the edge of the tar pit: haiku on selections from the hairdryer excommunication catalogue
September 17, 2015 at 1:02 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: benjamin hallatt, haiku, hairdryer excommunication, hardworking families, kay hill, kevin sanders, marlo eggplant, seth cooke, tom bench
kevin sanders – reducing ideas to words (CD-r or download, hairdryer excommunication)
kevin sanders – the physical resonance of attraction (a.m.) (3” CD-r or download, hairdryer excommunication)
Marlo Eggplant – Jutted (3” CD-r or download, hairdryer excommunication)
kevin sanders – Sounds of separation (3” CD-r, hairdryer excommunication, edition of 11 or download)
Kay Hill & Kevin Sanders (tape or download, hairdryer excommunication)
Seth Cooke – Christ of the Abyss (business card CD-r, hairdryer excommunication, edition of 100 or download)
Hardworking Families – Happy Days (CD-r or download, hairdryer excommunication)
Kevin Sanders – hyperhypercritical (3” CD-r or download, hairdryer excommunication)
1. reducing ideas to words
Scratching the paper,
we trade precision smears
for hard company.
2. the physical resonance of attraction (a.m.)
Albino lizards
lick the air – cavers approach!
A feast of tanned flesh…
3. Jutted
Brine, creosote, blood –
stir with rusting screwdriver.
Cut tethers, start work.
4. Sounds of separation
Waking innocent,
like it had never been said.
Then we remember.
5. Kay Hill & Kevin Sanders
From edge of tar pit
to aeon-bled exhibit –
petrified moment.
6. Christ of the Abyss
Petri dish culture
of tainted agar reveals
face of the prophet.
7. Happy Days
‘Sit on it, Winnie!’
says Fonz, buried to his neck.
Sammy feeds the shark.
8. hyperhypercritical
Each tide’s rasping breath
a fraction of Moon’s release,
or: “saying goodbye.”
—ooOoo—
In summary…
Prodigious output:
teeth, gears grinding
– reflected in silver bullets.
—ooOoo—
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—
sea, souvenirs, spice: luke vollar on grisha shakhnes, seth cooke and early hominids
January 8, 2015 at 11:28 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: early hominids, field recording, glistening examples, grisha shakhnes, jason lescalleet, luke vollar, neil campbell, new music, no audience underground, noise, organized music from thessaloniki, paul walsh, psychedelia, seth cooke, zanntone
Grisha Shakhnes – Distance and Decay (CD, organized music from thessaloniki, t24, edition of 200)
Seth Cooke – Sightseer (3” CD-r, organized music from thessaloniki, t25, edition of 100)
early hominids – palpate (CD-r, zanntone, 000)
Grisha Shakhnes is a Moscow born, Tel Aviv based individual. I’ve heard of him before as he has a record released on Glistening Examples, the label run by American tape fiddler and conceptualist Jason Lescalleet. There are some obvious similarities between the two as both use obsolete recording devices to blur and confuse what is recorded and what is an artefact of the recording – are we hearing the inner workings of a tape machine or is this a field recording made ghostly with ferric oxide?
There are no details provided with Grisha’s disc just the enigmatic, lovely artwork and title. There are sounds that hang in space as if suspended in water, their movements as slow and methodical as a giant sea creature. Indeed, when I try to put into words the sounds of this disc I invariably end up with an aquatic theme. At one point I imagined a mini-sub coming across a metropolis on the ocean floor, its occupants staring slack jawed at the enormous structures of neon lights and chrome towers churning out geysers of bubbling water. Later I hear a game of snooker played under a waterfall before the sad lament of a female voice in an alien tongue is buried beneath the gloop of machine malfunction. A somnambulant feeling is maintained throughout the 75 minute duration making it an unwise choice for your car stereo but a great soundtrack for full time dreamers.
Seth Cooke presents us with an entirely different beast on his little disc. He lists his tools as:
no recording, recording and no input field recording
No, me neither. Whilst ‘Cape Coast Seashell Bowed On Minster-on-Sea Shore’ informs us of its method of execution, the other titles reveal very little other than a rye [Editor’s note: sic, but what a great typo! I’m keeping that one in] sense of humour: ‘If You Only Listen To One FLAC This Year’ being a prime example. The mood is lonely, with voyeuristic overtones. At one point I could hear Seth releasing a caged pigeon to fly around a dimly lit multi-story car park. In other moments a faceless individual impassively views a seaside location, now devoid of human life. A sense of disquiet is achieved as a recording of, essentially, nothing is gradually enhanced with surgical precision only to be abruptly cut off just as it starts to become uncomfortable then switched for grizzled distortion swiftly followed by ghostly tones receding dimly. I have to say the more I listen to this, the more impressed I am with the craft and thought that has gone into it. Seth has used the format of a 3″ disc to fit in a lot of ideas though it never feels overcrowded.
Both artists make ample use of field recordings and both presumably use some form of processing for further confusion. Where Grisha’s sounds are in no hurry to get anywhere and are blurred by the use of cassette tapes, Seth’s sounds are clear and shrapnel sharp with abrupt editing and unexpected changes in colour and tone. Seth’s espresso to Grisha’s grande latte, if you will.
I’ve seen early hominids, the duo of Paul Walsh and Neil Campbell, play a few times and part of the pleasure is marveling at the collection of noise kit spread before them: a couple of light activated boxes that fizz and crackle in response to strobes, like an angry serpent disturbed from its slumber, and all manner of odd looking stuff, presumably soldered together in a shady basement with the fiendish duo shouting ‘it’s alive, ALIVE!’ as it bleeps itself awake. One show in particular sticks in my mind from a few years ago at the Fox and Newt in Leeds. Paul and Neil created a Technicolor psych noise juggernaut that vibrated the tiny room while threatening to levitate the whole darned boozer into another dimension. It was what I’d always hoped Incapacitants would sound like: noise as the ultimate euphoric wig flipper.
The boys are in a more restrained mood here but their electronic gadgets still stutter and belch as if barely controlled by their probing fingers. Rather than batter us with a relentless sonic barrage the sounds are allowed to rise and fall into pleasingly awkward shapes. As I am hypnotized and my head begins to nod I visualize the two of them face to face over a table of wires and boxes creating a slurry of rich and spicy noise blarts while occasionally reaching for the ever present ale that fuels them. ‘Tis good stuff I tell thee.
—ooOoo—
organized music from thessaloniki
not sure if the homs CD-r remains available – try contacting Paul via the zanntone bandcamp page or via that Twitter.
framing devices: packaged by michael clough, crow versus crow and every contact leaves a trace
March 21, 2014 at 9:44 pm | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: caught in the wake of forever, crow versus crow, dominic lash, drone, electronica, every contact leaves a trace, field recording, henry collins, ignacio agrimbau, improv, michael clough, new music, no audience underground, noise, seth cooke, tumblr, visual art, will montgomery
Michael Clough – Untitled (CD-r, self-released, edition of 5)
Michael Clough – SKRBL (16 page, A6 booklet, self-published, edition of 10, all unique)
Michael Clough – miniMA (Tumblr account and A7 booklet, self-published)
Caught In The Wake Forever and Crow Versus Crow – Excommunicado (3” CD-r and booklet, Crow Versus Crow, initial edition of 50, second run of 25)
Dominic Lash / Will Montgomery – Real As Any Place You’ve Been / Thames Water Live (CD-r, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, edition of 100 or download)
Henry Collins – Music of Sound (CD-r, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, edition of 100 or download)
Ignacio Agrimbau – Anatomy of the Self Vol. 2 – Decay, Corrosion and Dust (CD-r, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, edition of 100 or download)
Seth Cooke – Four No-Input Field Recordings (CD-r, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, edition of 100 or download)
Listen hard, dear readers, can you hear it? A faint, beguiling, rhythmic patter. It is the sound of the no-audience underground, in particular those that have submitted material for review, drumming their fingers on the collective kitchen table waiting as patiently as possible for comment on their endeavours. I jest of course, I can’t imagine anyone really giving a monkey’s about delays and deadlines around here, but occasionally I do feel bad about the length of time it takes me to get around to everything. In my defence I have been totally bewilderated by the demands of returning to work following a long period of illness. Also, whilst unable to write much, I have instead made the fifty tapes of the oTo back catalogue available as a (massively successful, I’m happy to say) distraction. Never mind that CD-r you sent me in January – look over there! – rare Phil Todd stuff!!
Anyway, the muse has poked her head around the door to see how I’m doing and is now helping me uncork the whimsy spout. Inspired by Joe’s account of a tape that comes packaged in a gnome I have been thinking a bit about the stuff we wrap stuff in and am bundling together some exquisitely presented releases that have recently come my way.
