Brkng Cnvtn

via Breaking Convention via Strange Attractor

w/music by the dronescapedelicans Ragnarok, amongst others

High Wolfings

High Wolf is a little brain worm.

Been listening a lot to High Wolf, stands out in an overloaded crowd of dronescapers and murkrakers

(seriously; there's so much of this stuff... used to be you managed to track down a few Zoviet France LPs, maybe some HNAS cassettes, the odd track on a compilation of amplified washing machines and scratches; now you can live a lifetime of drone, a futility of slipped discs)

But High Wolf transcends the genre, I think; a lighter touch, more wholly psychedelic than the Ferraro(adkillers) contingent; less in thrall to the sources of the samples and loops, more deranged by the looping itself; the lightly propulsive power of the everloops and the ever-so-sleight of hand gearshifts...

And the tones are generally lighter too; less stomach sucked-in blackness, more pushed out lightbeams, digging right at your brains... sparkly, even.

Maybe, it's just me.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff up at the Winged Sun Records bandcamp site, including a little slice of High Wolf from the Japan Tour CDR; listen and then pay what you will...

If you're in the US then High Wolf is about to tour there and are apparently hooking up with likeminds along the way - Robedoor, Magic Lantern / Super Minerals, Plankton Wat, Sun Araw, Starving Weirdos, L.A Vampires, Deep Magic and many more...

These collaborations are always hit and miss but I'd imagine when they hit it's going to put the mental in transcendental...

Old Is New Is

I like the oldWave creepings from OneOhtrix, Dylan Ettinger, Raoul Rorschach etc. They've sometimes added steel, other times they've smoothed/gritted tracks. They've broken machines and fixed them. They've addled information and occasionally come up for air. All good. But this year I've used these bands more than I've bought them (some are on my Christmas list). Used them to relisten to their antecedents, in fact used them to find more of their antecedents...



The new kosmiche is as good as the old, in parts. The old was only good in parts too.



The spread of gatefold LPs is welcome too. Friendly. As of Summer 2010, I stopped buying CDs and only bought albums again (this was mostly to do with having a new house and new daybed looking out into the garden and new positioning for my record player, now dusted and looking brilliantly old, nee retro).



I've had a little less time for music but I've given it more time. I've listened a little more intently, let it press as many buttons as it could. There's maybe 10 albums and 12"s now which I can hear phrase for phrase, swirl for swirl. In MP3 shuffle era that seems like a lot.



And the old stuff, rediscovered and reformulated, really seems like it was predicting the future...



One thing though. From what I've heard this year, I don't think Eno did any of the Kosmiche guys any good.

Crawling To Lhasa

Found this album via the cosmic/kosmichings at the brilliant Tonton Mahood - here, in fact - and it's been on a light rotation ever since. Pretty, occasionally threatening, odd combinations of firethrottled acoustic guitar and pan-pipes. Comus is perhaps as good a reference point as any; the deity and the band. I hear that bar/club from Fire Walk With Me during Tante Olga and the whispering nasties from Current 93 in Nearby Shiras... there's morsels all over this album, tasty bits of meat, plucked from teeth...

Ritualistic and Golden. Thrown from shadows. Gongs and bongs.

Trust me, if you're normally a cynic about these kinds of wig-outs, these little Golem tangles, these nonsense psychbits then forget all you know... this is as good as Krautrock gets and it's a little hard to believe that someone hasn't re-released it. Maybe they have.

If you find it, buy it.

Autotisticking

Been listening to Autotistic, in amongst the mire - it's an intense listen, all on it's lonesome, frazzling, blessed and burdened (in all senses of both words) by echo, lots of echo, echoes of echo... a sustained Acid trailer in sound...

I'd play it in stages, I really would... it literally get on your nerves when you play 2 or 3 tracks together... I don't mean this as a bad thing.

It's a kind of spirit dub but not the one you're thinking of if you've heard that term before... a kind of dub where the guitar slews slip and slide against one another, where little frozen shapes of feedback are found and then thrown to the winds... there's a lot of air here but it's difficult to breathe, like hanging your head out of a fast moving car...

It works for me better as a sideways glance, slipping inbetween other things; sounds perfect between some crystalline techno, a sliding scale between the beats... my favourite tracks - Slum Plastics, Milky Moan - have an odd sense of rhythm that seems to exist behind the music...

Somewhere, in the middle of roaring air and ebb and flows and clusters there's a sample or something of a voice saying something like: 'Are You Okay?' and it's a perfect sample, a perfect expression of the psychedelic gouging that I'm sure is at the heart of this record...

I have just played 4 tracks straight though so I could well be imagining that voice.

Seriously, play this between things; you'll thank me for it.

