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.

Alexander Tucker - Third Mouth

Well, you knew this was coming. Dorwytch hinted (OK, explained) that Alexander Tucker was moving closer and closer towards a kind of English pastoralism and now he’s got to Third Mouth, where the drones and buzzes move still further away from the longer forms of his early albums and head towards smaller, yet exquisitely designed, packages of psychedelic folk. This is like someone’s swallowed Rob Young’s Electric Eden, spent a few long nights reassembling the component parts (alongside a few glasses of wormwood and mead ) and then regurgitated the lot as a fully formed corn dolly. This is a good thing.

There’s places where he’s definitely got a touch of the Vashti Bunions (“A Dried Seahorse”), where it’s 1967 eternal and the fingerpicking and cello trails keep the caravans (and Caravan’s) moving. “Rh.” is meant to be electronics only piece though I keep hearing descending cello notes and heavily filtered drums alongside the drones – it reminds me of a friend who went a little crazy by listening, non-stop, for 48hrs to Bach’s pieces for unaccompanied cello.

I say a little crazy, I mean batshit mental.

He ate several posters of Ian Botham right off his wall. And a fair amount of wallpaper too. He never explained why.

This is not to say that there's craaaazy scrapings here; there's much that is plaintive, meditative, twilight leaning: the tinkles of baby keyboards on “The Glass Axe,” the early (is that a unicorn?) T- Rexisms of “Third Mouth”... and these gently picked figures blend well with the other stuff, the Celtic drones and jaws harpings of “Andromeon,” for instance. In fact, the latter reminds me a little of much-ignored medieval ambient Front Line Assembly side project Will, only without the booming kettle drums.

C'mon. Will. You remember them. They had kinda gabber girl hair and round glasses and long leather coats and played big booming sonatas of the kind of thing that got people a little nervous and convinced that they might be Nazis. Will. You remember. They were good.

It seems unfortunately likely that Alexander Tucker will more or less be ignored again, despite making the best undiscovered 1967 psychfolkrock album you’ll hear all year. You can't help but feel that if he were instead a band and had an associated army of imagery alongside that people would find it easier to get on with; maybe find it easier to buy a t-shirt, write in on their army surplus satchel (Do people still do that? Yes, I saw two people with those kind of scrawled bags in my class this morning. I even saw The Cure written on one of the bags, which made me smile). But none of this changes the fact that Alexander Tucker’s made the album you want those albums in Electric Eden to sound like, an album that’s worthy of much more attention than it’ll get. It's a gentle masterpiece.

I have no idea what Alexander Tucker looks like. After a consistent run of increasingly great albums, I really should. He's building up such a head of steam, such a body of work, that lots of people should know what he looks like.

But...

Ship Canal - Please Let Me Back Into Your House

This came in, slipped under the door like a thin slice of cranial pie...



A friend of mine was prone to petit mal seizures, seizures of absence, slow-wave spikes. They'd often occur in the middle of a sentence; she'd just... go away for a few moments, sometimes long minutes, sometimes the last word she was saying would simply repeat and slurrrrrrr ad infinitum: "The thing with Feynman is that he he he he he he he he he he he he he he..." and then sometimes she'd pop back, continuing the sentence, sliding seamlesssly into the world again "...always knew exactly which knot to start untying..." while at other times her eyes would close and she'd drift away for a few more moments, the echoe dying, the dark coming in.

My favourite track on Please Let Me Back Into Your House, Ship Canal's debut on Kek's nonnanononboutique label 19F3, reminds me of her.

Fog (what is it with fog these days? I'm hearing fog everywhere) and shipwrecked audio and Lilith drones crossover and pulse and then this voice, this slurring, cracked voice appears, a man swallowing himself with language; a kind of absence with automatism, like an electronic divination, a table turning... it's one of the best things I've heard all year; it just works (cf these guys - in fact, these releases might be rough twins) in a way that lots of this kind of stuff just... doesn't.

If it catches you as it caught me - 7 AM, wind, rain, mist - then this will speak to you. It's dredged music, perhaps incomplete (I like the way some of the female siren sounds just kind of cut------ when you'd expect them to drift away) but powerful and quite... beautiful, in parts.

I've seen Ship Canal's kit: ugly PCs, ugly-hackkneed software, ugly cables... but he's making a right Schwitters out of this slop, this detritus. The last release on 19F3 (I take it we're not counting the Hacker Farm stuff - the politics of consciousness always seems tangled where Kek's concerned!) was the gentle machine chattering hum of the Werneck Wretchmond release (which I covered here); this new one is a step (just one step) away from the machines towards a very human breakdown...

