Mirage Men Mirage

We know about Mirage Men. I saw it on NOCHEXXX's twitter or something - I want to believe (etc). It looks good, I haven't seen it yet but... I met someone who did. At a bus stop. No, wait; come back. And he said that the film was a Mirage, a triple bluff, maybe a quadruple bluff (he lost count, I lost count). I wanted to get away at this point. He said Mirage Men was simply a Hall of Mirrors inside a hall of mirrors and that the book - I wasn't aware at the time that there was a book - was a well-meaning investigation into what it said it was a well-meaning investigation into but the film of the book had secrets and new lies that deliberately attempted to obfuscate. He was just a young guy, maybe 25. He looked a bit like Rorschach (mask off, naturally). He seemed normal, except around the eyes. I'm not sure what to think. He was interested in my job as a Philosophy Teacher, though wondered if I'd been tricked too. I've wondered that too. He had a working knowledge of Plato but I didn't think I should hold that against him. The conversation laster only about 5 minutes and it seemed a little like that film about the meaning(s) of Kubrick's The Shining. I haven't seen that, either. He went the other way.

Mirage Men teaser trailer from Roland Denning on Vimeo.

Really want to see this now.

There's a wordpress thing here, too.

Drift Of Signifieds

This is a woozy, slurred, drugged up/out slice of unsettling gothic dub ( I reject the hauntological tag; it's haunting, yes). I like the way it seems to slow down the more you listen to it (maybe it does), like someone ever-so-slowly lapsing into a coma (maybe it is). Reminds me a bit of that David Tibet / Steven Stapleton thing where =wheezy hospital sounds sort of ache against the song, rubbing its bones. The video reminds me of a collapse of the William Hartnell / Tom Baker Doctor Who credits too, which is absolutely right.

Drift Of Signifieds

The Drift of Signifieds remix of the IX Tab track In The Blake Midwinter is here (it's quiet, but it's good)

Jenny Hval - Blood Flight

Why now? (I've been actually asked this) This is when I'm listening to it.

There are so many of these...Scandinavian things... great drips of beauty (occasionally uglybeautiful) that seem to be ripped from their landscape... All that Finnish freefolk, the gurt Popsweeps from Sweden...

And, perversely, a lot of it sounds perfect as a soundtrack to Murakami's 1Q94, since they both share world where Little People might be pulling at the seams.

I feel like I've just come into the middle of my own conversation. Sorry about that.

Hacker Farm @ Worlds Unknown

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...

Roll The Dice

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...

Shinjuku Thief

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...

Factums - Take Drugs

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...

Xylitol

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.

Julianna Barwick 2

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

Julianna Barwick Live at the Empty Bottle 2010

Julianna Barwick - "The Magic Place"

This is brilliant, haunting stuff...

inner-view with Julianna here...

A Dream Of Wessex

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...

Barry Bauman

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...

Old Is New Is

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.

Shit And Shine-ings

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...

Allantide

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

Zola Jesus

Oh, so that's where Danielle Dax has been. Knew she couldn't just be fucking around with UnicaZurn album covers. Scrubs up well, our Danielle.

Welcome too, to our new-old post label: Gert Big Goths, inspired partly by Speakers Push Air

Zola Jesus? I'm still undecided - the dubbier it gets the better. I think I might really like it, but I'm not willing to commit, just yet. Actually, I think Zola Jesus hasn't quite decided either - the music lurches from album to album, refuses to settle; I like that, even the stuff I don't like, I'm glad it's there. Certainly, there's bits I love and I really like the collaboration with LA Vampires (hate the name LA Vampires though) - love the No No No cover/reinvention.

Quite like this one too. As 80s as a Vaughan Oliver sleeve, though.

Zola Jesus - Sea-Talk

Via MBV

High Wolf & The Lycans

Because I was listening to High Wolf on the bus late last night and a werewolf got on. It freaked quite a few people out; one guy moved away so quickly he almost fell over. The werewolf smelled of weed, oddly enough and only lasted two stops before heading off into the night, perhaps to rub Virgin fat onto his alopecia-ing chesthair.... I know what you're thinking but it was a werewolf, a lycan, they used to be all around here, you used to be able to spot them out of the corner of your eyes, just before they dissolved into the bracken... they were relatively harmless then, the odd bite, the odd scratch and sniff... many of them were young, cubs even, barely more dangerous than the torch-wielding feral kids being chucked out of the Action Zone slums of Bridgy...

But still, the Lycans are creeping back. This one was an adult male - red eyed, yellow-toothed, hair like a dirty ripped dress. He looked like he meant business. Haven't seen them in a while. Not this type. They've been lying low, perhaps afraid of all the publicity, perhaps annoyed at how shitty the novels about them have been. Last time they were this out in the open is back in the CJD farm-culls...

Interesting. I'll keep you posted.

Other than that, High Wolf's donated organ tumbles are quite fetching, I think. Diverting. A little transporting. Tiny little squiggles of puff. Substantially insubstantial. Better than Ferraro et al, I think; more.... honest. Makes me think I need to start taking extra gulps of cough syrup.

