Shockheaded Peter

As a companion piece to the last post, here's Danielle's Lemon Kitten buddy Karl Blake in Shockheaded Peters mode, from the excellent Rough Trade Post Punk 01 Cd.

Karl Blake's take on zippy stab-jazz blues seems almost like something News Readers might do on Comic Relief Night only there's an odd undertow to the music and when the organ kicks in we're in Nick Cave territory briefly before Karl's geetar work falls over itself and breaks things apart into great gulps before ending up with a talent show gong crack.

Fun.

Go here for I Bloodbrother Be + a plethora of other crack lullabies by... well, just go and see.

And if that's too much fun, here's a little Black Metal to moisten your soul slipping. Can't say I ever really listen to Black Metal (or Metal of any sort, unless you count Circle) but I have a special little CD-R full of the stuff just in case I feel like stabbing someone.

Aborym - Darka Mysteria

Burzum - Ea, Lord Of The Depths

Danielle Dax 's Hairspray

I thought I saw Danielle Dax once. Can't be sure. She was trying on an outfit in the old Kensington Market. At the time, lots of people looked like Danielle, or at least thought they did: Danielle Dax in nastily rumpled purple velour; fat leeching out the sides of her thigh boots? Can't be. A pencil thin Danielle Dax backcombing like crazy and filling her hair with ozone-destroying hairspray n henna, biker boots rendering her body into a Gothic golf club? Probably not her either.

But I'm sure I did see her. She was buying a record by Eric Random...

In Kensington Market a lookalike lurked around every corner. A micro-version of Andrew Eldritch trying to haggle for cowboy boots (they didn't have his size and he rumbled like the Lucretia my Reflection bassline); the Fields of the Nephilim guy (Carl?) buying sprinkle on dust, tumbleweeds and a grey greatcoat.

Other times I'd just hang around watching sexy Goth girls pushing themselves into leather catsuits; the conjunction of mirrors in the upstairs changing area and hairdressers allowing for visual entendre and 15 year old wonder at every angle.

The market closed. Goth died. Kensington upgraded to "club" wear and static inducing bra tops / designer cowboy hats / Australian surf wear for boys scared of the beach.

But somewhere there's an EC mountain of surplus Bauhaus t-shirts and Wayne Hussey sunglasses so I reckon it can't be long before we see a replication of the Motorhead/AC-DC/MC5 phenomen and find David Beckham in 'authentick', newly price-hiked Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt shock...

Danielle Dax - Sleep Has No Property

Danielle Dax's Inky Bloaters is one of the only albums from the Goth period that I still listen too... it transcends genre, mixing electric fizzing pop with Eastern wailing, psychedelic guitar and sitar (bits sound like the Acid Mothers in pastoral spinning out mode),tinkling metal percussion and chunky beats... nowhere does it give any indication of it's 80s origins, not even the keyboards...

Kinda suspect I'm preaching to the converted here but if you haven't tried any before then dig in and bliss out. One time pop could have been like this.

Synaestheticals 2: The Seams of GoodWill

Because Mansion Mumra has recently been re-inhabited by mushroom sprites - see the middle classes rushing against time; see the nasty Government trying to make them hang out with crims - all kinds of things passing across the psychoscillators at the moment...

fluorescent activities from an unusually round Four Tet and the Smile Around The Face track in particular with it's sort of Julian Cope remix vibe, undulating up and down whistling and slight detourns in the progression (I especially like the the little guy panning around the speakers banging Gongs).

For some reason I'm put in mind of a very docile leopard.

and at 5 AM i found myself oddly attracted to the Amorphous Androgynous album The Isness, something that I've had for years and never really noticed, an album that slipped so far under my radar that I'd reconstructed my memory to forget it ever existed thus rendering the title ironic as the Kids From Fame not being famous.

The Isness seems to drift endlessly, the word ebb might have been created for it. The album ingratiates pleasantly rather than forces itself upon you, a bubble headed hippie girl with big eyes and a long Thurman nose.