MemoryHouse - The Years Or... PRESS:RELEASE

via here

Memoryhouse

((((...an amended and reconfigured press release))))

To avoid doing a Hari, the actual Press Release is in bold, as befits it's worth, its status, its totemic power.

A name, an art, a slice of Canadian now presented as memory of then... Evan Abeele (composer) and Denise Nouvion (vocals), hail from Toronto, which...

1) has a secret subway stop

2) stands in for New York (in films like.... add list, with snark) which was where I saw them play and where I bought their Lately single from a lovely earnest guy on the merch stall at The Mercury Lounge

Their music blends the contemporary with the forgotten, the traditional and the technological, the visual and the aural, within the sonographic landscape of pop.

It might... but this is a Press Release, and I'm starting to zero in on the:

1) PRESSING - which of course gives us urgency, agency, earnest persistence, insistence as well as the obvious record and cider presses

and the

2) RELEASING - which gives us removal of bondage, of confinement, of life... or calls into question our callous use of almost-language ("I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go...") or maybe implies loss (good or bad) or even catharsis



via here

So, with an eye on words:

AXIS 1: Blending contemporary with forgotten - calls into question the Memory of Memoryhouse of course but may simply be a causal reflection of the name rather than a stimulus for it. The contemporary is actually slightly missing from their work in my ears, which is one of the reasons I like them, think they stand ever so slightly apart from their (yes) contemporaries... forgotten I'm willing to go with since this is the key to the difference... sometimes they sound like the bands that have been forgotten, that have names but don't keep cropping up in press releases... they sound like music that was around late 80s, early 90s and was even listened to then but has since fallen away, hasn't inspired the same adoration and hasn't appeared in Press Releases...

I'm thinking of bands like Whipping Boy. Not Whipping Boy; they sound nothing like Whipping Boy.

AXIS 2: The traditional and the technological - now this one is odd; I'm pretty sure that technological is kinda traditional now, especially with all the retro/downgrading that people are eager to promote these days:

100% analogue!: No digital post-processing: Thick vinyl: Released on Superferric cassette only: Any pops and glitches are entirely intentional/unintentional

So I'm not really sure their PR company has thought that one through...

AXIS 3: the visual and the aural - this is an interesting one and often mentioned but in my experience the two generally compete rather than blend (i'm no natural synaesthete). Certainly, the visual won on the night I saw them, the dreaminess of the visuals trumped the slightly less dreamy music, which is definitely slurrier on record...

Did I mention? They have a record out soon. And it's really good.



On September 12, 2011 Sub Pop Records will release a fully re-recorded, remixed and re-mastered version of The Years, adding two new tracks entitled “Modern, Normal” and “Quiet America.”

I was listening to it and tweeted "dreamlogical & immersive; like a dead slow drive at 4AM through unfamilar country" and I think that holds; that is what's its like (my Twitter self and my Blog self often disagree, we're different beasts) but I feel I should clarify:

a) dreamlogical because it doesn't ebb or flow, it's edited into a slowburn, no ragged edges... the situation/people/location/characters change? no problem, dreamlogic smoothes things over... the edits between scenes are too sharp? no worries, our casually causal little minds will simply condense and assimilate...

b) immersive because it's so visual... you can't help but swim in imagery (so much so, that sometimes you forget you're listening).... it's thick, you could swim in it... of course, you might not want to....

c) when I meant dead slow, I mean dead slow... i mean the kind of driving we used to do

Oh, I know you often don't jump to those old blusters so here's what I'm getting at:

We were somewhere around Sutton Bingham Reservoir on the edge of the Somerset/Dorset desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It's 2 AM. We're driving maybe 3 miles an hour, crammed into Rs hopelessly fucked 1978 Mercedes Benz, the lights all blown so it seems like we're just floating, like the car isn't even there. We're heading towards a usual druggy haunt, the deserted ruin of a Chapel Perilous on the edge of the water.

Which more or less brings me to:

AXIS 4 (WHICH IS NOT AN AXIS AT ALL): Within the sonographic landscape of pop - which implies that Memoryhouse are attempting to delve inside pop (the landscape I'll let go, poetry needs some space), to find an imprint, to go beyond the naive realist view that the body is simply the body (read: the canon is simply the canon, the art is the art, the music is the music) and to discover the constituent parts, the whirrings, the beating hearts and valves...

now, this could be nothing (IT COULDN'T BE) and I'm not exactly hearing that kind of in-depth exploration so far in their music...

