Fucking Hell

Just that kind of day...

The Necks - Mindset

The Necks seem to have been around forever and they’re still boiling the elements of jazz down, adding their signature dabbles and occasional electronic bursts, collecting and sieving through new sounds, gold panning their way into new forms. This album collects two 20 minute-plus tracks that shadow each other like long lost relatives at a wake. Not that this is dark music as such (though the bass rumbles) but rather that the two tracks circle each other, as if wary. They clearly know each other, share a few drops of the same gene pool, but they are rough twins, twins brought up by different brothers.

first track “Rum Jungle” is the relentless one; drums tumbling almost into the late period jungle-jazz rhythms of Omni Trio. It’s all about the interweaves; the pulses are constant but shifting, the cymbals flicking against each other, urging the track forward. Here, the drums are the bad leader, the organ drones and piano tinkles and bass sounds following, adding their own comments but keeping to the drum’s pace, not outstripping. Best listened to in the midst of a serious caffeine binge. This is fidgeting, made music. It gets claustrophobic, very claustrophobic. You’ll find yourself searching for space, expecting it, but it doesn’t come. There’s no space at all until…

The second track “Daylight” is formally more contemplative, the sounds given more room to breathe. It’s not just softer, more airy; it’s necessarily softer and more airy. Sometimes it seems like a jazz transcription of some lost modular electronics classic; the pops and scratches and lightness (albeit lightness in a very Noir setting; lightness as the first whisky of the day, after a long evening of malice) giving way eventually to a more consuming, denser sound. You’ll need both tracks. One will pull you into a hole, the other just about pulls you out again.

For those out there who already hate jazz; this isn’t what you think it is. The Necks are their own genre.


First on Freq

All Apologies

On The Gradual Impossibility of Music Criticism...

It first started with this little off post about Demdike Stare... Not exactly a slagging but maybe a kind of shrugging. Now if you look at the (obviously unrepresentative) sample of commentators there's clearly a mini-consensus here which then got me thinking: how come no one else has said that before?

((Where are all the haters?))

Well, one reason is the diminishing circles of the internet, of course and the even more diminshing circles of the live circuit... take my recent trip to the Exotic Pylon gig ; I was outside smoking when Chris Bailiff aka Position Normal popped up and said hello. Now, I've said nice things about Position Normal in the past on this blog but it occurred to me as we were talking... what if i hadn't? What if I'd written some terrible, slaked, gnarly, bitchling piece about him and now had to chat amiably as if nothing had happened...

And that got me thinking...

I referred back to the comments of the Demdike post and right there, in the very first comment, an anonymous comment agreeing about what I was saying but clearly uncomfortable about saying it because, well:

my newfound status as a recording artist (who sometimes gets mentioned in the same breath as Demdyke, and who has met and enjoyed the company of one of their members)prevents me saying too much, but just to let you know I feel exactly the same way as you. i feel like i should like this stuff a lot more than i actually do.

You see what I mean? Which then got me thinking even more about how these endless routes and cycles and spirals are getting tighter and tighter, about how maybe along the way they're crushing the life out of criticism itself because this isn't the days of the fanzines, or even the early days of the blogs. In these days, gulp, you might actually meet the people you're writing about, even if you live in the backarse of the West Country, with all the associated smoke and mirrors that that brings.

And these people, these kindly souls you've denigrated, might be really nice people.

Anyone not scared about this must be lying, I think. Or caught in a terrible arch of blankness, or self-immolation, or...

When I started writing for Freq, I remember thinking a similar thing. I'm getting lots of freebies sent my way, lots of stuff I like, lost of stuff I don't. I wrote a lot of positive reviews but felt weird when I wrote something negative. This wasn't even my site, it was someone else's; I didn't want labels to stop sending stuff to them for fear of the bitchy Loki reviewer gnarling them... One CD (nameless, naturally) I didn't even write about because I couldn't think of anything nice (or even eloquently nasty) to say about it... I started to worry that this terrible plague of positivity was going to corrupt me too.

((God, if I don't write nice things then no one will ever send me free stuff, or get me into gigs for free, or...))

But I got over it. Thought nothing more of it until a few weeks ago when I started to make and slowly let seep some of my own music... Immediately, you wait for feedback of course because, though music is supremely personal and I really think that the bext possible music is the one track you've made that no one else likes, there's still that need to put it out there, to gain something else from it, even if it's just a slight nod or a wink or a raised eyebrow...

And I did get some feedback and it was all pretty good (some of it was completely on the money) but then, I would wouldn't I? I let it out on my blog and my twitter feed, to people who are already following so, of course 1) it's more likely that they'll like it - that's the 'group' it's for (even though the group it's really for are mostly lying on their back in a ditch outside East Coker, or making their living selling drugs and whittling in the woods at Caswell Bay, or are dead) and 2) even if they didn't, would they say? They might bump into me, somewhere. They will bump into me virtually... I mean, it would take a lot of balls to be that rude, and it's the kind of balls people wouldn't want to have.

