pure disco imbalance: rfm on karl m v waugh, storm bugs, midmight and panelak
May 2, 2017 at 6:24 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: emblems of cosmic disorder, karl mv waugh, midmight, panelak, pascal ansell, resipiscent, snatch tapes, storm bugs, urubu
Karl M V Waugh – o light; a lightness (Emblems of Cosmic Disorder)
Storm Bugs – Certified Originals and Vintage Fakes (Snatch Tapes)
Midmight–Cut Cut Cut Bruise (Resipiscent)
Panelak – Sunsplat/Quatsch (Urubu)
Karl M V Waugh – o light; a lightness (Emblems of Cosmic Disorder) CD and digital album
A three-part homage to light – or to life?
Opener ‘dawn’ is a shy overture. A gathering of electric-breath and glistening themes in a cloud of expectancy leading into the 30 minute bulk of ‘light’ – moving at the speed of morning.
The gentle yawn of night is giving up, once again, to budding and unfurling mauve tendrils stroking the un-blackening blue.
Yet this is a curious and optimistic light, the bucolic synth tones rising and falling like the warmth of the spring sunshine as it pokes yellow fingers into the places darkness prefers to lurk. The rolling nature of the soft-sound lolls between my sleepy ears carrying slight dissonant pitches and moans that build and decay, build and decay…
Somewhere in the background a gruff blustering slowly gathers pace in the same way a snowball picks up stones and leaves – mimicking the creation of a tiny world. About 20 minutes in I feel the churning emergence start to leave traces of itself – miniscule waves that shift in graceful S-bends, travelling the twin meanders in deliciously greasy detail.
The closer, a brief tropical ‘dusk,’ is altogether more hectic as fuzzing and fritzing notes buzz in Brownian motion, shimmering like moon-birds. It’s only in the closing seconds they jettison their fragile wings, ready to propel themselves in a steep suicidal ascent into the dead vacuum of space.
The circle remains unbroken.
Storm Bugs – Certified Originals and Vintage Fakes (Snatch Tapes) CD in hefty vacuum-formed case, booklet and digital album
The legendary Storm Bugs are respected old-timers residing, a bug apiece, on the South Coast and Deptford (Borough of Lewisham). Somehow this shared maritime history, pebbled-dashed openness, wide skies and neat beaches seem to run through their infectious sound.
Certified Originals is a very helpful drawing together of recent ‘dingles’, downloadable singles that play with the seven inch format in a variety of delightful ways: the three-minute pop song, the dub version, the unexpectedly superior b-side all get shoved through the Storm Bugs’ intelligent blender.
For the uninitiated get ready for SONGS…catchy verse, chorus, verse songs with real words and underpinning ideas. But like This Heat or something these songs all get twisted into new forms creating bold statements that weave through their deceptively dark synth-pop exterior.
Make no mistake – the sweet exterior always reveals a soft-centre of something unpleasant and darkly acrid.
Starting off gently there’s no nostalgia on ‘Hisstory of the Cassette Tape’ as it playfully pokes at both collector-scum and sepia-bores. And of course there are bonus points for rhyming “Cassette Tape” with “Ferrous Oxide bake.”
A bewildered diary entry ‘New Resolutions’ marches like a Roman Legion with the type of buzzing synth-sound EL-P loved to chuck into CoFlow jamz. The ghost of Esquivel squirms through ‘Up the Pylon and Down the Lane’ but in a sickly sinister nursery rhyme.
‘Pity the Small’ takes me right back to those minor-key symphonies perfected by New Zealand’s Tall Dwarves but here laced with suicidal thoughts.
And this darkness reaches a peak on ‘Take it to the Top’ a discombobulating mash-up of the ‘Are You Being Served?’ theme with a Class War manifesto.
Gosh! I need a bit of a sit down after that.
The instrumentals are measured as carefully as posh cocktails – a snitch of vermouth, a splash of bitters – so while tracks like ‘Storm of Bugs’ could have fallen out of an Art of Noise remix 12 inch way back when Morley was a mere annoyance, ‘Ordnance Survey’ is, without a doubt, a mosh-pit breakdown.
Wondering what 60’s corn-pop tune Popcorn would sound like full of acid squelches? Clear out your lugs for ‘MitWasser’.
These kindly Bugs don’t want you to leave this disc a wreck so they save the slick beats and hummus-rich atmosphere of ‘Triangulation’ until last; a strangely euphoric piece that started to claw-back my faith in human nature and throw a few shapes around the living room.
Consumers! Satisfaction is yours to demand. Order a Storm Bugs solution – NOW.
Midmight–Cut Cut Cut Bruise (Resipiscent) CDr and digital album that comes complete with another Midmight album ‘Almost Clear’
Midmight (be-masked and anonymous) offers a whole flotilla of mind-engorging short pieces on this unapologetically boisterous collection.
Some sort of electronic dissonance (hot-wired light sabre, explosive durian fruit?) takes centre stage buffing away at crumpled field recordings – often TV sound and domestic detritus – like a donkey’s tail swats bothersome flies.
The rhythm and timing of these swoops is both unknowable and difficult to categorise. At one point they seem to batter the taped sounds into submission (‘Abdominal Cavity’), at others they accompany as delicate parsley sprinkled on fresh gazpacho – see ‘Springville Auction’ for details.
‘Make no Mistake’ seems to mould the spitting energy into a quick ska-beat; ‘Let’s Pretend’ is a slow rinser from the Wolf-dong camp.
Sucking on a pencil I decide it’s probably a mistake to over-think this set of JAMZ.
Just raise your fist and yell!
Panelak – Sunsplat/Quatsch (Urubu) Tape and digital album featuring 25 different J-cards?
A whirring, churning, ever transmogrifying mulch of lo-fi tape magic!
Phew – them’s powerful words eh? What if I was to tell you young Pascal Ansell has created his very own Faust Tapes on this ecstatic Panelak release?
You’d read on with damp lips eh?
Huge, broad swoops of sound are moved with ease across a broad and ordered canvas. The shudder of tape grot rubs shoulders with children singing and ukulele strums along to winged-eel keyboard.
Field recordings (a gondolier, a market place) are wrenched across a digital interface and looped, chopped and edited with fine cotton gloves. You get the picture?
But it’s this fine sense of editing, a sure hand and a keen ear, that takes these colourful and varied sounds and turns them from dull bronze into a winner’s gold.
Each side holds a single 20 minute piece; one named Sunsplat and one named Quatsch and both contain more singular sound-moments than I can shake my walking stick at. If your experience of this form of sound-collage/gonk montage has been ham-fisted or without any internal narrative fear not! On this fine, fine tape Pascal has arranged each sound into a logical (un)sequence of deliberate/accidental, stressed/relaxed, acoustic/electronic. As a result the damn thing flows like a soul-river; deep and clear and free.
Individual moments create a framework to hang your hat on; but be sure to listen out for…
Elongated moans
>>>vintage tape scritch & scratch
>>>hi-pitch headphone feedback
Italian TV (backwards)
>>>clunky egg-slicer manipulation>>>crab-hand guitar loop>>>Portuguese translation aid
>>>the dry plastic click of a cheap mic
Basic keyboard exercise played with three hands>>>
unsuccessful radio tune-up>>>
old rehearsal tapes cut into pieces>>>pure disco imbalance
If you find joy in the miniature click your heavy fingers on the link and listen to the sweet action.
Dial up P.A.N.E.L.A.K for mighty change.
-ooOOoo-
kerry king’s amp fizz: joe murray on stuart chalmers, karl m v waugh, grey guides and cam
February 17, 2017 at 7:24 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: amateur shoegaze, cam, constellation tatsu, crow versus crow, dictaphonics, emblems of cosmic disorder, feedback, grey guides, improvisation, joe murray, karl mv waugh, noise, skrat records, slayer, stuart chalmers, tape loops
Stuart Chalmers – In the Heart of Solitude (Constellation Tatsu)
Karl M V Waugh – Future Glows (Emblems of Cosmic Disorder)
Grey Guides – Beast Mask Supremacist (Crow versus Crow)
CAM – Mirror Confrontations (Skrat Records)
Stuart Chalmers – In the Heart of Solitude (Constellation Tatsu) cassette and Bandcamp download
Don’t know if it’s just me but this appears to be the perfect winter cassette of glum collisions. Imagine bad thoughts reverberating inside your skull; the sounds bounce and amplify and leave a sooty fingerprint. You shake your head but the dust remains however low and mellow the sun.
Regular readers will know Stuart manipulates tapes and tape loops with a sparse pedal set-up, mighty fists, secret knowledge and magical skill. But this time it’s not just the loopology that takes the starring role, it’s the singular tape content that snaps like an arrowroot biscuit.
Here Stuart uses Indian Swarmandal tapes pretty much exclusively for his palette adding a layer of glittering resonance and magnetic space to each gentle track.
The dulcimer-like tones vibrate and twang, sour as brass but with an unmistakable air of mystery. “Just what is behind those beaded curtains?” They seem to whisper, while a be-jewelled finger beckons you through a hidden door into a room heavy with musk.
I’m transported (can’t you tell?) but you need facts eh reader? The killer stand-out, the magnum opus has to be ‘reflection’. It shimmers like a Bagpuss episode viewed through sepia-specs. It builds slowly and metallically, fine interlocking coils spiralling ever tighter and tighter until sonic shrapnel bursts rudely from the shell.
There’s a slight panic, a speeding edge that propels each track into momentary discomfort. And it’s that intersection between mystic enlightenment and dangerous toppling that makes me come back again and again to this wonderful little tape.
