knotty scabs, fresh burns: joe murray picks at smut, witchblood
November 30, 2014 at 12:02 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: culver, drone, hasan gaylani, joe murray, lee stokoe, lucy johnson, new music, no audience underground, noise, popular radiation, smut, turgid animal, witchblood
Smut – Incomplete Chaos (CD-r, Turgid Animal)
Popular Radiation/Witchblood – Live at the Mining Institute (tape, Boiled Brains Bootlegs, BBB #003)
Smut – Incomplete Chaos
Lucy passed this one to me merely minutes before she clambered up on stage at Newcastle’s OctoberTUSKfest and fairly flattened the attentive crowd with the extreme heaviness found inside an old violin and some dodgy FX pedals.
This time Smut plays it spookier and looser with a bunch of long/short/long pieces moving from candle wax smooth to hessian rough over 50 delightful minutes.
‘Mother Shipton’ is, as you’d expect, cave music; throbbing reverberation and haunted echoes. Squashed foghorns moan in a deep drizzle, a children’s pipeband is lost in a nearby chamber but play to keep their spirits up. You can hear terror in their reedy voices as eyes skit round the dampness looking for any pinpricks of light.
A rush of thick flaming oil is captured in the brief but aptly titled ‘A grandeur in the beating of the heart’. It’s warm and rough like knotty scabs over fresh burns; you can’t stopping picking at it despite the crimson pearls of blood collecting under your fingernails.
Free-guitar overload lurches while the runes rattle as the pivotal piece ‘G&G’ unfolds…chunky riffing collapsing and re-building solid shapes, sucking all the light out the room. A ragged apocalypse, dark alkali fires and barren earth all spring into my mind-cinema as I’m buffeted by this howling voodoo.
Long nights bring the unknowable with the three cackling demons: isolation, paranoia and fear. The super-spooky track ‘Tramadol 4am’ is a séance of terrible magnitude. Like slow suffocation, or waves closing over your head, the scruttered voices are just beyond the level of intelligibility… their dark chatter is unclear making this all the more haunting.
Phew… this brings us to the melancholic closer ‘Blood Moon.’ A giant ribcage from some monstrous beast is bowed (deeply) whilst thunderous exclamations get chucked from on high by a grumpy Zeus. Truly restrained and ponderous, like the sound of glaciers calving, this is now standard kit for all Antarctic explorers.
Being in the right place at the right time snaffled me up this boxed copy but Incomplete Chaos will be released on Turgid Animal soon. Keep watching… as the nights draw in you’ll need this grim disc, as autumnal as acrid bonfire smoke and spent fireworks found in the damp street.
Popular Radiation/Witchblood – Live at the Mining Institute
Like Cheap Trick and the Budokan or Motorhead and the Hammersmith Odeon some bands and venues seem inextricably linked. Is it the acoustics, the pre-gig ‘refreshment’ or the vibe (man)? I’m not sure about all that lot but one thing I know is some places accept a performance and some don’t. I’m delighted to report Newcastle’s Mining Institute is fast turning into a little Carnegie Hall for the No-Audience Underground with excellent performances this year from Fritz Welch & Crank Sturgeon, the Minton & Poot duo and Roger Turner & Urs Leimgruber to name but a few. So while you might not be able to scream, “I was there man!” you can sup from the excitement goblet by jamming this pink little tape.*
First up, Hasan Gaylani’s Popular Radiation. A full-throated and rich-coffee roar fills the air as soon as I press play. Blimey… this is heavy. Derived from something Sarod/Tanpura-esque this is a single point in time, stretched across 20 mins or so, but it would be disingenuous to call it a drone work. Poplar [sic. Editor’s note: nice typo though – imagine the luminescent forest!] Radiation has more in common with the dark art of the DJ, in particular Millsian techno. Deep sounds are mixed and blended and it’s in this mixing and blending that the magic takes place. Tiny incremental changes are edging between different states until it dawns on you that you’ve moved from one listening position to another without even knowing. As the Killer Bees state:
The slow blade cuts deepest.
