prick mason: rfm on id m theft able, robert ridley-shackleton, leitmotiv limbo/rnp no2 and gwilly edmondez
November 25, 2018 at 11:35 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: crow versus crow, gwilly edmondez, hyster tapes, i dm theft able, Kraag, leitmotiv limbo, mangdisc, Pink fucking Floyd, rnpno2, robert ridley-shackleton, slip, Slip Imprint, Yol 4 President
ID M Theft Able – Clean Houses Exude Fear (Mang Disc)
Robert Ridley-Shackleton – Stone Cold Crazy (Crow Versus Crow)
Leitmotiv Limbo/RNP No2 – Split (Hyster Tapes)
Gwilly Edmondez – Trouble Number (Slip Imprint)
ID M Theft Able – Clean Houses Exude Fear (Mang Disc) C30 Cassette
In the multi-faceted world of ID M Theft Able I guess this would be classed as a Rap Album. Concrete words and phrases are to the fore and the slapstick Foley-explosion is boiled down to a set of insistent hollow-point beats. But anyone expecting swaggering brags about cars, girls and dollars will be misty-eyed and disappointed. Less Young Thug more Big Hug. Trades Description jobsworths begone!
“The sight of your blood is always OK, you fall off your leg, what did you right, the sight of your blood is always OK”
The narrative is caught in aspic and carefully chipped away to reveal the irritated wasp inside. Repetition and subtle sense-change is ‘wrapped/rapped’ in breathless stanzas each collapsing on each other piled up like a language Jenga (or something). With such dense texts meanings are shucked like a plump oyster and guzzled whole, lining the brain pan with glistening salty gloop.
“There ain’t no desert, it’s like staring at the sun, it’s like staring at the sun, it’s like staring at the sun, other people see you they see you, you take your eyes from the sun and you bust your mouth”
The pace is pretty much relentless making this a very physical listen…I’m out of breath just jamming this tape at home. Heaven knows what it must have been like to sing the darn thing.
“Shove it. Shove it, Ah-wah, Shove it, Shove it, Ah-wah, Exist, Exist, Fight, Fight”
So readers…if you are new to ID M this is a great, yet fairly untypical, place to start. But with such a varied discography if you wanna get wet, you have to dive in somewhere eh? Check out his bonkers MangDisc site and label for details and while you wait for this shit to ship get goofed on strange passwords, online tests and quivering graphics.
Go Go Go!
Robert Ridley-Shackleton – Stone Cold Crazy (Crow Versus Crow) C20 cassette or digital album
The great Robert Ridley-Shackleton (RRS) seems unstoppable right now. After a bunch of essential Chocolate Monk releases and a pair of sublime performances at this year’s TUSK festival RRS is tearing up the dancefloor ‘card style’.
A world of funk, noise and gnarly confession is fully realised on this dark tape from the exceptional Crow Versus Crow label.
The title track, ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, merges Robert’s patent Tupperwave sound with teetering wonk-keyboard rhythms in a high-energy funk workout. But of course the Cardboard Prince has his signature moves and the punnet crackle leaps through my headphones adding layers of gritty confusion to this banger. ‘Pest Control’ is lyrically the darkest I’ve heard RRS, a disembodied, disinterested monologue over relentless t’wave somehow reminding me of the ickiness of my one and only listen to Throbbing Gristle. The Side A closer ‘Bury me’ warbles beneath a barrage of clack-clack and close-mic rapping that seems to slip in and out of reality. A demented carny riff completes the mental image of some dilapidated circus tent, hot animal scents wafting out the canvas flaps.
Side B starts with the bold statement ‘Yol 4 President’ so I’m expecting a joyful noise, a cathartic boil-burst. But this is more of a leaky pustule, a damp spreading yellow stain on a bandage with some inwardly focused angst. Much of Robert’s vocal is mumbled and hidden beneath static sheets but the announcement “God is Santa and Santa is God” is clear and filled with secret meaning.
There’s a wonderful jump-cut from the high-octane rattle that ends ‘Yol 4 President’ to the thumping ‘Dirty Cardboard’ complete with snarling multiple voices, ripped and shredded into many funky pieces. Dirty indeed, this track lets it ALL hang out in ALL the right places.
The final piece ‘Snack Effective’ is a bee’s nest of hiss and rumble. Like the insects got tired of slave labour and revolt into busy explosions of sexy freedom. RRS’s early ‘pocket jazz’ sound is revisited and honks like Louis Armstrong huffing his old cornet full of boiled rice.
As you’d expect from Crow Versus Crow the damn tape looks outstanding with a beautiful collage collaboration wrapping up this true vibe machine in a glittery package.
