hot, hot summer hitz: new from midwich on bandcamp

July 20, 2013 at 6:08 am | Posted in fencing flatworm, midwich, new music, no audience underground | 2 Comments
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three days in wooden block edition frontthree days in covermidwich - flint soul beach midwich - light industry

Ladies and gentlemen, may I call your attention to a further three releases cooling on the windowsill over at the midwich Bandcamp site.  There is much for the discerning dronester to get their teeth into.

First is three days in, four to go, originally released in 2003 on CD-r in an edition of 75 with a lovely screen printed cover by Carbon Records of Rochester, New York.  This is a rarity in that it has not been available digitally before and is one of my favourites of the first-wave midwich albums.  Forward looking, creamy.  ‘snows’ is an orchestra of hairclipper fuzz, the title track is a deeply penetrating 20 minute cardiothrob (at the time of writing a few of the original physical objects are also still available).

Next is a brand new live album, light industry, featuring recordings of my performances at the two Sheepscar Light Industrial summer shows, both of which took place at Wharf Chambers in Leeds.  The 2012 piece is a unique combo of the field recording from Eaves and the drone from ‘verdigris’.  The 2013 set is two tracks: a version of the title track from inertia crocodile and an as yet untitled track of heavy drone featuring a recording of Thomas the Baby gulping his milk as rhythm. The latter set was dedicated to Mark Wharton of Idwal Fisher in honour of his 50th birthday.  Links to more about these shows, and to a ten minute YouTube video immortalising part of the former, can be found over at Bandcamp.

Finally we have flint soul beach – a favourite from the back catalogue. This 18 minute track is full of hope that the broken can be mended and is perfect for the current heatwave. Originally released in 2003 by fencing flatworm recordings on a 3″ CD-r in an edition of 50 (ffr-e). For the cover picture the band name and title were chalked on the end of Littlehampton pier at low tide. It was washed away a few hours later…

I hope you enjoy what you hear.

midwich at Bandcamp

buy now! name your price! probably ‘zero’! midwich on bandcamp

July 6, 2013 at 8:50 pm | Posted in blog info, fencing flatworm, midwich, new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
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life underwater

Ladies and gentlemen, your faithful editor returns from his holiday week refreshed and bearing good news: RFM is proud to announce the launch of the midwich Bandcamp site.  The initial offering is of nine releases.  Featured among them are running repairs and ‘verdigris’, my contribution to the Victorian Electronics box, both originally released by Striate Cortex and both long sold out.  Also airing is the perpetually-coming-soon october in yorkshire, fished from the wreckage of the scuppered Zanntone label.  More will follow in due course.

As well as new releases, live recordings and rarities previously unavailable in a digital form, I will copy across some back catalogue items that can already be found in mp3 format on this blog’s discography page.  I think this is worth doing because via Bandcamp you’ll be able to get it in any format you like (the wavs sound well nice) and download whole albums at once.  Your convenience is my motivation.

Everything will be offered on a ‘pay what you like’ basis so visitors are able to use the ‘support’ and ‘collection’ functions within Bandcamp (whatever they are.  I’m told those functions get turned off I just select ‘free download’).  Don’t worry though as entering ‘£0’ is fine if you have ‘£0’ to spend.  I won’t be using this as a way of harvesting your email address either.  Donations are welcome, of course, and I pledge that 100% of any money raised will be spent within the no-audience underground either purchasing music by others or diffusing the cost of releasing physical editions of future releases, thus helping keep the flow of goodwill circulating.

Speaking of which, may I cash in a little goodwill in exchange for some quid pro quo?  If you are a reader and/or had your work featured on this blog could I ask that you return the favour by checking this site out and maybe nudge a friend or two in the same direction?  Those more connected than myself – I remain self-excluded from Twitter/Facebook – may wish to alert others via those means.

I would be very much obliged to you all.  I hope you enjoy what you hear.

The midwich Bandcamp site.

…and whilst I’m at it, various other midwich releases can be found elsewhere on Bandcamp.  Check out cut flowers, eaves and single figures too.

P.S.  This is the 300th post on RFM.  Woo!

kosmotroniks: new from michael clough and striate cortex

May 10, 2013 at 7:52 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 Comments
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Ürlich Uhrlich – Kosmotron II (2 x 3″ CD-r in handmade package, Striate Cortex, S.C.58, edition of 50)

Various Artists – SCFREE (CD-r, promotional compilation, Striate Cortex, S.C.FREE 1, edition of 50)

Uhrlich frontUhrlich insideUhrlich insertUhrlich inside insertSCFREESCFREE CD-r

Great to see Andy Robinson’s mighty Striate Cortex back in the conversation.  The multi-zellaby-award-winning label has been quiet of late due to Andy having to concentrate on those tangled processes that exist outside of music (I believe they are referred to collectively as ‘life’) but the wait for his return has been worth it.