Flipping the tape introduces us to Witchblood (Smut & Culver) who employ gas piano and shadow violin in a devastatingly effective duo. For me the name Witchblood conjures up Hammer Horror but this music is no campy bombast; it’s pure dustbowl depression. Like a tornado full of sepia-tinted pianola and slack cat-gut, sound whirls slowly. Things keep at a menacing pace but become more dense and complex as notes topple over each other, edging themselves out the twister to collapse to the ragged rocks below. It’s elemental, with that sense of gathering power, like when clouds bruise and blacken and you feel the delicious tension before the first fat drops of rain fall. Most precious of all is the beautiful, respectful silence that follows the thin grey fade out, a precedent to the howling cheers and applause.
All this for £4 only from the mighty Turgid Animal site.
—ooOoo—
*the other option of course is to just lie about it like the thousands of Manc half-wits who ‘saw’ the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall and still haven’t stopped going on about it…
rfm’s 2012 round-up part one of two: the zellaby awards
January 4, 2013 at 1:59 pm | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | 11 CommentsTags: ap martlet, aqua dentata, ashtray navigations, astral social club, bbblood, castrato attack group, cathal rodgers, culver, daniel thomas, drone, eddie nuttall, electronica, etai keshiki, fordell research unit, hairdryer excommunication, half an abortion, hasan gaylani, hobo sonn, improv, joe murray, joined by wire, kev sanders, kieron piercy, lee stokoe, live music, melanie o'dubhslaine, michael clough, miguel perez, neck vs throat, neil campbell, new music, no audience underground, noise, paul watson, petals, popular radiation, posset, shameless self-congratulation, sheepscar light industrial, space victim, spoils and relics, star turbine, striate cortex, tapes, the skull mask, truant, wharf chambers, yol, zellaby awards
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second annual Zellaby Awards, presented in association with Radio Free Midwich and hosted, via satellite link-up, from the quarantine ward at Midwich Mansions.
And what a year, eh? From watching Mel O’Dubhslaine reinventing music in Kieron Piercy’s basement through to laughing out loud on the bus as I listened to BBBlood’s breaking glass tape, the year in music has been remarkable.
Whilst the emphasis in these awards is on bloggable recorded music, the live performances I saw in 2012 could warrant a whole other sack of prizes – such was the astounding quality on offer. Congratulations to the venues and promoters of my fair city of Leeds for making them happen. Truly there is a renaissance at hand and anyone with a fiver who lives within commutable distance of Wharf Chambers can come and see it.
On a personal level, this has been my most satisfying and successful year in music since I first leant my elbow on a keyboard. I was delighted and humbled by the reception that met my return as midwich both as a live act and over a series of well-received (and largely sold-out) releases. The reanimation of Truant has proved most entertaining too. I’ve been careful to watch and learn from my betters and may finally, after twelve years on and off, be getting somewhere with this drone business…
OK, enuff with the vague preamble! It’s time to carve the turkey and dish out some meat!
—ooOoo—
Almost. First, some methodological asides:
One: the music mentioned below may not have been released in 2012, although most of it was. To qualify it just had to be heard by me for the first time in the calendar year 2012.
Two: I have taken the editorial decision to exclude releases that I feature on. Modesty is not a virtue I can be accused of but awarding myself prizes is a bit much even for me. This led to an interesting conundrum when making the big decision in the final category…
Three: there are the same five award categories as last time. Should an artist win big in one of them they may appear overlooked in others. This is deliberately done in the interests of plugging as much as excellence as possible. No-one should get the hump as I love all my children just the same.
—ooOoo—
Now if you’d kindly take your seat, the ceremony is finally about to begin…
5. The “I’d never heard of you 10 minutes ago but now desperately need your whole back catalogue” New-to-RFM Award goes to…
(with special mentions for BBBlood and Spoils and Relics.)
A lot of brusque, hard-bitten and jaded noise types have found themselves swooning like 12 year old Justin Bieber fans over the work of Eddie Nuttall this year. His small but perfectly formed back catalogue has the fascinating, alien charm of a pea-green lizard, eyeballing you from behind the glass of a reinforced aquarium. In an age of excess, the austere control he exercises over his minimal music is as refreshing as snow. You should have seen me elbow grandma out of the way to get hold of his latest. Big things still to come, I hope.