Leitmotiv Limbo/RNP No2 – Split (Hyster Tapes) C30 Recycled Cassette
This glorious, DIY as you like, split tape from Hyster really is the business.
The great Leitmotiv Limbo delivers a side of their trademark music-as-psychic-attack. In a series of smeared moans the mysterious Leitmotiv molds deep throbs from what I’m guessing is some sort of woolly synth and jacked it straight to the dirtiest, most warped tape in their collection for a quick foggy mastering job.
Each column of sound is oscillating like a sausage being pumped with sonic gristle and fat. The plump pink hands of the butcher (each fingernail a crescent of blood) are surprisingly agile and gentle as the tube of minced flesh gets heavier and heavier. Now imagine the gory mess being mashed slowly, sensuously into your ears.
It’s not all spit and sawdust…things get decidedly holy on ‘Door C’ as a whiff of incense coils like rope hissing through the gates of heaven. The mood is deepened on ‘Door E’ which generates that feeling of helpless exhaustion after an early winter run. You stand, steaming like a racehorse, hands on hips, breathing in the frigid air, the mind a perfect, beautiful blank.
In the best possible way Leitmotiv Limbo conjure up the in-between moments of life. The pauses and stutters; the twitches and delicious stretches. A satisfied yawn cast in iron.
Side two offers RNP No2, another mysterious presence, who operates in a similar sound world to that great Dane Claus Poulsen but with perhaps more of a pick n’ mix approach. Each piece is a perfect, stand-alone unit showing a variety of styles and obsessions.
So, what may be rubber batons are beating gently against a copper tube as a single note is worried and plucked from within a felt piano. Or, on the wonderfully titled ‘The Pink Flowd pecking order’, bristling electric-hums play the drums and collect the empties at the bar at the same time. I don’t know about you but for me that’s classic Prick Mason material.
Other jams of note take a tin bassoon feeding back through Jah Shaka’s soundsystem (or something) that slowly turns into early Dead C clanging, ringing and singing.
We’re eased out of the listening space with a buffling roar, it could be more rubberised twigs on vibrating pig skin, it could be a puffy cheek slapped until it glows maroon. I’ve no idea what is happening, and what has happened is no guarantee of what is next to come.
What a wonderful place to be eh?
Gwilly Edmondez – Trouble Number (Slip Imprint) Double tape (C60 and C30) or digital album
“Make your own world now” croons Mr Gwilly Edmondez (AKA Gustav Thomas and MYKL JAXN) on his career-spanning double-bulge tape package.
And even the most cursory peak into this wonderfully detailed bumper-harvest reveals a singular world that screams “E.D.M.O.N.D.E.Z!”
Tape one is comprised of unreleased gunk, radio broadcasts, classic album trax and live excursions as Gwilly leafs through his famously chaotic archive to pluck the ripest fruit, the sweetest meat from as far back as 1986.
As you’d expect a lot can happen in all them dusty years so many, many, many bases are covered my dear readers. You want the slick quick dictaphonix? You got it. You crave the sampling keyboard rainbow-beans? Tick yes sister. Is your personal Jones for the trademark un-sense gibber and brain-fold poetry? Consider yourself satisfied brother.
But this time-romp is no haphazard kitchen sink-style hodgepodge. The sense of the man (the very, very Gee Edmondez) feels as comfortable and natural as a favourite moccasin. All the pinches have been ironed out resulting in gratifying fullness. In fact there are few hard, sharp edits and things flow like one of those Fabric Mixes (or something).
The spectre of Southen Rap flavours many of these jamz like hickory-smoked BBQ. And, as would be fitting for a sweet n’ sticky rib, it’s darn slippery too. At points I’m thinking a Chopped and Screwed Stanley Unwin at others a hacked Eno biscuit but towards the end I’m exhaustedly thinking of Hugo’s big Balls.
Tape Two (Gnarlage of Self) sees EdMoNdEz jamming good in the more recent year of 2017. Here the method is to record a free-flowing data dump of capricious tunage on tape, keys, percs and gits then pass the resulting loopage to one Dario Lozano Thornton for editage.
At times this layering offers a Jack Kirby dimension, all bright colours, freaky angles and cosmic pronouncements. At others the live-in-the-room feel (bolstered by inter-jam bantz and nervous laughter) is more a modern day Alan Lomax capturing a chrome-plated Sonny Terry. And the blues reference is very deliberate readers for this tape is an unwinding transport spiel, a word-salad for sure but underpinned by the railroad whoop of the freight train hobo.