Kosmotron II by Ürlich Uhrlich is a double 3″ CD-r (truly the format of champions) housed in an example of the exquisite handmade packaging that Striate Cortex is justly famous for.  The CD-rs are ‘on body’ printed and housed in windowed paper envelopes.  These are held against the cover with sashes, behind one is a pro-printed insert containing (very minimal) release details.  The cover is a gate-fold constructed from handmade card and held shut with its own painted sash.  A remarkable object.

Ürlich Uhrlich is one of several mysterious aliases adopted by Michael Clough.  This guy’s invaluable contribution to the underground scene in Leeds, prior to his treacherous decamping to that London,  has been documented elsewhere (see here, here and here, for example).  Nowadays he will be better known to readers of this blog for recordings under his own name and as one third of synth/psyche supergroup Truant (with Phil Todd and yours truly making up the trio).

However, he also has a long history of creating pastiches, homages and oddities and making them semi-available under assumed identities, often with meticulously plausible back stories for the ‘long lost’ artist now ‘rediscovered’.  Nowt has been said (to me at least) about Ürlich Uhrlich so I’m tempted to have a go myself: I’m imagining a German Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and went on to become a pioneer of electronic music, a genius sound engineer and a shadowy but influential presence both in the foundation of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop and in the New York ‘Downtown scene’ of the 1960s…

Andy reckons the music could have soundtracked Tron and, yeah, I can hear that, but I’m tempted to go much further back.  The tightly wound, relentless back-and-forth of these analogue throbs and pulses suggest a kind of teeth-grinding, cheek-chewing, speed-freak non-narrative: ‘and then, and then, and then, and then…’  Perhaps it should accompany Warhol’s Empire?  Or maybe a time-lapse film of a giant copper clad cathedral dome oxidizing and being encrusted with livid green verdigris?

We could even get a little more active.  How about multi-limbed sport-bots thwacking a dozen basketballs at once to each other across an empty floor of an underground car park?  Or, especially during the bibbling sections of the second track, angry artificial intelligences throwing packets of information around in the hope of winning a competition the rules of which our pitiful brains could not begin to grasp?  Yeah, as good as that.

Also worthy of note is the ten track various artist compilation SCFREE.  This artefact is not for sale but will be supplied free of charge alongside paying orders made to Striate Cortex until the edition of 50 is extinguished.  Andy invited submissions stipulating they be about five minutes in length and ambient(ish) in nature.  The idea being to both encourage business and to promote the work of worthy artists with a connection to his label.  Slick.  No midwich track due to, y’know, ‘life’, but there could well be something from me on volume two.

Anyway, even without me it is pretty much all good.  Everything has the chance to engage, nothing has the chance to outstay its welcome, most leaves you wishing it was twice as long.  My favourites are the four tracks that top and tail the album.  The opener, Tim Newman’s ‘Park Page is Empty’, is a lovely, guitar-led see-sawing throb.  The second track, Mark Bradley’s ‘Sacred Musics’ is a Vangelisian curve of precious metal, slightly discordant to keep its edge serrated (a prime example of what an ex-girlfriend of mine used to call ‘wob-wob’ electronica).  At the other end of the compilation, the ninth track, Daniel Thomas’s ‘Heavy Density’, is the kind of refried physics you might hear whilst lying in your garage-constructed time machine, resisting the temptation to crawl out of the box, at peace, trusting the math and waiting for the cycle to conclude.  The final track, ‘Moonship (Phase One)’ is a live piece by Small Things on Sundays which suggests a desert camp fire scene on a sandy planet.  Huge, docile pack animals purr and buzz as they sleep nearby, ornithopters flap overhead, some radio chatter is ignored as the explorers relax.  Beautiful.