Again, I let it go. Calmed the fuck down.

But then there was this little bit of repartee with Kek over at his blog which was interesting from another, related, angle: what happens if someone who's already a mate releases something that's a bit shit?

Now, obviously, Kek is a mate but even he did a slight gulp when I (stupidly, I realise now) pretended to be offended by what he'd said (he was bang on, as usual) and that really got me thinking: if I thought, even for a second, via the irony-free domain of Twitter (curse that lack of italics) or the facial expression-free blogs, that I'd offended someone when I didn't mean to, I'd be scurrying back to my text, trawling over it, trying to find out where I'd slipped up...

And that's not all. Kek goes on to say:

Doing things for the right reasons (whatever they might be) can often balance out some of the potentially bad shit - vanity / attention-seeking / self-aggrandising / etc will almost always end in tears, so if anyone's gonna get into public-platform creative activities , then they need to weed that shit out of themselves pronto. But - gone round the block and met myself going the other way) I've certainly never written anything on this blog that I didn't mean. Though, sometimes I've meant to write something and didn't.

Which I think absolutely nails it and makes a mockery out of the lack of real criticism out there (The Wire, about a year ago, was full of reviews that refused to say anything negative - it seems to have gotten a bit better now, people are coming out their shells again); yeah, artists need to put away the self-aggrandising shit before even thinking of releasing anything and then the critics would be free to say whatever they really think, without fear of offending...

I mentioned this to a mate who argued that we didn't need haters; that they were an unecessary blight on the internet, hiding in their anonymity (confession: Loki's not my real name), spewing bad Exorcist bile but I can't agree... without them the circle contracts, the feedback artists get just makes them get worse, or go down blind alleys or try to second guess the critics by changing direction when, really, the old direction was where their mind was at...

I'm going to keep releasing stuff as IX Tab (maybe as Twiggwitch too - though I'll come to that) and it's gonna keep following my themes. That old bitch of a word - masturbatory - that's what I'm aiming for. It's music for me. If you don't get it; I don't mind you saying. I'll engage. I won't huff. There's no need for this politeness..

We need the haters, or at least the dissenters; they'll help... even if they don't mean to.

With that in mind the latest release of __________________________ is total and utter shite.

The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood)

...this is the latest, train-hewn IX Tab track to make the light of day (or the dead of night) though, actually, it's just another attempt at a song I posted on here years ago... albeit in a very different version to the one I splattered about here... the humchatter is still there, just about...I'm not near done with it yet... though things are getting muddier and muddier... caked...

This will eventually be in the middle of a Christmas EP, with versions of Silent Night and (naturally) Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand...

IX Tab - The Seams Of Goodwill (Blue Blood) by IX Tab

Scuplture

Haven't got this yet (The picture disc looks great!) but I've put it on my Xmas list... My favourite surrealist technostuffed, broken-arsed electrooiding of the moment. It chimes, it gurgles, it might spit up a little (bits of the track above even sound like a sort of debased, idiot savant trying to cover Orbital's Beached - a good thing, I think)

Abby / Mod Fuck Explosion

My ipod seems obsessed with trailers and radio spots for Exploitation movies at the moment, not even sure how they all got in there...

But you'd want to see this wouldn't you:



And, though it's bound to be badbad rather than goodbad, any film called Mod Fuck Explosion has to be fun, doesn't it?

Snuglife(s)

Oh yes...

SNUG02 - Ekoplekz - So Allein replekz by snugliferecords

SNUG 02: Drvg Cvltvre - Like Cattle You Run by snugliferecords



Due on 7" single. Maybe now. Maybe soon. Dig it out, track it down...

IX Tab - The Humchatter EP

Well, I threatened....

Here are the first churnings from my recently reanimated (after - yes! - 23 years) project IX Tab (Originally Dada IX Tab, but that was a duo)...

I've been trying to capture the humchatter sound that followed me around during the vaguely hallucinatory years of minor psilocybin abuse (wrong word) - a sound documented way back here - and now I've found it... more or less.

This will be exactly as some of you expect it to be.

Humchatter 1 is the slowburn, the humchatter itself, more or less rawformed. It's subtitled ...in 1975, since this is the year of broken magic, of no dreams. There'll be a vocal version soon.

Humchatter 2 is shorter and sillier, with added gulps. It samples a dead, much missed, friend, speaking from his new whirleds

Humchatter 3 also samples that friend, alongside other living souls plus the dead-eyed acoustic guitar playing of someone who crept into my room at night.

