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.

The Act Of Naming

Not everything Holy is good. cf. Wolf, Ghost, Panda, Fuck...

But... as the genres cleanse, fold and manipulate; maybe it's time to rearrange our musical thinking around the act of naming. You can't rely on the existing labels either (haunt, hyp, step, skwe,) - why not put the, er, Jung in jungle? The Act of naming may seem throwaway but there's a reality in there, waiting to get out... cf. bloggers internet names - Loki seemed plucked from the air, seemed hasty but... there's a few bitches of malevolence here and there on these pages, a few fake moves, some tiny pranks (this may be one, I'm yet to decide if I'm serious) and some afterthought actions that only retrospectively made sense.

I was serious about this being a good idea, for instance. I still think it's a great idea, especially with regard to The The - Girls Aloud should cover the whole of Infected, a la Pussy Galore.

Cat could be a genre, a nominal.

So, if they haven't already started doing this, I propose record stores start organising their stock by names rather than genres (or even, urgh, decades). You want to buy everything with Ghost in the name?

Everyone Loves Werneck-Wretchmond

"This is Not For You."

Or

"Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."

Where to go with this slice of slurr?

It makes no human sense; the machine sense is there and cows are just food is right: these aren't angry machines, not machines wanting to destroy or Merzbow the place into submission...



Instead, this is the sound of bored, neglected machines playing, the humchatter of unrecyclable machine-fuzz, miniDisc mutterings, the machine equivalent of jump-rope songs, pitter pattercakes, handclapping games...

If there's moaning, it's soft moaning. It's a machine's irritation at it's own limitations. It's the sound of an old wordprocesser chip, laughing at it's own green screen.

There's nothing human which isn't unusual, I guess - remember Stakker? - but this lack of humanity comes with a different slant; there's the intervention of listening in these manipulations and this brings it closer to these ears to the chargings of ElPH, a cross-reference with Ice Bird Spiral that I heard way back at The Croft...



Kek's trying to hear these little machines, they are calling to him. He doesn't want to control them, he wants to help; you can hear the love and attention in every little wave of sound, it's ridiculously personal, almost intrusive... this is how he hears the world... and this makes this a different kind of thing to other stuff that's on the surface similar; you'll find manipulated field recordings all over the place but they won't have this attention to detail, this attention-surplus disorder...

They won't understand the tyranny of attenuation that means many of these sounds are sucked out of the world or bypassed with mp3 players or uneccessary phone conversations

...

Dig deeper and you'll find some excellent field recordings out there but they won't mean the same thing at all and they won't come packed with little postcards of Butterflies or Jean Dubuffetish Art Brut crayon covers or blotter paper CDs...

They won't come with the meaning or the feeling for the plight of these abandoned, forgotten twitchings...

You probably need to spend a little time over here before any of these songs make sense. The Open University is the visual equivalent to these catechism-calls; there's a sadness to both projects that makes you wish you hadn't pulped all those broken-backed machines, all those hiccuppertronical potentialities.

A final image: imagine Europe After The Rain with the fluid earthshapes replaced by old Atari boxes, Burroughs adding machines and Dragon computer piles...

This is Not For You.

Kemper Norton Collective

The first CD from the Cornish / Su-Sex Kemper Norton Collective is out now. It's a beautifully packaged little artefact - mine came with a little introductory booklet and a sample of Cornish sand (thus invoking the fiery Gods of the Department for Anti-Social Insecurity and, perhaps, Fisheries).

Despite the deliberately fragmented nature of the release - Kemper himself features on most of the tracks but there's also stuff from the Rradiant Boys, Speckle, Loic Rich (whom I vaguely remember from my early years as a paranoid chaser; [Comments Deleted Due to Misplaced Freudery and Scatologics], Singularity Jones, employeeseven and Burnthouse - there's an inhouse feel to the crackling and slurtronics that seems to suggest a kind of Hive Mind at work... as if the Borg only assimilated FE teachers, Social Science researchers, computer technicians from 1973-1979 and Arthur Machen's godchildren, steeped in bedtime stories.

The collective vision seems to be one that evokes the dreaded hauntological word while channelling some of the sludgier aspects of Four Tet (the breakbeats are more often than not broken) and even Boards of Canada.

Of course, it doesn't sound like either of those bands but there's a fellowship there, a collective memory of what music might have sounded like, had things taken a turn for the worse.

Distant drones, crackles and water drips permeate several of the tracks, seemingly dragging up Salt Marie Celeste ghosts from the Cornish seabeds and then often letting them wander around abandoned fairgrounds and Morris Dancing competitions (the kind where rival troupes start swinging their sticks and flicking each others eyes out in debates about Olde English pronounciation). The Wicker Man, obviously, but I'm also hearing a film that I only just remember seeing, Carnival of Souls as well as that Dali dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound.

That said, it's not especially dark - there's a brightness in amongst the occasionally overwhelming and overlapping sound and there's real songs in there, tiny psychfolk passages that break the tension. The raven on the cover gives only part of the picture.