OH YEAH…While we’re talking I’ve got to give an honourable mention to Tlon a fruity collaboration between Stuart Chalmers (cassette/pedals) and Liam McConaghy (synths). It’s now sold out in this realm but available for all you millennials on digital (e.g. not really there) editions. It’s boss alright but gone, gone, gone.
Karl M V Waugh – Future Glows (Emblems of Cosmic Disorder) Cassette and Bandcamp Download
Ultra atmospheric, lichen creeping from the South Coast’s very only K M V Waugh.
Lengthy opener ‘Fire snow (i), fire snow (ii), fresh grow’ stretches out as slow as bone growth. It starts slow and ends slow yet visits several distinct intervals on the journey: Meredith Monk on the Woodbines, bummed Didgeridoo guffs and the Electric Spanking (of war babies?).
Things grow darker on the even lengthier ‘Future glow (ii), final gravity’ that matches John Carpenter’s percussive judders over Space Odyssey’s floating-backwards-through-the-monolith-with-rainbow-brite-whurrrring . The disembodied voice offers no comfort.
Designed for the sort of snitchy mediation we can expect in today’s topsy-turvy world.
A statement? Perhaps. A coping mechanism? Very much so.
Plug in and remain alert!
Grey Guides – Beast Mask Supremacist (Crow versus Crow) Tape and bandcamp download
Encased in a top-notch Andy Wild photo-collage-art-piece (slate grey of course) this tape just fucking drips quality.
The Grey Guides hail from Morley outta Leeds and concentrate that satellite town dislocation that those city slickers just can’t replicate. The exquisite weirdness of the suburbs runs through this tape like mould in a stinky cheese.
The instrumentation is sparse. A gentle roaring (sounding rather like The Cramp’s Poison Ivy practising over in the next parish) becomes a backdrop over which indistinct keys, fetid tape grot and soft Dictaphone squelches hover on opener ‘One Eye Lower Than the Other’
The next two tracks, ‘Millipede in a Doll’s House’ and ‘Mushroom Heads are Turning’ are surely designed to spook; they come across like a Yorkshire Dead C with their sound-on-sound fullness, their squished-sonic wrongness. Black reverb ripples across backmasked guitar and throb in a fair approximation of a tape player actually throwing up; brown ribbons spiralling out, collecting in sticky ferric pools. It all ends in a grim repetition which baffles against broken ancient machinery. A woven howl (now sounding like a 16th generation tape of Kerry King’s amp fizz) smears as Gerhard Richter, using only charcoal tones and coal dust, comes up with his next masterpiece.
‘Just Burned Down a Care Home’ starts with some s-w-e-e-t tape-juggling, thumb on the soft pause squealing out fractured speech while that dude out the Cocteau Twins wonders why all his pedals now sound like elephant seals huffing petrol fumes.
Massed tape séance-traps are forced open on ‘Van Hoogstraten’s Big Pay Back: Gorton Poltergeist Revisited’ leaking thick magnetic ectoplasm with a “whurrr, whhorrr, whurrrr” rattling like an unsteady wind. It’s heady like good brandy.
Several ghostly interruptions later we happen upon the rarest of beasts, a No-Audience Underground cover version of a real-live tune (x2). The Grey Guides join the dots, reversed of course, between The Can and The Fall from a barely perceptible start; the faintest of pulses through to a garage-rock-recorded-through-codeine-infused-marshmallow finale.
I finally collapse to the unruly jaxx of ‘The Unlovely Acolyte Anointed at Last’ – Sidney Bechet clarinet played on Satan’s mouthparts and wonder. “Is this what passes for entertainment in Morley right now? “
Yeah it is?
Book me on the Mega bus boys…I’m coming down to jam!
CAM – Mirror Confrontations (Skrat Records) Vinyl LP and digital album
These long-timers, Denmark’s enigmatic CAM, share six electronic improvisations with us on this classy vinyl offering.
It’s a noble three-piece set-up with Claus Poulsen, Anders Borup and Mads Bech Paluszewski-Hau on an encyclopaedic array of tapes, synth, processing, objects, things, toys, electronics and improbable occult practices.
Keen RFM-spotters will recognise the name Claus Poulsen from his work with Star Turbine (a duo with Sindre Bjerga – on tour in the UK late Feb/early March) but this is a very different animal to their ion-drive grit. CAM specialise in fast-moving tripod dialogue, texture and split-tooth wrangles ya’ hear.
The spirit of Northern Europe Improv is strong with strains of cold-dark hiss, low-frequency gloop and singular vocal hummings woven together in pan of steaming mind-think.
The six tracks on this el-pee make these impressions on my Swiss-cheese mind.
- Squiffy beats ba-da-bump like Saaaaalllllt n’ Peppppper over a humpin’ vox (heavy on a delay). Snatches of field-recorded atmosphere are tucked up nice with an analogue-warm wave; reverse-hissing seems to be become a new Olympic discipline as breath gets sucked out a puckered pair of lips.
- More moaning: a creaky bridge caught up in high wind. The cables sing sorrow in a thousand different voices. The damp thump of workboots crossing the swollen planks adds a steady beat. But what’s that I hear? The dreams of the factory workers hoping for sunnier Spring days.
- Uncertain hymns via Robert Wyatt’s fractured, dust-dry larynx. There’s a real Rockbottom vibe with that watery keyboard (a gift from Julie Christie) lapping gently at your stubby toes. The oyster grit comes in the form of treble-heavy child chatter and bubbling electronic slime.
- Primary tones/chalk sliding over wet slate/Babbit-bobble/wrenched petroleum
- Confrontations in the afternoon, seeping prose and dramatic static ripples – don’t go chasing waterfalls.
- Mind-over-matter becomes a group practice. Three individual voices hum the theme from ‘The Bridge’ in different timezones, accents and languages so voice two arrives before voice one and voice three has an acidic hangover. Deep as an oil well and twice as sticky.
OK Travellers…a reliable signpost might say Supersilent but I reckon these dudes are looser and, without doubt, DIY to the core.
-ooOOOoo-
psychedelic domestic: joe murray on karl m v waugh, duncan harrison, lost wax
April 28, 2015 at 3:08 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: ben morris, chocolate monk, disillusion.dot.dot.dot, duncan harrison, field recording, improv, joe murray, karl mv waugh, lost wax, musique concrète, new music, no audience underground, noise, reckno, tapes
Karl M V Waugh – unnamed murk (coagulated detritus may 2014 – january 2015) (download, disillusion.dot.dot.dot)
Karl M V Waugh – Varnish Crease EP (download, disillusion.dot.dot.dot)
Duncan Harrison – Others Delete God (tape or download, Reckno)
Lost Wax – The Poacher (CD-r, Chocolate Monk, choc.304, edition of 60)
Karl M V Waugh – unnamed murk (coagulated detritus may 2014 – january 2015) and Varnish Crease
A lazy, taking a line for a walk, kind of listen. That’s no criticism readers. I’m loving this particular ramble with Karl; round the town, out past the betting shop and onto the Downs, chatting and shooting the shit as we wander.
These unnamed murk pieces are poor orphans (coagulated detritus indeed) with no home to go to. And for me that makes things all the more interesting. Are you telling me these pieces don’t fit into your soundworld Karl? Man…I gotta check out these oddballs – they are going to be the nuts.
The modus operandi remains classic K M V Waugh – an object or technique is picked up and fiddled with for a while and each possible combination of rubbing, striking, bowing and blowing rained down until all options are exhausted.
‘Bread Failure’ dances with some close mic rustle, jazz-gob, fake sine wave feedback loops and acoustic guitar fumble as crispy as an early 2000’s Usurper jam. ‘Close Net’ starts with a slo-mo rave synth trapped in a bathysphere; the two Navy SEALS having it large while contact with the surface is registered in day-glo Morse and trippy emoticons. Outside the Angler Fish get anxious with stress-harps. Blimey, Jacques Cousteau couldn’t get this low. ‘Nada Test’, the most lovely one of the lot, is an untutored, unconscious guitar/balalaika/mandolin (?) improvisation heavy on the Korean and Rembetika influences. There’s pure innocence in this playing, a passionate exploration and experimentation that’s scrabbling but at all times searching for a melody to grasp out of the clear blue sky. The last 2 minutes of this 21 minute piece add a slight distortion giving you a soft landing destination.
This mini-album, the wonderfully titled Varnish Crease, is an 18 minute smeared collage, a bold painting in Bovril hues.
Industrial grot (a malfunctioning PEZ dispenser perhaps?) and novelty dice dropped into a chunky whiskey tumbler form the base coat to KMVW’s meta-poetry. Like several porridge-slugged mouths reading their dreams simultaneously this has a head-fudge quality. Ever been lost in a crowd? This mimics that slight panic and claustrophobic feel exactly.
Wonk-hop snatches of sound are introduced like RZA’s all blunted on Funeral Dance Party; a South Coast One Wobbly Egg. In fact this whole crease has a real Cidershed feel with that slight tint of threat added to the vulnerability.
Essential listening for any young dream-voyager.
Duncan Harrison – Others Delete God
Pearls dipped in butter swirling round the palm of a brown giant. The slick tones fill the smooth handful; fingers wiggle to spread the flutter.
This is a disarmingly charming and hypnotically beautiful opener from his holiness Duncan Harrison.
Gurble-gobs, slop and slobber the lazy consonants and sighs that very skitter with finger-manipulated tape skank. It soon turns into pigs grunting quick enough (oink oink oink) and a sonic Richard Scarry cartoon of crash-bang-wallop.