Humchatter 4 is missing, presumed.

Humchatter 5 is the pop song. The runt of the (g)litter. The lost rave classic that's not lost and not rave.

None of this is thought out. Consider it a midlife crisis of sorts, with tuned bells on. It was put together on a train through the harte of the wude. First takes, no edits, nothing wasted. Not even time.

Yeah, they're all gonna have that humchatter.

MscfrMgcMshrms.

Chris Carter - Moonlight (remix of remix review)

This will play out. This will be roundly buggered, sliced and diced and shat out all over the lightflashes and discofloors of your local sleaze pit. It’s good music for dancing girls, car chases, hedge-trimming, car-jumping. Chris Carter has the Abba fixations, of course, but the Devil’s in the disco. The Neurotic Drum Band remix (reimagining) maybe slows the beat down a little to create something that feels vaguely reminiscent of Spacemen 3’s “Big City;” a disco slur, narcotized but just danceable, if you’re prepared to shamble and wave, if you're knees are locked and loaded.

It’s not Italo; only partly Homoerotic. A slow, homo-sapping, slutty sound.

The press release tells you it’s “ultra cosmic-a-fying it for an ultra-headtrip psychedelic spaceflight!” but it feels a little earthier than that, Northern even; the sound of a Rugby or Widnes disco-bar with a headful of research chemicals (their twinkly names encoded into the music) and a full glass of Tetley. This is a good thing, I think.

Oneohtrix Point Never pipe(s) up on a digitial-only remix. He starts buzzing, thunders for a while, like the opening of Returnal and only lets in a moment of electro-pastoralism after the sawtooth openings have had their way for 4½ minutes or so…

Too long.

More rumbles, some Orbital-like squiggles. Mmmm. I love Orbital squiggles but... why bother here; like making a giraffe get on with the rhinos.

There’s nothing added here (there’s too much added here) and if this is an attempt to make Chris Carter sound more slurred and beyond then it’s missing the point (of Carter, of Chris and Cosey, even of Throbbing Gristle). Chris Carter’s machines are slurred and beyond because he’s clearly attempting to make them glistening and pristine. They don’t need processing; they find their own slurred path in amongst the glitter.

The Oneohtrix remix is a poor little devastation. A tiny sacrilege. A waste of time, a digital delay. It doesn't need to be; is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Don't take my word for it.

Chris Carter - Moonlight (Oneohtrix Point Never Version) by theQuietus

James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (remix)

An ever so slight detourn from the version at Freq.

History is a virus. A fifth horseman of the apocalypse. It’s brutal, beyond reason, full of rage and memory; brittle with the fear of being forgotten. A terrible, seething mass of tendrils, an Athazagoraphobic moron, shifting it's feet and trying to breathe, trying to suck your air, forgetting itself...

History loves and hates it’s host. It smothers it with affection, wraps it up warm, cools it's feverish brow with gentle reminders and emotional aggregates... but the terrible cytopathic effects are just a little while away. Them little fuckers'll get you in the end...

I know you think you're immune.

I know you think you're immune.

Nostalgia is a dish served cold and for a long time now people have been struggling against it, trying to reheat old spices (and Old Spices), attempting to bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur their way out. But history is winning (had already won before the battle lines were drawn) and now we’re on the retreat, if unable to move.



Buzz and blur, crackle, hum.....

It’s coming (through the trees).

It's still coming. It doesn't stop once it's got here. It'll never stop because it knows that it's never really even got started...

Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making.The virus comes in waves (but, what ends when the symptoms shatter?) and it can take a lot of shaking. You can struggle against the pre-settings, tread lightly around it or ironically through it or stomp all over its kindly old man face but you can’t avoid the inevitable and neither will you want to, when it comes to the end times.



The eschaton will be immanentized (etc).

And heaven is a tune you can whistle, a sound you’ve already heard, played endlessly and without motive. If you think you remember, you do. There’s no trick. At the end, you’ll lie back and laugh. It’ll make a Donnie Darko out of all of you.

Some resist longer, some even believe they haven’t started resisting yet – the Futurists are then, as now – some burrow themselves into a (w)hole, believe they’re not letting in any light at all, only to find that their dark isn’t a darkness at all, just another form of light, shone from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. The light will tear them apart too, as it tears all of us.

You know who they are:

E************

F****** F******

G*** and Y*****

Add your own.



This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted.

James Ferraro wasn’t easy to catch. He flirted with the history virus for longer and harder than most. He played all the angles, tried to wrestle with the memories, tried to break them, to cover them in snot and grime and fuzz. He added nauseous waves of his own.

He's tried, you've got to admire him for that.