There's a few mp3s here, if you'd like a little skoot...

Threshold Housings

Well, no one who ever reads this would expect me to let this go without a little comment since Coil mentions make me spin away into a kind of petit-mal fanboy gurns...

Regarding the origin of Threshold House...

Well, a few little inter-digs and here comes Heidegger:

“The threshold is always stony, because it bears the doorway, because it sustains the middle in which the outside and the inside penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between, and pain has petrified it.”

Emphasis mine, of course but this might be as good an origin point for Coil’s label as any and an even better, more apposite, name for Sleazy’s Threshold Houseboys project… “bears the between” seems to resonate with the kind of liminal light that Coil constantly referenced, alongside the idea that Heidegger is seeing the threshold as a complex inter-weave of inner and outer, of Us and Other - which, seems to fit Coil conceptually - cf Penetralia which references a linked theme:

1.The innermost parts of a building, especially the sanctuary of a temple.
2.The most private or secret parts; recesses: the penetralia of the soul

Coil - Penetralia

Coil - Penetralia (Version from Unnatural History)

cf that line in Circles of Mania - "Eaten alive by the perfect lover" - (which Kempernorton might remember was always the opening song on our ill-fated, badly-conceived lunch-time radio show on Swansea University Radio)

Coil - Circles Of Mania

Of course, I'd love it if it really did come via Doctor Who - Coil don't really mention Doctor Who in interviews but that kind of reference is hardly necessary - those old soundtracks are implicit in a lot of their work, you don't need to read a reference to hear one... and I don't think this is a product of Coil's esoterrorism; like Throbbing Gristle I think the esoteric aspects of Coil miss the point a little - they always seemed as likely to reference the prosaic (okay, maybe not as likely as TG) and the (Mmm) bog-standard as the occult; in fact, their version of occult seemed very rooted in the reasonably ordinary...

Off the top of my head: the Moomins, Edith Sitwell, Jarry, Dali, The Butthole Surfers, John Dee, Pasolini, Isidore Ducasse...

I'm not convinced they should have made more of the soundtracky stuff though - they're not that much better at this kind of thing than lots of other artists, before or since - and there is a certain absence of intensity in this kind of thing, the kind of intensity that's often thought to be in these kind of electronic sprawls...

On the other hand, I remember seeing the Journey to Avebury film in an art gallery somewhere - perhaps Amsterdam? In that space, there did seem room for the piece to breathe and the tiny electronic squiggles dragged me in...

Coil - Jorney To Avebury

Find your own space...

(And on that note - Mp3s sourced / stolen / referenced from KickabottlePunk.com and DJChronic)

Vluba Tunes

Yeah, Vluba... A Ruined sound; occcccasional voices like deeply scratched wood. There's maybe lots of stuff like this, lots of drone and grist and mill and krautrock moans but, I dunno, Vluba seem a little more... entrenched? I'm sure loads of people mean it but these guys/girls/whatever really mean it... there's no other reason for some of the musical decisions they seem to make, at least on the stuff I've heard... YES, I mean this as a good thing... i hate realness, authenticity makes me come over in a postmodern rash but when it's applied to Vluba, when it means that they really can't sound any different, I'm thinking.... yeah...

There's some squeaks that come in.... you'll see what I mean, the second side of



About half way through....when you think it might start coming over all Vibracathderal Orchestra or even attempt something some full-pelt Kraut's Corpuscles... then in come the creaks and the squeaks.... mocking....

You'll see...

Vluba give off an odd feeling. A not right. Unheimlich.

But don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently creepy about the sounds, least not to anyone even vaguely driven by drone.... this isn't Lustmord or Burial Hex creepiness... more the creepiness of the abandoned office block, the empty room with a child's toy at the edge of the carpet....

It's their choices, I think. The sounds they put together.

I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I've gone and it's coincided with my going, made some associative tangles that I can't unknot. Maybe tomorrow I'll be back again and this will make no sense and Vluba will just be another cosmic no-thing, a blip, a thing worth dropping or not mentioning. In which case, I apologise. Maybe I'm leading you down some bad tracks here, maybe these trails won't be worth your while... God Knows I've followed some bad 'uns in the past. I mean, I guess 20 Jazz Funk Greats has been a favourite of mine since it first came out and those fellahs describe things so well the music only occasionally matches up to their fantastical vision of it... they hear better than me... much better...

But....

There's definitely something about Vluba.

Something.

I'm sure.

...you'll see what i mean...

before my endless qualifications and my hesitancy rolls me up...

The Pyramid Album (Side 1)

The Pyramid Ablum (Side 2)

Sourced from the ever-wonderful depository of soft and shiny things at The Tanzprocesz Internet Archive... found, in label form, here

Cthulhu Bench

Stolen from here

Swine-floozy

Stolen from here.