(((((...speaking of bubble heads I made the mistake of catching Big Brother as the drugs began to take hold... Anthony looks like a Guy Fawkes Mask (surely a shoo in for V for Vendetta?)... Makosi looks like she's she's walked in off the set of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (a good thing but I hope she doesn't bogart the joint)... Max and Craig are twin pipes of Evil (awful bloodrush Righteous Brothers) while Sam and Saskia seem destined to a life of draping over cold cars in Birmingham Expos, perhaps helped by someone I can't remember who looks like a strip-o-gram who's just sat on a valve of a tub of compressed air... Derek seems like he's been drafted in as a Tory scene-setter, trying to dig the zeitgeist for the next elections, only to find himself soiled by the experience (later, we'll find him hanging upside down in the Groucho Club with an orange stuffed in his mouth and an expression of dull integrity on his foxblood spattered face... there's others but they fade, formless and redundant...

My wife, already beshroomed as the opening credits kicked in, started mumbling how there was no plot... ))))

Finally The (Other) Door's second single The Seams of GoodWill has been vein coursing since last night...

I first came across The (Other) Door via the now defunct Boiling Frogs nexus but, like The Isness, I never really listened too deeply - the slow pitter-patter of hand-drums, eastern howls and rolling mists seeming lost amongst all my i-pod clutter - but listening harder last night the gently strummed guitar gradually shifting in and out of focus and the Nasa Arab curls of alien voices creeping around the edges seemed to suggest some kind of friendly abyss.

It's definitely music that seems yoked to the kind of 24hr autism that accompanies nuits blanc, acting like a sort of psychedelic heli-pad. While The (Other) Door are hardly setting disco pulses alight, it's somehow comforting that 'ambient' music can drag your down to the depths without descending into painful industrial dirges (or worse the rightly maligned and very shortlived 'dark ambient' / isolationist nonsense).

The (Other) Door - The Seams of Goodwill

A rapidshare production so right/ctrl-clicks won't work - just press and follow the little fellah through

SHAMELESS STAR WARS CASH-IN POST

Collecting dodgy Moog Records is a perilous affair. The late '60s/early '70s were littered with exploitative electronic novelty records, some of which are absolute gems and others just unbelievably bad. I shall have to do a proper post on this subject at some point. For now, let's take a quick look at "Music From Star Wars", performed by The Electric Moog Orchestra, released on Musicor Records in 1977, and modeled here by young Darth Gutta.

Described on the rear sleeve as 'a stunning breakthrough in electronic music', this album was produced by Tom Owen and arranged by Jimmy Wisner, recorded at Minot Sound, NYC in June '77, just in time to catch the first wave of Star Wars mania. Of course, it's mostly a pile of crap, but there's still a few enjoyable moments to found...

The Electric Moog Orchestra - Imperial Attack

Y'know I seriously rate this arrangement, especially when that vaguely discofied beat drops in, with the ominous synth-bass undertow and random lashings of surf guitar entwined with the soaring polysynth strings. Groovy!

The Electric Moog Orchestra - Cantina Band

Well I had to rip this one too, didn't I? A prime slice of full-on Moog cheese that assaults my senses with it's putrid stench. Just don't listen if you've eaten recently!

The Electric Moog Orchestra also recorded a Battlestar Galactica album (which I've not heard) and a totally off-the-wall version of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, which is loaded with as many crazy analogue effects as you could ever wish for. I'll have to rip some tunes from that one to at some point.

Ed Rush & Optical

Day of bad portents...the sky looks very thin round here...Somerset descending into a blanket of grey threads...

((((...anyone remember the name of a comic story (in either Star Wars or Dr Who or 2000AD comics I think) in which the world was gradually enveloped in a grey mist/fog - it was set in someones front room if I remember rightly...just a sort of one-off story I think... really want to remember that story, just so as I can think of it as not happening))))

...but walking to work at 8.30 this morning the heavens opened and synced perfectly with the opening sampled cloudrush from The Bad Seeds' Tupelo... synced so well in fact that for a few exhilarating moments reality got lost and everything slurred, like a sudden bout of Dragon Breath Yoga...

...then, just seconds later, I saw two saw two living archetypes which sort of Shrekked me out even further...

1st a blind guy leading another blind guy.... one good blind, the other bad, both hopelessly lost in the middle of the park with one of their dogs going mental after two kids and a frisbee...

then...

