sunny murray’s right foot: rfm on brb>voicecoil, artwhore, no audience underground tapes, teatowels
October 7, 2017 at 8:12 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: acrid lactations, ant macari, artwhore, brb>voicecoil, churchburner, damo suzuki, fells, louie rice, luciano maggiore, muza muza, no audience underground tapes, pinnel, posset, proboscis, rust ruus, sippy cup, smut, spoils and relics, teatowels, vampyres
brb>voicecoil – Reconfigure Moments (Muza Muza)
brb>voicecoil – Containment (Muza Muza)
Artwhore – Pasty Posture (Muza Muza)
Various Artists – No Audience Underground Tapes
Teatowels- We are the Deadness (Beartown Records & Tapes)
brb>voicecoil – Reconfigure Moments (Muza Muza) Cassette and digital album
“Heavy manipulation of source material and resetting of audio time frames” says the ever informative Muza Muza website.
But even that clear warning couldn’t prepare me for the massiveness of these sonic-boulders or the grittiness of the resulting rumbling on Reconfigure Moments.
Totally elemental with that whole earth, fire, water and air gang being represented at the top of their game. A full bandwidth vista is peeling open my reluctant eyes and saying:
FEEL YOUR BONES CRUSHED,
YOUR SKIN CRACKLES WITH PHOSPHOR,
YOU ARE BRIGHT WITH FIRE…
…until I feel myself lurching for the ‘stop’ button on the booming stereo (and in an instant thinking – the old thing has never sounded quite so vicious as this before).
Phew!
brb’s Kev Wilkinson has collected years worth of field recordings from across the UK and subjected them to the most punishing treatment turning minute taps into ocean-going groans and gossamer strokes into the poisoned lash of a stingray’s tail. This really is ‘sound as weapon’ territory but at no moment does it ever succumb to ‘noise’ cliché. Each sound-mugging is clear as a shiv in the moonlight and twice as sharp. The crackles, rattles and pops are HUGE but placed with delicacy and a dark poetic logic.
The canvas is vast and as much attention is paid to the silences, the absences, as the abrasive implosions and gigantic reversed echoes like someone turned a borehole inside out.
Phew!!
FOOTNOTE: I took this down to Richer Sounds to test out a new tape deck and the smarty pants clerk looked fucking horrified when I cranked this up. The assembled glut of customers looked round, gulped and left as one. What more recommendation do you need comrades?
brb>voicecoil – Containment (Muza Muza) Cassette and digital album
A sister piece to the fearsome ‘Reconfigure Moments’, ‘Containment’ is made up of nine unprocessed field recordings with ears precisely trained on the resonant interior of huge concrete and steel structures (I’m guessing).
This being brb>voicecoil the locations are selected with great insider knowledge of the very mechanics of these materials and years of scientific precision.
What we hear are dislocated ‘clunks’ and ‘squeals’. Sheered of their original context the howling winds whip up these thick steel cables to really sing an unnatural overture. There is a cold ‘thwack’ of metal against cement that reverberates in these man-made canyons, decaying gradually into another whooping collapse.
These recordings being at the mercy of the weather/ambience make strange things happen to the timings. A dry ‘crack’ or gravely ‘crunch’ pop at the most eccentric moments. Like the earth became Sonny Murray’s right foot, this tape swings with an internal metronome that us mere mortals can barely comprehend. Like the freest of all jazz soaring buttresses honk deeper than Ayler and become more ‘out’ than Sun Ra.
Use this tape as an essential stepping stone readers – plug into the industrial Gaia-beat outside your door that’s as syncopated as chrome Dixieland.
Artwhore – Pasty Posture (Muza Muza) Cassette and digital album
There was a time when you couldn’t pass a lamp post in Newcastle that wasn’t tagged with an Artwhore sticker. They seemed to be everywhere at once: playing a thousand shows and dumping flyers to soak up spilled beer in the Barley Mow, Egypt Cottage and Broken Doll.
But while this mysterious crew had their street-art and promotion in the bag unfortunately I never caught them live. Thankfully Muza Muza have released these lost 1996-97 recordings on a kicking and screaming public.
The issue with vintage recordings is pretty obvious – does it stand up today, right here, right now? I’m delighted to say a firm yes to these curious electronic hummers.
