The Whorling Of M.

Apparently recorded in the down-time between recordings and placed inconspicuously in the gaps between the end of the last track ('Mono-lithic not Monolithic, Simon!) and the general CD splutter on their Cawls And Repose CD-R, here is the once 'lost' (as Justin reminds us: "Nothing is ever lost; everything we've ever done or ever will do is up here...") 1 minute 23 version of The Whorling of M. previously only found as a 23 minute 1 extended misture on the Broken Face Charlottes, Harlottes and Car-lots compilation.

I prefer the 1.23 version, myself. The other one goes on a bit.

The (Other) Door - The Whorling of M.

A Yousendit is musichaeological hypnobeaming

Remote Viewing

An odd superstition perhaps but I never bought the original version of The Remote Viewer because, well, because I didn't like having everything Coil came out with... I liked having something in reserve, to delay the moment, defer the gratification... to stop myself getting too used to the mechanisms of their sound; to protect myself against sudden abandonment...

To have something to look forward to in case... Well, in case the worst happened and they split up suddenly.

The other worst was never imagined, of course. Still not really imagined and the terrible feeling that there will never be another 'new' Coil album has sent me spiralling to find a new kind of kick, something equivalent which, frankly, I haven't found yet...

So I kept something back to buy in moments of abject mucical anomie, when all else was failing and then.... well the buggers only re-released it with some new tracks...

In fact they re-released The Remote Viewer and Black Antlers, both in newly remastered forms and with an extra half-disc of supergranulated extras I couldn't resist...

Both albums are better than The Ape Of Naples - Black Antlers is much more like the real thing, soft sounds pulling themselves in and out of holes, Balance at the helm, his voice carrying the tumbles and interlocks and sweeps and gurgles through (the sound of a plastic bag crackling and a door opening)... and The Remote Viewer sounds like where the other Coil might have gone...

If one Coil is, basically, a kind of terribly degraded pop, veering near the end to the kind of stuff I imagined solo Gavin Friday might have done - or should have sounded like - then the Coil of The Remote Viewer, the Equinox Coil is the kind of avant-folk I imagined before the media got hold of avant-folk and made everything folk avant-folk, just because it grew a beard or mentioned an elf... I mean, I love the cosmic whining of Devendra and Newsom, even Circulus (lovely big sword at Green Man, for instance) but they seem very much like folk to me... I can't see where the avant or the psych or even the cosmic comes in...


This second Coil is like folk played by non-folk; folk played by the instruments themselves and the sprites that surround them, floating in electro-magnetic coils of energy, self-adapted and fused with the kind of nature that Dylan Thomas used to talk about - "force(s) that through the green fuse drives the flower" etc

The Remote Viewer sounds really good in a ditch at dusk, looking up as the sky turns to stars and the plant-life starts to wake up for its morning walk. Its impossible to picture the band as the music plays; human images just don't come to mind at all, not even when there's tiny snatches of singing.

It reminds me of almost nothing and I'm gonna miss music like that.

Coil - Remote Viewing 5

A Yousendit ElpHinationary Xperiential Learning Curve

This is one of the extra tracks - the first 3 are the real killers but the extras add new themes and spin around some ideas that could have been.

Daevid gets it off his chest...

his words on the subject of management are priceless...

with an honesty that borders on psychosis


.........................................if

........you're

....................easily

..................................offended

.......just

...........don't

....................................................PRESS

.............................play....(expletives a plenty)



(but how would you know that until you do?)

The sounds of crowds...

Leakage

Had a dream all my music was gone and now I'm sitting in front of the computer contemplating making it happen.

Earth Leakage Trip - No Idea

A Yousendit Retrial after An Unheimlich Moment Of Request

When I say all, I mean everything on my computer, the whole hard drive rather than all my CDs and Records; a dream where everything was as it seemed, nothing was unreal - total clarity and just a single, blinking theme: I come downstairs and find that a virus is slowly wiping out all the MP3 files, one by one...

I can see it still. Tiny digital bits and bytes falling over themselves to get the hell out of there, the screen updating, the little Mac fellahs inside trying to stem the flow and the sodium pumps working overtime...

Big Star - Kangaroo

A Yousendit LovednLOathedallInOne

Can live bootlegs dissolving into George Michael's Faith into Siobhan Donaghy pre-releases into old All Saints remixes into the Rosa Mundi version of 'The Snowman' into Wolfgang Press b-sides into Kemialliset Ystavat scrawls into Kek-inspired Death Chant downloads into Crispin Glover singles into Alligator Shearings into Butthole Surfers intros into old versions of King Mong tunes into old Kim Fowley burns into Big Black bastards into A Hawk and A Hacksaw tumblings into nasty old D.A.F. albums into impossibly autistic Prog records that I'll probably never hear into Nurse With Wound rarities into Blogariddims podcasts...