Endless medicinal cassettes (themselves a symptom), CDRs, LPs have tumbled out, attempting to feed an antibody that was always just one protein shake off oblivion. His music has been magical at times and he’s played the sorcerer role well (even if he thought he was playing the alchemist), dabbling in Crowley magick, in Paris Workings, in symbols. He dabbled in motifs and tropes and Casio licks like Death In June dabbled in Eugenics and tooth and claw (but, what does end when the symbols shatter?). He fiddled in things he only thought he understood better than anyone else. He’s spawned numerous monsters, whose names cannot be said, whose names begin with the cross of H and end in Chris De Burgh, in daytime TV movies, in crane shots and stock footage of shopping malls and queues outside the Commodore 64 shop.

He thought things through, I think. Tried to play all the sides all the time.Perhaps thought this wasn't history at all, but some kind of uchronic intervention, a parallel, reverse-spin world of nu dreams and nu-reality.

Oh James. Remember James?

He thought that he could iron out the creases of history, maybe even thought he would escape but he was always at the Event Horizon and now he’s falling further in. In space no one can hear you scream. No hands clapping. The inside of the ping pong balls that cup The light he’s shedding will be seen by us as glimmer, as sheen, as surface.

C'mon... James. Jim. Jimbo...



Now, he’s letting the virus in, he’s accepting it, embracing it, loving it even more than it needs. Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making. History has him. His memories have suddenly burst through, unclouded and almost free of hum and chatter. This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted. The thick Calpol gloop of history is here, shining.

This is a time machine heading into the very near future when everyone gives up the ghost. This isn't even music anymore; it's History incarnate, is indistinguishable from the original, may even be the original...



But it's not a joke. We're not being played. Or rather, even if we are being played and this is all a Jim Ferraro Fuck You and next thing he'll turn around and say: Really? Chris De Fucking Burgh? Daytime TV? Holy Hot Tamalean Hell! Even if that's what happens next it doesn't matter (and why be paranoid when you know they're out to get you?) because he's going under, the virus still has him, is just keeping him alive for his take on the crispy shells(uits) of the 90s...

Do I like it? Is this artefact, this album actually any good? Yeah, it’s brilliant. But then I’m as infected as you.

The Acid Eaters

Presented without comment.

Ekoclef Considered As A Review Of The City And The City

In China Mieville's wondrous The City And The City the city of Beszel exists in more or less the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. The cities interweave, crosshatch; citizens unsee their counterparts in the other city, buildings themselves merge but don't merge. Neighbours live next to each other but dutifully don't notice their proximity, in fact are forbidden from doing so by the mysterious Breach, which is both an action and a powerful agent of order. To see what is there is to breach. To breach is to invoke Breach.

The cities are post USSR, post-world. They share many of the same characteristics but remain absolutely, qualitively different. They are separated by language, by intention, by Kant's categories. It vaguely reminds me of that Wittgenstein quote about how, if a lion could speak our language, we still wouldn't be able to understand it.

Disclaimer: I'm only half way through this book, it just turned out that I've been reading it now with the soundtrack (accidentally analogous) of the Bass Clef + Ekoplekz release, almost reviewed brilliantly here.

And

They

Are

The

Same.

Ekoplekz + Bass Clef doesn't sound like either artist; there are glimpses, unheard snips and wanes, but mostly the tape-swapping has birthed a new monster, one I think neither would have settled on independently.

The protagonist of The City And The City, Inspector Borlu, is vaguely doggged, vaguely determined but resolute in the laws of these non-twin cities; this is not (so far) about an unveiling of the truth behind these mysterious, space-rimmed cities... he doesn't intend to unpick the crosshatch to see the real cities; the hatching is as much a part of his reality, the psychic borders as real as empty spaces, as unmentionable...

And so with Ekoclef - you can listen to this and try to spot the joins. You can but you might miss the (twin) points. The crosshatch is the release, the medium is the massage... when it works it really works and you unhear the joins. Nick and Ralph speak different languages and when the two voices come together they form a supremely odd chorus. The effect is affecting.

Tape spools, unwind, pop and crackle.

Oh I dunno. Less driven than Some Truths, less slurring than Ekoplekz. 'I was a tree in the forest; they cut me down' has sounds that neither would use in their other guises: triballed yelps, flutes, singing... it could be a Vitamin K spoked Shpongle, shorn of its usual gentle mushroom gauze...http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

It doesn't all work; sometimes the joins are too obvious, too difficult to unhear, sometimes the crosshatching just muddies both city states, causes traffic chaos as they fail to swerve around each other and end up on top, like a pair of almost-merged naked wrestlers in a Francis Bacon painting...

(actually, those tracks sound better now I've read this as well)

But mostly this is dogged and delirious and, er, fun and you'll be wanting one.

Buy here maybe.