4. The “Astral Social Club” Award, given for maintaining quality control over a huge body of work making it impossible to pick individual releases in an end of year round up goes to…
(with honourable credit afforded to Lee Stokoe.)
The work of Kevin Sanders sounds like nothing but itself. Sure, a less conscientious commentator could categorize it as ‘drone’ or ‘noise’, even ‘improv’ in places, but these are just reference points that Kev politely nods to on his way past to somewhere else. Each dispatch from his own label, hairdryer excommunication, or guest appearance elsewhere, is another segment of alternative cartography, another section of the map he is constructing that overlays the everyday, revealing previously hidden connections, secret tunnels. This is why it is impossible to pick out individual releases for special comment but why every little bit is essential.
3. The Special Contribution to Radio Free Midwich Award goes to…
(also in the frame being Joe Posset and Miguel Perez.)
My burgeoning bromance with Daniel Thomas (who I knew previously by his given name) has been the talk of the no-audience underground in 2012. Our friendship has spurred me on in my creative endeavour and has led to an overhaul in the way I think about midwich and the place of this blog in the big/small scheme of things. The immediate success of his label Sheepscar Light Industrial was due to a carefully thought through ‘business model’ that has breathed new life into the ‘micro-label’ format. I’ve been sorely tempted back in that direction as a result – he makes it look so effortless (lolz etc.). The chap is a force for the good and well deserves this public pat on the back.
Likewise Joe and Miguel whose infectious enthusiasm has been great for morale all through 2012. An email from either is always a soul-lifting treat. Special thanks to Joe for actually contributing to RFM in the most practical way: 3,000 words of terrific reviews. His whole end of year account can now be read (in six parts, it totals 32,000 words!) here.
2. The Label of the Year Award goes to…
(with Sheepscar Light Industrial manfully accepting silver.)
For the second year running. I needn’t go on at great length: Andy Robinson’s vision, integrity and hard work led to a world-enhancing series of releases. A package from him is always a drop-everything-else cause for celebration. He also released the undisputed album of the year in the Victorian Electronics box – a four CD set, exquisitely packaged with astounding care and attention to detail – featuring four artists at the height of their powers. It led to a celebratory gig at Wharf Chambers which is generally held to be one of the highlights of the musical year and the edition sold out in a couple of days. I hope that it will be reissued in some form some day but in the meantime it remains a perfect historical document. So how come I’m talking about it here? Well, one of the featured artists is midwich so it is disqualified from the big prize. Tough, I know, but thems the rules. Hopefully being the only two-time winner will soften the blow for Andy. Congratulations, man.
1. The Album of the Year Award
There is so much to choose from this year that it is almost embarrassing. First, in no particular order, are those that would have been in the top twenty if it wasn’t for the brutal fact that a top ten is much more dramatically satisfying…
- Astral Social Club – ASC #23
- Ashtray Navigations – Three Spots Two Circles
- Hobo Sonn – Synthetic Preserves
- Fordell Research Unit – The True Meaning of Red
- The Popular Radiation CD-r series
- A Brief History of Joined By Wire
- Star Turbine – Equilibrium
- Posset – Correct Come
- Ap Martlet – Pyrite
All terrific stuff, click on each to read my thoughts at length and for contact/buying details.
Now on with the top ten, in reverse order of course:
10. castratoattackgroupetaikeshiki
The adrenal rush of these punk vignettes is as focussed as toothache and as effective as a blow-dart to the neck (Etai Keshiki)
…and…
It is a life-affirming, nostrils flaring, magnificent wig-out … There are no lulls, no tricksy passages of noodling, no lumpy transitions. This is, ironically given the name of the band, completely balls out from beginning to end (Castrato Attack Group).