THE TERM BETTER SUITS SOME OF THE RECENT JAMES FERRARO RELEASES ACTUALLY

...but the intention is honourable and maybe makes sense of the affinity I feel these guys have with David Lynch... they could soundtrack his movies and their music would benefit from his direction since he is almost unique in the ability to use sound and vision on (more or less) equal footing and so they wouldn't find themselves swamped by imagery... like his films, they deal in simple, but multi-layered, realities... they weave complex story lines out of simple patterns and echoes...

Someone sent me a black and white photograph of someone in a bunny suit riding a motorbike.

Taken By Trees - Taken Too Young

Loving this girl's voice... and this song, especially in it's remixed version, is like hearing Billy Bragg's A New England sung by children as you're coming out of a anaesthetic fog; I wonder if that was intentional?

Either way, it's subtle, trippy and very beautiful... Taken By Trees are (is?) one to watch.

Demdike Stare Are Just... Okay, Aren't They?

I keep looking. I like the covers, I like the music, the video projections. I like the idea but...

I can't seem to see what other people see about Demdike Stare. It's just... okay, isn't it? It's turning into a Shibboleth.

I mean, it's hard not to like this kind of thing, especially with all the pulsing nakedness:



But, I dunno, I'm creeped out in a different way; can't escape the feeling that I'm being manipulated somehow. It's really hard to define. It seems so calculated.



It's like it's checking boxes, boxes that I like but... the emotional aspect is missing for me. I haven't seen them live, maybe it'll make more sense then, maybe I need some fungal accessories, or maybe at the bottom of a k-hole I'd find illumination but, right now, I feel about them the same way I feel about, say, Love Actually: it presses buttons that I'm not sure I want pressed - it's sad that Emma Thompson just gets the Joni Mitchell CD, I'm happy that Colin Firth has found love, I'm vaguely understanding of that guy from Teachers being in love with his best friends missus but...

Does no one else feel like this? Seems like lots of people (everyone?), whose opinions and taste I value, love these guys - Demdike Stare have been elevated to the status of untouchables (cf some of the Ghost Box stuff) and I just don't see it. And when there's no visuals to distract...



I dunno... I've bought quite a few of their releases, mostly because each one seems to get a better review than the last and I want to like them so much that I end up thinking: this one will be the one, this one will sound like people say it sounds, this one will dig straight into my ZNS and I'll get it but then I put it on and... Nothing. It's like some kind of cruel joke, the Emperor's New Clothing for the new generation...

I need someone, anyone, to write an article counter to the prevailing opinion. I'm gonna go mad. The consensus is crushing. It's making me suspicious; it feels (ironically) like a Witch Hunt. Like even writing this (if anyone reads this fucking thing anymore) might be an act of revolutionary suicide. I'm dreading the time when I'm at one of their gigs and the whole crowd is going with them and I'm standing there, thinking about going outside for a cigarette...


UPDATE: I should have mention that, as well as asking for anyone who agrees with me, I am interested in anyone who disagrees... disagreement gets more done, I think....

Sing A Long A Wickerman

O, Lord! O, Jesus Christ!

Ghedelia Tanzartes

It's that sort of day:



Not every sort of day:



It might not be this day again, for awhile:

RIP Sleazy (2)

End Of Era.

Circa:

1987

...bring home Horse Rotovator (on the recommendation of a one-eyed Record seller at a Yeovil Record Fair: "like Psychic TV, only good...") only to find the speakers are shot... can just about make out the textures of this record from pressing my head very close to the needle itself... hear the opening silos of Anal Staircase, only almost without sound... even then, it was the greatest record ever... the horn blasts, the whorls... this was about to become my music, the only band that ever touched my dead-eyed soul...

...heard at last a few days later and then played repeatedely, ritualistically, obsessive-compulsively... a new world/whirled opening up... insect chatter, humchatter, big songs when I'd just about started a period of getting rid of songs...

...heard a day or so later through the gauze of just too much hashish... at times, during Penetralia, the world really does seem to slow down...

it becomes the downer LSD record of choice (the upper LSD record seems a long way away) - starts unravelling things... the world is a wound? Yes, of course...