The darkness is turned on for the majority of these pieces – dull thumps underscore sleet-coloured drone but an optimistic twinkle, a very Geordie characteristic if I may suggest, peppers these recordings. What I think is ‘Vallis’ is a truly gorgeous rainbow and unicorns number, all pink sunsets and warm hugs. By contrast ‘Hooverdub’ and ‘Electricity’ spit nails and rubber bullets.
The influence of rave culture is another signifier of the time. It hit the toon hard and it wasn’t unusually to find dreads and skins swap their para-boots for flip flops on a Saturday night. This strangely sounds fresh as daisies on ‘Shamm’ and ‘Horseloverfat’.
For younger readers…just think of it as the original vapour wave or something yeah?
Various Artists – Live Series (No Audience Underground Tapes) Cassette with occasional inserts and detritus
And so it came to pass.
As I mentioned before on RFM the much-loved NAU stalwarts Fucking Amateurs called it a day with their 100th release (give or take a few) earlier this year. I’d hinted that the baton had been passed and I’m delighted to say their grubby, semi-legal but thoroughly heartfelt, true and D.I.Y corpse is being reanimated by David Howcroft (ex-Helter Skelter Records) and the impeccably named No Audience Underground Tapes.
A straight-outta-Gateshead thing NAU tapes are attending those shows that you can’t get to, jamming performances direct to tape and bundling them up in outrageous packaging. Then dear reader they are being offered to the global underground FOR FREE!
Yup. Keeping this real is important to Dave so he is just asking for postage right now. But I know you are a generous bunch so an extra quid for tapes and stickers might be an idea eh?
So…what are NAU Tapes offering? It’s an eccentric and ever-growing catalogue.
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NAUT 01# brb>voicecoil / Vampyres / Spoils and Relics / Ali Robertson & Joyce Whitfield. Live at Soundroom Gateshead 23/07/17
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NAUT 02# SMUT. Live at Soundroom Gateshead 13/05/17
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NAUT 03# Watts / Fells / Church Burner. Live at Soundroom Gateshead 30/06/17
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NAUT 04 # (Limited Edition Band Members Only) Church Burner. 30/06/17
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NAUT 05# Trevor Wren / Proboscis / Eigengrau. Live at the Little Buildings, Byker 15/07/17 (Ed – Dave notes – quality of recordings compromised by tape recorder malfunctions)
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NAUT 06# Sippy Cup / Ant Macari & Posset / Acrid Lactations. Live at The Old Police House 30/07/17
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NAUT 07# Damo Suzuki’s Network. Live at Cluny2 04/08/17
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NAUT 08# Louie Rice & Luciano Maggiore / Pinnel / Rust Ruus. Live at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. 12/08/17
OK…that’s the infomercial. What do the damn tapes sound like?
NAUT 01. Captures the dark shudder of brb>voicecoil and Vampyres in grim fidelity. The boiling leaves a grey scum shot through with diamond streaks. On the other side of the equation Ali Robertson & Joyce Whitfield gabber like geese in an old-timey hairdressers (the ones with huge machines you put your delicate head in). Spoils and Relics fashioned their gruff-pumps through wires to hiss like an old factory of dreams. They are the equals sign, the fulcrum that balances a perfect evening.
NAUT 06. Acrid Lactations swirl a hand round the gene pool and pick out several chromosome-jamz. Both skitter-dry and tape deep –the first recording of the tiny AL with powerful lung! Dullard Posset and real-live artist Ant Macari continue their world domination thru corporate hypnosis and evil vibes (spoken word). The wonderful Sippy Cup (Drenching/Armitage) are as jazz as they come; each hand grabs an implement and drains it of sound-juice with expert timing. Total clutter core!
NAUT 08. Rust Ruus presents his piece for solo snare drum, tapes and steel butter dish – KLAKA, KLACKA, KLACKA energy! Pinnel loops soft voice and mouth pops on her Black & Decker Workmate. The crowd went wild after their vacation in these gentle hisses and slips. The most Eno! Rice & Maggiore are dressed in black and vibe out the audience with their regal focus and concentration. Performance for modular synth, puckered lips, red hands and two sets of big stamping boots. An outstanding show of control and timing. Don’t believe me? Order the damn tape yeah!
There’s no website comrades so please send questions, requests, stamps and good karma to : howcroft.d58@gmail.com
Teatowels- We are the Deadness (Beartown Records & Tapes) Cassette
As the gardener must prune their prize roses with regular surgical snips the musician must occasionally take a hatchet to their craft. Slicing out overused approaches, chopping back any excesses and burning the lazy ideas to truly grow.