Firstly three objects by the incomparable Michael Clough. I know the guy is amused and flattered when I start bandying terms around like ‘aesthetic’ but, having been delighted by his work for fifteen years, I can think of few artists more consistent. His achievements are all the more remarkable for being produced in tiny editions, or hidden on Soundcloud, created in moments snatched from family life. His erudite and self-deprecating humour disguises a homespun but hardcore conceptual rigour and a Savile Row tailor’s eye for quality of finish.
Take SKRBL for example – sixteen pages of exactly that, photocopied, layered, recopied, stapled into a neat card cover. The presentation gives these scribbles the air of architectural drawings by a madman, the blueprints of an impossible, nine-dimensional suspension bridge. The enlargements provoke a ludicrous desire to attend to detail that just isn’t there. Or is it? How serious is this nonsense?
miniMA, a very neat A7 booklet with card cover containing 8 photographic plates, is the first physical manifestation of the Miniature Museum of Art, curated by M. Clough. Presented as a tiny exhibition catalogue with knowing puns and allusions for artist names and picture titles, this is, of course, all his own work. His Tumblr account contains many more fascinating examples of ‘found art’ framed by his discerning eye and documented with his camera phone. I’d be happy transferring dozens of these pieces to RFM but they are best viewed in situ and the effect of scrolling through them is cumulative. Makes me want to get recording purely so I can nab his best for album covers.
The third of these objects is a CD-r packaged in a card, handmade, fold-out sleeve held together by the type of paper sash patented by Andy Robinson for his much-missed label Striate Cortex. No identifying information is included, no text of any kind, just photographs of light refracted through, I’m not sure, maybe some kind of corrugated plastic then cut into a waveform shape of the sort you might see via some sound-editing software. It is a genius piece of design – an almost completely abstracted city scape portrayed as nothing but pulse and it fits the music perfectly. The CD-r contains one untitled track lasting 33 minutes built entirely from layers of electronic throb. It is as sinuous, mindless and viscerally sensual as an interspecies orgy on a cold, tiled floor following a mass breakout at the reptile house. Indeed, in reviews I often use the term ‘meditative’ in the appreciative but not wholly accurate sense of ‘thought provoking’. This piece is ‘meditative’ in the Buddhist sense of aiding in the dissolution of ego. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking obliterating – marvellously so.
This stuff can be had direct from Clough himself. Email him at mriclough@aol.com for availability and prices.
Next we have Excommunicado by Caught In The Wake Forever (an alias of Fraser McGowan) and Crow Versus Crow. The package feels simple, coherent and appropriate but a list of its elements is overwhelming. I’ll let Andy Crow explain:
‘Excommunicado’ comprises a 10.5 x 10.5 cm 16 page mini art book, containing black and white inkjet prints of Crow Versus Crow’s minimal ink and pencil drawings printed on matte white paper within a 170gsm recycled card cover; four instrumental tracks from Caught In The Wake Forever, on a white-faced 3″ CDr housed within an 8.5 x 8.5 cm 100 gsm recycled paper envelope; an insert sheet containing recording and production information; a 35 mm photographic negative; and a dried rose petal, all housed within a 12.5 x 12.5 cm 100 gsm recycled paper envelope, sealed with a full colour ‘Excommunicado’ sticker.
OK, perhaps that level of description is bordering on the fetishistic but you get the idea: this is a package. In a letter to me Andy was coy about the informing idea behind the project as he wanted me to come to it fresh. Unfortunately, however, he clearly forgot that I was on his mailing list and had received a plug for the first edition of this release in which he told the world that it deals with…
…loss. Or, more specifically, it deals with the process of coming to terms with loss. I’m sure most people reading this will have got to a point in your life, post-trauma, where you’re confronted with the question, ‘What now?’. Sadness, bitterness, alienation, isolation, loss, nostalgia, hope, glimmers of happiness… all of these come together in a non-linear mess, as you attempt to ‘pull yourself together’, ‘get yourself back on track’ etc etc.
…which is a tough idea to jettison once you know it is there. I like to think I would have guessed anyhow. The project as a whole seems defined by absence: the blown pigment outlining a hand shape on a cave wall. Fraser’s music is a delicately balanced mix of electronics – dragging a cumbersome weight from the past behind it, unsettled in its present, grasping for the future. It’s like not quite remembering something. Andy’s drawings are perfectly complementary. Again, here is art reaching for something no longer there. The booklet ‘reads’ like the marginalia surrounding an entirely redacted text.
The initial run of 50 copies for this release sold out in a day. A second edition of 25 is planned. Please visit the Crow Versus Crow blog for updates and/or to sign up for the newsletter.
Finally then, I am delighted to offer a warm RFM welcome to new label Every Contact Leaves a Trace. My admiration for the luxuriantly bearded polymath Seth Cooke is well documented to the point of being borderline creepy. Suffice to say the news that he was starting his own label was gladdening and that these objects were hotly anticipated.
I’d like to get the less positive stuff out of the way first: I’m afraid the split album shared by Dominic Lash and Will Montgomery was not for me, despite some very satisfying passages of subterranean electro-gurgle in ‘Thames Water Live’ by the latter. Moving swiftly on…
Music of Sound by Henry Collins is an edit of family favourite film The Sound of Music removing all dialogue and music from the soundtrack. We are left with half an hour (that much!) of footsteps, weather, birdsong, doors slamming, whistles and the like – a celebration of the work of the foley artist. The worry with this kind of high concept stuff is that the cleverness will come at the expense of engagement, or to put it another way: that the technical accomplishment can be admired without being much, y’know, enjoyed. However, no need to fret here because Henry has created a surprisingly powerful and emotionally resonant piece. Subtracting the ‘content’ has also drained away the Technicolor of the original and we are left with a tense black-and-white atmosphere in which the dread of the approaching Nazis is fore-grounded. If you’d told me it was a version of say, The Third Man, I’d have no trouble believing you. Also, the insert picturing the alpine meadow from the film’s iconic poster image sans Julie Andrews is genius.
You might, given the amusing title, expect Seth’s own Four No-Input Field Recordings to be very, very quiet indeed. Instead what we have is twenty minutes of electrostatic roar uplit with digi-squiggles. I imagine Seth shrunk, with his boom mic and recording equipment, Fantastic Voyage style, and squirted into his kit in order to become the Chris Watson of the sub-atomic. Listen as herds of crackling electrons stampede along the canyon floor of his mixer’s circuitry. Marvel at the call-and-response of a quantum-level dawn chorus before us clumsy humans start collapsing the wave function all over the place with our observations. Very sharp and very entertaining.
Lastly, we have the ominously titled Anatomy of the Self Vol. 2 – Decay, Corrosion and Dust by Ignacio Agrimbau. It has taken me a while to appreciate just how good this one is. The first couple of listens left me skating on the meniscus feeling weightless and foiled by the music’s surface tension. As with After the Rain, the terrific but musicologically intimidating band of which he is one third, I am largely ignorant of the instrumentation used or the traditions and influences from whence it sprung. This is, apparently, broken music constructed with broken instruments but without Seth telling me this I’d be none the wiser. Imagine Ignacio as an expert marine biologist explaining his novel theories about the life of a coral reef over video taken during a scuba dive. I’m the guy at the back not really taking it in because I’m distracted by the strobing colours and alien patterns.
So, with that in mind, here’s an attempt at a description. A breathy, muted sound palette suggests the struggles of a pupa within its chrysalis – fluid life reforming into something new. This is underscored with a near constant percussive urgency that occasionally topples over into a Dada, clattering slapstick – like hieroglyphs sprung to life and leaping from the tomb walls in order to hit each other over the head with grave goods. Highly compelling stuff which rewards close attention.
The packaging for these four releases is as diverting as the contents. Before getting to the CD-r the listener needs to remove a bulldog clip, put the embossed card outer sleeve to one side, unfold a paper inner sleeve and note the details handily contained on a separate insert. Following their appearance on a blog hosted by The Wire magazine (pics above stolen from that source – I don’t like the publication but credit where it’s due: nice work) Seth offered the following explanation on the Bang the Bore Forum:
The idea is that the listener has to reassemble each release every time it’s played. There are lots of possible configurations, each outer cover is a square tile that can be positioned in any direction, or reversed. Each is embossed with a found object rather than embossing plate.
Which brings me neatly to the final point I’d like to make. Seth also said this:
You can figure most of the ideas behind the packaging out for yourselves, but Ignacio’s might take a little explaining. Iggy’s Anatomy of the Self Volume II is about breakdown – of instruments, of working methods, of relationships, of family, of organisations, of society. He wanted an image of a broken machine, and I initially got hold of some cogs to emboss, but it felt far too mechanistic for the sound of the record. So I got the chance to collect up some 3d printer misprints… the hexagonal hive-style pattern is the exposed inner structure, made that way to save plastic. As it went through the embossing press the piece started deteriorating in fibrous strands or splintering altogether, and some of the relief was so deep that it ruptured the greyboard. So in essence, you’re looking at the product of one broken machine creating another broken machine, a product that’s breaking as it’s repeatedly run through another machine two hundred times, a process that’s also rupturing the medium itself.