It is, as you’d expect from these two, artfully constructed, nuanced and textured as well being totally balls-out gonzo in places. Clinking-plinking-tinkling, smashing, grinding, crunching, squeaking, that kind of ‘pouring sharps’ noise as the pieces settle – like the apocryphal Eskimo having 40 words for snow, a specialist vocabulary is needed to describe the effects these chaps pull from their single sound source…
This is heroic stuff, recorded simply and cheaply with a red-raw honesty … Miguel was amused to see this described as ‘bluesy’ in Vital Weekly but during Part Three, the epic nine minute centrepiece, it isn’t hard to imagine him standing at the crossroads, his loose-fingered raga whipping the desert dust into strange, dancing anthropomorphic shapes. The pieces either side illustrate the expressive power of Miguel’s technique: sore-eyed from the campfire or crackling and mysterious or solemn and contemplative.
7. Daniel Thomas – Delighted in Isolation
Leaving dinosaur-related whimsy aside let me lean across the table, look you in the eye and conclude thus: Delighted in Isolation is an accomplished and deeply satisfying set. The impressive technical savvy with which it is composed and compiled is never an end in itself but instead always serves the flow. There are stand-out tracks – I’ve listened to that final section god knows how many times – but more importantly there is a coherence, a unifying aesthetic, throughout which allows for a sophisticated emotional response from the listener. Dan is a storyteller.
A gloriously super-minimal analogue throb. When listened to at the appropriate volume, that is: so loud as to be consciousness threatening, it sounds like the sewing machine that God used when she was stitching up creation. Fucking amazing.
5. Space Victim – Psychotropic Mind Murder
Passages of this album are properly fried. The psychonauts amongst you may be reminded of the ‘chameleon’ stage of an acid trip: peaking like crazy, your senses fizzing like sherbet fireworks, your skin rippling and morphing to mimic your surroundings, your eyes bulging and swivelling independently of each other. Or so I hear. I wouldn’t know, of course.
4. Mel O’Dubhslaine – I Can Remember the Faces of All the Grebs at My School
Absolutely extraordinary, nothing like anything else I’ve ever been sent. Thirteen tiny tracks, each properly titled, of spiky, squirming surrealism played on bizarre cross-pollinated hybrid instruments. …Grebs… is a unified collection expressing something wonderfully unfathomable.
3. Aqua Dentata – March Hare, Kraken Mare
This is precise, slow-moving, crisply defined and unafraid of periods of silence. It has an attention diverting flow and an interestingly oblique rhythm. The rise and fall is like the breathing of a quarantined astronaut, infected by some spaceborne virus which is now busy reconfiguring his DNA.
The other-worldliness is especially evident on the short second track when what sounds like a recorder is used as an unplugged analogue for the pulls and throbs of electronic feedback. The first and final tracks employ the near perfect length and despite being created with, y’know, instruments and that, have an unmistakeably ‘Lilithian’ xenobiological vibe. I trust that by now I have established this is a very, very good thing indeed.
2. Cathal Rodgers – Thirty-Nine Years Of Decay
Thirty-Nine Years Of Decay is artfully constructed, beautifully evocative and emotionally harmonious. It is melancholy without being maudlin or sentimental, gruffly realistic without being unkind or gratuitous. It is the sound of someone trying to process difficult notions about time, about aging, about mortality and taking seriously the enormity of the challenge. For the record: I am talking about layers of pedal-loop throbbing, scything guitar and/or synth drones, high tension metallic pulses all beautifully recorded and elegantly balanced. A point is being made eloquently and convincingly.
…and drum roll please as the golden envelope is opened… Ladies and gentlemen, the Zellaby Award for album of the year 2012 goes to:
Forgive me quoting myself at such length but the story is a good one…
Earlier this year me and Miguel Pérez, RFM’s correspondent of the Americas, produced a split CD-r: Miguel in his psychedelic raga guise as The Skull Mask, I contributed a throb-heavy Midwich track. Fifty copies were manufactured and offered to friends and to those willing to trade or brave enough to express an interest. One of those who kindly responded was Yol – see below for my thoughts on his art – who sent a copy of PUSHTOSHOVE in return. I was mighty impressed and threw some mp3s of it across the Atlantic to Miguel who found himself just as appreciative. Those two got in touch with each other.
Soon files were being swapped and neighbours unnerved. The work was fashioned into shape with machine tools, willpower and spit and now the results of this experiment in transatlantic improv can be revealed. It’s a fucking triumph.
