An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming

Ship Canal - Please Let Me Back Into Your House

2012-01-24T08:52:00.003Z

This came in, slipped under the door like a thin slice of cranial pie...

A friend of mine was prone to petit mal seizures, seizures of absence, slow-wave spikes. They'd often occur in the middle of a sentence; she'd just... go away for a few moments, sometimes long minutes, sometimes the last word she was saying would simply repeat and slurrrrrrr ad infinitum: "The thing with Feynman is that he he he he he he he he he he he he he he..." and then sometimes she'd pop back, continuing the sentence, sliding seamlesssly into the world again "...always knew exactly which knot to start untying..." while at other times her eyes would close and she'd drift away for a few more moments, the echoe dying, the dark coming in.

My favourite track on Please Let Me Back Into Your House, Ship Canal's debut on Kek's nonnanononboutique label 19F3, reminds me of her.

Fog (what is it with fog these days? I'm hearing fog everywhere) and shipwrecked audio and Lilith drones crossover and pulse and then this voice, this slurring, cracked voice appears, a man swallowing himself with language; a kind of absence with automatism, like an electronic divination, a table turning... it's one of the best things I've heard all year; it just works (cf these guys - in fact, these releases might be rough twins) in a way that lots of this kind of stuff just... doesn't.

If it catches you as it caught me - 7 AM, wind, rain, mist - then this will speak to you. It's dredged music, perhaps incomplete (I like the way some of the female siren sounds just kind of cut------ when you'd expect them to drift away) but powerful and quite... beautiful, in parts.

I've seen Ship Canal's kit: ugly PCs, ugly-hackkneed software, ugly cables... but he's making a right Schwitters out of this slop, this detritus. The last release on 19F3 (I take it we're not counting the Hacker Farm stuff - the politics of consciousness always seems tangled where Kek's concerned!) was the gentle machine chattering hum of the Werneck Wretchmond release (which I covered here); this new one is a step (just one step) away from the machines towards a very human breakdown...

Belgotronics

2012-01-23T15:06:00.003Z

This could have been. Might still be. There's scope for all kind of ____________otronics, I think. And Belgium, Brussels particularly, seems like a good place to start. Remove the vocals from this and you've got something very interesting. Though, of course, removing the vocals is a lot harder than it seems.

Psychological Strategy Board

2012-01-23T08:09:00.003Z

Machine hum; ghost train clanking...or ghost trails... fogfucked mornings at the edge of the world;fishing boats rattling lobster pots against the shingle... the sea just about to swallow everything whole...http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Submarine noises; not sonar, the hum as it works its way through the swell... then the sound of a minor meltdown, the systems failing...

Humans may have been part of this recording but there's just a smear left, a ghost trail... this could be by the machines alone... you can't hear someone stabbing at the laptop, at the synths, twiddling the knobs of the Monotron... I'd be suprised if Paul and Jonny were even in the room when this music came out... they'll pretend they were (no one wants to admit the otherwise horror, the unspeakable creating the unplayable), they'll take the plaudits ("Oh yes; that particular tone took 3hrs of programming and is related to a parrot sound I heard in the forests of Barcelona...") but we know the truth; this is the result of the humans setting an agenda and then the machines interpreting it in their own way...

(You've been) Savaging Spires (again...)

2012-01-20T08:52:00.001Z

Savaging Spires - When The Devil Says He's Dead

Talked about these guys here; not wearing me down yet.

Fucking Hell

2012-01-17T10:48:00.001Z

Just that kind of day...

The Necks - Mindset

2011-12-08T13:26:00.002Z

The Necks seem to have been around forever and they’re still boiling the elements of jazz down, adding their signature dabbles and occasional electronic bursts, collecting and sieving through new sounds, gold panning their way into new forms. This album collects two 20 minute-plus tracks that shadow each other like long lost relatives at a wake. Not that this is dark music as such (though the bass rumbles) but rather that the two tracks circle each other, as if wary. They clearly know each other, share a few drops of the same gene pool, but they are rough twins, twins brought up by different brothers.

first track “Rum Jungle” is the relentless one; drums tumbling almost into the late period jungle-jazz rhythms of Omni Trio. It’s all about the interweaves; the pulses are constant but shifting, the cymbals flicking against each other, urging the track forward. Here, the drums are the bad leader, the organ drones and piano tinkles and bass sounds following, adding their own comments but keeping to the drum’s pace, not outstripping. Best listened to in the midst of a serious caffeine binge. This is fidgeting, made music. It gets claustrophobic, very claustrophobic. You’ll find yourself searching for space, expecting it, but it doesn’t come. There’s no space at all until…

The second track “Daylight” is formally more contemplative, the sounds given more room to breathe. It’s not just softer, more airy; it’s necessarily softer and more airy. Sometimes it seems like a jazz transcription of some lost modular electronics classic; the pops and scratches and lightness (albeit lightness in a very Noir setting; lightness as the first whisky of the day, after a long evening of malice) giving way eventually to a more consuming, denser sound. You’ll need both tracks. One will pull you into a hole, the other just about pulls you out again.

For those out there who already hate jazz; this isn’t what you think it is. The Necks are their own genre.

First on Freq

All Apologies

2011-12-01T16:28:00.003Z

On The Gradual Impossibility of Music Criticism...

It first started with this little off post about Demdike Stare... Not exactly a slagging but maybe a kind of shrugging. Now if you look at the (obviously unrepresentative) sample of commentators there's clearly a mini-consensus here which then got me thinking: how come no one else has said that before?

((Where are all the haters?))

Well, one reason is the diminishing circles of the internet, of course and the even more diminshing circles of the live circuit... take my recent trip to the Exotic Pylon gig ; I was outside smoking when Chris Bailiff aka Position Normal popped up and said hello. Now, I've said nice things about Position Normal in the past on this blog but it occurred to me as we were talking... what if i hadn't? What if I'd written some terrible, slaked, gnarly, bitchling piece about him and now had to chat amiably as if nothing had happened...

And that got me thinking...

I referred back to the comments of the Demdike post and right there, in the very first comment, an anonymous comment agreeing about what I was saying but clearly uncomfortable about saying it because, well:

my newfound status as a recording artist (who sometimes gets mentioned in the same breath as Demdyke, and who has met and enjoyed the company of one of their members)prevents me saying too much, but just to let you know I feel exactly the same way as you. i feel like i should like this stuff a lot more than i actually do.

You see what I mean? Which then got me thinking even more about how these endless routes and cycles and spirals are getting tighter and tighter, about how maybe along the way they're crushing the life out of criticism itself because this isn't the days of the fanzines, or even the early days of the blogs. In these days, gulp, you might actually meet the people you're writing about, even if you live in the backarse of the West Country, with all the associated smoke and mirrors that that brings.

And these people, these kindly souls you've denigrated, might be really nice people.

Anyone not scared about this must be lying, I think. Or caught in a terrible arch of blankness, or self-immolation, or...

When I started writing for Freq, I remember thinking a similar thing. I'm getting lots of freebies sent my way, lots of stuff I like, lost of stuff I don't. I wrote a lot of positive reviews but felt weird when I wrote something negative. This wasn't even my site, it was someone else's; I didn't want labels to stop sending stuff to them for fear of the bitchy Loki reviewer gnarling them... One CD (nameless, naturally) I didn't even write about because I couldn't think of anything nice (or even eloquently nasty) to say about it... I started to worry that this terrible plague of positivity was going to corrupt me too.

((God, if I don't write nice things then no one will ever send me free stuff, or get me into gigs for free, or...))

But I got over it. Thought nothing more of it until a few weeks ago when I started to make and slowly let seep some of my own music... Immediately, you wait for feedback of course because, though music is supremely personal and I really think that the bext possible music is the one track you've made that no one else likes, there's still that need to put it out there, to gain something else from it, even if it's just a slight nod or a wink or a raised eyebrow...

And I did get some feedback and it was all pretty good (some of it was completely on the money) but then, I would wouldn't I? I let it out on my blog and my twitter feed, to people who are already following so, of course 1) it's more likely that they'll like it - that's the 'group' it's for (even though the group it's really for are mostly lying on their back in a ditch outside East Coker, or making their living selling drugs and whittling in the woods at Caswell Bay, or are dead) and 2) even if they didn't, would they say? They might bump into me, somewhere. They will bump into me virtually... I mean, it would take a lot of balls to be that rude, and it's the kind of balls people wouldn't want to have.

Again, I let it go. Calmed the fuck down.

But then there was this little bit of repartee with Kek over at his blog which was interesting from another, related, angle: what happens if someone who's already a mate releases something that's a bit shit?

Now, obviously, Kek is a mate but even he did a slight gulp when I (stupidly, I realise now) pretended to be offended by what he'd said (he was bang on, as usual) and that really got me thinking: if I thought, even for a second, via the irony-free domain of Twitter (curse that lack of italics) or the facial expression-free blogs, that I'd offended someone when I didn't mean to, I'd be scurrying back to my text, trawling over it, trying to find out where I'd slipped up...

And that's not all. Kek goes on to say:

Doing things for the right reasons (whatever they might be) can often balance out some of the potentially bad shit - vanity / attention-seeking / self-aggrandising / etc will almost always end in tears, so if anyone's gonna get into public-platform creative activities , then they need to weed that shit out of themselves pronto. But - gone round the block and met myself going the other way) I've certainly never written anything on this blog that I didn't mean. Though, sometimes I've meant to write something and didn't.

Which I think absolutely nails it and makes a mockery out of the lack of real criticism out there (The Wire, about a year ago, was full of reviews that refused to say anything negative - it seems to have gotten a bit better now, people are coming out their shells again); yeah, artists need to put away the self-aggrandising shit before even thinking of releasing anything and then the critics would be free to say whatever they really think, without fear of offending...

I mentioned this to a mate who argued that we didn't need haters; that they were an unecessary blight on the internet, hiding in their anonymity (confession: Loki's not my real name), spewing bad Exorcist bile but I can't agree... without them the circle contracts, the feedback artists get just makes them get worse, or go down blind alleys or try to second guess the critics by changing direction when, really, the old direction was where their mind was at...

I'm going to keep releasing stuff as IX Tab (maybe as Twiggwitch too - though I'll come to that) and it's gonna keep following my themes. That old bitch of a word - masturbatory - that's what I'm aiming for. It's music for me. If you don't get it; I don't mind you saying. I'll engage. I won't huff. There's no need for this politeness..

We need the haters, or at least the dissenters; they'll help... even if they don't mean to.

With that in mind the latest release of __________________________ is total and utter shite.

The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood)

2011-11-20T23:44:00.004Z

...this is the latest, train-hewn IX Tab track to make the light of day (or the dead of night) though, actually, it's just another attempt at a song I posted on here years ago... albeit in a very different version to the one I splattered about here... the humchatter is still there, just about...I'm not near done with it yet... though things are getting muddier and muddier... caked...

This will eventually be in the middle of a Christmas EP, with versions of Silent Night and (naturally) Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand...

IX Tab - The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood) by IX Tab

Scuplture

2011-11-15T13:31:00.002Z

Haven't got this yet (The picture disc looks great!) but I've put it on my Xmas list... My favourite surrealist technostuffed, broken-arsed electrooiding of the moment. It chimes, it gurgles, it might spit up a little (bits of the track above even sound like a sort of debased, idiot savant trying to cover Orbital's Beached - a good thing, I think)

Abby / Mod Fuck Explosion

2011-11-11T20:27:00.004Z

My ipod seems obsessed with trailers and radio spots for Exploitation movies at the moment, not even sure how they all got in there...

But you'd want to see this wouldn't you:

And, though it's bound to be badbad rather than goodbad, any film called Mod Fuck Explosion has to be fun, doesn't it?

Snuglife(s)

2011-11-02T08:07:00.002Z

Oh yes...

SNUG02 - Ekoplekz - So Allein replekz by snugliferecords

SNUG 02: Drvg Cvltvre - Like Cattle You Run by snugliferecords

Due on 7" single. Maybe now. Maybe soon. Dig it out, track it down...

IX Tab - The Humchatter EP

2011-10-31T20:58:00.005Z

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)

2011-10-21T10:33:00.003Z

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)

2011-10-19T19:06:00.005Z

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

2011-10-09T19:06:00.001Z

Presented without comment.

Ekoclef Considered As A Review Of The City And The City

2011-10-06T06:42:00.005Z

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.

Savaging Spires

2011-09-30T09:11:00.002Z

A slight detourn from the one at Freq

Imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a hard drive.

(((imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a Kek hardrive, like the Werneck Wretchmondings I talked about here )))

Imagine some mad urfolk indie scientist, their senses dulled by slow cracks and too good weed, decided that the shimmering pop tarts of

Merriweather Post Pavilion

was just too much to bear, too damned hummable and so somehow found a way to just suck the Baltimore boys back to a time, circa Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, when they were just raw potential, just vaguely primal yelps and fratboy folk tics and snaky little synths and gentle guitar mangles and tiptapping milkbottle drums.

....................

This CD is a time machine that takes you back to that raw potential; an endless loop of foundational knowledge that is about to pull apart; a Duchamp bicycle wheel, played as a percussion instrument for spacetime.

...................

I could be overstating things.

Still, imagine that the same, slight, indie scientist somehow got his calculations just a tiny bit wrong and ended up taking the boys back but changed, so that Panda Bear has become a girl and Avey Tare has sort of gone, well, English and Geologist has turned into Enthnobotanist and only Deakin is as before except now his synth is all broken and reverse-engineered and maybe eaten by reindeer and shat out as (magick) mushroom bedding.

(((The Fly just as Jeff starting Goldblooming. A miniature mutant. A benevolent reconfiguring. Things are the same but different.)))

Well, I’m maybe more than a bit wrecked myself right now but this is how the Savaging Spires album sounds. I’m aware that the above scenario is unlikely, but I’m not ruling it out just yet. The press for these guys and girls wants us to hear unfolding Espers-like folk (and maybe one track sounds a little Wicker Man) and it’s clear that this will be positioned by Critical Heights alongside the forlorn psych genius of Wooden Wand but I’m hearing more of the Finnish psychfolk scene than anything New or Weird (actually, that’s a lie) or American. I can hear a less dense Kemialliset Ystävät, a less feline Islaja, a less propulsive Avarus.

But mostly I hear Animal Collective as they might have been. On some songs (not all of these songs are songs) they take the forking path that meant Panda Bear leapt right over the Beach Boys and headed straight for Dennis Wilson instead. There’s a roughness and a fragility about some of these vocals, especially the male ones...

everything's a kind of forlorn shimmer, a tinkerbell... there's places though where this indecision and fuzz quietly erupts into song; it's those places that Savaging Spires will find an odd solace... the whole album seems like it's searching for those songs, digging around in the dressing up box, throwing toys...

