Belgotronics

This could have been. Might still be. There's scope for all kind of ____________otronics, I think. And Belgium, Brussels particularly, seems like a good place to start. Remove the vocals from this and you've got something very interesting. Though, of course, removing the vocals is a lot harder than it seems.

Ghedelia Tanzartes

It's that sort of day:



Not every sort of day:



It might not be this day again, for awhile:

Andrew Liles & Miraculous Monsters

The Miraculous Mechanical Monster.

Dirty slab of green vinyl obscenity from Andrew Liles popped through the door yesterday. Unsettlingly thick-cocked LP sleeve in lurid black n green with equally unsettling rattling audio inside... at times, this reminded me of some of the tracks on NWW's Automating Vol 2 compilation (and, by association Brainticket) with huge chunks of the Cold side of the classic Thunder Perfect Mind and other bits vaguely reminiscent of 10-20, itself half-recalling Automating Vol 2...

Circles within circles...

Not to say this isn't an unique piece of work; it's oddments and stabs are all of it's own... listenable but untenable... not something you'd want to listen to with your Gran... or with anyone, come to think of it. Which kind of adds to the seediness of the whole affair. It's music as shame, music as onanism, as solitary defilement...

Still, I'd love to be in the diskotek where the DJ plays this little fellah out to the woozy masses...

Huge bits of this sound like a sex robot falling downstairs. This seems to be entirely intentional and is to be applauded. Some of it is quite beautiful. Some of nit even sounds a little like Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisquatsi but the beauty occurs in dry humps and clusters, often savaged by the crackle of drums or the slide of robotic scales.

Some of it is disgusting, creepy, sad, horrific... there's enough fucks and cocks to spoil a Sunday Roast, to soil a Christmas party... as a glimpse into a future world of over-cyber-sexed teen Supermarket managers, their fingers glistening with creep oil as they retune their lovebots it's... well, it's not for the faint-hearted, even if the music itself is quite bouncy...

Yeah, you can bounce to this... you might not want to...

It's the feverish bounce you'd get as you unpackage your brand new robowhore, the bounce that comes from a devilish play of the mouth, a curl of the lips...

This is where apple iPod/iPhonophones go when they've stopped being human and delve finally into the pit of moist finger taps and loose trousers and thickly drawn drool. This is why we shouldn't fetishize objects. There may be a moral message here.

This is seedy stuff, unflattering about sex and maybe slightly hateful. Very odd but never wasteful. Very deliberate, composed and considered. A real song-suite in a real album. It would make little sense broken up into MP3s.

And the sleeve is so thick, I can hardly put my fingers around it..

Burial Hex/ Zola Jesus

Up to date, as ever.

Well, more or less what he said. Had this split album kicking around for a bit and didn't really give it a fair shot but it's actually pretty great, especially the Zola Jesus side; very creepy headphone music (ideal for marking student essays, as it happens). She even gets the title right (I worry about song titles in these genres) - Julius and Ethel has an easy-going horror about it, that works well in an understated don't-mention-the-chasm-of-demons kind of way. Implied horror. Unforced. Unless of course it's about Julius Caesar and Ethel Merman, in which case I'm utterly bereft.

I guess Plague Mass era Diamanda Galas might be somewhere near the mark sonically - though Zola Jesus is not such an eruption, it doesn't obliterate, which makes it much easier to listen to. I mean, how often do you play your Diamanda Galas records these days? I know you've got them somewhere. Under the bed, gathering T-cells.

This is my kind of wailing, as Barrymore might have said.

But no, it's not as creepy as that.

Ike Reiko Blues

Don't you just hate it when you've plugged the iPod* into the speakers, shoved it on shuffle and an Ike Reiko sexgasping orgasmatrack comes on just when your Mum's visiting?




Forgot to say that you can find some more on Ike Reiko at the ever-reliable, steamroller of a Blog, Mutant Sounds... which may have been where I first came across her...

Actually, during a brief Google for more on Ike Reiko (I won't say my search terms) I found a whole series of stuff on this blog which I'd completely forgotten about. Although now, An Idiot's Guide is clearly a doyen of taste and discrepancy and general good grammer way back in the past it was nothing more than an odd repository of solarised women and slutty record covers.

Check these out: Babe-a-licious Times!

I'm ashamed, but I still think I might return to those times, sometime soon.



*apologies to anyone who feels that my Apple-bobbing affects their delicate mythos / makes their blood boil / drags some terrible trauma into their naked consciousness...

From The Wytch Machine...

The Sunday Times

Well, my wife wanted the engorged Sunday Times Style Magazine so I bought this on and was amazed (okay maybe not amazed, maybe slightly startled) to see White Hills and The Advisory Circle with full album reviews in The Culture.

The new White Hills sounds pretty good. I loved Glitter Glamour Atrocity and then sort of stopped following them. I think I'll start again now, work my way backwards...

NOTE: a quick google image search for the cover of Glitter Glamour Atrocity and the first thing that pops up is, our friend and yours, Cloudboy, with a review from the heady days of 2008... the internet is a lot smaller than it seems sometimes...

