IX Tab - The Humchatter EP

Well, I threatened....

Here are the first churnings from my recently reanimated (after - yes! - 23 years) project IX Tab (Originally Dada IX Tab, but that was a duo)...

I've been trying to capture the humchatter sound that followed me around during the vaguely hallucinatory years of minor psilocybin abuse (wrong word) - a sound documented way back here - and now I've found it... more or less.

This will be exactly as some of you expect it to be.

Humchatter 1 is the slowburn, the humchatter itself, more or less rawformed. It's subtitled ...in 1975, since this is the year of broken magic, of no dreams. There'll be a vocal version soon.

Humchatter 2 is shorter and sillier, with added gulps. It samples a dead, much missed, friend, speaking from his new whirleds

Humchatter 3 also samples that friend, alongside other living souls plus the dead-eyed acoustic guitar playing of someone who crept into my room at night.

Humchatter 4 is missing, presumed.

Humchatter 5 is the pop song. The runt of the (g)litter. The lost rave classic that's not lost and not rave.

None of this is thought out. Consider it a midlife crisis of sorts, with tuned bells on. It was put together on a train through the harte of the wude. First takes, no edits, nothing wasted. Not even time.

Yeah, they're all gonna have that humchatter.

MscfrMgcMshrms.

Chris Carter - Moonlight (remix of remix review)

This will play out. This will be roundly buggered, sliced and diced and shat out all over the lightflashes and discofloors of your local sleaze pit. It’s good music for dancing girls, car chases, hedge-trimming, car-jumping. Chris Carter has the Abba fixations, of course, but the Devil’s in the disco. The Neurotic Drum Band remix (reimagining) maybe slows the beat down a little to create something that feels vaguely reminiscent of Spacemen 3’s “Big City;” a disco slur, narcotized but just danceable, if you’re prepared to shamble and wave, if you're knees are locked and loaded.

It’s not Italo; only partly Homoerotic. A slow, homo-sapping, slutty sound.

The press release tells you it’s “ultra cosmic-a-fying it for an ultra-headtrip psychedelic spaceflight!” but it feels a little earthier than that, Northern even; the sound of a Rugby or Widnes disco-bar with a headful of research chemicals (their twinkly names encoded into the music) and a full glass of Tetley. This is a good thing, I think.

Oneohtrix Point Never pipe(s) up on a digitial-only remix. He starts buzzing, thunders for a while, like the opening of Returnal and only lets in a moment of electro-pastoralism after the sawtooth openings have had their way for 4½ minutes or so…

Too long.

More rumbles, some Orbital-like squiggles. Mmmm. I love Orbital squiggles but... why bother here; like making a giraffe get on with the rhinos.

There’s nothing added here (there’s too much added here) and if this is an attempt to make Chris Carter sound more slurred and beyond then it’s missing the point (of Carter, of Chris and Cosey, even of Throbbing Gristle). Chris Carter’s machines are slurred and beyond because he’s clearly attempting to make them glistening and pristine. They don’t need processing; they find their own slurred path in amongst the glitter.

The Oneohtrix remix is a poor little devastation. A tiny sacrilege. A waste of time, a digital delay. It doesn't need to be; is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Don't take my word for it.

Chris Carter - Moonlight (Oneohtrix Point Never Version) by theQuietus

James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (remix)

An ever so slight detourn from the version at Freq.

History is a virus. A fifth horseman of the apocalypse. It’s brutal, beyond reason, full of rage and memory; brittle with the fear of being forgotten. A terrible, seething mass of tendrils, an Athazagoraphobic moron, shifting it's feet and trying to breathe, trying to suck your air, forgetting itself...

History loves and hates it’s host. It smothers it with affection, wraps it up warm, cools it's feverish brow with gentle reminders and emotional aggregates... but the terrible cytopathic effects are just a little while away. Them little fuckers'll get you in the end...

I know you think you're immune.

I know you think you're immune.

Nostalgia is a dish served cold and for a long time now people have been struggling against it, trying to reheat old spices (and Old Spices), attempting to bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur their way out. But history is winning (had already won before the battle lines were drawn) and now we’re on the retreat, if unable to move.



Buzz and blur, crackle, hum.....

It’s coming (through the trees).

It's still coming. It doesn't stop once it's got here. It'll never stop because it knows that it's never really even got started...

Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making.The virus comes in waves (but, what ends when the symptoms shatter?) and it can take a lot of shaking. You can struggle against the pre-settings, tread lightly around it or ironically through it or stomp all over its kindly old man face but you can’t avoid the inevitable and neither will you want to, when it comes to the end times.



The eschaton will be immanentized (etc).

And heaven is a tune you can whistle, a sound you’ve already heard, played endlessly and without motive. If you think you remember, you do. There’s no trick. At the end, you’ll lie back and laugh. It’ll make a Donnie Darko out of all of you.

Some resist longer, some even believe they haven’t started resisting yet – the Futurists are then, as now – some burrow themselves into a (w)hole, believe they’re not letting in any light at all, only to find that their dark isn’t a darkness at all, just another form of light, shone from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. The light will tear them apart too, as it tears all of us.

You know who they are:

E************

F****** F******

G*** and Y*****

Add your own.



This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted.

