Solarised Women

Cloudboy's def. on to something, I reckon: what this blog needs is more psychedelic/solarised photographs of women.

Bombs Away

Women that Yell - Part Four

Member of the Nordic anti-rock group Spunk and half of the sonic duo Fe-mail , Maja Ratkje’s vocal gymnastics confound all belief...

º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸, Trio º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø
(dwld expired)

This track, taken from her 2002 solo album – Voice is just one example from a release crammed to the brim with a bewildering scope of ideas. The startling dexterity of her voice is breathtaking. Original then and still packing the punches four years later...

Indulge your senses


Cuddly bonus: Jacob´s toy -
from Fe-mail’s 2004 CD release
Syklubb fra Hælvete.

A Picture of Jackie Chan made from Seeds...

(Artist unknown - but I'll be v. pleased to hear from you, whoever you are)

And here's the gatefold...

Yeah, yeah, downloads are fun and all that, but in this case theres' no substitute for the real thing...

Electronic Toys

Nothing even remotely hauntological about this and all the better for it. Heimlich.

While waiting for the meaty Rar download,why not go over to Rottenmeats, where I've been spouting a little today about Coil covers and Matmos.

Women that Yell - Part Three

Zos Kia was an early group of John Gosling, involving John Balance (Balance often going by the name Legion) and a post-punkette - Min. I think they realised one cassette and few 12 inches but they were mainly a live incarnation before they finally transformed into the duo Coil (although both bands seemed to co-exist quite happily together)

This trk was recorded live at the Berlin Atonal Fest of 83 and appears on the Transparent CD (1997)… The female vox is Min and you have to wait almost the whole trk before your ears are blasted by the most terrifying recorded scream you’ll ever hear.

The more dedicated Coil fans amongst you will recognise the backing for Min’s vocals…There’s also lots of tape hiss as this was pre-digital, but it sort of gives a “carpet of snakes” atmosphere that seems purposefully integral.

Violation/Rape (dwld expired)


Min - wonder what happened to her?

A year later Coil would record their landmark ‘How to destroy Angels’
and the shape of things to come was firmly set.

...........................................................................................................................

Postscript: Found this on Uncarved.org which gives an intimate insight into the origins of this track

One of the records was by Zos Kia. Zos Kia were an offshoot of Psychic TV and - so I have just found out- of Coil. For their very early existence Coil [before the split with Gen. P. Orridge / PTV] and Zos Kia were an overlapping project.

I was doing/ living what I had only imagined as an impossible teenage dream ten years earlier.

At the same time the Zos Kia record connected with adult realities. the A side was called ‘Rape’. It was written by Min. It described in stark detail her experience of being raped aged 13/14 in the Australian outback.

It was and is shocking, almost unbearable to listen to. [Min only listened to the finished song once- ‘ it was an exorcism’ she told me].

If a point marks my transition from teenage to adult, it took place when I was 23 and first heard Min describe the rape. We were both lying fully clothed in bed [she lived in a freezing cold squat and it was winter]. It was an encounter with a reality which under cut what ever ‘illusions’ i may have had about the world. I remember her crying and myself unable to say or do anything to comfort her… what can be said or done in such circumstances?

So being able to help Min exorcise the experience through the record was ? An act, however insufficient. We pressed up 1000 copies, but very few people bought them.

…Min is now a qualified Speech and Language therapist working in London with a case load of 93 children, most of whom do not have English as a first language.

Alistair - for the new moon 19th April 2004
2004/04/19 @ 11:50 am

Women that Yell - Part Two

Ahh, it had to be someone of great originality to pair up with Mr Stapleton and Diana Rogerson fulfilled all expectations. Delightfully foul-mouthed and with a vocal style that had a ‘missed yer medication’ vibe the formally named Chrystal Belle Scrodd was a great addition to the NWW armoury.

Taken from the Beastings comp from the long defunct World Serpent label, the selected track was a toss up between the musical carnage of ‘Reach for your Gun’ and the dirty minded ‘Cradle your Snatch’ but the Karl Blake guitar and the crazy sax scrawl on the latter, ended all indecision.