...the female voice(s) sometimes seem like they’re having to tiptoe around, so as not to send the male into shivering despair. If this seems a bit heavy then it’s not at all; it’s actually light as hell, with maybe a slight touch of volcanic whimsy, a slight shading of twee (the kind of twee that I’ve always associated with places like Winchester, which appears on the CD inner sleeve as if it’s a psychogeographical map reference).

I’ve played this only once so far*, it only came today, but I think it’s going to get played a lot. It might even get annoying eventually, maybe unbearable, maybe it’ll eventually seem just too fractured and whimsical ( am I saying too English? Perhaps, though I’m not sure it’s literally English; I don’t care either). It might be one of those albums that eventually does yer head in, even if you loved it once but it has a real will, like a leper hopping alongside with a bowl. It wants love and it’ll get some.

*I've played it 3 times now; it's not failing yet, it's growing, if anything. It seems more like other things the more you hear it. In a good way.

Love's Secret Domain

2011-09-27T22:09:00.002Z

I never actually saw this, only imagined it. Now it's here. I knew where but, well, you never really know where do you?

Prince Rama Re(tard)mix Review w/ Transglobal Underground

2011-09-23T18:28:00.008Z

For those that really can't be arsed with all the arsing, there's the proper review here.

"Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990 (where were you?), which is then savagely dismissed without a thought; a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… a primary imprinting on chiffon and chant and painted ladies inside golden pots, concealed by red smoke… I should be clear, this isn’t intended as a slight… I’ve been playing this album a lot, perhaps because I’m imprinted that way too…

...you are too...

...especially if you think you're not...

...or maybe you're looking at this and thinking: I don't know a single bit of A Clockwork Orange argot; I'm not from your world, pops...

...I've never heard of Leela or the Tight Fit...

In which case; I'll try and explain.

No punctuation, or at least no full stops…only accurate way to understand where this record is coming from… it’s breathless dandyism, artful sabre-tossing and ultimately a little melancholic because the sounds of the east appropriated here (or rather, churned over; this isn’t a Transglobal Underground-style appropriation) are the sounds of Holly/Bollywood’s understanding of the east pre 9/11, when it was exotic and tameable… when no one was even thinking about atrocities or Hassan I Sabbah…when the evilest Arab you saw was Tom Baker in full-make up…

...actually I think I'm getting the odd sniffs around the internet (OK, so far just Jonny Mugwump) that Transglobal Underground might be due a comeback and surely now in the midst of MaybeRetromania (not read that book yet so I'm not really sold on the premise) this would be a perfect time for one of those timeless/utterly time-dependent shaggy Club Dog bands to make their comeback... the music definitiely has never gone away (found different beats perhaps, but not that different beats) and, actually, I find it hard to think that Transglobal Underground in particular could go away, being less a band more a condensation of a certain time, a few uncertain spaces... for you, this could be (INSERT Megadoggish drug-binge here), for me it's aligned to Brighton, sometime early-to-mid 90s where I saw Transglobal Underground and where the whole Eat Static inspired psytrance was about to lift off... in just a few days ethnic drones would be smeared over everything... right then, you could only look back and see, what? Monsoon?

(though you could of course blame Coldcut and Ofra Haza; odd how few picked up on this, or how long it took for everyone to align)

So... Prince Rama.

…it’s not all Sinbad (a lot is Sinbad); “Trust” starts off with an airplane drone and then add voices that sound like they’re trapped in another room before building into some cargo cult version of Gary Numan circa Cars, with some added flourishes from Danielle Dax…

I hear a version of She... the Rider Haggard version... unfilmed but out there...

…the Dax references continue into “Incarnation” which may be a soundtrack to a James T. Kirk honour duel on some far off Essex planet* while “Portaling” starts somewhere inside a mountain during the heart-sucking scene of Temple Of Doom and then sort of detours into handclaps and, bizarrely, pub rock-soul circa 1974…

<<< I've read reviews since writing this and they seem to know about Prince Rama (art school Krishna commune )... and it seems like the associations, these pretty little stabs at meaning that I make, are only semi-appropriate but...

Fuck it; I'm getting more and more annoyed with research-based reviewing. Occasionally, I give a shit about the context of a band (or what they meant to say) but mostly I don't; with this kind of brainfizzing confection, it's all there, it's in the open, there's nothing that re ---- search could bring to the party... >>>

Hectoring over...

You’ll get a lot of fun out of this record; its brain is grimy enough to past muster with all the Pocahaunted TDK fetishists but its bones want to be in the middle of a Bollywood set; lip synching and twirling imaginary balls of bird fat… it has colour, has odd breadth (and odd breath)

But almost no punctuation.

*This phrase was in the original review but I wrote it so long ago I'm struggling to remember what I meant by Essex Planet... it could be a typo but then I don't believe in typos so I must have meant something by it... perhaps I was thinking of Essex quarries (in all senses of the word, or two at least), perhaps it was just one of those sniping non-sequiters that I occasionally shovel into my word piles just for the steaming hell of it... I'll get back to you on Essex planet,,,

Exotic Pylon @ The Vortex

2011-09-20T16:29:00.007Z

Ship Canal, no longer shitting it

Well, (lovely to meet you Dan by the way) Ship Canal is shitting it; it's his first gig, his first play out (play seems very apt for this kind of gig; Ableton Live being the toy of choice, the machine of a thousand voices, the churning dreadnaut in software form, sending boys and girls into whirls and paroxyms...)

I meet him about two hours before he's due on, staring at wine, wishing it glugged, knowing it can't be... his set works really well, works great with the chugging visuals... this crowd is a good crowd, a benevolent mass of chin-strokers and music lovers... Everyone's telling him it'll be fine, it's fine... he opens the evening really well... interlacing loops and samples of the other artists on show tonight, sending heads nodding when the beats kick in... great stuff; keep playing, keep playing...

By the end he's smiling.

He doesn't stop smiling.

Kemper Norton's wheezes of sound

Kemper Norton is also looking a little scared though he's played before, just never in this big city, where things might smoke, where the worry (we all have this worry) is that the London crowd is over-used, over-indulged in weird sounds, doesn't have to go too far to look for new weird sounds, can just glance and then dismiss...

I meet him pre-set and he's looking at wires and wondering... attempting to get mini drunk, drunkette... I buy a few cocktails, just to wind him up... I volunteer some breakdancing, to help distract the crowd... I know he's gonna be great and he knows it too but... there's always doubt, especially since he's just confessed that he's going to, er, sing something tonight...

Sing? Jesus, Dave. You're going to sing?

Jonny Mugwump describes Kemper Norton's set as "like a weird cafe" and he's got that right... all the tables and the candles do make it seem like that, maybe that cafe you finally find at 4 AM in Glastonbury Festival, somewhere up beyondf the stones, in the odd streetlit back-alleys of Shangri-La... at times, it's a kind of odd, lilting Cabaret (Voltaire - in the Swiss Dada sense, in the writer sense... Kemper would make a great soundtrack to Candide). It's haphazard at times, and he sometimes looks at his instruments as if they are about to punish him for some terrible sin, but it's also unique and affecting...

I've talked about Kemper Norton's music many times on here before, though this set is decidedly more slurred and urfolky and less beat-driven than a lot of his stuff and, despite the fact that he interrupts his flow by stop-starting in the middle (some people stopped watching here, which seems to mean stopped listening), by the end of the set, people are captured again. He takes a while to build up towards the song but, when it comes, it's...

It's...

People are listening again.

The song. The song. The slightly broken voice that might be a part of the accompanying wheezing ghostbox harmonium (harmony and radium) comes out.. a gentle folk song, gender benderingly untouched by Kemper hands... love, loss, sex and maidenhood despoiled... you can hear breath; Kemper's, the audience.

An odd magic.

Next, Time Attendant starts fuzzing with Coil synth trails; beginning more or less beatless and building swarms... a little bit reminds me vaguely of the Time Machines Coil stuff... especially the Queens Of The Circulating Library clamshell disc... a little later he starts up beats, cranks them and we get brittle headbutts of sound... audience heads nod (this isn't the place to dance but, people could dance, if they had a head full of belladonna, if they'd forgotten how)

and then came Philip Jeck; dance(ette) music for the already half gone... Jeck is as close to truly religious music as most of these people ever get and he seemed almost ghostly, a presence at the back of the room, watching the other bands, sucking in their sounds and getting ready to regurgitate his own. Jeck is the master regurgitator, taking what's not his, stealing as genius (the quotes go on into eternal regression)... what he's stealing tonight is thunder, or attempting to... that seems to be the message here, the underlying narrative... here comes Philip Jeck to blow these lil fuckers out the water (I'm sure he doesn't think this but I overheard a few conversations); people are quite crazy excited about him playing...

Butm in truth, while the sounds he coaxes wax and wane and certainly pulse it's way through this crowd, his set doesn't blow the other, younger, bands away... (The Liminal seems to disagree), he's not coaxing truly unheard sounds from his decks... I might be drunk as buggery by the time he's on but he looks even a little...disinterested, despite the eager audience...

I'm being harsh. He is a master at what he does; his set spins together in a way it really shouldn't and I like a lot of his records and find the time to play them more than almost any other artist of this type but I felt this wasn't transportive enough tonight. I dunno, there'd been a lot of drone out there, maybe you can fill up on drone, maybe there's a fucking limit...

Still, this evening was wonderful. I met up with some lovely people I've only ever chatted to online before and met some old friends who I've missed a lot this past year. It was also cool to put a face to Andrew and Chris Bailiff and, of course lovely to see Jonny again...

The Vortex remains an unique event in an unique place (and outside The Vortex is like a little slice of London life that looks scripted by Richard Curtis; very surreal and very beautiful); if you haven't been yet (anyone who reads this not been yet?) you need to. People will be talking about these events, one day. You'll need to go once, just to pretend you've always been there.

Dream Baby Dream

2011-09-20T16:27:00.002Z

This is an amazing cover version; The, er, Boss nails this... covers album of Suicide/Rev/Vega songs please, Brucie. Call it a Bonus.

Hacker Farm @ Worlds Unknown

2011-09-14T21:05:00.003Z

The boys are back in town.

Taunton shivers.

I'm a bit late and a woman in the audience already has both hands over her ears; she looks bewitched, maybe feeling those old ghosts come back to haunt her. Dark planetary voices digging at her bones. I take a few photos but then get told off by the woman on the door, herself a haunted replicant, a pink pearled twin set of malign benevolence...

The Steve Engineered video backdrop works perfectly in this context, this blackened cube of the Brewhouse's Studio; music and video morph and break apart; that could be a cow but it might be a Green Man, perhaps the Green Man...

Odd things are moving on screen. Things that shouldn't move.

I've seen these guys play out a few times now and each time there's wonders. They work in a kind of odd harmony, with potential chaos and crackle that should fall apart but doesn't. It's a minor miracle that this collection of wire and plastic and homemade petrol can synths (noisy little fellah) doesn't tip over into mere drone. Steve's (Farmer Glitch) a calm beat technician, dragging remarkable grooves (yes) from his machines; Kek's (the Kidshirt) an almost elemental wraith, hovering on the brink of suggestibility and small (mushroom) t trance, no more so than when playing his strange sawn off baby vuvuvela and winding tendrils around the room.

Real
Music
Comes
Out

And in their second set, playing with the guy who arranged this evening (playing clainet - i think, and toy thigh bone, a mini bullroarer and saxophone) there's a long slow beautiful track that sounds exactly like a lost Coil song from the New Orleans sessions. Lovely piece of music; I hope they've recorded it.

The collaboration worked well; an album as H(acker) Bilk Farm can't be far away...

In fact, Hacker Farm's music would work with most other genres and musicians because it's sponge-like. It's almost phagocytotic, engulfing but not disarming. It's music that can build a quiet storm around other music without denying or destroying. People should be queuing to collaborate with these guys. Hacker Farm music, despite the 'junkshop shaman' press and it's implications of cider-quaked West Country hermeticism/solipsism, seems a resolutely social music...

Which kind of makes it ironic that I had to dash off. Would've loved to stay for drinks. But...Sick baby syndrome at home. RT calling. Great to see you both again. We'll catch up later.

From The Wytch Machine...

Righteous Acid

2011-09-12T18:48:00.003Z

Almost everything available (or not available) at the Sun Araw shop is worthy of attention and dollarsbut I've been really enjoying/digging/wigging to this bright little baby recently:

Fans of Sun Araw will recognise a certain jaded/faded humming of psychedelia... a psychedelic sound that is undeniable but curiously monochromatic; as if somewhere, elsewhere, there's a really grooovy party going on but you're sitting in a room, headstuffed with Cumin and Salvia Divinorum imagining what it might feel like to be invited to that party.

And:

swept endless tumbling

jerky guitar trail offs

rhythms made out of the mis-hits from a 70s Cow Punching competition

others discarded from Maximquaye's dark hours on two track

tracks that seem like afterthoughts and come-downs

fidelity slips

broken-wheeled wagons, circling in the snow

cannibals w/cannabis

If any of this tickles yer kidneys then of course it's a monster fuck that this little fellah is all sold out but the good guys/girls at Mondo Nation have put it up on their site for your downloading pleasure pips... Don't normally link to full albums and will take down if it gets a rerelease but, for now, indulge....

Hacker Farm @ Forage

2011-09-10T18:32:00.003Z

Managed to drag the kids down to St. Werburghs to catch Hacker Farm's matinee performance at Forage earlier today. The technical problems of playing outdoors in a Willow Dome meant that they were running a bit behind schedule. The kids got bored, absolutely hated Brown Sierra, plus I'd pissed-off the Feral Trade char lady by asking for milk in my tea (I chucked a fiver in the donation box - is it too much to expect a bit of dairy produce??), so we sloped off for a walk down the road to the city farm, for a look at the pigs. By the time I managed to drag the kids back, Hacker Farm were into the concluding phase of their performance. So it goes. But I managed to record some audio-visuals for your pleasure...

You may notice that this is extraordinary music being played in an extraordinary setting, on extraordinary instruments, through extraordinary speakers, at an extraordinarily low volume, to an extraordinarily small, half-alert audience, in broad daylight. If that seems slightly surreal, imagine what it was like actually being there.

Well, I just hope that there's a massive, appreciative audience for their second performance, which is probably happening right now, whilst I type this.

Roll The Dice

2011-09-07T07:29:00.003Z

There'll be a full review of Roll The Dice's In Dust over at Freq soon (subject to Editor's approval, though to be honest, he lets me write any old crap) but this will do for now.

And, for anyone vaguely interested in what I might think about albums, there's also a review of Miminokoto and Billie Ray Martin's new project The Opiates which I'll probably get around the remixing on here when I get the time (at present that looks to be circa 2013)

In other news...

Cream Of Turner

2011-09-02T11:32:00.004Z

You don't often get feedback direct from the bands you revihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifew; I guess most never even see their reviews or are content to bathe in praise/ignore the criticisms... self-sealing must be a prerequisite for bands these days; better to find your own corner of the internet, find a place where everybody knows your name, listen to them and just smile or say thanks in person when you see them at gigs... an incestuous cycle perhaps, but one almost necessary for the smaller labels... who cares if someone doesn't like your stuff? Itt's easyish to shift 500 Ltd editions, providing a 1/3 of your twitter/blog/facebook fans are willing to stump up the cash...

