Ponycore/Broniecore

Late as ever to the party but...

Yeah. A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based continuuuuum. Eating all, spitting them out in multi-coloured goo; replace acid with skittles and here's your audio toxin, a Brasseye slab of cake...

In fact, simply add skittles (& maybe a sprinkle of magic dust) to acid and then start fucking around on Fruity Loops... this is the music FL was designed for; this is the music in FL's bad bones...

You have to love humans. This is perhaps another meta-genre /non-genre, a mere s(l)ideshow and circus, but I like that the collective can just take something and run with it, vomiting all the way. The lightning quick, feeble-minded stew of 4chan is brilliant at this kind of thing; inspiring bad trips and lost hours in bedrooms all over the world. It strikes me that the producers responsible for these minorly brilliant atrocities will have super-short half lives and the names will disappear almost as quickly as they've arrived (as Zizek says, it seems harder to image a ponycore revival in 2023 than the end of capitalism) but this is it's prime strength... the imagination run wild, stuffed with bad tidings and loosely tied ends.

This is, I guess, analogous to the kids' TV sampling debacles of the late 80s, early 90s (Sesame Treet, Charly, Roobarb) but with an elan and an elasticity that seems less cynical and more, well, if there's a internet meme-based definition of polymorphously perverse....

And yeah, you'll hear a lot of Rustie in there too if you're as old as me...

But oddpop exists...

It's mostly dubstep, 8bit, techno-popping, electronica of course, but the genre is elastic enough to include death metal as well:

These are not necessarily exemplars but there's ome demented mixtapes here, for starters. Tread carefully. As Lautreamont said, at the beginning of Maldoror:

"This is not for you."

Colour Sound Oblivion Coil

Love this Val Denham portrait. It manages somehow to capture an intensity and a normality, a humanity... this is the kind of portrait I'm sure Houellebecq was on about in The Map And The Territory. A rare thing. I found this again here, where there's loads of Coil related images, scans, covers etc. Some of which I've never seen before (and I've looked... a lot) Glad someone's still fanning the flames. Miss them. There's also a brilliant Cyclobe interview here . I especially like this bit:

I'm not saying music has to be complicated, or that it has to take a long time to make to be interesting, but I do think people need to take more time. The world is too 'now' orientated and we're littering, smothering each others’ minds with all this uncensored mundanity.

It's something too few people say. Another, incidentally, saying much the same thing is Kevin Shields, of course and he's also been interviewed at the Quietus. Really interesting. Anyway, if it's possible to be bored with nowness, I think I am. It's a seductive quality, spontaneity (or valuing spontaneity) but... maybe it's run its course for a little while. Time and Place. Take your time, folks...

Orbital: Wonky, The Flash & Kant

Well, this little slice of meek bile from Fact magazine got to me...

and it ended up in a mostly inconsistent rant about all kinds of things which I've decided against posting. I dunno, I've been busy and I didn't get round to posting it when I wrote it a few days ago and now... well, those kind of blogrants ony have currency when they are...of the moment...

Here's a few disconnected lowlights:

1) ... now most of the (FACT) features seem embarrassing/embarrassed, like those fitful days when every childrens' TV presenter clearly just wanted to be doing T4 or The News At Ten and just mentally squirmed whenever they had to do something genuinely child-like or child-centric*. The mixes stand alone.

2) ...they've done the hard work, broke the back... we still owe these fucking guys...

3) ...and Waving Not Drowning sort of predicted the poppier chunks of Ghost Box:



4) I mentioned it at the time - but nothing swept in to fill the void..

5) I love Shackleton but he tends to make me want to thrown commuters under trains...

6) (Actually, there's something reasonably joyous about Gentleforce but that's a different kind of joy)

7) Death to Emotional Bulimics!

8) ...and the thing I've always loved is that Orbital never seemed remotely experimental; they seemed entirely, utterly mainstream but in a kind of only slightly alternate universe when the mainstream was a good place to be...

"In a recent FACT interview, the brothers revealed they laid out the LP as a wall plan before they started recording. The weakness of this approach to music making is apparent in the album’s structure, and it feels like they felt forced to crowbar in musical styles that sit uncomfortably with their own sound. So we have “the electro-house one” (‘Where Is It Going’), and “the dubstep ones” (‘Distraction’ and ‘Beezlebub’), all as cringe-inducing as you’d expect."

9) The first part is the weirdest criticism of an album I've heard: the idea that planning the album itself can be a weakness. The cult of spontaneity attempting a sucker punch.