2nd saw a number of cooks (hats and all, like characters in Mr Ben) arguing inside the back of a large refrigerated van with Fullsome's Best Soups written on the side... one cook pushed another...tempers raised...someone swung a punch...any minute now there's gonna be a Chinese archetype leaping out with a meat cleaver...

such bad tidings... someone's flipping Runes up there and everythings slipping between their fingers...

two archetypes = bad times... bad things always happen at liminal times like these. At thin times.

and they did. (i won't tell you later)

so...

here's some oldish skool jungle in handy 100mb bites...

Ed Rush & Optical - Kiss FM mix (Feb 2000)

because this sort of nonsense is exactly the kind of thing to blow them clouds away...

Oh Ed Rush... never noticed that before... no, really, never noticed that before...

on the other hand got an extremely erotic e-mail today from an old, er, friend which just... well... somethings just knock you out without really saying anything don't they?

actually, it's been a great day.

Sin City Archetypology

Read a review of Sin City where it was criticised for engorged female stereotypes and for some reason I came away from it reeling. It was implying that the use of such sexual stereotypes detracted from the film per se, as if some female stereotypes are now verboten in serious films (okay for the real pulp fictions, because only beer-table bellied trash monkeys watch those) for intelligent people because we need protecting from dangerous archetypes. This struck me as an inversion of the usual film-schtick that suggests that, for example, erect penises and real sex are only possible in dull arthouse movies or subtitled, painterly slews because the people out there who would be immediately turned into rapists/victims are not going to pay to see anything which requires reading or doesn't feature a Wayans.

Yes, Sin City has a rather limited, er palette but it's kinda about that isn't it? (I'm talking comic here, haven't seen the film and thus fall into that unfortunate category of Tory minister ranting about a film they haven't seen) To talk of gender stereotypes in a film like Sin City is like moaning about Menance II Society using stereotypical rap music (we all know those guys kick their slippers off to Garth Brooks really) or bitching about Pasolini's Sodom because there's not enough nice fascists. (Haven't they seen Schindler's List?)

Do we need balance imposed on our lives? Can't we just occasionally dip into the archetype bowl, swing the keys and look towards the jock/whore/dits/angel/Cohen in the corner and love the fact that we're engaging in a social stereotype that might be a bit entertaining?

Yes, it's not real; yes, girls can be other than dominatrixes/sluts but is it really wrong to make a film where the subtleties are ignored? Is the film inherently weaker because of that?

When I go to watch Sin City I'm not expecting to come out filled with Foucault. I have enough of him at home.

(note: if you came here looking for some free music may I recommend stealing from your local MegaStore as a temporary alternative?- grab what you like, run like hell and hope to buggery the guy on the door has a gammy leg and a bad throwing arm)

Es

More cracked and cracklings from Finland, I'm afraid. The sound of a happy pig roasting.

I'll get off this nonsense someday...

This is just here because I'm reading Riddley Walker at the moment some songs sound like the Littl Shynin Man the Addom pult in 2 lyk he wuz a chikken.

And I guess I'm attracted to that kind of thing at the moment. Finland seems much further away when you hear these songs - though oddly reminiscent of some of the Somerset villages around here where everyone shares an eyebrow tuft and has an eye that looks both ways.

Spredin circcles indeed.

Es - Track 8 (from Kaikkeuden kauneus ja käsittämättömyys

Taken from KRAAK

Bad Surfers, Down!

For reasons only able to be expressed in mime, I spent a significant part of today trying to work out the lyrics to The Butthole Surfers' Graveyard from Locust Abortion Technician. I didn't do very well; only got as far as "Here I am in the graveyard" but it gave me a beatific serenity that confused my immediate peers into thinking I'd contracted bird flu.

I also dimly remembered a Yeovil band called Backstreet Abortion Technicians (BAT) that passed around the entrails and alleyways back in the mid 80s. But that could have been a bad dream.

On the subject, an ex-member of much-discussed (well, here) diss - seminated Yeovil band King Mong contacted me by e-mail asking me to take down the demo track I put up a few posts back. Despite my claims to co-ownership (vigorously denied through the spectacular abuse of emoticons) Mr Mong insisted that any further tracks posted should be accompanied by a link to his Pay-Per-Play service.

Naturally, I've been desiring media whoredom for quite some time but this isn't quite what i meant so I replied that my head felt like a bucket of cumin and told him to sod off.