But I digress... I came home late last night to find an exquisite little thankyou from the Cream Of Turner people; a thick little card:

And on the back a really sweet and heartfelt note, thanking me for the review of the Sunlore and Heart Land LPs I reviewed here and then remixed here...

I thought the label was definitely one to watch and I hope this kind of attention to detail (in a field increasingly governed by mass email PR shittings where earnest young PR people send emails to apologise for sending emails that you keep asking them not to keep sending) will prevail... I hope someone who reads this or Freq actually buys the albums, even to disagree and pick a fight with me (especially to disagree with me; does no one disagress with anyone any more?)

I hope these guys can keep going. We need this kind of stuff, these kind of people.

Shinjuku Thief

2011-08-27T10:26:00.004Z

Just found some of this guys stuff again. Shinjuku Thief seemed a little under-appreciated in the day... no way for this kind of stuff to get out into the light much, aside from the MFTEQ angle and the odd other fanzine you picked up from Berwick Street or wherever...

But this sounds like it really fits into the Boomkat now...

Gonna have to start digging again into the archives...

Ekoplekz - Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1

2011-08-17T18:08:00.002Z

Okay, (non) pop psychoanalysis time again. Can't resist. I listen to an Ekoplekz release and these things just keep flooding.

I'm really sorry / not sorry at all.

When Memowrekz was nominated for The Uranus Music Prize 2011, I joked on twitter that it was the pop album on that list... well, this brooding, black stutter of a record is Nick aka Ekoplekz's response. This isn't pop. This makes a Mouse out of Maus.

The title is revealing: throwaway and heartfelt, this is certainly intrusive (this is not ambient, except in the sense of enveloping) and it is a little incidental*, a little sketchy in both senses of the word (cf everything else by Ekoplekz) but there's more to it than that. There's something else here. This is Nick unleashing his noise horde and the title might almost be read as a minor apology, a little note to the many fans out there that says: don't worry, this isn't the real Ekoplekz album, this is a sidetrack, an open note, a few preliminary dashes,

I can remember Coil, the pressure of following Love's Secret Domain crushing them, releasing the Black Light District album; Aphex Twin scurrying into evermore oblique identities and eyewinks; Global Communications doing the same...

This is conjecture, of course. I know Nick pretty well but I haven't spoken to him about this. I could be way off mark, it might even be offensive, though it's definitely not intended in that way. Maybe he doesn't give a shit or feel any kind of pressure but something makes me think that my pop comment pulled at a few wires that were already sticking out... this feels like a deliberate attempt to destabilise, to show us that we haven't got Ekoplekz yet... maybe he's worried that those scary hauntological folks will adopt him against his will like a Madonna child...

...and wrestling works well as a metaphor for how this album sounds as well. This is a suffocatingly intense album, leavened only the relatively short track times. It's maybe not as suffocatingly intense as say this little monster but it's still a great credit to PunchDrunk that they are releasing LPs as uncompromising as this one (and their earlier 12" was also a lot more difficult than the Memowrekz stuff or the earlier tapes/CDrs).

A couple of tracks (mine's a white label, I don't know which track is which) sound like a human kidnap victim struggling inside a deep metal coffin, just audible, almost giving up on ever being rescued; some of the rest sound like electronic instruments being scraped across the floor, followed by a Copicat. On one track, the levels flip all over the place, causing a minor neuro-headache as I tried to follow. Throbbing Gristle's 2nd Annual Report is also referenced extensively here and in some of my favourite tracks there's a groove of real, degraded menace and a definite feel of being recorded on a condenser mic somewhere across the room...

There's one track which is lighter than the others and I wonder if this'll be the next Ekoplekz direction**. This one could almost be something off Aphex's second album; loops rolling and slipping off one another, slowly sliding in and out of phase... and it's especially interesting, I think, that the next track sawtooths these gentle melodies off at the neck... a vicious assault, worthy of Maldoror.

If you liked the previous Ekoplekz releases you'll probably like this one too, unless you haven't really been listening too closely; the signature sounds are all there, just a little more corroded, even less beat driven and definitely murkier and more difficult than its predecessors (which are now definitely pop by comparison). There's still the odd beautiful, simple, melody in here but this time they aren't foregrounded and are forced to struggle their way to the surface. Sometimes they don't get there. I like that.

((((((((( NOTE: I've just re-read my first Ekoplekz review (may be the first Ekoplekz review! I'm an early adopter) and I've already mentioned a lot of the stuff I've been on about here; this is just like a bigger, slightly uglier cousin, a cousin attacked by viruses in utero... )))))))))

Finally...

The cover tells you a lot about whether you want this or not. Look at it, decide at that moment. You won't be disappointed, either way.

*incidental, of course, also relates to emerging Sea Devils and Silurians and the kind of screeches they documented on The Stone Tape

**this won't happen; the next release will be noisier still, will be powerelectronics via Suicide organdrawlsssssss

Sunlore / Heartland Review (The Hardly remix)

2011-08-15T18:47:00.007Z

These two LPs came to me via Tequila Sunrise and Cream of Turner but really via Freq... (the proper review is here - this one has ugly appendages)

...And they came with the coolest hand-made LP sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs.

The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs if he'd found himself knee deep in Max Ernst smears (you can see it being made on the label website).

The Heart Land sleeve is perhaps a riff on Throbbing Gristle’s original sleeve for Second Annual Report, consisting of a wrist-thick gatefold slab of industrial card and a label that should be attached to one of those TPS reports that Lumbergh was always trying to get Peter to attach in Office Space.

And if the sleeves are idiosyncratic, so is the music. Sunlore’s explorations sound like explorations, as if they will be songs sometime in the near future but haven’t quite evolved yet.

I haven’t decided yet whether this approach really works in the way they intended it to but there’s certainly enough interesting stuff here to make you dig deeper, to listen harder. Or maybe... No, there's definitely stuff in here, scratching to get out...

At times they sound a little like some of the early albums by Volcano The Bear before they went, ahem, pop with Classic Erasmus Fusion (Ok, they never went pop, they couldn't pop out if someone kidnapped their grandchildren) and they use a similarly odd blend of instruments and non-instruments: toys, pianos, organ drones, broken keyboards, bruised guitars...

These fragments sound like they’ll eventually get to some pretty intense places but right now they’re just winding up in style...

the music wants to be more music.. it wants musical progeny... musical babies....

Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and fluxHeart Land play a similar field (I think it’s the same people) though theirs is a muddier approach, a denser vision, almost a shadow of the twinkling Sunlore album. Jung would listen to these two albums and smile. Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and flux. Genres flip in and out of the mix; slight hints of jazz (This Heat style jazz i.e. notjazz which may be jazz - I don't really understand jazz) and psychedelia and folk and Dada. Tzara would have liked this, would have jigged in a robot costume, or dressed like a moat. He'd have skipped in stage to the detuned bells and Sapir-Whorf errors with a grin that could've smuggled aubergines...

Not quite beguiling yet but you’ll want to hear more.

Both albums are remarkably economical; a lot of artists would have half the tracks and simply extend the motif, hoping to bludgeon their way through repetition and familiarity. They know who they are. We could all name three bands on two hands.

But... neither of these collectives seem to want to fall into that commercial trap; the tracks end if anything a little too quickly, giving the impression of a low boredom threshold, or a lack of tape. These releases electrify the sheer oddness of the attention-defecit approach and the gamble associated with taking this route; people will not like these LPs simply because there's not enough repetition...

These albums are sighs; expect bellows in the future.

Keep watching. This label is a thrilling anti-capital conceit in this awful age of austerity. Reward and applaud these guys, even if the music isn't quite your thing. Buying some of these albums is a revolutionary act and this is said from the dull-sensed, detached and disinterested opinion of someone who didn't have to pay for them at all, who sucked them all up on the heavy and ever-open coffers of the mighty Freq...

MemoryHouse - The Years Or... PRESS:RELEASE

2011-08-05T20:42:00.003Z

via here

Memoryhouse

((((...an amended and reconfigured press release))))

To avoid doing a Hari, the actual Press Release is in bold, as befits it's worth, its status, its totemic power.

A name, an art, a slice of Canadian now presented as memory of then... Evan Abeele (composer) and Denise Nouvion (vocals), hail from Toronto, which...

1) has a secret subway stop

2) stands in for New York (in films like.... add list, with snark) which was where I saw them play and where I bought their Lately single from a lovely earnest guy on the merch stall at The Mercury Lounge

Their music blends the contemporary with the forgotten, the traditional and the technological, the visual and the aural, within the sonographic landscape of pop.

It might... but this is a Press Release, and I'm starting to zero in on the:

1) PRESSING - which of course gives us urgency, agency, earnest persistence, insistence as well as the obvious record and cider presses

and the

2) RELEASING - which gives us removal of bondage, of confinement, of life... or calls into question our callous use of almost-language ("I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go...") or maybe implies loss (good or bad) or even catharsis

via here

So, with an eye on words:

AXIS 1: Blending contemporary with forgotten - calls into question the Memory of Memoryhouse of course but may simply be a causal reflection of the name rather than a stimulus for it. The contemporary is actually slightly missing from their work in my ears, which is one of the reasons I like them, think they stand ever so slightly apart from their (yes) contemporaries... forgotten I'm willing to go with since this is the key to the difference... sometimes they sound like the bands that have been forgotten, that have names but don't keep cropping up in press releases... they sound like music that was around late 80s, early 90s and was even listened to then but has since fallen away, hasn't inspired the same adoration and hasn't appeared in Press Releases...

I'm thinking of bands like Whipping Boy. Not Whipping Boy; they sound nothing like Whipping Boy.

AXIS 2: The traditional and the technological - now this one is odd; I'm pretty sure that technological is kinda traditional now, especially with all the retro/downgrading that people are eager to promote these days:

100% analogue!: No digital post-processing: Thick vinyl: Released on Superferric cassette only: Any pops and glitches are entirely intentional/unintentional

So I'm not really sure their PR company has thought that one through...

AXIS 3: the visual and the aural - this is an interesting one and often mentioned but in my experience the two generally compete rather than blend (i'm no natural synaesthete). Certainly, the visual won on the night I saw them, the dreaminess of the visuals trumped the slightly less dreamy music, which is definitely slurrier on record...

Did I mention? They have a record out soon. And it's really good.

On September 12, 2011 Sub Pop Records will release a fully re-recorded, remixed and re-mastered version of The Years, adding two new tracks entitled “Modern, Normal” and “Quiet America.”

I was listening to it and tweeted "dreamlogical & immersive; like a dead slow drive at 4AM through unfamilar country" and I think that holds; that is what's its like (my Twitter self and my Blog self often disagree, we're different beasts) but I feel I should clarify:

a) dreamlogical because it doesn't ebb or flow, it's edited into a slowburn, no ragged edges... the situation/people/location/characters change? no problem, dreamlogic smoothes things over... the edits between scenes are too sharp? no worries, our casually causal little minds will simply condense and assimilate...

b) immersive because it's so visual... you can't help but swim in imagery (so much so, that sometimes you forget you're listening).... it's thick, you could swim in it... of course, you might not want to....

c) when I meant dead slow, I mean dead slow... i mean the kind of driving we used to do

Oh, I know you often don't jump to those old blusters so here's what I'm getting at:

We were somewhere around Sutton Bingham Reservoir on the edge of the Somerset/Dorset desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It's 2 AM. We're driving maybe 3 miles an hour, crammed into Rs hopelessly fucked 1978 Mercedes Benz, the lights all blown so it seems like we're just floating, like the car isn't even there. We're heading towards a usual druggy haunt, the deserted ruin of a Chapel Perilous on the edge of the water.

Which more or less brings me to:

AXIS 4 (WHICH IS NOT AN AXIS AT ALL): Within the sonographic landscape of pop - which implies that Memoryhouse are attempting to delve inside pop (the landscape I'll let go, poetry needs some space), to find an imprint, to go beyond the naive realist view that the body is simply the body (read: the canon is simply the canon, the art is the art, the music is the music) and to discover the constituent parts, the whirrings, the beating hearts and valves...

now, this could be nothing (IT COULDN'T BE) and I'm not exactly hearing that kind of in-depth exploration so far in their music...

THE TERM BETTER SUITS SOME OF THE RECENT JAMES FERRARO RELEASES ACTUALLY

...but the intention is honourable and maybe makes sense of the affinity I feel these guys have with David Lynch... they could soundtrack his movies and their music would benefit from his direction since he is almost unique in the ability to use sound and vision on (more or less) equal footing and so they wouldn't find themselves swamped by imagery... like his films, they deal in simple, but multi-layered, realities... they weave complex story lines out of simple patterns and echoes...

Someone sent me a black and white photograph of someone in a bunny suit riding a motorbike.

Chloe Lattanzi

2011-07-21T08:47:00.002Z

Olivia Newton John's daughter striking out on her own and doing a leather Sandi... kind of annoying, actually... and nowhere near as dark or disturbing as Xanadu...

Select Magazine Scans

2011-07-19T08:42:00.004Z

A big thankyou to Richard at Select Magazine Scans for finding, scanning and sending me this (negative) review of Love's Secret Domain... I don't agree, of course, with Ted Kessler's review but, in the same way I occasionally read The Mail (or even the NOTW - what? It's gone? Why? What happened?) just to get a perspective on what the enemy are thinking, I like reading negative reviews of albums I love, just to prevent my Groupthink at bay in the hope I'll avoid the blog/critical equivalent of The Bay Of Pigs...

Ha, just found that my old Love's Secret Domain review is now coming up second (under Wikipedia) on Google... Jesus, I must've spent a lot of my life talking about this album!

Raica

2011-07-15T08:45:00.002Z

Try to listen to lots of this kind of stuff but not very much gets my attention beyond a cursory quarter-listen, mostly because I'm normally struggling with some elliptical Philosophical half-theory but... this has a distinct whiff of Twin Peaks about it, which can only be a good thing.

Books by chloe harris aka raica

More here.

Brain Drive / Soft Ballet

2011-07-15T08:09:00.003Z

Ever so slightly unsettling , geisha-faced EBMish poptartings from 1993:

Found via the anonymous comments at this post.

A little more EBM (they call it EBB) is this one, by Soft Ballet, also discovered via Deep Throat:

Keith Fullerton Whitman (again) & Sam Prekop

2011-07-14T07:49:00.002Z

...playing a lot of Keith's stuff at the moment; the blechs and twinkles and abstractions and machine lisps are soundtracking the last few days at work, bridging to the Summer proper...

... and this, by Sam Prekop (from his album Old Punch Card) is a related vein, slightly more pop and gasping... less inclined to headddddddddown myelin-sheathed God busting (No idea, either) but pretty as hell... more prettiness, I think; I'm done for the moment with the depths...

