dendrite

Liking this from dendrite, his first album. It's similar to lots of this kind of thing (these bedstuffed industrialists, these mad acid Averys) but definitely has something about it. This track, in particular, is softly intense, dead-eyed and lost. Odd and scratchy, like wearing someone else's face.

Non Ferric Memories

Well, Blogger just ate a long post about Non Ferric Memories and the PoMo Swindon event as documented by the ever industrious Cloudboy but the essence of it was - I'm pleased that oddworlds like this can still happen


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I've just bought this little stunner (Cloudboy does great cover art) and think possibly you ought to investigate these guys too, especially if you like Hacker Farm / Ix Tab etc...

Actually, just realised my colleagues over at Freq have reviewed it already....

Also, I was reminiscing about the Ice Bird Spiral at The Croft  (here and here) which then got me wishing that Nick would reinvent/relaunch Gutterbreakz (I often think that): c'mon, Nick... It's been years now.... those wounds have healed... get yer Gutter on!

Or at least get back on here...

Xylitol

Loving the latest Xylitol double 3", one of my favourite things released so far this year. It's not a remix album. It's a reimagining. It's a remix album in the same way that Aphex Twin remixed Nine Inch Nails on Further Down The Spiral i.e. it's not a remix album. It sort of is a remix album, even though I don't generally like remix albums (that Neubauten one put me off forever). It is maybe perhaps isn't.

It's varied but it's more or less all wonderful... though see here for a review of a track (not saying which one but you might be able to guess) by my wife (she's right, and i like it because it sounds like that...)

Lots of unusual suspects here, all on top top form: Nochexxx, Kek in Intangible mode, Belbury Poly, Pete Um, Woebot and many others...

Highlights: The NWW circa Rock N Roll station snare tumbles w/added Groove Is In The Heart bounce; the odd choirs, violin scratches and Cosey Cornets; the glacial kosmische melting soundtrack; the ever-so-slight Trance touches; the snatches of detourned Krautrock - a little feathering of rock era Kraftwerk added to the lunatic electo fizz; the stuttering vocals, eating themselves whole; the gentle Radiophonic loping; the supremely mental rapping; even the pops and crackles between the lines of some of the more superficially straightforward tracks...

sleevnotes, gutter press ramblings from Martin, photographs (apparently, I can't see any!) by Nina Power...

The 2 x 3" format is a slight bit annoying but I'm guessing this is either a) a deliberate attempt to engage the listener with the music by forcing them to confront the lack of symmetry on the 'sides' or b) a consequence of someone winning the 'shed load of 3" CDs' item on eBay...

Still, I've already listened right the way through four times and I can't think of many recent albums that I could say that about.

Tiny little moments of genius lie here.

Andrew Liles & Miraculous Monsters

The Miraculous Mechanical Monster.

Dirty slab of green vinyl obscenity from Andrew Liles popped through the door yesterday. Unsettlingly thick-cocked LP sleeve in lurid black n green with equally unsettling rattling audio inside... at times, this reminded me of some of the tracks on NWW's Automating Vol 2 compilation (and, by association Brainticket) with huge chunks of the Cold side of the classic Thunder Perfect Mind and other bits vaguely reminiscent of 10-20, itself half-recalling Automating Vol 2...

Circles within circles...

Not to say this isn't an unique piece of work; it's oddments and stabs are all of it's own... listenable but untenable... not something you'd want to listen to with your Gran... or with anyone, come to think of it. Which kind of adds to the seediness of the whole affair. It's music as shame, music as onanism, as solitary defilement...

Still, I'd love to be in the diskotek where the DJ plays this little fellah out to the woozy masses...

Huge bits of this sound like a sex robot falling downstairs. This seems to be entirely intentional and is to be applauded. Some of it is quite beautiful. Some of nit even sounds a little like Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisquatsi but the beauty occurs in dry humps and clusters, often savaged by the crackle of drums or the slide of robotic scales.

Some of it is disgusting, creepy, sad, horrific... there's enough fucks and cocks to spoil a Sunday Roast, to soil a Christmas party... as a glimpse into a future world of over-cyber-sexed teen Supermarket managers, their fingers glistening with creep oil as they retune their lovebots it's... well, it's not for the faint-hearted, even if the music itself is quite bouncy...

Yeah, you can bounce to this... you might not want to...

It's the feverish bounce you'd get as you unpackage your brand new robowhore, the bounce that comes from a devilish play of the mouth, a curl of the lips...

This is where apple iPod/iPhonophones go when they've stopped being human and delve finally into the pit of moist finger taps and loose trousers and thickly drawn drool. This is why we shouldn't fetishize objects. There may be a moral message here.