The emoticon that followed had to be breathed to be believed.

Here's The Buttholes doing what they do best.

The Butthole Surfers - Graveyard (live)

Ramases III

Little glacial and Silver Mt Zion for my usual tastes (prefer dirt n smoke n flames n whiplash n mess) but a fellow blogger sent me an MP3 of Ramases III, apparently from the Foxglove release Parsimonius...

Ramases III - When the bombs drop hold me close

Secondly, someone recommended the (Australian) Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood to me the other day but I haven't been able to find much about them... anyone like to keep me informed? Good? Bad? Indifferent? C'mon Kek you've probably been to see them at the Johnson Hall during the late 70s when they supported Hawkwind, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Frank Sidebottom...

Glide

Ex-Bunnyman Will Sergeant's Glide project plays a kind of happy Summerfuzz techno that seems destined to shy away from the darker, dystopian vistas that characterise seriousnessness, good taste and intelligence in techno/grime/dubstep/electronica at the moment and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. There's always time for sub-Ballardian monstrosities and Burroughs wordpox but, with Summer just around the corner I reckon I'll be playing this happy bunny more than the latest audio nasty from the techno-slums of Chislehurst or Emersham.

You know who you are.

Glide - Spirit

Glide - Gunmachine

Glide - Ipcress

Today me and my two littlest uns went searching in the woods for Gold Dragons and those Dr Who time anti-body thingies on yesterdays show. We found instead a strange circle of flowers and lanterns, hidden just off the main path and did an experimental piece of ritual magic that involved a lot of shouting, some chanting ("Book Elves, where are you?") and climbing up ridiculously steep cliff faces (quite Crowley, I thought as I munched on a Penguin) but the day came to a close around about the time that the conversation turned to Dr Who.

Try explaining to a 7 year old how come Rose saves one person and all hell breaks loose when the Doctor saves hundreds of people all the time all over time and space and nothing happens.

No, I mean it; go and try. There's plenty of 7 year olds still up on the estates. Might save a few cars from the pyre.

Psychic TV Singer Can't Sing Shock!

Psychic TV could sometimes be very sweet, with Genesis sounding like the kindly Uncle at a wedding... (yeah, yeah...who drinks too much Lambrini and then believes his own hype by insisting on singing an improvised Cyrano de Bergerac ode to the happy couple, a song which not until the last verse turns nasty when the same Uncle unsheaths a Japanese fighting fish, starts speaking in tongues and then ties everyone to stakes in the Garden of Earthly Delights, smears them with honey and wedding cake and blows a tiny trumpet to summon the ants....)

The bit in Japan Boy where Genesis starts gargling for no particular reason mid-verse is a little odd but it's the kind of thing that occasionally makes me return to the old red n black mid 80s albums even when the only thing I should still like about them is the design concept and the fact that they got Norris McWhirter, the world's freakiest twin, interested for a little while.

Psychic Tv - Japan Boy

When singers who can't sing stop primal screaming/Gristlizing and start doing, well,this kind of thing you sense they've lost perspective somehow, sense they've somehow forgotten that they can't sing, that acclaim and/or raw fame has touched too many nerves and now they don't know which ones are twitching or how to turn them off.

But with Genesis, who knows?

Requiem for a Dream

The Film has a bleak, glitchy beauty; oversaturated colours swapping with muted tones of grey-black and brown. The characters are forced into sleep-deprived wastes and forced into admiring each others blim-burns and abcesses, dallying just far enough into Heroin-chic before reversing and sending everything into beautifully shot nevermore.

The ending is shocking and sad in a way very few other film-makers (and virtually no Hollywood bunnies) even aspire to, making Hubert Selby Jr's ever-bleak, one eye open prose spin from the screen. It's one of the best, if not the best drug movies (I'm excepting Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ;))- pushing it's users down drains and into vacant lots and TV rent-back schemes. If anything, it's better than the book - how many films can you say that about?

But this isn't about the film because the most shocking thing about Requiem for a Dream is that Clint (Beaver Patrol) Poppie comes on all Michael Nyman on the soundtrack:

Clint Mansell - Lux Aeterna

Now I loved Pop Will Eat Itself - their James Brown bitchathon "Not Now James; we're busy!" was a perfectly timed anti-everything anthemn that caught the zeitgeist just when everyone was about to start clubbing funky drummers around the chops (and, let's face it, it was amazingly prescient; a terrible portent of things to come for the Godfather of Hyperbole) but you'd hardly expect that Clint, a man who once needed a Grebo Guru, to start churning out indie-classical.

