Momus, Retromania & Wormholes

Well, it seems like I fell into a wormhole in January and missed this:


But, as a result of the wormhole, and now partly inspired by that cover and partly by a throwaway comment here about musical thievery not being chronological, I've been settling on an idea to cover songs not yet written by the artists...

You heard.

I know that, perhaps, this has been done already (for instance, this is how the new My Bloody Valentine album sounds to me) and will (obviously) be done again but I feel it needs to be done with more intent and the proactive interference made more explicit. In fact, while Retromania covers some of this kind of interference from the past, I reckon Simon missed a trick by focusing mostly on the conscious aspects of this appropriation, more on the Present looking back than the Past looking forward which seems to me the dominant thread in music... Yeah, it's a Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick but it's my Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick.

You'll have guessed by now I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this (but that sort of fits, doesn't it?); this is just writing (what Beckett would call plumbing), the theory itself is a long way off... but it is there, tinkling around my skullshape, itching like that guy with the flies in The Wasp Factory (so sad about Iain Banks but he's going out wonderfully).

Right now, with this sleep-deprived melatonin deficiency I've got going almost anything could happen... Ivor The Engine, for example, is playing right now and a 2 year old is locked to the screen in his own Retromaniac Maze of sound and vision. He's even playing with a (AHEM) 'vintage' Fisher Price USA School Bus (which wasn't right even when it was made).

So...

The next IX Tab album will probably be a selection of cover versions that haven't yet been written. The first one contained at least three. Some of you clearly spotted the Coil and Cluster reunion singles (answers on a postcard).

I need sleep.

Pulses.

An episode of Sapphire and Steel where Sapphire and steel are actually elements.

Sone Institute, the Radiophonic Workshop & Sea Devilling

Another remix of a Freq review....

This gives me the gargles. It reminds me a little of the tone behind James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (it doesn’t sound much like it at all) in that it’s like Roman has found himself unable to distance himself from the music he’s riffing on. This seems respectable, seems right, seems like these aural artefacts (I’m talking about library music, mostly) ought to have a little bit more respect in themselves, rather than simply as cultural signifiers or soundpools for discerning (pillaging) Hauntological hordes and wraiths but.. then we’re faced with the slightly uncomfortable question: do these sounds by themselves really offer us that much?

This album is great in parts and then in parts it’s (mere) library music. Maybe the ‘mere’ is snobbery; maybe there’s gems to be found in unadulterated library music (“after all, Tod Dockstader…” etc) but if there are gems in library music per se, why listen to something that isn’t library music and is intended (perhaps) for something quite different? This is an album, this isn’t (I think) simply intended as something to be used, as something by definition incidental. 

To some extent (actually, to the whole extent) this crosses over with my feelings re: the redevelopment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in that it seems doomed to failure because the new artists will be continually looking over their shoulder expecting their incidental music to be acclaimed as something other than incidental music and thus will make music that isn't incidental per se, is focused on listening rather than helping the visuals elaborate, is readied for the CD boxset rather than the programme itself... 

I mean, I'm a long sugffering Doctor Who fanboy and I have several of the BBC soundtrack cassettes from the 70s/80s and the music doesn't sound at all like music, isn't at all structured in a way that makes sense in the kitchen... it makes sense only when I add in the visuals (the emerging Sea Devils, the flutter of a Sontaran landing) and then it gives that sense that some people seem to hear without having the original programme in mind... 

 I say it wasn't intended as music but that is a speaker, right?

I could be being snotty here: assuming that the music doesn't stand on its own, doesn't have power in itself without the heavy load of culture and memory (I was there; you can't hear it like I can hear it) but... it really doesn't have that power. Someone like Ekoplekz is much loved because he adds a musical sensibility (albeit via Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Rental et al) to a set of sounds not usually associated with music. He adds a skewed, er, pop (he'll hate me saying this) mentality that helps us along, that helps us treat the music qua music.

I'm digressing. I like this album. I like Sone Institute. He's doing something unusually tangled; introverted and outro-orientated. There’s undoubtedly a lot of skill here and a lot of real playing (and often playfulness) and many of the tracks, especially in the latter half of the album, find their own bouncing frequency but then there’s often a scything, cheesy guitar /organ sound to derail you and send you back to thinking: what if this were library music? Could we tell that it wasn’t? For this reason, the tracks work better alongside words; the spoken/sung passages help to clarify, even if they in fact lend a gauzy surrealism that matches the beautiful sleeve. I like the words. They make sense of this album and elevate it.

