all that is left: people-eaters, aetheric records and invisible city records
April 9, 2015 at 12:39 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: aetheric records, automatic drawing, invisible city records, new music, no audience underground, noise, people-eaters, poetry, slowthaw, spiritualism, tapes, visual art
people-eaters – The Only Thing Left To Fear (A5 chapbook, 16pp, with 3” CD-r mixtape, aetheric records)
people-eaters – The Only Thing Left To Fear (tape, Invisible City Records, edition of 30 or download)
It amuses me to imagine aetheric records and Invisible City Records sharing premises. I picture a cross between the drawing room in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the well-appointed lounge where William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki gathers his friends to hear tales of ghost-hunting. The more decadent staff members drape themselves over the chaise longues and, deep in a fug of laudanum and absinthe, lose themselves in painfully thin volumes of German poetry. The more scientifically minded look on disapprovingly and return to their geographical analysis of Eastern European folklore, or a heated exchange as to the properties of ectoplasm.
The pull-back-and-reveal (or ‘then I got off the bus’ moment – cheers Pete) in this scene occurs as the camera follows one of these chaps out of the main door and into… an anonymous, strip-lit corridor in a modern, faceless office building. What gives!? Well, despite my whimsical first paragraph I’d suggest both labels are solidly grounded in the present day and fully understand the ritual and psychological significance of the trappings they have chosen. Alistair of aetheric knows full well that his beloved photographs of spirit activity at Victorian séances are preposterous hoaxes, Craig of Invisible City knows full well that H.P. Lovecraft was a writer of fiction not a documentarian. Both can agree, with a shared wistful sigh, that there is simply no such thing as ‘cat people’ from the ‘old country’…
That said, the certainty that there are no tentacles under the bed is cold comfort. If these things don’t exist then the stories we tell about them are really attempts to explain unpalatable truths about ourselves and our place in an indifferent universe. In the absence of spirits and monsters all that is left is us, an infinity of nothing and the implications thereof. That is the only thing left to fear.
Which brings us through the woods to the album that ties the two labels together: The Only Thing Left to Fear by people-eaters. Released in two versions, on aetheric this comes as an A5 chapbook containing five poems, five automatic drawings and a 16 minute ‘mixtape’ on 3″ CD-r and on Invisible City it exists as a limited edition tape or download. You don’t get the chapbook with the latter but, beefed up with remixes, the amount of music included is more than doubled. Both editions are still available at the time of writing.
The poetry, written by Alistair using the pseudonym ‘slowthaw’, is grisly and bleak – part Baudelaire fever-dream, part Burroughs cut-up, all disgusted with the corporeal. It’s an uncomfortable read. Some of you will appreciate that. Regarding the artwork, I’m always tempted to ‘reverse engineer’ automatic drawing, to trace the lines with a fingernail or the tip of a pen and see what, if any, feelings fall out as a result. This time, appropriately enough, I got panicked – as if a spirit was trying to communicate something and getting increasingly frantic as it realised this ‘Ouija board’ had no letters on it, nor did the fleshy mechanism it had appropriated even believe in its existence.
Before accounting for the music, I should mention that all the creative aspects of this project are apparently inspired by the following quote:
Spirit sounds are usually of a peculiar character; they have an intensity and a character of their own, and, notwithstanding their great variety, can hardly be mistaken, so that they are not easily confused with common noises, such as the creaking of wood, the crackling of fire, or the ticking of a clock; spirit raps are clear and sharp, sometimes soft and light… (from The Medium’s Book by Allan Kardec published in 1861)
…as its influence is easier heard than seen. The quote is classic spiritualism – apparently saying something concrete and testable but, on examination, containing enough wiggle room to accommodate a salsa class. people-eaters play it straight, though (well, after an opening that samples a mindfulness meditation tape and thus returned me to early 90s ‘chill out’ ambient nonsense) and present a series of creaks, crackles and ticks drawn out with biomechanical rhythms for our appraisal. Anchor chains are cut and bows scrape against each other in a moonlit bay. Brass cogged difference engines strip oxidised gears. Parasitic organisms are hatched and scrabble at the walls of their red prison, the host animal oblivious.
Ghosts? We are asked. Monsters? Each time we have to look down and shake our heads: no, just us – just you, me and the fuckers on the other side of that bolted door.
Nothing else.
—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—
there’s no code for this: stories by forgets
February 8, 2013 at 7:25 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: forgets, hogwash, improv, kroyd, live music, mitch, new music, no audience underground, noise, poetry, spoken word, storytelling
forgets – and my equal vegetates for her boy (self-released download)
forgets – Bedroom/Redboom (self-released download)
forgets – we are joke man (self-released download)
forgets – Everybody Limps Here (Live At Hogwash 3) (self-released download)
Y’know, I haven’t touched a drop in some time. Whilst changing medication a couple of years ago I noticed that the accompanying advice also changed to the sternly worded ‘avoid alcohol’. ‘Hmmm…’, I thought, ‘surely moderation in all things, eh? A little whistle moistener won’t do any harm…’ But I was wrong. That little experiment was over quickly and the results were conclusive. Ugh. After some thought, I decided to use the circumstances as a reason to just stop drinking alcohol completely. Best to keep it simple, no exceptions to the rule.