I hear Foetus is doing the new Disney, with Lydia Lunch voicing a crazy cat called Minxie. Zev is currently under contract to sound-style the latest Aardman Animation. Whitehouse have been pulled in to develop the score to Runaway Bride 2: Still Running while The Bodines have teamed up with Yeovil supergroup The Carnations (later the massively misnomered The Beat Hotel) for a series of Eagles covers on the latest Sean Penn miserablepic.

Times have changed. Next thing you know we'll get Surgical Penis Klinik's Graeme Revell called in to score the latest crappy Hollywood...

Oh.

Kemialliset Ystävät: Chemical Children

For those of you put off by yesterday's descent into Finnish kraut disco-space here's a few tracks by the more typical Finnish scenestars Kemialliset Ystävät



These lack sheen in almost every dimension, soaring away from space and heading instead downwards into the earth, a pixified and mischievious version of a Doug McClure film...

The Kemis (as they've never been known) are not dark folk in a Sol Invictus red-in-tooth-and-claw way but compose in the half-light, refusing to be rooted into a typical song structure, occasionally swanning off into note clusters and descensions that appear uttetly lost in the woods until re-composing and re-combining into something approaching narrative coherence...

They chant like mad monks (Ra Ra...) and mumble like the Schizo pups on the Happy Bus (off, as they used to say around here, to the Vale*), pluck and slide over each other, lett unexpected electronics occasionally burst through, play lightly with (thankfully un cod-pieced) Jethro Tull flutes and then top things off with extended Chandra drones, ethereal wails and moans and chiming acoustic guitars.

The kind of beauty that you have to look for, admittedly but beauty nonetheless.

Note to self: Jesus that sounds crap, these Finnish things are sending you off with the Pixies of Verbosity (a little village near Milverton, just outside Taunton). Apologise wholeheartedly and get the hell out of there for awhile.

Kemialliset Ystavat - Wow va pitsi

Kemialliset Ystavat - Kelmeja

Kemialliset Ystavat - Kelsomiinannaama

Stole these off The Wire - apologies if any of the track titles are utterly skewed.

Anyone out there any idea what the fellows are on about? I get the feeling that a lot of the titles are jokes at the expense of earnest Brits, looking for a scene to get excited about...

And, yes; of course. How could I not.


*if you remember Tone Vale Psychiatric Hospital then you were probably never there

Ratto Ja Lehtisalo

More dementeds from Finland...

Unnerving in the same way as being confronted by enthusiastic but friendly visitors from Sirius B are Circle side project Rättö ja Lehtisalo, which take their cue from 80s space-Hawkwind electronicals and stir in some almost Neu-ish motorik krautrock...simmering gently into a faintly europop stew...

This is not typical of Circle and the rest of the Jewelled Antler like Finnish drone/urfolk/Dada/Lokki bitches in that the sound is bright and clear and disco rather than steeped in woodsfolk and fire crackles but it's still kind of affecting in a Fluxblog kind of way... Kraftwerk are perhaps the nearest this really comes though lacking the steely, glacial determination of those fellows...

Oh I don't know. Just have a listen. Maybe, like me, you'd prefer it on the third listen if the vocals were tuned down a little lower or drenched in Moravian babble...

Ratto ja Lehtisalo - Valonnopeus

Ratto ja Lehtisalo - Lentava Santeenvarjo

BZZTT!!! BLEEP!! BZZZZTTT!!!

In response to Kek-W's recent insectoid theme...

