Demdike Mafia Or Tim Hecker's Ravedeath

...well, I was half-joking when I talked about the post below feeling like revolutionary suicide but there's something definitely odd in the air... Anonymous commentators (in the blog equivalent of being in talking heads being heavy shadow with a modulated voice) and, even more worrying, several people via email said they didn't want to be associated with their views* but, yes, they'd experienced the same feelings re the Demdike boys...

Weird. And, just to check, I've been replaying a lot of Demdike Stare on my way to work and bits of it I've started to really like... scene and setting, or just me being a contrary sonofabitch? Bit of both I think...

Anyway, by way of contrast, here's someone I've always thought was somehow more than the sum of it's parts - Tim Hecker has a new album out today, a Valentine's special, and it just so happens it's got the best title of the year: Ravedeath 1972...

Here's a sample...




*this strikes me as entirely odd... sort of bad faith writ large in the blogosphere... is it even possible not to be associated with your views? I mean, I can see not wanting to run up to someone and say 'You're shit, mate' but, in the context of the internet, views are people aren't they? What else do we have if not a personal view? What the hell is happening here? Is the interconnectivity of the net (or maybe the real world) finally eating itself?

Existence (_) Precedes Essence

One day, I'm going to make these.

They are like the essence of humanity, the things that separate us from animals.

Found via spime.

Regina Spektor - Us

Cults - Most Wanted

Akron Family - Woody Guthrie's America

Dedicated to all the bloggers out there, living feral, in six quid tents.*

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

Glowings

Glowing fungi in Brazil

And still causing surprises...

Now, if only they'd quickly crossbreed / GM them with the right kind of indoles, there could be some very entertaining night-time walks this Autumn...


Fuck Buttons - Sweet Love For Planet Earth

Rave Etiquette

Interesting musings on rave 'etiquette' by Simon and Derek, especially because they seem utterly at odds with my own experiences of rave culture - this in turn reminded me of a recent conversation about why people used to face the front in raves, why there seemed such lines of demarcation, why there seemed such clear clustering...

what was everyone looking at?

My own experience of raves is probably not typical - around 1988/89 in the West Country they'd already descended into the vaguely Mutoid Eat Staticisms that later became the Planet Dog empire; they were always resolutely impractical and utterly handmade, there was always a fuck-off tree in the middle of your line of sight, a tree-stump to dash your feet from your freaky dancin' - the kind of Neo Nazi / Jane Fonda workout rituals that I came across when I moved to the city (any city - one thing organised / paid-for rave seemed to relish was homogenity) just weren't possible in the bowels of the country

... and the drugs were different too; we took 'acid house' rather too literally, I think, always preferring mushrooms and acid to the creeping tardiness of E - E was pretty much a dirty word back then, a drug that seemed a little too adult for our tastes, a little too wired into the workers' release spectrum, a stress reliever that seemed unecessary to us little sparkly acid kids who just wanted to dance like spazzes and watch hippy girls in bikinis, cowboy hats and DM boots (the posh ones had those see-through Red or Dead Spacebaby docs).... it was only a few years later that we started to really get into E and by then we were all probably 19 or so and the stressors of the world were starting to catch up...

Acid seemed so much more childish, something inner rather than outer, something that didn't give in easily to the lure of sponsored events and copied dance moves... we never knew what the fuck we were trying to do, a point made clear while watching my friends from a balcony move their way through the neat lines and arcs of a rave crowd in Swansea, they were going this way and that, failing to gel, spastics in time-signature...

Perhaps it was related to the different way that we heard music out in the sticks but an etiquette never emerged, or went unnoticed... there may have been some tree hugging, digeridoo blowing equivalent but I seem to remember it being far more akin to a Bacchanalia or a scene from Milton's Comus than the mad marching bands of the M25 raves...

Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Her/e

PTV3 step back into the slightly knotty hyperdelia they were churning out circa 1985/86. There's an air of triumphalism about this record, as if finally Gen feels he's getting some kind of recognition. There's a fair amount of 60s retroscending - traces of Acid Drops, Fug throughs, various Nuggets but to me it mostly sounds like an old Cordelia Records tape sampler, gradually unravelling, perhaps being tugged by The Bevis Frond, perhaps letting an Ozric Tentacles sub-species fuck around with the synths.

For those of you easily appalled, I mean this in a good way.

There's always been an arch sweetness around the eyes of PTV (though the only time I ever came face to face with Genesis, he terrified me) and even when that lovable dope Gibby Haynes from The Butthole Surfers steps in on vocal duties (on Maximum Swing) there's a manic love in the air, a Banana Splitting that seems to lead inexorably to the ten minute Just Because which could have been on Live In Tokyo - in fact, I think it was on that record, only called I Like You...

There's people who'll hate this with a passion usually reserved for the Hanta virus but there's something utterly magic(k)al about Gen's voice that shatters symbols and stops my cynicism dead in it's tracks. I have a feeling he might be Derren Brown in another life. Though Gen, of course has prettier hair.

PTV3 - Lies, And Then

A Yousendit ? and the Mysterians Rated X Tissue Sample

The Perfect 4 Notes

One day, when all the churning is done and my ears are ready (they need to be oiled) I'm intending to make a complete album of tracks based around my favourite four note sequence - the slightly lilting der dah de dahh as heard on thousands of songs in my head and quite a few outside it.

Here's one of them, perhaps my favourite song of last year that I never got round to mentioning.

Asobi Seksu - New Years

A Yousendit chordochromatic tension-breaker

It's a small piece of wonder that progression, it taps right into my psyche, it always makes me feel happy and content and as luvved-up as I ever managed on Ecstacy. In fact, every time I take anything remotely psychedelic nowadays (i.e. mushrooms, spaghetti bolognese that's been left three days too long) I hear it, even when it's not playing (or else, it's always playing ).

It's the perfect 4 notes.

Hubersnaps And Churnings

ee.

Man Caught In Taxi With Ridiculous Excuse is the penultimate track on the impossibly rare, never to be released debut CD-R by The (Other) Door - 2 lads from the dankest corner or the Somerset Levels, sharing teeth, eyes and a breakdancing fetish that asks for nutty wood over lino and pedestrianisation.

It's rretrro urrGoa with twwo twwists, one knotted and keen, the otherr grroaned and humble. The 2001 samples come directly from 9 separate white-label 12"s circa 1991. The sample of the cupboard falling downstairs is conemporary. The lags are still missing.

The (Other) Door - Man Caught In Taxi With Ridiculous Excuse

A Yousendit Shardinky

The Snowman

4th in a rapidly decaying series. The one where the ice breaks off from the trees and splits apart into Ice-age Trillions while small black balls pop open and garble unintelligible goodness.

Jhonn Balance sings, Rose McDowall drags her heels.

Rosa Mundi - The Snowman
A Yousendit Crawleymass Moonmilking