…and Andy Crow said this:
‘Excommunicado’ is a collaborative project from Caught In The Wake Forever and Crow Versus Crow that brings together work in the respective medium of both artists revolving around each artist’s interpretation of a single conceptual theme. The works within were produced as a continuous dialogue over a number of months, with various stages of development and articulation being sent back and forth between the artists, until both felt that their contribution was complete.
…making explicit, as if it were needed, that there is another level on which all these objects need unpacking. At the risk of sounding pretentious, the packaging also involves a metaphysical or conceptual element which acts as a further framing device for the content. This can be more or less obvious or implicit, more or less important to the listener or viewer’s experience but it is there and it is there because these artists wanted it there.
I am, as ever, in awe of the graft, the seriousness of intent, the lightness of touch, the quality of finish, the expert use of meagre resources, the intellectual rigour and the coherent and fascinating aesthetics that our scene is capable of exhibiting. You’d think I’d have lost the ability to be amazed, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it.
(contact him via the email address in the article above)
the 2013 zellaby awards
January 4, 2014 at 8:52 pm | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | 4 CommentsTags: aqua dentata, ashtray navigations, beartown, billy sprague, bjerga/iversen, black sun roof, blue yodel, ceramic hobs, culver, daniel thomas, drone, duff/nyoukis/robertson/shaw, electronica, foldhead, galena, gary simmons, hairdryer excommunication, half an abortion, helicopter quartet, hiroshima yeah!, hissing frames, id m theft able, idwal fisher, improv, joe murray, kevin sanders, kirkstall dark matter, knurr & spell, la mancha del pecado, lee stokoe, lost wax, lovely honkey, lucy johnson, mark ritchie, mark wharton, mastery, matching head, melanie o'dubhslaine, memoirs of an aesthete, miguel perez, moral holiday, new music, no audience underground, noise, ocelocelot, paul walsh, people-eaters, phil todd, plurals, poor mouth, psychedelia, robert ridley-shackleton, sanity muffin, scott mckeating, seth cooke, shareholder, sheepscar light industrial, shemboid, shoganai, skullflower, smut, somália, spoils & relics, starlite coffins, tapes, the piss superstition, thomas james hayler, union pole, vocal improvisation, winebox press, witchblood, xazzaz, yol, zellaby awards
Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers all, welcome to the hotly anticipated Zellaby Awards for 2013. The show, in its third annual outing, is presented in association with Radio Free Midwich and hosted by the editor from his comfortably-appointed padded cell in the basement of Midwich Mansions.
In previous years the awards have formed part one of a two part round-up of cultural highlights. However this year I can easily roll what would usually be part two into this preamble. Why? Three words: Thomas James Hayler. The birth of our son in March was an epoch-defining, paradigm-shattering, life-forever-altering event for all of us – I’m sure you’ll remember the moon turning a fire red that evening – but looking after the kid (y’know: issuing orders to the nannies, sorting through the mountains of flowers, cards and teddy-bears left at the gate of the estate, that kind of thing) has rather cut into the time and energy afforded to culture in general.
It was interesting to experience how looking after a baby pares life down to the essentials. I now do my bit to help with Thomas, I look after my wife Anne as best I can too, I keep up with my friends and family (more or less), I go to work (when healthy) and I think about music. That’s all I have but, crucially, it is all I want. Sure, we could do with more money and better health – who couldn’t? – but establishing this balance has been refreshing and revelatory. I can sincerely state, all joking and archness to one side, that Thomas joining us has made 2013 the best year of my life so far. By some distance.
<stares wistfully into middle distance, wipes tear from stubbled cheek, returns to business at hand>
I did get to read a handful of books, of which HHhH by Laurent Binet, about a 1942 mission to assassinate Richard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, was the most compelling, original and intriguing. I even stole a line from it to use in a review. I think I read the entire of Museum Without Walls, a collection of essays and television scripts by polemicist, architecture critic and commentator Jonathan Meades. I say ‘I think’ because it was mainly done in sleepy five page chunks in the middle of the night. Otherwise I kept my membership of the bourgeoisie fresh by reading the London Review of Books and took my news mainly from Private Eye which, despite its many faults, holds power to account at least some of the time thus making it unique in the mainstream. I pretty much gave up on film and television aside from using the boy as an excuse to watch Regular Show and Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. Oh, and Game of Thrones series 3 was fun too if you like that sort of thing.
Down here in the no-audience underground I devoured, as ever, anything posted by Uncle Mark over at the essential Idwal Fisher blog and cover-to-covered the no-less essential Hiroshima Yeah! the moment it arrived in the mail. Congratulations to the latter on reaching its 100th issue this year, no mean feat with one of its two editors in prison… Also in the realm of the self-published, a pamphlet of poetry by my good friend and comrade Nick Allen has been on my bedside table since he surprised me with it at work one morning and has been well-thumbed and repeatedly enjoyed.
It has been another golden year for music, both live and recorded. A couple of my all-time favourite gigs occurred in the last 12 months and my ‘long list’ for best album contained 34 contenders! Never mind those bullshit ‘end of year’ polls you see in print magazines that you know were proofread over ice-creams in August, never mind those ‘best albums of the last fifteen minutes’ you see on internet based blogzine snore-fests. This is the real deal: compiled whilst the New Year is still bellowing after being slapped into life. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – we need to trot through a few methodological points, then the ceremony can commence.
Firstly, the music mentioned below may not have been released in 2013, although most of it was. To qualify it had to be heard by RFM for the first time in the calendar year 2013. Secondly, releases featuring the staff of RFM (me, Scott McKeating, Joe Murray) are excluded. Modesty is not a virtue I can be accused of but awarding ourselves prizes is a bit much even for me. Thirdly there are the same five award categories as last time (although one has had to be renamed…). Should an artist win big in one of them they may appear overlooked in others. This is deliberately done in the interests of plugging as much excellence as possible and thus no-one should get the hump. Finally, I did invite the aforementioned Scott and Joe to contribute nominations but the final decisions are mine. Think of me as a benign dictator listening carefully to his advisers before passing judgement.
OK, shush now – the house lights are dimming… Time for the first category!
—ooOoo—
5. The “I’d never heard of you 10 minutes ago but now desperately need your whole back catalogue” New-to-RFM Award goes to…
(with honourable mentions for Joe’s choice: WANDA GROUP, “the absolute master of steamy hiss and non-linear edit”)
Here’s a extract from the lengthy overview of Lucy’s back catalogue that I posted back in July:
One of the refreshing things about what I playfully refer to as the ‘no-audience underground’ is that it is not full of self-aggrandising blabbermouths. There are a few – me, for example – and an acceptable level of self-absorption is common, but many artists quietly get on with producing excellent work mainly, it seems, for their own gratification and the pleasure of their circle.
This situation allows for the gradual discovery of that most mysterious of creatures: the unsung hero. Names are pencilled in – an aside from the omniscient Scott McKeating, a credit on a Matching Head insert, say – then repeated until they become underlined in bold and further investigation becomes inevitable. Such has been the case with Lucy Johnson.
I had, of course, already praised Space Victim, her duo with Mike Vest, to the hilt (they featured in RFM’s best of 2012 list) and more recently did the same for the Witchblood tape, her duo with Lee Stokoe, on Matching Head. A comment from Miguel Perez led to me picking up her tapes as Smut and hearing those led to me finally paying some proper attention. Over the last few weeks I have been putting two and two together via Discogs, the Turgid Animal site and various other rune-casting activities and have been gathering up examples of her work. She records solo as Smut and Esk, is half of the aforementioned duos, is the vocalist for black metal band Rife, and is also in the bands Obey and Dark Bargain (as reviewed by Scott below). Her artwork adorns covers and T-shirts and has recently been made available to buy as prints. Most of this stuff is available from the label and distributor Turgid Animal which (according to that same review by Scott) she co-runs. Blimey, eh?
Can’t wait to hear what comes next. There is at least one more Smut tape to pick up and the Obey album to look forward to as well…
Next is…
4. The “Stokoe Cup”, given for maintaining quality control over a huge body of work making it impossible to pick individual releases in an end of year round up goes to…
(with honourable mentions for Kevin Sanders whose consistency proves awe-inspiring, Bjerga/Iversen’s album-per-month Bandcamp project, Joe’s choice Hapsburg Braganza and, of course, Lee Stokoe, who was also Scott’s choice)
Given that I went from not knowing who he is to hearing/seeing around 50 objects produced by him during the course of a few months Robbie was odds-on favourite in this category. That said, I realise that it is a controversial choice as ‘quality control’ may not be an entirely appropriate concept to apply to this gushing, unstoppable flow. I suppose one man’s drivel fountain is another man’s exuberant exploration of an outsider vision. As I wrote in my first overview piece about his stuff:
Call it an ‘aesthetic’, a ‘vision’ if you like, but it becomes clear during the perusal of these artefacts that this is Robert’s world – a dimensionless jiffy bag containing a wonky, distorted universe – and that the rest of us are tourists within it.