Huge argument: no way this is Goth... this is the nonGoth death record... this is Mexican Goth i.e. not Goth at all...

...consider Malcolm Lowry for a little while.

...go backwards, find myself in a squat with Thatcher On Acid and Blyth Power practising in the basement... spend a few fruitless moments jumping up and down on the roof of the JAMMs car used in the Doctorin' the Tardis video... I've got a copy of Scatology under my arms, bought 2nd Hand at Notting Hill gate... insist on playing it to all the squat's hippies... curdles Soya... whiteouts....



...search.... Maldoror... De Sade... Bataille... it's an odd path but I keep going....

The Black Sun brings us to Harry Crosby... to Austin Osman Spare... to Richard fucking Dawkins...

1988

...hear an odd version of Tainted Love... a spun off version... a black hole of a record... it turns out much much later that it's isn't Coil I'm hearing except that it is...

...wake up in the woods with Coil's advert musics from the hellraiser 10" playing on a loop on a battered cassette player... someone (now also sadly dead and gone, our own version of Balance rather than Sleazy, has mixed the track so that it plays for the whole 45mins...)

...this is the beginnings of An Idiot's Guide... My Book Of Dreams

...read the Wild Boys, decide that Coil are the soundtrack of the film that never was.

Start seeing pirates again.... and not just in the music...

...keep digging... Gold Is The Metal... feels weightless.. true shards... but hearing Sleazy sing seems like he's talking from outside the grave....

1990

Trying to work out the Wrong Eye single... the slurrs not quite making sense... something seems missing from this... like this is a fragment of a bad dream... it's supremely odd... we sit around playing it over and over.... trying out different speeds... at 78rpm it starts to dance and we have to consider that whatever comes next is going to open up new depths....

...but instead... a new, crystalline brother turns out, blinking into the sunlight... Windowpane... this is a new curl, a turn up, a moment of sudden clarity when we weren't expecting it...

it took awhile before we could be turned from Horse Rotovator's churnings...

a little while...

then, Ecstacy.

Oh, yeah. I get it. This isn't about-

1991

I met a perfect girl on the day I bought ...Love's Secret Domain... a girl that would take me right the way through the end of my teenage years and onto my twenties... I'm talking to her and I'm holding this record... Chaostrophy will sort of become our song... without her, I couldn't have found my perfect wife... without this record, I couldn't have hoped to understand girls



from here this record soundtracks every acid trip for six years or more...

LP? yes. Cassette? Yes. CD? Well, you just had to.


The Acid squiggle is getting to me, finally. Before, I'd been following it; now it's following me...

Lying semi-conscious, wracked with shingles and pleurosy, those evil twins, those nasty little Kray fish - can now only listen to the Hellraiser themes, words are making no sense...

Later, humchatter.

1992



it's twin, Stolen and Contaminated Songs, comes a little later and that too keeps pressing at my brain, keeps me understanding the delirium, devastation and fun and frolics of drug use... these twins are the only records that make any drug sense to me... we sometimes played Shamanarchy compilations or early Shamen records but these two are just boiling and immense... these are why.

1993

very drunk, publicschool educated drunk, backstage at a Brighton Festival... Further Back and Faster is playing really loud over a PA, I can't findthe source, it seems to be following me... I've lost everyone I know... I can't even remember what this Press Pass means or who I'm supposed to be innerviewing.... holy fuck, Leigh Bowery is walking towards me... Further Back and Faster... Minty are playing, I think... soundchecking to... this?

A grin is sliding across my face like an open razor... Leigh Bowery looks mental of course but I'm freaking him out I think... I find myself mouthing the words of the song: "Fingers of the left hand, spell..."

I need out of here.

This music is way too much away from my little psychedelic cocoons...

Much later, on the beach at Brighton on Christmas Day: Chaostrophy blasting onto an empty beach, the perfect Christmas song.

Later, Derek Jarman's Blue premiers on TV... Coil blends... all Coil... the blue suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.. the fact there are all these people, out there, listening to Coil while I'm listening...

There's a glimpse, it seems. A new world. Coil on TOTP. Coil on Richard and Judy. Coil switching on the Christmas Lights...

But...

1994-1998

...Coil music thin on the ground... music itself losing significance a little... finding new things: work taking over, drink taking over... just obsessively scanning the Coil fanlist letters, looking for evidence that all is not lost...

played LSD to someone and they hated it: barely checked fury... music ebbing away...

The Glitch gets worshipped, though it takes it's spacetime to find its right place.