***


...but the key thing is that I can't really hear a bad Orbital album, a bad Orbital track because they are one of those bands that just happened, just flashed at the right moment, with the right people, at the right time... hearing (unexpectedly) the Doctor Who theme at one of my first Orbital gigs is one of the greatest moments in my musical life... it suddenly seemed like I was right, that everyone I knew was right... that we'd won.

Everyone I knew owned the Brown album. And they were all right.

This new album is welcomed with open arms. My children will have to love it. My friends will have to love it. I can't see past it. It may have flaws but I'm playing the fuck out of them, making it as much a memory as the other ones. There's been loads of great stuff released this year but I'll play Wonky more than any of them.

When Kant thought that appreciation of art and culture ought to be at the non-emotional, disinterested, level, he couldn't have been more wrong.

Psychic Ills

Old news now perhaps but absolutely loving this motorfed, spazzling of an EP...

Faustbits sounds half good again (people keep telling me about this album or that track but Faust often seem pointless and directionless and old-fashioned these days), whole-good, immense and kraut, depth-defying - more like this please.

Gibby Haynes reworks like The Jack Officers never stopped happening (in fact, like they ought to have sounded and didn't). This makes to completely spazz but remains restrained, Jet Li in Unleashed, just before the shit is about to hit the fan... That said, restraint is Butthole-based; it's not the restraint of most people... Someone get Gibby some more time on the remix desk. Someone send him some Panda Bear tracks...

Juan Atkins does something I'd listen to again despite not being club-bound. Model 500 always bawed me; fundamentally impressive but thin, groovey but not relentless enough... But this... this is what I want him to sound like.

This clubs similar remix projects over the head, sucks the life out of them... Psychic Ills never sounded so good...

Demdike Mafia Or Tim Hecker's Ravedeath

...well, I was half-joking when I talked about the post below feeling like revolutionary suicide but there's something definitely odd in the air... Anonymous commentators (in the blog equivalent of being in talking heads being heavy shadow with a modulated voice) and, even more worrying, several people via email said they didn't want to be associated with their views* but, yes, they'd experienced the same feelings re the Demdike boys...

Weird. And, just to check, I've been replaying a lot of Demdike Stare on my way to work and bits of it I've started to really like... scene and setting, or just me being a contrary sonofabitch? Bit of both I think...

Anyway, by way of contrast, here's someone I've always thought was somehow more than the sum of it's parts - Tim Hecker has a new album out today, a Valentine's special, and it just so happens it's got the best title of the year: Ravedeath 1972...

Here's a sample...




*this strikes me as entirely odd... sort of bad faith writ large in the blogosphere... is it even possible not to be associated with your views? I mean, I can see not wanting to run up to someone and say 'You're shit, mate' but, in the context of the internet, views are people aren't they? What else do we have if not a personal view? What the hell is happening here? Is the interconnectivity of the net (or maybe the real world) finally eating itself?

Richard Youngs

Listening a lot to Richard Youngs at the moment; he captures the cold perfectly.

Other than a Wire article a few years back and some end of year placings for The Naive Shaman, he doesn't seem to feature on the radar much, or else drops off, or else slides off, becomes deliberately invisible and revels in sunburned and ridiculous wealth ("Richard Youngs, you say? Oh Aye; you'll find him at the edge of the Loch, painting the fish with gold leaf and making little paper boats out of money...") and really doesn't want to be seen*.

Maybe the music is a byline/byproduct of his work as a Copper Magnate, Blood Diamond Seller? Maybe he's not even one person, the releases lurch sideways - he might be a fiction suit, for all I know... a collective noun for hundreds of struggling guitar-pickers...

Whatever, he's a mostly genius, I think.



*just finished reading Christopher Priest's The Glamour

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...

High Wolfings

Here is good.

And I like the Maclook of this blog which looks to have died after just a short run. Shame.

Ekoplekz and Hacker Farm live on Resonance FM

Bottom row, extreme left - Farmer Glitch, second from left - Ekolad, extreme right - Loki, second from right - 2ndFade; middle row, second from right - Kek-W, extreme left - Bob; top row, extreme left - Time Attendant, second from left - John Eden, third from right - Mugwump, extreme right - Cybore. We don't know who the other guys were, or why they turned up in near-identical outfits. Embarrassing.

...


...great live show, Ekoplekz almost early-Aphex Hard, Hacker Farm more ambient than I've seen them before (though ambient like an acid rush, ambient like an accidental theramin, ambient like the beats have gone round the back to meet the children of the night...)

