Aloha(tings) In Notting Hill

For some reason this picture has deeply unsettled me. I can't put my finger on it. I mean, it's obviously meant to be disturbing but there's something genuinely awful about it.



Maybe I glanced it once during one of my once mammoth record flipping searches in the depths of one of Notting Hill Gate's Record and Tape Exchanges - a glance that kills slowly, like a one-inch punch, worming through the system, undetected, waiting for someone to activate it by innocently posting the sleeve...

I don't even know why it reminds me of record flipping.

Or why it reminds me of Notting Hill (could this be the reason I don't like the film as well?). Could this be everyone else's reason too?

Maybe it's some kind of accidental post-hypnotic suggestion; the quick flicking of all those cut price records in those dimly lit basements acting like an accidental flip book, accidentally full of arcane commands... like the light flickering through lines of trees along the motorway, sending people crazy, sending drivers off into hallucinatory states, into dream sleep, messing with their alpha beats.... like Native Americans using their fingers to make dream machines out of the Sun...

...thinking about it, there was always an auditory element to the record flicking in the basement as well... the sounds of slapping record sleeves, making tiny micro-rhythms... the beginnings of Mille Plateux glitches? Slap slap slap... vaguely pornographic, easing the way into the unconscious... the nodding head symbolic of the nodding off into semi-consciousness - (Peter) Tripping into some vaguely altered state with no redeeming functionality....

anyone who's been in there, or an equivalent record store can recognise the symptoms, can see where dubstep came from...


...sometimes I used to flip two rows of LPs at a time, forcing one eye to watch each row (or rather forcing both eyes to separate, to obsessively monitor for bargains, to pan for Gold...)

(((((someone on here once tried to answer the question: what do you see if you pull out both eyes and face them towards each other...))))

... maybe something there caused that Henry Kaiser LP to slip into my barely conscious... maybe it combined with the seeping scum leeching out of the never-washed leather jackets of the people in there (Crass logos, black dyed hair that looked like it was melting), flicking alongside me as if they were humans too...

Or maybe I'm making too much of this because, on another level, this picture makes me feel weird too:

Tod Dockstader - Quatermass

I mentioned Quatermass somewhere in a post below and immediately remembered this album, which I used to own and has now disappeared and which I'd actually been trying to remember ever since I heard a Kempernorton water-based track on the now sadly departed radio show Mixing It (a show that imploded in part because of Kempernorton's track, at least that's what you can catch Robert Sandall muttering in the backlots of Shepherd's Bush).

Tod's one of my favourite of the electroacoustic guys, always seems to want to make music more than statements and a lot of his stuff is semi-okay to put on even if you've got girls around.

This one's almost all water.

Tod Dockstader - Water Music Part Four

This one isn't.

Tod Dockstader - Tango

Albert Ayler's Photoghsts

... every piece like the inside of a Ghost Box sleeve, the people of Belbury at birthdays in the middle of laughter and cakes.

Then the ads, which perhaps lose power in going too far gone but.

Albert Ayler - Spirits

Albert Ayler - Ghosts (First Variation)

I like the way he often sounds like he's losing control of himself, that everything's almost getting away from him; his breath, the brass. I don't often do jazz but there's something in Albert Ayler that's missing from the other noodlers. The cymbals on Ghosts seem like twigs snapping as you're chased through the woods or perhaps burning bracken. I normally hate cymbals; it takes a lot for me to understand what they're for.

Moon Wiring Club

Losing slowtime to Moon Wiring Club, the best dressed sleeves in town. Imagine Stuart Maconie's Freakzone show on 6 Music, compressed and slightly de-boned, de-clawed from the occasional lapses of jazzspunk and run through with some Quatermass imaginings (i.e. what people like me who have never seen Quatermass imagine it's like). It's a world which ground to a halt sometime during the 3 day week.

A world of teeth grinding and blank colours. A world definitely, definitively pre-punk and proud.

Obviously, there's now a whole scheme to fit this kind of thing into and I guess this sits most neatly alongside the Mordant Music take on the H word rather than the TV noodles of Belbury Poly (whose latest I'm just not sure about - in part, their best work, in part their worst). I guess MM's Dead Air is the most obvious reference point - though this is smoother and less hurried, less frenetic, less needing to lurch towards the next surreality or soundbite. Moon Wiring Club have a grainier soundfield and this is reflected by their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like cover (contrast with Dead Air's angularities and dead spaces)...

It's also the closet any of the Hauntological clan have come to Hip Hop; some of the longer tracks could easily be an alternate universe take on the kind of sludgy instrumental hip hop that DJ Spooky saw off back in the late 90s, just this time the samples are the kind that sound like a just-dead Johnny Morris, sending a thought-shiver to Valerie Singleton.

