Shackleton - Freezing Opening Thawing

Just in time for a mordant shot at the Easter Number 1, here comes Shackleton again; his last album was a work of necessarily flawed genius - or necessary and flawed or floored genius - it ought to have been everyone’s favourite album of the year but often got a little missed, as if it was just too singular, too far gone, too much. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Now, that album sort of skittered, drifting across lines, missing beats and breaks, losing itself in the mystery of moments. It was also taaalllkkkyyyyyy whereas this 12" is back to the slightly clipped, voices breaking through, approach of the previous incarnation.

It's less fluttery, more robust, a return to Form (as opposed to a return to form which would demean him and this and is, anyway, duckfuckingly wrong in all ways). This has a sheered off quality, like the inside of a chainsawed cow. It seems likely that in some other version there is more stuff (the other half) but these slices work just perfectly as they are; the small-scale, almost pretty, triangular motifs and lilts of “Silver Keys,” for example, would get lost in a denser soundworld; here they achieve a beautiful simplicity and work as a lovely counterpoint to the rapidly approaching Zulu drums.

You know they are coming, they always come. Here they come. Failing faster, to paraphrase Beckett.

I guess this would sit alongside those compilation albums he did in the midst of the first dubstep flush (Shackleton transcended those limitations as quickly as he emerged, holding down beats and bass but using tom toms like holding tanks) and many people will recognise the great thumping hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm that feeds the Shackleton heart. It’s a great sound, one that quickly gets under your skin and genuinely renders his tracks immediately recognisable. This wouldn’t be made by anyone else, which is different and better than couldn't be made by anyone else.

At times, this might even be an exotic lull in the middle of one of the more difficult Orbital albums (0h come on, don't be such a snob; there were diffIcult Orbital albums). I’d like to hear his take on Orbital’s Snivilisation, for instance. I can’t see how that could go wrong. and Someone make this happen, on a triple LP. Certainly, there are tracks (or rather, parts of tracks) that give off a welcome (updated) sniff of some of the other inhabitants of Planet Dog. If some transcendental God-thing managed to turn Eat Static inside out and found they could still play this would be the music it would hear.

Brain Drive / Soft Ballet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mokum

A throwaway comment on Twitter ended up throwing me back to some old Mokum tracks... didn't even know these guys still existed... thought the scene/label had been annihilated /sublimated by the I Wanna Be A Hippy crossover/dance-smash...



...the pisstaking sub Blue Sunshine look on the video seemed to cause a rift between the appearance (from outside The Netherlands) and the reality but it seems I missed the point a bit about what it was about... i.e. from here, gabber seemed inexplicable / impossible in a broader cross-cultural mileu... only worked whilst vaguely tainted w/ actual insanity, facism, inarticulate rage...

That seemed to be the marketing scam in the UK: 'Look at these crazy motherfuckers - it's like Rapido gone stabmental!'

while... in reality I think gabber was more complex than that - there were undoubtedly lots of nerve-shredding headbanged skins but there were also sub sub sub happy hardcore fans, shaking their booties with big smiles on their faces....

Anyway... digging a little deeper and you'll find that the Mokum artists were never counter-cultural in the sense I thought; Technohead had already had a hit under the Tricky Disco name, itself an exemplary pop bleep from Warp...



And Tricky Disco were, of course, Greater Than One/GTO who had more than a few industrialish connections way back to the mid 80s...

The links between Technohead/ techno heads and Industrial are not spurious: Mokum, for a moment, in the UK, stood apart from the bleep artists... the early releases were out there, talked about (pre I Wanna) in similar breaths as Power Electronics; the racks weren't far apart... your Whitehouse fan would consider a Mokum track as a first wedding dance.

I bought a few of the Mokum compilations and used them to shed people at parties that had gotten out of hand - people didn't go mental, they went... it seemed like outsider music and, in the absence of the internet, it was impossible to find the sources that would prove it otherwise... then I Wanna Be A Hippy rolled out and things started to change...

(compare and contrast with how people felt about Whitehouse etc before and after you could access info about them - in fact, I talked about that here...)

So, I drifted off... gabber became another genre that died in me... it never fitted my drugs (made the error of taking the wrong drugs in a gabber field, didn't make the same error twice), didn't fit where I was heading musically, seemed simultaneously inaccessible and over-accessed; snobbery ensued and I assumed that everyone else lost interest too...

But they didn't. It's still out there, Mokum's still going strong, gabber's morphed into even more ridiculous highspeed angles: speedcore, cybergrind, splittercore...



and then extratone...



which comes fullcycle with the Nazi imagery and kinda outCakes Chris Morris... Shatner's Bassoon will quake...

Specta - K-Hole

I dunno... there's stuff just like this everywhere, stuff like this crawling from under rocks, into storm drains, out of badly brushed mouths but... there's something a little off about this and I like it when something grabs you by the throat & makes you pay attention to it specifically, rather than simply echo off it's ancestors, friends, family members... even in a crowded, saturated, chain-smoked field the bass here is gutting... the name, the not Skepta... and the simplicity itself is like a-

Actually, the thing I like about this is that it sort of resists theory and interpretation so I think I'll just shut the fuck up

Snowy Red

Further to my previous post...