Disc rot has taken hold of my copy (being minted by PDO) and it has acquired a holiday bronze celebrities would kill for - lucky the music hasn’t suffered yet, so enjoy the harpy richness of Cradle your Snatch. (dwld expired)

And Start Again? It's Up... R.I.P.

A phonecall a few weeks ago about collaborating on a book. An throwaway comment about becoming a photoblog. The fucking with the template, scratching at the code: blogger's self-harm. The offering of gifts (even dullards like Levi-Strauss coulda recognised the laying to rest of the King rituals, or at least the Haile-Selassie parallels) as a last wave to the far-off lifeboats and now Psychbloke is gone.

Women That Yell - Part One

That dash of Annie Anxiety over the weekend made me realise that I just love hysterical female vocals, so I’ve decided to dedicate some blog time to my favourites over here at idiot's guide…

First up is that sweet Japanese siren – Hanayo and a track from her collaboration CD – Gift released on an off-shoot of DHR – Geist.
Les Sucettes by Candie Hank / Hanayo (dwld expired) is the number and boy that girl can screech. That distorted no-wave techno, crashing against a cute girly sing song ... until exploding feedback flings her voice around like some sadomasochistic plaything... just the thing to worry the neighbours.

As for the rest of the album read this old-time review of mine...
(there's also some frustratingly short streaming fragments (30sec) over at last fm)


Gift - Hanayo available on Geist 013cd

This ex Geisha girl turned musician/song-tress graces the cover dressed as a Hitler Youth lying back on crumpled sheets, a trickle of blood seeping from a nostril, an eye blackened. Almost like a victim of domestic violence or some sexual role-play, her seductive gaze remains frozen with expectancy- something that sums the album up beautifully, for beneath that thin veneer of a childlike voice there flows an interesting undercurrent that dwells on the shady side of life

Throughout the albums 13 tracks she suggestively implies and unpredictably darts from whispered seduction to orgasmic outrage all with a angelic conviction as if butter wouldn't melt...or maybe itâs just me? For example the opening track 'Sometime a girl loves a boy' all rolling piano and cute delivery sounding like a sweet ballad but when listening closely reveals a less than innocent perspective.

Every track is a collaboration with a different artists, making for a varied listen, to which Hanayo's voice has a chameleon-like flexibility which seems almost instinctive - second nature. In places this verges on abstract mania as on 'Les Sucettes' where her lyrics turn to grasping screams or 'Omisoshilu (miso soup)' with the noise master - Merzbow, where her voice is transformed into bubbling static and radio tuning hysteria sliding between stations.

As you may have guessed she doesn't go in for the stylistic treadmill, and just when you think it all left field experiment, she slips in the perfect pop song,ISDN - a robotically vocorded voice to a electro click n' skip guaranteed to get you gyrating round the room.

The variety found here has a very wide spectrum indeed and in complete contrast to isdn , Track 11 is all sibilant snakelike whispers to an equally dark semi-industrial soundscape provided by Christoph De Babalon. Hanayo sounds her most frightening - a black widow to which suitors will lose their heads in a post congical bite - the food for love literally. There's even a slice of pure Eurovision with 'Banzai Neoteny' which is all techno pump and sugar candy vocals.

By far the best track must be 'Kimigayo' with stillppusteya - ghostly synths and Japanese poetry drifting like cherry blossom in breathy chops and sluggish over-dubs. Later this is reversed set in disembodied loops - experimental minimalism at it's best.

The whole album ends with a hidden track, a cover version of that 90's hit 'Joe La Taxi' mutated into a Gus Gus like dance number...Perplexed - don't be, just enjoy the ride...

Unique and needing a wider audience, this knocks that delightful Icelandic pixie for six...complacency will never be Hanayo's thang!

Chords and notes don't mean a thing .....

Goes without saying really - the Farmer Glitch household vote for bestest of da punkiness goes to ATV - and Action Time and Vision ... lovely stuff !! Worth the price of admission alone for the superb live jam on the B-Side 'Another Coke'...

As a result of this post - happily sitting here listening to my copy of 'The Image Has Cracked'



man oh man - Still Life / Nasty Little Lonely / Viva La Rock'N'Roll - shit this stuff still sounds damn good .....

we don't care.....

of course Jode and I are going for 'Pretty Vacant'......