Sun Araw Meets The Congos

Written for Freq

This seems both unlikely and likely. The kind of thing you look at initially and sort of ‘Huh?’ but then creeps up at you as you stop thinking about it and suddenly seems like an obvious decision (cf. the Julianna Barwick, Ikue Mori release on FRKWYS). Sun Araw can (almost) do no wrong in these parts but previously in collaborations I’ve always felt that the message is over-diluted. Sun Araw’s is a washed out sound, is woozy and indefinite and yet utterly singular and immersive – add others to the mix and the same sounds lose something, perhaps even seem a little forced. Sun Araw seems like it needs just the one centre, everything else needs to be fixed, like a beetle crawling in circles because it’s tied to a nail.

For this reason, I was apprehensive when Frkwys announced this was going to be their Volume 9. The Frkwys releases have been some of my favourites over the past year or so, in fact theirs are some of the only perhaps a handful of 12” records I’ve actually bought over the last year (my remaining wall-space can cope with albums, just about, but EPs and singles? Not for years). Each Frkwys release has been different but they’ve shared a core of frazzle and bliss that out-psychedelicizes (you know what I mean) almost anything else.

But this could have been a weak-point. This could have been an unlikely-likely collaboration too far. This could easily have been one of those good-intentioned, try hard attempts, a disaster which only The Congos would have walked away from with any degree of self-respect (and that’s just because The Congos seem like they could walk away from anything with their self-respect intact; they’d float away…)

It isn’t. It works. You can separate the pieces but they do fit together. It’s an alchemical adjustment. The Congos’ voices hovering above and (miraculously) within Sun Araw’s fuzzy angles (not sure which bits are M. Geddes Gangras). There’s not a great deal of variation within the tracks here but the tracks blend beautifully together. It’s hard to express how well this works; it’s felt, can’t really be conceptualised.

It’s what I imagined dub reggae might sound like before I’d actually heard any. Sometimes the whole is weirder than the parts.

Psychological Strategy Board

Machine hum; ghost train clanking...or ghost trails... fogfucked mornings at the edge of the world;fishing boats rattling lobster pots against the shingle... the sea just about to swallow everything whole...http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Submarine noises; not sonar, the hum as it works its way through the swell... then the sound of a minor meltdown, the systems failing...

Humans may have been part of this recording but there's just a smear left, a ghost trail... this could be by the machines alone... you can't hear someone stabbing at the laptop, at the synths, twiddling the knobs of the Monotron... I'd be suprised if Paul and Jonny were even in the room when this music came out... they'll pretend they were (no one wants to admit the otherwise horror, the unspeakable creating the unplayable), they'll take the plaudits ("Oh yes; that particular tone took 3hrs of programming and is related to a parrot sound I heard in the forests of Barcelona...") but we know the truth; this is the result of the humans setting an agenda and then the machines interpreting it in their own way...

The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood)

...this is the latest, train-hewn IX Tab track to make the light of day (or the dead of night) though, actually, it's just another attempt at a song I posted on here years ago... albeit in a very different version to the one I splattered about here... the humchatter is still there, just about...I'm not near done with it yet... though things are getting muddier and muddier... caked...

This will eventually be in the middle of a Christmas EP, with versions of Silent Night and (naturally) Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand...

IX Tab - The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood) by IX Tab

James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (remix)

An ever so slight detourn from the version at Freq.

History is a virus. A fifth horseman of the apocalypse. It’s brutal, beyond reason, full of rage and memory; brittle with the fear of being forgotten. A terrible, seething mass of tendrils, an Athazagoraphobic moron, shifting it's feet and trying to breathe, trying to suck your air, forgetting itself...

History loves and hates it’s host. It smothers it with affection, wraps it up warm, cools it's feverish brow with gentle reminders and emotional aggregates... but the terrible cytopathic effects are just a little while away. Them little fuckers'll get you in the end...

I know you think you're immune.

I know you think you're immune.

Nostalgia is a dish served cold and for a long time now people have been struggling against it, trying to reheat old spices (and Old Spices), attempting to bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur their way out. But history is winning (had already won before the battle lines were drawn) and now we’re on the retreat, if unable to move.



