolas Dobson/Javier Saso – XZ ::::::::: Brazil (Soundholes)
Dylan Nyoukis & Friends – Mind Yon Time? (Chocolate Monk)
Plastic Hooligans – Untitled (Chocolate Monk)
Acrid Lactations & Gwilly Edmondez – You Have Not Learned To Play & Mock in The Psychic System (Chocolate Monk)
David Birchall/Nicolas Dobson/Javier Saso – XZ ::::::::: Brazil (Soundholes) C30 cassette
Super-charged scrimple-skriffle improv coming at you mixed in, depending on your view, (almost) mono or 3-way stereo.
But what’s going on?
Dave Birchall plays granite-flecked guitar in the left speaker, Javier Saso spills slippery, silvery lapsteel in the right speaker and Nicolas Dobson sprays wild, wild violin all over the place.
Side one is a string piece for three players and it waxes happily, darting in and out of focus like a lazy eye would. Contributions are in part clotted and meshed (like a scab) and independently driven. Imagine walking three energetic hounds, each with their own digging, burying, pissing mission. Their colourful leads are soon a wrapped-up maypole binding your arms and hands. Got it?
Now replace the noble hounds with these three improv-dudes and the dog-specific missions with group-mind blankness and collective musical mischief and you’ve got the perfect picture!
While the pace is athletic there’s always room for a ruminative cul-de-sac, a wet sniff about a single tone or blunt-thumbed technique. And as I listen I pass through several phases myself: chin-stroking on the non-idiomatic tip but also horn-throwing on the sexy electric eruption.
On side two I briefly land in a thoughtful strung-out lake but get distracted by amp-pops and bright lead-crackle. The tension mounts as our three players riff on the giant nothingness that exists right at the point of the horizon; saw, saw, sawing away, whipping up a gentle typhoon that bursts with bloated rain. It doesn’t take long to plinkety-plonk and things end with that ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ intro-played inside out and over ice.
This is what it sounds like when Slash cries.
Dylan Nyoukis & Friends – Mind Yon Time? (Chocolate Monk) CD-R
Popular wisdom suggests that there is nothing more boring than other people’s drug tales.
Ha! Popular wisdom is a duff grey lie.
On this re-imagining of Dylan Nyoukis’ Fae Ma Bit Tae Ur Bit radio show various sub-underground lads and lasses ‘fess up their first or otherwise notable drug experiences. Imagine Radio 4 has been snorting and huffing all night long (or something) with Dub Naughty on the controls.
They talk, in soft mumbles and gentle whispers; ‘it was like this…’, ‘we took a taxi…’, ‘I started to feel strange…’
Recorded up close it’s an intimate listen. Breathy and in your ear(s) – you sense the memories being dragged from that grey-matter prison and forced out into the open (in some case decades later) with all the added memory moss and drama a bit of distance provides.
D-Nyoukis works like a psychedelic Foley artist, twisting the background. Adding an addled ‘whuff’ or stoned ‘skofff’ to the voices that are dropping cautionary, ecstatic and, in some cases heart-warming tales of sweet, sweet intoxication. Subtle it is, in the way a shimmering hallucination first grabs you and makes you say “wha?” But it’s a flanger-free zone yeah?
So…anyone want to split this bottle of Cherry Lambrini? I’m thinking about getting it on now anyhow.
See ya on the other side travellers! YEAH!
Plastic Hooligans – Untitled (Chocolate Monk) CD-R
The aptly named Plastic Hooligans are gentle souls wrapped up in retro Adidas and Fila.
But an obsession with the Arabic world introduces ritualistic field recordings in a primitive electronic cloak. With a sparse, shady touch, loops are played via old reverb units and malfunctioning oscillators ramping up the potency of these already fairly ‘loaded’ sounds.
The shivers come in four waves.
- A xylophone tinkles in a French-speaking colony. Delicate as a music box found among boiled chicken’s feet.
- Moroccan tapes get fed through the mincer. The ‘boing’ of the overdriven hand-drum and voice pinched sonically to release only the most important tones.
- Rubberised machinery clunks away as a giant horn is blown roughly but slowly. Deep reparative hums.