I guess the question such a well-referenced retrospective raises is, ‘so what’s changed on the journey man?’ I can safely report back that to my ears it’s pretty much everything and at the same time nothing. The tunes may differ but the voice remains utterly distinctive and wonderfully radge.
But what do I know? Listen for yr damn self coz you the boss eh?
-oo00oo-
rolling gums, stiffening whiskers: joe murray on id m theft able
November 3, 2013 at 8:48 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: get me those pictures of spiderman now!, i'd m thfft able, id m theft able, improv, joe murray, mangdisc, new music, no audience underground, noise, orl records, skot spear, tapes, vocal improvisation
i’d m thfft able – Werther’s Original/Bruised Apple (tape, mangdisc, #69)
I’d m thfft able – BLOOD BLOOD / HER BLOOD (2 x 3” CD-r, Orl, orl16, edition of 100)
Le 6eme Doight de Dwayne (tape, mangdisc, #70)
Id M Theft Able – Babb’s Bridge
Hark! Let’s have a cheer for IDM Theftable. Or is that a shout out for IDM Theft Able? Or possibly we need to make some noise for I DM Theft Able? Whatever way you spell it, whatever way you say it, Skot Spear is a man of multiple characters, approaches and many, many tapes (editor’s note: since the time of writing Joe has done some journalism and asked Skot about this. According to the man himself there are two ‘official’ spellings: id m theft able or i’d m thfft able. No hint as to appropriate use of capital letters so we’ll just wing it.). A recent trawl through the internet slurps up at least 50 but I’m pretty sure that’s just the tip of this particular ferric iceberg. I first came across Skot in a very real, physical form. I pretty much tripped over his enormous rucksack at Newcastle’s historic Morden Tower (sadly now decommissioned) and amid the apologies and grovelling we started to chat and it turned out…this guy was the band. OK. Fast forward a hour or two and the whole room is glowing with rum, wearing witches hats and moaning and groaning under the instructions of the giant ginger instructor. It was a great night, a live spectacle, a shaking of hands across the Atlantic and all that.
In a plot hatched between Skot and Jonah Jameson (editor’s note: heh heh, very funny.) here I’ve scored a whole swag bag of ID M Theft Able goodies to talk/spraff/go wild about. OK…time to dig in and see what comes out first.
There’s a whole bunch of approaches across these releases. But Werthers Original/Bruised Apple are what some cats are calling sound poetry these days. Yeah….I kinda go with that description but there’s none of that academic frigidity in ID M’s voice. The psychedelic domestic is explored and probed with an adventurous tongue as word bombs light up the gloomy interior of my skull. The phrase “she slipped a Werther’s Original into my mouth and my eyes rolled round like a slot machine” is teased and taxed with no electronics or nothing. Just lips, teeth and throat flapping the gas out into my ear. The B-side (ID M describes this as a ‘kinda like a single’) is more overlapped with various ID Ms inhabiting different levels of time & space intoning his Bruised Apple schtick. The words, phrasing, inhalations of breath all stir together in a creepy kind of way making nonsense of sense and leading your lurching down the path mossy with glossalia. We need more of this mung in the top 40 you pop pickers.
The double CD-R package (HER BLOOD / BLOOD BLOOD) comes in the kind of triple folded pop-art collage folk like Richard Hamilton used to paste up and makes me happyjolly right from the off. Inside the delicate envelopes are two live discs; ‘HER BLOOD’ is pure vocal, feral choir chops, with an audience of youngsters and hipsters. ID M makes the process easy, explaining his cues to the assembled choir, then launches into a giant hissing and sighing piece that sounds like the world’s largest Whoopee Cushion deflating as Yoda settles his bony buttocks into the rubbery folds letting out a goose-honk ‘bronx cheer’. Phonetic consonants are rolled round moist gobs and spat into a crackling fire as some Chip, Chet or Chuck wonders ‘Why did he put that in? It’s plastic.’ There is an occasional bell ring from an old fashioned telephone to punctuate but, in the main it’s all live hiss conducted for the BBQ crowd. Wow. This is a hell of a heavy document.
‘BLOOD BLOOD’ (very confusingly) starts with The Verve then Florence and the Machine’s corporate indie rock, and what sounds like psycho-beard Matt Berry (from the IT Crowd fame) as some hapless XFM Jockey…until I realised I had knocked on the radio my mistake. Sheet! I listened for about 5 mins before realising my mistake. I think this serves as a salutary reminder of how diverse ID M’s chunks can be. I guessed it was some anglo-indie-tape piece. No dice!