This is seedy stuff, unflattering about sex and maybe slightly hateful. Very odd but never wasteful. Very deliberate, composed and considered. A real song-suite in a real album. It would make little sense broken up into MP3s.

And the sleeve is so thick, I can hardly put my fingers around it..

Andrew Liles Ear Wax

Andrew Liles of Nurse With Wound and Andrew Liles has released a way cylinder of his latest tune. This is an authentic wax cylinder especially lathe cut and surely the future of limited edition releases.

Didn't realise they still made this babies but seems like there's a gfew places, out there on the periphery, looking in and tutting. Great stuff.

The cylinder is (apparently) playable on the Edison 'Home' & 'Fireside'. They will play on any non-Edison machine and on any Edison machine that is equipped with a Model 'B', Model 'C', Model 'K' or Model 'O' reproducer. Edison Amberolas usually will not play them but I guess we all knew that. I blame the Tories.



In case you don't know what you're looking for in Dixons, the Edison Fireside model looks like the picture on the left here; a fabulous beast, one faintly redolent of the aquatic dream-forms on Andrew Liles site. You can see what drew him towards this project and I'm hoping someone I know buys one so I can see it in action.

Somnipathy

Martin great on the best music to fall asleep to. There was a number of years when I could only fall asleep to music so I must have done my own accidental experiments. Though this makes it sound like a Humphrey Davy laughing gas party when I guess it was more the sound of elongated (Damon and Naomi) sigh and the occasional winsome (NWW) creak. I think I tried a lot of the same things as Martin - this was the only time I listened to Soliloquy For Lilith; I found it an excellent tool for sleep and dreams - but I understand what he means about Time Machines; it's too invasive. I can barely listen to it when wrapping presents (tried this recently, with spectacular results not dissimilar to Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag).

Time Machines (Coil) - Everything Keeps Dissolving

The best music was music that dribbled. Music in dots. The first two Aphex Twin albums were always good. Anything produced by Peter Namlook, of course, was more or less intended for people to lie down and start counting as were various Divination albums, a few of the Mixmaster Morris I Think Therefore I Ambient albums, later on I guess I found sleep attracted to Fennesz and a lot of the Touch stuff, including the odd freakish turn towards Chris Watson's recordings of swallowing cranes or wading hippos. At some point I tried to make my way into stuff like Ligeti or even the dronier side of Xenakis but there were too many odd angles and surprises in there for a true sleep-dip and...............

(read Martin's stuff, I'm getting all sludgy just thinking about this)

10 - 20: Neurobashment

...it's about placement: the 10-20 stuff passed through the circuitry from Thorsten at Highpoint Lowlife (cheers!) is finding a way into my skull; the songs I've heard so far appear slightly ragged and loose-limbed and it's only during a very close listen that you recognise the patterns and the placement are rather more considered than that...


...at first, this reminded me a little of a dubbier, steppier Nurse With Wound (I'm thinking especially the proto-junglist tinbox percussive NWW of the Automating Vol 2 compilation, esp. The Strange Play of the Mouth... but then, then, the structure sort of creeps out at you, leaves that kind of automation (writing, scribing, channelling) behind, replacing it with a more mechanistic, lurching robot, signature that does seem to have order...



<<<<<....placement of electrodes on the scalp; sending beams in and recievers switching themes and blocking patterns and shooting shards of pure energy into the brain. The intent was never to free the patient, more to entrap them in a device of our making...>>>>>

From: Tripwires and Tangents: the misuse of others by Dr. G. A. Solomon

...and it's then that a lot of what I said about previous Highpoint Lowlife releases starts to take hold - again, this seems like accidental dubstep, leaking electricity, currents running through everything... the beats are considered in the sense that they follow the paths of electricity itself, the sounds come in waves because, well, they are already travelling in waves...

<<<<<...we'll turn them, inside and out; that was the whole point of everything I argued for...>>>>>

From: A Bird's Eye Of The Brain by D. A. Robertson

and then it makes me think that 10-20 as a human is just there to press pause at appropriate moments; is there primarily to observe, to consider when the circuits should be switched... this music might be as endless as all the audio gunk from that early Eno software... the human simply cuts in and out... music as flint knapping...

Neurobashment.

Highpoint Lowlife are putting together an impressively coherent roster... they are due some attention...

Of course, if the 10-20 relates to something entirely different then I'm going to re-evaluate, re-listen and re-hear - if there's one pair of ears I have no problem mistrusting then it's my own...

A Curious Sucked Orange

As a continuation / logical extension of conversational tics here, I'm now thinking that the character from the front of the A Sucked Orange compilation might be the logical sidekick for the cartoon Professor Brawnstawm-Stapleton Undertaker... an elemental being, similar in theory to the daemons of the His Dark Materials books... an irrationalist Hobbes to Calvin... Leviathan Rising...