Sun Araw

feelin' a little Sun Araw today, sun-bleached...

if you don't know Sun Araw then you should... you could argue that there's others out there ploughing the same lo-fi spangles but, really, Sun Araw keeps coming up with the goods...

you already know that I listen blind to mostly everything.... just load it up and let it fly from my iPod, letting the complexities of the Shuffle Al Gore Rhythm bust a gut as to the mood... I rarely even look at the track titles / artists... preferring to let things blow... a lot of the music washes over me... but every time a Sun Araw track comes on I find myself caught up.... it's devastating music.... guitars swirl like nothing else... percussion sounds like skulls or chemical containers... and it swirls... in a very psychedelic way... the voice, the guitar, even the drums swirl... dance music for Ayahuascans, for Magic Mushroom Modettes... it's music that vocalises the unvocal, that tries to speak what shouldn't be spoken...

Keep with me here. I know. I know.

Sun Araw - Horse Steppin

Sun Araw - Deep Cover

Music for walking out of the desert. Scab picking psychedelia of the highest order. Music with it's face burned off. Songs that arrive in town over the back of a mule. Creepy as hell. It would make a perfect soundtrack for a Jodorowsky film. In fact, for Jodorowsky filming this little special needer...

(must get round to writing that someday)

Relentless stuff but intoxicating. Hard work like acid is hard work.

You need this.

Autotisticking

Been listening to Autotistic, in amongst the mire - it's an intense listen, all on it's lonesome, frazzling, blessed and burdened (in all senses of both words) by echo, lots of echo, echoes of echo... a sustained Acid trailer in sound...

I'd play it in stages, I really would... it literally get on your nerves when you play 2 or 3 tracks together... I don't mean this as a bad thing.

It's a kind of spirit dub but not the one you're thinking of if you've heard that term before... a kind of dub where the guitar slews slip and slide against one another, where little frozen shapes of feedback are found and then thrown to the winds... there's a lot of air here but it's difficult to breathe, like hanging your head out of a fast moving car...

It works for me better as a sideways glance, slipping inbetween other things; sounds perfect between some crystalline techno, a sliding scale between the beats... my favourite tracks - Slum Plastics, Milky Moan - have an odd sense of rhythm that seems to exist behind the music...

Somewhere, in the middle of roaring air and ebb and flows and clusters there's a sample or something of a voice saying something like: 'Are You Okay?' and it's a perfect sample, a perfect expression of the psychedelic gouging that I'm sure is at the heart of this record...

I have just played 4 tracks straight though so I could well be imagining that voice.

Seriously, play this between things; you'll thank me for it.

There's a few mp3s here, if you'd like a little skoot...

Ekoplekz

Well, expect a full review a little later when I've digested and molested but for now I'd just like to say a massive thank you for letting this little fellah drop // through my door /into my pigeon hole/ :



Actually, while I'm hear/here and it's actually ON...

I'l just say that so far (I'm 3 tracks down; not listening in order, nowhere near - I'm sensing this can be double-dipped) I've heard:

1) the Chris Carter end of TG, the stuff a little in awe of Disco but tangled up in wires...

2) a definite Cabaret Voltaire about the eyes of some of the tracks, bits of the live bass, bits of the way the drums seep into the sides of the tracks....

Clicktracking // Back and forth /

<<<<<>>>>>> (this as sound)

3) Dr Who soundtracks circa The Silurians / Sea Devils - episodes just a little before my time: John Pertwee? Nothing especially Delia'd so far but...

EDIT: I've just noticed there's a track called Malcolm Clarke (i wasn't referring to that one but he's in there, definitely) - this must be a freaky auto-suggestion or perhaps just a bit of subliminal reading... either way.... The Sea Devil's are ROCKING this place...

I'm 4 tracks, I'm 5...

4) An Anti-Group record that I swear I used to have but can now find no mention of anywhere*

*I know what you're thinking but you're wrong... it is out there....it's just slipped through... as all the other Anti-Group records were supposed to but never quite managed

5) It smells of a Copy Cat tape loop (you either know the smell or you don't, I'm nowehere near talented enough to even attempt a decent description) but I don't know if he's got one.

It's all <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< cheap as CHIPs (or as expensive as CHIPs once were).

Or maybe He's just reminded of those crusty old machines, of the little catches and loops,

There's lots of little drum machines through fuzz or wah (through both). There's

Casio in there, I'd swear; a calculator wanting to play with the bigger boys...

6) At times, of Cosey Fanni Tutti's 'solo' track Hometime comes to mind. Not the voices, just the background ebbs and flows. They're following the same pace...

I'm 6ing and 7ing...

7) Nocturnal Emissions are in there, somewhere...

8) Screen Test, especially the bit where they showed award-winning kids animations about eating eyes.



9) The intro to B%^ B*@£ tracks before they get to the crappy bits.

10) What OMD thought they sounded like...

11) A TV show where giant chess pieces battle it out on a map-rendered 3D blanket, while Richard Stilgoe look-a-like competitors pick fights with glass-eyed child/snake hybrids...

12) The sound of Too Much Golden Nuggets**, of transistor radio music heard from inside concrete playing apparatus (tubes, coils, mounds)

**cereal sounds, a West Country Cluster...

13) Actually the Krautrocking Cluster isn't far off the mark... the shady bits of Harmonia...

Great stuff....

The Kek quote is priceless and very apposite.

Inspiring stuff from a guy let loose.

More later..