Everything

going

going

gone.

And once I remembered it was just a dream it left me thinking...

Well, I could, couldn't I?

The Owl's Map

...through a mangle of dire-hard prog, French guy Jordi ("Dur Dur D'Etre Bebe") sings up, dancing like Vanilla Ice, hair spun up into a Douglas Hurd ice-cream cone, eyes scanning the net to download Death To Careless Kids Summer Holiday Specials, featuring a very tired looking Peter Purves (Hyacinth Bucket?)...

A fluttering synthroll on the driveway, A Casiotonic, a FZ-1 with bells on it, modulating its way down the road towards the New World, towards a man in an old TV repair shop, ripping the innards out of old organs and rewiring them to play Wicker Man midi files with bossa nova beats and iceblock synth settings...

...Jordi flops down (still can't control his limbs, they're growing too fast for his mind to keep up with the spatial coordinates), throws the draft excluder across the room and flicks down on the ancient video machine; he's trying to record the soundtrack to Children Of The Stones through an old condenser mic but it's not playing ball... he rubs at the mic head like it's a White Worm and dreams of being eaten by Amanda Donahoe...

In the den, made of old beds and iron, his half-brother is practising Legs Eleven routines and repeating the mantra:

The 80s are more like the 70s than the 70s
The 80s are more like the 70s than the 70s

over and over again, trying to find a rhythm in the text.

...bend, stretch, bend, stretch... he looks out the window from between his own legs; everything inverted, the sky a bubbling red lawn, the grass a stormy sky on which Arthur Machen and his White People are lurking around, fingers on noses, candles at arms length, wishing for night and stalking Pan...

...pipe musick in the near distance, across the hedgerow; Pan is sitting on an artificial hill with a 2 foot sewage pipe through the middle of it in a vague confabulation of a kids sandcastle. Pan is reading the Collected Short Stories of Saki and smiling his tail off: this boy can schmooze...

Ah, Io...

...inside the pipe, rain expected, a small child in a Kids Of Degrassi Street tartan lumberjacket is flipping Top Trump Horror Cards, marvelling at the High Priestess of Zoltan and invoking a time-space shift where suddenly, without warning, the whole era will be condensed into a single Bank Holiday Special Edition of Look Around You...

Under his breath, you can just about hear:

Wake up in the morning, gotta shake this feeling,
I gotta face a day of school.
What's to be afraid of?
I can ask a question, or maybe even bend a rule.
I'm looking for a way so I can fit in,
If there's a way if I can look, then I can win.
I can see I'm not alone, I can face the unknown.
Everybody can succeed, in themselves, you must believe,
Give it a try at Degrassi High.

Degrassi kid grins - he's one of the last of his generation to have bad teeth.



...Pan's piping continues; taken in by Jordi's mic and then played back through a CopyCat and then sent forwards in time to be oscillated and straightened (all the fur stripped off) by Thighpaulsandra, dressed in Mao grey and wearing a Norris McWhirter mask...

Jordi turns the Tv off but finds that even when he unplugs it it's still playing: an endless Mcluhan stream of fastcut Quatermass, Lost episodes of Dr Who and the Tomorrow People episodes, mixed together so fast only the beats are audible; the pauses inbetween frights, the gaps between the language of the characters, between the gulps for air... and through these gaps a little of the future is starting to leak through...

...from nowehere the sound of laughing - the laughers from Coil's Anal Staircase (never a tape of the Hindley-Brady murders, despite what Peel thought) all grown up but having no 'where' to go...

The idea of a Polytechnic seems older than the Sun. What arcane devices might have been activated there?

Yeah, I'm speakin' to you, PCAS boy...

Belbury Poly - Lord Belbury's Folly

A Yousendit Imaginary Spangle Taste

And, yeah, there's probably nothing here that takes you away like Caermaen, on The Willows but then now this sounds less alien because we've come to expect a certain set of soundfiles from Ghost Box and they don't like to disappoint us.

Still, everything about this package - the cover, the sleevenotes (the way they teeter on the brink of parody but never fall off) - warms your buns like a good CDR should. Even the paper feels nice.

And it sounds like other people seem to hear early Boards Of Canada.

Siobhan Donaghy's Transitional Phrasing

Later, in an odd calibration intended as a rebuke but softened by doe-eyed expressionism, Siobhan fought off all the EMI suitors and opened up a new can of wurms.

"Girl dun gut" etc only, this time, the faint embryonic clothes-horse that followed her dutifully (face like a scorched child) spoke up:

"I'll live for longer if you love me."

And this changed her mind for the split-second they needed to sow more weeds into the fillers and start spiking the ballads with off-centre pall-bearing Greek hype.

Siobhan thought longer.

"They'll make a whine out of all of you," they heard her say as she skipped a beat onto the conference table and then belted out her new demixture.