For what it is worth, The Butterfly Farm, the tape pictured above released by Beartown Records, is as good a place to start as any.
On to…
3. The Special Contribution to Radio Free Midwich Award goes to…
Joe Murray and Scott McKeating
(with honourable mentions for Dan Thomas and Miguel Perez who both understand what friendship is really about. Cheers fellas.)
Obviously. In May Scott offered to help out, I bit his hand off. This gave me the idea of asking Joe, who bit my hand off. Once these appendages had been sewn back on we shook them vigorously and got down to the typing. I like to think that the house style at RFM sits somewhere between the jazzed exuberance of Joe and the more meticulous, journalistic work of Scott. Thus between us we offer a comprehensive ‘three bears’ account of this remarkable scene. Being able to lean on these guys has kept the porridge at a perfect temperature during some pretty distracted times, especially baby- and illness-related, and I am beyond grateful for their contributions.
Now we have…
2. The Label of the Year Award which goes to…
(with honourable mentions for, well, see below…)
This was a very, very hotly disputed category. I was tempted to be perverse and, in the style of Time magazine’s mirror cover, proclaim label of the year to be ‘self-released’. Certainly, in this Bandcamp enabled age the idea has to be considered seriously. But that ain’t much fun is it? Let’s have an argument instead! Joe stepped up for Winebox Press:
Jon Collin’s labour of love has presented some amazing music this year (Vampire Blues, Lost Wax, and his own gorgeous schizzle) all nailed to hand-sanded wooden chunks. This extra detail might make things difficult to file but the soft hand-feel makes me return again and again to these loose spools of joy.
Scott proclaimed Matching Head, natch:
Same as every other year. Lee Stokoe keeps it prolific, adding new regulars to a strong cast of returning cassette-friendly noise/drone/wtf artists.
Both excellent choices, of course, but what of the Sheepscar Light Industrial, last year’s runner up, or Kirkstall Dark Matter – a blood feud between Leeds postcodes? Or is the glorious return of Sanity Muffin gong-worthy? Speaking of returns, was any more welcome or surprising than that of Union Pole which made a long-gone 76 item back catalogue available to download for the total of one dollar? Or what about Hissing Frames or hairdryer excommunication, the content-pumps of Robbie and Kev respectively?
The choice seemed impossible so I left the scribbled lists and did a couple of those things that you only see people do in the movies: splashed my face with water then stared into the bathroom mirror, took a cold can out of the fridge and held it against my cheek etc. Soon clarity was restored. For not putting a foot wrong, for never having even a single hair our of place, it had to be Memoirs of an Aesthete. Phil Todd’s label has released one belter after another this year and has probably clocked up more minutes playing time in Midwich Mansions than any rival. If it has Phil’s seal of approval on it then you should buy it. Simple really.
…and finally…
1. The Album of the Year Award
Risking accusations of hyperbole, I have claimed once or twice over the course of 2013 that we were living in a golden age. Revisiting the releases I heard during the year I feel absolutely vindicated. Add my long list to the short lists provided by Scott and Joe and you have a total of over 40 titles without even counting much not-really-released-as-such-but-still-magnificent work such as the soundcloud presence of, say, ap martlet. Scott mentioned…
Black Sun Roof – 4 Black Suns & A Sinister Rainbow (Handmade Birds) – Davies and Bower make noise ritual a rhythm thing.
Skullflower / Mastery – Split (Cold Spring) – Black metal soundtracks.
Joe added:
Duff/Nyoukis/Robertson/Shaw – Acetate Robots (Giant Tank) – Soft Scottish mumble, sweet as tablet.
Poor Mouth – S/T (Total Vermin) – Stream of consciousness wonk-out in proud Estuary English.
Lost Wax – My Sore Daad Heap’d (Winebox Press) – Environmental sounds lashed into a bivouac as the sun rises.
ID M Theft Able – Babb’s Bridge (Veglia, King Fondue, Zeikzak, Taped Sounds) – Like Manson’s internal monologue as knives get knotty.
Blue Yodel & Lovely Honkey – Poppies & Cocks (Chocolate Monk) – Mooooggg, hummm…voosh. Boo-fffff.
Both lists pleasantly indicative of the interests of my comrades, I think. Take note. Right then, as I did last year I have whittled my choices down to twenty with the first half presented in no particular order, linked to the original RFM reviews. Here we go:
- Witchblood – Eponine
- La Mancha Del Pecado & Culver – collaboration 6
- Spoils & Relics – Angels Trumpet Over Moonbeams
- Plurals – Gland Extraction
- The Ceramic Hobs – Spirit World Circle Jerk
- Aqua Dentata – Ten Thousand Wooden Faces
- Half an Abortion – Small Scale Demystification Quandary
- starlite coffins – medicine eagle
- Galena – Buried Finch
- people-eaters – imprecate
Every one a winner. Click on the above for further thoughts and for contact/purchasing info. Now on with the top ten, in reverse order…
10. Xazzaz – Untitled (Molotov 20)
This was reviewed twice on RFM this year. Firstly Joe said:
…a melodic pitch-shifting that recalls those tremolo-heavy vibes from MBV…except this time the jazz electricity comes via belt sanders, floor polishers and hammer-action drills rather than sappy guitars. The crashing continues, churning up plankton and hurling it on the zinc-coated rocks until, at around the 11 minute mark a large rusty anchor is thrown overboard and is dragged nosily (sic – it was more fun to keep the typo than correct it – RH) across a rocky sea bed. Grrrgrgggrgggrgghhhhhh! After a while your ear hairs can bristle no more and I had to settle back to accept this Black Metal take on Frippertronics as an astringent lullaby…
…then I pitched in with:
Mike’s music causes my edges to crumble, then crevaces to open, then huge thoughtbergs to calve from my mental glaciers. He isn’t averse to roar, of course, and can stamp on pedals if need be, but it is the subtleties and nuance that make it so compelling. He listens patiently, he understands what is going on. He knows what to do.
Check out the Molotov catalogue now distributed by Turgid Animal.
9. Shareholder – The Backwards Glance volumes 1, 2 and 3
Joe turned me on to this one. He wrote:
The Backwards Glance is ten god-damn years of recordings all wrapped up in beguiling drawings, elastic bands and creepy collage work. Sandy has taken the Faust approach and jams are cut-up hard against each other so you lurch between approaches, styles, themes and moods … My advice is to block out a few hours in your schedule, settle yourself in your preferred listening area and drink this special brew in deep. As in the dog-eat-dog world of high finance the Shareholder is always looking for a unique selling point. This USP for these clever little tapes is their god-damn addictiveness!
Joe also beat me to this one too and came up with the best simile of the year, damn him:
Culver is a master of the dark art of static movement. In the same way smoke will fill a room to the corners, too thick to see thorough but fragile enough to part with the wave of a hand, Culver plays that hard/soft, full/empty, maximal/minimal dichotomy like Erich Von Daniken’s ancient astronauts. Always working on the edge of being there and not being there this piece, this relatively brief drone called ‘seven human hairs’ is like watching ink boil … Somália is some mysterious Portuguese music maker who, on ‘das cordas’ takes a melancholic Satie riff (Gnossienne No. 1 I think) and loops it over and over again with a grimy patina of tape murk. That’s it. No speeding up or slowing down. No descent into beats or basslines. Just a gradual fade into the muck collected round the capstans. Super simple and super effective. It works at times (and I have to point out here I have played this tape a lot!) like dark canvas, swallowing the light but freeing up the subconscious. This is dreaming music.
The spec is simple enough, a single track of about fifteen minutes in length, but its ingredients are tricky to separate out. I suspect the noise that sounds like a swarm of angry wasps flying into a juddering extractor fan may be a vibrating implement set upon a drum skin. The buzz is malevolent – like tapping the glass of a giant tank full of insects only to have them all turn in unison, give you a hard stare and then start working together to get the tank’s lid off… Some abrasive electronics are then set loose in order to scour and gouge the source noise whilst a bucket of low end catches the swarf. The concluding crescendo is visceral, tough and as sparkling as your peripheral vision after a sharp smack to the back of the head. Yeah: awesome.
Joe is a true believer:
I think it was the mighty Stan Lee/Jack Kirby axis that came up with the Incredible Hulk to explore the untamed, brutish side to mankind. The trick Yol has turned is to take this Yahoo Hulk and transplant it into the damp and bland world of Northern Britain – 2013. This is no Marvel Universe magic realism but the dark perverted land of a bent cop, conflicted priest or overworked teacher. It’s a post-Saville world where celebrity corrupts and no one can really trust each other. Yol gives a voice to the bitter and bleak, the misplaced righteousness and revenge that most of us keep buttoned up tight. The inner struggle is played out in vivid crimson, choked out, spat into the gutter and stamped on with spite.