.... whooosh; fizz ... thudddddd ... flick flick ... crackle crackle crack-le... fizzzzzzzzzz ...

scatter scatter scatter drummmmmm ... scatter scatter scatter drummmmmmm ...

Pics, audio, etc here...

Johnny Mugwump was a brilliant host; putting up with the liggers and the hangers-on (i.e. me) and generally being gutsuckingly charming... lovely to meet you Johnny!

....

...and on that note, wonderful to see John Eden and Woebot / Hollow Earth / Cybore / in the flesh too... (cheers for the drink, Matt)... John especially I've had a lot of dealings with over the years. I say dealings, I mean mostly just envy-ridden seethings over the gigs he got to see in the 80s / 90s which me and my Yeovil mates were often trying to get to as well, only somehow getting derailed by falling car doors, exotic illness, bad tidings, fleshfalls, cold readings and non-specific Chaos Magick (in roughly that order - I'm serious: a car door falling off on the motorway stopped us getting to two different gigs)

...

and, almost forgot that the equally charming Bob from West Norwood Cassette Library was also in attendance... as was Time Attendant, who jammed along with the West Country boys in their final flings... Monotron a go go...

... truly a great Blogger meeting of minds... though by then mine was a little, er, aft via Red Wine and Gin and Mojitos

... still, didn't bite anyone...

Flower Electronics

I just liked the pun originally but now I want one of these bad boys:



as designed by noise monster-girl (sound artist) Jessica Rylan (who seems to have kind of reinvented the noise genre, with added swirls and flourishes and less of the My Dad's Bigger Than Your Dad vocalising) and used by her and Cody Renaldo (son of Lee, from Sonic Youth) and others I hadn't heard of like Tara Rogers.

There's a few MP3s of the little boy blue synthesiser at Disquiet and I guess more will tumble out over the years as people figure out what to do with it and why. All good clean/dirty fun.

Jessica Rylan - Gift For The Fan Boys

Jessica Rylan - Hide And Seek

It's The End Of The World

Enjoying Heroes, especially because the trailer features The End Of The World, everyone's favourite (okay - etc) Skeeter Davis song and my favourite apocaplyptic pop-country ballad. It's so resoundingly Goth it reminds me of the Pete Murphy look-a-likes that used to (still, really) hang around Yeovil College, trying to keep out of the sun (Near Dark was a big favourite, just try opening the curtains on one of them after a heavy nights drinking) and giving each other chicken scratches to ease the pain of another crap 12" by the Mission. Sweet, country voices do the end of the world better than anyone; there's already a touch of KKK fire and brimstone around the edges, lines of burning crosses like wind farms, a Rapture (for more info, see Hal) in reverse.

Skeeter nails every ventricle of the desolation of heartbreak, the spoken bit seems totally unforced, as if she simply can't keep singing... her voice sounds like she's utterly at odds with the world and is trying to maintain a little dignity in the face of totally sensory derangement and ontological disturbance, the descent into autism and egocentrism- "why does the sun go on shining? why does the sea rush to shore?" This works perfectly for Heroes, which seems to have this as a theme running through the first few episodes - I love the fact that the main characters are circling one another, not clubbing together, wanting to save the world because it's their world; there's a slight parallel with the bit of A Thousand Plateaus I'm reading (slowly) at the moment about immanence and the state of becoming animal (okay, it's a shoe-horn but the whole book is a shoe-horn into everything). There's also a chunk of Heroes that evokes the whole Marilyn Complex as well, the need to save through people...

When they become the Defenders I'll lose faith, I imagine, because I never saw Namor or the Hulk (especially Namor) ever really letting themselves be a part of a whole. I guess that was a point of irony I missed when I read the comics originally. In fact, the Silver Surfer's existential angst was all about a girl wasn't it? (I'm not going to bother looking this up - this is the internet, after all). As was the Hulks. And Namor - all fucked over in one way or another by personal loss and a hatred of humanity that stemmed directly from a hatred of one person who's not there any more. I always liked the fact that the Silver Surfer surfed - a kick in the face to the 'surfers of the world unite' mentality that's sold through the shops; his solitary approach is like the surfing community as it really is - wave rage, dissonance, feudalism, nothing remotely Swayze about it, as far as i can tell, at least not in it's British incarnation.

One day this song will be about you.

Skeeter Davis - The End Of The World

A Yousendit Wailing Wall Of Sound Production