- A hiccough bounced across eleven cryptic reverb-drenched minutes. The sort of mind-loop you feel on waking from a cumin-scented dream.
Acrid Lactations & Gwilly Edmondez – You Have Not Learned To Play & Mock in The Psychic System (Chocolate Monk) CD-R
The exact Reuleaux triangle-shaped intersection between modern classical, goofy wonk and hardcore improv. Oh yes!
History Lesson #1: The Acrid Lactations have been humble key-players of the untranslatable wonk scene. Really, really, really free players smiffy that non-idiomatic improv by adding an indefinable ‘something’. I’ve pondered this conundrum long and hard and the best I can come up with is that ‘something’ might be their slight unhinged quality; a willingness to go the extra mile, wherever that trek will take them.
History Lesson #2: Gwilly Edmondez has ploughed a similarly deep furrow. A Dictaphone high-priest, instant composition stalwart and one half of those rising stars YEAH YOU! [The UK’s only father/daughter slack-hop duo pop-pickers.] Gwilly, the tallest man alive, is a selfless player, an encourager, a persuader whose full-frontal yet ego-less schtick seems to be able to connect with that artistic blank space where anything becomes possible.
Taking this babycake as a whole I’m shocked by the time-shifting quality to these suckered gobbles, hazy trumpets and clogged electronics.
The lumps are bigger yeah! For 20, possibly 30 seconds you could be listening to Pharaoh Sanders (Impulse Era), or Morton Subotnick and then it could be nothing other than the good ole AL & GE. Things are so precarious I’m on a mental zip-wire sporting a psychic g-string baby.
But readers, it’s the edit that’s the thing here. In a similar way to the exceptional Hardworking Families latest disc the sweet jelly is in the deft cut taking these pretty much wonderful recordings and carefully layering, stripping and selecting the ripest cheese.
And this editors ear not only multiplies this trio but forges new links and allegiances between sound-nodes. Put simply; a ‘clunk’ recorded one day now spoons a sexy sigh recorded another and lo! A whole new thing starts a’going on.
The sounds? A dignified sniffle and pre-language burrs make up a respectable percentage but add to that bamboo pipes that ape the breath hissing down a human neck, disturb-o-moans and high-octane heffer on brass and tin. We’re talking “Seriously munged magic” (Nyoukis 2016)
But I’m throwing in a deep balloon-rubber ripping, a damp Dictaphone squelch and a goff-keyboard going electronically slow & low. Not only but also, the relaxing humming of social insects (ants probably) discuss their complex legal system.
To sum up I’ve got (consults notes, adjusts spectacles and frowns) three quarters goat-legged- spry and muscular, one quarter lazy liquid. So that’s something for everyone then; time for dreamers to collect themselves and activists to get-up-offa-that-thing.
Right-o. Discussion proposition? Dub opened a new door for Reggae. Teo Macero projected Jazz into an alternate future state. What about this N-AU versioning then readers?
Like…whoa man. Makes you think and shout “welcome to the world Keir J Arnot.”
-ooOOOoo-
my bloody ventolin: joe murray on star turbine, robert ridley-shackleton, sindre bjerga
October 13, 2016 at 11:25 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: chocolate monk, claus poulsen, frozen light, gold soundz, joe murray, robert ridley-shackleton, shade barka martins, sindre bjerga, star turbine
Star Turbine – Nothing Should Move Unless You Want It To (CD, Frozen Light, edition of 300 or download)
Robert Ridley-Shackleton – Tupperwave (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.338, edition of 42)
Sindre Bjerga – Japan 2013 Tour Documentary – A Film By Shade Barka Martins (DVD-r, Goldsoundz, GS#130, edition of 26)
Star Turbine – Nothing Should Move Unless You Want It To
This canny duo of Claus Poulsen & Sindre Bjerga have now been together for about 6 years – that’s longer than The Beatles live-performing career. And in that time they’ve moved from loveable moptops (read: hessian cloaked druids) to Abbey Road sophisticates pulling sounds from a cosmic-scurf fortress and mixing them cleverly with improvised crackles and hopped-up speech interventions.
On this disc they reach deep into the hard drive and present, in the main, truncated live performances; the bacon in the bap, hurling you straight into their fully articulate sound cavern.