The Teatowels have cut and cut and cut until all is left is one guitar/one drum/one voice. Even the idea of a song is sliced and diced in a semi-improvised blur. Sure, some pieces on this extraordinary tape are recognisable ‘songs’ (track 6) but others are fumbles, sketches and essences that make this like a long-lost practice tape found in the bottom of a shoebox.
The rehearsal room ambience is thick with amp fug and ideas blooming in the moment. It’s a secret shared in hot breathy gasps. The shamanic use of repetition and lowest of all known ‘fi’s’ becomes a grey carnation shuddering in an autumn storm.
If you’re looking for less botanical references the mumbled vocal, spindly guitar and boxy drums take me back to the woollen-scratchy and indistinct world when the Dead C and The Fall and Sonic Youth had a lot more in common and seemed to answer a three-way conversation back and forth across the international freak-rock underground.
And like all three examples above the process of recording became part of the signature sound: cheap studios, busted amps and exhausting schedules gave this music a patina of sleep-deprived itchiness, a splitter van’s claustrophobia.
Teatowels have built this up into an impressive whirl where things abruptly jump-cut between half-remembered jams, free-rock (track 2), drum-led moaning (track 3 ) and more realised explorations. A deft finger on the pause button (track 7) makes some of the more hectic jamz blur with distinctive tape smear and is the perfect hot sauce on this tasty wiener.
The closer (track 8) is a lengthy nine minutes and boils all these approaches into a thin gruel applied in erratic brush strokes over the bones of the type of speaking –song-dramatic-build that Slint favour.
But instead of the Louisville drama we get an unrelenting British chug – all tension and no release; drizzle sizzling forever on the vinyl roof of a Ford Cortina.
brb>voicecoil, Teatowels are playing TUSK festival 13th – 15th October.
–ooOOoo-
more yomp than stroll: socrates martinis, enrique r. palma, richard kamerman, louie rice & daniel bennett
April 4, 2017 at 6:13 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 1 CommentTags: computer, daniel bennett, digital noise, electronics, enrique r palma, kostis kilymis, louie rice, omft, organized music from thessaloniki, process, richard kamerman, socrates martinis
Socrates Martinis – Under the arches of her voice (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Enrique R. Palma – Contenance (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Richard Kamerman – Music for Glassblower’s Studio and Broken Toy Piano (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Louie Rice- 33/45 (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Daniel Bennett – Roil (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Socrates Martinis – Under the arches of her voice (Organized Music From Thessaloniki) CD and digital album
Richly textured recordings of rumbling mic damage. Abstract in the extreme, this symphony of hiss and clicks, gritty-roar and deflated muss are edited cruelly with a straight razor.
The quick, decisive cuts that dart between dry hessian rough and oily slipperiness are arresting to say the least. No sooner does my heart-rate settle into a particular gruff hum then I’m thrown by a high-end squeal or inflatable ping.
Insights?
Track 3, ‘Under the arches of her voice, words explode in blue sparks like gunpowder spilled on candles’ gradually reveals a slender hand dropping plastic cups, the echo of the cloister thick and clouded as mediaeval glass.
To my cloth ears track 4, ‘Under the arches of her voice, horses carry the milk of dawn’ seems the most worked on: an imagination of typists clicking away on MacBook keys, inside the Laundromat, singing bowls rubbed with warm Vaseline.
But its track 6, ‘Under the arches of her voice, the air of summer whistles over the headless statues of the hours’ that stretches out a battered alarm bell’s (?) tinny ring into the most gorgeous fade out you’ll hear today.
But any way you want to slice this dusty fig the power of the scrubbed and polished sonic palate is palpable.
Like stepping down the ladder of the landing vehicle to emerge blinking into the harsh white light of Mars.
Enrique R. Palma – Contenance (Organized Music From Thessaloniki) 3 inch CD
Enrique offers us lucky listeners a passport to an imagined future via the murmurings of some giant data engine. The sound of one million calculations bouncing from damp connectors and making the valves glow a warm sunset orange.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. The process is important and in this case the process involves Javier Beci on melodica huffing over Enrique’s bowed cymbal and computer morass – the electronic 10101010’s merging seamlessly with that dry breath bruising a vibrating reed. Simple enough I guess but the resulting bluster can throb wildly like a stubbed toe or smear itself as hot tar covers a pock-marked road. Gosh…either approach is good for me and I find myself rocking gently to this 20 minute piece never quite relaxing but riding the changes in intensity and clarity…we’re weaving between clearly recorded melodica/cymbal and abstracted NOIZE flickering like a stick pulled across a chain-link fence /or/ a rusty jet taking off /or/ a scrap-yard dog dragging an iron bone across black rivets.
