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...

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...

Vluba Tunes

Yeah, Vluba... A Ruined sound; occcccasional voices like deeply scratched wood. There's maybe lots of stuff like this, lots of drone and grist and mill and krautrock moans but, I dunno, Vluba seem a little more... entrenched? I'm sure loads of people mean it but these guys/girls/whatever really mean it... there's no other reason for some of the musical decisions they seem to make, at least on the stuff I've heard... YES, I mean this as a good thing... i hate realness, authenticity makes me come over in a postmodern rash but when it's applied to Vluba, when it means that they really can't sound any different, I'm thinking.... yeah...

There's some squeaks that come in.... you'll see what I mean, the second side of



About half way through....when you think it might start coming over all Vibracathderal Orchestra or even attempt something some full-pelt Kraut's Corpuscles... then in come the creaks and the squeaks.... mocking....

You'll see...

Vluba give off an odd feeling. A not right. Unheimlich.

But don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently creepy about the sounds, least not to anyone even vaguely driven by drone.... this isn't Lustmord or Burial Hex creepiness... more the creepiness of the abandoned office block, the empty room with a child's toy at the edge of the carpet....

It's their choices, I think. The sounds they put together.

I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I've gone and it's coincided with my going, made some associative tangles that I can't unknot. Maybe tomorrow I'll be back again and this will make no sense and Vluba will just be another cosmic no-thing, a blip, a thing worth dropping or not mentioning. In which case, I apologise. Maybe I'm leading you down some bad tracks here, maybe these trails won't be worth your while... God Knows I've followed some bad 'uns in the past. I mean, I guess 20 Jazz Funk Greats has been a favourite of mine since it first came out and those fellahs describe things so well the music only occasionally matches up to their fantastical vision of it... they hear better than me... much better...

But....

There's definitely something about Vluba.

Something.

I'm sure.

...you'll see what i mean...

before my endless qualifications and my hesitancy rolls me up...

The Pyramid Album (Side 1)

The Pyramid Ablum (Side 2)

Sourced from the ever-wonderful depository of soft and shiny things at The Tanzprocesz Internet Archive... found, in label form, here

Everyone Loves Werneck-Wretchmond

"This is Not For You."

Or

"Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."

Where to go with this slice of slurr?

It makes no human sense; the machine sense is there and cows are just food is right: these aren't angry machines, not machines wanting to destroy or Merzbow the place into submission...



Instead, this is the sound of bored, neglected machines playing, the humchatter of unrecyclable machine-fuzz, miniDisc mutterings, the machine equivalent of jump-rope songs, pitter pattercakes, handclapping games...

If there's moaning, it's soft moaning. It's a machine's irritation at it's own limitations. It's the sound of an old wordprocesser chip, laughing at it's own green screen.

There's nothing human which isn't unusual, I guess - remember Stakker? - but this lack of humanity comes with a different slant; there's the intervention of listening in these manipulations and this brings it closer to these ears to the chargings of ElPH, a cross-reference with Ice Bird Spiral that I heard way back at The Croft...



Kek's trying to hear these little machines, they are calling to him. He doesn't want to control them, he wants to help; you can hear the love and attention in every little wave of sound, it's ridiculously personal, almost intrusive... this is how he hears the world... and this makes this a different kind of thing to other stuff that's on the surface similar; you'll find manipulated field recordings all over the place but they won't have this attention to detail, this attention-surplus disorder...

They won't understand the tyranny of attenuation that means many of these sounds are sucked out of the world or bypassed with mp3 players or uneccessary phone conversations

...

Dig deeper and you'll find some excellent field recordings out there but they won't mean the same thing at all and they won't come packed with little postcards of Butterflies or Jean Dubuffetish Art Brut crayon covers or blotter paper CDs...

They won't come with the meaning or the feeling for the plight of these abandoned, forgotten twitchings...