Striate Cortex

artifacts of the no-audience underground: crimson rainbow facility

December 6, 2012 at 2:13 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 2 Comments
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Crimson Rainbow Facility – Unknown Strains (3″ CD-r in handmade packaging, Striate Cortex, S.C.55, edition of 50)

crimson rainbow facilty frontcrimson rainbow facilty cdrcrimson rainbow facilty inserts

Back in the dark days of 2010 when Striate Cortex was a mere mewling babe-in-arms, label-founder Andy Robinson was introduced to the work of Tim Mitchell. When Tim’s CD-r, titled Ch [u47] and recorded under the name Crimson Rainbow Facility, arrived at SCHQ the hand-made packaging and tiny edition (12 copies) alerted Andy to the presence of a kindred spirit. Sure enough the music caught his ear and demanded repeat listens. Shaking himself free of his reverie he fired up Myspace (amazing to think that it was only last year that Bandcamp became truly all-conquering and Myspace was reduced to ‘decaying Victorian graveyard’ status) but Tim had already moved on and left no forwarding address. So that was that for a while.

However, in recent weeks a mutual acquaintance – James Moore of Sapir Whorf – dropped Tim’s name and Andy leapt at the chance to be reintroduced. This belated pairing of Tim’s eerie post-industrial aesthetic with Andy’s unrivalled attention to detail spawned the excellent Impurities by Thossian Process, Tim’s current musical moniker. A package well received ’round these parts.

For the final Striate Cortex release of 2012 Andy has chosen to tie up the loose end that Tim’s disappearance in 2010 left hanging. How satisfying. Unknown Strains is composed of five fragments, totalling 19 and a half minutes, taken from the same sessions that produced the long-gone Ch [u47].

The packaging is a multi-layered treat.  From the inside out: a printed 3″ CD-r in red paper windowed wallet is accompanied by three professionally printed card inserts.  One has the release details on the reverse and a photo of a buttoned down 1950s scientist type on the front – presumably Andy’s reading of Tim’s persona for these experiments – the others have unnervingly unspecific photos of (possibly) bugs, infections, soft tissue and the like.  These objects are tucked into a purple plastic slip which in turn slides into a case of handmade paper. Another clear plastic slip printed with a pattern likely to be microbes or cells or spores or spawn or something equally worrying is the final ornament and the lot is contained within a hygienic plastic wallet.

The music is compelling, eerie, spacious.  Machines emit electronic throbs and skitter.  Bubbles of sound rise and burst releasing snatches of barely audible dialogue from public information films or maybe a videoed record of laboratory life.  It feels like walking around a ruined industrial complex on a frosty morning, taking off your glove to feel the side of a giant centrifuge and, inexplicably, finding it warm to the touch, still humming.  The album and track titles suggest a science fiction tale of escaped contagion, a story compiled from the remaining fragments of the official record but told with the nihilistic, noirish efficiency of Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers.  Hypnotic, immersive, icily calm.

Buy here.

…and let me take the opportunity to congratulate Andy of Striate Cortex on another champion year of terrific releases.  His label is a model of what can be achieved with love, enthusiasm, faith in your own taste, attention to detail and stringent quality control.  All accomplished whilst having pretty much bugger all resources too – he is no trust-fund dilettante: this is all done with graft .  I know that Andy, admirably modest, will not allow artists to thank him on the packaging of his releases so I’m doing it for them here: cheers, man, Happy Christmas and here’s to 2013…

artifacts of the no-audience underground: thossian process and joined by wire

November 13, 2012 at 7:01 am | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
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Thossian Process – Impurities (CD-r in handmade packaging, Striate Cortex, S.C.54, edition of 60)

joinedbywire – lost weekends (CD-r, self-released, edition of 17)

Patience is a virtue, eh readers?  Without it how could I ever come to appreciate the oblique, the abrasive or a not-immediately-welcome change of direction?  It took me a while to get with these releases (one even had to be snuck into Midwich Mansions ignoring my polite but firm indifference) but the rewards have far outweighed the effort.  When life outside music proves difficult and I eye the teetering review pile with, shall we say, ‘mixed feelings’ these CD-rs remind me that remaining open-minded is a virtue too.

Impurities by Thossian Process – a chap called Tim Mitchell – is new on Striate Cortex.  Reason for celebratory fireworks usually but in his plugging email to the Striate faithful Andy described it as follows:

Impurities has a more industrial feel to it, very dark and edgy and for me has massive reflections of early TG

Oh, I thought, maybe I’ll give it a miss.  Heresy, I know, but I don’t really like much of that first wave industrial nowadays.  The claustrophobic seediness of Throbbing Gristle just makes me feel sad.  Thus I maintained a dignified silence.  Andy contacted me again, I explained my misgivings and suggested hardier blogs that might be more receptive …and a few days later a copy turned up in the post anyway.  The cheeky bugger had guessed correctly that once it was in the house I’d feel compelled to give it a chance.  Well, I’m glad I did.