A water butt slowly fills with rancid treacle as tiny black imps dance around the bloated barrel, slapping their bulbous bellies and blowing crimson smoke rings. A watchful Duncan scoops up the imps and ingests them all a-wriggle, recording their hapless plummet down his gullet.
But please don’t take my sub-Stan Lee dribbling as evidence of sonic goofiness, cynically used to leap-frog to the desired ends (freedom, bliss, ecstasy etc). Repeated listens to this humble tape reveal this to be a mature work, a self-assured work, a personally resonant work floating slowly into my consciousness. There’s no reliance on underground clichés here. The psychedelic-domestic of bus number recital, buffeting wind noise, slow chip-pan ‘pop’ and throaty Gatwick roar have filled my heart with honey and my head with sleepy nutmeg.
Side one ends with another real-life vignette, this time trad-jazz busker (think bowler hat and pinstripe waistcoat) overlaid flinty guitar pluckage (think sloppy Arran jumper and orthopaedic shoes) bringing two worlds together – the beach front and the bedsit – into a tangy-sharp fragment.
Side two opens with a wanking mumble, a half remembered dream of the time John Noakes applied Chopin’s poesie sonore methods in the Blue Peter garden (don’t bother to ‘YouTube’ it. This nugget was never televised and then destroyed on direct instructions from Biddy Baxter.) as the tape edits flutter around his West Riding glottal stops.
Valhalla opens its gates to welcome another fallen hero. For a time the drunken revelry quietens and the bard’s horn plays mournfully through the mist. Shields become bronze gongs beaten with a soft as the captured skald drones on.
Back in the studio Duncan dons his silk gown and adopts the Crane stance blowing on flesh bassoon until a feeder tape of allotment gristle joins the sound mix like it was the most natural thing in the world. Birds aimlessly chirrurp and flapper and cast iron tools are tinkled like collectible glass bells. I can feel the late afternoon sun in this recording baking my neck and making me sleepy. This. Is. Delicious.
A game-changing tape from D Harrison. It looks innocent enough for sure; but this tape’s got a confident swagger that’s unmatched right about now.
Lost Wax – The Poacher
Super-classy Musique Concrete from Ben Morris that takes full advantage of the far-flung places he’s laid his loveable mop-top over the last couple of years (China, Vietnam and even Derbyshire).
The Poacher is split into three parts, each third revealing a different side to Lost Wax, that unlock and fold out on hidden brass hinges. Let’s look inside…
The first third, ‘The Sun is a Hammer’, takes clear recordings of tin parakeets, smoke-train rumble and happy-clapping ritual and slices them up nice with a razor like some heavy radiophonicia dripping secretly out of 1970s Bulgaria.
The pace is stately, like a nurse on a bike, as Ben adds layers of hiss and schloop weaving them into a tapestry fit for a medium-sized town hall. But before we can even jiggle a heavy chain of office beautiful voices creak out of the floorboards. They soar and float like rainbows. Flutes trill. I swoon.
Next we visit the watch menders convention for ‘Time Travel Corrodes the Mind’. A hired drummer fiddles with his high-hat (fairly obsessively tiss-tiss-tiss) as the cummerbunded MC beckons in a phalanx of beach balls full of gaseous hippy crack. The massed horologicalists look up from their chaotically ticking handfuls but relax as Ben, safely at the controls, squeezes out a rhythmic pulse for the cast-iron disco crowd. Tapes of paranoid mumbling (source: CIA bugs, Cuban Missile Crisis?) bookend the track as several men bend aluminium picture frames in your left ear.
This tasty trio is completed by ‘Home, Exhuming a Shed‘. Imagine F.M. Einheit getting ready for a date (checklist – red rose, lump hammer, rusty chain, trumpet, gas canister) dressing in his best dungarees with bear-grease controlling his wanton quiff.
Gnarled hands rip up steel casings and pummel a brass boiler with oranges. The bright zest fills the air and this sudden change in atmosphere calms our man…his fingers caress the splintered keyboard moving from black to white. Digit-shapes transfer from 3D geometry into calm sound-pools that sit gently rippling in the citrus breeze.
—ooOoo—
patina of yuks: joe murray on the new blockaders, charles dexter ward, libbe matz gang, dr:wr
December 16, 2014 at 5:37 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: charles dexter ward, dr:wr, drone, electronica, fuckin' amateurs, improv, joe murray, karl mv waugh, libbe matz gang, libertatia overseas trading, loxley tapes, matching head, new music, no audience underground, noise, tapes, the new blockaders, tusk festival
The New Blockaders – Everything You Ever Needed (tape, Fuckin’ Amateurs, edition of 12, FA90)
The New Blockaders – A Beginner’s Guide to TNB (tape, Loxley Tapes, edition of 45)
Charles Dexter Ward – CDW 111014 (TUSK) (self-released download)
Charles Dexter Ward – Past Lives (tape, Matching Head, MH208)
Libbe Matz Gang – Infantilised Britain EP (7″ single, Libertatia Overseas Trading, LMG4S, edition of 150)
DR:WR – Trippin’ Daggers Inner Skull Metal Blade Musique (self-released CD-r with ‘original gonzo artwork’, edition of 20 or download)
The New Blockaders – Everything You Ever Needed and A Beginner’s Guide to TNB
A warning. Art-jokers The New Blockaders like to keep folks on their toes right? They’ve toyed with ‘blank’ tapes, live performances that contain no actual Blockading and recordings that never see the light of day. The question on many lips seems to be…
Will this be a real Blockaders recording or some grimy stunt?
The extra patina of yuks comes from the labels themselves, Fuckin’ Amateurs & Loxley Tapes. In Blyth parlance they are most definitely, ‘cheeky fond’. Translation – loveable rogues, with a long history of bootlegged, unofficial and deliberately misleading recordings dubbed quickly and distributed for free.
This time F#A! and Loxley have really nailed the presentation: A Beginner’s Guide… is encased in a rusty metal tin, dripping with foul-smelling bitumen. The tape itself smeared with grime and grit. Everything You Ever Needed is less dirty, the monochrome artwork sporting a spot-on-grim smeared photo of local graffiti, but more or less playable.
Both of these tapes were originally dealt out personally to folk at Newcastle’s TUSK fest by F#A! frontman Martin dressed as a police officer. The remainder were shoved in a bag and left near the bins behind the Star & Shadow cinema for people to stumble upon.
1. How does it sound? The title gives us a clue of sorts. Side A, ‘ACAB – Changez Les Blockeurs vs Live at Morden Tower’ sounds to my tin-ear like two live recordings jammed together. These kind of extended noise jams are always tricky to describe. Here goes…
SKKKEKKKEKK…approximately 30 minutes of mega-amplified squeaky plimsoll on hardwood gym floor…HHHHHUUUUMMmmmmm…moving furniture, painful feedback squeals…KUUMMSSKKkkkkkkSSSSS..broken-glass shatter, spurting electric springs…BuuuuuuummmmBBBB…rusty metal shearing all delivered with hectic energy.
It’s soooo frantic. Any pauses are brief oases and end sharply as things get broken and kicked with renewed vigour. Say what you like about this dark art: it’s really exciting. I can see my teenage self jamming this full-throttle alongside Suicidal Tendencies whilst disastrously skating the local parks.
Side B is labelled ‘Blank’ and seems to be really, like blank man. Totally silent without no background hiss or nothing to judder or hang on to. OK…given the TNB history that’s all very fitting. I’m fine with all that.
As I deconstruct The Beginner’s Guide I swoon for this is indeed a beautiful object. From the insert replicating the famous TNB manifesto to the detailed sleeve notes (hidden inside the tin) it just hums attention to detail. Shining a torch inside the thing suggests this is a TNB approved compilation of their greatest hits; a handy taster for any up-and-coming noise fan. The only problem is I can’t play it. Some of the blue grit (the sort of thing you find at the bottom of a fish tank) has gummed up the spools so my cheap-o-stereo just whirred uselessly and looked at me whispering…
Really? Are you sure?
…under it’s cheap-o breath.
So, dear reader, I’m no further forward with my original ponder: is this TNB or some stunt? I’m not sure – it seems genuine enough but I’m no expert. I reckon as long as everyone goes into things with their eyes open we’re all good. Yeah?
What are your chances of picking one of these up? Slim I’m afraid. But in true New Blockaders style… why would you? Reject the Art! Use the above blueprint to create your own. I’ve got a hot nut for some amplified baking tray action just right for this one.
Mamma…we’re all Blockaders now!
Charles Dexter Ward – CDW 111014 (TUSK) and Past Lives
Brace yourself for a clutch of psych/drone/kraut-tronics from the wonderful Charles Dexter Ward (the tweedy beast). First up this super-hectic live piece from CDW’s storming set at this year’s TUSK festival. Things start all relaxed alright: water bubbling, birds singing and Greensleeves style plucking afore…
Yonder!
The analogue synths start to mist up your eye mask with long-haired groaning lurchers. Slowly, so slowly, new textures (a two note keyboard hum) are added, like peeling an onion in reverse, with each papery skin folding up nicely over the next all neat n’ tight.
Content to let this scene build for over ten minutes the patient Mr Ward starts adding guitar riffs, each loaded with potent chemicals. The rhythmic strumming builds up and up into rapier-sharp soloing clearing the vapours like menthol. And it’s this electric soloing, ecstatic and optimistic that makes CDW my contender for the No Audience Crossover prize. I can picture this, in my giddy mind’s eye, going down in hearty gulps at shindigs like the Liverpool Psych Festival or Islington’s Union Chapel.
There’s a universal in the grain of that guitar sound…a forward motion that’s as unstoppable as evolution. Don’t believe me? Watch with those beady eyes!