James Ferraro wasn’t easy to catch. He flirted with the history virus for longer and harder than most. He played all the angles, tried to wrestle with the memories, tried to break them, to cover them in snot and grime and fuzz. He added nauseous waves of his own.

He's tried, you've got to admire him for that.

Endless medicinal cassettes (themselves a symptom), CDRs, LPs have tumbled out, attempting to feed an antibody that was always just one protein shake off oblivion. His music has been magical at times and he’s played the sorcerer role well (even if he thought he was playing the alchemist), dabbling in Crowley magick, in Paris Workings, in symbols. He dabbled in motifs and tropes and Casio licks like Death In June dabbled in Eugenics and tooth and claw (but, what does end when the symbols shatter?). He fiddled in things he only thought he understood better than anyone else. He’s spawned numerous monsters, whose names cannot be said, whose names begin with the cross of H and end in Chris De Burgh, in daytime TV movies, in crane shots and stock footage of shopping malls and queues outside the Commodore 64 shop.

He thought things through, I think. Tried to play all the sides all the time.Perhaps thought this wasn't history at all, but some kind of uchronic intervention, a parallel, reverse-spin world of nu dreams and nu-reality.

Oh James. Remember James?

He thought that he could iron out the creases of history, maybe even thought he would escape but he was always at the Event Horizon and now he’s falling further in. In space no one can hear you scream. No hands clapping. The inside of the ping pong balls that cup The light he’s shedding will be seen by us as glimmer, as sheen, as surface.

C'mon... James. Jim. Jimbo...



Now, he’s letting the virus in, he’s accepting it, embracing it, loving it even more than it needs. Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making. History has him. His memories have suddenly burst through, unclouded and almost free of hum and chatter. This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted. The thick Calpol gloop of history is here, shining.

This is a time machine heading into the very near future when everyone gives up the ghost. This isn't even music anymore; it's History incarnate, is indistinguishable from the original, may even be the original...



But it's not a joke. We're not being played. Or rather, even if we are being played and this is all a Jim Ferraro Fuck You and next thing he'll turn around and say: Really? Chris De Fucking Burgh? Daytime TV? Holy Hot Tamalean Hell! Even if that's what happens next it doesn't matter (and why be paranoid when you know they're out to get you?) because he's going under, the virus still has him, is just keeping him alive for his take on the crispy shells(uits) of the 90s...

Do I like it? Is this artefact, this album actually any good? Yeah, it’s brilliant. But then I’m as infected as you.

The Acid Eaters

Presented without comment.

Ekoclef Considered As A Review Of The City And The City

In China Mieville's wondrous The City And The City the city of Beszel exists in more or less the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. The cities interweave, crosshatch; citizens unsee their counterparts in the other city, buildings themselves merge but don't merge. Neighbours live next to each other but dutifully don't notice their proximity, in fact are forbidden from doing so by the mysterious Breach, which is both an action and a powerful agent of order. To see what is there is to breach. To breach is to invoke Breach.

The cities are post USSR, post-world. They share many of the same characteristics but remain absolutely, qualitively different. They are separated by language, by intention, by Kant's categories. It vaguely reminds me of that Wittgenstein quote about how, if a lion could speak our language, we still wouldn't be able to understand it.

Disclaimer: I'm only half way through this book, it just turned out that I've been reading it now with the soundtrack (accidentally analogous) of the Bass Clef + Ekoplekz release, almost reviewed brilliantly here.

And

They

Are

The

Same.

Ekoplekz + Bass Clef doesn't sound like either artist; there are glimpses, unheard snips and wanes, but mostly the tape-swapping has birthed a new monster, one I think neither would have settled on independently.

The protagonist of The City And The City, Inspector Borlu, is vaguely doggged, vaguely determined but resolute in the laws of these non-twin cities; this is not (so far) about an unveiling of the truth behind these mysterious, space-rimmed cities... he doesn't intend to unpick the crosshatch to see the real cities; the hatching is as much a part of his reality, the psychic borders as real as empty spaces, as unmentionable...

And so with Ekoclef - you can listen to this and try to spot the joins. You can but you might miss the (twin) points. The crosshatch is the release, the medium is the massage... when it works it really works and you unhear the joins. Nick and Ralph speak different languages and when the two voices come together they form a supremely odd chorus. The effect is affecting.

Tape spools, unwind, pop and crackle.

Oh I dunno. Less driven than Some Truths, less slurring than Ekoplekz. 'I was a tree in the forest; they cut me down' has sounds that neither would use in their other guises: triballed yelps, flutes, singing... it could be a Vitamin K spoked Shpongle, shorn of its usual gentle mushroom gauze...http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

It doesn't all work; sometimes the joins are too obvious, too difficult to unhear, sometimes the crosshatching just muddies both city states, causes traffic chaos as they fail to swerve around each other and end up on top, like a pair of almost-merged naked wrestlers in a Francis Bacon painting...

(actually, those tracks sound better now I've read this as well)

But mostly this is dogged and delirious and, er, fun and you'll be wanting one.

Buy here maybe.

Buy The City And The City too (if it turns out to be crap in the second half I'll tell you) and play with them together. They make a curious sort of sense together.

God knows what they'd sound like apart.