You probably need to spend a little time over here before any of these songs make sense. The Open University is the visual equivalent to these catechism-calls; there's a sadness to both projects that makes you wish you hadn't pulped all those broken-backed machines, all those hiccuppertronical potentialities.

A final image: imagine Europe After The Rain with the fluid earthshapes replaced by old Atari boxes, Burroughs adding machines and Dragon computer piles...

This is Not For You.

Favourite Album Of Noughties V.2

Well, I've osciallated wildly; flipped back and forward, found myself caught in several ontological traps of my own making: attempts at out-cooling or under-cooling the others, attempts at de-anxietizing or contextualising, at attempting to avoid the obvious and the unheimlich... I've had a number of ideas floating to the service since Gutter's post, each with their own reason, each seemingly prosaic or flabby or otherwise distasteful. The more I think about it, the more this choice seems really like something to send out. Something that might make people click their teeth or eye-roll. A tremendous pressure, building behind the eyes, forcing me to change my mind over and over and over until, finally, I go with the rather predictable (for anyone that reads any of this):



Yeah, I know. Coil again.

It's quite possible that Love's Secret Domain (or here) was my favourite album of the 90s and Horse Rotovator my favourite of the 80s (though I might have chosen The Cure).

But Coil it is and will be. The way the major Coil releases magic mirror my own state of musical mind (Mmmm) is uncanny:

The 80s semi-Goth phase (a half-hearted Goth? Surely that's not Goth enough... I was a Goth afraid of black, replacing it instead with a massive jumper that made me look like a Fly Agaric), Western Lands, Maldoror, Pasolini obsessions through to the...

90s Acid Kid phase (kid becoming less appropriate as the decade wore on) where the only symptom of schizophrenia was delusions of grandeur and everything was seen through the psilotripitarka'd gauze of Glastonbury Festival mushroom socks, trance, Fraser Clarke ("Give us back our treeeees!") and..., well, you get the picture.

And so to the (now) unquestioned album of the noughties: the Moon's Milk compilation of the Equinox EPs. It works better as an album, I think ; it slips between tracks and moods as seamlessly as the British seasons. Moon's Milk evoked the crackling (cf: A Book Of Idiot Dreams) and the twig snapping lycanthropy of my childhood at a time when I was just arriving back in the West Country after 10 years of being away.

Moon's Milk is also apposite because it has a vague folkiness to it; in fact I think it'll stand in years to come as a direction for British Folk music that never quite came off, perhaps akin to the Comus album or the imaginary EPs series of folk classics (Gyre and Joanna Newsom's Duck With Two Backs) or even to my oft quoted (by me) rufflings about the missed Acid House opportunities suggested by Jack The Tab album (also here).

Coil - Amethyst Deceivers

As the decade wore on I found myself getting more and more into folk in all it's various forms - The Sunburned Hands, Ice Bird Spiral, Kemilliaset Ystavat, Devendra Banhart, the Time-Lag contingent, Joanna Newsom (who was Kemper Norton, who outfolked lots of people and will outfolk others in the times to come) - and any album choice needs to reflect this gentle, subtle calming of the psychedelic ways.

Here there be swirls:

Coil - U Pel

Moon's Milk also seems home-made somehow and this has been another theme for my musical decade; the regrowth of folk-art and CDR culture, the return of absolute effort into making musical artefacts; funny that when lots of commentators are talking about the death of CDs and musica as tangible object, my experience of the noughties has been one where the product has often been central; I play Moon's Milk on my iPod yeah but it exists only as a package, within the artwork, even down to the hidden track which presupposes that the CD is somewhere, left running. Lots of little musics existed in beautiful forms with spectacular and necessary artwork. The margins flourished.

So, the music itself. Well, drones rise, electronics nestle up against acoustics, voices rise and fall; this is not just where folk might have gone but also where classical music might end up. It works as a tidal album much better than the on the surface more river orientated Astral Disaster and allows just the right amount of dissonance to creep around the edges of all the beautiful songforms. There's long and short songs. Fat and thin ones. It's a dangerous record too: a breath either way and it's a pretentious, portentous nonsense of a record. Moments of great beauty and slivers of ugliness.

