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...

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.

Ekoplekz and Hacker Farm live on Resonance FM

Bottom row, extreme left - Farmer Glitch, second from left - Ekolad, extreme right - Loki, second from right - 2ndFade; middle row, second from right - Kek-W, extreme left - Bob; top row, extreme left - Time Attendant, second from left - John Eden, third from right - Mugwump, extreme right - Cybore. We don't know who the other guys were, or why they turned up in near-identical outfits. Embarrassing.

...


...great live show, Ekoplekz almost early-Aphex Hard, Hacker Farm more ambient than I've seen them before (though ambient like an acid rush, ambient like an accidental theramin, ambient like the beats have gone round the back to meet the children of the night...)

.... whooosh; fizz ... thudddddd ... flick flick ... crackle crackle crack-le... fizzzzzzzzzz ...

scatter scatter scatter drummmmmm ... scatter scatter scatter drummmmmmm ...

Pics, audio, etc here...

Johnny Mugwump was a brilliant host; putting up with the liggers and the hangers-on (i.e. me) and generally being gutsuckingly charming... lovely to meet you Johnny!

....

...and on that note, wonderful to see John Eden and Woebot / Hollow Earth / Cybore / in the flesh too... (cheers for the drink, Matt)... John especially I've had a lot of dealings with over the years. I say dealings, I mean mostly just envy-ridden seethings over the gigs he got to see in the 80s / 90s which me and my Yeovil mates were often trying to get to as well, only somehow getting derailed by falling car doors, exotic illness, bad tidings, fleshfalls, cold readings and non-specific Chaos Magick (in roughly that order - I'm serious: a car door falling off on the motorway stopped us getting to two different gigs)

...

and, almost forgot that the equally charming Bob from West Norwood Cassette Library was also in attendance... as was Time Attendant, who jammed along with the West Country boys in their final flings... Monotron a go go...

... truly a great Blogger meeting of minds... though by then mine was a little, er, aft via Red Wine and Gin and Mojitos

... still, didn't bite anyone...

HF Ghosts / Kraftwerk treats

From The Wytch Machine...



For no reason, other than something to listen to while you baitbreath for the boys to send out some HF/Junkcrunch audio, here's a little Kraftwerk treat to get yer pulses racing...

Go here and download to death.

Benders & Alveoli Inc.

Well, I wonder whether eBay'll eventually become a new trove of unspeakable treasures; the old synths seem to be going very cheaply these days, compared to a few years ago, but the modified, cyber-synths are still clinging on...

Like the added video, too... Maybe the future of all selling on eBay: "here's a video of me enjoying the Satin Chickens double 7" in the comfort of my own home. Please don't mind the mess, only my friends were staying over and some of them haven't got autistic spectrum disorders."

That was surely the future of music selling circa 2009/10? The niche, the personalised, the soup-chucked, egg-stained pre-release CD, with added polaroids of the tour bus?

Where next? I want DNA... I want a coughed-up bit of lung inbetween the covers. let's keep people going into record shops on the off-chance that a new bit of alveoli has crept onto the market alongside the re-born 12" ers.