Keith Fullerton Whitman/Alien Radio (Rhizomatic Review Remixxx)

2011-07-13T17:21:00.005Z

This is a remix of the review over at Freq.

This is a work in progress about a work of progress. A split album in all senses.

<<<>>>

Split seams... or spilt seems

Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics.

(((arpeggios that didn't follow the usual waves of the sea, that didn't submit to the ravages of what others thought the sea must sound like, but instead turned a conch into an amplifier and heard the sea anew)))

Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms.

<<<>>>

There’s rumours that a good few of the audience were high on LSD when he played this out. Let’s hope not, eh?

<<<>>>

It’s not as… breezy as some of Keith’s recent works, not as obviously de-tangling (insert here quote about Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structures, strangling the life out of the roots from tree of knowledge) and instead reminds me in form of Faust’s “Krautrock” opener from Faust IV, if less smooth than that suggests and less solipsistic.

((((Actually listening for a third time this isn't true; apologies to Freq readers but it really doesn't sound like that at all; whatever resemblance it seemed to have this morning, seem gone now... I don't know what I was thinking...I'm a twat)))

It’s (still) a symphonic roar of a track (though) which gets to crescendo early on and doesn’t really give up until the end. Despite being built from edits, it’s propulsive and you’ll never hear the joins; you can just about imagine Keith holding on to this track like it’s an aircraft engine, hoping to hell he doesn’t slip on one loose wire and get thrown off.

One loose sinewave, one loose electron... Keith Fullerton Whitman is getting more scientific in his (not very) old age... this is music that sounds like it was made in a laboratory, or rather a garage that's been turned into a laboratory, like those guys in Primer... it's akin to people trying to make Owsley Acid; only to find that occasionally the air turns sulphuric...

<<<>>>

Alien Radio responds to this long, dense frightener with shorter, smaller tracks. Ping pong bleats, electronic White Noise* gulps (gulps seem everywhere at the moment in electronic music; everyone’s finding things difficult to swallow it seems**) that shift ever so slightly in and out of focus (this could be my ears) and then slope off behind the sheds for a robot smoke. He seems a little intimidated, anthropomorphically spinning into a sort of jester role to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s angry Bear King.

(((Listen closely, you'll hear them skipping around, these multi-jesters. you'll hear them sniping at each other with little electronic twizzles; skipping in the light, where Coil*** jesters skipped around in the half-light, pulling on the light cord...)))

They are pleasant and mildly diverting with all the plusses and minuses that come from that shallow-arsed phrase, sounding not unlike the collaboration between Aphex Twin and Mike Paradinas (as Mike and Rich) on Expert Knob Twiddlers. You’ll like both sides, I think but I reckon you’ll return to Keith’s side more often, if just to check that he’s still clinging on.

*I'm sorry, these guys seem to get a mention every fucking review. Lazy, stuffed turkey/tourniquet joinerism, almost Hari in it's effortless smudge...

** I'm assuming this is the gulps of (De)Cameron et al, future-recorded, watching each other auto-fellate while Rome burns. I'm assuming Chris Watson has plied himself from the soft burrs of The One Show and sent himself hurtling into the near-future, armed only with throat-mics...

***yeah, again; fucking sue me... actually I mention Owsley acid in that post too... this blog is eating itself; every post is a remix of every other post...

And here's the back...

2011-07-10T12:00:00.001Z

From The Wytch Machine...

Littlest Loki's New T-Shirt (1)

2011-07-10T10:17:00.001Z

Oh Lazy Sunday mornings...

Me and Littlest Loki spent this one making him a t-shirt with all the bands he listened to and liked in the first few days of his life...

From The Wytch Machine...

Run DMT in the style of Nietzsche

2011-07-09T12:06:00.005Z

Liking: though none more morose than the 'liker', the stolen wish-fulfiller who ran with Eros and then took out her younger sister!

The inexplicable signs of reason compete and manifest, all for nothing, yes and always yes, but a wondrous nothing of escapes and a tired lack of reason itself is a while away, still.

The worst of these bands - the typologies, as far as can be written down and de-meaned, can hope to compete in a market of what were then called marketing opportunities and are now called marketing opponents.

The impersonal takes stage - but from these small beginnings, come masters of loyalty and merchandising; there are better things here than there, for that you can be certain... and if you worry that the task is still to turn a man into a machine then, remember, that these men go willingly into the soul of the machine and are willing combatants of humanity and occupants of a guiding role for machines.

With Will, comes accident. Let it always be soul-raking but never misunderstood!

Faith is needed - and necessary and incomplete; you can understand most of this by looking at a t-shirt or a loose bit of clothing. But where Faith is necessary, there lies a spark of currency, to still the blood...

And what of Kant, the dog and the doggerel of Psychology? If those tired eyes still seek a categorical imperative, rather than it's zippier cousin, it's smiling Man For All Seasons*, then I would suggest a headshake in your direction, a motif merely and a sense that perhaps these Men, if you are among them, seek beauty in simple forms, in 'mere bagatelles'

For more eat here or here or here, and wisely.

*which is not the same, no matter how much the universalists and the curanderos and the geneticists - Eugene and his terrible brothers - think it is...

Pseudo Nippon

2011-07-01T07:01:00.001Z

Would you buy a fried breakfast off this man?

From The Wytch Machine...

Larsen w/ Little Annie w/ Coil

2011-06-24T14:03:00.003Z

I love the way Little Annie says the word cigarette; she makes it an onamatopoeic word. This is a little bit like a Rollins rant, a slight detourn of Steven Jesse Bernstein. A No No Woman in the sub-basement of hell.

It's not as good as this one of course:

...but you could put it in the same box.

Full review of the Larsen album will appear at Freqzine fairly soon.

Barbara Panther

2011-06-22T07:35:00.003Z

sourced of sorts from the bare bones of Fredgeogblog, which will apparently turn into a horticulture/music blog: what is the best music for mulching?

BP is clearly syntactically/visually related to Bjork , a slicing and dicing of some of her best popbits, with maybe a smile of Lykke Li about the edges...

Lyrics seem Bjorkish too... oddly-hinged flights of fancy and a fascination with tropes/archetypes

She dances better , though.

100 all time children's favourites

2011-06-17T19:31:00.001Z

You know, the one with the proto Moon Wiring Club sleeve...

The Blind Mice are frightening. Like they've been drawn by Francis Bacon, like they've been speared in the eye sockets, or had methyl-blue dropped into them as part of some awful Mengele experiment...

Moonlicking, Ekoplekzing

2011-06-15T18:39:00.006Z

Image stolen from the mad mentals of R.K.Sloane

In the middle of a mini-renaissance of new music listening at the moment, mostly a result of moonlicking as a reviewer at Freq, the evergood fulcrum loined from Richard Fontenoy - a guy it turns out is good friends with some old Yeovil buddies and who I've also probably met way back in the times when I'd hump up the road to that London to watch The Revolting Cocks or whoever... small small world - ironically, I'd sent a chance email because I figured my own little Twitter/Blog circuit had become a little self reverential and I fancied dipping into another circle, only to find there are several tendrils coming this way and that way, like some terrible cross-haired Nyarlotho-step beat beast...

Anyway, my first 2 contributions are up at the Freq site now:

1) a doe-eyed Kraut's Corpuscle take on the new Mist album (c'mon... it's the guy from Emeralds, you know...)

and

2) a gulping shudder at the electronic pastoralism and arcane (device) buzz of John Chantler's The Luminous Ground

I've just got a bunch of other goodies through the post to review as well, including what is shaping up to be a Hawkwind-tastic classic by a Pikacyu from Afrirampo and Kawabata Makoto from Acid Mothers...

Finally, a slightly smeared lump of white vinyl goodness in the form of Ekoplekz's Live At Dubloaded album came and I've been listening to it while typing... sounds more restrained than other stuff I've got from Nick, not a million miles off the gentlest Throbbing Gristle stuff... the backside of In The Shadow Of The Sun...

...some great textures though, and some odd squeaks and whistles, some bent shapes in there, Nikolai, some way bent shapes...

I'm one side in, so far...probably should accumulate more thoughts before really committing to the page but... since, my first Ekoplekz review was real-time blagging/free-associating...

...these gulps and electronic groans seem like Nick's consciously trying to play himself out of a psychic corner; not give in to the pulse that I'll bet anything he can feel himself resisting... he's an old rave guy at heart and you can feel him holding back on the beats, conscious that he's always just a light teckstep to the left from balls-to-the-wall techno and wants to rein those tendencies the fuck in...

I'm guessing wildly here, it's just an impression... maybe this is partly a consequence of playing somewhere so bass and beaty, big and bouncy as Dubloaded? Maybe there's a need to counterpoint, or else just a desire to move away from the early CDrs and tapes (which Cabbed it up with all those neat washes and wah-wahed drum patterns and organ tinkles)...

...whatever the wresting and hand-wringing Ekoplekz has been up to (maybe none at all, maybe he's in the zone, is oblivious to even the rush of his own blood), he's pushing his machines in interesting directions... not resting on laurels, hardly resting at all... he's poured an awful lot out into the records he's released so far... the well must be getting dry... and it's interesting that, so far, ever release has been distinct, despite the relative sparseness of his raw materials...

where's he gonna go next?

is he gonna give in?

Contact

2011-06-10T06:43:00.003Z

Dismissed Wooden Shjips before (bit harsh perhaps, just not really noticed them before), but this cover of Gainsbourg/Bardot's Contact (surely everyone's favourite 'alien girl gets injured in space and needs to strip for a mercury transfusion' song) has a loping, electronica feel, despite it mostly being gentle chugggs and spacey guitars.

The sounds could be switched - synth buzzes for the guitars - and you'd get something along the lines of Ekoplekz... especially the stuff he churns over live, the longforms rather than the snappy Robert Rentals. You're not believing me, I can tell. I'll stop. Just listen.

Wooden Shjips keep things very simple, letting the thin pulse of the original tickover while they spread psych smears to thicken it...

The original, with a video of sorts that takes the space girl theme and runs with it, as you'd expect. Jules Verne imagined this, but never told anyone.

Underground Railroad & Ghost Rider

2011-06-09T10:09:00.005Z

my inbox is taking on the hue of an abandoned betting office, a stockbroking floor after dark...but I'm picking my way slowly, laboriously through all the digital promos that have backed up and just thought I'd just stuff a few bands down some throats...

These guys are moving towards something, I think. Not there yet, still in SonicYouthAwe maybe but I can see something happening... there's something, I dunno, around the eyes, that makes me think this band will keep getting better... Like I say, it's not there yet but...

Anyway, I'm on a temporary hiatus from abstract electroni-canings and dwelling instead on guitar rocks and cover versions of old Suicide songs (Fave so far: Gavin Friday and Dave Ball's turn on Ghost Rider, followed by everyone else's take on Ghost Rider; Ghost Rider seems to be one of those tracks that no one can fuck up)

Still, these guys:

I like the video, too. And I like the fact that it's relatively pure sounding, no greasy retro wipes (or different greasy retro wipes), no queasiness, no hipstamatic sound...

Same here... like a French take on the Sister era

I dunno... can't quite put my finger on it... Not even trying to, to be honest.

Mokum

2011-05-20T08:09:00.006Z

A throwaway comment on Twitter ended up throwing me back to some old Mokum tracks... didn't even know these guys still existed... thought the scene/label had been annihilated /sublimated by the I Wanna Be A Hippy crossover/dance-smash...

...the pisstaking sub Blue Sunshine look on the video seemed to cause a rift between the appearance (from outside The Netherlands) and the reality but it seems I missed the point a bit about what it was about... i.e. from here, gabber seemed inexplicable / impossible in a broader cross-cultural mileu... only worked whilst vaguely tainted w/ actual insanity, facism, inarticulate rage...

That seemed to be the marketing scam in the UK: 'Look at these crazy motherfuckers - it's like Rapido gone stabmental!'

while... in reality I think gabber was more complex than that - there were undoubtedly lots of nerve-shredding headbanged skins but there were also sub sub sub happy hardcore fans, shaking their booties with big smiles on their faces....

Anyway... digging a little deeper and you'll find that the Mokum artists were never counter-cultural in the sense I thought; Technohead had already had a hit under the Tricky Disco name, itself an exemplary pop bleep from Warp...

And Tricky Disco were, of course, Greater Than One/GTO who had more than a few industrialish connections way back to the mid 80s...

The links between Technohead/ techno heads and Industrial are not spurious: Mokum, for a moment, in the UK, stood apart from the bleep artists... the early releases were out there, talked about (pre I Wanna) in similar breaths as Power Electronics; the racks weren't far apart... your Whitehouse fan would consider a Mokum track as a first wedding dance.

I bought a few of the Mokum compilations and used them to shed people at parties that had gotten out of hand - people didn't go mental, they went... it seemed like outsider music and, in the absence of the internet, it was impossible to find the sources that would prove it otherwise... then I Wanna Be A Hippy rolled out and things started to change...

(compare and contrast with how people felt about Whitehouse etc before and after you could access info about them - in fact, I talked about that here...)

So, I drifted off... gabber became another genre that died in me... it never fitted my drugs (made the error of taking the wrong drugs in a gabber field, didn't make the same error twice), didn't fit where I was heading musically, seemed simultaneously inaccessible and over-accessed; snobbery ensued and I assumed that everyone else lost interest too...

But they didn't. It's still out there, Mokum's still going strong, gabber's morphed into even more ridiculous highspeed angles: speedcore, cybergrind, splittercore...

and then extratone...

which comes fullcycle with the Nazi imagery and kinda outCakes Chris Morris... Shatner's Bassoon will quake...

Taken By Trees - Taken Too Young

2011-05-17T06:53:00.004Z

Loving this girl's voice... and this song, especially in it's remixed version, is like hearing Billy Bragg's A New England sung by children as you're coming out of a anaesthetic fog; I wonder if that was intentional?

Either way, it's subtle, trippy and very beautiful... Taken By Trees are (is?) one to watch.

Specta - K-Hole

2011-05-16T19:15:00.003Z

I dunno... there's stuff just like this everywhere, stuff like this crawling from under rocks, into storm drains, out of badly brushed mouths but... there's something a little off about this and I like it when something grabs you by the throat & makes you pay attention to it specifically, rather than simply echo off it's ancestors, friends, family members... even in a crowded, saturated, chain-smoked field the bass here is gutting... the name, the not Skepta... and the simplicity itself is like a-

Actually, the thing I like about this is that it sort of resists theory and interpretation so I think I'll just shut the fuck up

Am I Real?

2011-05-09T07:04:00.005Z

As a partially relevant add-end-um... to Kek's piece on the Britney/Salem collaboration (it's not a remix, even if both parties say it is) this seems to encapsulate the fluffier side of the chillwaves, with the assumption that a slightly slowed Britney is less witch-like, more glacial/glazed and should therefore sit snugly with the likes of Nite Jewel...