Buy The City And The City too (if it turns out to be crap in the second half I'll tell you) and play with them together. They make a curious sort of sense together.

God knows what they'd sound like apart.

Savaging Spires

A slight detourn from the one at Freq

Imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a hard drive.

(((imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a Kek hardrive, like the Werneck Wretchmondings I talked about here )))

Imagine some mad urfolk indie scientist, their senses dulled by slow cracks and too good weed, decided that the shimmering pop tarts of

Merriweather Post Pavilion

was just too much to bear, too damned hummable and so somehow found a way to just suck the Baltimore boys back to a time, circa Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, when they were just raw potential, just vaguely primal yelps and fratboy folk tics and snaky little synths and gentle guitar mangles and tiptapping milkbottle drums.

....................

This CD is a time machine that takes you back to that raw potential; an endless loop of foundational knowledge that is about to pull apart; a Duchamp bicycle wheel, played as a percussion instrument for spacetime.

...................

I could be overstating things.

Still, imagine that the same, slight, indie scientist somehow got his calculations just a tiny bit wrong and ended up taking the boys back but changed, so that Panda Bear has become a girl and Avey Tare has sort of gone, well, English and Geologist has turned into Enthnobotanist and only Deakin is as before except now his synth is all broken and reverse-engineered and maybe eaten by reindeer and shat out as (magick) mushroom bedding.

(((The Fly just as Jeff starting Goldblooming. A miniature mutant. A benevolent reconfiguring. Things are the same but different.)))

Well, I’m maybe more than a bit wrecked myself right now but this is how the Savaging Spires album sounds. I’m aware that the above scenario is unlikely, but I’m not ruling it out just yet. The press for these guys and girls wants us to hear unfolding Espers-like folk (and maybe one track sounds a little Wicker Man) and it’s clear that this will be positioned by Critical Heights alongside the forlorn psych genius of Wooden Wand but I’m hearing more of the Finnish psychfolk scene than anything New or Weird (actually, that’s a lie) or American. I can hear a less dense Kemialliset Ystävät, a less feline Islaja, a less propulsive Avarus.

But mostly I hear Animal Collective as they might have been. On some songs (not all of these songs are songs) they take the forking path that meant Panda Bear leapt right over the Beach Boys and headed straight for Dennis Wilson instead. There’s a roughness and a fragility about some of these vocals, especially the male ones...

everything's a kind of forlorn shimmer, a tinkerbell... there's places though where this indecision and fuzz quietly erupts into song; it's those places that Savaging Spires will find an odd solace... the whole album seems like it's searching for those songs, digging around in the dressing up box, throwing toys...

...the female voice(s) sometimes seem like they’re having to tiptoe around, so as not to send the male into shivering despair. If this seems a bit heavy then it’s not at all; it’s actually light as hell, with maybe a slight touch of volcanic whimsy, a slight shading of twee (the kind of twee that I’ve always associated with places like Winchester, which appears on the CD inner sleeve as if it’s a psychogeographical map reference).

I’ve played this only once so far*, it only came today, but I think it’s going to get played a lot. It might even get annoying eventually, maybe unbearable, maybe it’ll eventually seem just too fractured and whimsical ( am I saying too English? Perhaps, though I’m not sure it’s literally English; I don’t care either). It might be one of those albums that eventually does yer head in, even if you loved it once but it has a real will, like a leper hopping alongside with a bowl. It wants love and it’ll get some.



*I've played it 3 times now; it's not failing yet, it's growing, if anything. It seems more like other things the more you hear it. In a good way.

Love's Secret Domain

I never actually saw this, only imagined it. Now it's here. I knew where but, well, you never really know where do you?

Prince Rama Re(tard)mix Review w/ Transglobal Underground

For those that really can't be arsed with all the arsing, there's the proper review here.

"Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990 (where were you?), which is then savagely dismissed without a thought; a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… a primary imprinting on chiffon and chant and painted ladies inside golden pots, concealed by red smoke… I should be clear, this isn’t intended as a slight… I’ve been playing this album a lot, perhaps because I’m imprinted that way too…

...you are too...

...especially if you think you're not...

...or maybe you're looking at this and thinking: I don't know a single bit of A Clockwork Orange argot; I'm not from your world, pops...

...I've never heard of Leela or the Tight Fit...

In which case; I'll try and explain.