The packaging is first class.  Inside a robust plastic wallet there is a length of black gauze.  This veils a fold out cardboard case painted in ‘oriental’ colours of red, gold and black.  Inside is a title card, a booklet of creepy black and white photography and a colour printed CD-r in its own black window envelope.  The attention to detail is… well, you can only shake your head in amazement.

The music unfolds to reveal a similar seriousness of intent.  I see where Andy is coming from with his description.  With so much noise these days being so, er…, noisy it is easy to forget how empty and eerie some of that early industrial stuff could be.  Thossian Process captures that vibe perfectly with rhythmic ticks, pulses and pitter-patter in lieu of anything too drum-like and a carefully chosen palette of electronics used sparingly and with purpose.  A couple of tracks even have that vaguely ethnographic Middle Eastern/North African influence that bands like Cabaret Voltaire tapped into.

Part of what makes the album so compelling is the space within the music.  I don’t mean it is ‘dubby’ – this is not a stoner-friendly warm bath – rather it is ‘spacious’ like a harshly lit, unfurnished room, or a view across a frozen lake, or the inside of your head when you wake sweating in the pitch black at 3.30am.

The seven tracks that make up this release total a fat-free 28 minutes.  This efficiency shows a respect both for the material and for the listener and ensures that the quick-witted inventiveness throughout is left undiluted and espresso strong.  Its discipline is admirable.  Given its very high tolerance to repeat listening, and the art-object level of the packaging, this release is incredible value for money.

Buy here.

The issue that delayed my appreciation of Lost Weekends, the latest CD-r by Joined  By Wire was a bit different.  I’m a big fan of the work of Stephen Woolley (and associates) and was delighted to be offered one of this super-limited edition.  Imagine the shiver of anticipation as I slid it into the CD player, pumped the volume and… was bludgeoned.  Oof.

Now, JBW is a noisy project and doesn’t mind loosening teeth/bowels if necessary but this is something else.  Stephen’s turn to brute electronics is closely akin to that taken by Neil Campbell with his recent Astral Social Club stuff.  However, being the dimwit that I am, my first thought wasn’t ‘oh yeah, Neil did something like this and I eventually understood it and learned to love it.’ It was: ‘oh shit, how am I going to break it to Stephen that I don’t like his record?’  Luckily, good ol’ fashioned English fear of an embarrassing situation kept me from pressing ‘send’ for a few days and in that time I realised that I was wrong.  Once I’d got used to the chilli heat I could taste the nicely balanced blend of spices underneath.  It turns out that, after your eyes stop watering, the new JBW disc is delicious.

It’s another cracking package.  A brown card gatefold sleeve, screen printed with a cartoon forest on the front, opens to reveal a CD-r, itself printed red and decorated with a wood grain pattern, and an eight page card booklet.  The booklet contains no information about the release just more of Stephen’s lovely graphic work.  The CD-r contains seven untitled tracks and runs to approximately 44 minutes.

The first three tracks are full of joy and energy but are unrepentantly brain-scouring.  It is like an audio time-lapse account of geological processes: formless masses are melted, boiled, set hard, torn into reflective shards, melted again.  Exhilarating stuff but you’ll need to fiddle with the volume to minimise ear-bleed.  Track 4 is relatively mild so affords us a deep breath and a brief, refreshing interlude to wiggle our toes in the grass before cracking on.  Track 5 is exactly one minute of sanity-baiting anarcho-squiggle so breathtakingly looney that if it continued any longer it may well cause irreversible brain-tilt.  Luckily it cuts when it does and we are back with the longer form, shimmering, rolling, scarifying tectonics until the end.  Blimey.

Now, in my reviews I generally try and avoid the internet cop-out of ‘if you like that, you’ll like this’ but fans of recent Astral Social Club material that don’t already know Joined By Wire should really check this out.  I’m sure neither Neil nor Stephen would grumble at the comparison as they are clearly both attacking the void with similar weaponry.  This particular edition runs to a mere 17 copies but fear not as Stephen has previous for bootlegging his own stuff.  I’m sure some arrangement could be made should it have ‘sold out’.

Buy via the JBW Big Cartel shop or drop Stephen a line at joinedbywire@hotmail.com.

simon reynolds, diy culture and the no-audience underground

October 7, 2012 at 9:45 am | Posted in musings, no audience underground | 20 Comments
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Click on the screengrabbed photo above to be taken to a video of the author, journalist and accomplished cultural critic Simon Reynolds giving the keynote speech on DIY culture at last month’s Incubate festival in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

“Why are you pointing me at that?” you might think.  I had the same thought when, as I was getting ready for work last Friday, I opened an email from the comrades at Pyongyang Plastics.  “Are you aware of this?” they chorused, “skip to 38 minutes and 40 seconds(ish).”  Perhaps you might do the same, watch a few minutes, and then return here.  If you have an hour to spare then feel free to watch the whole thing.  I’ll wait.