To be specific: what we have is a five track, 32 minute CD-r, packaged in another example of Yol’s winningly stark graphic style. Two of the pieces are Miguel improvising over material provided by Yol, the other three vice versa. I think the difference between the two sets of tracks is marked and interesting. One is furious, claustrophobic, the other has more air to it, a little more room in it to pace nervously up and down. I’m not going to tell you which are which, though, as I think it might be fun to try and work it out for yourself.
Yol’s contribution is aptly described as ‘Throat Attack & Smashing of Objects’ on the back of the CD-r. His vocalisations range from the almost conversational to horrifying bellowing to teeth-clenched, spittle-flecked groaning. It is remarkable – unlike anything else I’ve been sent. His utter commitment to the physicality of the performance is awesome. Scraping, crashing, the dropping of metal objects augment and divide the stuttering tirade, like punctuation.
Miguel’s part is described as ‘Guitar Neck, Hair Sticks & String Damage’ and his style here is similar to that on recent recordings released under his own name. No effects, no overdubs, rarely even sustain, hard picked, unforgiving in its discipline yet nuanced, subtle and compelling. There is no ornament to it because none is needed.
The collaboration is a success, meaning the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Miguel underscores the rhythms and cadence of Yol’s glossolalia. Yol’s furious delivery both bounces off of and is contained by Miguel’s guitar, like the steel ball bearing on a pinball table.
…and there we have it. Another magnificent year.
The Award Ceremony
Well, given that Yol is in Hull and Miguel is on the other side of the world in Mexico I quickly gave up on the logistics of actually handing over a prize. Instead of a voucher (as won by Ashtray Navigations last year) I will be putting an equivalent amount of money behind the release of the second Neck Vs. Throat album in the New Year. Yes, I’m getting my hands dirty with this one. Is it the return of fencing flatworm recordings? Watch this space!
Right, everything that isn’t music to be summarised in part two…
artifacts of the no-audience underground: recent jazzfinger
August 7, 2012 at 7:57 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: bells hill, drone, hasan gaylani, improv, jazzfinger, noise, popular radiation, sonic oyster
Jazzfinger – Poem of Stones (Bells Hill, BH010, CD-r, edition of 50)
Jazzfinger – Night Fall At Borrowed World (Sonic Oyster Cassettes 009, edition of 50)
OK, what we have here is a nicely presented CD-r on Scott McKeating’s ever reliable label Bells Hill. It contains one track which documents about 45 minutes of a Jazzfinger rehearsal from 2004. The recording is inexpensive, unedited – rumble at the bottom, harsh at the top, meandering throughout – however as it progresses it becomes clear that this is no mere ephemera of interest only to Jazzfinger obsessives. I can’t get enough of it. The liner notes provide some context:
Recorded at Morden Tower, this was a rehearsal for a gig we were going to play at a Weekender at the abandoned Aldwych Tube station back in November 2004. As it turns out the event was cancelled at the last minute and coincided with John Peel’s funeral on the Friday, and Jhonn Balance‘s death that Sunday. What a shit weekend.
Presumably the band did not foresee this shitness but the melancholy air to much of the piece suggests a hint of what was to come may have been in the room.
There are changes of direction, as you would expect from a rehearsal tape, but these are far from aimless. As with all good improv, the transitions are as interesting as the periods of ‘steady state’ noise. It shifts with the unknowable purpose of a nocturnal marine predator swimming over what in the daytime is a multi-coloured reef rinsed to grey-scale by the moonlight. Is it looking for food, a mate, shelter? Or is it a Lovecraftian ‘Deep One’/human hybrid, fully adapted to the life aquatic and shaking off the last vestiges of its humanity? Irresistible.
The tape is a more manageable, relatively slick affair with properly edited and titled tracks released in the generic neon packaging of the collectable Sonic Oyster cassette series. Would it be perverse of me to describe this as ‘urban pastoral’? What I mean is that Jazzfinger’s psychedelic noise is no hippy delirium, no prelapsarian bliss. Instead it seems pulled up from the streets of the city, like strange flowers growing through cracks in the pavement, in a place where urban foxes knocking over bins have the same totemic power as the coyotes of the Mexican desert.