A car, going dead slow in the snow, The Solar Lodge is making a comeback. In the trees, odd figures that will reappear on the Moon's Milk CD just a few years away... for a little while, this Essex backwoods is flipping into Apocalypse Now...

1998

The Solstice singles start creeping out - these will eventually coalesce into my favourite album of the noughties, will eventually make all the sense of the world...

they soundtrack all seasons equally, as such suck air in in all kinds of ways... hot becomes cold, cold becomes hot... this is weather-baiting music...



A car journey full of flashing speedcamera lights and allCoil... I'm deranging the girl who's driving, kinda hoping for a crash.... I'm in an odd place...

1999

Kate Bush appears, as she always threatened to... this is a waves... this is a disappointment at first... not as sparkly as the Solstice singles, too windswept... but it grows... they always grow...



2000



Music To Play In The Dark is played in the dark. Another new direction that no one saw coming. This has been ages in coming.

Eyes closed, sucking it all in. A new child gurgling in the background. Perfect. Moon Musick at a time when the moon is always out; perpetual dawn.

Lots of mushrooming. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night takes over. This track will creep, will creep forever now. Begin to understand Thighpaulsandra.

Discover Salvia. Time Machines is the only CD I can listen to while this plant takes hold. Everything else is impossibly intrusive. All words shriek. Flashback to pleurosy/shingles time.

2002

See Coil live, with the wrong girl. The tubes on strike, everything circling.

2003



The live albums keep spilling... each one is a different mystic beast... they will go on and on and on... Coil will live forever...

2004

They. Don't. Fuck. ImBalance. This is the first rock star death that I feel. I'd just managed to have the courage to go an innerview him. He'd been very nice on email and over the phone. He lived just up the road. I sent the questions and then he was gone.

Gutted.

What can we see in the entrails, Roman?

Then: Shards, fragments, totems... there must be more product out there, mustn't there? Thousand of unreleased gems from when Jhonn was alive. It'll all come out now, won't it? There must be ghosts of vocal tracks lying dormant on harddrives, elPHing out, waiting in the shadows...

2005

Oh Christ, the multiverse... Chaostrophy reemerges. For a brief moment, things might be alright...

The Ape Of Naples comes and... it's not enough. It's great, but it's not enough. The harddrives aren't there - is this machine recording?



There's shards, fragments, totems but...

"Some of the songs from Backwards are here too; mostly in much improved versions from the bootlegs that crawled the Russian cracks in the net... mostly in versions where the vocals rise and fall, clambering to get out because he knows it's almost time for words to end...

So far, we've had Boy In A Suitcase and Broccoli but, now this is out, the question remains: will Peter sing again?"

2006-2010

I hear hidden things. An odd sort of hope.

Peter Christopherson is regrouping, getting ready, coming up with some brilliant angles. It's not Coil but it's a breathlike, a tangible, a skew. He's gaining in confidence, the Thresholds being met allover again. He's going to release something immense soon...

These tickles, these treats.

I can't believe he's gone. There must be more. Collaborations, compilations, missing tracks, oddbins, entrails, humchatter...

Allantide

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

Crawling To Lhasa

Found this album via the cosmic/kosmichings at the brilliant Tonton Mahood - here, in fact - and it's been on a light rotation ever since. Pretty, occasionally threatening, odd combinations of firethrottled acoustic guitar and pan-pipes. Comus is perhaps as good a reference point as any; the deity and the band. I hear that bar/club from Fire Walk With Me during Tante Olga and the whispering nasties from Current 93 in Nearby Shiras... there's morsels all over this album, tasty bits of meat, plucked from teeth...

Ritualistic and Golden. Thrown from shadows. Gongs and bongs.

Trust me, if you're normally a cynic about these kinds of wig-outs, these little Golem tangles, these nonsense psychbits then forget all you know... this is as good as Krautrock gets and it's a little hard to believe that someone hasn't re-released it. Maybe they have.

If you find it, buy it.

English Heretic

"We listened, sideways up, by the star-dogged moon...."