—ooOoo—

Done?  Interesting isn’t it?  And how flattering for me, midwich and the ‘no-audience underground’ to be mentioned in such a prestigious context.  I don’t always agree with everything Simon Reynolds says but his reviews were key in shaping my tastes via the halcyon days of Melody Maker in the late 1980s and I have followed his writing on and off ever since.  In fact, it is quite game of him to talk about me as I think I have only mentioned him ‘in print’ twice and was spectacularly rude on both occasions.  Firstly, I described his comment that Myspace was a ‘mass grave’ as ‘shrill nonsense’ during that interview with Bang the Bore (and though the image chosen is unfortunate, I have to admit that his comment is now irrefutable.  All hail Bandcamp).  Secondly, I singled out a piece by him as ‘beyond parody’ in an article I wrote against criticism which contained a lengthy takedown of the joy-vacuum that is The Wire magazine.  I suspect from comments made in his speech that the anti-Wire article is how he came to know about this blog’s existence.  He is a good egg, obviously.

Anyway, the speech is entertaining and thought provoking and I recommend watching it all.  I imagine everyone who is a regular here will think ‘hey, hang on a minute’ at one point or another, which is a good thing.  What you get for your hour is a brief history of DIY culture both before and after punk’s ‘Year Zero’ plus musings on the implications (practical and political) of new technologies for the meaning of DIY culture now.  It’s good stuff and I am now going to engage (more or less directly, mainly less) with some of the points he raises by offering an extended definition of what the phrase ‘no-audience underground’ has come to mean to me.

When I first coined the phrase at the turn of the century it was because I needed a succinct way of referring to a scene that contained wildly diverse creative endeavours: from blood-and-spittle power-noise to the daintiest bowed singing bowl.  On reflection, the only thing all these types of racket had in common was that almost no-one was interested in them.  Hence my tongue-in-cheek, irreverent bit of shorthand.

Over the years, especially during the time I’ve been writing this blog, my understanding of what was at first just a self-deprecating joke has deepened.  I’ll come back to the implications of the low numbers involved later but first I need to say more about another important meaning of ‘no audience’.  Simon (I’m going informal, we’re all friends here) is worried that that a ‘transmitter requires a receiver’ and that there are too few of the latter around.  I’d reassure him that his concern is misplaced – it doesn’t work like that down here.  There is no ‘audience’ as such, in the sense of ‘passive receivers’, because almost everyone with an interest in the scene is involved somehow in the scene.  The roles one might have – musician, promoter, label ‘boss’, distributor, writer, ‘critic’, paying punter and so on – are fluid, non-hierarchical and can be exchanged or adopted as needed.  I must stress that this is not a snobbish clique of insiders obsessively tending to every aspect of their hobby (not a dirty word, by the way, who makes a living from experimental music nowadays?) but a friendly and welcoming group who have realised that if they want it to happen then they have to make it happen themselves.  Simon raises concerns about the right-wing implications of self-sufficiency but the connection is not a necessary one and if you tried that argument on down here I suspect you’d get either blank stares or would be laughed out of the pub.

Some examples of how people can contribute in different ways may be illustrative.  Firstly: Kieron Piercy.  Kieron may be known to readers of RFM as one-third of improv troupe Spoils & Relics.  He is also a gig promoter of impeccable taste here in sunny Leeds.  Like all gig promoters he enjoys a good moan about what a stressful and thankless task it is but he obviously loves the music so much that he just can’t help himself.  Last Friday evening I was personally invited by email to a gig in Kieron’s basement where I saw Gael Moissonnier, Hering Und Seine Sieben Sachen and Melanie O’Dubshlaine in a very select gathering.  The atmosphere was magical, I loved it and what was terrific was there wasn’t a sniff of hipsterism about any of it: this was the only way the gig was going to happen, so this is the way it did happen.  Perfect.