For more on Bells Hill see their discogs page or email Scott via scottjamesbellshill@gmail.com. Details of how to get hold of the the Sonic Oyster tape can be seen here.
popular radiation post popular, radiating
July 15, 2012 at 2:07 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: drone, hasan gaylani, jazzfinger, live music, new music, no audience underground, noise, popular radiation, posset
Ah, it is good to be back! My beloved and I have just returned from a less than satisfactory holiday in Devon. The weather was atrocious throughout, the accommodation acceptable at best and what little relaxation we could manage when our teeth finally unclenched was unavoidably interrupted by terrible news about the serious illness of a close friend. Grim. I won’t miss those roads either. The journey from the local village to our cottage was like a hedged-in rollercoaster. With sheep on it.
Oh well. Back in civilisation I have been taking solace in a skim through the pile of correspondence that built up in our absence. My eye was naturally drawn to a lengthy email by the lovely Hasan Gaylani of Jazzfinger whose solo project Popular Radiation was the subject of my last post before going away. He makes a bunch of interesting and explanatory points adding to my own comments and I thought you lot might be interested to read ‘em for yourselves. Over to Hasan (with one more note from me):
I’m so glad that you heard this as one thing divided into 5 – did you notice that some of the outros are actually the intros to the following gig/CDR?
(Editor’s note: I DID notice the outros/intros thing, and now I wish I had mentioned it, but I thought it was my overactive imagination. My mp3 player shuffled the tracks into alphabetical order so at first I didn’t hear them in chronological order yet STILL heard intro/outro links between them. Hasan is obviously a massive genius because his skills make sure the tracks appear linked no matter what order they are listened to in!)
Yes, Space Argument is a reference to the fantastic Modern Toss cartoon, but it’s also a reference to that cat on the sleeve. She was called Patti Smith (!) and died in Jan 2011 at the grand old age of 18. The photo was taken in the early 90’s – at that time she didn’t like living with me and the other cat I had at the time and tried to keep away as much as possible: in the photo she’d finally found a bit of privacy – on top of the kitchen door!!
A while back I was reading a lot about Merzbow and discovered that an alternate title for Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau was The Cathedral Of Erotic Misery……and the term Erotic Misery really fitted into my feelings about the bits of Kes I used – the scenes where the headmaster is berating and caning those boys, and also when Billy is hitting and cursing his inebriated older brother all seem highly charged in a totally wrong way. The bit from Paris Texas (I knew these people…) is the scene where Travis is talking to his ex through a one way peep show mirror: at once beautiful and desolate, he can only talk to her and love her as long as she can’t see him…….etc……two of my all time best movies.
Ariel Bender is a reference to the Mott The Hoople guitarist of the same name and also a reference to a lot of the sounds being lifted from the radio. The second half of the track is me mashing up the beat from the Strangulated Beatoffs ‘(Theme From) Fart Inhaler’ (mixed with a faulty Bong live tape) – it’s recognisable if you know the original track so it’s a cover version!
I thought your comparison of PR to the girl in Poltergeist was spot on and great. Kraftwerk’s Radio Activity’s allusion to radio waves and radioactivity says that it’s ‘in the air for you and me’ and so it follows with that in mind I’m nicking/soaking up/recycling stuff from the radio (presumably it’s popular if it’s on the radio, right?), TV, DVDs, other people’s records etc…….you know what I’m getting at, right?
I think the humourous side of things comes through more in my stuff than in JF as it’s more personal to me, and I love my twisted comedy as much as my favourite music – my favourite band ever is Sun City Girls which probably explains a lot. JF is more about a collective pursuit of beauty, and a manifestation of our friendship.