The fella behind this project, remaining semi-anonymous for his own reasons, has produced a piece of work so ambitious and accomplished that the fact that it is available to download on a pay-what-you-like basis from that Bandcamp left me stupefied … Some details: your download will contain nine tracks spanning 41 minutes. These episodes are clearly the product of a single aesthetic but vary in construction. There is computerborne surrealism, the programme code distorted by a horseshoe magnet ordered from the Acme catalogue, there is deep-fried tropical psychedelia the like of which wouldn’t be out of place on a Space Victim or AshNav album, and there is the cooing and squawking of an alien menagerie, recorded rooting and strutting about the forest floor on a distant, poisonous world.
4. Helicopter Quartet – Where have all the aliens gone?
Their sound (‘drone rock’? ‘dark ambient’? I don’t know) is dense and rich, each element absorbing in its own right, all contributing to a mysterious but coherent whole. It is like finding an ornately inlaid wooden casket containing a collection of exquisitely handcrafted objects: what might be a bear, carved from obsidian, a female form cast in an unplaceable grey/green metal, an abstract pattern, possibly even unreadable script, scrimshawed onto yellowing bone. All irresistibly tactile, all fascinating, all revealing aspects of the character of the unknown and long dead collector who gathered them together.
It is cliché to describe simplicity as ‘deceptive’ and efficiency as ‘ruthless’ but both phrases are perfectly apt in this case. There is no waste, no let up, the emotional demands of this music are unmistakeable. Despite the jokes about torturing aliens on its Bandcamp page, this is a deeply serious music but it is epic on a human scale.
Four tracks, each about twenty minutes long, by four different solo artists. First is veteran Leeds scenester Shem Sharples, recording as his robotic alter ego Shemboid, who kicks things off with ‘myths of the prehistoric future’ – a Ballardian pun well suited to this blistering, splintering track. Shem is an aficionado of the garage psych sound and his skyscraping fuzz/wah guitar illuminates the rubble like harsh Californian sunshine.
Next is ‘bontempi bastet’ by Ocelocelot, Mel O’Dubhslaine’s noise/drone endeavour. The track is remarkable: an ectoplasmic gumbo, a thick electronic soup spiced and seasoned to make the corners of your eyes twitch. Or is it an evocation of heaven? Mel is a serious artist quietly and brilliantly re-purposing music to serve her own mysterious ends. She does this with good humour and modesty and I think she might be my hero.
Third is ‘no forks’ by Moral Holiday, Phil Todd’s affectionate homage to first wave industrial music. The backing is brittle, unforgiving, stark. Phil has taken the bucolic feel of the most utopian electronic Krautrock, frogmarched it to a grimly urban setting and then recorded it amongst the glass and concrete, mutating to fit its new surroundings.
Finally, we have ‘taser delerium’ (sic) from Paul Walsh’s foldhead. Perhaps you could imagine spiking the punch at a convention of shortwave radio enthusiasts then getting the fried participants to improvise a jam using nothing but the guttering warbles of atmospheric interference. Life affirming stuff – joyful noise wall. Like an intruder appearing at the foot of your bed, paralysing you with a swift injection to the sole of your foot, then draping his cock across your forehead as you lie prone and immobile, it is a perversely calming experience.
In summary: this album is damn near perfect.
2. Ashtray Navigations – Cloud Come Cadaver
Previous winners come oh-so-close once more. I wrote a lengthy psychedelic ramble accounting for each track in turn which you can read by clicking on the title above. For now I need only quote the final remarks:
It’s like a ‘Comfortably Numb’ for the psych/noise underground but defiant, without a trace of self pity. It could accompany the ‘ages of man’ sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Did I mention that Ashtray Navigations are my favourite band? This is why.
Absolutely magnificent.
…and finally, the RFM Zellaby Award for Album of the Year 2013 goes to…
1. The Piss Superstition – Vocal Learning
Back in May I had a moment of prophetic clarity:
The music suggests systems gone wrong, like some guy pushed in a punch card upside down and then went to lunch leaving everything running. Yet heavy, juddering electrics describe arcane symbols as they spiral through the iterations of this garbled instruction set. Something truly wierd is being revealed. The serrated buzzing suggests saw mill equipment escaping its moorings and consuming itself as one bladed machine vibrates into the path of another. But again, there is nothing random about this movement. All is being conducted by an unfamiliar intelligence for some unknowable purpose. In the end though, all metaphors, similes, superlatives and whimsy just slide off this band or, at best, get caught in the gears and mashed – such is the beauty, mystery and power of their output. They do not sound like anyone else and yet, somehow, it turns out that this sound is exactly what I wanted to hear. Its value can only be calculated by fumbling with an alien currency, glinting strangely in my palm.
Thus: Vocal Learning is the best album of the year so far. Why? Because it is – I said so.
…and there we have it. The End. Well, not quite. There is a prize should the winners wish to claim it: a release on the fabled fencing flatworm recordings. Yes, in a tradition stretching all the way back to one year ago I decided to reanimate my legendary label to issue one release a year which could only be by the winner of the Best Album Zellaby Award. So, JB & Paul, how about it? Drop me a line if the idea tickles you both and we’ll talk turkey.
RFM’s ongoing account of the no-audience underground’s creative endeavour will continue shortly. We wish you all a very happy New Year!
eat local part one: rfm gorges on new produce from sheepscar light industrial
September 16, 2013 at 11:07 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: andie brown, daniel thomas, dave thomas, drone, hagman, leeds, new music, no audience underground, noise, seth cooke, sheepscar light industrial, these feathers have plumes
Hagman – TKT and TMS (3” CD-r, Sheepscar Light Industrial, SLI.019, edition of 50 and download)
Seth Cooke – Run For Cover (3” CD-r, Sheepscar Light Industrial, SLI.020, edition of 50 and download)
These Feathers Have Plumes – Untitled (3” CD-r, Sheepscar Light Industrial, SLI.021, edition of 50 and download)
The 22nd anniversary of my move to Leeds is fast approaching. Numbers such as these mean less and less as I get older – my nipple piercings reached the age of majority in 2011, for example – but occasionally the change in the seasons, the ripening of the blackberries or the pressing of releases like the above into my sweaty palm make me look with renewed appreciation at my adopted home city.
I don’t need to sing its praises at length – it ain’t that type of place. Leeds supports a dedicated, self-sufficient noise scene brimming with talent, good-humoured respect and a thoroughly punk-rock suspicion of hype. Unlike our hipper big brother over on the wrong side of the Pennines the Leeds scene does not need the approbation of the wider world (though it is nice when we get it occasionally). No-one has any money; the only motivation is satisfaction in the work. Knuckle down – put the hours in – keep the quality control tight – have fun.
Leeds based microlabel Sheepscar Light Industrial is run very much in this spirit. In fact, despite its roster being drawn from all over the place, it could be said to represent this spirit distilled to its essence, as it were. Whilst I can’t agree with Uncle Mark over at Idwal Fisher that SLI has never dropped a stinker, I have nothing but respect for the refined and definite taste of label boss Daniel Thomas. His ears are golden. So what of the latest trio of releases?
First up is Untitled by These Feather Have Plumes. These two tracks by Andie Brown (of that London), totalling about 16 minutes, have already garnered plenty of super-superlatives from my peers who write about these things. Allow me to add my own: this work is clearly informed by a profound respect for and connection to the human condition. Andie uses an organically sourced sound palette – bells, gongs, singing glass, (possibly) field recordings (I hear the sea at one point, I may be imaging it) – discretely looped and treated. The whole created manages to be both earthy and ethereal at once. She has harnessed the kami of these objects to draw forth a music with the homespun grace and human-scale emotional pull of a roadside hokura. Amazingly though, I’m afraid this release only wins the bronze medal today.
In second place is TKT and TMS by Hagman, the duo of Dave Thomas (ap martlet) and Daniel Thomas (no relation). When Dan handed this over he proudly claimed it to be the best Hagman recording yet. I humoured him much as I might a toddler displaying a crayon scribble and added it to the playlist that accompanies my daily chores. During the first couple of listens I didn’t grok this at all – 20 minutes of industro-drone, change of scene halfway through, some nice crescendo management – but choosing it as a lullaby one night and listening to it closely in a state of otherwise sensory deprivation revealed what a dolt I’d been. There is a lot going on. Their daisy chain of pedals, synths and homemade tuppertronics emits a satisfyingly grainy low end throb. Into this field recordings are sunk and suspended. These augmentations give the vibe a sense of location, albeit intriguingly unanchored and vaporous. This factor – place – really lifts work of this kind to the next level (see, for example, the cartographic back catalogues of Petals and Culver) and with this recording Hagman join the ranks of those explorers who have figured out that ‘X’ marks the spot.