Maybe Mark E Smith could be another sidekick... in his ghost-hunter guise... his slipping false teeth themselves deadly weapons of limited range...

Maybe Joe Meek playing the John Barrowman role?

MyNameIs

And then this came in, on return from Paris, where I played Burroughs for a while outside the old Beat Hotel (now posh, with the odd picture of dream machines and Brion Gysin dotted around the walls), Rue Git La Coeur (see the picture, further down - trying the Burroughs walk, one foot in front of the other, dead straight.... and failing, of course, and resolutely not wearing a hat....

and, anyway, this came in, another net freebie, a perk of this place, beautifully packaged, with a little card introducing herself and an explosion of colour - the record sounds like a rainbow, unashamedly immersed in joy and light:::::::::::

--- you'll know by now perhaps that despite my dark leaning towards Gristle and Sunburned and slur-folk and Industrial etc etc i've always had a weakness for the beautiful - female - voice ----

and besides, even in Coil and Nurse With Wound and all my longtime loves; it's the light coming out of the cracks that I've always really loved, the oboe coiling from the wind and the wreckage of Chaostrophy, the little yappy dog at the innermost heart of NWWs Cold...

So Leerone is playing in my kitchen , like it's jammed into the machine... someone who puts this much hope and love into her work deserves a few plays... the music kinda evokes a happier Regina Spektor perhaps, maybe a less mannered Tori Amos (you might say Feist(y) but you'd be a sadder soul than me - or, rather, exactly as sad as me) but others aren't really the point; the songcraft and the tunes put this above most of the singer-songwriter stuff that comes my way.... there's tunes you can whistle, tunes you can hummmmmmmmm....

the album title, Imaginary Biographies is important...helps to acknowledge, perhaps, that all biographies are imaginary; that we are what we do, as Sartre said...

---- looking like that, we could hardly be what we seem to be... in Paris we sat outside the Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots - the intellectual hubs of Paris, the places where Sartre wrote 'we are condemned to be free'; tried to soak some learning - headed to the Shakespeare and Co ex pat bookshop, which looks like you'd imagined it always looked; with Gysin and Burroughs and Henry Miller and Anais Nin scrawled all over it, etched in the shelves; ghosts lounging in the reference library upstairs---


Loki, Rue Git La Coeur, 2008

...that we imagine our lives as much as we live them...

more perhaps

which is why a photograph of william burroughs heading past the Beat Hotel on Rue Git La Coeur has been reimagined with me and by me for most of my post-teenage life... a stupid thing, a trifle, utterly self-pretentious but something that had to be done, the countercultural equivalent of putting your head through the holes on the Pier...



They've removed Jim Morrison's head from the grave at Pere Lachaise - I imagine someone has it in their garden, amongst the trolls and the fishing gnomes...

There's more tallying and yattling to get through but for now a simple message:

Thanks Leerone, I wasn't looking forward to coming back...

God knows what's next through the door...

Nurse With Lounge

Haven't heard the new NWW album yet but much seems to be made of the new 'lounge' departure: gone the fogtrails of the Shipwrecked sessions, in come exotica and Martin Denny with tuned bells and bad endings.

All I can say is that this:


caused much fun and frolics in years past. Ideal music for cocktail n belladonna n breakdancing/flapper parties and I can only hope that the new one mangles the themes even further (bits of Sylvie and Babs did come a little too close to the crapper moments of John Oswald, an artist I've never understood the fuss about).

Go here to hear S and B and probably somewhere else to hear the new Huffin Rag Blues

Irr. App. (Ext.)

On the theme of deep listening I've been having a real go with this album, another beautifully packaged mystery from Beta-Lactam Ring records. I've listened to it three times on the trot now, in various modalities (well, all auditory) and, despite initially thinking it a bit too flyaway and drifting ( dismissing it as something I'll probably only seriously bother with the next time I get hold of some psilocybes), I'm starting to change my mind...

Listened to loudly enough it's genuinely creepy in places, making me jump a few times on the way to work and gradually scraping it's way around my skull.

Sounds cling together like frightened children on the rocks (or like children menaced by nightingales) and then fly apart; hovering before settling again... odd skitters of children's voices (best use of 'willy' so far this year?), soft Pan clops, stretched sings, deep-sea Soliloquy drones, spazzed Spanish guitar.... these elements work in a gentle processs of coagulation and rupture, coagulation and rupture...

This one's one of the most 'musical' on the album but, with the exchange rate what it is at the moment you really ought to go and buy the whole thing because it's a beautiful record...

Irr. App. (Ext.) - Wretched Density

A Yousendit BucketO'Cumin