The Wyrd Tales album by the eccentric English Heretic stable is keeping train journeys sane at the moment; it's an odd, almost startling, piece of evil whimsy; taking Hauntology at it's literal word, seeing nasty faeries and ancient rites everywhere. It's similar in places to Moon Wiring Club but with the hip hop replaced by shiny little tambourine shakes and processed churns. I like the fact that despite the very explicit occult leanings, it doesn't always go where you expect it to - the music is often freakishly upbeat and, well, happy as a naked butcher, pretending to be a witch. No Lustmord demons here; this is savagery before the sun goes down, while it's still filtering through the trees, making leaves into fractals. And I like that it's unafraid to be silly. This is the Devil's work, no doubt, but it's also music for the devil worshippers who are worrying whether their robes are truly colorfast...

And it makes the trawl through Pewsey a delicate, occult experience...

Recommended. Though I'm not so keen on the accompanying book, or at least the stories in it. Still, a box of some delight.


From The Wytch Machine...

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.

The Hare And The Moon

The little ipod that runs my alarm clock - sets the tone for the day etc - keeps shuffling onto tracks from this album; my favourite sludgey, Wicker Man, experimental folk album of the year so far.



It's almost straight folk (at least compared to the Sunburned, American beardy weirdys, Four Tet, Music To Play In The Dark folk tangents ) but there's weird bits around all the edges and in all the corners... odd TV soundbites (Children Of The Stones? I'd have to check), Death In June drumming, frazzled guitar lines, odd angles... but all done with a lightness of touch uncommon in these fields... there's a hint of humour in amongst the sex and violence and a cackling, belladonna sense of darkness and light...

Unlike many claimants, this really could have been an alternative soundtrack to The Wicker Man...

Fire Walk With Me

Tricky - Smoking Beagles

- forgot how much I loved this, the B-Side to the Tricky Kid single. Actually, I think PMT period Tricky is a lot better than I imagined at the time.

Tricky - Tricky Kid

Anyway, I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on ITV4 last night and the Roadhouse nightclub scene had subtitles, an additional which utterly wrecked the atmosphere of what has to be my favourite scene in any film....not being able to hear the dialogue gave a stuffed-ear, wasted authenticity that is just lost when you know what they're saying. Ridiculous.

Ilyas Ahmed

Many thanks to Time-Lag records for the bunch of stuff they sent me a while back. I've only just got around to deep listening to the stuff (the packaging is uniformly amazing; surely the way to go in these MP3 stung, recessed times). So far, the Illyas Ahmed album (Vertigo Of Dawn) has struck me the hardest - there's more than a thin neural slice of Jajouka around these gills; ecstatic mountain music perhaps, a drug-flipped Brion Jones hybrid dancing in the moonlight (not Toploading). There's also a faint whiff of Hassan I Sabbah, the old man, the talking severed head, wishing his hashsassins into a sweet opium haze. It's the kind of music you turn into rather than seek out (in a good way).

Love it; it fills the room with smells.

Well worth dipping into your Christmas Club money for.

Sample MP3s here

Pretty soon, I'll be putting together some kind of Time-Lag giveaway / competition, so if you're into this kind of thing stay detuned.

The Alchymical Walkers

Walker's new crisp flavours show that alchemy is still alive and kicking in the chemlabs of Little Age, Mass... the cows turn left at the tannery, exhale slowly, build up a froth of steam from their hooves... the magickians in the Walker's lab are scuttling animal extracts, pulling bad teeth from imaginary animals, creating their own Jenny Hanivers, slipping on loose electrons...

Cornelius Cardew - Octet '71

These people potboil themselves into infinity, these potions coagulate metal, draw inspiration from Hell itself...



The new Builder's Breakfast flavour is tinged with brimstone and sulphur, kisses the arse of the Devil - these are crisps that would be burned at the stake... that should be.

No amount of food technology and wrangling can offer a better solution - the people who created this flavour are full of bad tidings, drenched in Lore, suffused with dark light, moonspill, sufferance, servitude...

The Old Ones coming in a conduit of slippery potato eelskins...

Builder's Breakfast crisps are the new Necromonicon ; stay away from backwards eating, stay away from eating at all... nothing good can possibly come from this hellish brew, this broken limb, this synaesthetic savagery (the shapes created by the taste of these things are the kind that exist only in the mind of quantum physicists, all the edges heading towards the places you can't point to).

Cornelius Cardew - The Turtledove

You might think I'm overstating but, honestly, this is the kind of stuff that breakdowns are made of, somewhere in the bowels of Paris a magickal working has left a lone adept naked and rocking, his mind blown; the packaging plant must look like the final scenes of the Exorcist...