The only un-rawkus moments are the final 3 mins. Of course this only serves to remind us of the technique and brains behind this operation. As slack as a Jazzfinger jam, this brief pause in the splintering noise digs deep into the engineering of sound, pulling leavers and oiling the blunt teeth of the many cogs making up this contraption.
File under: magnifying-raindrops-to-better-understand-the-hurricane music.
Richard Kamerman – Music for Glassblower’s Studio and Broken Toy Piano (Organized Music From Thessaloniki) Cassette and digital album
Blimey! Ultra-minimal rattle and site specific munge; a real scratcher that makes me go ‘wha?’ And I like it.
Side one – This may well be a glassblowers studio with the fiery ‘husss’ of the blast furnace underpinning some rusty hinges, various droppage and steel-rod clangs along with an almost Lucier-like radio chattering in a room (in a room). There’s an easy momentum as things get plunged into stuff, utensils are washed and tools are replaced noisily to the tool box.
Side two – The flipside makes me think of a miniature Big Ben, small enough to fit in John Cage’s top pocket along with the pens. Delicately placed pings humbly peal through a glorious riot of cassette grot. Ever heavier manners are laid upon the scene until dread is the only emotion vibrating out the stereo. A happy finish of deeper drone, slow slaps and the faint impression that you’ve left the iron on.
Layers of enigmatic rustle; plateaus of barren shell-noise whistle – this cassette pushes boundaries.
Louie Rice- 33/45 (Organized Music From Thessaloniki) 7 inch single and digital album
33
Right-to-left dry brillo scours out your ears, bouncing
A slow glutinous train advances from Osaka directly into your weak skull
Onward black snake, advance dark worm!
This hiss that shuffles the shadows, the finger that smears grease on soft bacon
A fumble for tickets means you drop your felt hat
45
More pop than mope, more yomp than stroll
The interior dialogue of a boulder (containing quartz and seams of basalt)
The soft rubber leavings from an erased life-drawing collected in tiny pyramids
Metal Guru? Iron Man?
There’s a great Wurlitzer in the sky hungry for the 3:23 of this perfect un-beat
Daniel Bennett – Roil (Organized Music From Thessaloniki) CD
This sharp palette of breathtaking sourness makes me realise how sweet and cloying much of today’s music is, as our Daniel is relishing in the zesty and tangy on this quartet of electronic pieces.
The first two tracks ‘Pain’ and ‘Mint’ are forged of elements ranging from thin magnesium to bright electric scissor-kicks. They unfold like the endless belt on an escalator, gnashing interlocking steel teeth with a relentless energy. But there is enough black avalanche to please a grim-faced noise fan. For me though the sweet spot comes in the quieter moments: a reflective squeal, an introverted circuit snap, all placed with unknowable logic.
The second pair of tracks take a clubbable twist with the scent of salty bodies writhing on ‘Tennenbaum’ and ‘We’. The first is a superbly warped beat and bass rumble that’s boiled down until it is almost liquid. The approach to rhythm is choppy as the Solent with static breakers crashing on a crisp digital shore…
…and on my deckchair I fantasise about FKA Twigs humming over the top of the bit-splicing, waving a tiny foot in a bruised ballet pump.
The closer ‘We’ is a bacchanal; a no-holds-barred ritual in losing one’s shit at 6am in the morning after fourteen hours of hard partying and then ending up in a chill out room with a cyborg Sunn O))) providing the vibes.
Or do you disagree?
