radio free midwich

group mind clank: the murray dynasty on ua yenoh cry cry, le drapeau noir and various various artists

Ua Yenoh Cry Cry – Space and Order (C40 tape, Orl Records and Paraphernalia, orl17, edition of 100)

Ua Yenoh Cry Cry is some Shon Mahoney dude from the USA doing his solo jizz on the cheeky Greek label, Orl.  Who sez the no-audience underground doesn’t get around eh?  Well packaged with some lace/plant cell motif this sexy little tape slips into bed and spoons you without any small talk.  Headline…degraded loops of keyboard mung and gentle brown distortion fug round the corners of some proper tunes that repeat and loop and repeat.

Now then, reviewing tapes can be a lonely business so this time I enlisted young master Posset for his views.  We did the Burroughs/Bowie/Gysin method to create a two-mind, stream of consciousness thing.  You get the drift.  So catch this one:

Soft waves of chords and notes travel to you from another space as black rubber drone pipes get huffed leaving a sooty halo round the gob. The ever growing drone wobbles and shakes; micro-syringe sounds swagger like mercury badgers waddle.  ‘Verberating beacon flashing highs and lows bridging the gap between no-audience underground and the hipster set…a crossover hit?  A meditation on ferric construct?  The incessant ringing becomes more eerie and sinister as kindergarten keyboard melodies (played by stubby fingers) lighten up a blowfly hum.  The sci-fi organ continues to bless us with more notes and patterns as the drone pauses and sound pierces the atmosphere.  The ominous furious-classical rusts and decays.

(Editor’s note: woah… can you dig it?!  Whilst they were being super-jive hep cats Joe and son created a visual review of this tape too.  Check it out.)

Hope that’s all useful my dearest reader.  And if not Orl have a snazzy website with all the sounds so you can do a judge for yourself.

Le Drapeau Noir – Whalley Range (C30 tape, Krayon Recordings, KR020)

A whole family of mungfarmers: Chora, Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides and The Hunter Gracchus team-up like DC’s finest to beat up swollen-headed bad guys.  This is reconnaissance blues.  A stealthy assault, silently slipping a dagger between the ribs…you don’t know you’re cut till you drop to your knees.  My head was here, there and everywhere when I first jammed this one so I bribed Master Posset again to give me a hand with the cut-up technique:

Group-mind clank and free reed drone; quivering waves and harmonic screams with cymbals thrashing, drums beating.  Imagine the Edinburgh tattoo populated not by purple rinsed matriarchs but the very you and me; but there’s subtle feedback behind the violence.  They shriek, “A river flowing out to the sea embraces the thick salty arms of wild current.”  Whooping and gentle rings pierce the heavy beat of a solemn drum but among the soft rock, soldiers march in concentric patterns – shifting your gaze starts the sands to pour down one channel.  Slight shakes can be heard but they’re not alone in the sound of this dark opera.  The grain of moans is rough, a feral call to prayer.  Then the noises clear and all that is left is the drums and metallic, echoing howls.

Yup.  That’s it.  It’s been out for a while now but still available via the ever reliant bandcamp.

Infinite Gaaah / Blood Stereo / Usurper / Pengo – Summer 2013 Tour (cassette and inserts, Giant Tank)

I missed my opportunity to get one of these on the actual tour but later was cock o’hoop to slam it in the tape drawer and dribble on the eiderdown as it gushed.  Infinite Gaaah takes a couple of loops of sweating machinery, roasts ‘em up nice and hot and plunges them in ice-cold cider.  Bright and refreshing.  Blood Stereo take a nice set of domestic cackles and record in the garden (it has been a great summer eh?) bending and shaping loops like they were silvery zinc.  A dinosaur’s tears roll down scaly cheeks while a caveman mungs on.  It could be that I have all that Opal Tapes stuff locked in my head and I’m making unnatural connections between things.  Check out your nearest hipster coffee room.  Are they playing Blood Stereo?  Thought so…the tide is changing and the Blood shall inherit the earth.  The Usurper employ egg whisk and bottletop-rattle, twanging ruler and various dull ‘clunks’ to make a pastoral piece of gentle loveliness.  Like listening to the breathing of a new born baby this has an innocent rise and fall with sweet chirrups of milk-sour breath making your nose wrinkle and say, ‘Ahhhhhhhh-bless’. Pengo come across like a beefy Spacemen 3 raised on good old beer rather than that nasty heroin.  But the routes to transcendental bliss are buffeted and bruised by honking geese and wild fowl as the kind of echo-action King Tubby saves for extra strength dub gets hurled about.  A mighty tape document of this season’s tip-top sounds baby.

…and if these sounds were not enough there is visual tosh to viddy while you listen.  Karen Constance & Dylan Nyoukis collaborate on a tidy cardboard box cover (that squeaks pleasingly on opening) and four C-30 sized postcards printed with a kind of kinky Victoriana that raise a variety of chin-strokers around the medical aesthetic.  Release the foxes!

See the Duff and Roberton tumblr and email ‘em for availability.

Blue Spectrum Tapes Artzine #4 (Various Artists Patterns Grown Like Crabgrass CD-r and 30 page art-book, Blue Spectrum Tapes, edition of 50)

Another intriguing package from Brum’s Blue Spectrum.  The zine cradles a selection of ‘cut ‘n paste’ collages from Mr Blue and the occasional photo-copy blurr/photo shot from some of the other collaborators.  I’m no expert but I’m guessing the zine as we know it is celebrating it’s 40^th birthday right about now. But there’s no grey hairs or paunch for this slim-hipped package…it crackles with punk energy and sticky edges.

As for the disc, there’s 17 jokers on here all pumping it hard and bursting forth with variations on scorched-earth noise, rusty-metal-clanging noise, throat curdling noise and black ambient noise.  For reasons beyond my ken there seems to be a hard drinking theme to this comp; it all starts off pleasant enough but before long you’re wobbling on your heels and puking down someone’s neck.  A guilty knee tremble round the back then it’s nosh first into some deep-fried nightmare.  Most notable mentions go to the Gas Mask Horse for recording a bouncer’s dark thoughts pre kick-off, Yol for an increasingly unhinged closing time lament (to Kebabs it seems), Kapali Carsi’s subtle mic bumble that wanders into sound poetry, Robert Ridley Shackleton’s enraged ripping sound stretched low and slow and the extra-violent, knuckle duster kerfuffle from Blue Spectrum himself.  There’s over an hour of sub-underground noise and drone in this sleek edition of 50.  Don’t wait ‘til they ring last orders.

Buy here.