"Zip Nolan, Highway Patrolman"

Favourite punk single? Far too many to list in one life-time, but anything by Swell Maps is never far from the centre of my heart and this single ("Zip Nolan, Highway Patrolman" (Named after the UK comic character) by side-project The Cult Figures) def figures somewhere in my top 20, maybe:



Comes complete w/ anarchic free-noise b-side "Zip Dub"...mentally re-evaluating the 'Maps 25+ years on, their brand of free-wheelin' experimentalism makes them a sort of second cousin (by marriage) to Krautrock and a Third Uncle to the 'rockier' end of the Finnish 'Free-Folk' 'Tinuum, particularly the Avarus/Maniacs Dream axis. Ditto: their day-glo DIY Cut und Paste graphics make them a sorta hybrid of post-Warholian Nu Pop-Art and a John Hartfield-esque Punk'd-out photocopier assault on old Stingray annuals...again, I see echoes of their visuals in Finnish 7-inch covers and all sortsa no-fi US Out-Rock fall-out...they were born between generations/genres, the poor things...Gawd Bless 'em, I say.

Pretty much everything they ever did, even demos & out-take comps, comes firmly recommended by me and if you find you don't like 'em, then...well, tuff.

Funny enough...

My favourite punk single apart from the over played (but brilliant) Anarchy in the UK and the ever popular Hong Kong Garden by the Banshees would be another crass related release - Annie Anxiety - barbed wire halo - there's nothing more alluring / terrifying than a unhinged girly.

Hello Horrors (dwld expired)

the b side's slightly more pop...

Bloody Revolutions

A question because of an argument I had the other day: what's your favourite punk single? Mine is the Bloody Revolutions / Persons Unknown split 7" by Crass / Poison Girls, mostly because of the Crass side though the Poison Girls track is fun because she sounds just like David Tibet from Current 93 on one of his Lucifer Over London rants.

As someone who missed Punk by being an unhip six year old when the Pistols released Anarchy In The Uk, Bloody Revolutions sounds like I imagined Punk sounded like, when I'd just heard the name and some of the artwork. It's four or five songs in one, leaping about all over the place, the threads sewn together by appropriations of 'iconic' Brit chestbeating music that should seem obvious (Crass weren't afraid of easy targets) but still manages to sound unhomely and anarchic.

Crass never seem to be given much credit for their actual music. Most writers seem to focus understandably on the polemic, some on the graphics with the music taking backstage, an irritating memory burn.

Thing is, Crass echo much of the musically revered industrial preoccupations: tape manipulations, found sound, cut-ups - - - ((Throbbing Gristle seem to be coming from distantly familiar angles and it's no surprise, for instance to see Steve Ignorant appearing with Current 93 a little while into the future)) - - - and weave some interesting sidelines into their music... one day I'm going to take the beautiful strings and static of the first 5 seconds of this track and I'm gonna make an immense Chaostrophy out of it...

Also not often mentioned is that Crass had some good tunes (in the same way that Big Black wrote good tunes) and this release is full of them, parts that sound almost kraut, as if Crass were one step away from locking into a groove-

Imagine if they'd managed to get Jaki Liebezeit on board; there's already something a little hippy about Crass, just around the edges, in amongst the radio static and the girly singing, just before Steve Ignorant starts charging... I'd love it if they re-formed and went all Amon Duul on us...though it's much more likely that they'd go...

HipHop.

Just replace those martial drums with breakbeats... add a little beatslurring... get that bassline to bounce just a little more (Crass basslines are always bouncy)...

Steve Ignorant is a proto-rapper, a ranter and raver, a ragga-mystic.

Someone's bound to have picked up on this before but if only Brit rappers had gone towards Steve Ignorant rather than LL Cool J we might have got to Grime a little earlier and not had to deal with the whole Derek B, Hijack, Demon Boyz axis that seemed a waste of everyone's time.

