Wounded Galaxies

White vinyl, snake's tail thick; an exquisite package... the cover, the inserts, the poetry, the fact that Stephen Thrower's starting to look a little like Kempernorton (who's been churning goodies all over the shop)... this is a real release, in all senses of the word...

Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window is quite beautiful and out of alltime.

I have plenty of records that try to sound like this; there's thousands out there and almost every one of them should look at this and start over... this is music for people who know, who understand where this music comes from, who get that this music is sometimes out there, waiting to be heard; it's music you might glimpse out of the corner of your eye, to synaesthesise a little... music that just is, is found in fragments and then pieced together majestically...

(not channelled, Christ no...)

Previous Cyclobe albums have been a little dense for me... I've struggled to listen to them all the way through...

(I felt the same about Autotistic, a while back)

I have found that previous Cyclobe tracks worked best in mixes, in amongst other sources of light and air... I liked them but they worked as counterpoint, as a stirring, they only sounded truly beautiful against other songs...

this one is an entirely different proposition...

there's lots of sound, snake tumbling charms, drones, bagpipes, eastern melodies but there's also lots of air and the result is something of an aural eqivalent to Hermes Caduceus, with the melodies and drones winding their way around a central motif - hand drums, flute signatures, pipe hum - occasionally taking gentle flight...



...there's voices here and there, some definitely real, others imagined... there's moments which could be Hermes chastising Pan... there's often a statesmanlike quality to this music... these guys have seen it all, are reflecting on the chasms, not stumbling towards them... they've looked into the void, let it look back and then started to consider what it means to them.... this is clearly music born from Pan(ic) and vine and frivolity but it's never frivolous... there's no Balance in there, running around in a Jester's hat, swinging on the light cords...except for the odd few bars of Jim Foetus-like intensity

(horn stabs as Pan running across the grassland, as Hermes/Mercury remembering their youth?)

Oh fuck it: I love this album, have played it five times right the way through already... if you want an easy reference then of course there's Coil (some of the instrumentals on Scatology, Chaostrophy, bits from Stolen And Contaminated) but these are references of intent and understanding, not sound... Cyclobe have their own slurs and whirls... sound like themselves: truly psychedelic, truly steeped in occult traditions and hidden reverses and truly magnificent...

Mind At Bay

Reading this on the train right now, soundtracked by 23 Skidoo, Jac Berrocal, Woebot and Juana Molina.

Love the John Holmes cover. Even made that Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry album half good, I thought.


From The Wytch Machine...

Andrew Liles & Miraculous Monsters

The Miraculous Mechanical Monster.

Dirty slab of green vinyl obscenity from Andrew Liles popped through the door yesterday. Unsettlingly thick-cocked LP sleeve in lurid black n green with equally unsettling rattling audio inside... at times, this reminded me of some of the tracks on NWW's Automating Vol 2 compilation (and, by association Brainticket) with huge chunks of the Cold side of the classic Thunder Perfect Mind and other bits vaguely reminiscent of 10-20, itself half-recalling Automating Vol 2...

Circles within circles...

Not to say this isn't an unique piece of work; it's oddments and stabs are all of it's own... listenable but untenable... not something you'd want to listen to with your Gran... or with anyone, come to think of it. Which kind of adds to the seediness of the whole affair. It's music as shame, music as onanism, as solitary defilement...

Still, I'd love to be in the diskotek where the DJ plays this little fellah out to the woozy masses...

Huge bits of this sound like a sex robot falling downstairs. This seems to be entirely intentional and is to be applauded. Some of it is quite beautiful. Some of nit even sounds a little like Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisquatsi but the beauty occurs in dry humps and clusters, often savaged by the crackle of drums or the slide of robotic scales.

Some of it is disgusting, creepy, sad, horrific... there's enough fucks and cocks to spoil a Sunday Roast, to soil a Christmas party... as a glimpse into a future world of over-cyber-sexed teen Supermarket managers, their fingers glistening with creep oil as they retune their lovebots it's... well, it's not for the faint-hearted, even if the music itself is quite bouncy...

Yeah, you can bounce to this... you might not want to...

It's the feverish bounce you'd get as you unpackage your brand new robowhore, the bounce that comes from a devilish play of the mouth, a curl of the lips...

This is where apple iPod/iPhonophones go when they've stopped being human and delve finally into the pit of moist finger taps and loose trousers and thickly drawn drool. This is why we shouldn't fetishize objects. There may be a moral message here.

This is seedy stuff, unflattering about sex and maybe slightly hateful. Very odd but never wasteful. Very deliberate, composed and considered. A real song-suite in a real album. It would make little sense broken up into MP3s.

And the sleeve is so thick, I can hardly put my fingers around it..

New Genres

My Top 11 favourite new genres for Christmas 2010:

Gurgle-fi - The sound of an R&B compilation drowning; water filling up the crevices between the road and the Hummer; the slowed-down, slur of a waterboarded Usher, kept by the Moonies...

Ratchet (sometimes Asp, or Asperger's)- wiry, three-step, instrumental techno with a massive filtered sidesweep of massed Cdskip choirs and a 'Parmegianian' rhythmic reluctance. True Ratchet should begin with EQ'd mumblings and end with the Tin Man falling down concrete stairs.

urlingPop - the small 'u' is crucial. Otherwise, pop.

Faunrock - aggressive panpipes, a re-imagined Comus. Faunrock is normally acoustic, with volume crucial but dependent on singing bowl amplification or massed playing. Slightly fascist leanings, vigorously denied. "Faunrock is Panic. Faunrock is Hansel and Gretel. Faunrock opens the harts of the wuds. Faunrock smiles like a slashed face" (from The Faunrock Manifesto)

Relentless - Gabba techno played by string quartets. Increasingly popular at weddings. Began as a postmodern joke and quickly became popular. Social cryptoamnesia at work. Sometimes foul.