It starts as you’d imagine – mice invest dollars in sonic-grip technology, aiming their blunderbuss straight at you for the duration of ‘An/Auf’. It feels sort of sticky and thick and on the verge of panic. I feel much more comfortable if I keep my breath even and calm.
Grey-rubber ripping shakes a tail on ‘Hearing Voices’ among some seriously screwed vocals and inter-planet hum. The rushing of tape grot adds a complimentary momentum pulling your ears in different directions; microscopic insects rearrange your nerve endings.
Some sort of My Bloody Ventolin wash creeps through the recording, ‘Looking For the Centre’ a heady rush of airbrakes and panpipes bleeding into a, into a bloated walrus gas pouch?
[worried reviewer checks sleeve notes in panic]
Don’t worry. It’s my bad. No sea mammals were harmed in the creating of this particular jam… it’s just the ‘Fractal Zoom’ piece unpicking my learning centres and scrambling early illustrated encyclopaedia memories. Gosh! The tape work on this is black as tar and twice as difficult to remove.
The cherry on the pie belongs to the wonderfully titled ‘Ape Escape’ that sounds as if IRCAM released its answerphone message recorded after a rather noggy Christmas party. OR… photocopying your arse and sending it to Dick Raaijmakers. You my dear listener will have to work that one out yourselves.
Closer ‘Alef 0’ sees Claus take a sharp mallet to Sindre’s basic recordings and goof them up good and proper. How he’s managed to turn this herring into a Tangerine Dream I’ll never know but it’s heavy as bad news (never BAD NEWS) and rich as freshly ploughed soil.
Despite this recent Euro-nonsense (AKA Brex-shit) the Star Turbine will be back in your town soon. Pull your canoe out the mud and set a course for their cleansing murk.
Robert Ridley-Shackleton – Tupperwave
Fifty minutes of RR-S starts with a respectful tweak on NWA’s collective nips and then gets exponentially odder by the minute. The trademarked pocket jazz sound is still in effect but over a longer duration this is embedded and augmented with child-like interactions, tangent-shearing thoughts and bakerlite ring-tones of the mind.
Question. But just what is Robert Ridley-Shackleton? An effortless creature of spoken wordisms, a stream of consciousness half-thought jester, a purple pretender, a dry-rattler extreme? Or perhaps he is the new plastic messiah?
As an excitable, hyperbolic fanzine-style reviewer it’s almost too much to take in. Do I describe the actual sounds coming out my headphones? Oh… I do, do I? Here goes…
…scratch, hiss, crackle, sniff, sex-rap-brit-funk, casio-donk, sniff, meandering monologues, scratch, clonk, harsh noise sock, house keys, humming & mugging…
…but what a thousand tapes with similar components don’t do is pose a really important question. With a comedian’s nicotine-fingered timing RR-S unravels what it means to entertain and what it means to be entertained?
There’s a long tradition of artists pushing and pressing at the limits of acceptable entertainment. And I don’t mean that violent or sexist bullshit, that wreckers of civilisation cul-de-sac, but the more fundamental – how far can I go unwrapping to find the very essence of my own personal music? Family favourites like Gwilly Edmondez, Hugh Metcalfe and the Shadow Ring have been there and chipped out their own answers in the No Audience Mount Rushmore but our very own RR-S has a bag of chisels too and he is already tappy-yappy-tapping incoherent pictograms at the base of the cliff.
The whiffle and flounce feel like a diary of instant conversation created in the moments between a late tea and bed. The Illuminati and God get equal footing to Mr Poo and Mrs Wee as mistakes, pre-thoughts and apologies are sent direct to you in a monologue of seemingly endless imagination.
Oh yeah… there is much rattling and shaking with the texture of Quaver’s eggs.
One of the ‘traditional’ musical pieces, a 5 minute keyboard funk jam, ends with the sound of brittle punnets being crushed (it’s sound art – listen!). The other (a 3 minute keyboard funk jam) launches into a discogs/format paranoid rant backed with static/analogue card-noise war and a riff on taking apart the post-creative process re: publishing.
I’m happy with myself I think
RR-S concludes. As well you might be – the most singular record of the year.