Secondly: Andy Robinson.  Andy is label boss of Striate Cortex and I suspect the ‘3 inch boxes in editions of fifty’ that Simon refers to are his releases, possibly Star Turbine or Victorian Electronics.  Andy is not a musician himself (that I know of) so he pours his passion into handcrafting the amazing packaging that his one-man label is justly famous for.  It is his way of showing his love and appreciation of the artists that create the music that he cares so much about.  Simon says these objects are ‘presented in the form of art’ with a seriousness of intent, ‘as if’ for an audience.  I’d be less equivocal and say these objects are, without question, art.  I own paintings that were produced in an edition of, er…, one and are only seen by me, my wife and visitors to Midwich Mansions.  They are no less art for that.  Andy’s boxes are for an audience – a small but dedicated one.  He knows from hard work and experience how many he can sell.  Fifty is fine – think of it like an edition of a fine art print, rather than a hobbyist version of mainstream practice and it makes more sense.

Thus, there is no ‘audience’ for the scene because the scene is the audience (I feel I should add ‘ya dig?!’ at the end of that sentence).  Now on to numbers.  As I have recently argued, recognizing that this endeavour is only ever going to be of fringe interest is incredibly liberating.  Get over the fact that your genius is not going to grant you fame or money – no-one even remotely sane in the no-audience underground thinks that they deserve an audience – and you are rewarded with the realization that you can do anything you like subject only to the restraints that affect all others areas of your life: family, employment, money, the law (!) etc.  This is clearly amazing.

One thing I didn’t understand in Simon’s speech was the implication that the removal of the restraints on means of production that were encouraged by punk were great and democratic but the removal of restraints on means of production encouraged by the internet, software etc. are problematic.  I’m tempted to swat this away (whilst acknowledging that I’m being a bit naughty and kicking over a staw man – his argument is more nuanced than I’m giving it credit for) with a dismissive snort and repeat a notion oft used here: now it’s all about quality control.

These days, anyone (even Simon – dying to hear his synth experiments) can make something and release it.  The challenge, restraint if you like, for the artist is to rein it in, to only release the best stuff.  Simon wonders how he can keep up with someone who pushes out releases with the regularity of bowel-movements, even if he likes their stuff.  Well, simply put: you can’t and the artist is making a mistake.  I suspect the current stage we are in with internet based distribution is ‘kid in a sweet shop’ – everyone going crazy just because they can.  Some have already got very sick as a result – see previous posts on this blog about resisting the archival urge and giving up indiscriminate downloading (the cost of free things parts one to five etc.) – and it wouldn’t surprise me if a new phase of discernment, taste and quality control is around the corner.  Wishful thinking maybe, but, hey, in an age of infinite access the new restraints are obviously going to have to be internal and self-imposed.

A final word about the mainstream.  For Simon, to be an underground culture, rather than just a hobby or a private practice, there needs to be some connection to the mainstream, ideally antagonistic.  The underground culture should wish to change the mainstream, or at least to be a nuisance to it.  I don’t agree.  What’s so noble about being a flea in the ear of an elephant?  Whilst adopting some of the methods and vocabulary of the mainstream can be useful – a ‘label’ is still a good way to organise the presentation of music, for example – actual interaction with it is corrosive and unnecessary.  The mainstream will never be interested in what we do in any substantive or meaningful way and money eventually fucks up anything it touches so why waste time with the inevitable compromises that engaging with it necessitate?  Simon is right when he says I don’t give a shit, but let’s be clear that it is courting, or even acknowledging, a mainstream audience that I don’t give a shit about, for all the reasons given above.  I’m choosing to be free instead.  It’s way more punk, innit?

artifacts of the no-audience underground: the skull mask and claus poulsen on striate cortex

September 25, 2012 at 3:55 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
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The Skull Mask – Sahomerio

(3″ CD-r in handmade packaging, Striate Cortex, S.C.53, edition of 50)

Claus Poulsen – Terrestial

(2 x 3″ CD-r boxed in handmade packaging, Striate Cortex, S.C.51, edition of 45)

Regular readers will be familiar with my role as UK champion of The Skull Mask – a terrific project from my Mexican cousin Miguel Pérez.  I refer newcomers to the blurb used by Striate Cortex head honcho Andy Robinson in the publicity for this release:

Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, is a city with a murderous reputation. The war between rival drug cartels and the police made it, until recently, the homicide capital of the world. Life is tough for a civilian just trying to raise a family. I’m sure you can imagine that if you found yourself in that situation you would need a means of catharsis, a way of making sense of it all. Well, my friend Miguel Pérez lives there and he escapes through noise.

A background in the metal scene of the 90s taught him musicianship – he is an exceptional guitarist – but it was his discovery of noise and improv that set him free. A Stakhanovite work rate has led to dozens of releases under several pseudonyms, mainly through the netlabel Oracle he co-runs with Pablo Mejia, a noise artist based in the Dominican Republic.