And Stewart Lee bangs the problem with The Advisory Circle right on the head:

"Is there a word for an album that you know is excellent, but that you really don’t want to listen to?"

Position Normal

A mysterious, unheralded email with a yousendit attachment has appeared in my inbox from Chris Bailiff of Position Normal, er, fame. I'm at work and so am locked out of the yousendit spaces and I'm not going to have access to my home 'puter for a few days so it's gonna have to stay mysterious. Maybe it's a complete mp3 edit for the new Position Normal fetish cassette which I haven't bought because I don't have a cassette player (though i might get one anyway. just because i like the colour)?

I'll find out on Monday.

For the Mnemonically inclined, or else those style besotted with the H word, then Position Normal's Goodly Time and Stop Your Nonsense albums are excellent scrawls and crawls through old baggage, stuck public service announcements, twitchy C81 rhythms and general sampladelic mischief... very (s)light of hand, and very cassette orientated... (like the best bits of, say, The Tape Beatles only more open-spaced, less dense - in both senses of the word) ...almost as if all the bands in Rip It Up And Start Again have been oddly conflated and given a sense of humour. The Past Sound Of Now.

Great stuff...

Gruff Reese Jones Family

This made me smile - the sugar rush, the protein fix and the psychedelias all in a handy, bite size cupcake...

Pilfered fvia Tara

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Wickerman

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Spacemen 3

Coil & Coh - fffetish

Pilfered from the pinkly mysterious Robot Dreams

Soisong

Well, this is simultaneously weird and exactly the kind of thing you might expect from the Soisong boys. And while it's perhaps viral in every sense, it takes a little while to sink in how odd it is to focus on the actual source of a Soisong voice, especially in this kind of imaginary, hyperstitional ethnography...

Bonaparte

Saw these last week in Berlin... all good foolish fun but I think you might have had to have been there (with associated beverages and a bucketload of overexcited Berliners) to really appreciate it... the crowd knew every word and moshed their way through the night as various members of Bonaparte gradually stripped, tore off their hair and waved their dangly bits... duct tape popping fun for all the family...

Kill and Eat

....this came yesterday and reminded me immediately of the bar scene in Kubrick's Shining - the pivotal, if not immediately iconic scene in that film - where memory is dragged about and given a kicking... Kill and Eat play the music in that bar; a degraded kind of cocktail jazz, heard from far away (in space and in time)...

an ambient sort of itch that slowly unfolds as they start to scratch...

scritch, scratch, what's the matter?
Pitter, pat-ter...

a voice that seems lost... a fuse that seems blown... even the horn sounds like it's pulled a muscle... the sound of a hornplayer being strangled but still trying to get their message across...

haunted smiles...



...if some of the New Weird Americans got less frothy, spilled less beans, got themselves de-frazzled and came in out the woods and into a large Gold (haunted)ballroom and started playing then it might be like this:

Kill and Eat - Green Bushes

It might also work as a soundtrack to some film version of a Ligotti story; the liminal quality, puppet masks hanging in an abandoned corridor, a scarecrow blowing in the wind,
the slight darkness at the corner of your eye,

The Willows, perhaps...

I'm not sure how often or where (or who with) I might play this but you might hear it, when you'e not expecting, when there seems to be an innocent, gentle sound, played far off, in a place you thought was empty...

Ice Bird Norton

PLUS







EQUALS

Nurse With Lounge

Haven't heard the new NWW album yet but much seems to be made of the new 'lounge' departure: gone the fogtrails of the Shipwrecked sessions, in come exotica and Martin Denny with tuned bells and bad endings.

All I can say is that this:


caused much fun and frolics in years past. Ideal music for cocktail n belladonna n breakdancing/flapper parties and I can only hope that the new one mangles the themes even further (bits of Sylvie and Babs did come a little too close to the crapper moments of John Oswald, an artist I've never understood the fuss about).

Go here to hear S and B and probably somewhere else to hear the new Huffin Rag Blues

Children Eating Birds

The self-titled CD-R by Children Eating Birds (available here) dreams it's way through earlyish Animal Collective territory with a smattering of the woodfunk of the Wooden Wand folk... you know the drift here : melodies lightly scraped from bark; deer-lick tunings; accordian drones that crossover each other like people are playing in different glades, tonally not dissimilar to the Coil equinox eps...

Plus I like anything which reminds me (is influenced by?) my favourite Magritte painting, Pleasure (pictured above). Okay, 40% is in the titles with Magritte - a trait shared by the Burroughs cut-up books - but from the age of about 10, when I first saw that painting in the school library, it kind of grabbed me by the throat. Children Eating Birds don't sound anything like their name (contrast Sheep On Drugs, who sounded exactly like their name) but I guess the old surrealist art of forcing tension via lack of correspondence is still live and kicking in the backwoods of Canada.

Worth a look. These guys have just enough musicaliity to push their way through the trees.

Children Eating Birds - Is that ?

A Yousendit Whittling