The title of the Past Lives tape is a cheeky wink to the age of some of these recordings. Two of the four tracks are from circa 1996 but are in no way patchouli-scented juvenilia. Both dark and gloomy ‘Pathfinder’ is one of the back catalogue offerings; a brief but richly fertile drone building up into a drumlin – a soft-boiled egg in sound.
‘131213’ starts all Carlos Castaneda with that wide-open-spaces-desert sound; shimmering guitar and gritty synth as distant and insistent as the mid-day sun beating down on your naked pate.
But, as the analogue storm slowly blackens and brews, I’m transported to an alternate space. The sense of heat and desolation remains but it’s altogether more sinister now. An abandoned drive-in stands lonely as a poisoner. The tattered screen flickers and springs into life, washed-out colours are slightly unfocused as a Mexican version of Assault on Precinct 13 plays to its audience of one. The slowly shifting colours on screen smear out the violence behind.
Side B opens with ‘010612’; a synth-led warble and fritter. All the juddering warps the stereo-vision like a mirage in sound. Tones flit in and out of focus, showing a partial shape but content to tease until a pair of tamed sea-lions honk in harmony (errr…probably a guitar played with e-bow in reality but please grant me this indulgence). The mantra continues as a raga based on charred notes from Rugby’s space programme but by upping the noise quotient this moves beyond any stale rock music and closer into the tumbling chaos of Edgard Varese.
‘Stereo’, the final piece and another offering from the crypt, is a roughly psychedelic theme tune. Slowly descending chords wreathed in glistening effects remind me of that AR Kane lot when they spoke about remaking Bitches Brew but with guitar feedback. This is a questing sketch (at about 2 minutes long, it makes me want to hear more). An ode to yearning.
Libbe Matz Gang – Infantilised Britain EP
Raised as I was on the heady tripod of Jazz, Heavy Metal and US Hardcore I’ve always felt slightly uneasy around electronics. I mean, I dig all that kind of thing now; but I still have to take a deep breath when faced with anything resembling a plastic keyboard.
The Libbe Matz Gang have no such aversion as this neat little sevener is heavy on the ‘tronics right from the off. This back of the bus rave on a Blackberry Bold with a cracked screen vibe is both harsh and heavy. Each short track is a rap over the knuckles and cosh to the conscience with evocative titles like ‘Casualty to Custody’ and ‘Punterhunt 2’.
The sounds? Well, like I said it’s electronics that rule. What I hear in my ears is: bedpans emptied down a steel tube, concrete burrs over a rubber glove and guttering wobble. The ghost of Chrome hollas a tune…and even forms a rhythm for a few bars. Sonic bombs explode – a scurrying hustle of a contact mike dropped into a tin can, an elbow cracking a tender collarbone are all captured and served on brushed-steel platters.
While that takes care of your percussive needs be prepared for some snatches of speech that are World-in-Action grim/red-light district grotty. They add a dark heart to the bleak, fractured blasts of twisted noise rumbling under the surface.
Available now from their intriguing blog/news/update site.
DR:WR – Trippin’ Daggers Inner Skull Metal Blade Musique
This is one of them discs that doesn’t like to sit about too long. It’s itchy, it’s twitchy and keen to get up, pogo, lie down, roll on the floor and pretty much do everything in its power to grab your attention. This is just the sort of slap I need from time to time. Sure…I’ve got the patience for a 50 minute plus drone workout but I often favour the sugar-rich rush of folk who just want to jam an idea, stop, re-set their equipment, than jam another as quick as silver.
DR:WR have an attention solution. And so in that very spirit I’m going to write this as each track plays. No filler or bumf. No navel gazing or theorising. Just first impressions hammered home on the keys as quick as these folk make ‘em.
Mung Crow: Guitar scree played in forbidden harmonics. Lumping beatbox high with cowbell and handclaps.
Hyper Tile: Super-burnt-electrics ripple like hot water then turn to freezing Napalm.
Lumbargo Extraction: The sort of beat Basic Channel reject for being too out-there played in the dark…no lasers!
Blood Rental: Fizzing electric squid.
City Storms: Oi Eno? Is this what you’re up to these days? Ambient for the terminally uneasy. Seagulls solo. The cliffs crumble in slo-mo.
Sherbet Delay: Tubular Bells heard through the chill-out room door. A 4am vibe when my nerves are shredded by 16 hours or drum & bass and … I drift … slowly … … off.
There you go. An instant reaction to this frothy disc just champing to be played. You’ve got some time don’t ya? I urge you to click here for this and more speedy enlightenment.
—ooOoo—
eye for detail: a long month passes quickly
November 2, 2014 at 10:09 pm | Posted in midwich, new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: ap martlet, aqua dentata, astral social club, bbblood, breather, brian lavelle, chrissie caulfield, clive henry, dale cornish, daniel thomas, devotional hooligan, dr:wr, drone, dsic, eddie nuttall, electronica, foldhead, gerado picho, hagman, hardworking families, helicopter quartet, improv, in fog, joe murray, john tuffen, julian bradley, karl mv waugh, la mancha del pecado, michael clough, michael gillham, midwich, miguel perez, neil campbell, new music, nick allen, no audience underground, noise, orlando ferguson, panelak, pascal ansell, paul walsh, paul watson, posset, psychedelia, pyongyang plastics, scott mckeating, shameless self-congratulation, simon aulman, the piss superstition, the red cross, the zero map, tom bench, van appears, yol, zn
It is now a month since eye for detail, the midwich remixes album, was released as a Bandcamp download. In that time there have been 35 purchases and well over a thousand plays of the individual tracks. More than £150 has been raised for The Red Cross as a result. I can only repeat how grateful and touched I am to those that contributed and to those that have supported it. Keep spreading the word.
Now that a little time has passed some critical reaction has started to bubble to the surface. Opinion first popped into being via Twitter, of course, and friends of RFM like Miguel Pérez and Paul Watson used their 140 characters to praise favourite pieces. Others have stepped out of the limelight to send me personal emails, such as the enigmatic Daniel Thomas. Paul Margree posted a welcome summary over at We need no swords – grinning and shrugging at the enormity of it and shooing his readership in this direction. Andy Wild has played extracts on the 81st edition of the Crow Versus Crow radio show too. The ‘scene’ has rallied around in a most heart-warming fashion.
Further to the above I have also, amazingly, had not one but two track-by-track accounts sent to me. The first of which is a collection of one-liners from the over-clocked, fizzing metaphor engine that is RFM’s own Joe Murray, the second a lengthier effort from my friend Nick Allen.
Joe needs little introduction but Nick is a new name here. We have been friends and work colleagues for many years. He is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic music fan and a frequent gig-goer but is by no means a noise head. He has listened in a tolerant, amused and open minded manner to me gabbing on about it all the while we’ve been sat in an office together and has done me the courtesy of coming to see me play live at Wharf Chambers. In return I have suffered no worse than occasional piss-taking which I consider fair exchange. Being a good sort he donated a tenner to the cause and, after dipping his toe in once or twice, decided that he was going to spend a Saturday afternoon immersed: listening to the whole lot, in order and making notes as he did so. Blimey.
Both sets of reactions are posted in full below. Why not open the eye for detail Bandcamp page in another window and listen along as you read?
Oh, and finally, Nick is an occasional writer of poetry and the combination of a glorious Yorkshire sunrise experienced whilst listening to the track by ZN inspired him to write ‘Juego de la Luz’ – also posted below. Should you enjoy it, Nick has a terrific 32 page, A6, self-published booklet of his work (called, with admirable brevity, ‘Poems’) available for nowt much so email him at the address at the foot of this post and make arrangements. I’m on my fourth copy because I keep wanting to pass them on to others I think will be interested – high praise.
First up – Joe:
Various Artists – Eye for Detail (The Midwich affair)
Micro-reviews/descriptions/impressions of each piece from the Now That’s What I Call Midwich smash hit.
Dale Cornish – Management. Hissing clicks like freshwater shrimps gone loco. Wonderfully sparse.
Aqua Denta – Natural Wastage. A glassy shroud wrapped round a tin body. After time rusty horns blow.
In Fog – Verdigris. A Mynah Bird enrols at IRCAM. This is her final project (informed by heartbreak).
Dsic – Procedures. The gods throw road mending equipment through a black hole.
Clive Henry – Witch Mania, Mend Gem. Scrabble tiles become sentient and form one-note Tangerine Dream tribute act.
Brian Lavelle – Slowly, we illuminate future truths. New Star Wars theme slowed down 1000 times.
Van Appears – Molluscs. Undersea skat. SCUBA improv. Oxygen/Nitrogen mix set to high
AP Martlet – New Plateaus. Elegy for out-of-date School Atlas (circa 1951).
Foldhead – Glacier. Super minimal like pink frost.
Chrissie Caulfield – oTo T50. A sharp intake of robot’s breath. Klezmer exhale.
DR:WR – Left Unresolved. Prison riot as heard through battered brass ear-trumpet.
Hardworking Families – Be to under weather to be. Sunshine distilled into individual waves, pickled then shook in a jar.
John Tuffen from Orlando Fergusson – Weather to be Under. As above but dubbed like On-U Sound.
Panelak – Irnwrks. Chipped-crockery-core! Salty blood runs over teeth staining them pink. Sharp to the touch.
Simon Aulamn – Too Early. A spitting porpoise (of course).
Paul Watson – Midwich. Sneak into the chapel. Stuff the organ pipe with potato. Hit the keys for chips.
Posset – A Moment of Stillness. Dictaphone frottage in Lovecraftian word jam.
