New IX Tab album (teaser)

The new album - R.O.C. - will be out sometime when the Sun goes down; expect it before Midwinter 2013.

5th Dimensional Paper Cups

OK. Me, the Hacker Farm boys and maybe Kemper Norton... surely we ought to do a promo identical to this as part of an anniversary (can't think what of yet) celebration? Release a single to go along with it? I know you Hacker guys are kinda busy undermining the mainframe and cutting off the toes of Google and Kemper is psychosurveying the nooks and grannies of Cornish Death Mounds but... C'mon. Maybe a songcircle and dance routine? Draft some local munkins to paint the backdrop, blend in some subliminals, add some fuzz, a bit of smoked bracken and 'is this the kind of mould you can lick?' attitude and... well, it'd have to be a hit wouldn't it?

Do they still have hits?

IX Tab: A Manifesto of Sorts

Some tiny IX Tab bits in the wires fairly soon but otherwise nothing except this. The track will eventually-maybe be the song Prayer For The Head Of Alfredo Garcia on the second album but it won't sound much like this one and probably won't be called anything like that either. My own Ship of Theseus, yet again.

Katie Gately

Well, there's not much here yet but I'm really liking the arbitrariness of Katie Gately, it's almost as if she doesn't know what she's doing...

She does pop in a degraded, hopeful kind of way. In her own words this track "is what happens when you realize you cannot be justin timberlake so you decide to destroy your own work over the course of a sleepless evening in the dirtiest city in the world" and it does sound like this, not Prince dirty but like James Ferraro used to sound like before he got cleaned up by Mumma Dolby (her son, Thomas, looks on, wondering...)



It seems utterly unpretentious too. Like a doodle on a phone pad that somehow comes to life (I think this might have been a Doctor Who Story at some point)


She also does this kind of thing that sounds more like a less well-prepared Lee Gamble (I mean this to be a compliment) and then flutters away and loses sight of itself in little moments of unreasoned noise (actually, disquiet has it right when they suggest 'synth pop turned inside out')



I think I might send her some IX Tab tracks to remix...

Hacker Farm - UHF

You know I know Hacker Farm; they are comrades without arms; part of the body... you know I'll like UHF, see things reflected in its mirrors... you know I'll get it because it is part of where I am and these fine people are part of an accidental conglomerate (IX Tab is subsumed by Hacker Farm, which is now not just Hacker Farm and, post-Wire interview, indivisible from the hole).

I also know that Hacker Farm aren't for everyone. To paraphrase Lautreamont: not everyone can savour this bitter fruit with impunity.

And that's the point.

Which is why I feel the need to take an issue with Rob Young's review of UHF in the recent edition of The Wire which, perhaps accidentally, savagely misses the oppositional stance of Hacker Farm even when, more or less, mentioning it as part of his review.

I think he likes it but that's not relevant. In some ways it would be better to dislike it - UHF courts dislike, expects it - because that final passage, where Rob sort of offers advice to the boys, comes across as not merely patronising but also as a political assault, an attempt to codify what Hacker Farm do in terms of the accepted. Now I realise that suggesting the (great) work of Raime and Emptyset might somehow be regarded as the status quo is absurd; they are clearly plowing their own furrow but still, in those slim lines that suggest Hacker Farm adopt the 'abyssal dynamics' of those two it's difficult not to read 'If Hacker Farm weren't Hacker Farm then people could embrace them more easily, some space could help us digest; there's just too much information...'

Which misses the point because that is what they are about. I'd imagine this recording, if anything, is cleaner and more spatial than they'd originally intended; it's likely to get more noisy (noise is information, information is noise) in the future, not less... they are really not going to adopt those dynamics because they are, at least in part, about opposing those dynamics (I know for a fact that they are fans of Raime but that doesn't mean they are the same as Raime, or can be slotted in beside them neatly).

I don't know... I'm ranting; it was a throwaway comment, it means nothing; they probably don't care but I do because it seems like a generalising move, an attempt to reconfigure something from here to there; they live in different worlds to lots of the music they can ostensibly be compared to (they live in different worlds to my music and I've seen the same places they've seen, our timelines are more or less homogenous).

For what it's worth, there's no reason anyone should get Hacker Farm - I'm sort of amazed at the response to their work (not as much as I'm amazed as the response to mine!) - I'm not even sure I get them most of the time (UHF can be exhaustingly dense; I was listening to it in the snow the other day and it felt like all the snow at once) but it does stand alone, it is singular, it does not have the dynamics you'd expect (and sometimes it doesn't have the dynamics you need).

But...

Rant over.

Non Ferric Memories

Well, Blogger just ate a long post about Non Ferric Memories and the PoMo Swindon event as documented by the ever industrious Cloudboy but the essence of it was - I'm pleased that oddworlds like this can still happen


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I've just bought this little stunner (Cloudboy does great cover art) and think possibly you ought to investigate these guys too, especially if you like Hacker Farm / Ix Tab etc...

Actually, just realised my colleagues over at Freq have reviewed it already....

Also, I was reminiscing about the Ice Bird Spiral at The Croft  (here and here) which then got me wishing that Nick would reinvent/relaunch Gutterbreakz (I often think that): c'mon, Nick... It's been years now.... those wounds have healed... get yer Gutter on!

Or at least get back on here...

Pop Up Museum (w /Hacker Farm)

This is happening in my birthtown so it'd be rude not to turn up. I'll be tinkering along with the Hacker Farm guys at some point on the 22nd in my IX Tab guise (actually, I'll be in the my 'me' guise)... adding another layer of dead-eyed colour and psycheDelia to their buzzing thoughtfrosts...

i.e. I might play some tunes, if I can find any.

IX Tab - Spindle & The Bregnut Tree

Well, I finally finished the IX Tab album; it's called Spindle & The Bregnut Tree and it's available from here, if you're interested... along with a host of guff and goans about it...

There's a full colour (sort of) 4 page CD booklet with associated information about all the tracks plus a not at all full colour leaflet with the early copies. Limited to 50 or so copies, unless I get more printed...

If it helps, it's sort of themed on West Country bad turns and lost tidings; all of the tracks mean something to me, maybe to you... and there's guest appearances by the usual suspects: Doris Stokes, Glenn Close, Austin Osman Spare, Marshall Applewhite, Gene Hackman, Rock Hudson, Nietzsche, Crackling Dubb and Olivia Newton John...

12 tracks, 70+ minutes of fine slurr, lost sound, crackled graft and logbeats...

You've heard this one:

But here's another:

All Apologies

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)

...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

IX Tab - The Humchatter EP

Well, I threatened....

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humchatter 4 is missing, presumed.

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

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

Yeah, they're all gonna have that humchatter.

MscfrMgcMshrms.