Thee Satisfaction

Bands with 'Thee' in the title will always suckle up to an old Psychick Youther like me, will always be worth a listen (or the more important second listen) and this is no exception.

(actually, most of the bands with 'Thee' in the title have been pretty awful; it's a pretty piss poor hit rate to be frank but...)

Enchantruss has the kind (which makes a spin, perhaps, on medieval magick and hospital corners) drunk-doop-dub backing vocals which can't help get you at least curious and the phrasing just keeps spilling, making what I suppose is notionally a Hip Hop / Psychedelic Soul hybrid into something a little more... off.

And QueenS has an insistent mantric lost groove that reminds me of being in Asian jungles, listening to German DJs fucking around with old soul records and trying to find the manic Tetsuo machine breath at their heart. QueenS might not be for you; it's not really a song from a genre I ever listen to but...

I dunno, there's just something...



Thee Satisfaction - Enchantruss

Thee Satisfaction - QueenS

Jack: Treacle Eater

Psychic TV - The Orchids



Califone - The Orchids



This song. Yeah. Long time ago now in the wind-blasted Barwick dunes. The God of Hell-Fire. Two out of four of the people I associate with this place and this song are dead. Blood arching through the air like a loose artery. Fire. A beautiful, cursed place. A hinterland.

This guy as well, of course.

Throbbing Gristle Ltd

as a supplement to John's Uncarvings on the Throbbing Gristle Ltd. Astoria gig... here's some adverts you might remember... I can vividly remember staring at these and wondering... really wish I'd got off my arse and up to London... in them days it seemed so far away...




Images sourced from here

The only recording I can find is this one, a bootleg cassette... Anyone got it? I'd love to hear this baby...

And, while we're on the subject, is there a complete audio record of the 1989 Mean Fiddler gig? It went on for 3hrs or so, if I remember correctly (I probably don't, to be honest)

Processed Meet-Reality Sandwich

Anyone interested in the machinations of the Process guys will know about this book by now but, as a taster of interesting things to come, there's a great article by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge - unusually (?) precise / concise / lucid for those who have occasionally struggled through his TOPY stuff - documenting the early days of TOPY.

Neon Indian Remixes

Finally getting through all the emails and adverts and sentsongs that have caused ripples and digimountains in my inbox over the Festivities. This one caught my eye for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who ever reads this blog.

Grizzly Bear - Cheerleader (Neon Indian Sega Genesis P Orridge Remix)

Though I think I actually prefer this one:

Grizzly Bear - Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Studio 6669’ Remix)

They both remind me a bit of the stuff that Weird Tapes get up to; this hollow, shining sound that's creeping into all kinds of things post Ariel Pink.

No Zombies, though.

Gary Glitter Memorial Society

I'm looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes, looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes....

Return To The Source

Regular readers (Yeah, I know...) will understand that despite the overwhelmingly cool music that I mused to write about on here (and still will, someday)I've always had a terrible aesthetic hangover for the gloriously uncool genre of goa/psytrance that just won't shift, no matter how long and hard I stare at my jazz fingered, spastic-in-time dancing. With this in mind, I recently bought the Return to the Source DBL CD from the heady days of 1995.

The first CD is great moving boxes music and since I've recently moved house it's been on quite a bit.

The music, perhaps the whole genre, is like musical infantilism; resolutely uncool, totally unsophisticated and utterly naive. Just reading the utopian spin of the booklet makes you remember just how long ago 1995 was: people still believed that the whole Megadog / Shamanarchy / Fraser Clarke tangent might actually make the world a better place - contrast that with the thick, delirious bubbling from the dubstep scene (and the associated goddess worship of those proclaiming bassline house as an alternative) and you can see that the zeitgeist has shifted further in the last 15 years or so than anyone might have predicted: no wonder Throbbing Gristle are back on the scene, they must feel like they're returning home to the same issues as before - a full circle that deviated for just a second into a hyperdelic youth...

And now we're heading into recession. Of course, we are. Critics will no doubt suggest that the music is reflecting this change but I'm not so sure that it's not the opposite; that the music is in fact prefiguring the change. Without the dark recesses of dubstep's clattering, there would be no recession.

I heard that the Shackleton record made Ricardo Villalobos cry.

The french-inspired Super Discount spin on electro might save us a little - Daft Punk probably came a bit early - but I'm predicting a new Industrial renaissance so expect more nasty Buchenwald-themed minimalist albums and strangulated SPK samples for a few years yet. They're even releasing supercharged editions of Ramleh albums, for godsakes.

In the meantime, I'll be waving my hands in the air to Doof while putting up bunkbeds. Interesting times.

Sleeve

From the days when he had a crystal eye and jacked tabs, Richard Norris has plumbed psyche for all it's worth... He's kept with it; straining to hear drumbeats and synth washes where they might have been or should have been in bargain basement, zero album, lost 7" garage bands from the 60s. Pitterpatter. Squelch. Zing. Swirl. A few clunks along the way which reminds me somehow of the disorientated lost soul of the Circle guitarist wrapping himself in bliss and cable during their performance at legendary Cloudboy hangout The Cube in Bristol. This music might be largely synthetic but it's paradoxically authentic as well, in that the (patchouli) smoke and the (convex) mirrors seem very real, or at least hyperdelic and hyperreal. This is nostalgia with knobs on and it glistens with the thoughts of what might have been. The glistening is important because it's not hauntological at all; it's almost the flipside - no sadness implied, it's nostalgia with zero tolerance for misty eyed beardy weirdies, nostalgia that doesn't breathe deeply at the thought that everything faded away into nothing. It glistens instead with the thought that nothing faded and everything still might be and as such it's beautifully at odds with the times, just like psyche ought to be.

Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve are the past zeroing into the present; Hawk winds and analogue simulations and sounds that manage to seem dug out rather than preset. Some of their stuff pulls back the curtains on the final few scenes of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls - the mushroom madness, the P-Orridging, even the final apologetic coda with the bubbling streams...


Here's a DJ set from Manchester

Not sure about the name though, Richard...

Psychic TV at The Bierkeller

PTV play the Bristol Bierkeller on 17th September. How theIR dayglo transgender hypno-retroscending hyperDelia mixes with the scum and cider froth of Bristol's premier German-themed dancehall I can only imagine but it looks like it might be worth a wander up the traintracks. Anyone interested? Doppelganger, can I stay at yours?

24 hrs

Well, it may be blagged and blogged from various sources but I think Chris has done a good job. And here is 23 Drifts To Guestling the TG / PTV obscurity that the venerable/ venereal ( I forget which is which, or which was 'Chimed Rig') Beyond The Implode sent me a few years ago. Check out his interview with Joy Division's dead arch-eppy Ian Curtis and then try and work out if that 'Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders' line really was about those nasty second-hand overcoats that everyone wore back then...

Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Her/e

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

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

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

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

PTV3 - Lies, And Then

A Yousendit ? and the Mysterians Rated X Tissue Sample