No punctuation, or at least no full stops…only accurate way to understand where this record is coming from… it’s breathless dandyism, artful sabre-tossing and ultimately a little melancholic because the sounds of the east appropriated here (or rather, churned over; this isn’t a Transglobal Underground-style appropriation) are the sounds of Holly/Bollywood’s understanding of the east pre 9/11, when it was exotic and tameable… when no one was even thinking about atrocities or Hassan I Sabbah…when the evilest Arab you saw was Tom Baker in full-make up…

...actually I think I'm getting the odd sniffs around the internet (OK, so far just Jonny Mugwump) that Transglobal Underground might be due a comeback and surely now in the midst of MaybeRetromania (not read that book yet so I'm not really sold on the premise) this would be a perfect time for one of those timeless/utterly time-dependent shaggy Club Dog bands to make their comeback... the music definitiely has never gone away (found different beats perhaps, but not that different beats) and, actually, I find it hard to think that Transglobal Underground in particular could go away, being less a band more a condensation of a certain time, a few uncertain spaces... for you, this could be (INSERT Megadoggish drug-binge here), for me it's aligned to Brighton, sometime early-to-mid 90s where I saw Transglobal Underground and where the whole Eat Static inspired psytrance was about to lift off... in just a few days ethnic drones would be smeared over everything... right then, you could only look back and see, what? Monsoon?

(though you could of course blame Coldcut and Ofra Haza; odd how few picked up on this, or how long it took for everyone to align)

So... Prince Rama.



…it’s not all Sinbad (a lot is Sinbad); “Trust” starts off with an airplane drone and then add voices that sound like they’re trapped in another room before building into some cargo cult version of Gary Numan circa Cars, with some added flourishes from Danielle Dax…

I hear a version of She... the Rider Haggard version... unfilmed but out there...

…the Dax references continue into “Incarnation” which may be a soundtrack to a James T. Kirk honour duel on some far off Essex planet* while “Portaling” starts somewhere inside a mountain during the heart-sucking scene of Temple Of Doom and then sort of detours into handclaps and, bizarrely, pub rock-soul circa 1974…

<<< I've read reviews since writing this and they seem to know about Prince Rama (art school Krishna commune )... and it seems like the associations, these pretty little stabs at meaning that I make, are only semi-appropriate but...

Fuck it; I'm getting more and more annoyed with research-based reviewing. Occasionally, I give a shit about the context of a band (or what they meant to say) but mostly I don't; with this kind of brainfizzing confection, it's all there, it's in the open, there's nothing that re ---- search could bring to the party... >>>

Hectoring over...

You’ll get a lot of fun out of this record; its brain is grimy enough to past muster with all the Pocahaunted TDK fetishists but its bones want to be in the middle of a Bollywood set; lip synching and twirling imaginary balls of bird fat… it has colour, has odd breadth (and odd breath)

But almost no punctuation.




*This phrase was in the original review but I wrote it so long ago I'm struggling to remember what I meant by Essex Planet... it could be a typo but then I don't believe in typos so I must have meant something by it... perhaps I was thinking of Essex quarries (in all senses of the word, or two at least), perhaps it was just one of those sniping non-sequiters that I occasionally shovel into my word piles just for the steaming hell of it... I'll get back to you on Essex planet,,,

Exotic Pylon @ The Vortex

Ship Canal, no longer shitting it

Well, (lovely to meet you Dan by the way) Ship Canal is shitting it; it's his first gig, his first play out (play seems very apt for this kind of gig; Ableton Live being the toy of choice, the machine of a thousand voices, the churning dreadnaut in software form, sending boys and girls into whirls and paroxyms...)

I meet him about two hours before he's due on, staring at wine, wishing it glugged, knowing it can't be... his set works really well, works great with the chugging visuals... this crowd is a good crowd, a benevolent mass of chin-strokers and music lovers... Everyone's telling him it'll be fine, it's fine... he opens the evening really well... interlacing loops and samples of the other artists on show tonight, sending heads nodding when the beats kick in... great stuff; keep playing, keep playing...

By the end he's smiling.

He doesn't stop smiling.



Kemper Norton's wheezes of sound

Kemper Norton is also looking a little scared though he's played before, just never in this big city, where things might smoke, where the worry (we all have this worry) is that the London crowd is over-used, over-indulged in weird sounds, doesn't have to go too far to look for new weird sounds, can just glance and then dismiss...

I meet him pre-set and he's looking at wires and wondering... attempting to get mini drunk, drunkette... I buy a few cocktails, just to wind him up... I volunteer some breakdancing, to help distract the crowd... I know he's gonna be great and he knows it too but... there's always doubt, especially since he's just confessed that he's going to, er, sing something tonight...

Sing? Jesus, Dave. You're going to sing?

Jonny Mugwump describes Kemper Norton's set as "like a weird cafe" and he's got that right... all the tables and the candles do make it seem like that, maybe that cafe you finally find at 4 AM in Glastonbury Festival, somewhere up beyondf the stones, in the odd streetlit back-alleys of Shangri-La... at times, it's a kind of odd, lilting Cabaret (Voltaire - in the Swiss Dada sense, in the writer sense... Kemper would make a great soundtrack to Candide). It's haphazard at times, and he sometimes looks at his instruments as if they are about to punish him for some terrible sin, but it's also unique and affecting...