-ooOOoo-
the heady scent of courage: joe murray on greta buitkute, alan wilkinson, thf drenching, seth cooke, nick hoffman, va aa lr
February 12, 2015 at 12:29 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: 1000füssler, adam asnan, alan wilkinson, council of drent, dictaphonics, dominic lash, electronica, fort process festival, free jazz, greta buitkute, improv, infinite jukebox, joe murray, lf records, louie rice, new music, nick hoffman, no audience underground, noise, organized music from thessaloniki, paul lomere, plush wattle, seth cooke, thf drenching, va aa lr, vasco alves, vocal improvisation
Greta Buitkute & THF Drenching – Contribution to a Discussion on Tic (download, Plush Wattle)
Alan Wilkinson & THF Drenching – Night of the Flaming Meatus (download, Council of Drent)
Seth Cooke – Eternal World Engines Of The Demiurge (3” CD-r, LF Records, LF044)
Seth Cooke / Dominic Lash – PACT (3” CD-r, 1000füssler, 025, edition of 60)
Nick Hoffman – Necropolis (CD, organized music from Thessaloniki, t26, edition of 200)
VA AA LR – Newhaven (3” CD-r, organized music from Thessaloniki, t27, edition of 100)
Greta Buitkute & THF Drenching – Contribution to a Discussion on Tic
An under-the-radar, sneaked-out recording from two of the out-est heads around.
I came across this one by accident via that You Tube. This led to a series of embedded links, a journey through the dark web to the home of the Plush Wattle Corporation, where this very generous free download sits.
Taking callused thumbs, fingers and twin gob-holes to act as our orchestra these two have charmed their way into my very bones. This is an intimate listen, full of clicks, creaking and rustling; it’s an interior sound world that’s perfect for headphones and tedious train journeys.
So (drum roll please)…introducing Greta Buitkute! Greta might be a new name to Radio Free Midwich but she has been wowing Northern audiences with her fresh take on vocal jaxx/nu-scat for the last couple of years. A recent move to Manchester, a light ale quaffed and connections made via The Human Heads means Greta and the great THF Drenching have teamed up – their individual super powers amplified by the presence of similar corduroy mutants.
You already know THF Drenching and you’re thinking Dictaphones yeah? Sure, the Dictas make an appearance but over half of this collection is vocal-based doof, hurling two well-lubricated throats together to dance merrily like bacteria in a Petri dish.
Yet keen Drenching watchers will note the Dictaphone tone is drier – less squelch; more rattle and hink/rustle and clatter. The bombs are deftly dropped and the feedback ‘heek’ soars like a rectangular alto.
‘Bach Bathed in Bathos, Full Illustration’ is an important cornerstone. An Hawaiian motel room is wrapped up in garish litmus paper, reacts pinkly and then is noisily unwrapped. You can’t beat them apples!
But it’s the twin-vocal pieces that froth me over like excited milk. The twin ‘Portrait of Baize Wattle’ pieces (large and small) make me recall those European Public Information films that would show up on That’s Life! The humorous animation would be followed by a vaguely chucklesome punchline…’Winner’s drink piss’ or something like that. The pace is furious but uncluttered; live with no overdubs (I think). This almost puritan and old oaty approach really pays off. The clean living certainly lends itself to Amish-style efforts.
This is in and out, reflexive and agile music. It slips happily between hi-brow and goose-honk, pearly notes and granddad mumble. As the closing seconds of the recording state:
Greta Buitkute:
Oh my God, it’s exhausting
THF Drenching (sniffs with a chuckle):
I know.
Alan Wilkinson & THF Drenching – Night of the Flaming Meatus
This is an altogether more Jazz recording. Two pieces; live, live, live at Sconny Rotts (2014) or something.
Welcome, reader a fine pair of foils: thin breath pushed through brass and the quivering whine of sculptured feedback. Damn, that’s good!
Soundz?
(i) Like snakes making out in the back of an old Audi until they make a mess of the upholstery; their coppery tones get all twisted and spoony.
(ii) Old doods reminiscing about the days in their wartime dance band – sounds leak all gummy from their ears.
(iii) The alarm on our oven telling me the bread’s ready…oh wait. That is the oven. Give me a minute…
…but it’s not all top-end tomfoolery. A real satisfying base layer of hissing creak (Dictas) and watery saliva- garbles (Saxes) give this a weighty gravity that pulls on the rocketing undulations (a flight of a condor).
And if you’re still asking questions about what free music is doing right now jam your ear up against these two beauties and huff up the heady scent of courage.
This is music for heroes!
PUBLIC APOLOGY: This review also functions as an apology to Mr A Wilkinson for my cheeky and childish ripping of his sound check sounds on my Correct Come tape. Sorry mate – can I buy you a pint or something?