...but it's the title that really adds something here. The song is Nite Jewel, whatever that means to you (to me, it means a fantastic Summer last year in New York) but the song isn't really where we're at here - it's the plaintive cry of Am I Real? Am I Real? that shoves this to the front of the queue and will no doubt see it on the Chillwave 3CD sets sold for £6 circa 2013...

It's an important question in this genre (cf. witch house, hauntology, whatever) and becoming increasingly difficult to answer... in fact, the 3CD set should only contain versions of this song, or versions of other songs that incorporate this phrase...

Am I Real? she's asking... the TV turning to static... the debt to Twin Peaks extended character assassinations exemplified... Am I Real?

And maybe someone ought to sample this guy, a Borges stemfish, grappling with Who Am I? in mixed metaphor and shifting language....

Time for a shift in the shift... Kek is right, there's something scurrilously upended about the way music's going... the You in Youtube becoming less and less key... the Tube taking all with it... sucking it down... sluicing history like it means nothing because it means nothing...

Lots sounds like lots but I'm beginning not to care. Let it fly. There's still a lot of stuff to coalesce out there, we shouldn't be afraid... we're only at the beginning of the revolution...

Another year where music bites itself and finds new flesh...

Add.

End?

Um...

Hacker Farm - Poundland

2011-05-05T06:48:00.006Z

Perhaps not fully available yet but here's a place to start snuffling.... There's also this little slice of the olde worlde, which has other stuff... maybe more on this later, the floppiness will need another headbubble to get around.

Poundland wreaks tiny little havocs. Electronic ape gulps, scales and scrapes; all shrouded in deep echo... Lots of tracks start like they're dying.

West country voices occasionally drift up - voices you don't hear often, ghosts of Holloway (Ian and the prison)... there's hidden tinkles and micro melodies that never quite reveal themselves... the hi-hats sound like aerosol sprays... this sounds like music from a country that's just discovered electricity, is still in it's thrall, is wondering if nature could ever tame such a beast...

I know their equipment: the close-miked toys, appendages, shower caps, broken machines... and it does sound like all of those... Steve keeping the beats just in check, Kek flinging himself softly at piles of pure matter... but this is more, er, musical than you might expect... these guys aren't altogether sane or altogether willing to compromise or altogether but... you get the feeling this is a great group, that they've found a way to stitch their two approaches together...

You want superficials? TG is an influence, of course and a lot of this - the violins, the shudders, the leftover electronics and drums; but this is X-TG, none of the Gen(eric) egoings... there's a hint in one section of a West Country version of Peter Christopherson's solo contribution to DOA, for instance... The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death...

Some of it sounds like being inside a giant Zardoz skull; with weapons replaced by cornstalks, sweet wrappers, puffballs...

It's music for a Riddley Walker boar hunt (we're going on a boar hunt, we're going to catch a big one, what a beautiful day; we're not scared....)

Except....we're too fucked to spear, we're rooting for vegetables, snuffling for hallucinogenic fungi alongside the bird squawks (these birds feed on badger carcass)... we're fogfucked, we're wandering...deep in the wud... and there's a glimmer, somewhere up ahead, it's a man with, God, he.... those mirrors, they are blinding... He... shit, he seems to be kicking what looks like a... No... Christ...

Did I say I liked it a lot?

The Act Of Naming

2011-04-28T06:46:00.004Z

Not everything Holy is good. cf. Wolf, Ghost, Panda, Fuck...

But... as the genres cleanse, fold and manipulate; maybe it's time to rearrange our musical thinking around the act of naming. You can't rely on the existing labels either (haunt, hyp, step, skwe,) - why not put the, er, Jung in jungle? The Act of naming may seem throwaway but there's a reality in there, waiting to get out... cf. bloggers internet names - Loki seemed plucked from the air, seemed hasty but... there's a few bitches of malevolence here and there on these pages, a few fake moves, some tiny pranks (this may be one, I'm yet to decide if I'm serious) and some afterthought actions that only retrospectively made sense.

I was serious about this being a good idea, for instance. I still think it's a great idea, especially with regard to The The - Girls Aloud should cover the whole of Infected, a la Pussy Galore.

Cat could be a genre, a nominal.

So, if they haven't already started doing this, I propose record stores start organising their stock by names rather than genres (or even, urgh, decades). You want to buy everything with Ghost in the name?

Factums - Take Drugs

2011-04-26T06:50:00.002Z

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (actually Yeovil) I wrote a song called Take Drugs that was intended to be played only be accident. It was rubbish, done on an old Casio SK5, mixing up something unfunky from MAARS, a Lydia Lunch drone and me, as a backward-looking 15 year old, telling myself to take drugs, something in the style of Mel and Kim, or the PWEI appropriation of them.

Yeah, I know. I also used to make tape mash ups of Monty Python records and Health and Safety adverts - fucking sue me...

I never played it because I wanted it just to appear, to turn up on an old tape sometime in the future, hopefully when I needed some definitive guidance, maybe in the depths of an K-Hole (actually more likely to be an A-Hole but...), maybe at a loose moment in time when thing were getting thinner (hair, teeth, skin etc). I liked the idea of my past creeping out at a time when I was least expecting it (a past without an attached County Court Judgement, restraining order, alimony suit, that is). I liked the idea of it just appearing and being only half-remembered.

It did appear once, in an appropriate place, at an appropriate time, somewhere around the depths of Good Hell (Swansea) and now I've found it again... when i get a new cassette Walkman I'll upload it and play it out here... maybe someone else'll find it...

Anyway, this track by Factums has nothing in common except the fidelity and the title. The video is creepy as a one-eyed horse though...

On The Floor Considered As a Downhill 3yr Olds Birthday Party

2011-04-04T07:53:00.006Z

It’s a new generation (who inbvited that kid? He's been scratching for 15 mins now and I swear his hair is moving without him)(everyone here)
Of party people (what do you mean we didn't order a Clown? Who the hell is that then?)

Darling get on the floor (security services suspect terrorism)
Darling get on the floor (security services suspect press invasion/paedophilia)

Let me introduce you to my party people (I invited Randy, but he's dressed as a bear)
In the club… (aka in the soft play area)

[Pitbull]
I’m (on) loose (women)
And everybody knows I get off the train (after watching that documentary with the guy from Merlin and One Foot In The Grave)
Baby it’s the truth (we lost a child down the back of the inflatable; I'm pretty sure he's stopped breathing)
I’m like inception I play with your brain (like the snow scene in Inception perhaps; now, where's the motherfuckin' wotsits?)
So I don’t sleep I snooze (one eye won't shut due to some awful neuralgia; you try being glamorous and trying to keep Calpol on the spoon at 4.30 in the morning...)
I don’t play no games so don’t get it confused no (quadruple negative here is perhaps some attempt at Neural Linguist Programming; the intention is clearly to remind the children that musical statues is coming up)
Cos you will lose yeah (we've rigged pass the parcel so that our kids win)
Now pump it up (the bouncy castle's fading...)
And back it up like a Tonka truck (we decided not to afford an actual Tonka truck, here's one made by Bruder instead...)

[Jennifer Lopez] (interesting move here to a variation of the never-used monoryhme scheme... perhaps a comment on the self-imposed drudgery of filling party bags?)
If you go hard you gotta get on the floor (assumed to be directed to cleaning staff re: fallen savoury hazards)
If you’re a party freak then step on the floor (the only kid here not a party freak is filling his ears with M & Ms)
If you're an animal then tear up the floor (talking to you, face-paint boy; anyone know if Sharpie washes off? I got these as a shop-spoiled lot from the Beckhams)
Break a sweat on the floor (mispelling; should read 'sweet' - the appropriation of the English term rather than the American - 'candy' - is perhaps a significant move towards Global certainty)
Yeah we work on the floor (the cleaning staff retort)
Don’t stop keep it moving (We don't pay 3 cents over minimum wage for nothing!)
Put your drinks up (directed towards the Dads at the back, some of them already slipping into Kestrel Super comas)
Pick your body up and drop it on the floor (How come concussion isn't on my predictive text? This is gonna be in all the papers tomorrow if we can't figure out how to bury the body...)
Let the rhythm change your world on the floor (I think this is just a commentary on the appropriation of the Lambada theme; the world will change if you squeeze it enough - in fact, let's just get rid off this troublesome World Music tag once and for all eh?)
You know we’re running sh*t tonight on the floor (every parent with small children will understand this feeling)

Brazil Morocco
London to Ibiza
Straight to LA, New York
Vegas to Africa(the wonders of positive discrimination, the paucity of American Geography teaching)

[Chorus]
Dance the night away (until we pack up at 6.30)
Live your life ,and stay young on the floor (Mummy's staying young, look, she can still do the... oh... Can someone call the ambulance?)
Dance the night away (in a hospital waiting room)
Grab somebody drink a little more (fuck, the coffee machine dispenses drinks at a thousand times hotter than the surface of the Sun)
Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala (the morphine kicks in...)
Tonight we gon’ be it on the floor (though I'll be sleeping on an old sliding door, trying to realign my vertebrae)

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala (Morphine, Morpheee Richards, Keith Richards, Keith Harrisand Orville... Is that a pig?)
Tonight we gon’ be it on the floor (I've just brought up some alveoli; I think there may be internal injuries, after all. What does a spleen look like?)

ETC

Mega Mystery Band

2011-03-28T08:23:00.005Z

Digging into the inbox for the first time in ages. Fluff and nonsense, mostly, with a few gems curdling to the surface (more later, perhaps) and also this:

It doesn't the matter that the music is a bit. Or that this will end up as a. Or even that the idea itself returns yet again and will bite it's tail until.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>

(please let the truth not be revealed, let the identity founder, let whoever it is just slip silently away; at least, let it have due course, let the prosaic truth turn up when)

...

This Hardy Boys mystery is irrelevent, a nasty little retrovirus - I don't want to find out who the MMB (though wouldn't it be great if it turned out to be Maurizio Mufti Bianchi?) are, but I like the idea of pretending to be them. More things like this should happen, I think. The internet's easy giving is killing this kind of mystery: even being able to buy Power Electronics et al killed it for me a little.

As Martin Beyond The Implode says in the comments there:

"...if anyone wants to preserve any mystique about early Whitehouse, whatever you do don't watch the Come Org video...."

But still, I like the idea of everyone pretending to be everyone else. Before the internet it seemed very possible that those people you were seeing up there weren't really who they said they were. Images couldn't be tracked down easily. I went to see Autechre and Orbital and there was no way to tell if it was them, or just some lackies with a CD player, an echobox and a shuffle function...

In fact, it didn't matter if it was them or not...

Aphex kind of killed that, of course; made the face central, put himself about, made things Rock... but until then, the anonymity was everything, which lent itself to sampler as pirate, sample as unmarked pirate gold: the anonymity was the music and had to be. When Richard James said "I don't use samples" (can't find the source of this, maybe he didn't say that) it was a anti-revolutionary retrogressive act, a Rockist uplift, a return to the old days...

But back to MMB, it reminds me a little of a silly dialogue (followed up by an email conversation) I had with Terre Thaemlitz in the letter pages of The Wire...

See here, for the letters...

I wrote that because it ought to be true. That was 2004, now it really ought to be true.

I wonder.

Maybe we need a partial media blackout. Stop any information leaking out. You can see where Burial was going with this and you should have shivered at the hungry pack, hunting the poor sod down.

Make your next release a release.

A Radiophonic Weekend

2011-03-25T19:06:00.004Z

Yes, it's been a long time since I posted on this blog, but this is an event that needs to be pimped far and wide.

I'll be there because (a) I live in Bristol and (b) I'm performing at the event, but also because (c) Dick Mills will be there (yes that Dick Mills, the one who did all those farty laser gun noises on those old Dr. Who episodes you used to watch) and (d) so will David Cain (yes, that David Cain, the one who made this record). Delia will be with us in spirit.

C'mon dad-bloggers, no excuses now. Your generation needs you...

Rene Hell Flicker + Moonlighting

2011-03-10T13:45:00.003Z

It gets better...

Keep with it...

Rene Hell "{e.s. des Grauens in fifths}"

Also, some accidental moonlighting at Blissblog, as part of the rock-kissed gitttttarrrrrr solos/quirkings that's been going on for a little while over there... though clearly I missed that The Buttholes kicked the whole thing off...

Unrelated Paradox

2011-03-09T07:27:00.001Z

On my way to work...

From The Wytch Machine...

Xylitol

2011-03-08T14:05:00.005Z

Loving the latest Xylitol double 3", one of my favourite things released so far this year. It's not a remix album. It's a reimagining. It's a remix album in the same way that Aphex Twin remixed Nine Inch Nails on Further Down The Spiral i.e. it's not a remix album. It sort of is a remix album, even though I don't generally like remix albums (that Neubauten one put me off forever). It is maybe perhaps isn't.

It's varied but it's more or less all wonderful... though see here for a review of a track (not saying which one but you might be able to guess) by my wife (she's right, and i like it because it sounds like that...)

Lots of unusual suspects here, all on top top form: Nochexxx, Kek in Intangible mode, Belbury Poly, Pete Um, Woebot and many others...

Highlights: The NWW circa Rock N Roll station snare tumbles w/added Groove Is In The Heart bounce; the odd choirs, violin scratches and Cosey Cornets; the glacial kosmische melting soundtrack; the ever-so-slight Trance touches; the snatches of detourned Krautrock - a little feathering of rock era Kraftwerk added to the lunatic electo fizz; the stuttering vocals, eating themselves whole; the gentle Radiophonic loping; the supremely mental rapping; even the pops and crackles between the lines of some of the more superficially straightforward tracks...

sleevnotes, gutter press ramblings from Martin, photographs (apparently, I can't see any!) by Nina Power...

The 2 x 3" format is a slight bit annoying but I'm guessing this is either a) a deliberate attempt to engage the listener with the music by forcing them to confront the lack of symmetry on the 'sides' or b) a consequence of someone winning the 'shed load of 3" CDs' item on eBay...

Still, I've already listened right the way through four times and I can't think of many recent albums that I could say that about.

Tiny little moments of genius lie here.

Kraftwerk at The Johnson Hall

2011-03-07T08:40:00.003Z

Kraftwerk played my old home town Yeovil? OK, so I'd have been 3 or something so didn't go but still... Kraftwerk played Yeovil.

Visions Of The Future

2011-03-04T09:46:00.000Z

Africa Hitech

2011-03-03T13:53:00.003Z

Well, never too sure about some of my old mate Mark's Africa Hitech stuff... the futurenowspeedgarage thing has never been my sack... but this one pushes some good buttons. It's a little Shangaan, I think...

Found via Slutty's Fringeings

Mati Klarwein

2011-03-03T08:30:00.003Z

Yeah

Miles Runs The Voodoo Down

Labradford - Grate

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Twins Of Evil Ghosts

2011-03-02T23:10:00.001Z

From The Wytch Machine...