Finally then, we have Run For Cover by Seth Cooke (lately of that Bristol) which ‘bolts’ (Ha! ‘Bolt’! Like that guy who is good at running!) past the competition so comprehensively that he is already being photographed cheekily biting his gold medal whilst the rest of us are taking off our tracksuits. I have, like, totally, a crush on Seth. Not only is he the owner of the most strokable beard in improv (a hotly fought category, as you can imagine) but he is a family man, musician and improviser of rare talent, writer, thinker and co-curator of essential web-resource Bang the Bore. I know: swoon, right?
An example: Seth realises that the BtB forum has been a bit quiet recently and wants to chivvy up a little activity. However, instead of kicking off a bunch of obviously crowd-pleasing threads he starts this – a fascinating account of his upbringing in the charismatic Christian community, neuro-linguistic programming, the missing person report process that forms part of his employment, the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion and how he may try and link it all that together in a piece of creative endeavour. I’d have just been rude about The Wire magazine or something. He thinks differently.
The real cool thing though is that, unlike most theorists, his music rocks too. Whilst it is wrong to call Run For Cover unprecedented (I know a bit about Seth’s influences and working methods) it is certainly, and gloriously, refreshing. The spec is simple enough, a single track of about fifteen minutes in length, but its ingredients are tricky to separate out. I suspect the noise that sounds like a swarm of angry wasps flying into a juddering extractor fan may be a vibrating implement set upon a drum skin. The buzz is malevolent – like tapping the glass of a giant tank full of insects only to have them all turn in unison, give you a hard stare and then start working together to get the tank’s lid off… Some abrasive electronics are then set loose in order to scour and gouge the source noise whilst a bucket of low end catches the swarf. The concluding crescendo is visceral, tough and as sparkling as your peripheral vision after a sharp smack to the back of the head. Yeah: awesome.
alien menagerie: rfm catches up with oracle, kevin sanders, north east noise and shoganai
August 29, 2013 at 12:47 pm | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: charles dexter ward, crown of bone, culver, dirty demos, drone, erosm, george proctor, hairdryer excommunication, hogwash, improv, kevin sanders, la mancha del pecado, lee stokoe, matching head, miguel perez, mike simpson, mutant ape, new music, newcastle, no audience underground, noise, north east noise, oracle netlabel, pablo mejia, petals, seth cooke, shoganai, sindre bjerga, suburban howl, tapes, the truth about frank, turgid animal, xazzaz
ErosM – Demo II (download, Oracle Netlabel, ORE97)
La Mancha Del Pecado – Masiva Pared Dedicada Al Placer (download, Oracle Netlabel, ORE99)
Crown of Bone – Children of the Corn, a Tribute (download, Oracle Netlabel, ORE100)
Seth Cooke / Kevin Sanders – split (CD-r, hairdryer excommunication, edition of 25, or download)
Kevin Sanders – heard more saying less more nothing enraptured in their mud of nothingness (or “no matter”) (hairdryer excommunication, download)
Petals – Salivate Stone (tape, Dirty Demos, edition of 30)
Suburban Howl/Mutant Ape – split (tape, Turgid Animal)
Sindre Bjerga – foreign tongues (tape, Matching Head, mh195)
Culver/Xazzaz – split (tape, Matching Head, mh196)
The Truth About Frank – Live 10/04/13 Hogwash 6 Fox and Newt Leeds (self-released download)
Charles Dexter Ward – CDW 310513 (self-released download)
Charles Dexter Ward – CDW 121012 (self-released download)
Shoganai – ショウガナイ (self–released download)
Eagle-eyed readers will have noted that since joining the organisation in May RFM’s new staffers Scott McKeating and Joe Murray have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting. As they frolic – sweating, bare chested, rearranging the rockery in the grounds of Midwich Mansions – I close the window to avoid breathing in their heady, powerfully erotic musk. There, behind closed curtains in the cool darkness, I mumble into the whisper-ma-phone that links my property to Idwal Towers and discuss possible sightings of an absent muse with Uncle Mark.
She was here until recently: the Summer season has seen (*ahem*) ‘major’ articles by me about Lucy Johnson, Robert Ridley-Shackleton and the purported golden age of internet-enabled uber-punk amongst other things, a dozen (re)releases plastered up on the midwich Bandcamp site and the publication of the first two issues of North Leeds most popular noise/art microzine The Barrel Nut with much more to come. Not bad, eh?
And yet… in the face of a review pile of over thirty items, some received more than two months ago, I feel guilt-stricken. It’s an oddly masochistic response as I have every reason to take things at my own pace. This is ‘only’ a ‘hobby’ after all and I have, to put it mildly, a lot on. However, it still pains me to see quality pile up whilst I don’t have the energy to attend to it. Leaving aside my own musical fumblings, writing is how I pay my way but, despite being thrilled by a lot of what I am hearing, my organs of musical appreciation are currently worn to sorry nubs, my powers of whimsical metaphor generation flummoxed.
So what to do? It don’t seem right to sleep on so much good stuff so I’m going to embark on a desk/head clearing news round-up and see what happens. I apologise to those kind enough to submit their work recently – you may not be getting the 1000 word flight of fancy you were perhaps hoping for – but I call on the discerning readership of this flagship blog to do their duty and check this gubbins out.
First then: RFM offers heartfelt congratulations to our Mexican cousin Miguel Perez and his comrade-in-arms Pablo Mejia on the occasion of the hundredth release from their netlabel Oracle. A remarkable achievement, an admirable dedication. Number 100 itself is Children of the Corn, A Tribute by Crown of Bone. From the off this is ruthlessly pummelling – watch where you have the volume set prior to pressing play – and until a change of direction in its final minutes (during which the soundtrack of the film that inspired it is sampled, I’m guessing) is like screaming into a hurricane. You already know if you like this kind of thing – check it out if you do, it’s a great example.
Other noteworthy recent releases include Masiva Pared Dedicada Al Placer by Miguel’s own La Mancha Del Pecado. This is a feature length (96 minutes!) rumbling drone which sits static in a culveresque way, like some machinery of war idling as a mechanic fine tunes the engine, before exploding with speaker-challenging bass in an all too short final section. I was so amused by this that I imported the file into Audacity and, as expected, the wave form looks like something that you’d use to unblock a sink, or bash someone over the head with. At the other end of the spectrum we have a four track, 21 minute EP titled simply Demo II by ErosM. This music is sombre and delicate, weighty and expressive. It shows discipline, ambition and a seriousness of intent that makes its short running time all the more remarkable. Those of you into Geordie drone/noise should be tempted across the Atlantic to pick this one up.
Closer to home, we find a split release on hairdryer excommunication featuring field-recording-based tracks by label boss Kevin Sanders and bearded polymath Seth Cooke. I’m saying nowt about Seth’s effort here because (spoiler alert) I’m going to proclaim his genius (again) in a soon come review of his latest for Sheepscar Light Industrial. Kev’s ‘side’, a piece of augmented atmospherics titled ‘Eight aisles (for Truro Court)’, brought on an irresistible attack of vanity on my part as I thought I could hear the influence of my very own ‘eaves’ in its construction. It’s a largely domestic recording buzzed up with accompanying fuzzy drift. I put on a Christmas cracker paper crown saved for such occasions, proclaimed myself King of Drone and strutted up and down the hallway. Then I listened to his latest work, heard more saying less more nothing enraptured in their mud of nothingness (or “no matter”), four tracks of entirely lovely, glittering brilliance constructed from nothing but a ukulele and a fuzz pedal. I was, all joking and whimsy aside, moved. Once I’d finished gawping I tore up my pathetic headgear in a fit of jealous rage.
Also well worth getting hold of is Salivate Stone by Petals, Kev’s usual nom de plume. This tape has been released in a perilously limited edition by Dirty Demos and comes lovingly cocooned in a bed of tissue paper within an oversized case. The content is spring-loaded, high tension, balanced, held by the slightest of catches. Spiralling screws lift a heavy vibe upwards whilst friction heats the barely greased moving parts until they throb and grind against one another. Birds tweet. Clearly, he is the King.
Whilst I’m on interestingly packaged noise tapes, I have to mention the Suburban Howl / Mutant Ape split on Turgid Animal. Here you will find two sides of unnerving catharsis housed on a neon orange cassette safety-pinned into a hessian bag painted in camo colours (shades of TG’s industrial 7″s) and accompanied with an exquisite mini-comic detailing a suicide by self-butchery. The object as a whole has a satisfyingly doom-struck, hopeless aura. Two new tapes on Lee Stokoe’s Matching Head label are dressed in his standard livery of black and white sleeves with the minimal information provided typewritten by hand. The Culver / Xazzaz split sees Lee’s giant robot square up to Mike’s lizard monster in a contest to decide who wins the North East. An honourable draw is the all-too-predictable outcome and both end up side by side, content to stamp on the false noise pretenders that dare challenge them. foreign tongues by Sindre Bjerga documents three involving live sets from his travels in 2012. Has he now got something released on every noise micro-label in the world? He can’t be far off.