There's even a Christmas song.

Coil - Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

Of Coil's other big releases this decade, The Music To Play In The Dark series had their moments of divine clarity but don't get played right through that often while the hugely anticipated The Ape of Naples felt like a letdown. Moon's Milk took a few breaths to get into but have stayed with me. There's not a month gone by when i haven't played it right the way through and there's very few albums which I can honestly say that about.

Ice Bird Spiral @ Kraak

...Kek breaks the fast first, sending up whorls of bad tidings to the Belgian Stasi(s), conscious of the fact that their set began 3 minutes ago and him and Cloudboy (now renamed Colonel Cloudboy as a result of a flemish-language translation tick) are still on the road, heading east when west seems more logical... the boys are crammed into the tour bus, itself a masquerade of misleading intentions (i.e. a converted circa WWC Andersen Shelter-sided Citroen van), as the police car slides into the rearview mirror...

"Keep going!" yells Cloudboy, who's been afraid of mirrors since the terrible Orphee debacle.

"I am going," replies Kek, "it's just everything else has speeded up. There's some kinda warp spasm out here and i can't shake it."

Onstage their equipment, carefully arranged into a vaguely (the last few pages of the book were smeared with ectoplasm and beetjuice) Osman-Spare protection sigil, behins playing by itself, a tiny amplified toy monkey kicking off with his drum and cymbals stick, while a disemboweled Casio FZ1 starts playing it's own circuitry, sampling and resampling itself into a frenzy.

The crowd, unsure at the best of times, catch a few beats and start to put on their goat head masks.

The police, meanwhile, have decided that Kek and Cloudboys now slower than the rotation of the earth tour bus must be a product of sensory derangement and are now sitting on the side of the road, watching it run backwards in time, sure that all they need is to shake the illusion away.

Onstage, a toy trumpet has raised itself, serpentine and amorous, onto an old machine coil and is blurting out a little Fanni Tutti fanfare, accompanied by great hoops of reverb and an ancient, tape-based echo box. An amplified mobile of beer cans and voodoo chickenskins crackles into life, whirling like a dervish, sending almost impercetible molecules of chicken fat out into the crowd.

The Vegans go apeshit but the critical lack of protein supplements due to the recent Franco-Belgian Quorn Wars mean that their palpating aggressive stances soon dwindle into exhausted muttering and tiny golden shivers of hatred (that sprinkle onto the stage and are then close miked back into the mix).

A guitar almost catches; not quite.

Two thumb pianos start up, a plinking little melody that catches a breath and fuels itself, the old-new school ravers immediately recognise the tune as an Alice Deejay b-side and start humming a contradictory Autechre number, which is then amplified by the dead guitar pick ups and looped back over the crowds head.



Kek and Cloudboy appear at the back of the auditorium and make for the stage, eaget to tame the tiny beasts that threaten to take the show away from them. Three steps and the heavy lights have fused Kek's mask to his face, making the kind of skin crackling sound that european authors attempt to align to the Holocaust; everyone is sucking in bad thoughts - "I can't help feeling there's something, well, evil about all of this..." - even before Cloudboy sticks some contact mics onto Kek's melts and resamples the crackling, yelling into the microphone something mostly inaudible about digital bonfire pops.

Kek then.

Cloudboy.

Breaks loose. Mayhem.

Fire, fire! Fire, fire!

Pour on wwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaatttttttttttterrrrrrrr

The man I saw becomes a bird.

Ice ice babeee...

The mexicans in the crowd go crazy, stereotypical.

The french swap shrugs and intellect.

The belgians, christ, the belgians.

He's almost melted now.

Ice, ice baby.

"It's a rhumba. No, really; I did classes...."

Ever Y thing IS sloooooooo

Ice Bird Spiral