Threshold Housings

Well, no one who ever reads this would expect me to let this go without a little comment since Coil mentions make me spin away into a kind of petit-mal fanboy gurns...

Regarding the origin of Threshold House...

Well, a few little inter-digs and here comes Heidegger:

“The threshold is always stony, because it bears the doorway, because it sustains the middle in which the outside and the inside penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between, and pain has petrified it.”

Emphasis mine, of course but this might be as good an origin point for Coil’s label as any and an even better, more apposite, name for Sleazy’s Threshold Houseboys project… “bears the between” seems to resonate with the kind of liminal light that Coil constantly referenced, alongside the idea that Heidegger is seeing the threshold as a complex inter-weave of inner and outer, of Us and Other - which, seems to fit Coil conceptually - cf Penetralia which references a linked theme:

1.The innermost parts of a building, especially the sanctuary of a temple.
2.The most private or secret parts; recesses: the penetralia of the soul

Coil - Penetralia

Coil - Penetralia (Version from Unnatural History)

cf that line in Circles of Mania - "Eaten alive by the perfect lover" - (which Kempernorton might remember was always the opening song on our ill-fated, badly-conceived lunch-time radio show on Swansea University Radio)

Coil - Circles Of Mania

Of course, I'd love it if it really did come via Doctor Who - Coil don't really mention Doctor Who in interviews but that kind of reference is hardly necessary - those old soundtracks are implicit in a lot of their work, you don't need to read a reference to hear one... and I don't think this is a product of Coil's esoterrorism; like Throbbing Gristle I think the esoteric aspects of Coil miss the point a little - they always seemed as likely to reference the prosaic (okay, maybe not as likely as TG) and the (Mmm) bog-standard as the occult; in fact, their version of occult seemed very rooted in the reasonably ordinary...

Off the top of my head: the Moomins, Edith Sitwell, Jarry, Dali, The Butthole Surfers, John Dee, Pasolini, Isidore Ducasse...

I'm not convinced they should have made more of the soundtracky stuff though - they're not that much better at this kind of thing than lots of other artists, before or since - and there is a certain absence of intensity in this kind of thing, the kind of intensity that's often thought to be in these kind of electronic sprawls...

On the other hand, I remember seeing the Journey to Avebury film in an art gallery somewhere - perhaps Amsterdam? In that space, there did seem room for the piece to breathe and the tiny electronic squiggles dragged me in...

Coil - Jorney To Avebury

Find your own space...

(And on that note - Mp3s sourced / stolen / referenced from KickabottlePunk.com and DJChronic)

Vluba Tunes

Yeah, Vluba... A Ruined sound; occcccasional voices like deeply scratched wood. There's maybe lots of stuff like this, lots of drone and grist and mill and krautrock moans but, I dunno, Vluba seem a little more... entrenched? I'm sure loads of people mean it but these guys/girls/whatever really mean it... there's no other reason for some of the musical decisions they seem to make, at least on the stuff I've heard... YES, I mean this as a good thing... i hate realness, authenticity makes me come over in a postmodern rash but when it's applied to Vluba, when it means that they really can't sound any different, I'm thinking.... yeah...

There's some squeaks that come in.... you'll see what I mean, the second side of



About half way through....when you think it might start coming over all Vibracathderal Orchestra or even attempt something some full-pelt Kraut's Corpuscles... then in come the creaks and the squeaks.... mocking....

You'll see...

Vluba give off an odd feeling. A not right. Unheimlich.

But don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently creepy about the sounds, least not to anyone even vaguely driven by drone.... this isn't Lustmord or Burial Hex creepiness... more the creepiness of the abandoned office block, the empty room with a child's toy at the edge of the carpet....

It's their choices, I think. The sounds they put together.

I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I've gone and it's coincided with my going, made some associative tangles that I can't unknot. Maybe tomorrow I'll be back again and this will make no sense and Vluba will just be another cosmic no-thing, a blip, a thing worth dropping or not mentioning. In which case, I apologise. Maybe I'm leading you down some bad tracks here, maybe these trails won't be worth your while... God Knows I've followed some bad 'uns in the past. I mean, I guess 20 Jazz Funk Greats has been a favourite of mine since it first came out and those fellahs describe things so well the music only occasionally matches up to their fantastical vision of it... they hear better than me... much better...

But....

There's definitely something about Vluba.

Something.

I'm sure.

...you'll see what i mean...

before my endless qualifications and my hesitancy rolls me up...

The Pyramid Album (Side 1)

The Pyramid Ablum (Side 2)

Sourced from the ever-wonderful depository of soft and shiny things at The Tanzprocesz Internet Archive... found, in label form, here

Bad Acid

Looking forward to the latest edition of the oddly mammoth, DVD and PDF bursting brain-melt that is Bad Acid magazine. I happened upon a copy in the middle of a flick jam skulk and fell in love with the crazed percussion of the thing. I've ordered mine, you should order yours. Even if the music's a little too scratchy for your delicate earbubds, the artwork (and animations!) are bound to start tapping yer brains back inside.

There's a lot worse you can spend your money on.

Actual Bad Acid springs to mind.

Or a subscription to one of those Build-A-Working-Steam-Engine-One-Molecule-At-A-Time magazines.

(though that build a Dinosaur one advertised on TV recently looks great)

Coming Soon...

Soon is relative, of course.

But...