Cornelius Cardew - Smash The Social Contract

Glastonbury

...tiny cidersplash sparkles are already decorating my clothes - Owlwoman made a return, for those in the know - by tea-time on Friday and the mud is threatening, preparing for mayhem, for a recreation of some Chapmanesque Hell... Jimmy Cliff is on the Jazz World stage, belting classics to a crowd of people who all previously thought they were too old to come (later, they might be right): they suck in pear cider, close their eyes and sing along to I Can See Clearly Now

(The Rain Has Gone)- yes, blown away, the Sun will be scorching everything by daybreak

and Vietnam and You Can Get It If You Really Want and, especially Wild World, which pleases the Skins-frazzled teenagers who have been brought along by their parents with the express direction that they must LOVE Jimmy CLiff before going off to get mashed on Ketamine at The Glade....

"You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do
And it's breakin' my heart in two
Because I never wanna see you a sad girl
Don't be a bad girl
But if you wanna leave, take good care
I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"
Jimmy Cliff is about as transcendent as a 60 year old man with a backwards cap on can be - no mean feat.



then off on the usual 9 mile hike to find whatever's still noisy... with people's sense of vision already impaired and their sense of smell switched off at the cortex through necessity and mouth-breathing it's sound that drags everyone onwards, towards morning... people attracted up endless Auschwitz style leafy lanes towards the dull thud of dance music, which takes over everything by nightfall and just spins off in different directions... accordian house, dubstep, disco, bagpipe Style, eastern mangling techno, Buddhabeats, fuzzed out takes on old Anita Harris tunes in abandoned Diners...

Sleep is almost there but then the Sun is coming up and there's just enough time for a three foot long hot dog...

Saturday and the Sun has put its hat on, hip hip hip hooray

Well K is dead in the (no) water in the morning so ended up watching deranged mini Moby singing for Autokratz and then The Teenagers, those Parisian pottymouths who try maybe a little too hard to win over the non-teenagers in the crowd (who know all the filthy words and would jump to car alarms ) - the sound isn't really loud enough until the middle of the set by which time they've already invited a bunch of teenage girls to invade the stage and belt out the lyrics to Homecoming, an act that more or less saved The Teenagers from drowning in canvas...



people are high-fiving all over the place, Glastonbury is a beating heart of slightly soiled palms...

...The Imagined Village collective are on , Billy Bragg seems to be everywhere, along with various McCarthy's and Sheila Chandra and some Afro-Celts... over to The Park next for MGMT (underwhelming, as expected) and then descending into the 20 min Battles take on Atlas... they noodle their way into it and then back out but Atlas itself is a crazed nitrous oxide shock to the system (the guys with NO2 balloons are sucking everything in, even the warmth), forcing a few at the front into some speculative Cosack dancing...

"This is so weird
Am I sleeping? Is this a dream? ... No!
Am I a Mouse?
Am I an elephant?
And I had just sliced your tongue

So tell me he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-hey:
Do you wanna drink some alcohol?
I'm just a boy (girl) but I have a very strong punch
And I had just broken your nose..."
a guy with an LCD for a face can't stop winking

CSS come on and blast out the hits, silver wigs, balloons...music becomes their hot hot sex... their enthusiasm infects everything, even the slower numbers are played with such joy, even the crap numbers... everything is slightly smaller than real life, more child-like, ecstatic, immature in all the right ways... they'll play better and louder but it's the playful kick in the pants that's needed before

... the trek to Shangri-La begins all over again and the Diner erupts into old soul disco classics, The Prodigy, The Clapping Song and, er, The Police's Roxanne

(you have to wonder why people don't always Rave to Roxanne - maybe they do)

"3, 6, 9, The goose drank wine
The monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to
heaven in
a little rowboat"
ever-presents Babyhead next in a packed tent, masquerading as a Freak Show... it's basically Madness, downdated (no bad thing), with a lead singer who looks like a compressed member of King Kurt, dressed for an interview at the bank and bounces around the stage, wrestling with his clothes and the outsize Trombone guy (the guy, not the trombone) like an oddly quiffed Machine Elf...

people happy themselves awake...

It's 3.30 AM but people are still everywhere... can't face the Titled Disco or the lunatic stylings of the Drag Queen house in Trash City...



tea, yes, tea... God, yes.

Sunday begins slow, The Cave Singers lamenting some awful past, documenting the slow coming of the final acts...