Psychic Ills

2011-03-01T11:23:00.003Z

Old news now perhaps but absolutely loving this motorfed, spazzling of an EP...

Faustbits sounds half good again (people keep telling me about this album or that track but Faust often seem pointless and directionless and old-fashioned these days), whole-good, immense and kraut, depth-defying - more like this please.

Gibby Haynes reworks like The Jack Officers never stopped happening (in fact, like they ought to have sounded and didn't). This makes to completely spazz but remains restrained, Jet Li in Unleashed, just before the shit is about to hit the fan... That said, restraint is Butthole-based; it's not the restraint of most people... Someone get Gibby some more time on the remix desk. Someone send him some Panda Bear tracks...

Juan Atkins does something I'd listen to again despite not being club-bound. Model 500 always bawed me; fundamentally impressive but thin, groovey but not relentless enough... But this... this is what I want him to sound like.

This clubs similar remix projects over the head, sucks the life out of them... Psychic Ills never sounded so good...

Julianna Barwick 2

2011-02-28T13:48:00.002Z

Almost forgot about this, which was the best of the Reckoner remixes a few years back...

Her new album's out now, via asthmatic kitty...

Julianna Barwick

2011-02-28T09:15:00.002Z

Julianna Barwick Live at the Empty Bottle 2010

Julianna Barwick - "The Magic Place"

This is brilliant, haunting stuff...

inner-view with Julianna here...

Hong Kong In The 60s = Mad Men ?

2011-02-24T09:11:00.005Z

Quick disclaimer: this is based on only about 3 tracks I've heard. The album itself could derail all of this...

Again, this is something I'm just not sure about. I like it. I mistrust it. It's beautiful but echoic, a mental echo of a Phantasy...

(the title suggests they know it, but I'm not sure if this makes me like them more or less)

...it's imitating sound and it's a great imitation: the soft burr, the perfect Mad Men glass clinks, the predictably heart-melting beauty; you can't see the joins and you wouldn't to - the joins would creak loudly, would call bullshit on the 60s... this is music of a time when men were men and women were grateful...

Now, I like Mad Men, watch it (in every sense of the word) religiously but it's the perversion that I like. It too is a lot dishonest but the style and the psychosexual dribbling appeals... It seems to exist solely to allow us to simultaneously sneer and indulge; how funny we (God, they) were, with their sexism and their racism and their funny little ways...

I feel a little the same way about Hong Kong In The 60s except that it seems to be pretending to find sweetness in it's sources; the resonances here are Razorcuts twee, Flatmates twee, Vaselines twee... i.e. lovely, sweet, gentle, empty... music for our 16 year old selves

Contrast with, say, Momus, who attempts similar tricks, off and on, with added (sweet) malevolence and much more honesty. Much more commentary?

Warren Ellis is quoted as saying it's “a charming summoning with a weird sheen of degraded international glamour” and that's a good starting point for discussion, except that it doesn't feel degraded to me. I think I'd like the degradation.

The band's name is perhaps revealing: my parents were in Hong Kong in the 60s and the casual, soon to be supperannuated, sexism (not that soon) was endemic and regarded as a cultural resource... the girls can't just sing sweetly, they must sing sweetly; they can't just wear pretty dresses and headbands, they must wear them, their hair must be... the world was like that but it seems Hong Kong was particularly like that: East and West meeting and dragging the best and worst of both worlds... a constant of the past and the present, a forward lancing unreal jet-age trail that derives from the Mad Men of the 60s and finds itself, 50 years later, as reality, as the heart and brain-melting echo of a past that wasn't.

I'm going to keep listening. I like it. I'm not sure of it. It's-

Hong Kong In The 60s - You Can Take A Heart But You Cannot Make It Beat*

As a Thought Experiment, extrapolate the title of this track: is this a meta-commentary? I kind of hope so.

Woebot Chunks

2011-02-16T07:51:00.004Z

Really enjoying Woebot's new album Chunks; it really doesn't sound like anything else. Unless... well, the scope of it is impressive, the soundfield not really used like this before; the psychedelic soul slips through, the 70s proto-metal slabs and 80s licks are not smeared over as in the rapidly decreasing circles of the Ferraro et al contingent; you can hear the groove, just about to start, even if sometimes it's halted in it's tracks, re-aligned and then started all over again.

Boomkat'll tell you that Steinski and Position Normal might be a reference point (don't hear Dr John though) and while the, er, Bailiff's are knocking on the door I think this is misleading*, as is the idea that this is 'refreshingly un-earnest' when I'm pretty convinced it's exactly the opposite; this seems very earnest, seems to wear it's heart on it's sleeve...

(INSERT ORANGE AMP JOKE HERE)

It's important to be earnest, I think. Don't find the lack refreshing at all.

It is groovy, occasionally very groovy... the track I posted here, Argos, with it's yelps and Hair Metal slutiness is representative, but only cumulatively; the album gets to that state of Sly perfection but the journey is perhaps more interesting; lots of the other tracks sound like someone attempting to find their way towards that state of pure, sexualised groove and thumping bliss...

...which makes the track sequencing on the LP even more interesting; Argos comes at the start of the B side... as if Woebot is setting out his stall and then letting it unwind through all the antecedents, counterfactual histories, future shocks etc

I hear aspects of early 90s jungle in here... just in the edits... it doesn't sound like jungle... bits remind me obscurely of Quiet Sun, an underrated slice of prog weirdness... there's even a slight dash of a more relaxed, les hyper, Shangaan Electro too in one of the tracks, which ends up sounding not unlike the way I thought Vampire Weekend might sound before I'd heard them, when everyone was bigging up the African appropriations, rather than their C86 appropriations...

If The Osmonds had really gone for their Crazy Horses track/tack, started stealing from other Funkadelicates as well as Zeppelin and then all got laryngitis before they started to add their vocal parts...

I like the way that the whole album is clearly based on joy as an emotion, especially at a time when lots of people are increasingly turning towards the dark; this is the flipside to Raime, the light cousin; using Soul, Funk and ecstatic Zeppelins in place of Goth and Tech... it's a bold move and one that pays off big time...

It's an unsettling and smart album and it really makes sense as an album - it even makes sense to have it on vinyl because you really ought to flip it over, that seems an integral part of the experience.

You. Need. To. Flip.

*Boonkat is always misleading. They've mislead me so many times I'm thinking about leaving them for Chelsea...

Shazzala

2011-02-15T08:47:00.003Z

AQUA NEBULA OSCILLATOR "Lost in Space" by MArco Laguna Films from shazzula on Vimeo.

There's buckets of this stuff around these days but... C'mon; everyone loves witches, don't they? That cute little nose wrinkle on Bewitched? Those crazed old hags in Clash Of The Titans? That naked girl you once thought you saw in the woods behind The Carpenters Arms, Chilthorne Domer...

And the Shazzala line/brand/nebula has a nifty line in gig posters...

Italian lowbudget sleazeeee:

Incredible String Band directed by Russ Meyer:

Sub Cremaster Fetish-set Dark Crystal-Meth Dreams:

Demdike Mafia Or Tim Hecker's Ravedeath

2011-02-14T08:40:00.004Z

...well, I was half-joking when I talked about the post below feeling like revolutionary suicide but there's something definitely odd in the air... Anonymous commentators (in the blog equivalent of being in talking heads being heavy shadow with a modulated voice) and, even more worrying, several people via email said they didn't want to be associated with their views* but, yes, they'd experienced the same feelings re the Demdike boys...

Weird. And, just to check, I've been replaying a lot of Demdike Stare on my way to work and bits of it I've started to really like... scene and setting, or just me being a contrary sonofabitch? Bit of both I think...

Anyway, by way of contrast, here's someone I've always thought was somehow more than the sum of it's parts - Tim Hecker has a new album out today, a Valentine's special, and it just so happens it's got the best title of the year: Ravedeath 1972...

Here's a sample...

*this strikes me as entirely odd... sort of bad faith writ large in the blogosphere... is it even possible not to be associated with your views? I mean, I can see not wanting to run up to someone and say 'You're shit, mate' but, in the context of the internet, views are people aren't they? What else do we have if not a personal view? What the hell is happening here? Is the interconnectivity of the net (or maybe the real world) finally eating itself?

Demdike Stare Are Just... Okay, Aren't They?

2011-02-10T07:58:00.005Z

I keep looking. I like the covers, I like the music, the video projections. I like the idea but...

I can't seem to see what other people see about Demdike Stare. It's just... okay, isn't it? It's turning into a Shibboleth.

I mean, it's hard not to like this kind of thing, especially with all the pulsing nakedness:

But, I dunno, I'm creeped out in a different way; can't escape the feeling that I'm being manipulated somehow. It's really hard to define. It seems so calculated.

It's like it's checking boxes, boxes that I like but... the emotional aspect is missing for me. I haven't seen them live, maybe it'll make more sense then, maybe I need some fungal accessories, or maybe at the bottom of a k-hole I'd find illumination but, right now, I feel about them the same way I feel about, say, Love Actually: it presses buttons that I'm not sure I want pressed - it's sad that Emma Thompson just gets the Joni Mitchell CD, I'm happy that Colin Firth has found love, I'm vaguely understanding of that guy from Teachers being in love with his best friends missus but...

Does no one else feel like this? Seems like lots of people (everyone?), whose opinions and taste I value, love these guys - Demdike Stare have been elevated to the status of untouchables (cf some of the Ghost Box stuff) and I just don't see it. And when there's no visuals to distract...

I dunno... I've bought quite a few of their releases, mostly because each one seems to get a better review than the last and I want to like them so much that I end up thinking: this one will be the one, this one will sound like people say it sounds, this one will dig straight into my ZNS and I'll get it but then I put it on and... Nothing. It's like some kind of cruel joke, the Emperor's New Clothing for the new generation...

I need someone, anyone, to write an article counter to the prevailing opinion. I'm gonna go mad. The consensus is crushing. It's making me suspicious; it feels (ironically) like a Witch Hunt. Like even writing this (if anyone reads this fucking thing anymore) might be an act of revolutionary suicide. I'm dreading the time when I'm at one of their gigs and the whole crowd is going with them and I'm standing there, thinking about going outside for a cigarette...

UPDATE: I should have mention that, as well as asking for anyone who agrees with me, I am interested in anyone who disagrees... disagreement gets more done, I think....

Brkng Cnvtn

2011-02-09T16:20:00.003Z

via Breaking Convention via Strange Attractor

w/music by the dronescapedelicans Ragnarok, amongst others

Hans Bellmer Ate My Hamster

2011-02-09T08:00:00.003Z

Can't place the music, sure I know it...

This has the perhaps dubious distinction of making Hans Bellmer's dolls even more illicit and unsettling; scary and incomplete, like the dolls themselves and with more than a whiff of Bataille about it...

Also like the look of (haven't heard the sound yet) of the Sexual Cough Syrup for Black Swan mixtape up at Sailormouth (beautiful looking site by the way)

Cher's Gaze Of The Other

2011-02-08T08:25:00.002Z

From the disco-tastic, Sophie Ellis Bextor-baiting days of 1979... Cher reinvents herself as a Flesh Gordon extra for this album cover... the music is light discofunk and can't hope to match the lunatic genius of the album art...

Whenever I think about Sartre's gaze of the other, I think about this and shudder.

The Bran Flakes Revisited

2011-02-07T13:10:00.002Z

In the early days of the blogs, I got a lot of innocent, spazz-dancing fun out of these guys and then kinda forgot about them. In the meantime, slightly less psychotic successors like The Go Team have been Mercury nominated and hosts of bright-eyed, (Kate)Bush(y)-tailed sonic clusterers, appropriators and sludge-fiends have come and gone, beat-digging the life out of every genre imaginable.

But there's something just.... further out about The Bran Flakes. They seem resistant to categorisation (contrast those artists - they know who they are - who seem resistant to not being categorised, lest they miss out on being included in the latest Pontone mix or something) and lost in the music itself... I'm pretty sure The Bran Flakes started off being ironic but have now found themselves trapped/immersed into a kind of Rainbow Hole, a soundworld where nothing can escape, where the teeniest hint of hipster funk is pulled apart by rabid toys and where the only sex is the sex-o-lettes.

And if this stuff is all sampled then fuck knows where they dug these beats up...

The Bran Flakes are as unselfconsciously odd as anything Drag or Witch or whatever. This music which makes me want to go score some Crystal Meth in double-quick time. Now, where's that guy in the Chelsea tracksuit...

Snowy Red

2011-02-07T10:30:00.003Z

Further to my previous post...

This could be featuring on Altered Zones, coming out of Brooklyn etc. And might be. I'm not sure i trust anything of the internet now. The shock of Milli Vanilli runs deep. And now...

This is laid back to the point of falling, the machines keeping time but only just... Not heard Snowy Red mentioned too often as a reference/source for the new minimal (chill) wavists but...

I like the dancing on the video too, though it reminds me of a (to be unnamed) mate dancing to The Mission's Butterfly On A Wheel circa 1990...

Led Er Est

2011-02-06T16:52:00.003Z

Led Er Est - PS 18 (Mannequin MNQ 012 split Ancien Régime)

It's getting harder to distinguish the original early 80s synth poppers from the newbies; the odd fatter drum, slightly elongated synth-tail, a micro-squelsh off centre...and now the old synthwavers are getting reissued (I'm assuming blogs like >Mutant Sounds< are generally responsible - wonder if any credit gets shoved their way?) it's gonna get even more messy:

"Is this new? Don't look like that...New new, I mean... i can see it's still in the packaging but... No, I know it's Futurist but... For fuck's sake: I'm just asking if the band are around now... Yeah... No, not reformed, actually around... it's a simple enough question... I mean is it Retro? I mean... Eh? Don't fucking raise your eyebrows to me... I know it's Futurist, but that isn't what I was asking..."

How To Dive Well

2011-02-03T08:07:00.003Z

How To Dress Well : "Suicide Dream 1"

I've been undecided about How To Dress Well, but this little mindmeld of vision and music has a definite grace... it's maybe a bit (i.e. less than a tad) literal, given the watery nature of How To Dress Well's music, but I think it's somehow better for it...

...and it feels heartfelt; you get the sense that Tom Krell is influenced by his, er, influences at a very deep level; this isn't appropriation or casual sideways-glancing irony, the R&B flicks (not really evident here) are from someone who really felt their pull and is perhaps due to be a dominant strain in a long line of 'indie' (shudder along with me) artists influenced less by The Velvet Underground, Can, Stooges axis than by the half-heard glitches, tics and tickles of prime-Beef Timbaland and Blackout era Britney...

There's a mix by Tom via The Wire:

How To Dress Well Mix

Woebot Goes Pop

2011-02-02T08:48:00.005Z

Woebot: Argos from Matthew Ingram on Vimeo.