Couldn't resist the excuse to do a spotlight on the mighty Wasp synthesiser - British- made budget monophonic synth that was one of several machines that drove the imagination of the post-punk electronic innovators. Designed by Chris Huggert (who also built the OSCar) at EDP (Electronic Dream Plant) in Oxfordshire, the Wasp was intended as an affordable alternative for those starving musicians who couldn't afford a Moog or ARP. Costs were cut by housing the Wasp in a light-weight plastic case and non-moving touch-sensitive keyboard (the keys were delineated by a plastic sticker that eventually wore away from repeated use!) and 'cheating' by using digital oscillators and filters (so it's not really an analogue synth). Tinny little built-in speaker reveals EDP's intention to sell the Wasp to the home market. It went on to sell more than any other synth until Yamaha's DX-7. Other products in the range included The Gnat (a cut-down version of The Wasp) , The Hornet (cut-down version of The Gnat that never actually made it into production) and The Spider sequencer, which could all be linked-up using EDP's own interface system. As the advert states, upon it's release the Wasp could be purchased for an unbelievably cheap £199. Incidently, doesn't the artwork look like an early Dave Gibbons piece?

Thomas Leer & Robert Rental built their 1979 album "The Bridge" using just two Wasps and a Spider, plus some guitars. This album never ceases to amaze me. I wrote a bunch of stuff about it once before, so won't start frothing at the mouth again here.

Thomas Leer & Robert Rental - Connotations

On the downside, the Wasp also provided an entry-point for Nick Rhodes, The Eurhythmics and Thomas 'bloody' Dolby to inflict the world with their nonsense. But clearly, there was something special about the Wasp sound - why else would money-bags stadium fillers like Pink Floyd and Jean Michel Jarre invest in them?

I've never owned or used a Wasp. Sometimes I look at my Minimoog and think; "what the hell am I doing with this piece of crap? Anything endorsed by Keith Emerson and Rick Wakemen must be shit, surely?!" (but then I play it and it's feels so fucking good). I should be keeping the DIY spirit alive with a Wasp (although could I have the Deluxe version with the proper keyboard, please?)

Books

In response to kek's shout... the book meme that's running like Ebola through the nether regions of the super-information webway...

1) The Fahrenheit 451 Scenario.

Since I'm unfortunately exactly as intelligent as I look (and I look a little retarded) I'm still not entirely sure what this question meant so I'll go along with a book I'd like to see burned:

Automated Alice by Jeff Noon because, having read Vurt and Pollen I thought it was going to be really good and it just wasn't; it sort of aspires to be cyber-(K)Dick cool and misses almost every mark, ending up dull and inspid and lifeless; the literary equivalent of the grey John Major on Spitting Image.

A book I'd like to see plucked from the fire and saved for all eternity is the Comte de Lautreamont's Maldoror because 100 years on it's still the creepiest, most surreal, downright uneccesary novel in any language and everyone ought to have the chance to be appalled by it. Besides, my favourite literary genre is the Sex with Sharks and Shopping novel and this guy practically invented it.

2) Have I ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes. The girl from the Battle of the Planets cartoon. Sissy Hankshaw from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Lila from Lila: an enquiry into morals though the misnomer of a subtitle put me off a little bit.

Almost every girl character is every book from the ages of around 13 to now figures a little bit here, except perhaps the one in The Wasp Factory

3) The last book I bought?

Rudy Rucker - The Fourth Dimension (and how to get there) - a sort of guided tour through theories and ideas about the existence of other dimensions, mixing in time-travel, excerpts from novels, poems, Ouspensky etc. It's all done with a feather-light touch (my science generally has to come feather light - i nearly always read about three quarters of science books (especially Quantum Physics ones) - stopping when I get to the phrase: "This is best explained by the following equation..."

The kind of book that makes you feel a little cleverer and helps me understand why the Science bods at my workplace never seem to see any daylight.

4) Last book I read?

Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve - multi-breasted desert Goddesses, gender shenanigans, road races and ridiculous plots combine to form a squelchy adventure story for the kind of people who seriously think about what's called in these parts "popping an Orridge.

5) Currently Reading?
Re-reading Riddley Walker because it used to be one of my favourite books and I like to check my memory every now and then.

6) Five Desert Island Books

Five is about 73 too few but...

Jonathan Meades - Pompey

Everytime I read this it makes me laugh and it has the best pygmy hunt ever committed to paper. And any book with sympathetic cannibalism is okay by me.

Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicron

Nice n big n bouncy: a multi-channelled adventure into Hacking, Cryptography, World War 2 and big business... (no, honestly, it's amazing). One of the only books I've read that I genuinely didn't want to finish.

Michel Houellebecq - Atomised

Nasty, spiteful, bitter, rollicking: sort of like Erasmus with knobs in. Like meeting up with unsuccessful friends after many years, this makes me feel better about myself.