Buzz and blur, crackle, hum.....

It’s coming (through the trees).

It's still coming. It doesn't stop once it's got here. It'll never stop because it knows that it's never really even got started...

Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making.The virus comes in waves (but, what ends when the symptoms shatter?) and it can take a lot of shaking. You can struggle against the pre-settings, tread lightly around it or ironically through it or stomp all over its kindly old man face but you can’t avoid the inevitable and neither will you want to, when it comes to the end times.



The eschaton will be immanentized (etc).

And heaven is a tune you can whistle, a sound you’ve already heard, played endlessly and without motive. If you think you remember, you do. There’s no trick. At the end, you’ll lie back and laugh. It’ll make a Donnie Darko out of all of you.

Some resist longer, some even believe they haven’t started resisting yet – the Futurists are then, as now – some burrow themselves into a (w)hole, believe they’re not letting in any light at all, only to find that their dark isn’t a darkness at all, just another form of light, shone from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. The light will tear them apart too, as it tears all of us.

You know who they are:

E************

F****** F******

G*** and Y*****

Add your own.



This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted.

James Ferraro wasn’t easy to catch. He flirted with the history virus for longer and harder than most. He played all the angles, tried to wrestle with the memories, tried to break them, to cover them in snot and grime and fuzz. He added nauseous waves of his own.

He's tried, you've got to admire him for that.

Endless medicinal cassettes (themselves a symptom), CDRs, LPs have tumbled out, attempting to feed an antibody that was always just one protein shake off oblivion. His music has been magical at times and he’s played the sorcerer role well (even if he thought he was playing the alchemist), dabbling in Crowley magick, in Paris Workings, in symbols. He dabbled in motifs and tropes and Casio licks like Death In June dabbled in Eugenics and tooth and claw (but, what does end when the symbols shatter?). He fiddled in things he only thought he understood better than anyone else. He’s spawned numerous monsters, whose names cannot be said, whose names begin with the cross of H and end in Chris De Burgh, in daytime TV movies, in crane shots and stock footage of shopping malls and queues outside the Commodore 64 shop.

He thought things through, I think. Tried to play all the sides all the time.Perhaps thought this wasn't history at all, but some kind of uchronic intervention, a parallel, reverse-spin world of nu dreams and nu-reality.

Oh James. Remember James?

He thought that he could iron out the creases of history, maybe even thought he would escape but he was always at the Event Horizon and now he’s falling further in. In space no one can hear you scream. No hands clapping. The inside of the ping pong balls that cup The light he’s shedding will be seen by us as glimmer, as sheen, as surface.

C'mon... James. Jim. Jimbo...



Now, he’s letting the virus in, he’s accepting it, embracing it, loving it even more than it needs. Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making. History has him. His memories have suddenly burst through, unclouded and almost free of hum and chatter. This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted. The thick Calpol gloop of history is here, shining.

This is a time machine heading into the very near future when everyone gives up the ghost. This isn't even music anymore; it's History incarnate, is indistinguishable from the original, may even be the original...



But it's not a joke. We're not being played. Or rather, even if we are being played and this is all a Jim Ferraro Fuck You and next thing he'll turn around and say: Really? Chris De Fucking Burgh? Daytime TV? Holy Hot Tamalean Hell! Even if that's what happens next it doesn't matter (and why be paranoid when you know they're out to get you?) because he's going under, the virus still has him, is just keeping him alive for his take on the crispy shells(uits) of the 90s...

Do I like it? Is this artefact, this album actually any good? Yeah, it’s brilliant. But then I’m as infected as you.

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.

Righteous Acid

Almost everything available (or not available) at the Sun Araw shop is worthy of attention and dollarsbut I've been really enjoying/digging/wigging to this bright little baby recently:



Fans of Sun Araw will recognise a certain jaded/faded humming of psychedelia... a psychedelic sound that is undeniable but curiously monochromatic; as if somewhere, elsewhere, there's a really grooovy party going on but you're sitting in a room, headstuffed with Cumin and Salvia Divinorum imagining what it might feel like to be invited to that party.