"I... heard something that didn't sound... right," mumbled one of them, his face already greasy from smearing £50 notes across his cheeks and eyes.

She spotted the flaw, managed it. Breaths caught a little; tuberculosis temporarily tickled it's way through the room and down the halls, getting in the throats of one of the T-girls, specially brought in to fend off the Haters and The Hives.

Siobhan held firm, refused to cave and went immediately into the Scorpion Attack Position, awaiting orders from above.

Allhellbrokeloose.

Siobhan Donaghy - Ghosts

A Yousssendit Devianticon via Zeon

No really; this is lovely...

Some things. Kinder. Oh!

I don't understand the feeling word at all. As in 'really really feeling the new Grable Horn / Derdereth split 7". I could be autistic, I reckon but the word seems all wrong to me.

Still, utterly unimpressed by the new Girls Aloud... the studied emptiness and vacancy has been supplanted by a terrible absence. It's trawl-pop, despite the vaguely Croneberg sounding early yelps of 'I've got to heal it up' (or something) - to me it's like there's just too much being done with too little sound, the 'Oh boy"s always sounded tired (and that was the appeal, the apathy, the backend emotions creeping over you like a rash. Or Drew Barrymore) but now they sound earthshocked and dead-eyed, zombies in Vogue, pistol-whipped into another appearance where the PA sucks in more air than it can push out...

As a guide, it resembles slightly a much less fun version of this.

All of this makes me think that perhaps this is a sneaked-out facimile (trawled from the X Factor carpet sludge) to spin the bloggers heads, while the real Girls Aloud quietly release the real next single...

Hope so, because this sounds like a mash-up, done 2 years too late for all the wrong reasons.

Girls Aloud - Something Kinda Ooh

A Yousendit Eye-Pop

Still say they should've released this. Or this.

Palestine Meat Tales

Reply etc to KemperNorton sometime soon re: The Monks and their ilk (only comparatively sexually successful?? - hey! I was in like Flynn... No scuffing for me*)

But first this soundtracked a cycle ride today where a truck full of very bad meat, destined I think for the Dog Food Factory, spilled it's load over a small car and ended up causing relative chaos (actually, literal chaos - χάος an act of acute destruction and creativity), forcing it's participants into thinly veiled dervishes of discontent (the driver of the car, ballistic and bollock-eyed), spontaneous near-combustion caused by laughter (two schoolkids narly fell into the canal giggling, even with earphones in you could see their ribs would soon be cracking like knuckles) and semi-literate hiccupps of regret and self-loathing (the truck driver, picking bits of dead flesh off the windscreen of the car seemed to tourette himself into the kind of depersonalized state of anxiety normally associated with small children who think they've been caught fingering the cat)

It looked vaguely like a scene from a Peter Greenaway movie, one improved no end by Charlemagne Palestine's odd Wyatting (in the old sense) falsetto-in-tongues singing and the teaming indian drones that accompany him. I've had a few bits and bobs of Charlemagne Palestine for years now but never really paid that much attention to it - seemed a little long, whereas my life often seems a little short - but this really gripped me as I watched the above scene, making a kind of magical sense and symbolism out of the minor disaster, filling it with a meaning that I'm sure wasn't really there.

Charlemagne Palestine - Karenina Part 3

A Yousendit Droneating Diatribe



*scuffing was our term for failing to have sex / get off with a girl despite initially overwhelmingly favourable odds (i.e. she was at University; during an experimental 'stage'in her psychosexual development that somehow necessitated wanting to be ravaged by a floppy-haired twatmonkey with a nasty sideline in giant red hats and suits with babyheads sewn onto them; she'd just been released from a Catholic All Girls School etc)

A true nugget amongst the pellets

One of the most luxuriously-furnished refuges of the joyless music snob can be found in garage music. And as they would point out, we’re not in the domain of UK garage, dubstep, crank or crunk but garage music all right ? Garage. The true sound of the sixties, where the revolution happened not through George Martin’s Eton overdubs, or the scrawlings of college prettyboys like Dylan or Morrison , but Houston
acned noboteens and their bad amps. In their garages. Garage, all right ?

For me the Nuggets-wielding wonks represented the opposite of what liking music was all about, and was a warning of what occurred to you if you read Q magazine too much……instead of listening to sounds and words you might start collecting musical obscurities. And worse you might start imaginary charts in your head rating the obscurity, the forgotten history of the lost genii of the pop explosion, yada yada. Until you never actually listened to anything ever again. The piece of your brain normally reserved for enjoying the Cramps, say, would instead jabber at you in nerdfax a list of the bands who recorded ‘Psychotic Reaction first’, what three-figure chart position they reached...and would then fall silent as you asked aloud in your incense-soiled Altamont-pit why you had neither a girlfriend or any pleasure centres .

