radio free midwich

scatty and clotted the rattling: joe murray gets hep to schrein, melchior & piermattei, dylan nyoukis

Schrein – EinsZweinSchrein (vinyl LP, Meudiademorte Records, edition of 500 or download)

Dan Melchior & Ezio Piermattei (tape, My Dance The Skull, MDTS 10)

Dylan Nyoukis – Yellow Belly (tape, Chocolate Monk, choc.292, edition of 21 in individual collage slipcases)

Jazz.

I’m just going to let that word sit there for a while and shimmer.

Jazz.

There it is again.  The ‘J’ word.  That’s right.  I’m talking about Jazz right now.

Ask anyone:

Does Joe like his Jazz?

…and they’d say:

Joe?  Jazz?  He is Jazz.  He loves it inside out fella.  MilesDizzyColtraneOrnetteRaMonkArmstrong.  He lives for that crazy-ass Jass music.

And of course they would be right.  Jazz is the cornerstone of my listening habits.  So it’s with great anticipation I sit down to rap with Schrein  – a real Jazz group from Germany.  Ruth-Maria Adam (violin) , Bastian Hagedorn (drums) and Ronnie Oliveras (clarinet) take their three very jazz implements and imbue them with no-audience underground chops rather than beardy Trad swing.  This makes for a strung-out and exhilarating listen.

‘Llullaillaco’ is particularly medicated with Ritalin drums pushing and rushing everything forward at breakneck speed until three dark voices join in profane chorus like a mini-Popol Vuh complete with dank Kecak koff.

You spot something on the horizon.

In ‘Emi Koussi’ the creaks and scratches lay beneath keening clarinet gasps (similar to PEEESSEYE kinda) and dark fractured electronics.  The drums clump and skit across your field of listening as brittle as slates on a roof.

You venture deeper into the woods.

During ‘Fogo’ the horns/violin/something gets processed into the austere tones you’d expect on an Editions Mego record as the bristling hubbub clears the forest floor below.  The night draws in on ‘Shinmoedake’ covering you and your party with heavy black murk, liquid bumps and waxy scratches making your neck hairs stand to attention.  ‘Eyjafjallajokull’ is the finisher.  Scatty and clotted the rattling of prayer bowls adds no comfort to you now.  Trapped in dark magic the metallic tones ‘k-u-n-g’ and ‘c-h-u-n-g’ all wobbly.  Just at the limits of your hearing a toad licks its lips hungrily. Wet slobbery anticipation?

At times the sound is as hectic as worker bees.  At others it’s as mellow as a fat caterpillar basking in the mid-afternoon sun.  But it’s in the bringing together of all these sounds and textures: wet and dry, soft and hard, clear and occluded that keeps this disc filed next to Alexander von Schlippenbach in the dusty racks.

Dan Melchior/Ezio Piermattei

Exquisite tape collage collaboration between two crackling bonfires of good ideas.  Voice, tapes, guitar, organ, synth, percussion etc get chucked into a pot and ladled out into rough clay bowls.  The soup is a steaming but cleansing broth full of herbs and piquant with fine vinegar dressing.

I think what I am trying to say is there is no confusion here.  Sounds and structure are distinct and clear.

The casio-tone rhythm of ‘Bad Gateway’ may be emboldened by rubbery ripping but it’s very deliberate.  As if to prove the point a simple piano sparkles in 3D above the misty sounding mung below.  ‘Lurch’, a micro song, betrays Dan’s Medway roots and acts like a punky sorbet before the prog-tastic ‘A Corner of the Forest’ in which the sound of Cluster artfully collapsing in a doorway, folding way into nothingness, is channelled through psych-guitar and no-audience vocal hink.  The sung coda, picking up the guitar part, is pure genius and worth the price of the tape alone.

‘Two Tiny Kingdoms’, the longest piece on the tape, is an epic construction.  Through whirling sound-strobes and dainty vocal recordings a humble theme emerges.  Over, under and between this central frame echoes of Italian and American voice the bilingual, the act of listening to another language jabbing my pleasure centres just like a Phil Minton jam.  Subtle tape skizz adds some sonic grit and gets cautiously heavier with some occasional fretboard fuggery until the creaking of old ropes leads us out the maze.

The final song makes me smile the widest, because ‘A Teacher Star’ sounds exactly like Portishead jacked-up on Dictaphone Jazz and filthy vocal Jizz.   Can you imagine that?  Of course you can.  And I have to tell you it sounds bloody right and bloody great.

Dylan Nyoukis – Yellow Belly

Another cracking tape from Chocolate Monk.  This time it’s Dylan doing the gumming on this peachy, peachy release.  The website said ‘dictaphone, voice, organ, delay’ and was recorded a few days after my birthday…the omens were good so I slipped a fiver in an envelope and waited.

A scant week later the postie plopped this beauty through the door and we all gathered round the cheap-o stereo to listen.

If you’re expecting hi-jinks and ear-tuggery look away now for this is a beautiful gush.  A gentle warming, an egg-shaped fondle.

A brief introduction of Dictaphone voice ‘glurrr’ is exact and well placed.  You can hear the rush of cars somewhere and the delightful button-click between takes as thoughts form and a plan emerges.

Here’s the real world in all its domestic charm

…it seems to say…

remember this and remember this well for we are going on a voyage long and arduous.

With a breathy chuff the organ begins to takes centre stage.  A simple one-handed motif rises through the gently churning windpipes.  It is spotted left, then right then centre stage; ever changing and growing – a misty grey dream world pulsing gently to the end of the side.

Side two opens tentatively but soon revisits the multi-layered world of rushing amber tones.  Things are more clotted here, like a bust-out church organ with small dogs sleeping on the keys.  Dank notes tumble down through a well of souls.  The Dictaphone adds its trademark gristle and grime (rain falling, plastic crackling?) as the organ is fingered bluntly by the parishioners.

I’m writing gently in bed to the seemingly random fug of notes, all placed next to each other with ever-so-slight overlap and digging this scene immensely until the Dictaphone trills like a funky Oboe.  Vocal snatches are FFWed across the church roof from Nave to Transept in a soft Suffolk burrrrrrrrr bringing things to a crystalline climax.  Whoooshhh.

Individual artwork and super limited (21 copies only).  Sold out but sure to surface again  – keep your eyes peeled.

—ooOoo—

Meudiademorte Records

My Dance The Skull

Chocolate Monk