The Piss Superstition – tinymuscle. The Detroit mass transport system scored for bic pens and pocket fluff.
Michael Clough – Left Unresolved. Thomas Tallis jumps in the Tardis and demands sexy-android motet.
Neil Campbell – MidwichMIX. Sly Stone comes round to polish yr Horsebrasses? Beware excessive Brasso fumes.
Devotionalhallucinatic – August in Ribblehead. Severe throttling. Barbed Wire snogs. Not a great first date.
Michael Gilham – oTo T22 Part II. Tractor beam vibrations, asteroid mining, dirty spacecracft.
Daniel Thomas – Striking Flint. Cast Iron Cello rubbed till the rivets pop out.
Breather – Floating. The real Pirate Radio material…stick that up your Skinner!
Yol – Stoma 2. Real-live stutter gob vs Jojouka horns (acid remix)
ZN – La Industria De La Luz. The Museum of Misery opens its doors. Churning machinery whirrs inside with dismal efficiency. In your pocket, an invitation…
Andy Jarvis – Bosky. Shit. Wish I’d thought of this. Pure vocal drone like some Pandit Pran Nath dude. Heavy vocal sludge gets more and more looped and freaky. God damn perfect!
—ooOoo—
OK, that’s that for Joe, over to Nick:
I know almost nothing about this music – so here goes – I have had one run through a week or so ago…in bits…when I picked out Cassie Caulfield and Michael Clough as early front runners, let’s see how they perform now its all in one sitting. It is 1.30pm on Saturday 18 October, press PLAY and let the spontaneous prosody begin:
Management – Dale Cornish
static bursts or restrained pissing…something frying long pauses…a message not reaching me
Natural Wastage – Aqua Dentata
outside…natural atmospheric background…perhaps a distant motorway…higher scratchings…spirals…low-level tinnitus…flying saucers from Plan B from Outer Space…an itching…something more coming into view…more solid…almost expect the screen to wobble a la transportation device of sci-fi TV…nevertheless a peaceful embracing enveloping atmosphere…also something of Sunday morning church bells (I can hear my dishwasher in the background glugging a rapid beat)…entering bat territory…higher higher pitch…like listening to a Turner painting, hearing colours…inside a sensory depravation tank with my eyes open…pulsing…meditative…a note, sustained…riding over, riding over…a crashed car with the horn jammed…a ferry…pulled out of calm…fade…stop
verdigris – In Fog
accidental musicality…placid…measured…sounds like a workshop…with an insect trapped…a guide bell…a mood reminiscent of the White Lunar album (N Cave and W Ellis)…fitfull/restful
Procedures – dsic
clamour…clamour…irregular jerking clamour…opening different doors in an industrial factory one after the other…working with the caffeine to increase heartbeat…I can’t help wondering why…space invaders!…and then a drill…all sent to annoy…some pre-recorded music and bleeping…finished and not sad
witch mania, mend gem – Clive Henry
digging, chipping…low backdrop…the sound of an insect invasion, walking…bricklaying…nothing restful…constantly constant…to a whistledown stop and something…walking on bubblewrap (question mark)…wet finger on a glass rim…paranoia perhaps…this could hurt…two apparently unrelated soundtracks…converging on an incoming tide…the hurricane winds battering the wooden window boards in downtown Florida somewhere
Slowly, we illuminate future truths – Brian Lavelle
revelation, and the clouds part…for the first time I close my eyes…a wider picture…within…too calm to be euphoric…there is a place, there is a place…boats passing boats, unseen – that’s something from Apocalypse Now, I’m sure…
Molluscs – Van Appears
Headunderwaterlistening…high tide perhaps…recorded dolphin speak but the voice has been disguised to protect their identity
New Plateaus – ap martlet
pressure build…irritation…a white noise box to mask traffic and city clamour…in a block of flats above an urban motorway, the JG Ballard flyover, and from the balcony you watch the lights swing following the same path, following the same path, lighted traction from the darkest fraction…a city in all its horror and glory…follow the red lights bead…the blinking white lines…sodium…it must all lead somewhere…repetition, the flow, of repetition…dementia…fractures our habits…the neverending nightcity hum…enter the void…there is a darkness beyond…still falling or climbing, hard to tell…exposure…try not to blink…water pressure builds…the last lost signal is broadcast – END
glacier – foldhead
less glacier, more fog, sea fret…immersion and low frequency vibration…soothe…calm intention…passed through some kind of body scanner…observed…minutely…for some reason whales come to mind…perhaps their song…I see in greens and blues…the Sea of Tranquility is green and bottomless and calm…adrift…dreamlike…slumber beckoning…sleep phantoms loom and pass harmless, soft creatures of the deep withstanding enormous gravity, eyeless blind…take an age, we grow…to achieve
oTo T50 – Chrissie Caulfield
outside or wind or…something landing…musical, structural almost a rhythm…there is a Who intro keyboard, slightly…violin-ish…and then cello…trepidation…a sense of lurking…before the trauma…Hitchcock’s Psycho…and so of course, blood in water…some message tapped out
left unresolved (short) – DR:WR
too many voices calling…cannot pick out a thread…interwoven…a sense of cacophony controlled…layers…no structure but mass…diminish…what will happen…
Be To Under the Weather to be – Hardworking Families
the start, the keyboard, the looping beat, then the skip, move up, shape, an invitation to dance, and to risk a beat, this is the dance track, played backwards, beats meet you out of sequence causing surprise, call and refrain, where are the horns, playful, happyhappy, repeatedly running towards me smiling in the video, definitely a song for spring not autumn
Weather to be Under (five is the number he is bounteous) – John Tuffen from Orlando Ferguson
Ibiza choon…arms waving through lights…risings…sunrise…this could pass for euphoria in a bleak world…where next though where next out of the loop…some scattered thoughts fleet and dash before being grabbed and harnessed…and so the loop, ever on, ever on with the loop…mobius sound…within sight of the place we started…zone in zone out…not boredom but the same effect of inattention…the focus is shattered…no, something softer than shattered…but the centre is nevertheless lost in all the rounding circularity…spirals…concentrated meandering always tethered…I’d like my drugs now please
Irnwks – Panelak
flckng rd sttns…nny nny…no pleasure to be had…Alex in Clockwork Orange had his eyelids pinned open…watching someone operate on a broken bone in your leg in your leg because they forgot the anaesthetic…followed by indecision…not unhinged, just hingeless…why would you…
remix of Midwich’s Too Early from Every Day is the same – Simon Aulman
(at 3 minutes this is the Ramones remix)…channelling paranoia…from a bad bad place…do less…much less…a longed for beat stop
Midwich (Hangover mix) – Paul Watson
lethargic crepuscular start…moving with a heavy heart…a car door?…in darkness water dripping…ripples and swirls…open the hands over the mouth and close again childhood megaphones…movement…through a corridor…listening from inside a cupboard afraid of detection…muffle…hiding, stay hidden…steps overhead, steps overheard…feels like ghosts…when you’re unsure
a moment of stillness – posset
verbal verbal…muttered words overlaid an aural mosaic senseless confusion I hear treacle but this is not glutinous it shatters and cracks and loops insensible a moment of stillness is sought, is noted a moment of stillness a moment a moment it is brave and compulsive I imagine him rocking rocking rocking without stop without eventually reaching for the wall like an exhausted swimmer
tinymuscle – the piss superstition
something organic growing one of those slo-mo shots of plants shoots emerging…the remnnants of a dance loop…an antiquity…dust on the needle…laboured breathing, perhaps emphysema, with an oxygen tank by the side of the chair…old industry…with a light touch…a hope…I start to imagine Ian Curtis’ voice…I’m at a loss as to why…
left unresolved cakemix edit – Michael Clough
a spaceship’s groans as it flexes…who would hear it…is it instead the magnified groanings of our knees as we stand again, cartilage upon cartilage…nevertheless it is a wave of sound that seems to enfold in an understated calm…something derived from the element of things…not quite the Buddhists’ chant of Om…closer less ethereal…I am reminded of the alien goo in Under the Skin, that absorbs men, erections and all…which all seems a long way from “cakemix”…the bringer of peace?
midwichMIX – Neil Campbell
tuning up…layers…not yet distressed enough to be Sonic Youth…as if you were touching a piece of metalwork and hearing the vibrations at its atomic level…there is a cohesive harmony but it is hidden among the density…such weight…occasional shafts of light penetrate
august in ribblehead – devotionalhallucinatic
(I like Ribblehead)…adrummerinthedistance…is the foundation…scraping away (an old Jam song)…an element of something happening over there… a show, a performance to be watched, passively…completely immersive
oTo T22 – Part II – Michael Giliham
gently meditative…not quite pastoral…slowly lifting…could be an interlude…so much scope, so much space…allows steady breathing…we float…unhurried…nothing seems immanent…the Northern Lights
Striking Flint – Daniel Thomas
deep echo…slowed dub electronica…all about the pattern on the cardiogram caused by the waves…the repeat and the variance…the approach and the retreat…the search for the optimal point…benign hypnosis…there must be a centre…standing on the shore of an avatar sea…watching the lights on the boats…knowing that the unknowable teems beneath…shoals…that pulse in light…thin filtered light…all this submerged beauty…beyond reach…beyond…timetracklost of…
throating (stomaching) – Breather
(almost) feedback…return nourishment…non-stomaching…which is of course vomit…not a reflection on the sounds, which are gastric at best…push a gurgle through a re-verb…insistent like an alarm…bike horns, he asks unsure…pleasant enough without cramping…
Stoma 2 – YOL
This sort of noise in a supermarket would make you skip to the next aisle and vow to yourself that next time you’ll do the shop on line.
