saltwater lake: joe murray on michael morley, seymour glass & fleshtone aura, shepherds of cats & panelak
December 2, 2015 at 1:06 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: chocolate monk, fanfare, fleshtone aura, joe murray, michael morley, panelak, seymour glass, shepherds of cats
Michael Morley – The Burning House (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.317, edition of 60)
Seymour Glass & Fleshtone Aura – Amplified Teacup (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.316, edition of 60)
SHEPHERDS OF CATS & PANELAK – Muscle atrophy in a squirrel’s left leg (CD-r, FANFARE)
Michael Morley – The Burning House
Excuse me if I get all ‘Classic Rock’ for a moment but Michael Morley has been part of that guitar legend category for like what? Twenty years? His distinctive scuffed and ultra-primitive shredding in The Dead C confounded, confused and delighted a generation of dysfunctional weirdos (like me).
That Morley sound, explored further in Gate and other duos/trios and collaborations, has remained fairly consistent. The emphasis has been on the rotten, decay and the fine art of falling apart. This glorious sound is singular to the degree that the actual method of creation, the humble guitar, becomes the least important part of the equation. The sound is the thing man!
So what happens when this rotten, decayed and deconstructed approach is aimed at a poor old acoustic guitar? What happens when amp-buzz, rich feedback overtones, volume and crushing distortion are painted out, shipped off and packed up for another day?
This conundrum is answered by Michael in a calm, reasonable and clear voice:
I’m gonna pick up this thing and just play. Roll my fingers over the strings and let my head go blank and my heart pulse with pure unrefined love.
Or something
So… if you are expecting lame Fahey-isms look away now. Sure, you get some finger-picking-dixie but this is more of a strummer – the ghost of punk can’t help but glimmer in the distance.
I’m not sure if these pieces were recorded in chronological order but they sure travel in the same direction. ‘The Hills’ is a watershed moment. You can hear the decisions being made in the Morley-mind… this chord/that chord, repeat or move on, hang a note and let it ring or plough on?
And that’s what makes this so darn charming. It’s how I want to hear a guitar get played. Not all cocksure strutting but more questioning, more searching.
FLASHBACK: I’m reminded of THE BEST SHOW EVER (29th October 2004) when Christina Carter played so free and so wild and so unconsciously unfettered we all (us the freezing audience) lost touch with reality for a moment or two. We nudged our dimensional boundaries for a time and pushed ourselves collectively into a new altered state. It was like a Close Encounter without the sunburn. Phew. Back to business…
Shorter, tidy and neat tracks build to the 22 minute epic ‘The Living’ that takes the lessons of each pause, harmonic sigh and fret-board creak and lays them out, like a floodplain extending towards the horizon, perfectly flat and reflective – giving nothing away.
Themes bloom from the mirror-like lake: an arthritic flamenco and soft dub whispers. Knotted straw is fashioned into a scratchy homunculus… but these are mere dreams on the bucolic journey.
The fingers crackle over the strings, moving with determination but at a baroque pace, letting a foot stomp occasionally. But mainly? I’ve got my elbow stuck out the window as I keep on trucking.
Just watch out for them sinister hitchhikers!
Seymour Glass & Fleshtone Aura – Amplified Teacup
Jaxx, JAXX, JAXX!! Goof-off jizz collage from gents old enough to know better.
Like-I-said, any old giffer can chuck a tape-machine in the blender and stand back, hands on hips looking fairly pleased. But it takes a lifetime of weird to let things float a bit, to resist the easy temptation and play the hot denial card.
I like it best when everything crumples into a pile like a screwed up set of pyjamas. All the energy is spent and collapsed, fagged-out, so all that’s left is a memory of a split second… and that’s rolling away like a greasy marble.
It’s a two track beast this. Live (recorded like, live, man in San Francisco) plays with one hand tied behind the back and one eye closed. Glass // Aura become a neat one-ness. The sounds are clean and fresh, diced with a quick sharp knife but free of any residual gump or snot. A sense grenade redecorates your scrambled mind and non-sequiturs suddenly form allegiances and join hands singing like Cola-hippies.
The speedier Non-Live possum ramps up the tape-rottage… the sound snippets jitter between calamity and tragedy. With Jaxx so heavy it’s as physical as hauling in a sodden trawl net. There’s all sorts of briney sparkles caught up in the weft but some are squished beyond recognition. TED talks cut up into alien syllables anyone?