Others are content to release their own live stuff. I know nothing about The Truth About Frank other than what can be gleaned from their Bandcamp site but suffice to say that a friend of Hogwash, that is the admirably eclectic and regular experimental music evening hosted by Dave, Noah and Benbow, is a friend of radiofreemidwich. My own single figures was recorded at one of their gigs. TTAF’s set is a three stage affair – a shuffling beat, looped, layered barely intelligible voices, orchestral stabs to finish – that I found engaging and entertaining. They don’t try and do too much in their twenty minutes, each idea is allowed time to breath. They also submitted a bonkers photoshop collage to The Barrel Nut #2 – guys, check your email! I’m waiting on a postal address so I can send you a few paper copies!
Also to be found on Bandcamp are two live sets by Charles Dexter Ward performed at the Cumberland Arms and Morden Tower respectively, both to be found in that Newcastle I keep going on about. These pieces are beautiful. There is fuzz tone shimmer with enough bite to chew your ego to mush. There are chopped and filtered loops heavy enough to anchor the vibe yet sinuous enough to let the groove flow and build. They do the thing that a successful live recording must do: make you wish you’d been there.
Finally, then, we have the album of the year. Well, maybe – it is certainly a contender. ショウガナイ by Shoganai was one of those out of the blue ‘hi, let me introduce myself, would you like to hear my album?’ surprises that makes this ‘job’ such a joy (the cover is the pic that heads this article). The fella behind this project, remaining semi-anonymous for his own reasons, has produced a piece of work so ambitious and accomplished that the fact that it is available to download on a pay-what-you-like basis from that Bandcamp left me stupefied. More evidence of the golden age, should it be needed.
Some details: your download will contain nine tracks spanning 41 minutes. These episodes are clearly the product of a single aesthetic but vary in construction. There is computerborne surrealism, the programme code distorted by a horseshoe magnet ordered from the Acme catalogue, there is deep-fried tropical psychedelia the like of which wouldn’t be out of place on a Space Victim or AshNav album, and there is the cooing and squawking of an alien menagerie, recorded rooting and strutting about the forest floor on a distant, poisonous world.
I’m imaging (the muse! she returns!) one of these creatures sitting patiently in a tree, humming and carving intricate patterns in the bark with an impossibly sharp talon. Earlier it was furious having found itself caught in a snare – the indignity! It freed itself immediately, of course, and is now waiting for the return of the witless hunter that set the trap. The unsuspecting fool is going to be disembowelled for his trouble. The creature trills to itself, musically…
…and on that happy note, I call ‘enough!’ Plenty of links within the body of the article – go hear for yourselves.
rfm attends to recent downloads: cthulhu detonator, deceiver, orange annihilator, seth cooke, petals
March 8, 2013 at 10:41 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: bells hill, bells hill digital, cthulhu detonator, deceiver, drone, field recording, hairdryer excommunication, impulsive habitat, kev sanders, mp3, new music, no audience underground, noise, orange annihilator, petals, seth cooke
Cthulhu Detonator – Infernal Machines (self-released)
Deceiver – I Will Always Be Dead Inside (Bells Hill Digital)
Orange Annihilator – Scrub (Bells Hill Digital)
Seth Cooke – Intercession (Impulsive Habitat, IHab065)
Kevin Saunders / Petals – various back catalogue items (Hairdryer Excommunication)
My lack of willpower regarding downloads has been extensively documented on this blog before and explains my general attitude of wariness towards this most tempting aspect of modern musical appreciation. Not all music stored on physical objects is good, of course, but to present it as such does indicate a faith in the work and acts as an initial filter to limit an otherwise unprocessable torrent. My preference is to sit with my back to the firmly secured floodgates and listen to them creak as I open my post.
However, what is a boy to do when approached by charming artists touting interesting sounding projects that are only available on that Bandcamp or via netlabels? Or if a known favourites make experiments or long forgotten back catalogue available via the same means? I would hardly be a conscientious editor if I just ignored these leads, now would I? In that spirit there now follows a series of ‘in brief’ accounts of some clickable goodness recently brought to my attention. *Sigh*, one thing no-one dares mention when warning you of a slippery slope is just how much fun it can be to slide down it…
First is Infernal Machines by Cthulhu Detonator. I know what you are thinking: “how dare this impertinent rascal imply that our master, Lord Cthulhu, is the sort of thing that can be detonated?!”, right? Well, I’ve sent this disrespectful heretic an oddly cut purple crystal in an anonymous package and if he looks into it he is fucked. That’ll teach him! Ai, Ai!
Anyway, blasphemy aside, this album is very entertaining. Perhaps, like a lot of debut albums, it is a little over full – RFM recommends keeping it to a tight 40ish minutes and saving the offcuts for an accompanying EP – but who am I to fault exuberance? This is from the computer-constructed/electronica end of noise: ten distinct tracks working through aspects of a coherently defined sound. There is a momentum, a squelching bounce, that is gleefully pummelling interspersed with quieter moments spent exploring cyclopean ruins with faulty batteries in your torch. Nicely balanced and engaging throughout. Ideal background music for an evening spent flicking through your dog-eared copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten.
Second are two cuts from the recently formed Bells Hill Digital. I Will Always Be Dead Inside by Deceiver is as grim as its title suggests. Part I is a three minute harsh noise blow-out, a planet wide, corrosive hailstorm pitting the black surface of an inhospitable world. Part II is an almighty eleven minute conflagration. About halfway through a mournful tone attempts to rise above the roar – like the one building miraculously left standing in an area otherwise devastated by carpet-bombing – but is soon vandalised, deliberately destroyed by the same spiteful fire. It is utterly without hope and, in my humble opinion, remarkable. Please investigate.
Scrub by Orange Annihilator is so irresistible that I listened to it ten times in a row the other day, non-stop, on my commute to work. No, my bus wasn’t stuck in a snow drift, nor have I been seconded to Aberdeen. The reason this feat was possible is that this five track album is in total three and a half minutes long!
It is electronic noise, best heard at ear-splitting volume for maximum nostril-flaring effect. Plenty happens but this is not a frantic gonzo cut up. Segments are allowed a toehold, are established fleetingly, then tumble into the void and are instantly replaced. Its efficiency and brevity are refreshingly classy.
I think this is a clever example of what imaginative types can do with the Bandcamp model. I’d argue that this really is an album – it is coherent, complete, self contained – but its length makes it very difficult to present physically. A 7” single maybe? Expensive to produce, difficult to distribute. A credit card CD-r? A fiddly format that has never really caught on. Neither of these formats suggest ‘real’ album anyway. However, on Bandcamp its format is just the same as for everybody else. Brilliant.
Next is Intercession by Seth Cooke released on intriguing netlabel Impulsive Habitat. This is one 21 minute track constructed with Seth’s customary attention to detail from sound sources found ‘singing in the wires’ at his place of work. It starts with a frantic chirruping and buzzing – an orchestra of locusts conducted by Steve Reich – before settling into a shifting pattern of hums, ticks, throbs and gentle feedback tones. It suggests the micro-climate of self-storage warehouses, server farms, aluminium tubing, ducts in the crawlspace. In the last five minutes birdsong and traffic can be heard alongside a scything overload in the cables, reminding us of the natural world replicated by the landscaping of the science park outside. I find this intensely absorbing. It has a kind of fractal geometry that pulls the listener into the recording. Despite being as cool as air conditioning and as alienating as fluorescent light I’m sure I can hear a very human yearning behind the machine buzz too. Exemplary.
Finally, I need to mention the archival project ongoing at the hairdryer excommunication Bandcamp page. Kev is making as much of the Kevin Sanders / Petals back catalogue as he can find freely available via this resource. I guarantee that any fruit you pick from this vine will be delicious. The more I hear of Kev’s work, the more I want to hear and there is no higher praise than that.
All this stuff is freely downloadable:
are after the rain the best band in britain?
February 13, 2013 at 8:40 am | Posted in musings, new music, no audience underground | 2 CommentsTags: after the rain, bang the bore, electroacoustic, hossein hadisi, ignacio agrimbau, improv, joe kelly, memoirs of an aesthete, michael finnissy, new music, no audience underground, persian classical music, phil todd, seth cooke, the hola
After the Rain – The Night Must Fall
(CD, joint release by ATfield, Memoirs of an Aesthete & Bang the Bore)
…Phil Todd certainly thinks so and I suspect Seth Cooke agrees with him too. Bold claims need striking evidence, eh? Well, before I present my own findings you will have to endure a lengthy preamble. Get that finger off the scroll button – I know the anticipation is killing but, as you can’t actually buy this yet, there is plenty of time for musing…
Sometimes it is embarrassing to think how little I know about music. It has been a driving force in my life for 30 years and I have been recording, performing and promoting music for over a decade (well, on and off). I can pontificate for hours about subjects within my area of ‘expertise’ – this blog tops 100,000 words in total – but if you were to say to me ‘yeah, and what key is that in?’ then all I could do would be to stare at you blankly and guess. The black keys? I dunno. Despite years of experience developing a finely honed aesthetic I still know almost nothing about the technicalities of how this art form works.