And:

swept endless tumbling

jerky guitar trail offs

rhythms made out of the mis-hits from a 70s Cow Punching competition

others discarded from Maximquaye's dark hours on two track

tracks that seem like afterthoughts and come-downs

fidelity slips

broken-wheeled wagons, circling in the snow

cannibals w/cannabis

If any of this tickles yer kidneys then of course it's a monster fuck that this little fellah is all sold out but the good guys/girls at Mondo Nation have put it up on their site for your downloading pleasure pips... Don't normally link to full albums and will take down if it gets a rerelease but, for now, indulge....

Roll The Dice

There'll be a full review of Roll The Dice's In Dust over at Freq soon (subject to Editor's approval, though to be honest, he lets me write any old crap) but this will do for now.

And, for anyone vaguely interested in what I might think about albums, there's also a review of Miminokoto and Billie Ray Martin's new project The Opiates which I'll probably get around the remixing on here when I get the time (at present that looks to be circa 2013)

In other news...

Hong Kong In The 60s = Mad Men ?

Quick disclaimer: this is based on only about 3 tracks I've heard. The album itself could derail all of this...

Again, this is something I'm just not sure about. I like it. I mistrust it. It's beautiful but echoic, a mental echo of a Phantasy...

(the title suggests they know it, but I'm not sure if this makes me like them more or less)

...it's imitating sound and it's a great imitation: the soft burr, the perfect Mad Men glass clinks, the predictably heart-melting beauty; you can't see the joins and you wouldn't to - the joins would creak loudly, would call bullshit on the 60s... this is music of a time when men were men and women were grateful...

Now, I like Mad Men, watch it (in every sense of the word) religiously but it's the perversion that I like. It too is a lot dishonest but the style and the psychosexual dribbling appeals... It seems to exist solely to allow us to simultaneously sneer and indulge; how funny we (God, they) were, with their sexism and their racism and their funny little ways...

I feel a little the same way about Hong Kong In The 60s except that it seems to be pretending to find sweetness in it's sources; the resonances here are Razorcuts twee, Flatmates twee, Vaselines twee... i.e. lovely, sweet, gentle, empty... music for our 16 year old selves

Contrast with, say, Momus, who attempts similar tricks, off and on, with added (sweet) malevolence and much more honesty. Much more commentary?

Warren Ellis is quoted as saying it's “a charming summoning with a weird sheen of degraded international glamour” and that's a good starting point for discussion, except that it doesn't feel degraded to me. I think I'd like the degradation.

The band's name is perhaps revealing: my parents were in Hong Kong in the 60s and the casual, soon to be supperannuated, sexism (not that soon) was endemic and regarded as a cultural resource... the girls can't just sing sweetly, they must sing sweetly; they can't just wear pretty dresses and headbands, they must wear them, their hair must be... the world was like that but it seems Hong Kong was particularly like that: East and West meeting and dragging the best and worst of both worlds... a constant of the past and the present, a forward lancing unreal jet-age trail that derives from the Mad Men of the 60s and finds itself, 50 years later, as reality, as the heart and brain-melting echo of a past that wasn't.

I'm going to keep listening. I like it. I'm not sure of it. It's-

Hong Kong In The 60s - You Can Take A Heart But You Cannot Make It Beat*

As a Thought Experiment, extrapolate the title of this track: is this a meta-commentary? I kind of hope so.

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...

Barcodes 4 Revolution

Go here for other barcode bits.

Didn't Crass or affiliates do something with barcodes? Have a vague memory of something similar. This reminds me of the great barcode=the Devil rant in Naked (sampled by The Orb on S.A.L.T.) as well which seems to be on TV all the time at the moment - I guess its time has come around again...

Ekoplekzing All Over The House

Many thanks to PunchDrunk records via Nick for sending me a white label of the inaugural Ekoplekz 12". It's great stuff... perhaps showing off Nick's (Basic) Channelling influences rather than his motorik or Cabs side... sounds great coming through the floor... digs deep, lurches, crackles...lovely release and now I guess I'm gonna have to fork out for the fullcover version when it comes out, especially since it's minimal splatter design is by our boy 2ndFade, purveyor of the finest Kierkegaard in the East...

While we're here, all the fuss and vinyl fetishism has caused the second Ekoplekz CDR to be a little pushed under the carpet... it's called, gulp, Volume 2 and way worth picking up if you're after a longer fix or you can't negotiate your way into one of the limited 12"s...