I came to his work via the Culver-esque roars of La Mancha Del Pecado but my favourite of his projects is the solo, acoustic guitar of The Skull Mask. These improvised, psychedelic ragas are influenced by ritual music from around the world, including the shamanistic tradition of his native country, filtered through his own experiences of the Mexican wilderness.

It is beautiful, compelling, raw, ego dissolving stuff. To listen to The Skull Mask is to stand facing the hot, abrasive desert wind.

What a masterpiece of the copywriters’ art, eh?  I wonder who wrote that.  Oh:

Rob H, Leeds, UK, August 2012

*Ahem*, moving swiftly on…  The package is awesome:  printed 3” CD-r in its own wallet with beautiful pro-printed insert featuring evocative smoke photo, all contained in a handmade fold-out cardboard parcel tied up with string.  Acknowledging that the title refers to a type of incense used in purification rituals, Andy has thoughtfully included a little bundle of incense sticks in each box.  Why not make an offering to your favourite pagan spirit whilst this is on in the background?  This release is so cool that it even smells good.

Before getting to the music there is, perhaps, a short discussion to be had about to what extent improvised music can be edited.  Do you need to hear the whole performance, dead ends and mistakes included?  I sometimes think the, say, two minutes of genius at the end of a passage only makes sense in the context of the six minutes of meandering that led to it.  With some improv, especially groups – Spoils & Relics spring to mind – these transitional periods can have an enthralling, alchemical mystery to them as the band looks for and eventually settles on a new groove or texture.  Following an act through this process is one of the rewarding joys of improvised music.

Or should we just cut to the chase?  Are the minutes of genius all we need?  Can we jettison the intermediary passages as just so much rehearsal?  This is how, for example, the great Vibracathedral Orchestra albums were assembled.  Mick et al had a great ear for start and end points and also had the vision to see individual tracks rise out of the whole.  Much as I still love to hear the crescendo-plateau-fade of a full length 45 minute live tape, the discipline exercised over something so unruly and amorphous as VCO performance is one of the things that makes these records essential.

Andy has decided to take this second path.  Over half the source material provided by Miguel has been excised leaving five extracts totalling 19 minutes.  Some of the edits are severe, brutal even, but all are fully authorised by Miguel and, after a few listens, I have to say Andy’s decisions cannot be faulted.

This is heroic stuff, recorded simply and cheaply with a red-raw honesty (occasionally a ‘chk-chk-chk’ noise can be heard high in the right channel, no doubt an artefact of the recording, but it stands in for the cicadas of Miguel’s beloved Mexican wilderness and inadvertently adds to the heat-haze atmosphere). Miguel was amused to see this described as ‘bluesy’ in Vital Weekly but during Part Three, the epic nine minute centrepiece, it isn’t hard to imagine him standing at the crossroads, his loose-fingered raga whipping the desert dust into strange, dancing anthropomorphic shapes.

The pieces either side illustrate the expressive power of Miguel’s technique: sore-eyed from the campfire or crackling and mysterious or solemn and contemplative.  In isolating these moods Andy has given us a new way of appreciating the rolling whole.  He has somehow managed to carve smoke.  An essential purchase, obviously.

Also new and noteworthy and issued in a painfully tiny edition is Terrestial by Claus Poulsen, probably best known around these parts for Star Turbine, his collaboration with Sindre Bjerga.  Packaged in a thickly painted jewellery box, the like of which housed the aforementioned Star Turbine release, this is a double 3” CD-r set, each tucked into its own windowed envelope accompanied by a pro-printed insert and, a shocking first for SC as far as I know, a Bandcamp download code!  Well did you evah?!  The shape of things to come?  Who knows…

The music is unashamedly spacey electronica: epic synth washes, chattering and bibbling, languid shifts in texture.  Apart from some late bursts of noise, perhaps, this could have been released in the mid-90s on Pete Namlook’s FAX label.  High praise from me.

The entire of the first disc is given over to the 19 minute title track (no, I don’t know where the third ‘r’ has gone either) which is a sweeping account of a generation starship‘s cruise through unimaginable spans of nothingness.  The production is careful, balanced, detailed – exquisite.  The second disc contains four shorter tracks, noisier but just as disciplined in their construction, which mark the arrival of the craft at its destination planet and the exploration of the seas and caverns found there.  There is even a party of sorts to celebrate touchdown: second track ‘Heat’ has a beat (very rare on SC releases!) but its dubby clatter only serves to accentuate the eeriness of the new surroundings.  Accomplished and involving stuff.