(or else being unneccesarily cognicent of the hell that is leaving this place)

I'm intending to try and catch Leonard Cohen but know I never will, it's not really the place to see things, unless by accident - you always end up where you need to be, rather than where you'd intended...

saw an old friend from Yeovil, JF, looking blonde and pink and well and with a tatoo of Neubauten that matches mine (and Henry Rollins) ... time lines converging, JF is working as security, yelling out

KEEP LEFT

to the travelling hordes of weekend refugees.

It occurs to me that almost no one here knows where they're going at any given time...

somehow we make a slow, lysergic past Goldfrapp (wish you were here, Kek!) on the main stage towards Crystal Castles who suffer a little from the John Peel Stage's soft sound but try hard to break through regardless, with Alice Glass attempting to climb to the top of the lighting rig and nearly getting the show stopped by anxious Health and Safety executives.... they play at most 5 songs and then implode in static: good, but you sense this was a little big for their intimate 8bit take on showdown power-electronics...

to end, old timers Tristan and Eat Static at The Glade... must have seen Eat Static about 20 times over the years but they just fit so well at Glastonbury:

aliens landing? whatever.

Plants mushrooming up through the cracks in the floor? whatever.

people raise the roof, stumble over themselves, find a million little grooves to wind themselves into... the DJ looks like one of the futurekind from Doctor Who, snarlingly beneficent, shaggily ecstatic... Eat Static are the comfy shoe you can slip into and wave your hands in the air like you just don't care...

you will care later, at work on Monday, with your knees busted at the seams and your legs feeling like they've been subject to a 24hr Charity deadlegging and your arms a good 20 cms longer than they should be...

I'm pleased to announce that after my fairly anaemic last visit, back in 2004 or something, Glastonbury gained Sun and a new, chaotic heart...

the man i saw became a bird....

The Beast That You Are

Got rid of all my tapes last year but still watching stuff pour out from the likes of Raddoo-oo-oon affiliated Night People - who seem like the kind of kids that Kek might correspond with. The cassette culture keeps on, beautiful art brut packaging and stuff that often seems light years ahead (or perhaps behind) the 'real' releases of 'proper' record labels, if only because this market is a captivated one, in all senses of the word. For a couple of quid people will experiment with their purchases and cassettes allow stuff to fallout from bands who would otherwise struggle to find a reason to release things. I sometimes still wish I hadn't got rid of all these little tiny artefacts but console myself in the dark hours with wondering who the hell bought all the micro-label casssettes I gave away to Charity shops - next time, I'm going to put little coded messages inside, leading them to here and other places, see if there's an invisible community out there...

Side A from The Beast That You Are set

This probably isn't the best thing that Pocahanuted have done, or will do, but for a twilight cycle ride into the cold dark heart of the West Country, this is the perfect soundtrack, like wind and bracken and razor-wire forced into musical shapes by a burnt-out composer who once knew Terry Riley but then fell out with him over a bassoon.

For those interested, there's lots of Pocahaunted stuff here. Gorge yourself silly and then get on eBay, find yerself a nice little Walkman and start buying cassettes again. I think I'll join you.

Gown - For the Maples

Many thanks to the great Three Lobed Recordings for sending me a preview copy of Gown's latest grammaphone record, For The Maples . It's pretty impressive stuff, with Gown tag teaming up with the Sunburned Hand Of The Man girls and boys to create an album that lurches seamlessly (is that even possible? perhaps lurching negates seamlessness...) from almost pastoral guitar textures to roaring Raccoo-oo-oon rumbles. At times, this sounds like a better recorded early Sonic Youth but it's a little more far-reaching than this, makes more sense played straight through; letting the air fizz, letting the guitars breathe.

Worth checking out the rest of the Three Lobed Catalogue, I think; it seems like they have a real style and, well, ethic about them. This release comes in chunky vinyl with a glass mastered CD (okay, no idea what glass mastered might mean) and a silkscreened cover. I have a few of their releases, including the excellent l'un marquer contre la moissonneuse by wooden wand and the vanishing voice, which I think Kek gave me as well as my favourite Sunburned release The Mylar Tantrum. If you have any, give these people some money; these kind of labels ought to make you feel warm inside and, one day, your post-angular psycheDelia derbyguitar scrawl might find it's way to their door, begging for entry (and begging for etching)onto one of their slabs. Or else, if you're that way inclined, pretty much all these mostly limited releases are destined to shed tears on eBay a few years from now when people just like you suddently come into money and start scrabbling for a little piece of early 21st century history.

Here's a preview of For The Maples:

"Taylor's Jam"