So now you know, eh? Thanks again to Hasan for taking the time to reply so comprehensively. I can only repeat my recommendation that you get hold of this stuff. Contact Hasan directly via hasan.gaylani@btinternet.com and ask how.
artifacts of the no-audience underground: popular radiation
July 4, 2012 at 3:48 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: drone, hasan gaylani, jazzfinger, live music, new music, no audience underground, noise, popular radiation, posset
Popular Radiation – PR1 to PR5 (self-released CD-rs)
- PR1 Space Argument
- PR2 Magnum Hopeless
- PR3 Ariel Bender/Fart Inhaler
- PR4 Erotic Misery
- PR5 I Remember Every Day Of My Life
I’ve heard it said that you should never meet your heroes and I suppose that if your idol is, say, a Premiership footballer or a big name contemporary artist then this is probably true. The experience is unlikely to be edifying. However, down here in the no-audience underground the notion is total bollocks. I am in the enviable position of being friends with many of my heroes and can report on their qualities as human beings as well as their creative talents (see here for an explanation of why we are all so wicked awesome). Always good to meet a new one too…
…And so it came to pass that before the recent Ceramic Hobs/Jazzfinger gig in Leeds I received an email from Joe Posset, RFM’s North East correspondent, telling me that I HAD TO GO because Hasan Gaylani of Jazzfinger had been asking after me. That was very flattering. Imagine if the subject of my humble blog was poker and Chris Moneymaker had requested an audience – a legendarily down to Earth and approachable guy but still a world champion. I was, as our American cousins might say, stoked.
The gig was great (see the write-up at Idwal Fisher) and I managed not to make a twat of myself in conversation with Hasan, Ben (Jazzfinger) and Mike Vest (of Bong, Space Victim etc.) who had all travelled down. The ‘social’ was well good that evening. Hasan was very appreciative of the coverage this blog gives to the North East noise scene and flattered me even further by handing over the first two in this series of CD-rs by Popular Radiation, with a promise to send on the others. He’d been pleased with my review of the 3″ CD-r by PR on Bells Hill and wanted me to flap my ears at his solo project’s more long-form incarnation. This I have been happy to do.
The specifications: a series of five CD-rs packaged in minimal wrappers featuring found illustrations (at least I hope they are found given the subject of the piccy on PR3 – yes, that one you stopped and had a good look at on your scroll down to the text). All are recordings of live performances which took place between June 2010 to July 2011 in various venues around Newcastle. To keep it all in the no-audience family: PR3, 4 and 5 were recorded by the indefatigable Joe Posset. Each contains a single track and vary in length from one quarter to three quarters of an hour, though I’m inclined to think of it as one piece in five parts with a total running time of about two hours and twenty minutes.
These recordings have three main ingredients: a) noise, mainly strata of distortion, b) drone, mainly swarms of fuzz and c) lengthy samples appropriated from other musical sources or dialogue taken from film or ‘field recorded’ conversations.
The tone is some distance from the expansive, psychedelic delirium of Jazzfinger. This is demanding stuff, occasionally claustrophobic, darkly humorous to the point of nihilism. For example, Space Argument (PR1) is presumably titled for the series of cartoons by Modern Toss which features a pair of bickering astronauts oblivious to the majesty of the cosmos due to their annoyance with each other (“Stick the flag in over there”, “You fucking do it”). Erotic Misery (PR4) features a lengthy excerpt from the film Kes of a teacher berating some school boys, exasperated at their intransigence and enraged at his impotence in the face of it: the whole system is fucked, always has been, always will. Cheery thought, eh?
Or am I imagining it? The ecstatic reaction of the small but appreciative crowd at the end of each set suggests the audience was not pummelled into submission by despairing bleakness. There are plenty of lighter moments and some proper laffs too. The bit from Kes is followed by an entertainingly squashed extract from In the Hall of the Mountain King, its inherent campness enhanced by a little industrial distortion. Ariel Bender/Fart Inhaler (PR3) cannot be taken entirely seriously either, as you might expect from its title, cover picture and the grin-inducing exotic croon-pop that kicks it off.
I did use the word ‘claustrophobic’ earlier, and so it can feel, but it isn’t oppressive – plenty of headspace for interpretation remains. My thoughts drift in and out of focus as these pieces progress, becoming more or less plausible. To attempt to think hard about Popular Radiation is to put yourself in the position of the little girl in the film Poltergeist: her hand on the television screen, face flush to the static, chatting with voices only she can hear…
Recommended, of course, though I can find no indication that any of this is commercially available. I suggest contacting Hasan directly – hasan.gaylani@btinternet.com – and asking him nicely.
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