Don't imagine this will need much interweb promotion but Woebot goes a bit Dangermouse on this track, this little slice of Funkadelica; all subsex yows, gentle guitar licking, bass slaps and shimmer...even a slight Hair Metal slutiness about the drums and guitar interplay. He might not appreciate it (he might love it) but there's a hint of, gulp, Primal Scream about the eyes here...

For the record, I'm not a Primal hater, quite like the gruff little guy's drawl through americana, have even considered getting my 'rocks' off, at one point in time, when the lights were flashing, when synapses were snapping, when hot girls in cowboy hats were bouncing off the walls...

Primal Scream were also tough-looking guys; we tried to steal their rider once and dthey chased us right out the Festival. Looking behind, you tell a glasgae bolga was not far away from their minds...

Oh, the flips and fancies of the internet... I'd like to see where he's going with this... or where everyone's going with it...

It seems bold to go clean and musical in amongst the fluorescent grey sludge of yawnology, hypnodiscogs etc.

Richard Youngs

2011-02-01T08:23:00.002Z

Listening a lot to Richard Youngs at the moment; he captures the cold perfectly.

Other than a Wire article a few years back and some end of year placings for The Naive Shaman, he doesn't seem to feature on the radar much, or else drops off, or else slides off, becomes deliberately invisible and revels in sunburned and ridiculous wealth ("Richard Youngs, you say? Oh Aye; you'll find him at the edge of the Loch, painting the fish with gold leaf and making little paper boats out of money...") and really doesn't want to be seen*.

Maybe the music is a byline/byproduct of his work as a Copper Magnate, Blood Diamond Seller? Maybe he's not even one person, the releases lurch sideways - he might be a fiction suit, for all I know... a collective noun for hundreds of struggling guitar-pickers...

Whatever, he's a mostly genius, I think.

*just finished reading Christopher Priest's The Glamour

Sing A Long A Wickerman

2011-01-27T12:45:00.001Z

O, Lord! O, Jesus Christ!

Sidney Cohen: Drug Pusher

2011-01-25T08:04:00.003Z

Well, it's been a while since I posted one of those. This one was found via Radiophonic-botherer, Cabs fetishist and polymath Nick Ekoplekz, soon to be in End Of Timeschart near you...

We really need some good music to reappropriate all these old 50s/60s acid clips - them pesky psytrancers cornered the market in these kind of samples (I blame The Shamen) and it'll be on 3 bargain bucket Psytrance compilations by the time you reach the end of it.

A Dream Of Wessex

2011-01-21T07:45:00.005Z

I'm about 40 pages short of the end so don't know what's going to happen but that seems an appropriate place to review the book - the end might not be, after all.

Cheers to K-Punk for the heads up on this one; it really could be the dreamtext for Inception - I'd be surprised if it hadn't been swallowed somewhat by Christopher Nolan. Maybe not swallowed whole but...

This is Inception if they'd decided it didn't need to be an action film.

It's a simply disconcerting ride; nothing wild-eyed about the prose - I like Priest's matter-of-fact style; things lollop together and then slowly ease apart. There's no quick about turns, even in a novel where allthings are clearly not as they seem... it reminds me a little of John Fowles, though without the uneven sense of literature that Fowles brings...

But A Dream Of Wessex really reminds me of Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - both books seem to share a character: Noboru Wataya in Murakami, Paul Mason in Priest... both of these characters are peripheral to the story, even if the story is largely about them... the main characters' journeys are inconceivable without them, they act as terrible distorting/distorted mirror images...

Both books deal with sex in an uniquely realistic way: we see it as a gentle union and a brilliant desecration, an (actual) violation of consciousness which shudders Julia (and David) with self-loathing, obsession, yearning, fear, hatred and love... people are drawn together for reasons they don't understand; loss is felt literally and symbolically...

I wonder if Deleuze (or especially Guattari) might have read this? I think they'd have smiled.

...you could say it's about Virtual Reality and Dreams and the Collective Unconcious but you wouldn't be right... they are the subject, the great Jungian theme that perhaps just about tips this into the realms of Science Fiction but it's about memory and how it invades the present and sends us scuttling towards the future with imperfect background knowledge...

It's about how other minds are irretrievably tangled with ours and the contortions we'll go through to try to extricate ourselves from the past.. it does hold hope for collectivist dreams, but only just... Soviet Britain dissolves almost as quickly as it arrived... read this now and wonder that, in 1977, the future looked like Mad Men looks now... only with the American sheen-suits taken off and replaced by...

Ghedelia Tanzartes

2011-01-18T08:00:00.003Z

It's that sort of day:

Not every sort of day:

It might not be this day again, for awhile:

Inverted World

2011-01-17T09:11:00.006Z

Semi-spoilers. Perhaps. Maybe not. It's right there...

Christopher Priests's Inverted World is a savage, now times novel. It's a gentle form of savagery; moving slowly, inexorably, towards what we already know but perhaps fail to comprehend; a sleight of hand trick that keeps you guessing despite the truth being out there, for all to see.

The pace matches the context; the dragged city, the blinding sun...

It's a perfect pace.

Consider too the renewed popularity of Leo Strauss: the aspect of his political thought that is so relevant today is his elitist notion of democracy, the idea of the ‘necessary lie’. Elites should rule, aware of the actual state of things (the materialist logic of power), and feed the people fables to keep them happy in their blessed ignorance. For Strauss, Socrates was guilty as charged: philosophy is a threat to society. Questioning the gods and the ethos of the city undermines the citizens’ loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavours. The solution proposed was that philosophers keep their teachings secret, as in fact they did, passing them on by writing ‘between the lines’. The true, hidden message contained in the ‘great tradition’ of philosophy from Plato to Hobbes and Locke is that there are no gods, that morality is merely prejudice, and that society is not grounded in nature.

This is from Zizek's Good Manners In The Age Of Wikileaks article at LRB, but he could be reviewing Priest's book. Maybe he is; sometimes Zizek twists and turns like he's got his showreels mixed:

I can see how Inverted World's bravura flips, even the change in narrative style (or, at one point, narrator) might be annoying but why it's annoying is fascinating in itself and the internal, secretive, seemingly unlikely yet unquestioned (at least initially) logic of the Guilds parallels the logic used to explain, for instance, why bankers need their bonuses or, more abstractly, why the world has to be how it is...

As if "Life's not fair; move on!" is the only response possible to our situation...

Again, Zizek could be describing Inverted World with his: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (here via Doctor Who...)

In turn, that phrase seems attributable to Jameson, whose mall-logic could perhaps also be inverted here; what could be more postmodern than a wooden city, pulled on rails, besieged on all sides and forever escaping a boundless terror which no one is sure of?

The third? world is also rendered well here; the savage is savage, even if at times it's just an attractive sexual savagery - contrast the odd sexuality between Helward and Victoria (a lights off for the territory) with his easy, light-hearted sexplay when he's taking the took girls back(we are all taken).

And it surely can't be a surprise that it's the girls who are disappearing into heavy gravity mesomorphs with every step away from the rarefied air of the city - this is going native in extremis, returning to the land, ending up immersed in a nature which nobody can agree on...

here there be tygers...

The sense of other is a permanent state for the city - the city literally can't exist without those outside it's boundaries... city dwellers literally can't perceive the world how they need to without those who can't perceive that way... they need others not to see... it's Them and Us and without Them there is no US.

Oh, shit, sorry; what was I thinking? I forgot to say: it's a great book...

High Wolfings

2011-01-12T08:54:00.007Z

High Wolf is a little brain worm.

Been listening a lot to High Wolf, stands out in an overloaded crowd of dronescapers and murkrakers

(seriously; there's so much of this stuff... used to be you managed to track down a few Zoviet France LPs, maybe some HNAS cassettes, the odd track on a compilation of amplified washing machines and scratches; now you can live a lifetime of drone, a futility of slipped discs)

But High Wolf transcends the genre, I think; a lighter touch, more wholly psychedelic than the Ferraro(adkillers) contingent; less in thrall to the sources of the samples and loops, more deranged by the looping itself; the lightly propulsive power of the everloops and the ever-so-sleight of hand gearshifts...

And the tones are generally lighter too; less stomach sucked-in blackness, more pushed out lightbeams, digging right at your brains... sparkly, even.

Maybe, it's just me.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff up at the Winged Sun Records bandcamp site, including a little slice of High Wolf from the Japan Tour CDR; listen and then pay what you will...

If you're in the US then High Wolf is about to tour there and are apparently hooking up with likeminds along the way - Robedoor, Magic Lantern / Super Minerals, Plankton Wat, Sun Araw, Starving Weirdos, L.A Vampires, Deep Magic and many more...

These collaborations are always hit and miss but I'd imagine when they hit it's going to put the mental in transcendental...

Red Birds 2

2011-01-11T08:21:00.005Z

Kind of companion piece to the post below, though don't think any of this is actually Paris, destroyed or otherwise...

In case, you're wondering, Red Birds 1 was here, though now mostly decayed.

Paris In The 20th Century

2011-01-11T07:59:00.004Z

On a slight sci-fi kick right now and this little fellah came up on the steam-sonar...

Not read it yet but it's joining the list (Christopher Priest at the moment, as recommended by K-Punk) and it seems to be eerily prophetic... I'm guessing with all the University Humanities Depts closing and everything scurrying to be declared 'technology' or 'applied' less the cuts bite even deeper, this has to be rattling a few nerves...

Disneyland Paris will never be the same again.

Barry Bauman

2011-01-10T13:35:00.002Z

The Star Thief. Born without any of the five senses. Senseless. Kept alive for 24 years. Started eating the stars with his brain.

This Warlock story has stuck inbetween my brains since I read it as a child. A sort of quiet, unspeakable, cosmic horror; unheimlicks...

To celebrate being reminded of this, here's some no-input mixing board shenanigans, courtesy of Toshima Nakamura, which seem rather apposite:

Toshima Nakamura - NIMB 19.1

Feel that lack of input; play around with it; fuck around... Millions of people now living will eat stars.

More at UBUWEB...

Inside the Cop Kettle, New Scotland Yard

2010-12-14T14:48:00.015Z

This wasn't what I was expecting. For a start, there's Scarlet Johannson, kicking off big time with what looks to be some kind of experimental mime. "Careful love," some wag yells out (It's only later I recognise him as Ryan Reynolds, he's wearing a stormtrooper helmet at this point), "I've read somewhere that miming agression is actually aggression - and that means-"

The spectre of a lonely, clattering wheelchair rolls through the lines. Could this be the bomb the papers are talking about?

Ryan pauses, distracted. Banksy, dressed as John Lennon, is spraypainting the back of his stormtrooper suit with a bare arse stencil.

"I thought you were supposed to be on...um...our side?"

But by then Banksy is off, scuttling between the crowds, chuckling and signing cheques for the masses. Out the corner of my eye, the red dwarf from Don't Look Now disappears into the surge.

Scarlett mimes "Nuclear attack." The Police line, their 'James' Corden as people are insisting, visibly flinch.

'This is sooooul damage!' someone behind me yells. I turn and see several past winners of the X Factor, apparently corralled into appearing by Simon Cowell(who turns up predictably late, on an elephant)

"Where the fuck is My Bloody Valentine?" yells a police-officer, laughing.

"Where's Moose?" another yells.

"Where's Slowdive?" a third joins. This is becoming intimidating. The kettle is firm but you can feel something is in the air. If they're prepared to use shoegaze...

A silent wish: don't let it be Galaxy 500.

Behind the floating Penrose Triangle that now revolves in place of the NEW SCOTLAND YARD, it's just possible to see Derren Brown, staring impassively towards the Police lines, trying to go unnoticed. I think for a second of going to speak to him but I'm told by a steward that I shouldn't interrupt: "I can't remember why, but I think it's something like the same reason they say don't wake up somnabulists," she says. "Besides, look..."

Just behind the police lines, lying in a crumpled heap in the doorway, is David Blaine.

I wipe this memory like a spruce of pizza fuzz and instead push sideways, moving beyond the chained together members of Westlife in their identical Dennis The Menance jumpers (nice touch, guys!) and towards the twin-towers (whisper it!) of Flo-Rida and Jeff Goldblum, who are doing some kind of rap tribute to Badiou (pronounced in this instance Badass).

"Jeff, what the fuck?" I say, but he's immersed in some human beatboxing.

Inside the Kettle, the police have set up a soundsystem. Despite good-natured calls from the students for The Laughing Policeman, they've gone for Crass and a barbershop quartet (only there are six of them) is having a crack at an impromptu sing-a-long of 'Securicor', joined by some joshing punks, hair-dye newly dripping down their faces.

It's a beautiful moment, a bit like the Paul McCartney video for 'Pipes Of Peace'.

Meanwhile, someones driven a burger van through the kettle and right up to the door of Scotland Yard. The doors spring open and out spills several tiny children, maybe 4and 5 year olds, all dressed as elves. The mood darkens. Could they be using child soldiers?

"Oh, fuck; human shields!" yells Scarlett Johansson, now dressed as Joan Of Arc (this is her third costume change of the afternoon).

I'm still laughing (albeit tinged with horror) at this when I notice who I'm standing next to. "You're...you're.."

"Such shitty architecture," said Prince Charles, shaking his head and indicating the building. "No wonder we're trying to keep them out..."

"We're keeping them in," I protest, but he's already speaking to a girl dressed as a flower, who's trying to push herself inside a water-cannon.

I look more closely, recognising the girl's eyebrows. "Kylie?"

"You ain't seen me, right?" Kylie hissed, moving away in a crab-like motion that I'm pretty sure was a commentary on the lack of forward progression in the HE Sector.

Over on the other side, at the part of the kettle organised by Stewart Lee and Richard Madeley, there's a bit of a do when someone thinks they've just spotted Nigella Lawson, apparently cooking butter-based dishes for the students. I look closely - it is Nigella and her butter curry is giving off some serious evil/good vibes. I move forward to take a picture to show the kids but get bundled out of it by various members of the Socialists Workers Party, who are all clambering for autographs.

"This is like meeting Mandela," one of them says.

"Or Gadafi."

"It's like meeting a less Imperialist Jesus."

I decide to make my way behind the lines instead, artfully dodging some Press wags who are attempting to interview Jedward, who've apparently swapped identities in a (not particularly well-judged, yet heartfelt) commentary on Clegg's shifting social policies. You can tell just by looking at him that Chico is dying to join in but he looks uncharacteristically restrained and resorts to gazing wistfully at his watch, his cutely turned ankle suspended in the air, like a frozen moment.

"The winter of disco-tents!" a guy tells me, "And you know the cast of Mama Mia are due at three... They couldn't get out of the matinee performance but they promised a shout-out during Money Money Money..."

I nod, it's been a problem. The celebrities are thin on the ground, despite many promises. "Pah, some of the fuckers have buggered off for the pissing Golden Globe nominations," Lenny Henry snorts before wading into the police lines after some crafty copper who was handing out Travelodge vouchers.

"Lenny! for God's sake, show some restraint!" booms a voice from behind me. I turn around and Tom Jones, cunningly disguised as himself circa 1978, puts a ham-sized hand across his mouth, giggling.

