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?

Kemper Norton on that ther Quiet-us (A Post for Dave)

Kemper Norton is interviewed here, where he eloquently details the tolls and twains that lead to his own slurred version of Folk... well, regulars and locals of these parts (this part) will know his music well enough by now, I'd imagine but there's some interesting titbits scattered around which might help sharpen your appreciation of the work... p

On the other hand I can't believe he didn't mention the true genesis of his sound, which anyone who knew him at Swansea will understand was forged in the psychedelic furnaces and mind-melding headfucks at the edge of Constitution Hill, at streets named for cigarettes, at Rose-hills...

If I mentioned only a few words, a few sad hymns then maybe the young Kemper Norton will remember and rejoice and despair:


The guy who wanted to buy my *** bass *** guitar (but Spacemen 3's Suicide got in the way) ---=== ONLY Dogs allowed ''''' 2 Shamen albums at once ++ watch those squirrels! watch those squirrels! (((Give us back our treees))) "I'm afraid; I'm afraid Dave" --- Charlie from Casualty is watching you --- Edward Scissorhands ^^^^ Is Welsh Twin Peaks language? {{}} \\\ Love's Secret Domain / Stolen and Contaminated Songs --- Alex and his homemade fireworks... IS THAT AN ORANGE LANDROVER, COMING OVER THE HILL? *** Nuclear War Now *** Did someone just kill that ...thing? ///\\\ The Wall in the Botanical Gardens? ((Theresa The Wytch))

Kemper Norton - Carn & Collision

Kemper Norton – Carn

http://kempernorton.bandcamp.com


Kemper Norton – Collision / Detection v6

www.frontandfollow.com


It makes sense to review these together, since whatever the actual chronology of these songs, one begat another. They are linked to each other by a strange umbilicus, a slurry wurm of flesh. The self-released Carn shows us the Coilish side of Kemper’s sound; the voices here are muttered, liminal, lurking around in the dark. One track in and the loops are occasionally intersected with electronic scribbles and then leavened with added orchestral drone and beautiful hums. This all makes a perfect kind of sense if you imagine this is as a direct extension of the attempt at Folk on Coil’s Solstice releases. ‘Dorcus’ is a premonition of the Collision/Detection EP, a song I first heard when Kemper sang it live at an Exotic Pylon event. It wavers beautifully as much now as it did then, when it was perhaps the highlight of the set, and set him on a trajectory towards…

…the Collision/Detection release. There’s two tracks here – ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ – that exactly reconfigure Kemper Norton to a place where he was always headed. The voice comes out, reminding me a little of Woebot’s recent vocal incursions. Buy both of these releases and you’ll see what I mean. One bleeds into the other. They are not twins; one is the father, the other is the son.

Many of the previous EPs had their genesis in the drones/jazzdrums/flutery of the mid-period Four Tet albums (‘Colour the ocean pink’ on the Carn EP is an exemplar of this, even if the rest of the EP isn’t). They rattled away in different directions, for sure, but Hebden remained a silent spectre, just visible in the margins. The older EPs were headed towards a kind of unique Folk work but they seemed reluctant to really embrace it, to allow the tunes to speak for themselves. The songs were in there but hidden amongst the smoked bracken, deep in the wud.. As such, the old EPs were brilliant, often innovative, and occasionally magically unhinged but they didn’t feel quite so Kemper as this set. Here the songs sing, almost unhindered by the dark roots and clanking behind them. The music is there to allow the songs to rise to the surface, even if the Spirits are still flying around them. He lets his inner Unthank in and he pulls this daunting task off magnificently. I hope he keeps on this track; he’s the best person doing this kind of thing at the moment.

Kemper Norton's Unrequited Love

...there's a joke there I'm not going to say.



tidal drones and surges, always musical, never take the money and run. considered and considerate. a distinct lack of capitalization, in all ways that can be interpreted...

of course, that may be unintended...

go here for volumes

Exotic Pylon @ The Vortex

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.

Allantide

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