Sindre Bjerga – Japan 2013 Tour Documentary – A Film By Shade Barka Martins
A what? A DVD-R? That most neglected of formats gets a swift brush up and plane ticket to Japan for this super-charming documentary.
See! Sindre (and brother Jorn) explore downtown Japan and creep through the narrow streets looking for the off-off-map venues played on our Norwegian friend’s first visit to the home of the mighty Budokan.
Marvel! As Sindre sets up his trusty yellow Dictaphones, echo tube and tape mess in cramped bars, tiny arts spaces and a beautiful elephant temple; blowing hot steam through his cobbled-electronics, bristly mouth parts and drone-boxes.
Watch!! Various ex-pat goofs and clean-cut Japanese fellows captured doing their own damn thing: solo keyboard hums, circular clarinet, chromed electronics, theatrical goon impressions and electric- fan-versus-acoustic-guitar living sculptures.
Shade’s camera is a friendly traveling companion; always present with a pack of tissues; clear, bright and attentive but never in-your-face. The downtime of a tour is captured with a practiced eye as attractive, vibrant shows are interspersed with sleepy train rides, airport snoozes and the gentle panic of being lost in an unfamiliar city.
Proving the No-Audience Underground, although sparse, is strategically placed on a global scale the gig-goers lap up Sindre’s approach to tape manipulation in a very physical way; lobbing projectiles at him during an instruction piece and (incredibly politely and gently) scything miniature cymbals across the room to topple Bjerga’s constructions of WalkMan/Dictaphone/steel resonator.
But of course this wouldn’t be a trip to Japan without a session in a silk robe and Sindre rocks his white-patterned shortie like a motherfucker!
Like all Gold Soundz releases this is super-limited so I’d make a bee-line for this quick to feast those peepers.
—ooOoo—
close to the pylons: joe murray on robin foster, henry collins, leda, arv & miljö, tear fet, troy schafer
August 5, 2016 at 3:41 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: aetheric records, arv & miljo, chocolate monk, henry collins, i dischi del barone, iddb, joe murray, leda, lf records, robin foster, tear fet, troy schafer
Henry Collins / Robin Foster – Spill Lynch Corrosiveness / Frostlike Neighbourly Aversion (CD-r, LF Records, LF050)
Leda – City/Clear (7″ vinyl, I Dischi Del Barone, IDDB010, edition of 200)
Arv & Miljö – untitled (7″ vinyl, I Dischi Del Barone, IDDB008, edition of 200)
Tear Fet – Blabber (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.333, edition of 40)
Troy Schafer – Amplified Double Fiddle (3″ CD-r and pin badge or download, aetheric records)
Henry Collins / Robin Foster – Spill Lynch Corrosiveness / Frostlike Neighbourly Aversion
These two ‘non-guitarists’ play something approaching Kaiser-mash with some extremely damaged fingers.
Two tracks. One mind/ten fingers a-piece. You dig?
Spill Lynch yeah! Guitar-as-you-trucking-lump-it. Totally wrecked non-playing as strings are hammered on and hammered off. Steel is plucked and pulled and shredded hard with foam mallets. Rubbery metal is found bounced in the reverse making this a righteous dental dam for pearly whites.
Tiny fists, like Joe Pesci’s ‘pow…ping…pow’, jab into your soft temple raising a bruise and yet… this would be a wonderfully zesty cocktail! But you add the mangled FX-BOX and goof-timing and you are looking at a particularly sexy beach. Memory gong ripples out a Daxophone reference but it’s slung as low as a Kev Hopper bassline so figure that captain!
Frostlike yeah! One man spitting canned peas out a tight, puckered gob-hole dribbles cold green bile. OR has Eddie Van taken the vapours so his ERUPTION is all STAR SPANGLED out a tiny HIWATT about to burst into flames. It’s like a pissy Morse; a constant chatter of on/off/on/off rattling up through my ribcage and whispering into my fontanel. It’s machine code on the jibber-jabber somehow rocking a ska rhythm. It’s barium voodoo and it’s aiming for any hole going.