Right…back to work, here’s the real deal. ‘BLOOD BLOOD’ starts with some speed rapping “I Want It” and breaks into brief verses from TLC’s classic ‘Waterfalls’ to spice things up. The infamous ‘box o’ things’ makes an appearance like some Harry Partch equipment hot-wired by the mice out of Bagpuss and cranked up tight by angry worker bees to sculpt the minimal poem ‘The Hole’; soft twanging tones rumble gently reminding me of a foam gamelan. ‘Encore!’ Chuck, Chet or Chip calls out squeakily and, ever the gent, Theft-san rolls his gums up round more tape-collage fuss to spit and slobber ‘I’m Swimming in Blood, Blood, Blood’ mixing gob-punk techno-squelch with random radio blather and feedback tweaks. A heavily amplified hamster cage is rattled for a bit like another Harry, this time of the Bertoia persuasion, was kidnapped and thrown in the boot seguing into the most primitive sampling this side of the Dave Howard Singers, ‘boof, Burrrfff….clunk!’ Wow. The audience babble and chat and laughter only makes this all the more dixy. As a beginners guide to the ID M universe this is a mightily good place to start.
So far there has been a knockabout, laff-a-minute thread to many of these ID M releases. Me, I love this. Does humour belong in music? If you don’t know the answer, pack up and go home man. But, ya’ know, we’re all different and I appreciate not everyone likes to listen to the band playing for yuks. OK…now that’s settled, the stern-gobs can be safe in the knowledge that Le 6eme Doight de Dwayne is pretty much a serious piece of group improv recorded in a basement so low ID M couldn’t even stand up in it. Instrumentation seems to be sporadic with metal percussion, keys, voice and occasional bass making a rich broth of hive-mind. For a tape recorded in Quebec in 2011 it has a very late 1980’s Eastern European quality (perhaps one of Martin Klapper’s shindigs?) with deliberate placement resulting in busy-brittle-rustling meshed up with junk/toy clatter. ‘Ching, ching…wurrrupp’ says a musical see-saw answered with polite restraint from the players. Things really take off when the voices babble in unison, the electronic bird caller warbles in the background, and throats coalesce into a single snort and honk chorus. Again… I’m a sucker for this approach and it takes me back to huddling under the bed covers listening to Mixing It on the verge of sleep; all the signals getting scrambled in my dozing brain.
Babb’s Bridge (on recycled Max Bygraves tape…I didn’t know Max had ‘broke’ America) channels a totally different approach to everything else I have heard up to now from Thefty (editors note: apparently originally released on vinyl in 2009 via a four-way label collaboration involving Veglia, King Fondue, Zeikzak and Taped Sounds).
Side one totally wrong foots me as it starts with a field recording/stream-of-consciousness poem that rambles politely across time, tense and sense to come up with demented couplets, “loves Kurt Cobain…forever, italiano cheek, 1980…Mike Gray is gay. Bleed rat bleed.” which the occasional knotty thump that I suspect is tapped out on Babb’s Bridge itself. Slowly it turns back into field recording as cars drive on and revellers shout. It’s all drawing to a close I think but, amid the sparse background chatter ID M continues with more precisely timed loves and losses, “the sexy ass beast” and most unusually, the occasional Wu Tang Clan quote. Then it dawns on me…he’s reading from the bridge itself, or rather from the accumulated graffiti that must be scrawled across it; picking up themes, repeating them, turning words and phrases inside out. What makes this all the more haunting and worthwhile is the calm and relaxed way it’s all delivered. There’s no am-dram shouting or over-enunciated performance poetry theatrics. It’s all matter-of-fact and chatty, like overhearing one half of a conversation between an anxious God and his disciples. A beautiful piece of music to add to the ever-growing no-audience underground sound poetry cannon.
Side two picks up the honky electronics, wires, tapes and samples approach. Flustered mouthings and fizzy lippings are laid out over Morse Code spurts while the wheels of a matchbox car are mashed into bright blue Play Doh. It’s all speed-of-thought chaffings and pips, rolling and lurching (bishp…booop. FZZZZZZZzzzz) that raises the pulse rate and stiffens the whiskers. The logic of the collage is taken to extremes with one sonic idea laying over its partner to create a herringbone pattern of interlocked brickwork. As one sound fades it’s cousin takes over, holding the construction tight, making it safe to walk over…just about perfect for a bridge yeah?
For a far more in depth understanding of this mysterious record (also available on vinyl) check out this vintage interview with the man himself. For more general intelligence on IDM look no further than his propaganda page: KRAAG.
I reckon I’ve listened to about 3 hours of IDM Theft Able straight this morning and it’s been a right tasty trip for my ears. I’ll listen to goof-off mouthing all day but it’s Babb’s Bridge that’s stolen my heart with it’s pure otherness. Use Google…check ‘em out Midwichers!
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