News from Threshold House
Coil - Chasms

Big Stick - Drag Racing

"Speak softly and carry a big stick..."



...i liked the outfits and the hair...

Children gone bad.

And Crack Attack was pretty, brilliantly, wasteful...

Bought the singles from a bucket in Acorn Music, sun-drenched Yeovil. Maybe a coupla years too late. There was something about these guys that makes me think Big Stick are due a comeback any day soon.

Dusting down the wig-outs and clumping up the beats...

This was Mnml for a while. The Phrases. Cut. Out. To. The. Fucking. Point.

Big Stick - Drag Racing

Stolen from here

John Peel's Ambient Stew

Maybe this has already happened.

An album, vinyl only. A treasure trove. An ambient stew to help 30,40,50,60-somethings sleep through their night terrors, their fear that 6Music might be sacrificed to the Gods of public ownership...

An ambient stew. Every record they've ever heard (Gentle Giant tugs at Ivor Cutler tails off into The Frank Chickens which grins at Bogshed who opens the heart of 70 Gwen Party and nails cLOUDDEAD), pulled together and undistorted and smoothed into a thick indie paste and above it all, in the mix and above, there's John Peel's voice...

...he's just talking, unrelated words spilling, following the ups and downs of slightly warped records, wrong-speeded...

...just words coming out - "flexi, fanzine, sorry..."

...the words are irrelevant, as always.... it's the tone people are after, the tone they need to help them drift off into an older, more naive world...

and these words are taken and stewed into some broken-back beats (maybe some Bolt Thrower / Electro Hippie echo(ic) trails, just audible in the background), maybe tangling with guitars in the breakdown but not letting anything get too whiny...

...because these people who can't sleep are OVER that now... they've found their little indie girls, or settled for a Coldplay fan with a rack to die for... or settled for someone who looks like Cheryl Cole but doesn't mind Bon Iver...

The album - the price sticker is as much of the art as anything - will be missing the crapness, the ARCH of the Covenant but it'll remind them of older times, gathered around the wireless or the (ahem) Ghetto Blaster... remind them of the hard click and soft burr of a tape-to-tape machine... remind them that there was once a time when music was for amateurs, when all they ever wanted was an appearance on the already failing Snub TV...

This ambient stew, this Mogadon haze

(Janice Long's voice as an undertow)

Will keep them - US? - safe from harm.

There must be plenty of Peel out there, unlicensed, doing no more. A thousand tiny Peel sessions, micro-moduled into submission, made passive and re-charged...

There could be a series of albums, one or each night of the week, for each month of the year.

Turn on, listen, crackle, sleep.

Like leaving the fridge open.

There's people out there that need to sleep.


UPDATE: It's possible this has been thought of long before by non other than Delia Derbyshire, the pert, uber-geek's knob twiddler of choice. She always gets there before me.

I say possible because I'm at work and haven't actually heard this yet. Still, shot in the dark...

Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson - John Peel's Voice

Ron Muech's Hyper-Realist Tensions

That massive child in the old Millenium Dome? You remember. It was the only good bit wasn't it?

Here's more from the same guy.

Joanna Newsom's Florid Organums

There's been a few changes...



The leaked songs seem less faerie than before, less otherness but there's a triple CD out there, waiting for release - so, there could be excess around the corner. I hope so, because, while I like these songs, Good Intentions Paving Company seems to bring her more into line with the likes of Regina Spektor et al and she's always stood apart from the others; fidgeted awkwardly, spectacularly, quietly in the corners. The other released track is a return to The Milk Eyed Me(a)nderings which should have pleased those disappointed at the tough lines of Ys. Beautiful stuff, nonetheless.

The cover art tells a story, I think. A good story.



Me, while I don't listen that much to Ys compared to the Milk Eyed Mender, I liked having to let it's awkwardness through. It made you work at it and it seemed medieval in more than just cover art and harp garnish... I guess from here I was expecting a second sideways glance towards deeper medieval musics, a florid organum of multi-tracked voices or a spin off into the dark side, adding a slice of (new) english heretic (more about them later) to the mix... more Dee, more Dee, more Dee.... maybe a touch of Lovecraft.

Someone's got to spin some Lovecraft loops well; there's so much crap, bumper-sticker uncool around

In other news, the Oneohtrix Point Never backlash begins... old New Age kicks back

Bad Tidings For Danielle Dax

Er...

Weird nightmare last night which centred around finding out that Danielle Dax had died. This isn't a Chris Morris thing and I'm pretty sure she hasn't actually died but in dreamland this set off a frightening chain of events that are still disturbing the quiet edges of my consciousness. The dream centred around a sequence of news events that more or less treated her death as a Diana style mass-hysteria (It would be a great world), complete with Telegraph obituaries, Myspace tributes popping up like mushrooms, whole sections of the internet savaged with grief. Then... well, then the nightmares start, creeping away from understanding like a Ligotti story.

Now, I'm a fanboy of old, a stalker with no sense of direction and limited planning skills (frontal lobe damage) and still keep looking for new stuff - not yet heard the Unicazurn album which she's on, apparently - but I don't know where that came from...

Here's UnicaZurn...



And, before anyone says anything, I'm actually quite glad that Bat For Lashes took the ball and ran with it 30 years later. It's maybe not quite the same ball but if it's inspired a new breed of girls to start using bodypaint, chanting and odd orchestrations then...

30 years? Christ...