We Roll tonight to the guitar bite
Leda – City/Clear
Crispy bouncing beats sound like they crept out of Sheffield circa 1979. A wheexing synth plays a one note melody and twists the pitch up, out of waxy remains, until the thing squeals like a pinched nut. One dimensional in the best possible way; focused and determined Leda sings a line that blends soft as Egyptian eye shadow. It does its thing at a totally brisk pace: skip, skip, skipping like a hockey puck over dull scuffed ice.
The flipside proper songs it; imagine shoving a Woodbine into that Vape pen and huffing hard. Misty organ vamps float like a kite flapping drastically close to the pylons. Leda sighs as if bad news is arriving soon in a manila envelope. I’m thinking of Barbara Manning in her total waif days if you’re looking for a mind-crutch.
Wonderfully brief, totally Nu Wave. Where’s my piano tie dude?
Arv & Miljö – Untitled
The mysterious Arv & Miljö are quite possibly the equally mysterious Matthias Andersson who has jammed a high-quality mic out his neat apartment window to record the big wide world going about its business.
Side A picks up those pesky seabirds all going
CAW CAW SQUEEEEEE CAW
in fine white clarity. If this was Whitby they’d be fighting over chips but Matthias’ location is totally smorgasbord, all gherkin fresh and sauna-clean toes.
Side B revels in a Swedish downpour. The trebly ‘hiss’ of the rain fills my ears almost whole but gradually subsides into more bassy individual drips (off your peaked cap perhaps) and ends on a fragile bowl ringing making this a super-fucking-classy ride on the vinyl.
Tear Fet – Blabber
As serious as your life.
This meditation on disease and ultimate loss is pure honest gibber that surfs straight from tragedy. It’s a pretty unsettling raw disc of vocal jaxx, jammed to tape direct with no discernable dubs or edits. The 20 minute piece was scored by Fet himself (a Matt Dalby apparently) and then, as the moorings loosen, it breaks free of all reason.
My first few listens marvel at the sheer range of guff coming outta two lips, two lungs and one tongue.
Me? I’ll carry this like Wisdens… a goddamn almanac of honk. A how-to guide!
Over the course of the spinning shiney I count the following techniques: slack mouth farts, gulps, wheezing roars, tactile yawns, owl squeaks, slibby gibbers, lip-smacks, jaw creaks, warble and weft, dry huff/wet huff, moans, scones and drones, deep sighs, ribbet-lite, mucus croak, deft saliva manipulation, pinched inhalations, seal barks, wet sucking, coughs (phlegm and tickle), rude burps, careless whispers, dirty slurps, humms, ululation, snivel and whimpers, throat rasp, snivels (without whimpers), throat shred, large cheek inflation, nasal gargles, proper singing, mithering, call and response (solo), repetition and imitation, vibration of fleshy jowls, cavity popping, fake Russian bantz, sinus snort, irregular mucus work, jakey muttering, horse blowing and common or garden slobber. [Editor’s note: Bravo Joe! *claps meatily in approval*]
For students of vocal jizz in all its glorious forms; consider this one essential.
Troy Schafer – Amplified Double Fiddle
A tremendous hot spurting event of a record that moves from God-rattling fists to microscopic blossoms bursting.
Mr Troy here has built his own double fiddle, inspired by Aussie out-violinist Jon Rose, and rammed it through all manner of cheap distortion sawing away raising merrie hell.
The horsehair rips up a storm (x 2), the dragging and pushing astringent as a spilled gin ‘n tonic but still fatly full and all encompassing. Occasionally things fall apart into an elegant digital-ditch or rusty tape hole; all the better to keep things human and sprightly I say!
Oh my sweet Lord! There’s something wonderfully elemental about the frenzied bowing, the constant car-crash of sound that’s as bright as a spotlight; a pure unfettered stream of energy and information.
The overtones really play nice with my pink ears, especially on the less noisy moments. The double movement is shaped like slow geography, a gradual denudation of the bristling sonics turning the abrasive into smooth gold teeth.
Hey! Conventional wisdom loves a crescendo eh? A simple narrative that leads to the big pay off, the money shot. But Troy baffles by moving from Piss Superstition-levels of fuckedness to a no-more-than slightly water-damaged scrape over the course of this beautifully direct record. The arc in reverse.
I’m so keen you hear this I checked with aetheric and blimey… it’s sold out at source. Click the download my beauties!
—ooOoo—
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