Seth Cooke – Eternal World Engines of the Demiurge
These two pieces of electronic gumbo take what we might call process recordings and apply the extraction method adding calm and deliberate shadings to a real-world sound scenario.
In the first of two offerings Seth ransacks an insurance office circa 1978 whilst the office party averts prying eyes. The unmistakable sound of a dot matrix printer (duh…I was mistaken. Research shows it’s one of them stupid 3D doo-hickies) going all akka over a slowly emerging picture (in this case a 3D bust) of Benjamin Disraeli – or some similarly bearded goof – as it appears line by dotty line.
Said printer is jammed with cocktail sticks and discarded business cards – in reality electronic shadows – as he hits the print button and lets nature take its course. The frantic slide, shuffle and whirr is hypnotic and lulled me like a fat wren zonked by bright red berries until it snaps off into disturbing silence.
The calm is suddenly fractured by track number two, a gliding, sliding and silvery cascade; a perfect sound track to ice skating that would make Torvill & Dean throw greasy shapes ending up as sooty smears on the ice.
Gear heads will be pleased to note that the machinery on this disc was pioneered by Paul Lomere for his Infinite Jukebox that “endlessly extends and reconfigures MP3s by calculating probabilistic routes through the sound file based on pitch, timbre and metric position.”
Seth says he’s channelling Jack Kirby but for the romantics out there this is Bolero 2015 and a perfect 10 for artistic interpretation.
Seth Cooke/Dominic Lash – PACT
The quicksilver tones versus Pront-a-Print kerfuffle that starts this disc (‘PA’) are a waterslide into a world of grimy groan.
Massive and ungainly ‘things’ are rubbed with tweed gloves. Moist and sweating ‘objects’ are painfully squeezed to release sticky ichors. Soft and flexible ‘parts’ are cruelly bent into unholy shapes resembling the Goat of Mendes.
A close-up inspection reveals canyons of scrape and gummy friction. And while the pace remains stately for a time layers of rub and tug bring forth some slippery excitements. Oh Matron!
Track two (‘CT’) is a darker affair. The double bass bowing (Lash) and kitchen sink manipulation (Cooke) as uncooperative as a sullen teenager. Black storm clouds gather over my cheap-o high-fi and I feel my brows knit.
Gosh. This is brooding stuff.
The simple bass riff is not happy with me or you and doesn’t care who knows about it; electronics twinkle but with the black light of sea coal from Redcar beach. I love this sombre and funereal pace and can feel my mood merge into full-on sulk.
So, what you looking at eh? Clear off and leave me with Lash & Cooke. You don’t understand me anyway.
I hate everything!
More details here if you can be bothered.
Nick Hoffman – Necropolis
Microscopic attention to microscopic detail turns my hammer, anvil and stirrup into marshmallow fluff.
This is a record of extreme extremes: from hosepipe-full-on-gush to tiny cooling-metal-tik. These five pieces of sieved electronics lurch from Black Metal through the Gristleizer (The Rotten Core) to the ivory click of miniature pool balls intensifying until my speakers are fizzing and flipping-out like a model railway going straight to hell (Eros).
But what I like most about this disc are the abrupt edits, the inter-track halts and about turns that keep this grizzled noise monkey twisting to check that a fuse hasn’t blown. While I enjoy a heads-down, no-nonsense, continuous blast of fetid sludge as much as the next pair of ears being wrong-footed and fooled is a joy. What’s next? Is this build up going to explode or whimper out? It’s as slippery as Be-Bop from Minton’s Playhouse.
Nick pulls out all the stops for the lengthy closer, ‘The Scent of Ground Teeth’, a 16 minute monster of glitching signal, spluttering like a coffee percolator spiked with cobra venom.
If this blog was a radio show I would segue seamlessly from this blustery fizzing into the white-hot spitting of VA AA LR’s Newhaven. Recorded at last year’s fascinating Fort Process festival VA AA LR drop their usual prepared electronics and objects and carve out a landscape from the sound of distress flares alone. Taking away the literally explosive visual element you are left with a wonderfully peculiar 20 minutes of sparkling hiss and frazzle. Every permutation of splutter and crackle is worked through like Coltrane on Giant Steps, probing and searching; pushing forward and wringing all possible combinations from this electric spitball.