It's a kin to Volume 1, with perhaps added squiggle... it still sounds haunted (actually harassed) by the Radiophonics (and you'd want it to be...) but now Nick is fighting back, pulling things sideways, letting the subsystems of electronica (even, um, triphop in places?) through...

A bargain.

Burial Hex Runs The Voodoo Down

Burial Hex vs. Maya Deyens. Well, not exactly vs. Apposite, if anything. Saw some of her films in NY over the Summer... haunting, like watching Hungarian footballers in the 1950s.

Burial Hex in quite a restrained mood here. Dainty, even.

Washed Out

Been enjoying Washed Out recently, one of a long string of bands genred into chillwave etc that all sound like the Hipstamatic app takes pictures. Vaseline-smeared as Pitchfork put it (for once apt). Perfect dozing music; instantly evocative of nothing in particular. I just like the name, really; think that it'll go places where the mass choirs of other similar artistsi will founder. Names seem more important than ever. Posters. Sleeves. The album artists are coming back, I think. Album artists. We'll see.

Washed Out - Hold Out

Washed Out - New Theory

Washed Out - Feel It All Around (Toro Y Moi remix)

People Who Live In Solar Houses (and what they say about them)

Found this in a Goodwill Store in Boston.



The subtitle is key here. Giving Solar dwellers an alien status, lost in time. What might these kind of people think? Are they like us? 1979 seems two worlds of 'what if?' away.

Highpoint Lowlifes

Well, there should have been an inner-view with Thorsten, head-honcho from Highpoint Lowlife, as part of my not particularly ongoing series of future stealers (as documented here and here) but I think that things are changing a little re: Highpoint Lowlife and so he's been a bit reluctant.

Still, I've managed to contract a couple of Remote (Inter)Viewers from the backslides of Chard and Steeple, a mere ectoplasmic slick from the Idiot's Guide Temple in Taunton* and now I think we're just about ready to dig into Thorsten's mindmoulds.

((((((((*follow an etymological path from River Tone - the moon mood musick, tidal tones, Tone-Loc, The Anti-Group's Teste Tones - "we hear the lapland, the laps on the land.." and then reverse-turn from the Tau and end up in Mithras, inside the Taurobolium pit, letting it rain tears of blood )))))))))

Er...

Ok, Thorsten, lets have it:

1) first, tell me a little about the label - how did it all get started?

Well, it started out as a legal form of tender, legal here that is. Really, it was the endpoint of a whole chain of events - for example, the coinage issues of mid to late 20s, where no one really knew how to spend or save... I...

(Here Thorsten pauses, as if remembering an evil clown)

... You see, if you weren't there then... this is going to sound odd. Maybe I shouldn't start from the beginning because...

(Sigh. Twinkle)

The label started because at that time we were using releases as legal tender, as coinage. We'd started with feathers and leaves then progresseed (with little fortune, though don't print that) to shears and bottle-tops, to compensate the townfolk who couldn't get out much. Next the limes and the goblets, before returning to a particularly crazed (and actual) coin which looked the same as any other except had a number of extraneous moral messages indented into the edge.

Then someone decided that records and CDs might be more useful and Highpoint was born. The Lowlife, as i'm sure you know, came later.

2) is there a label out there that served as inspiration?



This isn't just a visual pun. The Tate and Lyle label has been inspiring, for many reasons. In the Book of Judges 14:14, Samson was travelling to the land of the Philistines in search of a wife (plenty there, apparently). During the journey he killed a lion, and on his return past the same spot he noticed that a swarm of bees had formed a comb of honey in the carcass. The similarities between this and the genesis of Highpoint Lowlife are obvious, I think... Carcass? Lion? Bees? Well, I particularly like the use of the Samson riddle on the label: "Out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness" because it reminded me of the Coil song, Ostia which I know you're going to mention because you always mention Coil in every fucking post...

3) who would be your ideal signing?

Shane McGowan's techno project with Morten Harket from A-Ha... best thing since Alien Sex Fiend went techno.

That or Prince. We could do a job on that little guy, I think.

4) Which release has been your favourite so far?

So hard... so hard... I guess I'd have to say that it's Magnetism, That Electricity beccause that's the one that really got noticed by the staff at our favourite blog An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming...

(I look at him, searching for clues. Too late.)