La industria de la Luz – ZN
(this was partially responsible for a poem on the first hearing; see end, Juego de la Luz)
builds and builds…slow accumulation…uncertain pressure…pushing…
something below…an expectation builds…waiting…a chrysalis splitting…no clear view yet…never quite in focus…yet intense…perhaps it is a birth…waiting for what…it is breathing, it is everything, it is repetition it is grind and it is the turning day…the sound of white light at the end of the tunnel…
Bosky (AJ vocal remix) – Andrew Jarvis
…and so the last one…tibetan monk chanting lost behind feedback… something bizarre…squalls over mutterings…vague sense of it being something from another time…or unearthly or uninterpretable…an outtake from the White Album…if I hear a scouse twang I’ll believe it…comes a point where a rock song could climb and take off…but instead it meanders and fades…never less than interesting.
…and we’re done – at 17.23 – off to Fanny’s.*
[*Editor’s note: Fanny’s Ale House is a pub in Saltaire near where Nick lives. I thought it best not to leave that ambiguous…]
—ooOoo—
Juego de la Luz
Awash,
The tentative dawn spills gentle and golden
Sweeping the valley like euphoria
This is what I imagine a warm wind
Would look like, or a heart in love
Rising behind the mass of Windhill
As if a great dam is breaching
Making shadow theatre silhouettes of the radio mast
Which lacks only sails to ride out to sea
And the great chimneys of the ex-factories
Blackly loom exclaiming their redundancy
The lambent air is still, the river’s skin
Lies un-nipped and un-blistered
This gold slips warm and soft along
The singing overhead cables
While the melting iron of Dali’s tracks
Lead the sliced eye to flattened horizons
What will today bring. I suspect
The attentive heron knows, the drifting swan
And the bolting deer locked in their moment of
Stillness, will both know. I am gently enraptured
By this timorous dawn, under whispering mists,
That offers a promise of transcendence
On arriving in the city I find
I no longer understand traffic jams
—ooOoo–
Nick Allen: Panic@6haroldplace.co.uk
eye for detail, paul watson and a giant cardboard cheque
October 12, 2014 at 8:40 pm | Posted in midwich, new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: ap martlet, aqua dentata, astral social club, bbblood, breather, brian lavelle, chrissie caulfield, clive henry, dale cornish, daniel thomas, devotional hooligan, dr:wr, drone, dsic, eddie nuttall, electronica, foldhead, gerado picho, hagman, hardworking families, helicopter quartet, improv, in fog, joe murray, john tuffen, julian bradley, karl mv waugh, la mancha del pecado, michael clough, michael gillham, midwich, miguel perez, neil campbell, new music, no audience underground, noise, orlando ferguson, panelak, pascal ansell, paul walsh, paul watson, posset, psychedelia, pyongyang plastics, scott mckeating, shameless self-congratulation, simon aulman, the piss superstition, the red cross, the zero map, tom bench, van appears, yol, zn
Regular readers and Twitter followers will know that the 1st of October saw the release of eye for detail – the midwich remixes album. This Bandcamp download comprises 27 tracks by various no-audience underground luminaries each refiguring some section of my back catalogue. It totals three hours and forty minutes in length and can be bought for the knock-down price of five pounds. All proceeds are being donated to charity. The album has garnered universal love since its birth – making it even better than a royal baby – and has already been hailed as the album of the year by no less an authority than the voices in my head. The total plays for individual tracks topped 1000 in ten days. Further details as to its genesis can be read here and notes on its release can be read here.
The cause I have chosen to support is The British Red Cross. You may be aware of the front line medical help they supply in disaster situations but may not be familiar with the global network they have for tracing missing family members, or the support they provide to refugees in accessing services and adapting to life in a new country. You can read about what they do here. It is vital work.
Paul Watson, best known ’round these parts as BBBlood, contributed a handsome mix himself and then went on to earn limitless karma points by enthusiastically badgering punters into coughing up. In return for his help I somehow agreed to make my initial donation of £100 via one of those giant cheques you see in local newspaper photo opportunities – handshake n’all. I have to admit to being tickled by the idea and thought I could pop into a Red Cross charity shop and have a bit of a laugh with the volunteers there. Alas, a little research revealed that The Red Cross do not have such a business here in sunny Leeds and, in fact, their only office is a refugee assistance centre. A visit was nixed immediately – I’d feel a right knobber interrupting this crucial work by prancing about with my sheet of cardboard.
…and yet I still really wanted to get the felt-tips out and had a giant box that bits of a bed had been delivered in down in the cellar. What the hell, eh? I’d make my fake cheque, my 18 month old son Thomas could be The Red Cross’s representative during a symbolic ceremony and I’d do the actual transaction online.
Here are the stats: 25 sales of eye for detail at the time of writing raising £136.23, removing Bandcamp and PayPal fees leaves a donation of £109.01 which was handed over electronically prior to this post being written. My thanks and gratitude again to all those involved and to all those who have donated money. The compilation will remain available indefinitely and I will continue donating future proceeds on a regular basis.
The cheque measures 20″ by 38″ (piss superstition CD-r included in picture above for scale) and is now for sale. If you’d like to own this historic document in return for a further donation I’ll look into posting it – get in touch.
The Ceremony in pictures:
Visiting dignitaries take their seats.
Thomas takes a few photographs himself whilst waiting for it all to begin.
The presentation! Thomas is amazed at this princely sum.
The ceremonial handshake – Thomas a bit unsure about the etiquette.
…goes for the fistbump first…
…then the full celebratory shake…
…then subverts custom by presenting his foot to be shaken too. Kid has flair.
Worrying (with some justification) that Daddy can’t be trusted with money he is eager to get it safe…
…so immediately deposits it in the Bank of Shove-It-Behind-The-Sofa. Daddy retires to the study to do the real transaction online. A job well done. Thanks to Anne for taking the photos.
—ooOoo—
‘eye for detail’, the midwich remixes album, out now!
October 1, 2014 at 9:22 am | Posted in midwich, new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: ap martlet, aqua dentata, astral social club, bbblood, breather, brian lavelle, chrissie caulfield, clive henry, dale cornish, daniel thomas, devotional hooligan, dr:wr, drone, dsic, eddie nuttall, electronica, foldhead, gerado picho, hagman, hardworking families, helicopter quartet, improv, in fog, joe murray, john tuffen, julian bradley, karl mv waugh, la mancha del pecado, michael clough, michael gillham, midwich, miguel perez, neil campbell, new music, no audience underground, noise, orlando ferguson, panelak, pascal ansell, paul walsh, paul watson, posset, psychedelia, pyongyang plastics, scott mckeating, shameless self-congratulation, simon aulman, the piss superstition, the red cross, the zero map, tom bench, van appears, yol, zn
Comrades! Light the bonfires! Blow those long, thin trumpets with banners hanging off ’em!
Radio Free Midwich is delighted to announce the release of eye for detail – the midwich remixes album.
About six weeks ago a passing comment on Twitter was tossed over the chalet balcony and started to roll down the mountainside. The resulting giant snowball crashed through the doors of my back catalogue and, within hours, a happy band of looters was ransacking the vault. An album was retroactively called into existence with a deadline and a charity cause adding some ‘oomph’ to proceedings. The cut off was the 30th September, the release date today. Such is the unfettered power of the no-audience underground.
I have been delighted with the number of responses, the enthusiasm with which contributors embraced the task and the breadth, quality and imagination shown in the submitted tracks. The artists featured represent a (partial at least) cross section of the ‘scene’ this blog reports on and the gathering of the clan has reminded me, more than once, of the ridiculous oTo tapes project I oversaw a decade ago (indeed, check out the title of Michael Gillham’s track – dude also has a long memory). It has been extremely flattering and morale boosting to see such art inspired by my own meagre output. I am humbled but beaming.
A few words about the album itself. There are 27 tracks in total and the combined running time is over three and a half hours. The artists included are (deep breath):
Andy Jarvis, ap martlet, Aqua Dentata, Breather, Brian Lavelle, Chrissie Caulfield (of RFM faves Helicopter Quartet), Clive Henry, Dale Cornish, Daniel Thomas, devotionalhallucinatic, DR:WR (Karl of The Zero Map), dsic, foldhead (Paul Walsh – who accidentally started it all), Hardworking Families (Tom Bench), In Fog (Scott McKeating of this parish), John Tuffen (of Orlando Ferguson), Michael Clough, Michael Gillham, Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club), Panelak, Paul Watson (BBBlood), posset (Joe Murray also of RFM), Simon Aulman (pyongyang plastics), the piss superstition, Van Appears, Yol, and ZN.
Phew, champion line up, eh? I have made a stab at organising a coherent running order but please feel free to chop and change according to your own mood. Over such a long time, and with so many different styles in play, some juxtapositions are going to grate for some listeners. I have done a little light-touch mastering – mainly just amping up a couple of tracks – but not much, most tracks are presented as they arrived. There are some variations in volume but SO BE IT – no unnecessary compression/loudness war crap here.
The cover photograph was donated by Michael Clough and I encourage all readers to regularly check his tumblr site for a stream of similar observational genius. The download includes a portfolio of a further seven photographs from Clough to accompany the release. Also in the bonus items is a document listing links to further information about the featured artists and, where possible, links to the midwich material that was the source for their track.
Finally then: the cause. It seemed appropriate to me to make this a charity release and chose the Red Cross as the beneficiary. You may be aware of the front line medical help they supply in disaster situations but may not be familiar with the global network they have for tracing missing family members, or the support they provide to refugees in accessing services and adapting to life in a new country. You can read about what they do here. All proceeds from this album will be heading their way.