After a time the busy and frantic schizzle seems to fine-tune my old ear ‘ole letting me pick out tone and textural changes. There is a whole world in here as the planes of fuzzing gimble regroup like a forgotten language. Be sure to make a beeline for this vibrant crackle readers; a worthy bookend to that other splutter classic, Lee Patterson’s Egg Fry #2.
—ooOoo—
‘\/\/\/\/\/\/\/’: joe murray on louie rice, adam asnan, vasco alves
February 15, 2014 at 3:27 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: adam asnan, consumer waste, drone, electronica, hideous porta, hideous replica, joe murray, louie rice, new music, no audience underground, noise, psychedelia, tapes, va aa lr, vasco alves, wasted capital since 2013
Louie Rice – Degenerates (C25 tape, Wasted Capital Since 2013, WC1, edition of 50)
Adam Asnan – Veil after Veil (C30 tape, Wasted Capital Since 2013, WC4, edition of 50)
Vasco Alves – Volume 1 (C32 tape, Wasted Capital Since 2013, WC3, edition of 50)
VA AA LR – It Just Ain’t Flapping (CD, Consumer Waste, cw09)
The other week Rob was kind enough to publish my homage to the speedy National Express, their stalwart service and the hours of pleasant listening my recent trip to London gave me.
I was surprised (and a little flattered) to learn that my motorway movements caused a commotion. RFM readers have been whispering in their garrets, ‘What was Joe doing in London?’ ‘What business can a doof like him have in our nation’s proud capital?’
My first reaction was of course to play this mystery up; ‘hum’, ‘hah’ and possibly drop a few coy clues blushing rosily as a Southern Belle. But it’s the internet age innit and you can probably tag my footsteps as easily as folding your arms…so no mystery there. Bloody technology.
TRUTH: I was in London to play a show at the latest Stoke Newington hotspot – Ryan’s Bar. This unassuming Irish-themed tavern has seen the likes of Phil Minton, Spoils & Relics, Wanda Group, THF Drenching and Temperatures cross its threshold to honk, sqwark and hiss. Jesus mang…Thurston Moore lives down the road…it’s that god damn on-point.
The night was carefully organised by the dynamic HIDEOUS PORTA duo of Louie Rice and Vasco Alves; two strapping gents full of bonhomie and spotless no-audience underground credentials. The gig was a peach: Pablo Sanz opened with demonic soundscapes, I did my tape/gob thing and Tom Mudd and John Wall breathed fresh new life into computer glitch fizz and bubble. I met up with old friends (Foxy, Johnny, Ed) and made a couple of new ones (Nicky, Marie), we drank beer, chatted about records and generally stayed up far too late. As the night wore on tapes and CD-Rs were passed under the table, inspected and wrapped up safe. The handshake of the underground had taken place…close as a tango. Here’s my lucky bag.
Louie Rice’s Degenerate mines a sea of crystalline electronics; each ‘pip’ and ‘phaff’ is clearly birthed from some silica gel, wet and frictionless. The five shortish tracks manage to be both austere and jolly as an apple-cheeked yokel at the same time. Opener ’06:45′ has a grumbling appendix bassline, low as hipster pants, and a drunkard’s roll to its smear of eclectic fez. Micro track ’01:29′ revisits Pong like a dubby ghost. ’03:42′ reminds me of the sound our sickliest cat makes when it’s about to throw up. A kind of deep ‘blurrrp’ that repeats in diminishing contractions until the inevitable fishy yash. A static ripping floats over the ‘blurrrp’ and catches in any available hangnail or crevice dragging with a delicious tug.
Blimey…time for side two already.
It’s with a triumphant buzz ’05:25′ lurches out the cheap-o stereo. That static tugging is there again but it’s pink and warm giving you exactly same sensation as letting a prawn cracker dissolve slowly on the tongue. The buzz trumps on, majestic and unhurried; an oozing camembert. The cat returns for ’06:13′ with soft ginger purring coupled with the clatter of them joke dentures you used to be able to buy from joke shops until an oppressive throb (sourced from project Blue Book perhaps) does that Olympic wrestle thing and pins you to the mat…Ah one-ah. Ah two-ahhh. Ahhh,three!
For Vasco Alves on Volume 1 it’s the battered portable cassette recorder that’s the star. The dear old thing adds a patina of rust to the airy field recordings and grimy electronics found on this one-sided beauty.