Nah. It's probably one of The Village Orchestra things. Love those girls. Incredibly hot, all three of them and well up for a bit of promotion, if you know what I mean. Really couldn't give a shit about An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming.

5) Highpoint Lowlife aside, tell us your five favourite albums of all time

Highpoint Lowlife aside? Fuck you.

Oh, I guess...

Peter Gabriel 1

Peter Gabriel 2

Peter Gabriel 3

Peter Gabriel 4

HNAS - Melchior

6) What's in the future of Highpoint Lowlife?

(A long pause. A long pause. He comes back sometime in the next decade)

There. Is. Nothing. I. Have. To. Say. About. Time. Of. Any. Kind.

7) Suggest a track for my funeral

Oasis - Live Forever

Yeah. Abso Glasto Lutely! A track of dreams, man. Pure energy. I'm ot dying, I'm dyeing... You know. A Death's Head Dylon fix! God, yeah. Libby flipped Kipling y'know. Kipling. Made cakes and wine, got caught at the back end of a bull, caned Del Monte (as in Del Boy). Car salesman and all round mean-giver. Blown fuses and spark plugs for noses...

(At this point I assumed he was speaking in tongues and I turned off the tape for ethical reasons)

8) Any films or books that have acted as an inspiration to you?

(Thorsten is a lot calmer now, though now sucking on oxygen through a nosepipe like Gary Oldman in Hannibal)

Well, it'd be hard not to mention HP Lovecraft, especially after all the difficulties we faced getting The Starry Wisdom project off the ground...


(He gives a little subsonic whistle here. At least, I think he does)

...the estate, the fucking ghost of Osman Spare, all that creeping around Dunwich and wherever... clashing with the feral girl gangs responsible for those English Heretic plaques... but Lovecraft, or rather Cthulhu himself, is behind an awful lot of the releases on Highpoint Lowlife - an atmosphere more than anything, a guiding black light... Lovecraft and electricity, the buzzzzzzzzzzzz, y'know... what you said about the 10-20 album... neurobashment... to me, that is so HP, you know.. such a sauce... love him, love it... I think we had a better thrash at Cthulhu than anyone.. I really do... we may even have charged some brains...

(Tape unspools. Didn't even realise that digital recorders could do that...)

The final 2 vinyl releases from this label, soon to be deaded (truly awful news, this is genuinely one of my favorite labels of recent years), are by Roof Light and then they'll close with albums Depakote, Erstalub and The Village Orchestra and an epic DVD-r compilation featuring pretty much everyone who was ever released on or worked with the label.

Can't wait for that one.

After that, Thorsten Sideb0ard will moving on to focus on writing and drawing a graphic novel entitled "74", which is set in a near future post-industrial northern UK city...

The machine rolls on...

Cheers for all the great music, Thorsten; I've still got you down as a future pioneer...

To end, here's a link to the recent Highpoint Lowlife show on Exotic Pylon.

Spazzlings

Well, I haven't downloaded this yet but the picture of Ozz is enough to get the juices flowing. Ariel Pink wreaked (no, really) brother. And what the hell's Jimi doing not taking over? Browse around the site a little more and there'll be plenty of things the readers here might recognise, half-remember, find at the bottom of their tape drawers...

Ariel Pink's 4AD Graffitti

I like that Ariel Pink's on 4AD now. Don't know why. I guess the smears of sound that characterise the Ariel Pink sound seem to fit happily in the little snug recess of my brain that used to amaze over old 4AD record sleeves, wondering what the hazy girls in the 23 Envelope artwork would look like in the flesh, without the fuzz or the glaze or the soft focus...

Now, of course, I just have a tendency to impose soft focus on everything; not wanting to look too, er, clinically at the world, not intending for anything ever to have too much clarity, in case I turn into a worried Lancome or Oil of Olay model.

They didn't ask.

And Haunted Graffitti must have come from looking at the 23 Envelope typefaces mustn't it? I can't think of a better description for all those roccocco curls and skews and frazzled perspectives...

V23 was the visual representation of the mistaken empathy of many a young, earnest, overcoat-wearing, Mary Chain-haired carrier in the 80s... A visual poem, mirroring the scrawl at the back of your roughbook, mirroring the posh signature you're still trying to develop, in the hope that one day someone will ask you to write a cheque...

I'm glad Ariel Pink is on 4AD. I don't know why.

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...