I haven’t missed it really. Well, there have been one or two fraught occasions where a bit of social lubricant would have oiled my squeaky hinges, but other than that: good riddance. I was a lousy drunk: overbearing, unpredictable, prone to bouts of nihilistic irresponsibility. Sure, fun at the time (for me at least, if not those around me) but for a sufferer of depression the hungover self-loathing following a weekend of ‘self-medication’ was dangerously close to unendurable. I don’t think I ever had a problem with drink, as such, but I lived on the same street as the problem for a while and it isn’t a happy neighbourhood. I suppose that there is a possible world not too far from our own where I ended up as an incidental character in a track by forgets…
I first encountered the duo of Kroyd and Mitch (words and guitar respectively, stage names – natch) at the Hogwash night where I last played as midwich. What with Chrissie Caulfield also on the bill that gig proved a revelation. Props again to Dave, Noah and Benbow for organising things. May I encourage my dear readers to support their ongoing endeavour.
Over Mitch’s improv noise guitar – filtered through an impressive daisy chain of effects pedals – Kroyd told us a story, off the top of his head, of how repeated exposure to a song by Ronan Keating led him to jack in his job and instead roll up at Wetherspoon’s at 8am each morning instead. There he helped defuse a tricky situation between the staff and two other early bird punters. It’s a love story. Kinda. In-between chapters Kroyd read poetry/stories/routines from a sheath of notes. These fell to the floor as he scrabbled through them one handed, his other busy with the mic or a large glass of red wine. It had the dishevelled drama, the nervous shaky energy of someone who will ‘be alright once I’ve got this down me.’
I loved it. In fact I’d loved ‘em since the soundcheck when Kroyd checked the mic line by reading his asthma clinic appointment letter whilst Mitch’s guitar gruffly weeped. Others weren’t so sure. A highly regarded comrade of mine told me ‘I don’t like someone talking when the guitar is talking.’ At first I dismissed this objection as daft, pretentious even, then I thought about it and… dismissed it again. It is bloody daft. The arrangement seemed appropriate to me. A hip New York beat poet can have a double bass player picking out the rhythm. Thus a poet from Yorkshire documenting the pitiful consolations, pyrrhic victories and gallows humour of a life, shall we say, not steeped in luxury can have a noise guitar emphasising his own ebb and flow. It makes perfect sense.
My friend’s comment also underestimates, in my humble opinion, the extent to which the band really is a duo. They were clearly listening to each other and reacting accordingly, both altering tone and tempo as the narrative required. Anyway, this performance was recorded and has surfaced on the forgets Bandcamp page so you can listen and judge for yourselves.
After the gig I hastily followed things up and downloaded the other albums available. Kroyd himself described this work to me as hit and miss but he is unnecessarily self-deprecating (he admits on one track to being passive-aggressive – which is a classic passive-aggressive double bluff, of course). Yeah, the recording is raw but I don’t care about that. The noise comes in two basic flavours: an agreeably spacious post-punk boom and rattle or an actual-punk anarcho-chug which wouldn’t seem out of place in a black-and-white wraparound sleeve.
The writing/storytelling is ramshackle or tightly controlled or improvised or carefully thought out or very funny or chokingly bleak – often all at once. we are joke man has its moments but I’m going to discuss a few examples from the other two: Bedroom/Redboom – a 22 minute epic with instrumental coda – and and my equal vegetates for her boy – an album containing 19 tracks all titled with words beginning with the letter ‘D’.
The latter describes a battle-scarred past, a banal, bureaucratic present and a militaristic, totalitarian future. The songs and stories share themes and are linked with repetitions and reprises. Sometimes a passage that appears to be a gushing stream of consciousness is repeated word for word in another context. This gives the unnerving impression that all this is happening at once, now, or is waiting just around the corner.
The opener, ‘Divide’, is a harrowing report of protesters slaughtered at a checkpoint. But we are not allowed the luxury of imagining this is happening in some far-off land. The leader of the demonstration is a taxi driver from Doncaster, a grocer from Leeds helps with the banner. What has happened that has led to this? ‘Doors’ describes a group of strangers gathered mute and motiveless outside Kroyd’s house. It’s part Tubeway Army-style paranoia, part ‘Shadow Over Innsmouth’ dread and part delirium tremens. The closing ‘Duke #2’ ends with a bitter lament for all the ‘war mad little boys.’
I realise that by now you are probably thinking ‘whoo boy, tough listen’ and, well, yeah, in parts it is but, crucially, it is really good. As well as the doom there is drama (see ‘Disc’ about an ex-boy band star stealing a song from the narrator’s garage punk band) and a lot of humour (see ‘Donkey’ a joyous account of cheering up an emo horse). There are plenty of lines and images to make you guffaw on the bus too – even in this Orwellian future ‘robots cook your tea’. Ah, not all bad, eh?
‘Bedroom’ is framed with a semi-prepared story of Kroyd being visited by Death. This set-up made me laugh (Death can’t be bothered explaining it all, just mentions A Christmas Carol and hands Kroyd a scroll of terms and conditions to read) and, like the gig recording, is interspersed with poetry and sub-routines throughout. One of these routines is a long list of things that scare Kroyd – basically everything – which starts off as amusing but becomes electrifying as the impotent rage and despair at the ridiculousness of it all boils into a shouted fury mirrored by Mitch’s increasingly violent accompaniment. This peaks, breaks and mutates into a beautiful poem – ‘we invented death’ – that is disarmingly profound. It is a terrific, stomach-flipping moment. The first time I heard this I was on my walk to work and realised that even at my dawdling pace I was going to reach the office before it finished. So I stopped, leaned on a convenient wall, ignored the suspicious glances of fellow commuters and heard it out.
I suggest you download all this, get your coat on, find a suitable wall or bench yourself and do the same. Maybe we can meet in the pub later to discuss it. Just a coke for me, thanks.
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