My knowledge of musical history and the traditions outside of my field are similarly patchy. Whilst I don’t agree with Noel Fielding’s Vince in The Mighty Boosh when he describes all music prior to Human League as ‘tuning up’ I certainly understand the joke and have a good, self-deprecating laugh at my own limitations. With regards to ‘world music’ – if it wasn’t sampled by Cabaret Voltaire or encountered during the breathless couple of months I spent as a teenager trawling the libraries of West Sussex for gamelan CDs and listening to Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares then it is lost on me.
I’m not proud of this, I’m just being honest about the situation as it has a bearing on the review to come. I readily admit that a grasp of historical context, of critical theory and a proficiency in the technical and formal aspects of composition and performance can add a layer of nuance, detail and sophistication to musical appreciation. Just as a grasp of allegory and technique are invaluable in deciphering masterworks of art history separated from our current cultural idiom by time and/or distance. Those prepared to learn are rewarded for their effort.
But is this always necessary? Can’t I just like what I like? Just get my groove on? There’s a story about how a collaboration between Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix came to naught because the latter didn’t read music and thus could do nothing with the compositions the former sent over. ‘Aww, man, tragedy!’ I thought when I first heard about it, then, later: ‘what a ridiculous waste.’ To nix a possibility as mouth-watering as this because Hendrix had no formal musical education is criminally dumb. What does it matter? Get in the studio and improvise – play jazz for fuck’s sake.
Away from music one of my other interests, as alluded to above, is art history. I have been lucky enough to stand in front of some of the most striking products of human creativity – say, for example, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, the most perfect man-made object I have ever encountered – and have found myself transported by an unmediated, awestruck reverie in which all ‘learning’ just falls away, irrelevant. Can you imagine Titian providing the now ubiquitous ‘artist statement’ by way of explanation? The idea is grotesque.
Thus with ground prepared – rock of theory on one side, hard place of intuition on the other – we come to The Night Must Fall by After the Rain. I want to convince you that it is wonderful but how to go about it? Well, first an infodump:
After The Rain was formed in 2009 in Southampton, UK, by instrumentalists/composers Hossein Hadisi (Iran), Ignacio Agrimbau (Argentina) and Joe Kelly (UK). They met at the University of Southampton, where they studied composition under Michael Finnissy. Originally emerging as the last mutation of The Hola, an eclectic ensemble founded by Agrimbau in 2005, After The Rain’s sound combines elements from electroacoustics, ‘free’ improvisation, and DIY aesthetics. More importantly, the group uses performance practices and creative methods derived from Persian classical music, which is at the centre of Hadisi and Agrimbau’s research projects.
This blurb accompanied the inclusion of the track ‘Distance III’ on one of those dreary compilation CDs that come with pointless snore-fest The Wire magazine – more on this track later. The description is as dry and cold as hotel toast but it will do to get the chronology and spellings correct. It also hints at the difficulties that lie ahead for an ignoramus such as me: “the group uses performance practices and creative methods derived from Persian classical music, which is at the centre of Hadisi and Agrimbau’s research projects.” Whoo boy – rumbled!
How much does this last point matter? Well, I don’t need to know (presumably) Farsi as the lyrics are helpfully translated into English in the booklet. Do I need to know anything about Persian Classical music or the band members’ research projects? Hmmm… it might help. I can get with the electroacoustic buzzing. That clatter-scratch is perfectly within my usual remit, but the ringing metal percussion, breathy, snorted flute (or flute-ish wind instrument) and guttural vocals – mellifluous or hacking in turn – are tricky. How much is rehearsed, how much improvised? I have no way of knowing. There is some exquisite violin playing on this but I find myself reaching for clichés such as ‘mournful’ to describe its beautiful, emotionally electrifying harmonics. I find myself humbled, discombobulated and wanting to learn.
But enuff of brains, what about guts? What does it feel like? Well, it feels great, thanks for asking. Whilst on the level of theory my ignorance is a hindrance, down here it is a positive boon. Never mind the subtle nuances and clever allusions of the musicologists, the alien nature of this racket is glorious and eye-opening. There is plenty of meditative content but nothing that can be slipped into like a warm bath, I’m kept on my guard, even when lulled. As well as the delight of being surprised I’m totally grooving on trying to figure this stuff out and then, when I can’t, just letting it carry me along. Like a wave washing me up on a shore full of unfathomable sea-worn objects and strangely knotted driftwood. Is it cheating to relish the rewards of not knowing what the fuck is going on? I hope not, because that is what I am doing.
So finally we come to the beginning. The first track on this album is called ‘Distance III’ and is an indescribable marvel that works perfectly on both the levels I have been talking about. It’s smart as a magic trick: a mysterious delight, a thrilling intellectual puzzle and it’s as visceral as a giant octopus attack. It isn’t representative of the album as a whole (which, in general, involves a lot more percussive racket) but that is OK because it isn’t representative of anything, or at least anything that I currently understand. Three minutes of genius. No wonder that the band picked it for the Wire magazine CD, no wonder Seth Cooke used it to kick off Missing Nothing – his gargantuan, 6 CD-r, fund raising compilation for Bang the Bore. On that website, which Seth co-curates, you can watch a video of the band performing this track live at a gig in Leeds that I was lucky enough to attend. They split the audience – which you know is a good sign.
Sadly, this album is not yet commonly available. Despite being completed last year it has been stuck in ‘development hell’ ever since. If you’d like to find out more, perhaps help provide the finance so sorely needed to get it distributed, then email via Bang the Bore – bangthebore@gmail.com – and the caretakers there will happily put you in touch with the band.
jackhammer meditation: seth cooke’s pneumatic logic
January 25, 2013 at 8:51 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a commentTags: lf records, new music, no audience underground, noise, pneumatic drills, seth cooke
Seth Cooke – Pneuma (CD-r, LF Records, LF028)
Ahh…Seth Cooke: polymath, renaissance man, musician of note, inventive collaborator, co-caretaker of Bang the Bore and owner of the most luxuriously strokable beard in improv (which is a hotly contested honour, as you can imagine). When he moved from Leeds to Bristol howls of anguish were heard around the noise community here. ‘How could we have let this one slip through our fingers?’ we moaned. An emergency committee was convened to make sure it never happened again. Manacles were mentioned. Clearly the issue needs more thought. Anyway: he escaped and Leeds’ loss has been Bristol’s gain. Not only has he networked his way onto every art-noise bill promoted in that fair city but the area’s microlabels are clamouring for his product. See, for example, the release pictured above on the flavour-of-the-month LF Records.
There is an entertaining back story to the genesis of Pneuma that can be read at LF or on Seth’s own new website (well worth clicking around). Suffice to say here that a major element of the composition is the sound of pneumatic drills at work. It is a noise that has a long pedigree in experimental music (especially industrial music, for obvious reasons). I remember my old mate Kev (still kickin’ it down in that Brighton as Mouthful of Worms) once telling me that he’d learnt two things about life. The first was:
I prefer the sound of a pneumatic drill to all music
…and the second was so unspeakably filthy that it cannot be repeated on a family blog. Moving swiftly on…
This source material is not hidden behind walls of processing, it couldn’t be clearer what we are being treated to (especially on the second track), however Seth has very cleverly realised what the key component of this sound is. A lesser musician may have amped the pummelling racket of the giant steel needle unstitching the tarmac, but not him. Instead he focuses our attention on the ringing of the loose metal parts of the machine caused by its juddering movement. This is foregrounded in the mix by augmenting it with crotales and complimentary feedback tones. The overall feel is therefore shifted from the brute physicality of hairy-arsed, horny-handed-sons-of-toil tearing up concrete with machine tools to a more spiritual realm where a monastery of Buddhist monks collaborate with a visiting gamelan orchestra by getting busy with hundreds of singing bowls. It is surprisingly refreshing and, as the two tracks total about three quarters of an hour, makes for excellent early morning walking to work music (as I think Kev Petals may have already observed elsewhere).
Speaking of walking to work: it may pain some of you to find out, especially after the paragraph praising tape in the Mantile review below, that almost all of the music I listen to is in mp3 format and heard via earbuds on my commute. They’re high bit rate mp3s and good-quality ear-buds, for what it is worth, but I can sense the purer purists out there sadly shaking their heads. BUT I know that Seth is a fan of close, high-end, transparent recording in the music he listens to for fun (as he has a telephone based job where all day is spent listening to ultra-compressed, lo-fi shouting) and so did him the courtesy of listening in WAV format too and on my actual stereo – y’know, sat down in a room like a civilised adult and all that – and it is crystal clear. His faultless attention to detail does him credit and serves the recording admirably.
This is a top-spec item, packaged in a lovely colour sleeve, and comes highly recommended by me. What more do you need?
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