Freaky like a flatfish.
SHEPHERDS OF CATS & PANELAK – Muscle atrophy in a squirrel’s left leg
This single piece of music, running for over 50 minutes once rang clanging alarm bells for me. I was raised with Punk, Trad Jazz and Skiffle – four minutes constituted a major opus in them grimy-thumbed worlds; how am I going to cope with almost an hour of klattersome huffin’ and puffin’? So, as a result of my small-minded defeatism this handsome looking disc stayed on the mountainous ‘to do’ pile for far too long. For shame.
I should have had faith in my host’s skills. Poland’s Shepherds of Cats and the Leeds/Lisbon wunderkind Pascal ‘Panelak’ Ansell have paid their dues man and ‘…squirrel’s … leg’ is a damn fine piece of collated jam, taking in free-freak-folk, company-style improv and Impulse-label ecstatic jazz. Those 50 minutes I churlishly baulked at give this quartet the time to relax and stretch out, develop the narrative and bring each performers unique voice to life. Obvious now, eh?
Earphones ready, I dive in. The very proper percussion rubs shoulders with dirty electronics. Ritualistic vocal chants beat down cheap plastic pipes, cello drones interrupt spoken word instructions (“let me show you”) and we end with the sort of fusion keyboards Herbie Hancock would vamp back when he was good.
But of course it’s the careful and sensitive edit that makes each micro-element flower into life. I have no background info but I’m guessing that individual solo, duo and trio recordings are woven together to create a meta-tapestry. Hey, if it’s good enough for Teo Macero…
Keeping such rich material in a collective form but still allowing it to breathe is no mean feat. And especially as this doesn’t resort to any climax clichés. In a world where peaks and troughs, to-you-to-me improv is busting my balls it’s delightful to hear such confidence just letting things flow.
There seems to be a two-layer thing going on here: interior, close sounds are crackling at pillow-talk volumes but the external, wider sounds carry everything along in a gritty wake. You want comparisons? I’m minded of some of the more sparse Vibracathedral Orchestra pieces overloaded with Phill Niblock’s sandpaper electronic shapes with a snifter of ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ in its loose-limbed Wurlitzer flailing.
The combinations of keys, horns and percussion get tangled together and instinctively unravel at the exact point we’d welcome some electronic fizz.
That’s right. International telepathy gets a new spokesperson!
—ooOoo—
fever dreams of a plush boob: joe murray on no basement is deep enough
November 5, 2014 at 9:39 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: alvaro, andrew zuckerman, field recording, fleshtone aura, found sound, horaflora, improv, joe murray, lieven martens moana, my dance the skull, new music, no audience underground, no basement is deep enough, noise, raub roy, singing bows, spoken word, tapes, vocal improvisation
Alvaro: The Chilean with the Singing Nose – 1978 (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#27, edition of 60 packaged in ‘breast-shaped construction’)
Fleshtone Aura – Wet Cocomo (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#29, edition of 55 packaged in ‘triffid-shaped construction’)
Lieven Martens Moana – The Volcano, The Night that precedes all, and a hymn for Paul Gauguin (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, ‘purple tape in leather-look wallet painted and bubbling faecal mess’)
Horaflora – No Roof is High Enough (tape, No Basement is Deep Enough, NBIDE#26, edition of 49, ‘blue tape wrapped up in multi-coloured plastic rope’)
Alvaro: The Chilean with the Singing Nose – 1978
A true original. Grey-beard Alvaro was born in Chile in the 1940’s then moved to London as Punk gobbed and pogo-ed its way into the Bill Grundy Show. For a time he was a 101’er, some cockney pre-punk pub-boys, with a bloke called Strummer but luckily he had the sense to move on before things got stale and boring.
Rejecting Punk’s uniform but rejoicing in easy-listening, avant-garde composition and wonderful daftness in three equal parts Alvaro sits down at his piano to come up with…err… I’m not quite sure.
To my tender ears I can pick out something that sounds like the Goon’s Bluebottle (possibly a quality of the nose) with the magic-realist lyrics of an Ivor Cutler. Songs concern themselves with a number of domestic situations: a love of honey, mothers milk and in one case being made of wood. But this never comes across a faux-naive or affected, it’s all utterly convincing.
For me the piano sound is a big part of the draw. It does that wonderful swooping thing, a slightly warped thing, making it all sound wide-eyed like Charlie Brown cartoons. An instant memory-bomb that detonates in less complicated times.
