Sun Araw Meets The Congos

Written for Freq

This seems both unlikely and likely. The kind of thing you look at initially and sort of ‘Huh?’ but then creeps up at you as you stop thinking about it and suddenly seems like an obvious decision (cf. the Julianna Barwick, Ikue Mori release on FRKWYS). Sun Araw can (almost) do no wrong in these parts but previously in collaborations I’ve always felt that the message is over-diluted. Sun Araw’s is a washed out sound, is woozy and indefinite and yet utterly singular and immersive – add others to the mix and the same sounds lose something, perhaps even seem a little forced. Sun Araw seems like it needs just the one centre, everything else needs to be fixed, like a beetle crawling in circles because it’s tied to a nail.

For this reason, I was apprehensive when Frkwys announced this was going to be their Volume 9. The Frkwys releases have been some of my favourites over the past year or so, in fact theirs are some of the only perhaps a handful of 12” records I’ve actually bought over the last year (my remaining wall-space can cope with albums, just about, but EPs and singles? Not for years). Each Frkwys release has been different but they’ve shared a core of frazzle and bliss that out-psychedelicizes (you know what I mean) almost anything else.

But this could have been a weak-point. This could have been an unlikely-likely collaboration too far. This could easily have been one of those good-intentioned, try hard attempts, a disaster which only The Congos would have walked away from with any degree of self-respect (and that’s just because The Congos seem like they could walk away from anything with their self-respect intact; they’d float away…)

It isn’t. It works. You can separate the pieces but they do fit together. It’s an alchemical adjustment. The Congos’ voices hovering above and (miraculously) within Sun Araw’s fuzzy angles (not sure which bits are M. Geddes Gangras). There’s not a great deal of variation within the tracks here but the tracks blend beautifully together. It’s hard to express how well this works; it’s felt, can’t really be conceptualised.

It’s what I imagined dub reggae might sound like before I’d actually heard any. Sometimes the whole is weirder than the parts.

The Acid Eaters

Presented without comment.

Sunlore / Heartland Review (The Hardly remix)

These two LPs came to me via Tequila Sunrise and Cream of Turner but really via Freq... (the proper review is here - this one has ugly appendages)

...And they came with the coolest hand-made LP sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs.

The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs if he'd found himself knee deep in Max Ernst smears (you can see it being made on the label website).



The Heart Land sleeve is perhaps a riff on Throbbing Gristle’s original sleeve for Second Annual Report, consisting of a wrist-thick gatefold slab of industrial card and a label that should be attached to one of those TPS reports that Lumbergh was always trying to get Peter to attach in Office Space.



And if the sleeves are idiosyncratic, so is the music. Sunlore’s explorations sound like explorations, as if they will be songs sometime in the near future but haven’t quite evolved yet.

I haven’t decided yet whether this approach really works in the way they intended it to but there’s certainly enough interesting stuff here to make you dig deeper, to listen harder. Or maybe... No, there's definitely stuff in here, scratching to get out...

At times they sound a little like some of the early albums by Volcano The Bear before they went, ahem, pop with Classic Erasmus Fusion (Ok, they never went pop, they couldn't pop out if someone kidnapped their grandchildren) and they use a similarly odd blend of instruments and non-instruments: toys, pianos, organ drones, broken keyboards, bruised guitars...

These fragments sound like they’ll eventually get to some pretty intense places but right now they’re just winding up in style...

the music wants to be more music.. it wants musical progeny... musical babies....

Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and fluxHeart Land play a similar field (I think it’s the same people) though theirs is a muddier approach, a denser vision, almost a shadow of the twinkling Sunlore album. Jung would listen to these two albums and smile. Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and flux. Genres flip in and out of the mix; slight hints of jazz (This Heat style jazz i.e. notjazz which may be jazz - I don't really understand jazz) and psychedelia and folk and Dada. Tzara would have liked this, would have jigged in a robot costume, or dressed like a moat. He'd have skipped in stage to the detuned bells and Sapir-Whorf errors with a grin that could've smuggled aubergines...

Not quite beguiling yet but you’ll want to hear more.

Both albums are remarkably economical; a lot of artists would have half the tracks and simply extend the motif, hoping to bludgeon their way through repetition and familiarity. They know who they are. We could all name three bands on two hands.

But... neither of these collectives seem to want to fall into that commercial trap; the tracks end if anything a little too quickly, giving the impression of a low boredom threshold, or a lack of tape. These releases electrify the sheer oddness of the attention-defecit approach and the gamble associated with taking this route; people will not like these LPs simply because there's not enough repetition...

These albums are sighs; expect bellows in the future.

Keep watching. This label is a thrilling anti-capital conceit in this awful age of austerity. Reward and applaud these guys, even if the music isn't quite your thing. Buying some of these albums is a revolutionary act and this is said from the dull-sensed, detached and disinterested opinion of someone who didn't have to pay for them at all, who sucked them all up on the heavy and ever-open coffers of the mighty Freq...