This is the kind of thing that Ian Penman heard in Tricky's Maximquaye.

Picking up on the DJ Spooky, Olive axis, Illbient works better for theseguys. There's a woozy illness to lots of Moon Wiring Club's music, a sort of benevolent disease, one which sees you under the covers, watching the taught surface-tension struggle between Calpol and air, hooping coughs into the air and waiting for them rebound off the walls.

Tardissing

Missed this somehow. Mark Wallinger's thrash at a mirrored tardis.

Ilyas Ahmed

Many thanks to Time-Lag records for the bunch of stuff they sent me a while back. I've only just got around to deep listening to the stuff (the packaging is uniformly amazing; surely the way to go in these MP3 stung, recessed times). So far, the Illyas Ahmed album (Vertigo Of Dawn) has struck me the hardest - there's more than a thin neural slice of Jajouka around these gills; ecstatic mountain music perhaps, a drug-flipped Brion Jones hybrid dancing in the moonlight (not Toploading). There's also a faint whiff of Hassan I Sabbah, the old man, the talking severed head, wishing his hashsassins into a sweet opium haze. It's the kind of music you turn into rather than seek out (in a good way).

Love it; it fills the room with smells.

Well worth dipping into your Christmas Club money for.

Sample MP3s here

Pretty soon, I'll be putting together some kind of Time-Lag giveaway / competition, so if you're into this kind of thing stay detuned.

Ice Bird Spiral @ Kraak

...Kek breaks the fast first, sending up whorls of bad tidings to the Belgian Stasi(s), conscious of the fact that their set began 3 minutes ago and him and Cloudboy (now renamed Colonel Cloudboy as a result of a flemish-language translation tick) are still on the road, heading east when west seems more logical... the boys are crammed into the tour bus, itself a masquerade of misleading intentions (i.e. a converted circa WWC Andersen Shelter-sided Citroen van), as the police car slides into the rearview mirror...

"Keep going!" yells Cloudboy, who's been afraid of mirrors since the terrible Orphee debacle.

"I am going," replies Kek, "it's just everything else has speeded up. There's some kinda warp spasm out here and i can't shake it."

Onstage their equipment, carefully arranged into a vaguely (the last few pages of the book were smeared with ectoplasm and beetjuice) Osman-Spare protection sigil, behins playing by itself, a tiny amplified toy monkey kicking off with his drum and cymbals stick, while a disemboweled Casio FZ1 starts playing it's own circuitry, sampling and resampling itself into a frenzy.

The crowd, unsure at the best of times, catch a few beats and start to put on their goat head masks.

The police, meanwhile, have decided that Kek and Cloudboys now slower than the rotation of the earth tour bus must be a product of sensory derangement and are now sitting on the side of the road, watching it run backwards in time, sure that all they need is to shake the illusion away.

Onstage, a toy trumpet has raised itself, serpentine and amorous, onto an old machine coil and is blurting out a little Fanni Tutti fanfare, accompanied by great hoops of reverb and an ancient, tape-based echo box. An amplified mobile of beer cans and voodoo chickenskins crackles into life, whirling like a dervish, sending almost impercetible molecules of chicken fat out into the crowd.

The Vegans go apeshit but the critical lack of protein supplements due to the recent Franco-Belgian Quorn Wars mean that their palpating aggressive stances soon dwindle into exhausted muttering and tiny golden shivers of hatred (that sprinkle onto the stage and are then close miked back into the mix).

A guitar almost catches; not quite.

Two thumb pianos start up, a plinking little melody that catches a breath and fuels itself, the old-new school ravers immediately recognise the tune as an Alice Deejay b-side and start humming a contradictory Autechre number, which is then amplified by the dead guitar pick ups and looped back over the crowds head.



Kek and Cloudboy appear at the back of the auditorium and make for the stage, eaget to tame the tiny beasts that threaten to take the show away from them. Three steps and the heavy lights have fused Kek's mask to his face, making the kind of skin crackling sound that european authors attempt to align to the Holocaust; everyone is sucking in bad thoughts - "I can't help feeling there's something, well, evil about all of this..." - even before Cloudboy sticks some contact mics onto Kek's melts and resamples the crackling, yelling into the microphone something mostly inaudible about digital bonfire pops.

Kek then.

Cloudboy.

Breaks loose. Mayhem.

Fire, fire! Fire, fire!

Pour on wwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaatttttttttttterrrrrrrr

The man I saw becomes a bird.

Ice ice babeee...

The mexicans in the crowd go crazy, stereotypical.

The french swap shrugs and intellect.

The belgians, christ, the belgians.

He's almost melted now.

Ice, ice baby.

"It's a rhumba. No, really; I did classes...."

Ever Y thing IS sloooooooo

Ice Bird Spiral