This negative reaction was usually confirmed by being played the fabled music itself by some saucer-eyed approval junkie in his (single) flat and realising that I usually preferred the bands that covered, were influenced by or (it was insisted) merely copied the originals. They usually played the songs better, with better equipment.
Besides, I had my ears full being exposed to early post-punk and post-industrial
sounds by my ( comparatively sexually successful) flatmates and couldn’t bear tracing the Chinese-whispers-daVinci-rock-puzzle back any further. I’d probably end up being told that some technician working for Edison wrote and recorded Grail-esque acetates of Mr Pharmacist, Venus in Furs and Tomorrow Never Knows. And he’d be rubbish.

I understood that the stories surrounding the bands, their tales of failure, epic drug abuse, asylum committals and more failure were good stories but usually the bands themselves weren’t as much fun and sounded like bland pub band versions of those Johnny-come-latelies who nicked their tunes and had the technology to make the ideas work. For example, the 13th Floor Elevators sounded like a crap version of Spacemen 3. The Electric Prunes paled in comparison with my discovery of The Cramps. The Seeds vs The Bad Seeds…no comparison. And before hollow-eyed garage-geek Loic reminds me that the Bad Seeds were another shit garage band I’ll jump in to state that I know, and this type of comment illustrates exactly why I hate the whole thing.

But.

But. And I’m so pleased, because I always wanted to find some hidden treasure in there that would make me want to caper around like an angry ape, and because they are simply great, and I take back everything I’ve said up to now, and that even if the Fall covered them and their only album (they did an album ? sellouts !) rakes in £800 on Record Collector, and their biography reads like the brainburp of the worst type of 60s failure-fetishisto, I don’t care, because they’re fabulous, I can’t listen to anything else. And I’m becoming one of them.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3bMVcuiv6Q

Teenage Talk-In

Listen To Teens Talk!

A few people out there might know this girl but... it's the cover really.

courtesy of Waxidermy

Persian Love Saved Me

...not really sure where or when or what had happened in the past three hours; it must be late because the sand and water at th sea edge (where's the sea?) are making mirrors, reflecting the lights from the road and the University of Swansea but not making any sense at all... it must be late because I can feel my skin stretching itself out around my eyes, trying to deny sight (who wants to see this anyhow?)...

a few hours ago I was in London, listening to Abendigo's whitehouse/plastikman hybrids, wondering at the sonic capabilities of those little electronic bike horns that can change your voice, wondering at how far you could actually go with a Yamaha RX 7 (we managed a few Foetus-like orchestral manglings, an aphex-lite bouncing ballpop or two) but that seems very long ago now because that
was
before i decided to drain my pockets of drugs to ease the long train ride home, that was before i bought some Thai Fuckballs of hash from the guy in the bogs at the station, that was before I left my book (70s version of The Magus - ha!) somewhere and realised that 4hrs on the train with only my sane mind for company would pass for eternity...

That was before i took the Thai Fuckballs inbetween a nice sweet curry bun from the Chinese where the guy has the kind of stare that shouts at deaf people.

Now I've lost my shoes, I might be wet but it's hard to tell; everything is hard and cold. There's no one else around, not even the moon. The blinks and flares of Port Talbot steelworks seem to be beckoning me but it only takes one look at the sand - with it's terrible Mandalas and portents of doom - to realise that that is not going to be a good way to go...

For a second I think one last time about running into the sea - at least finding it - and hoping for the best.

I turn back, dazed, confused and still barefoot and end up wandering around the halls of residences, trying to explain to someone, anyone that I've just taken something that didn't quite agree with me and can't now remember the number of my room... I keep thinking one of my ears is bleeding but no one I know is around and everyone else seems utterly redundant...

Is there a doctor in the house?

Eventually, i remember my own room number and lie on the bed, ears still bleeding, heartbeat working its way up towards my eyes, where it sits bleating... the black and white TV is clearly colour again (it does that when it takes drugs) and the noise is unsettling so I flick the sound down and press play:

Holger Czukay - Persian Love

A Yousendit Lifesaver

which seems to calm me down more or less instantaneously. Normally it's a voice that has this effect - I've been drawn back from the abyss a number of times by a soft female voice, on tape or in reality - but this time it's not the samples as such, more the little crappy, almost insignificant chord progressions because they-seem-to -speak of a gentler existence, children playing, soft grass, happy smells away from all this nasty synaptic snapping, away from all this self-imposed chaos...

It's probably just me but my ear stopped bleeding as well...

I haven't played this track since that time, now the better part of 20 years ago but I found it again recently and decided that perhaps that was for the best. If it had any power - and i can't work it out now - then maybe I should hold some pack for the next time...

Still never found out what the hell Thai Fuckballs are either; how easily information slips away...