Smirk-hop - If beats could be insincere, they'd smirk.

Kohl - The soundtrack to self-harming rituals, guitarless, beatless, yet propulsive proto-shoegaze. Kohl tracks are generally ten minutes or more long with a gradually increasingly tempo, building up a head of oily black steam.

Sliphop - Anticon artists heard through a cardboard tube.

Cthulhop - Dark, unsettling, multi-tentacled, sample-heavy instrumental hiphop. Samples on samples. Depth is all. Only remotely comprehensible on headphones. Cthulhop albums generally have a complete list of (mostly uncleared) samples and literary/film references on the sleeves, often stretching to 5000 words or more.

Yellowbelly - Half-hearted attempts at defunct genres of all kinds, played for laughs. The Barron Knights take on Goth, Gangsta-rap, Punk, Postpunk, Electro etc. Music for people who hate music.

Krave - hardcore for people who have no clue of the score. Or even that there is a score. Or even that a score is a theoretical possibility.

Burial Hex/ Zola Jesus

Up to date, as ever.

Well, more or less what he said. Had this split album kicking around for a bit and didn't really give it a fair shot but it's actually pretty great, especially the Zola Jesus side; very creepy headphone music (ideal for marking student essays, as it happens). She even gets the title right (I worry about song titles in these genres) - Julius and Ethel has an easy-going horror about it, that works well in an understated don't-mention-the-chasm-of-demons kind of way. Implied horror. Unforced. Unless of course it's about Julius Caesar and Ethel Merman, in which case I'm utterly bereft.

I guess Plague Mass era Diamanda Galas might be somewhere near the mark sonically - though Zola Jesus is not such an eruption, it doesn't obliterate, which makes it much easier to listen to. I mean, how often do you play your Diamanda Galas records these days? I know you've got them somewhere. Under the bed, gathering T-cells.

This is my kind of wailing, as Barrymore might have said.

But no, it's not as creepy as that.

High Wolfings

Here is good.

And I like the Maclook of this blog which looks to have died after just a short run. Shame.

Ekoplekzing All Over The House

Many thanks to PunchDrunk records via Nick for sending me a white label of the inaugural Ekoplekz 12". It's great stuff... perhaps showing off Nick's (Basic) Channelling influences rather than his motorik or Cabs side... sounds great coming through the floor... digs deep, lurches, crackles...lovely release and now I guess I'm gonna have to fork out for the fullcover version when it comes out, especially since it's minimal splatter design is by our boy 2ndFade, purveyor of the finest Kierkegaard in the East...

While we're here, all the fuss and vinyl fetishism has caused the second Ekoplekz CDR to be a little pushed under the carpet... it's called, gulp, Volume 2 and way worth picking up if you're after a longer fix or you can't negotiate your way into one of the limited 12"s...



It's a kin to Volume 1, with perhaps added squiggle... it still sounds haunted (actually harassed) by the Radiophonics (and you'd want it to be...) but now Nick is fighting back, pulling things sideways, letting the subsystems of electronica (even, um, triphop in places?) through...

A bargain.

Goth All Too Goth

Well, this doesn't have to be about Goth, it just is. It could be about Shoegaze (it probably is somewhere), Sarah Records/C86, postpunk in any (all?) of it's forms, Industrial, punk in some of it's forms (maybe the anarchopunk revival is missing, but surely it's on the horizon)...

(Though even Nietzche's subtitle was A Book For Free Spirits - altogether now: Woooooooooo!)

In fact, more on this later perhaps. There's a few things curdling after a brief twitter last night...

Have we reached a time when new musical re-runs/reinventions ONLY serve to send people back to the originals? Wytch House >>>> Goth? I hope not; I like a lot of the new takes on goth, postrock, shoegaze, rave... Some more than I liked the originals...

But I'm going to deal with my feelings on this in a different post (even that sounds portentous, sounds Goth). And I meant to say postpunk not postrock - I can't even imagine what a postrock revival might sound like...

For now, back to Goth. Goth has been in the air. All of these (and there's more a out there) are great takes on the genre which have stopped me posting my own... all you need is here, honestly... some great music, memories and musings... Besides, I've wittered enough about Danielle Dax and Kensington Market

Instead, I'm going to contest that this is the Gothest / nonGoth thing I can remember, especially the bit where the actual shivering man gets into the action (around 1.22):



Bruce Gilbert of Wire on the music. Interesting to think that sort of notGoth Goths The Fall had a dalliance with Michael Clark during the mostly excellent Kurious Oranj thing circa:



So, NotGoth? Perhaps. But make-up doesn't make the Goth; the Goth is inside, the Goth is in the veins of history, the Goth could only occur in the deadheartlands of Britain, as Glam got tainted and rubbed raw by Thatcherism and unemployment and the little dayglo daftness of Glam went a whiter shade of pale.

Which brings me to Leeds, Goth(am) City and especially to the Goth poem extraordinary: Tony Harrison's V:







When this was shown on TV it was a shudder, a brutal slap, a beautifully straightforward, non-residual, non-allegorical punch in the face; a proper TV event, a ghostly presence that reminded everyone that Channel 4 was independent...October 1987 seems closer now than it's every been, I'll not be surprised if V gets a re-screening soon, some wag'll see the fun in showing it all over, people are noticing, the eighties are coming back to haunt us in a way unimaginable just a few years ago...

Unimaginable and Inevitable, those Two Tribes of Doom.

Where next?