This could be featuring on Altered Zones, coming out of Brooklyn etc. And might be. I'm not sure i trust anything of the internet now. The shock of Milli Vanilli runs deep. And now...

This is laid back to the point of falling, the machines keeping time but only just... Not heard Snowy Red mentioned too often as a reference/source for the new minimal (chill) wavists but...

I like the dancing on the video too, though it reminds me of a (to be unnamed) mate dancing to The Mission's Butterfly On A Wheel circa 1990...

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.

The Search for Japanese EBM

You'd have thought there'd be more Japanese EBM bands, that this scene above all others might have taken off in a big way there, might have fit Japan like a leather glove...

I'm aware that I've never been to Japan, am seeing it instead through a terrible gauze of Occidental 'otherness', aware that even when I do go I'll probably still not be able to see things straight but... I'm still curious why I don't know much about the Japanese EBM scene; why it hasn't crossed over, made itself more obvious...

I mean, there's components there, a definite cultural imperative towards the kind of metal/leather fetishism, a definite body horror / man-ipulation vibe, right the way from Mishima to Tetsuo and then way beyond... EBM would soundtrack the Japan I think of well (Albeit the one I'm thinking of is perhaps a slightly attenuated Blade Runner)... and the likes of Merzbow and particularly Masonna have been churning the man-machine interface into pure noise for years now... it seems suprising that the beats have been less forthcoming, have mostly spun off into brighter tones, to techno, to house, to disco or trance or dub...

There must be a Japanese EBM scene...

You could start here, but it's hardly propulsive; doesn't seem like an organ of mass manipulation - doesn't seem like a big enough gateway - what have these bands got to hide?

A dark heart of Japan that they think shouldn't exist? Is EBM too obvious a move?

This place seems promising, but I'm struggling to find a leader of the pack; a Klinik or a Front 242. There's no one I can find that's willing to be Skinny Puppy and face the consequences.

That said, I like the look of these guys, though they're really a lot closer to Depeche Moded J-pop than you'd imagine by the company they keep:



and you can tell by their t-shirts that they are going for the kind of Emily Strange market rather than puff-powdered, ski-goggle wearing Neuro-Trashers:



Perhaps these guys are nearer the mark. I could get into this kind of stuff:



though I guess it's still more techno than EBM, more like a messier Prodigy than a tight-balled Front Line Assembly clone. Good stuff, but not EBM..

I've recently discovered 2 Bullet and have more than a suspicion that they might be more fun than a bag of hungry cats and, judging from their influences, might be as close to a 'true' Japanese EBM band as I'm going to get. I'm certainly digging the paramilitary look:




And this kind of storms along like a very breathless robot:

2 Bullet - Human Kind

A little odder, trancier and still more Gothic is SawDUST in me which have a strange awkward sordidness about them, like a Balthus painting, come to life.

Well, a Balthus painting come to life in the middle of a seriously tranced out space-room:

sawDUST in me - Heaven

sawDUST in me - Thirteenth

On the same theme, they look like Strawberry Switchblade, modelled by Belmer:



But, again, there's nothing really BODY BEATING about this. It's pummelling without the body. And the machine fetshism isn't really fetishism at all; where Front 242 et al seemed to view machines as something to be wrestled with, and then commanded... the Japanese seem to take a friendlier tone; the machines are our natural extension, something to be kissed on the head rather than wrestled to the floor until they submit.

The search continues... where is the Tetsuo of Japanese EBM? It's a monster waiting to happen...

The Revolting Cocks as EBM Binge

Well, it started innocently enough, the root of all this was a Front 242 track that slipped into the Shuffle Mode a few weeks back and then coincidentally I got my first cease and desist notice about another Front 242 track I'd posted (alongside a cutting stolen from Gutter) and now, well, now I'm in the middle a of one of those periodic binges of re-listening to stuff I've long since discarded

...and this time it's perhaps the least cool and least salvageable (we'll see) of all genres - EBM, which is quite possibly still going very strong in all kinds of dark holes, which probably isn't called EBM (and never really was) and which, assuredly, isn't New Beat or anything like that (a more loved cousin genre which did get a little reinvention a few years back by that Dunlop-wearing Caretaker guy) although it's Belgian by inclination and there are times, in a dark room, with a badass PA system, where the two have been known to slide around in the mud together, like all good cousins...

Which brings me to Revolting Cocks.

I'll probably be chugging my way through the likes of a:GRUMH and A Split Second and FLA and the Klinik/Dive angle and maybe DAF which I loved since I heard Kebab Traume on the C81 tape (and which was perhaps a bigger gateway band for me than almost any other) but for now, this 12" single is as good a place to start as any...