—ooOoo—
stress of speech: joe murray sings along to emblems of cosmic disorder, pascal nichols
September 4, 2014 at 2:56 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: binnsclagg, chloe wallace, discombobulate, dogeeseseegod, emblems of cosmic disorder, improv, joe murray, karl mv waugh, kosmos 954, krautrock, new music, no audience underground, noise, pascal nichols, poetry, prosody, the zero map
Karl M V Waugh – 5 Alarm Systems / Songs About Choir Boys (CD-r and text prosody poems in document file, Emblems of Cosmic Disorder)
dogeeseseegod / The Zero Map – Split (tape, Emblems of Cosmic Disorder, unspecified limited edition)
Kosmos 954 – IX V IV (CD-r in hand made cover, Emblems of Cosmic Disorder)
Binnsclagg – 23 (CD-r, no label)
Pascal – Nihilist Chakai House (LP, Discombobulate, BOB003, edition of 250, ‘on frozen puddle coloured vinyl’ as Joe would have it)
Karl M V Waugh – Songs About Choir Boys / 5 Alarm Systems
Like many folk I’m slightly aroused by office stationery [Editor’s note: too right – I’m still banned from Rymans]. There’s something about the clear usefulness of envelopes, pens, polyvinyl packets that’s so darn satisfying. So it was with trembling hands I slice open the latest package from our esteemed editor; a selection of goods from new ‘boutique’ label Emblems of Cosmic Disorder.
A slim document file, the kind of thing you’d find in any dusty HR department, houses a neat CD-R in a clam case and several pages of closely typed text.
I check out the disc (‘songs about choir boys’) first. This 20 minute piece has three distinct sections:
- Cluttered junk noise collage – echoed pings, guitar scratch knitting itself tighter and tighter. Balloon squeak adds a slivery ripple.
- Domestic vocal psychedelic – “What valley?” Bus-travel-noise, digital avalanche, granular fractals etc. “I’m gonna go out now.”
- Electric Balalaika heard through the fog of war, Austrian glitch and heavy pastries.
The editing is sharp, each distinctive piece flows nicely like egg yolk through new copper pipes. Not a leak in sight!
I take out the poems (‘5 alarm systems’) and give them a bash. On a first reading these short pieces come across like some fractured stream-of-consciousness narrative…
“Diamond scratching on the inside of my scalp.”
Or
“Duncan Harrison refuses to fight Johnny Liron and everyone’s oxygen supply is depleted.”
Pretty heady stuff, ya dig? Like reading old Bananafish magazines through a gin hangover or something. But closer inspection of the handy press release states these are prosody poems; a term I have never come across before. A quick google search tells me…
Prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or by choice of vocabulary.
OK…I get it. It’s all about how the poem is read. So I heave myself from the comfortable armchair and gracelessly unfold to my full (and rarely realised) six foot three and read these darn things loud and proud.
The neighbours curtains twitch, the kids giggle, Mrs Posset asks if I am feeling well. The answer is a boisterous ‘YES’. In fact I feel better than ever. The act of reading is a tonic, a shot in the arm, just the very thing. And I read on; in trembling baritone. The intensity and vigour leaves me glowing like a Victorian lady.
I wonder if these excellent poems are to be read along with the music? There are no instructions in the envelope to the contrary so I take matters into my own hands and rig up the gramophone to record and play and hawk out money scam intake collection [Editor’s note: click to hear a one minute rendition – self-embedding journalism, that] for kicks.
Even if this was never K.M.V. Waugh’s intention the interactive nature of abstract sound and spoken word is a great one: ham & eggs, strawberries & cream.
I urge you to check this one out and popularise as a parlour game for all the family.
dogeeseseegod / The Zero Map – Split Tape
There’s some real right brain/left brain stuff going on here on this pocket guide to cosmic disorder.
dogeeseseegod take the knotted tangled path with raw ganglions swaying. Junked up domestic field recordings get clotted and rubbed up rough with the sound of water (a unifying fixture with dripping tapes, gushing pipes and the steady trickle of piss) running through this whole piece, ‘Tappin ‘Ard O Phiernahe On Rye’. As I settle in my listening chair I’m picturing some Futurist Opera, the men of dogeeseseegod wrapped in itchy suits as they arrange scrap metal structures to a newspaper score. Occasionally there’s the rare fizz of melody. A guitar or keyboard makes a dash out the door with a tune stashed up a tight cuff. But mainly the sounds are free to roam within the strict structure of the edit. You’ve seen One Man and his Dog right? Sort of like that but with sheep being replaced with rude tape blarts and hawking tremors. Thankfully the electronic effects are kept to a minimum so the pure mung rises to the top of the beaker, ready to be scooped off and fermented; brewed into zingy espresso.
This kinda porridge pot can be hit or miss but I am delighted to say this is breakfast gets a Goldilocks ‘just right’ from me.
The Zero Map set their dune buggy down a smoother, less hectic, route. The modestly titled ‘Z’ is a meditation. Pale blue tones float out my cheap-o hi-fi clearly. They arrange themselves in regular symmetrical patterns that turn in on themselves, forever folding and unfolding across a hidden axis to reveal a thousand-leaved Chrysanthemum glowing with an inner light. The sound warms up to a pinky-red hue and the slight ‘tap, tok, tap’ of a recurring theme (the decaying ring of a bell with all the attack digitally snipped off perhaps?) rubs my shoulders as I settle deeper into the Chesterfield. My eyelids droop and I find my 14 year old self perched in front of the TV trying to keep up with Horizon or something. I’m scrunching my brow over some really complex but beautifully original maths, the slight chemical tang of lemon squash leaving a bright yellow smile on my lips. The almost spiritual neatness of a Venn diagram, intersecting arcs creating enclosed spaces calms my teenage self into a Zen stillness that rockets through the years anointing my old-guy bristles with Nag Champa.
Kosmos 954 –IX V IV
What’s this? A live in the studio jam all cut up with a monkey claw? Yeah man yeah. It starts with odd honks and the sort of space echo Joe Meek would have pawned his Ouija board for. And then a scissor cuts and Kosmos 954 draw us into the gloom for some heeds down pub-kraut-rock. Zoinks! The edits keep on coming: a rhythmically blocky soundtrack to 80’s handheld game ‘Scramble’ (Kink, kink, kink!) slides into slurring crabs leaving tracks in the sand of mystic Hebrew script ending the ritual with a heaviness worthy of Haikai No Ku. I love to be confused by a record and Kosmos 954 are cheeky mystic monks Ra-Ra-ing like a funky Rasputin.
Binnsclagg – 23
More poetry and ‘natural malfunction’ from the South coast. I’ve been told this is not an emblems release but it bears all the hallmarks; handmade sleeve, ambitious scope and grievous cluttered sound etc. The lazy blogger would drop names like Graham Lambkin but this is a far more robust beast. Sure enough, there are browned-off words that melt like dripping but some of the accompanying sound is sharp and glitchy enough to share self space with those Editions Mego jokers.
Things get pretty dark about 14 mins in. The crystal plumage noise is replaced with matter-of-fact reportage and amplified gibber/gong workshop. The natural energy of a live improvisation takes over and an end of the pier sample wraps things up nicely in under 25 minutes.
Pascal – Nihilist Chakai House
Whooosh. I’m on my way to mighty Manchester with an earbud full of Mancunian musicians making the Megabus the most happening bus on the M62.
Rob has beat me to it, covering the excellent, Getting Nothing to Appear on the Developed Film by The Piss Superstition already. So, all that I can add to the no-audience dialogue is a breathless “CHECK OUT THE SUICIDEFUZZOUTLIVEATTHEBUDOKANMIGRANE ON THIS SHIT MAN!” to the poor bloke sitting next to me. He snores on…
The next record in my brace of Manc offerings comes from Pascal Nichols, one half of the wonderful Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides (often abbreviated to tongue-straining acronym PWHMOBS) who are stealthily playing their way into the hearts of the underground.
Here Pascal wallops hollow gourds until they clank and click like a Moondog army marching menacingly through a dark Mardi Gras.
And then…a bagatelle? Rubber marbles? The sound of impact folded inward.
In my cloth ears a theme reveals itself. Cacophony is introduced then tamed…the gradual removal of syncopation reveals the human heartbeat within. ACTION POINT: A Grandfather Clock is taken apart piece-by-piece – a military ‘tick / tok’ resolutely strict and stiff-upper-lipped morphs seamlessly into an allotment shuffle; muddy tools being hung in racks by knotted hands.
A dry ‘thwock’ repeats. Micro spaces click sticks. Did I just hear a sneaky ‘Moonlight on Vermont’ snare ripple? The stick clicks continue and seem to say ‘hatchback’ in the language of the trees. Bees are waxed for sure…you can smell the yellow howl of varnish all over the ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing.
Soon a knitting machine of Patrick Woodroffe proportions rattles pennies in a jar. Each bronze disc placed with a trajectory planned by a master’s hands.
This is a glorious and life-affirming record. The joy of playing is evident in every snare swish and cymbal brush. Share the spirit of adventure…let the love in!