High Wolf & The Lycans

Because I was listening to High Wolf on the bus late last night and a werewolf got on. It freaked quite a few people out; one guy moved away so quickly he almost fell over. The werewolf smelled of weed, oddly enough and only lasted two stops before heading off into the night, perhaps to rub Virgin fat onto his alopecia-ing chesthair.... I know what you're thinking but it was a werewolf, a lycan, they used to be all around here, you used to be able to spot them out of the corner of your eyes, just before they dissolved into the bracken... they were relatively harmless then, the odd bite, the odd scratch and sniff... many of them were young, cubs even, barely more dangerous than the torch-wielding feral kids being chucked out of the Action Zone slums of Bridgy...

But still, the Lycans are creeping back. This one was an adult male - red eyed, yellow-toothed, hair like a dirty ripped dress. He looked like he meant business. Haven't seen them in a while. Not this type. They've been lying low, perhaps afraid of all the publicity, perhaps annoyed at how shitty the novels about them have been. Last time they were this out in the open is back in the CJD farm-culls...

Interesting. I'll keep you posted.

Other than that, High Wolf's donated organ tumbles are quite fetching, I think. Diverting. A little transporting. Tiny little squiggles of puff. Substantially insubstantial. Better than Ferraro et al, I think; more.... honest. Makes me think I need to start taking extra gulps of cough syrup.

RHOd(amn)esia - a review of Kempernorton's latest without hearing it

Rho - a value of 100; Moment, Um (Ohn?) or: the endtime for RNA synthesis and
((((Road)))
Rhode(s)- and associated Colossus; Helios archetypes... Sunburned Hands of God
Damn - the exclusion from Heaven or the separation from the GODhead; the Rhett row...
Amnesia - Fugue in E (Morris Dancer) Minor - a cow's eye looking at the pathway to the Tannery at Pittards; yellow elbowed men from the sticks, eyes burned by chemical vapour...

Kempernorton's road roaming, in music... ripping the wheel from the Motorik: Kraftwerk's Autobahn, Neubaten's Onomatopeic Nnnaaammm, various Highways to Hell...

British Roads mostly resolutely not motorik, not beat-driven but altogether slow and crumbly and ambient... glitches abound, mis-steps, fumbles, false starts - Elvis's Are You Lonesome Tonight dissolving into man-giggles and choking makes much more sense as a soundtrack to West Country roads....

Kempernorton is keeping with his Sus-Sex theme but he's a W/C lad at heart, can't not be...

So...

Comus perhaps... the stop/start, the possibility of burning Christians in the fields... Comus the band and the deity.... The Wicker Man outside Bridgwater, Junction 23, sunk in a trench to avoid the

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

of local Bridgey boys, confused and aroused at a bare wicker bottom...



... the Westonzoyland Road.... past the old abandoned airstrip, now full of kids learning to drive in clapped out taxi cabs .... a territory mapped out in another life by JG Ballard... Psychogeographers in the surrounding woods, digging out trenches, hiding in Hides, watching the anthropology unfold...

The 303... the squiggle and the sound of deer hitting your windpipes... the related sound of the car behind licking it's lips...

80s style burst johnnies..... Nnnaaammm

Roadtrip to Sutton Bingham.... The Spice must flow...

Cows burning in the fields during the Foot in The Mouth days / daze... Punch drunbk farmers wandering the fields.... walking like the Scarecrows in Dr Who... the traffic slowing down to watch and then catching the barb-e-cue smell...

More.

Gown - For the Maples

Many thanks to the great Three Lobed Recordings for sending me a preview copy of Gown's latest grammaphone record, For The Maples . It's pretty impressive stuff, with Gown tag teaming up with the Sunburned Hand Of The Man girls and boys to create an album that lurches seamlessly (is that even possible? perhaps lurching negates seamlessness...) from almost pastoral guitar textures to roaring Raccoo-oo-oon rumbles. At times, this sounds like a better recorded early Sonic Youth but it's a little more far-reaching than this, makes more sense played straight through; letting the air fizz, letting the guitars breathe.

Worth checking out the rest of the Three Lobed Catalogue, I think; it seems like they have a real style and, well, ethic about them. This release comes in chunky vinyl with a glass mastered CD (okay, no idea what glass mastered might mean) and a silkscreened cover. I have a few of their releases, including the excellent l'un marquer contre la moissonneuse by wooden wand and the vanishing voice, which I think Kek gave me as well as my favourite Sunburned release The Mylar Tantrum. If you have any, give these people some money; these kind of labels ought to make you feel warm inside and, one day, your post-angular psycheDelia derbyguitar scrawl might find it's way to their door, begging for entry (and begging for etching)onto one of their slabs. Or else, if you're that way inclined, pretty much all these mostly limited releases are destined to shed tears on eBay a few years from now when people just like you suddently come into money and start scrabbling for a little piece of early 21st century history.

Here's a preview of For The Maples:

"Taylor's Jam"