Revolting Cocks - No Devotion

Leeched from here

I went to see them at The Astoria in 1990 and, while they were predictably fantastic and gross and stupid (i.e. ideal 18 year old brain fodder), they were probably already on a downward spiral... we were already slightly annoyed that they didn't bring the herd of cattle onto the stage (we were expecting something to rival the Frank Tovey, Blixa Bargeld, Genesis P-Orridge ICA smashing) and I think, even then, we knew that The Cocks would morph into RevCo (Ugh!)... Beers, Steers and Queers was about to become an indie disco anthem and they were going to get over-excited at all the attention... even old ice-cream head Douglas Hurd had a crack at them before the UK gigs after Teddy Taylor brought them to the attention of the House of Commons EBM select committee (love to have been at that gig, DJ TT in da house...)

But the first few albums were good - the live album was brilliant and No Devotion was off it's time and perfect; the way it starts all sludgy and industrial and then pulls a light cord and - WHAM- it's disco-spastic. It's a fine line and they found it a difficult one to tread. When they eventually covered Let's Get Physical and Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, it was already too obvious. If they'd done That's The Way (Aha Aha) I Like It then maybe things would have turned out differently (actually, I always thought Laibach would have done that well; the way i hear it is with Laibach or The Cocks singing along) but I lost interest soon after that gig and they picked up more guitars and got sloppy with the drum programming and, well, drifted off...

Still, watching a crowd of indie kids all singing the lyrics (and samples) of Beers, Steers and Queers remains a very fond memory... especially since this was the same time period that people would sit fucking down when Sit Down came on or go spazzmental to The Mission. Seriously, The Mission. Butterfly On A Goddamn Wheel.

Punishing times...

Glowings

Glowing fungi in Brazil

And still causing surprises...

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


Fuck Buttons - Sweet Love For Planet Earth

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...

N-Eurobashing

Dreamt about being in Thailand and going to see a Front 242 gig - "Hey Poor, You Don't Have To Be Poor Anymore! Jee-sus Is Here!" - they were really good, just like I remembered them; the hardest working snaredrums and hardest sounding hi-hats in the business at the time, the best drum programmers bar none - none of the leaden Wax Trax / RevCo / NiN contingent ever managed to make the machines sound so malevolent.

Okay, the odd dodgy vocal. Okay, they got a little carried away with all those people buying that t-shirt with the swimmer on it. Okay, they ended up chasing the same tails ass Portion Control and 23 Skidoo a few years earlier; following the followers but...

As ever, with dreams, you get sucked in. I woke up and found some Front 242 and stuck it on my i-pod for the walk to work; neurobashing myself into submission, letting it carry me; music for stomping over James fans, for headbutting yer ski goggles off, body-beating music which is --------------

-------------- Great to walk to work; normally I have to put up with some Venetian Snares like spazzout that puts me in a shifty mood and dealigns my spine or else some elegaic droney folk which sets me off dreaming in another dimension but gets caught short when I turn the i-pod off and face the terrible reality of timetable management programmes or Excel deathsheets (Yep, the students are away but I've still got a week to go). Front 242 gets you going, sets you up for the urban sprawl, makes cities out of crappy towns like this one.

I arrived at work fully charged and decided to investigate further - I hadn't heard anything by or from them in years and certainly not consciously thought about them so I figured maybe some subliminals were at work here, a poster advertising a live appearance, a new album... I'd not paid any attention since the very early 90s and figured they were on a still downward slope but I stuck their name into Google nonetheless, just to see...

"In the past 20 years, the use of computers has drastically transformed music production; in this way, creation is totally integrated thanks to user-friendly technology.

FRONT 242 come from a different era, when working with electronic music was difficult. The machines were hostile and humans needed to interact strongly with synthesizers to master their art. Music required discipline."

Which annoyed me so much I barely noticed anything else all morning. Okay, slight overreaction perhaps but... Jesus, when was difficulty something to be yearned for, to be fetishised? Okay, maybe that was partly the point of Front 242 but still, sounds like it could have been written by Steve Vai or Eric Clapton. Yeah, it's probably true that the old electronic artists struggle with their equipments limitations brought about some interesting accidents but to eulogise that struggle in and of itself? The new equipment can be abused as well, can't it? Doesn't have to lead to easy options and quick cop-outs? There's people out there still struggling to find new forms, aren't there?

Sure, Front 242 played their rudimentary drum machines better than anyone, found wholly different ways of slicing beats apart (I struggled witha DR-550 and RX7for a number of years, eventually making some terrible sub New Beat nonsense with lyrics about turning into horses - maybe I'll try and dig it out and send it to Nick for his Bleepfiend project) but to suggest that I, a priori, couldn't have done a better job with slightly easier programming seems absurd.

I can understand the analogue = warmth angle a little better but that wasn't what Front 242 were about, was it?

I dunno, to me it sounds like the old guys are just bitching (cf Glastonbury Festival!!!) and moaning about how the youngsters have got it easy, yet another variation on the age-old/old-age Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen (Of The Apocalypse?)sketch - "Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh."

Still, they are still going, playing at Infest in Bradford - Home of Darkwave, no less and I am curious as to what they might still have to offer, now that their knees will need more padding.