Towards the end of this single, the doubletracked vocals point the way towards a British Urban music that never was - and this from some nice punk folks who lived on a farm... I'm still utterly disappointed that hiphop in Britain never managed to attach itself to people who might actually have taken it in some interesting directions away from the USA model. Yeah, there's Timezone but where did it go from there? Didn't anyone knock on Mark E Smith's door? Or even Spizz Energi?

I guess we got MC Foetus but he was Australian.

And then... well, there's a section around 3 mins where they play out a kind of pots n pans freakfolk, not unlike the recent Vashti Bunyan/Animal Collective EP and this seems to knot together loose strands of musical rebellion from various eras - something Chumbawamba made a little more explicit in their English Rebel Songs 1381-1914.

The folk/ rebel songs link was important and attractive to my teenage self because I wanted Punk to seem like a thrilling resonance, an inevitable coming together of ideas rather than a hastily thought out McClaren media coup. I imagined Punk as sounding like the artwork, as if it'd be a fusing of trends, a radically mixed bag, a set of mutated artefacts. Before I heard a single Punk and Disorderly compilation I imagined Punk was unplaceable and alien not the nasty pub rock and sneer I kept getting... it seemed like a big bad mistake until I heard Crass and The Fall and Throbbing Gristle.

As for the polemic...

Crass might seem a little, er, utopian in hindsight (and why is that always used as a negative quality in thinking?) but it's still somehow soothing and rhapsodic to remember believing, just for a second, that this kind of mere music could actually change something...

Most things Crass released make me want to sing along like a burnt puppy. Some things make me shiver.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the best Punk single of all time:

Crass - Bloody Revolutions

Hydra

The best raised chair, lazer-gunning, cack-wheeled vehicle I had at my disposal. Imagine this monkeyshin racing towards yer crappy Luke Skywalker figure...

And while you're there, have a listen to this:

Steven Jesse Bernstein - No No Man (Part One)

"Midight and the sunglasses twirl..."

And we've all had that "Face like a butcher's board" moment.

Micronauts: Time Traveller

On a heavy dopamine and nostalgia trip right now. Just how cool were the micronauts?

Yahowa 13

First heard these mad munties by accident after buying the wrong album at a car boot. For years, it stayed at the back of my wardrobe, collecting skin shards amongst the discarded Shaker Maker Monster moulds, Letraset skims and Maskatron bits.

I'd given it a quick listen but it just wasn't my kind of thing. Too hippy by half. I owned a Sex Pistols bootleg, bought from a bargain bin in Butlins - no really - called Never Trust A Hippy and I took that as gospel for a while.

I didn't play it again for six or seven years, despite the fact that for some reason I'd got it out of the wardrobe just before going to University and it'd stayed, unplayed, at the back of one of my record boxes for the entire course.

I played it again while living in Brighton after seeing someone I thought was the main beardy weirdy behind Yahowa 13 lying, burnt red, on the beach by Hove Leisure Centre. I guess it probably wasn't him but it had got me curious so I went back and played the record again, hearing it with new, drug-tingled, ears. The years between stretched away, my childish punk snottishness dissolved and reassembled into a wider plain, a bigger picture and an expanded soundfield that now included everything from La Monte Young through Cathy Dennis to Kevin Ayers and Merzbow. I listened long and hard, right the way through the night, conjuring the shaman i am...

And it was still much crapper than it ought to be.


Go here and see for yourself.

Gurnings

In the dag nasty village of Servile near Honiton at the back-end of the last millenium, Morph and Mindy played a gig at the Retreat And Asunder which ended with 3 close-miked badgers invading the stage, their subsonic snuffling, snooting, howls and hooting eventually cleaving the audience in half - those kneeling in supplication and generally digging the sounds (example: "Kinda Fennesz, kinda Nautical Almanac...") and those who'd come for the customary last song apple n flour n white noise fight who left disgruntled and disorientated (though not as disgruntled and disorientated as the badgers) to trainspot Come Org covers in a cafe across the road.

The Servile gig, ostensibly a triumphant homecoming for the all conquering Morph and Mindy, became a watershed for the duo, who decided then and there to ditch the easy world of the multi-million dollar noise music festival circuit and head off in a brand new, more dangerous direction - the world of folk-pop.