I've talked about Kemper Norton's music many times on here before, though this set is decidedly more slurred and urfolky and less beat-driven than a lot of his stuff and, despite the fact that he interrupts his flow by stop-starting in the middle (some people stopped watching here, which seems to mean stopped listening), by the end of the set, people are captured again. He takes a while to build up towards the song but, when it comes, it's...

It's...

People are listening again.

The song. The song. The slightly broken voice that might be a part of the accompanying wheezing ghostbox harmonium (harmony and radium) comes out.. a gentle folk song, gender benderingly untouched by Kemper hands... love, loss, sex and maidenhood despoiled... you can hear breath; Kemper's, the audience.

An odd magic.



Next, Time Attendant starts fuzzing with Coil synth trails; beginning more or less beatless and building swarms... a little bit reminds me vaguely of the Time Machines Coil stuff... especially the Queens Of The Circulating Library clamshell disc... a little later he starts up beats, cranks them and we get brittle headbutts of sound... audience heads nod (this isn't the place to dance but, people could dance, if they had a head full of belladonna, if they'd forgotten how)

and then came Philip Jeck; dance(ette) music for the already half gone... Jeck is as close to truly religious music as most of these people ever get and he seemed almost ghostly, a presence at the back of the room, watching the other bands, sucking in their sounds and getting ready to regurgitate his own. Jeck is the master regurgitator, taking what's not his, stealing as genius (the quotes go on into eternal regression)... what he's stealing tonight is thunder, or attempting to... that seems to be the message here, the underlying narrative... here comes Philip Jeck to blow these lil fuckers out the water (I'm sure he doesn't think this but I overheard a few conversations); people are quite crazy excited about him playing...

Butm in truth, while the sounds he coaxes wax and wane and certainly pulse it's way through this crowd, his set doesn't blow the other, younger, bands away... (The Liminal seems to disagree), he's not coaxing truly unheard sounds from his decks... I might be drunk as buggery by the time he's on but he looks even a little...disinterested, despite the eager audience...

I'm being harsh. He is a master at what he does; his set spins together in a way it really shouldn't and I like a lot of his records and find the time to play them more than almost any other artist of this type but I felt this wasn't transportive enough tonight. I dunno, there'd been a lot of drone out there, maybe you can fill up on drone, maybe there's a fucking limit...

Still, this evening was wonderful. I met up with some lovely people I've only ever chatted to online before and met some old friends who I've missed a lot this past year. It was also cool to put a face to Andrew and Chris Bailiff and, of course lovely to see Jonny again...

The Vortex remains an unique event in an unique place (and outside The Vortex is like a little slice of London life that looks scripted by Richard Curtis; very surreal and very beautiful); if you haven't been yet (anyone who reads this not been yet?) you need to. People will be talking about these events, one day. You'll need to go once, just to pretend you've always been there.

Dream Baby Dream

This is an amazing cover version; The, er, Boss nails this... covers album of Suicide/Rev/Vega songs please, Brucie. Call it a Bonus.

Hacker Farm @ Worlds Unknown

The boys are back in town.

Taunton shivers.

I'm a bit late and a woman in the audience already has both hands over her ears; she looks bewitched, maybe feeling those old ghosts come back to haunt her. Dark planetary voices digging at her bones. I take a few photos but then get told off by the woman on the door, herself a haunted replicant, a pink pearled twin set of malign benevolence...

The Steve Engineered video backdrop works perfectly in this context, this blackened cube of the Brewhouse's Studio; music and video morph and break apart; that could be a cow but it might be a Green Man, perhaps the Green Man...

Odd things are moving on screen. Things that shouldn't move.

I've seen these guys play out a few times now and each time there's wonders. They work in a kind of odd harmony, with potential chaos and crackle that should fall apart but doesn't. It's a minor miracle that this collection of wire and plastic and homemade petrol can synths (noisy little fellah) doesn't tip over into mere drone. Steve's (Farmer Glitch) a calm beat technician, dragging remarkable grooves (yes) from his machines; Kek's (the Kidshirt) an almost elemental wraith, hovering on the brink of suggestibility and small (mushroom) t trance, no more so than when playing his strange sawn off baby vuvuvela and winding tendrils around the room.

Real
Music
Comes
Out

And in their second set, playing with the guy who arranged this evening (playing clainet - i think, and toy thigh bone, a mini bullroarer and saxophone) there's a long slow beautiful track that sounds exactly like a lost Coil song from the New Orleans sessions. Lovely piece of music; I hope they've recorded it.






