Big Stick - Drag Racing

"Speak softly and carry a big stick..."



...i liked the outfits and the hair...

Children gone bad.

And Crack Attack was pretty, brilliantly, wasteful...

Bought the singles from a bucket in Acorn Music, sun-drenched Yeovil. Maybe a coupla years too late. There was something about these guys that makes me think Big Stick are due a comeback any day soon.

Dusting down the wig-outs and clumping up the beats...

This was Mnml for a while. The Phrases. Cut. Out. To. The. Fucking. Point.

Big Stick - Drag Racing

Stolen from here

Hallam Foe / 2 Days In Paris

Finally got round to seeing this on DVD and I guess Hallam Foe is exactly like you probably imagine it will be, if you've seen any trailers or interviews or read anything about it. Not bad but not something I can be bothered to write about. Mice hat, which reminded me on an old Yeovil saying 'Badgers never let go'.

A few tracks from the soundtrack here



2 Days in Paris on the other hand was tremendously unsettling since it seemed to be an only slightly skewed transposition of conversations I've just had onto the screen in a film which lopes around like it's been made by Woody Allen's younger cousin. I can't honestly tell you if this film was good or bad (and why would you care?) but it made us giggle like drains, even if I'm guessing that for almost everyone else on the planet it could be a little annoying.

Like my own life, this definitely would be improved by some zombies and cheerleaders.

Second Band

... from punk to post-punk, a wrench in time, a spastic transposing of the timeline from the Sex Pistols USA tour to the launch of PIL into the late 80s, a decade on and nothing has changed; same troubles with the lead singers who more or less get ditched in favour of group chanting (the 'Healy is Dead' chant inspired by our Chemistry teacher who self-destructed in the town centre to the general gossip and bemusement of all) in a vaguely Furious Pig style (The Animal Collective are but a glimmer in the eye, the freakfuckers still years away from the collective mushroom jamborees)...

The Rejected ditched all the musicians, ditched the name and the silly hats, ditched the Crass (crass?) stylings and ditched most of the instruments and replaced them with a Test Dept / Neubauten inspired array of metal girders, steel sheets, chains and oil drums - add in some bottleslide guitar played through fx and a couple of tasty Casio SK5 sampling keyboards (the king of samplers - so small you could strap em on and take em for a ride)and Dada IX Tab was born... a band so loud that we had to do all the recordings three doors down, on a little condenser microphone inspired by the recording of TGs First Annual Report.

If there was a lead singer then it must be the feral guy down the front, just a few months away from vomitting fake blood onto the teaching staff during an orgasmic rendition of Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' in the School Leavers Assembly - the clapping was polite, even through the sheen of blood and wine, the teachers might even have been proud that this time someone wasn't singing The Snowman...

It might have been him but it's quite impossible to tell in the filthy flip of orange semi-dreadlocks and cider-eyes. Foetus in his blood. He's got a scream Bargeld would still die for, doesn't even need a microphone to cut swathes through the multiple crashes from the oil drums and sheet metal; sounds like a guy having his arms mangled up at the steampunk Yeo-Valley cattle factories, at the East Coker bacon ranches, at the Tanneries (where the social club beer is cheaper than life itself).

There was rhythm, in places. Tiny micro-house anthems extrapolated to the Clyde ship yards - thin middle class boys with wild eyes and metal drumsticks specially lathed by my Dad. The slide guitar kept sounding like the cattle at the end of The Butthole Surfers 22 Going on 23. We kept it in. We loved that song. Punk sensibilities disbanded, as Dr Benway never said but we continually misquoted: "This is art, pure art".

It was noise. Catharsis. None of us had girlfriends. I think I was wearing a psychedelically-dyed dentists outfit.

There was more sexual rage in the moaning from the Casios. Sometimes they'd malfunction and we'd get La Marseillaise blasting out, complete with barking dog samples, train whistles and lion roars. We thought about playing an entire gig of thoe preset sample tunes, standing arms crossed like Laibach while they blasted out at Boyd Rice / early Swans volume. Later, Dr. Octagon.

The finale was always the same; a legoland micro-recreation of the GPO / Neubauten ICA gig, where they drilled through the stage and wrecked the place (Did I read somewhere that someone actually tried to recreate this event? - that has to be a worse idea that the remake of The Wicker Man). We threw oil drums around, trapped each other under migraines of iron, blasted the frail walls of the assembly hall with sliding scales of steel.

It sounded less good than that.

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?

Rave Etiquette

Interesting musings on rave 'etiquette' by Simon and Derek, especially because they seem utterly at odds with my own experiences of rave culture - this in turn reminded me of a recent conversation about why people used to face the front in raves, why there seemed such lines of demarcation, why there seemed such clear clustering...

what was everyone looking at?

My own experience of raves is probably not typical - around 1988/89 in the West Country they'd already descended into the vaguely Mutoid Eat Staticisms that later became the Planet Dog empire; they were always resolutely impractical and utterly handmade, there was always a fuck-off tree in the middle of your line of sight, a tree-stump to dash your feet from your freaky dancin' - the kind of Neo Nazi / Jane Fonda workout rituals that I came across when I moved to the city (any city - one thing organised / paid-for rave seemed to relish was homogenity) just weren't possible in the bowels of the country

... and the drugs were different too; we took 'acid house' rather too literally, I think, always preferring mushrooms and acid to the creeping tardiness of E - E was pretty much a dirty word back then, a drug that seemed a little too adult for our tastes, a little too wired into the workers' release spectrum, a stress reliever that seemed unecessary to us little sparkly acid kids who just wanted to dance like spazzes and watch hippy girls in bikinis, cowboy hats and DM boots (the posh ones had those see-through Red or Dead Spacebaby docs).... it was only a few years later that we started to really get into E and by then we were all probably 19 or so and the stressors of the world were starting to catch up...

Acid seemed so much more childish, something inner rather than outer, something that didn't give in easily to the lure of sponsored events and copied dance moves... we never knew what the fuck we were trying to do, a point made clear while watching my friends from a balcony move their way through the neat lines and arcs of a rave crowd in Swansea, they were going this way and that, failing to gel, spastics in time-signature...

Perhaps it was related to the different way that we heard music out in the sticks but an etiquette never emerged, or went unnoticed... there may have been some tree hugging, digeridoo blowing equivalent but I seem to remember it being far more akin to a Bacchanalia or a scene from Milton's Comus than the mad marching bands of the M25 raves...

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

The Brotherhood Of Breath

Many thanks to A Pound For Brown for posting this 'legendary' Brotherhood Of Breath album, recorded mostly in Bridgwater, home of multiple bad tidings, burning Wicker Men, diesel-faced boys and monkey-headed girls.

I was trapped for an English Hour once by an old guy with a wart for a nose who claimed, through the waves of cider-gas and cyanide poisoning, that this was the best gig ever in Bridgwater and , since the Brotherhood drew breath and stopped parping, that things had inexorably sludged downwards, towards the sea and the mighty River Parrett Boar.

Well, I couldn't possibly comment but they do make a fine racket, easily suitable for fans of Henry Cow, The Art Bears and the like...

The Brotherhood Of Breath - Untitled Original (Live at Bridgwater Arts Centre)
A Yousendit Saliva and Asthma Noodleation