William Burroughs - The Western Lands

My favourite Burroughs, mostly because it was the first thing by him I read and because I read it while pretending to be an office cleaner at Westlands Helicopters Ltd. Love them door dogs. One of the few novels that has so many ideas you don't realise that there's a gaping hole where the plot should be.

David Keenan - England's Hidden Reverse

Coil, Nurse With Wound, Current 93. Because if I'm on a desert island it would be nice to imagine some music. This book is all the better (actually, I've worked it out - it's exactly 7 times better) for completely obliterating the dull Death in June angle.

7) Three people to pass this quiz onto

Mmm... Farmer Glitch; Worlds of Possibility and Nick Gutterbreakz though am I alone in worrying like hell that it's already been passed onto these guys and that this will therefore seem like a ActuallyIhaven'treadyourbloginawhile slight?

Boards of Canada

After a teensy bitchfest in the Gutter I thought it was time for a few words on Boards of Canada... Yes, the fellows plop out some faintly affecting scratches and bleeps and washes, yes they dabble inconsequentially with the occult and mnemonics, yes they make all the right squeaks and noises re: album covers and track titles but... i don't know, to me there's just something missing, an odd absence of content that nevertheless makes me keep buying their records for the simple reason that I figure the next one is gonna blow me away. To me, the sinister/innocent duality that they seem to be going for just doesn't pay off, at least not anymore than your average knob twiddler - to my mind there's plenty of people/bands out there doing similar things in more interesting ways.

I've been trying to see more, feeling that all the praise they get must mean I've missed something fundamental here, something elemental even but... I just don't think it's there...

Comments invited and required for my peace of mind.

And, for those who love the band but haven't bought any of their records (I bet there's loads of you), here's a few tracks to sweeten the critical blow:
Smokes Quantity
Sixtyniner
Chinook (from Maxima)

Have to say, I haven't heard the last two myself yet...maybe the secret is just around the corner...

Or maybe the answer could be found here. I guess David Koresch lives on in BOC fans...

Synaesthesiasticals

I normally like 'round' electronic music; sounds that come in bubbles and pops, sounds that curl up and die (Hairdresser sounds), sounds that open out into liquids. 'Square' sounds have never really been my thing, it's one of the reasons why I never really got into the glitch / drill n bass end of things: i bought the records but I haven't obsessed about any of them...too many edges.

Most of Orbital is round, though they can streak some corners around. Coil is nearly always round, as is most of Throbbing Gristle (though there are live moments especially that are full of corners). Whitehouse is mostly squarer than hell. Nurse With Wound is often square too, though they can also be rounder than almost anyone. Stuff like Shpongle is always round (BTW interview with these guys coming soon) and even most of Hallucinogen (which is edgier but still round). Goa trance is almost by definition round while anything on Planet Mu is almost by definition 'square'. Didgeridoo is almost round, while Drukqs is almost square. Kraftwerk is full of round corners.

You get the drift.

I don't really like too many corners in my music, nothing too crunchy, nothing that puts pictures of set squares and kitchen units into my head as I listen.

For this reason, I've never really understood things like Venetian Snares, despite having a few of their albums and trying hard to like them; it seemed music made entirely of edges, music hewn from hard cloth with those crinkle-cut scissors kids fight over at school...

But, recently, I've found myself warming to it (or, more likely, it's warming to me*); as if there's been a small evolutionary step onwards, breaking the ever-so-slightly ouroborotic, fungi-obsessed paddling that has characterised the majority of my listening...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I don't think this period in my life will last too long (last time I just bought a whole load of stuff from Mille Plateux which I've played about once) but, for now, I'm all cornered up:

Venetian Snares - The Children Are All Dead

The Modern day king of edges; if he could match his compositional style to 'round' sounds, he'd be my favourite artist. But I guess that's missing the point.

Atari Teenage Riot - Revolution Action

Plenty of edges from these sweaty fellahs; corners all over the show. Like being beaten with Lenin Mirrors.

Machine Drum - Floss

Machine Drum is not the edgiest music around (the corners here are tiny) but shows that even fading in and out voices (often round) can sometimes be edgy as hell.


*If I have to explain this then you're probably not interested