The collaboration worked well; an album as H(acker) Bilk Farm can't be far away...

In fact, Hacker Farm's music would work with most other genres and musicians because it's sponge-like. It's almost phagocytotic, engulfing but not disarming. It's music that can build a quiet storm around other music without denying or destroying. People should be queuing to collaborate with these guys. Hacker Farm music, despite the 'junkshop shaman' press and it's implications of cider-quaked West Country hermeticism/solipsism, seems a resolutely social music...

Which kind of makes it ironic that I had to dash off. Would've loved to stay for drinks. But...Sick baby syndrome at home. RT calling. Great to see you both again. We'll catch up later.

From The Wytch Machine...

Righteous Acid

Almost everything available (or not available) at the Sun Araw shop is worthy of attention and dollarsbut I've been really enjoying/digging/wigging to this bright little baby recently:



Fans of Sun Araw will recognise a certain jaded/faded humming of psychedelia... a psychedelic sound that is undeniable but curiously monochromatic; as if somewhere, elsewhere, there's a really grooovy party going on but you're sitting in a room, headstuffed with Cumin and Salvia Divinorum imagining what it might feel like to be invited to that party.

And:

swept endless tumbling

jerky guitar trail offs

rhythms made out of the mis-hits from a 70s Cow Punching competition

others discarded from Maximquaye's dark hours on two track

tracks that seem like afterthoughts and come-downs

fidelity slips

broken-wheeled wagons, circling in the snow

cannibals w/cannabis

If any of this tickles yer kidneys then of course it's a monster fuck that this little fellah is all sold out but the good guys/girls at Mondo Nation have put it up on their site for your downloading pleasure pips... Don't normally link to full albums and will take down if it gets a rerelease but, for now, indulge....

Hacker Farm @ Forage

Managed to drag the kids down to St. Werburghs to catch Hacker Farm's matinee performance at Forage earlier today. The technical problems of playing outdoors in a Willow Dome meant that they were running a bit behind schedule. The kids got bored, absolutely hated Brown Sierra, plus I'd pissed-off the Feral Trade char lady by asking for milk in my tea (I chucked a fiver in the donation box - is it too much to expect a bit of dairy produce??), so we sloped off for a walk down the road to the city farm, for a look at the pigs. By the time I managed to drag the kids back, Hacker Farm were into the concluding phase of their performance. So it goes. But I managed to record some audio-visuals for your pleasure...

You may notice that this is extraordinary music being played in an extraordinary setting, on extraordinary instruments, through extraordinary speakers, at an extraordinarily low volume, to an extraordinarily small, half-alert audience, in broad daylight. If that seems slightly surreal, imagine what it was like actually being there.

Well, I just hope that there's a massive, appreciative audience for their second performance, which is probably happening right now, whilst I type this.

Roll The Dice

There'll be a full review of Roll The Dice's In Dust over at Freq soon (subject to Editor's approval, though to be honest, he lets me write any old crap) but this will do for now.

And, for anyone vaguely interested in what I might think about albums, there's also a review of Miminokoto and Billie Ray Martin's new project The Opiates which I'll probably get around the remixing on here when I get the time (at present that looks to be circa 2013)

In other news...

Cream Of Turner

You don't often get feedback direct from the bands you revihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifew; I guess most never even see their reviews or are content to bathe in praise/ignore the criticisms... self-sealing must be a prerequisite for bands these days; better to find your own corner of the internet, find a place where everybody knows your name, listen to them and just smile or say thanks in person when you see them at gigs... an incestuous cycle perhaps, but one almost necessary for the smaller labels... who cares if someone doesn't like your stuff? Itt's easyish to shift 500 Ltd editions, providing a 1/3 of your twitter/blog/facebook fans are willing to stump up the cash...

But I digress... I came home late last night to find an exquisite little thankyou from the Cream Of Turner people; a thick little card:



And on the back a really sweet and heartfelt note, thanking me for the review of the Sunlore and Heart Land LPs I reviewed here and then remixed here...

I thought the label was definitely one to watch and I hope this kind of attention to detail (in a field increasingly governed by mass email PR shittings where earnest young PR people send emails to apologise for sending emails that you keep asking them not to keep sending) will prevail... I hope someone who reads this or Freq actually buys the albums, even to disagree and pick a fight with me (especially to disagree with me; does no one disagress with anyone any more?)

I hope these guys can keep going. We need this kind of stuff, these kind of people.

Shinjuku Thief

Just found some of this guys stuff again. Shinjuku Thief seemed a little under-appreciated in the day... no way for this kind of stuff to get out into the light much, aside from the MFTEQ angle and the odd other fanzine you picked up from Berwick Street or wherever...

But this sounds like it really fits into the Boomkat now...





Gonna have to start digging again into the archives...