"We were tired of the same old mutilated penis collages and bone-tingles," said Morph in an interview with American GQ. "It was all too chocolate box. Sony were throwing money at us, just for Mindy's blood gargling tapes and Ramleh and Robbie Williams kept coming round the studio with their crew, trying to get us to chew up their mastertapes. It was sort of pathetic and scary all at once."

The duo's latest album then is a move away from their noise roots and into far darker, most experimental pop terrain. Spindle and The Begnut Tree is a concept album of sorts with a theme that "Explores the role of wood in the beginnings of the world".

The duo disappeared into the studio for 9 long years (i.e. 7 years) only emerging recently with a brand new album and new 'pop' sound.

This track, due to be the album's first single, is a churning meta-pop ballad complete with Orca breath, two types of recorders, the primitive circuit-bending of a childs electronic bicycle trumpet and very silly pagan chanting.

Morph and Mindy - Gurnings
(a Yousendit...)
(from the album Spindle and The Bregnut Tree)

The Importance Of 'De'

When you're young and impressionable things can go so wrong. I spent the best part of 1985 listening to Diamond Life trying to find hidden messages of deviance and depravity.

Listen instead to load of Sonic Youth covers

The Wild Boys

Re-reading this at the moment, partly because of things like "You touch him you get sores itch you scratch spread sores feel good scratch more scratch self away" which is probably about the algebra of need or something but seems more or less exactly to echo my thoughts about work right now and partly because it's my fourth favourite bookcover ever.

To celebrate, here's my fourth favourite disco track:

Donna Summer - Wasted

And my fourth favourite Coil track featuring Marc Almond:

Coil - Dark Age Of Love

(both YouSendIt conks)

Actually, I miscounted. Wasted is my third favourite disco track. Sorry for any inconvenience. I hope it didn't spoil your viewing too much.

Pink Elephants On Parade

...Calgon... Calgon... Calgon...normally songs send me to a world that forgets there is someone in a studio singing. Normally, I forget that there's an engineeer furiously waving their arms at the levels, a blank-eyed hanger on grinning like an ocelot at coke burns, a multi-chinned session muso picking at their nails with a Fender pick.

Normally, the music is immersive but some songs have the opposite effect. Advertising jingles, for instance, can't help but evoke a kind of eidetic false memory of thin white dorks banging out 5 min tunes in a studio in Hackneyed, of pure-bred StageSchool hounds baying at the mic, of (you get the picture).

Sun Ra's version of Disney 'classic' Pink Elephants on Parade is like this. I try to see the kaleidoscopic visuals, the psyched-out whirls and eddies, the cosmic runs, the star shpongled banners etc etc etc but all I get as soon as I hear it is Sun Ra's badass mudders in Native American Space Gear, sitting around with blank expressions, waiting for Sun Ra to baton-twirl them into action, waiting for their time to parp...

I can see their sad, puffy, little faces, sitting on stools, eye rolling to each other, itching under their Space headresses, adjusting and readjusting their jumbo Kaftan cuffs, trumpets hanging at their sides like withered limbs...

When they start singing this image gets worse and worse...overpoweringly like an odd Cosby show episode or something killed from the Prince Of Bel Air's College hoedown...I can't shake it, this dull clamour...it's ike I'm actually there retroscending all over the place, remote-viewing a scene of pure soul carnage.

And that's why I like this so much.

Sun Ra - Pink Elephants (on Parade)
A Yousendit File

Princess Superstar

This song makes me smile whenever I play it. Sometimes that's enough.

(FILE NOW GONE:CHASTENED - CHASTISED-CRISPLY ADMONISHED)

It also makes me think of Grant Morrison, something about the way she spews things out and gets obsessed with turning into cereal reminds me of the first arc of The Filth and I like appropriate uses of robotic voices; somethings work better in place rather than out.

Finally, I like the way she says 'weird'.

I'll be around sooner or later with some fruity free-folk or some heroin-jazzed harpsichordidelica, maybe a little deathrock or some nasty noisebutts but I'm one of the happy people at the moment so I'm just gonna let the Princess soak me like a weak Heroin drink on a hot Summer's day.