—ooOoo—
meditative anarchy: releases from tor press
January 26, 2014 at 5:30 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 7 CommentsTags: bram devens, chloe wallace, drone, glen steenkiste, hellvete, ignatz, jake blanchard, karl mv waugh, new music, no audience underground, noise, plurals, sophie cooper, tapes, the zero map, tor press, visual art
The Zero Map – Cerebrum Paté (CD-r, Tor Press, TORCD04, edition of 60, lino print cover)
Plurals – Debasement (CD-r, Tor Press, TORCD03, edition of 100 with three lino prints)
Ignatz / Sophie Cooper – Split (tape, Tor Press, TORCAS005, edition of 75)
Hellvete / Jake Blanchard – Split (tape, Tor Press, TORCAS006, edition of 75)
Blimey, you lot have woken from your winter hibernation pretty sharpish, eh? After throwing off the bear skins and shaking out the grass matting the first thought in the groggy collective mind of the no-audience underground seems to have been ‘must… send… parcel… to… Rob…’ or ‘nnnghhhh – download code for RFM!!’ Thus a review pile that had been diligently reduced to single figures during a hyperactive December has, by the end of January, been re-swollen to over forty items. I ain’t complaining, comrades – far from it. A skim through the new stuff reveals a level of quality and invention that is noggin-baking. My only concern is how to do it all justice. What a glorious bind to be in, eh readers? What a privilege to be a creative partner in this collective endeavour! Anyway, enuff swooning – I better get to work: a few posts to put 2013 to rest, the spring greens of 2014 to follow shortly after.
Today we’ll be looking at four releases on Tor Press, the Todmorden-based record label, zine publisher and gig promoter, run by illustrator Jake Blanchard. The first of these is Cerebrum Paté (cover above) a thirty-two minute, two track CD-r by The Zero Map, the Brighton based duo of Chloe Wallace and Karl M V Waugh.
I consider this band to be underrated – meaning that Uncle Mark of Idwal Fisher doesn’t like ’em as much as I’d like ‘im to like ’em – but not, of course, here at RFM HQ where they are firm favourites. On several enjoyable occasions I have pretzelled myself attempting to classify the meditative anarchy of their vibe. On the surface there is nothing gonzo or discordant apparent. An augmented drone, or electronic collage, carries you along like a pooh stick on a slow moving stream, flowing over and around some interesting obstacles. However, the closer you look the more peculiar it gets. One of those obstructions might be, say, the arm of a shop window mannequin sticking up out of the current, or perhaps some unknown hand has rearranged the pebbles of the stream bed into a mosaic depicting the face of Philip K. Dick, or maybe some biological agent in the water has turned the orchids in that tree stump blue (aside: Upstream Colour – best film of 2013) and so on…
Suffice to say that the first track, ‘Neutrino Detector’, begins with some nicely intestinal bass and that the second track, ‘A Python’, ends with a visceral crescendo that makes me want to drink blood from the skulls of my vanquished enemies. In-between times you’ll find plenty of whatthefuckery to flavour your reverie. Recommended.
Next is Debasement, a CD-r by the three (or four?) member ‘scattered collective’ Plurals. The disc is accompanied by three beautiful lino prints, one each by Ben Jones, Tom J Newell and Jake Blanchard, each an interpretation of one of the three tracks that make up the album. I consider this band to one of the frontrunners in this sport. Their sound has, for me, a subtle narrative quality that is compelling, exciting and rewarding of repeat listens. It draws stories out of me. Like this one:
The first track, ‘Modal Nodes’ is a glorious drone piece, a model of adulterated perfection. Picture a conical, many-limbed alien creature, nestled comfortably in an indentation on a sandy beach. Scattered around it are a number of terracotta coloured objects, each of which is picked up and, with a whip of a tentacle, set spinning. Some of these tops contain whistles, others beads and carved stones, all of which hum or rattle as they rotate. Luxuriating in the buzz it has created the creature uses half its mouths to join in with ululations and the other half to grin with.
‘Ape Skull Photography’ begins with more insistence – the urgent throb of a distress signal triggered by the captain of an exploration vessel sent to map this new world. The cause of his alarm is the frightening speed at which his crew have ‘gone native’ since arriving. The majority can be found scooping out their own hollows and joining in with the alien groove, only to be dragged away by the few left unaffected. This gathering siren sound begins to blot out the sound of the siren. Cut to the bridge of a rescue ship sent to investigate. The crew shift in their seats, uneasily listening.
‘Glowing Generic Diety’ is the final sublimation. Primed by the smeared-out distress signal the rescuers didn’t stand a chance and succumbed immediately. The captain can now be found on a nearby riverside, covered in red muck, fashioning his own spinning pots from the clay. Dozens are drying on the bank behind him. The rest of the crew are entwined in tentacles, consciousness liquefied in a grotesquely beautiful parody of nirvana.
Heh, heh – how’s that? Tremendous stuff.
..and finally the two split tapes. Sadly, they are already sold out and do not appear to have a digital afterlife. However, I am compelled to mention ’em at least because they are marvellous.
Ignatz, a guitarist from Belgium called Bram Devens, contributes five tracks of outsider blues with an archaeological crust to the recording that suggests Daniel Johnston transported back to the Mississippi Delta of the 1920s. His playing is raw and immediate but contains passages of disarming subtlety. His voice is fragile but his delivery has plenty of personality and push. I have been charmed by these haunting, humorous pieces and invigorated by the lifeforce they exhibit. One track, ‘Liquorice’, is named for my favourite confectionery too!
Sophie Cooper’s songs here concern absence and displacement and are half submerged in fuzz, echo and lapping ripples of liquid noise. The atmosphere is maintained beautifully, the medium conveying the message. ‘Dreamlike’ is an adjective easy to reach for when faced with anything at all diaphanous but, despite an explicit rejection of the notion by Sophie: track four is titled ‘I Never Associate Dreams With Anything’, I think the description fits. The tidal to and fro between here and distant, me and you, inside and outside has the sort of discombobulating internal logic you might struggle with on waking at 3am. I recently had the pleasure of seeing her perform live. Her voice and guitar were accompanied by a filtered flow of taped audio detritus which gave the impression her songs were emerging from a kind of shared, consensual hallucination. Also, by filling the gaps between songs and thus not providing the usual silence for applause her set was placed firmly in the context of the noise performances that preceded it. Very smart and very engaging.
The tape shared by Jake Blanchard himself and Hellvete, a guy called Glen Steenkiste, is a meeting of mighty, magical dronezillas. However, instead of tearing chunks out of each other whilst stamping on the unsuspecting burghers of Todmorden, Jake invites Glen to a campfire party at a beauty spot up on the Pennine tops. After roasting a few cattle the monsters take turns casting spells to entertain each other. This isn’t lazy, elbow-on-the-keyboard drone but a glowing, crackling, rolling presence built from ‘real’, sometimes handmade, instruments. It is beautifully layered and textured and animated by a sparkling and complex soul. Vibracathedral Orchestra comes to mind, of course, as does Jazzfinger, but replace the incense with the sinus clearing tang of pine resin. It ain’t all epic, though. The Hellvete side ends with a charming, tiny, banjo-plucking coda called ‘Op Linkeroever’ (Dutch for ‘On the Left Bank’). This return to a human scale serves the same take-a-deep-breath purpose as, say, ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’ at the end of Neil Young’s death-of-the-hippy-dream masterpiece After the Goldrush. If I hadn’t taken so long to get around to this release it would have surely figured in the 2013 Zellaby Awards, so sincere apologies for that.
To conclude: Tor Press is boss. The attitude exhibited by this outfit is impeccable. Every aspect of the operation exudes an understated but unmistakeable class. The content and choice of acts, whilst not always to my exact taste, show an adventurous but coherent vision for the label. Attention to detail is rigorous and quality control strictly enforced whilst retaining a loose, friendly and collaborative vibe. The packaging is exceptional – covers and inserts are hand-printed where feasible and beautifully designed with an eye for the aesthetically satisfying. Jake is, and I do not bandy this term about lightly, an artist.
Should you know anyone unconvinced as to the achievements possible here in the no-audience underground, any fool who uses the term ‘hobbyism’ as an insult, or insists on clutching tatty security blankets like The Wire to their bosom, then point them at labels like this and tell them to shut the fuck up. Tough love, yeah, but they’ll thank you for it eventually.
first impressions: kevin and karl play pretty for baby
April 11, 2013 at 8:43 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: drone, hairdryer excommunication, improv, karl mv waugh, kevin sanders, new music, no audience underground, noise, petals, tapes, the zero map, thomas james hayler, vocal improvisation
Kevin Sanders – Singing (etcetera) in a hallway for baby (tape/download, hairdryer excommunication)
KMVW & PTLS – split (2 x 3” CD-r/download, hairdryer excommunication)
Amongst the tributes paid to the birth of our son, I was particularly touched and delighted that Kev Sanders, best known ’round here as blog fave act Petals, dedicated a recording to him. The ol’ smoothie did the same for Seth and Sara on the arrival of Beatrice last year too.
Aww…
Anyway, as it was created in his honour, I thought I’d let him review it. Here is Thomas’s initial reaction:
I see what he means – it is very odd indeed. Here’s how he was at the end, having dressed for dinner with it on in the background:
A success, I’m sure you’ll agree. Download it for the amusement of your whole family here.
On a roll, I decided to try him on the Karl MV Waugh (him of The Zero Map) and Petals split too and, to my sleep-deprived surprise, I think I heard him say the following:
Finest quality aural cartography of the neurotic mindscape and a cracking object to boot. Double 3″ CD-r is truly the format of champions and to mount it in a 7″ single sleeve is magical. All should be rushing to acquire one of these, or, if it proves no longer available, gratefully accepting a free download in consolation.
Remarkable – I couldn’t agree more. Then he filled his nappy with something the colour and consistency of korma paste and the listening session was brought to a hurried close. To get your copy see here.
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