Buy both releases here.

artifacts of the no-audience underground: cathal rodgers – thirty-nine years of decay

August 26, 2012 at 1:59 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
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Cathal Rodgers – Thirty-Nine Years Of Decay (Striate Cortex, CD-r in handmade packaging, Striate Cortex, S.C.52, edition of 50)

Right, there is plenty of musing to come so I’m starting with the spec: this release by Cathal Rodgers, formerly Wereju, consists of a hessian pouch in which can be found a plastic wallet.  This wallet contains a mounted photo, a printed card wallet and a CD-r all featuring the same illustration (see above).  Also included is a smaller card wallet containing an insert featuring the tracks titles, contact info etc.  The package is as plushly produced and cleverly thought out as you’d expect from Striate Cortex but the pouch and the blood-smear colour scheme give it a slightly edgy, ‘outsider art’ feel too.

You might think that the structure of the album – five thematically linked drone/noise pieces – and track titles that chime with examples from my own back catalogue (Rodgers: ‘The Days Become The Weeks And The Weeks The Years’, midwich: ‘months, years’ etc.) would have me nodding in vigorous and immediate approval but no, this was a very slow burner.  In order to explain why it is magnificent I have to account for why at first I didn’t like it.

Some context.  For a while now two big themes in my life have been frailty and mortality.  My depression is an ever-present background radiation but I only hear it hissing when I am very tired or stressed.  Otherwise I’m fine, thanks for asking.  Some of those near me are not so fortunate.  A dear, lifelong friend has terminal cancer.  Another, even younger, is recovering from a shocking, debilitating stroke.  A third, retired but robust, just dropped down dead for no reason a couple of weeks ago.  An elderly relative has been in hospital following a fall.  Even Anne’s pregnancy has not been cause for unalloyed celebration as she had horrific ‘morning’ (really ‘all day’) sickness which meant she couldn’t keep down food or drink for six weeks.

Contemplating these events (and these are just the headlines, there were others – ask me about being punched in the face on the way to work the other day) has left me in a puzzling and conflicted mood.  Almost all of what I feel about the business of life – its grandeur, glory, delight, absurdity, wonder, sadness, pain, grief – has one reason, one cause: my love for the people around me.  This is, I suppose, what it means to be a grown up and, at the ripe ol’ age of 40, has finally filtered through to my consciousness.

Whilst figuring all this out I have been listening to stuff I was given at (or since) the SLI/Striate Cortex gig, including this album.  I kept returning to releases that cut through my mood, that distracted me from it, that ran counter to it.  This did not.  In fact it so mirrored my state of mind that I almost did not hear it.  ‘I don’t like this,’ I thought, ‘nothing is happening.’

But how wrong I was, how silly.  The reason I had trouble processing it and the reason I did not fully appreciate its quality was that I was already overwhelmed by the mood it creates.  Over the last week or so a break in the clouds has allowed me to step back, go at this again with fresh ears and reach some proper conclusions.  Thirty-Nine Years Of Decay is artfully constructed, beautifully evocative and emotionally harmonious.  It is melancholy without being maudlin or sentimental, gruffly realistic without being unkind or gratuitous.  It is the sound of someone trying to process difficult notions about time, about aging, about mortality and taking seriously the enormity of the challenge.  For the record: I am talking about layers of pedal-loop throbbing, scything guitar and/or synth drones, high tension metallic pulses all beautifully recorded and elegantly balanced.  A point is being made eloquently and convincingly.  It is an album of the year contender, for sure.

I’m sorry to report that this is already sold out at source (hey Andy!  How about arranging a downloadable afterlife for sold out SC releases?  Bandcamp?  I dunno.  Could raise a few quid…), though some copies apparently remain at Norman Records.  Cathal’s Sonic Drift blog can be visited here.

midwich live on video!

August 19, 2012 at 4:44 pm | Posted in live music, midwich, new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
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Who is this grinning, nodding idiot?!

Filmed by Uncle Mark Wharton of the formidable Idwal Fisher blog, this video is about ten minutes of my seventeen minute set at the recent Sheepscar Light Industrial/Striate Cortex celebratory gig at Wharf Chambers here in sunny Leeds.  The film starts about five minutes in and cuts with about two minutes to go.  The piece is a unique combo of the field recording from Eaves (out now on SLI – more about this soon) and the drone from ‘verdigris’ (from the Victorian Electronics box set).

Oh, and by the way: I am not the Toulouse-Lautrec of noise, I was kneeling on a cushion (health and safety) behind a coffee-table-height table.  Hope you enjoy it – I certainly did – and cheers to Mark for recording it.

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