Totally non-linear sounds are presented simply and with sharp edits as play/record is pressed and, on playback, a faulty motor or loose capstan make the captured sound wibbly-wobbly like you’re listening through textured brine. Imagine a hearing test of abstract domestic and psychedelic tones, each one syringed into your ear…bop-bop-bop. You can? Congratulations…you’re getting close to the oddness of this tiny marvel.
Sonic content? Tissue thin drones nestle next to elephant calls. Heavy rain and commuter chunter. A tape-warped Tangerine Dream. The distinctive sound of wind bothering a condenser mike, kettle whistle, tape whirr, pissing into a bucket, pirate radio interference, cement mixers and gentle, spacious ‘\/\/\/\/\/\/\/’ exhibited in the stream-of-consciousness, brown-sauce genius style of Blyth’s Cidershed brigade.
Things move from abstract to concrete, accidental to composed, domestic to industrial at a brisk pace. Not too fast to see the join but almost revelling in the ‘wax on wax off’ discipline of carefully collected sounds.
At times I take this for an exercise in extreme listening (like that reductionist bunch), it’s that intense. I’m glued so tight to my speakers, waiting to make sense of the next wave of giger-counter babble or market garden chatter, that I’m starting to (audio) hallucinate. My teeth clench as I ride the waves of oh-so-subtle distortion that play out this tape until I realise this is no elaborate construction of pico-waves but common-or-garden tape hiss run-out. Punked!
If you are looking for music to lift you out of your school-work-death pothole this is the very thing. A singular listen!
Talking of school…when I was at secondary school I was forced to take metal work for a year. Metal work. Sounds incongruous enough eh? Do you reckon I was any good at working metal dear readers? You guessed right. I was bloody hopeless. The metalwork room (or shop as they called it) was a temple to masculinity; greasy, hot and loud with deep-throated swearing. As a youth more content in the library I expected to find this a lesson a bore and chore. But what I hadn’t counted on was the sound of metal working; the screech of bandsaw ripping through tin, the rough-bark of the file against steel coathooks. And best of all…the reverberant clanking ‘doiiinnnnnggg’ of a dropped spanner.
It’s this memory-laden metallic KO that Adam Ansan unearths with his Veil after Veil cassette. It’s a beautiful din of metal-on-metal drone, long drawn-out tones like molecular choirs hymning the great eventual. Brass-plated boilers hiss and pump out grey gas, a blackened hand strokes the riveted tub like a lover. On side two a soft juddering motif, like a marshmallow steam train running over points of warm liquorice, draws us into a world where the heating engineer is also a sonic artist; each fan blade and ventilation shaft throbs with a different tone turning your humble abode into a Pompidou breathing-machine of pork-scented gasps and asparagus guffs.
If you stare long enough at a cloud it starts to disappear. I’m convinced if I listen to Veil on Veil long enough all that will be left will be the plastic whirr of scrubbed tape running silently through the spools. This is the sound of temporary music!
OK. Put this all together and what have you got? What would normally be a ‘what if’ becomes a ‘look see’ as these three chaps have put a tasty smorgasbord together as VA AA LR on their very professional looking CD It Just Ain’t Flapping. Mission statement: whiffle-bud earphone action finds tiny scrunching in one lug and machine-like fripping in the other.
Over eight brief and untitled tracks magnified metal and environmental recordings rub up against rubbery electronic loucheness as insect radios get de-tuned and hauled behind a smog-trawler. As ever, the art in this kind of group collage is the way it’s all put together. These carefully minced sounds melt and drip like a finger-painting picture traced on the window of a condensation drenched bus window. While the reels turn you get a gentle phasing; a smidge of clarity and then a jammy smear of opaque ‘wooahhh’ in that lopsided 1000-year-egg kind of way.
You want examples, yeah?
- Dr Who’s coffee pot splutters on ‘8’ almost drowning out the slo-mo rave synth.
- Text book examples of close-miked clicks, rattles and raps played alongside Heath Robinson cackles all over ‘2’ and ‘3’.
- Little Stevie Wonder gets a look in on ‘6’ with a malfunctioning videodisc cracking through Chariots of Fire as he solders bad-tempered joints (badly).
- The tugboat/trawler chugs out the harbour vibrating the dock and smaller vessels dangerously on ‘5’ while Silver Beatles jidder the mandibles.
…but it’s ‘4’ that pumps me up hard; a scant 1 min 56 seconds of percussive black hiss…slow steam escaping from a Tudor chimney.
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