Unprocessed found voices break through, BOC style and remind me a little of how they're used in The Advisory Circle and some of the better tracks on Mordant Music's Dead Air i.e. they sometimes work a little against the tracks but sound all the better for it.

It's not ecstatic music, not really danceable unless you're suffering from an Asperger's hangover and sometimes it gives you the giddy feeling that it might kind of topple over, taking you with it. A sleeping cow, covered in spiderspit. This might be what you hear when deaddrunk and trying to keep the the world from spinning. In a good way.

Go to his myspace site, pay the guy a little money - it's also very cheap! - delve deeply. If you like the stuff on this site you'll like this stuff. He's got a got a few celebrity fans and he'll get more...

You know you can't resist a conversation that begins with you saying: "Course, I was kinda into them a bit back in 07, after that they got a bit, well, commercial I thought... the old CDRs were great though, still play them all the time even if the dog gets a little boss-eyed..."

The Dead Beachboy

When he first came out of the sea, his lungs popped like kelp. One eye kept staring out to sea while the other fixed beachside, waiting for the boys to sweep him up into their arms. He wanted endless love and knew that they could never provide it. His hair was salt and moan, sea and fortune. When he exhaled, he breathed out their names: Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Alan - seamless and drifting, they looped in endless coils right the way up the beach and over the dunes, an odd plainsong that dragged even the wounded birds from their nests.

In time, he found rhythm and rhyme in the piles of sand and seaflash and made himself a voice - degraded perhaps, and pulsing but a voice nevertheless. He had one hand by the end, dragged himself around in crop circles like the wounded birds, found a way forward with the flaps of whaleskin and cuttlefish that bleached at the edges of the rockpools.

He made a crown of deep thorns and lichen and wore it proudly. He sang a song, still waiting for brothers he couldn't be sure were ever alive.

Fennesz - Endless Summer

But still they didn't come and so he curled into a shell, a mollusc, a tango in taupe and waited for the sealaps and the moon.

A threeday past.

The sea never ranged and roared; everything was ghostly still (the idea of a frozen ghost was still the only joke that made him laugh) and the wind went upwards to play in the trees a thousand miles inland.

Every cough was an oyster drop or a lampworm. Every hooked crescent he drew in the beach was a sign upstairs to where God lived or outthere were God played. He called again but got nothing except cools and cawls from the seabirds and Puffins (he didn't see Puffins as seabirds and told them so, in his way).

He scared some children but they were jammed and birdpecked and anyway were down beachscrobbling to feed asphalt and mandrake and yeast to the gulls. They saw his lone arm and sad eyes and burst into enough tears to fill a sandpool.

"Do you know my brothers?" he called out as they turned and fled but by then his sandpocked cheek had already puffed out to issue forth a final, desperate song:

Panda Bear - Ponytail

All Yousendit Denigradations

Werewolf By Night

*

Blubird - The Way You Thought It Was

A Yousendit Indie-Unlikely

Werewolf by Night, watching helpless as someone is suspended from ropes of pure energy, their arms outstretched, something voodoo happening. All is gnash and impotent howling while out of the aether a songform begins, making slow, uncertain, perfectly-pitched tiny gabbles and wings and goffs...

Indie-scent

Indecent.

This will turn into something else.

These girls seem to be 12 and 13. No longer policemen getting younger. Burning Star Core has an average audience age of 15 - a median of 7, if you can believe it, while latent 3 year olds (i.e. 4 year olds) are in a more or less constantly agitated state of denial with regard to UK Subs tunes played on electronic bubble machines and sent over their cot by well meaning, Morrissey-quiffed monsterDads. The target population for Modest Mouse marketing is 19 but the hotter the sound (with heat operationalised as the number of contact-mics used), the younger the audience - stick your nose in to the average Focus Group focus group or take a spin with the braves and squaws in the latest Racc00-00-00n release van marketeering venture - a Bedford, stacked with vegetable matter and Marshalls, playing Iron Butterfly records backwards and loud. Colchester next.

33% of the people who bought the latest Throbbing Gristle long-player were less than 13 years old. Think about that for a second.

The children are taking over. This time last week, Blubird would've been 17 or 18. They'd have scabbed their knees in the playgrounds of Camden and the University of East Anglia (hereafter UEA). They've had drawn rough arcs in the sand as bigger girls twisted their arms in odd crochets, forcing ligetiesque timbres from their mud-soaked throats.

But now.

But now.

12.5% of the people who bought Hair Police t-shirts in the last tax quarter had not yet finished their primary education. Think about that.

*source of the infamous 'from-the-ground-to-the-air slapping technique is unknown. Maybe Eastenders. Maybe early J.Chan.

Twiggwitch

Released simultaneously with the Hubersnaps EP, TwiggWitch's debut CD-R is a three track trawl through tumbles and girders. Most of this is made with leaves. This time the 2001 sample comes from the 2001 sampling of a 2001 sample from Diatribe's lost classic of ethnology 'Recapper'. The recorders are the artists own and the acoustic guitars are played with all the fingers we have.

TwiggWitch - 12 Minutes Over Pevvie

A Yousendit Mourning Crescent