These lovely piano-led songs are punctuated by the occasional spoken word spiel, sax bleat or drums to keep it spicy. But it’s all kept simple and pretty uncluttered with the kind of frail gossamer-touch that Robert Wyatt musters up.
Side one ends with an augmented domestic field recordings (dentist chatter/water running/tuneless singing/plastic pipe whistle) that is as bang up-to-date as anything in the no-audience underground today.
You could waggle that ‘outsider artist’ card if you like but I think that’s a bit of a red herring. I think Alvaro (recording here in 1978) is exactly where he wants to be, doing exactly what he wants to do with confidence and, with a quality you don’t get every day, charm.
Fleshtone Aura – Wet Cocomo
OK. You wrestle with the Triffid/Venus Fly Trap package and stick the tape in. You ponder, is this jizz any good or what?
Thankfully the oval sounds within match the green construction without.
Fleshtone Aura is the one and very Andrew Zuckerman, half of mung-faves Gastric Female Reflex and involved in the very collectable Beniffer Editions label.
Found sound, loops and accidental damage are the kings here all netted up and laid out like noxious butterflies. Fleshtone Aura provides the base material and it’s the listener that has to join the dots into <><><><><><> patterns. Are you ready readers?
The different approaches work well. Found tapes of ‘X Factor-style’ auditions are charming and cheeky, the Wii sounding electronics frothy like bubble tea. Recorded cat squeals and deep throated bilge nestle up against brightly-blurring vash. But the scratched electronics stop anything becoming over-twee. The velocity is generally quick…the edit pieces are less music concrete and more attention deficit disorder channel-hopping but there’s plenty of space to stretch out and enjoy the fuzz if you are patient.
The teenage rampage card is played several times but FAura can’t help being god-damn classy on the tape’s closer, ‘Gomer’s Frontispiece’, in which wet digital clicking pitches against brass horn (downtuned) like the kinda thing Scott Walker should be thinking of next.
Listen or buy here or see NBIDE links below.
Lieven Martens Moana – The Volcano, The Night that precedes all, and a hymn for Paul Gauguin
Real name realness from Dolphins into the Future main-mung. DITF were the red-hot tip a year or two ago, name checked in Pitchfork and The Guardian. We dig a little deeper here at Radio Free Midwich so here’s an early pitch of the solo, real name project. Always an interesting prospect that when a moniker-beard goes back to the birth name. Must mean something; a glimpse under the rug? A trueness of intention?
The jams on this handsome purple tape are superb right from the off. Deep gaseous whales moan and croon churning the briny and vibrating atom to atom with greater efficiency than through air. Therefore the ‘gungs’ and ‘tungs’ meet my ear and melt into the fibrous bristle within. Like wallpaper paste its thick and gloopy but strong with purpose, an aid to mesmerism perhaps? The final snatch of close-vocal harmony (recorded in a Paris side-street) snaps me from my stunned state and prepares me to get up and turn this fella over.
Side two is an extended vocal piece for voices and recorded tape titled ‘Lava (The Bells from Above)’. It’s beautifully tropical with a Howler Monkey vibe that moves to greedily rising tones surging onwards and onwards, higher and higher like pure sine waves until my merely human ears become useless. The final section blends the sounds of the Maldives (noisy birds and insects) with a sonorous gong adding its own bronze gravity.
There’s a beautiful laziness to these recordings. I don’t mean things are careless or idle. They take their own time to do what they need to do and, as a result of that, force you to too. Prepare these for the cocktail hour! Meet me on the veranda with a Mint Julep at six o’clock.
Horaflora – No Roof is High Enough
Horaflora is just one guy going by the name of Raub Roy. He seems to be a busy fella up to his eyes in sonic experiments with a whole flotilla of names, dudes and radgies.
On this little tape he’s pretty much on his own, crouched on a rooftop, recording Cambodian Singing Kite Bows. Singing bows give off a harsh buzzing as the wind rushes by; loud enough to scare away squirrels and deep enough to summon the spirits. It’s not a gazillion miles away from the vibrations of a throat-singing guy but with the added twinkle of bells and very subtle sound manipulation it’s an altogether prettier listen. Perfect if you are after something light, yet still with experimental credentials, at the end of a busy day.
—ooOoo—
No Basement Is Deep Enough – Discogs
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