"Gave yourself away there, Tom" I say and we exchange a sly look of regret.

A guy with CAT SHIT written on his forehead steams up, looking for trouble. I let him pass, seeing that he's heading for the police lines but not wanting any trouble.

"I think that's supposed to say EAT SHIT," Tom explains.

"Well, Literacy isn't going to be helped with these kind of fees," I reply, giving my sagest nod.

CAT SHIT attempts to attack some of the police while they cook thier hotdogs, apparently claiming they don't possess an up to date food licence. He's batted backwards by the students, many of whom have now changed into St Trinian's costumes, a pre-emptive move that has already send several commentators spinning into affective apoplexy.

"We're our own self-fulfilling prophecy!" they chant, sending CAT SHIT scarpering.

"Apparently, JG Ballard is coming," one of the girls tells me. "He'll love this! Well, if there was more tennis..."

I explain why Ballard's not coming and there follows a brief altercation (not batonable)summarised as:

"William Burroughs? Shit? How about Sartre? What? Really? Fer fuck's sake. Camus?C'mon, don't tell me he's dead as well?"

The cops, crafty as ever, have turned up the music. Technohead's I Wanna Be A Hippy is blaring out, with some accompanying amateur jackboot tapdancing. It reminds me vaguely of Test Dept, doing Gododdin. People are getting delirious. For a brief moment, the lines blur; both sides are swaying now, in time to a restless heartbeat of logic that is slowly overwhelming them.

"This is the End Of History all over again!" shrieks one of the police officers, to general looks of disdain.

This Event Is Sponsored by Vodaphone, says one poster.

I Left My God In Sainsbury's Tax Returns, says another.

Everyone's dancing, some of them in time. This is turning into some minor bachanale. Mulled wine is passed around, as if it were nothing. The police seem in good spirits, barely protesting at all. I think maybe they've reverted back to the 60s. Those episodes of Heartbeat suddenly taking their toll.

"Heartbeat is their kryptonite!" I yell, trying to get a chant going but no one is really listening because behind us David Tennant, Matt Smith and Christopher Eccleston, all in their Doctor Who garb, have arrived. The police switch to The Timelords Doctorin' The Tardis and everyone turns in a kind of mass psychogenic rubbernecking.

"We've arrived," says Tennant. "This must be the 80s..."

A cheer rises, more dancing. People are going crazy. I'm swept up, ecstatic. The sway of bodies is lurching the crowed from right to left, hair is flicking in slow motion, the worst Silvikrin advert you've seen. Someone's gonna get whiplash.

I think I see Sean Connery, climb on top of the watercannon. People are trying to convince him to come down, but he's not in the mood to be swayed. I see Tony Cottee, I think and Charlie Nicholas. I see Konnie Huq sneaking a kiss from Charlie Brooker. I see the police start an impromptu breakdance burn, using their riot shields for extra spin. Humanity seems to be breaking through, the lines blurring, inside and outside the kettle is a concept that's near breaking, becoming strained, time and space ("Not strictly divisible," I'm reminded) are getting thin; this is dimensional change, right here, right now. The Penrose Triangle might be glowing. There's a rumour selling like hotcakes that David Cameron is about to resign, that everyone is about to resign, that everything is being re-routed backwards to a gentler time, when animals could still speak and cakes didn't kill you.

There's energry here, glowforms and waveforms, we're swimming in it. It's a collective baby panda sigh, a moment of brilliant...

I'm not sure where I'm going-

Old Is New Is

2010-12-13T11:02:00.003Z

I like the oldWave creepings from OneOhtrix, Dylan Ettinger, Raoul Rorschach etc. They've sometimes added steel, other times they've smoothed/gritted tracks. They've broken machines and fixed them. They've addled information and occasionally come up for air. All good. But this year I've used these bands more than I've bought them (some are on my Christmas list). Used them to relisten to their antecedents, in fact used them to find more of their antecedents...

The new kosmiche is as good as the old, in parts. The old was only good in parts too.

The spread of gatefold LPs is welcome too. Friendly. As of Summer 2010, I stopped buying CDs and only bought albums again (this was mostly to do with having a new house and new daybed looking out into the garden and new positioning for my record player, now dusted and looking brilliantly old, nee retro).

I've had a little less time for music but I've given it more time. I've listened a little more intently, let it press as many buttons as it could. There's maybe 10 albums and 12"s now which I can hear phrase for phrase, swirl for swirl. In MP3 shuffle era that seems like a lot.

And the old stuff, rediscovered and reformulated, really seems like it was predicting the future...

One thing though. From what I've heard this year, I don't think Eno did any of the Kosmiche guys any good.

RIP Sleazy (2)

2010-11-30T07:57:00.005Z

End Of Era.

Circa:

1987

...bring home Horse Rotovator (on the recommendation of a one-eyed Record seller at a Yeovil Record Fair: "like Psychic TV, only good...") only to find the speakers are shot... can just about make out the textures of this record from pressing my head very close to the needle itself... hear the opening silos of Anal Staircase, only almost without sound... even then, it was the greatest record ever... the horn blasts, the whorls... this was about to become my music, the only band that ever touched my dead-eyed soul...

...heard at last a few days later and then played repeatedely, ritualistically, obsessive-compulsively... a new world/whirled opening up... insect chatter, humchatter, big songs when I'd just about started a period of getting rid of songs...

...heard a day or so later through the gauze of just too much hashish... at times, during Penetralia, the world really does seem to slow down...

it becomes the downer LSD record of choice (the upper LSD record seems a long way away) - starts unravelling things... the world is a wound? Yes, of course...

Huge argument: no way this is Goth... this is the nonGoth death record... this is Mexican Goth i.e. not Goth at all...

...consider Malcolm Lowry for a little while.

...go backwards, find myself in a squat with Thatcher On Acid and Blyth Power practising in the basement... spend a few fruitless moments jumping up and down on the roof of the JAMMs car used in the Doctorin' the Tardis video... I've got a copy of Scatology under my arms, bought 2nd Hand at Notting Hill gate... insist on playing it to all the squat's hippies... curdles Soya... whiteouts....

...search.... Maldoror... De Sade... Bataille... it's an odd path but I keep going....

The Black Sun brings us to Harry Crosby... to Austin Osman Spare... to Richard fucking Dawkins...

1988

...hear an odd version of Tainted Love... a spun off version... a black hole of a record... it turns out much much later that it's isn't Coil I'm hearing except that it is...

...wake up in the woods with Coil's advert musics from the hellraiser 10" playing on a loop on a battered cassette player... someone (now also sadly dead and gone, our own version of Balance rather than Sleazy, has mixed the track so that it plays for the whole 45mins...)

...this is the beginnings of An Idiot's Guide... My Book Of Dreams

...read the Wild Boys, decide that Coil are the soundtrack of the film that never was.

Start seeing pirates again.... and not just in the music...

...keep digging... Gold Is The Metal... feels weightless.. true shards... but hearing Sleazy sing seems like he's talking from outside the grave....

1990

Trying to work out the Wrong Eye single... the slurrs not quite making sense... something seems missing from this... like this is a fragment of a bad dream... it's supremely odd... we sit around playing it over and over.... trying out different speeds... at 78rpm it starts to dance and we have to consider that whatever comes next is going to open up new depths....

...but instead... a new, crystalline brother turns out, blinking into the sunlight... Windowpane... this is a new curl, a turn up, a moment of sudden clarity when we weren't expecting it...

it took awhile before we could be turned from Horse Rotovator's churnings...

a little while...

then, Ecstacy.

Oh, yeah. I get it. This isn't about-

1991

I met a perfect girl on the day I bought ...Love's Secret Domain... a girl that would take me right the way through the end of my teenage years and onto my twenties... I'm talking to her and I'm holding this record... Chaostrophy will sort of become our song... without her, I couldn't have found my perfect wife... without this record, I couldn't have hoped to understand girls

from here this record soundtracks every acid trip for six years or more...

LP? yes. Cassette? Yes. CD? Well, you just had to.

The Acid squiggle is getting to me, finally. Before, I'd been following it; now it's following me...

Lying semi-conscious, wracked with shingles and pleurosy, those evil twins, those nasty little Kray fish - can now only listen to the Hellraiser themes, words are making no sense...

Later, humchatter.

1992

it's twin, Stolen and Contaminated Songs, comes a little later and that too keeps pressing at my brain, keeps me understanding the delirium, devastation and fun and frolics of drug use... these twins are the only records that make any drug sense to me... we sometimes played Shamanarchy compilations or early Shamen records but these two are just boiling and immense... these are why.

1993

very drunk, publicschool educated drunk, backstage at a Brighton Festival... Further Back and Faster is playing really loud over a PA, I can't findthe source, it seems to be following me... I've lost everyone I know... I can't even remember what this Press Pass means or who I'm supposed to be innerviewing.... holy fuck, Leigh Bowery is walking towards me... Further Back and Faster... Minty are playing, I think... soundchecking to... this?

A grin is sliding across my face like an open razor... Leigh Bowery looks mental of course but I'm freaking him out I think... I find myself mouthing the words of the song: "Fingers of the left hand, spell..."

I need out of here.

This music is way too much away from my little psychedelic cocoons...

Much later, on the beach at Brighton on Christmas Day: Chaostrophy blasting onto an empty beach, the perfect Christmas song.

Later, Derek Jarman's Blue premiers on TV... Coil blends... all Coil... the blue suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.. the fact there are all these people, out there, listening to Coil while I'm listening...

There's a glimpse, it seems. A new world. Coil on TOTP. Coil on Richard and Judy. Coil switching on the Christmas Lights...

But...

1994-1998

...Coil music thin on the ground... music itself losing significance a little... finding new things: work taking over, drink taking over... just obsessively scanning the Coil fanlist letters, looking for evidence that all is not lost...

played LSD to someone and they hated it: barely checked fury... music ebbing away...

The Glitch gets worshipped, though it takes it's spacetime to find its right place.

A car, going dead slow in the snow, The Solar Lodge is making a comeback. In the trees, odd figures that will reappear on the Moon's Milk CD just a few years away... for a little while, this Essex backwoods is flipping into Apocalypse Now...

1998

The Solstice singles start creeping out - these will eventually coalesce into my favourite album of the noughties, will eventually make all the sense of the world...

they soundtrack all seasons equally, as such suck air in in all kinds of ways... hot becomes cold, cold becomes hot... this is weather-baiting music...

A car journey full of flashing speedcamera lights and allCoil... I'm deranging the girl who's driving, kinda hoping for a crash.... I'm in an odd place...

1999

Kate Bush appears, as she always threatened to... this is a waves... this is a disappointment at first... not as sparkly as the Solstice singles, too windswept... but it grows... they always grow...

2000

Music To Play In The Dark is played in the dark. Another new direction that no one saw coming. This has been ages in coming.

Eyes closed, sucking it all in. A new child gurgling in the background. Perfect. Moon Musick at a time when the moon is always out; perpetual dawn.

Lots of mushrooming. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night takes over. This track will creep, will creep forever now. Begin to understand Thighpaulsandra.

Discover Salvia. Time Machines is the only CD I can listen to while this plant takes hold. Everything else is impossibly intrusive. All words shriek. Flashback to pleurosy/shingles time.

2002

See Coil live, with the wrong girl. The tubes on strike, everything circling.

2003

The live albums keep spilling... each one is a different mystic beast... they will go on and on and on... Coil will live forever...

2004

They. Don't. Fuck. ImBalance. This is the first rock star death that I feel. I'd just managed to have the courage to go an innerview him. He'd been very nice on email and over the phone. He lived just up the road. I sent the questions and then he was gone.

Gutted.

What can we see in the entrails, Roman?

Then: Shards, fragments, totems... there must be more product out there, mustn't there? Thousand of unreleased gems from when Jhonn was alive. It'll all come out now, won't it? There must be ghosts of vocal tracks lying dormant on harddrives, elPHing out, waiting in the shadows...

2005

Oh Christ, the multiverse... Chaostrophy reemerges. For a brief moment, things might be alright...

The Ape Of Naples comes and... it's not enough. It's great, but it's not enough. The harddrives aren't there - is this machine recording?

There's shards, fragments, totems but...

"Some of the songs from Backwards are here too; mostly in much improved versions from the bootlegs that crawled the Russian cracks in the net... mostly in versions where the vocals rise and fall, clambering to get out because he knows it's almost time for words to end...

So far, we've had Boy In A Suitcase and Broccoli but, now this is out, the question remains: will Peter sing again?"

2006-2010

I hear hidden things. An odd sort of hope.

Peter Christopherson is regrouping, getting ready, coming up with some brilliant angles. It's not Coil but it's a breathlike, a tangible, a skew. He's gaining in confidence, the Thresholds being met allover again. He's going to release something immense soon...

These tickles, these treats.

I can't believe he's gone. There must be more. Collaborations, compilations, missing tracks, oddbins, entrails, humchatter...

RIP Sleazy

2010-11-25T11:22:00.003Z

Oh, FFS.

My last proper musical hero has gone and it's way too soon. Rest in peace; your music has changed my life and made lots of crazy days brighter and more demonic. At least 5 of my 10 favourite records of all time were in part produced by Peter Christopherson. A true genius.

Avey Tare - Down There

2010-11-19T18:33:00.004Z

...this is drunken slurr.

beached boys.

...thick

jaunty even, in dark parts.

(music that makes you want to attenuate the lyrics)

Real words but wordless...

suffocatingly intense joy.

...a death eater.

that bar scene in Fire Walk With Me?

only Laura lives and builds a house near a lake.

Avey Tare - Lucky 1

Barcodes 4 Revolution

2010-11-08T13:32:00.003Z

Go here for other barcode bits.

Didn't Crass or affiliates do something with barcodes? Have a vague memory of something similar. This reminds me of the great barcode=the Devil rant in Naked (sampled by The Orb on S.A.L.T.) as well which seems to be on TV all the time at the moment - I guess its time has come around again...

Shit And Shine-ings

2010-11-07T17:36:00.003Z

Bit late on this maybe but Shit and Shine go dubstep? What could go wrong?

Sounds necessary... there hasn't been enough genre bending / genre baiting in recent times...

and too much genre-creating...

Haven't even heard this yet but I know it's a good idea, even if it doesn't quite come off... actually, especially if it doesn't quite come off... more follies, I say...morfe mistakes,less worry... Take on all the genres, play with them, ruin them if necessary...

don't spoof them though... forget irony... go with them...

be a have a go Hero...

what does dubstep / chillwave / psychfolk / goth / amphetamine crunk mean to you?

your take is the best take... how could it be otherwise?

Let's see everyone's take on dubstep...

2010-11-05T14:30:00.001Z

May contain flashing images.

Allantide

2010-11-05T09:38:00.005Z

Available here, as always. Like the little Blair Witching at the end.

Wounded Galaxies

2010-10-30T16:47:00.007Z

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...