Snooker's not the same without him.

Mike Hinge

After recognising a paperback cover at Breakfast In The Ruins, I found some more of Mike Hinge's artwork... Psychedelic and slightly wobbly.

Psytrance / Goan Wurries

...I can feel it coming; the Sun... I'm as cursed as a werewolf...

The Sun is rising; there's nothing I can do. Soon, i'll hear the drumming, the squiggles, the flipping 303s, the Terence McKenna samples, the spaaaace noises...

Hallucinogen - Shamanix

<<<<<<>>>>>>>
My Mind Is Going
<<<<<<>>>>>>>

With the Sun comes Psytrance, comes Goa... putting my Shame in Shamanic...

Here they come; faster now, crawling over the sunlit hills, through the woods, dragging everything out of the shadows, making everything gleam...

I'm gasping for breath just thinking about it, almost in tears as the Sun outside starts to burn, starts to drag the light from my computer monitor...

I'm listening to dubstep, honestly - that Spatial, great stuff, love it, degraded cybermen, Maldoror rising, sine wave speech, surbanity, profanity; a Burial for Rave, a requiem Mass... i'm there, as Catholic as the rest of them; stretching all the way from Delia Derbyshire (fuck that, from Pierre Henry, from John Cage) to Astral Social Club (actually, it's not that far), to The Caretaker (still not that far...), to...

Shpongle - And The Day...

I've tried the usual deprogramming techniques, tried the methadone programme of woozy, wonky post-everything Rave: stuff The Wire says is okay, even dipped all eleven toes into the mechanics of Zomby, trying to get a fix before it's too late.

Sublime Frequencies? Hell yeah... proper TRANCE innit? And I can see the linearity between, like, Tinawiren and Tuung, course I can, I'm Duchamping at the bit... it all makes perfect sense, slots together, makes new connections and drives things forward...



But...

I can hear the drums, the rising synths, the breakdowns over the Blackdowns...

I can hear the samples calling:

From 2001, Blow, Star Trek, The Matrix, Excalibur, Merlin, Blade Runner...

Shpongle - A New Way to Say Hooray

The Sun is opening up another badly mistimed third eye. I want to resist. I want to.

(I've seen Eat Static more than I've seen any other band)

<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
I've never paid. I've never seen them deliberately. <<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>


It's more abduction than capitalism; forced exposure, intimate haggling with my neurochemistry, a Burroughsian brain rape...



It's happened before and will always happen.

My reptile brain is churning.

Those female vocals...

Orbital - One Perfect Sunrise

The Sun comes out and my finely honed winter musical earbone get cracked. I'm gonna be blissed out with Psytrance and Goa; it's gonna happen. The more I resist the more I find myself in a field, confused, disorientated and drawn towards the tent with the little animated mushrooms... it doesn't matter what Festival I end up at, it's always the same - Marquee as Alien Abduction; the light will tear me apart.

Soon, I will be unrecognisable; dancing like a spastic in time, making my own Masonic Distres signals, a bag of elbows and pointy fingers...

1200 Mics - Salvia Divinorum

It's All Greek To Me

Following on from my Jarre post (inspired by Simon's 'Cosmic' article for the OMM), one of those funny incidents of synchronicity occurred recently when I came across a handful of Vangelis albums at my local branch of the PDSA (and call me an old fart, but I still get more of a visceral thrill from finding music this way than from mooching around on Soulseek). I love that shop - nine times out of ten it'll just be a bunch of old Des O'Conner or Bert Kaempfert records, but then the other time you'll find something interesting, and with all records sold for a mere 49p, it encourages one to take a few wild chances. I was fairly dismissive of Vangelis previously. The only thing of his I've listened to since my school days is the Bladerunner soundtrack (and in private correspondence, Simon admitted that this was the one that first inspired him to explore Vangelis' back catalogue - with negligible results!). I can't say I'm converted in the slightest either. It was almost pleasant to hear "Chung Kuo" (the opening track on 'China') again, and some of those collaborations with Jon Anderson are still quite listenable (although Donna Summer's version of "State Of Independence" is far superior), but mostly it's either too overwrought with grandiose arrangements or too damn cheesy, uncomfortably close to some of those dodgy Moog records I spoke of a while back. All told, I don't think the world's quite ready for a Vangelis revival. But wait - what's this? Crazy free-jazz intro, atonal splurts of ring modulated synth-mucus, spiky phrases like something from Pertwee-era Radiophonic Dr.Who scores, glacial waves of speculative ambiance...mmm, maybe there's something there if you really dig deep...

Vangelis - Beauburg Excerpt