Noise Park

Sometimes simple pleasures are the best ones; other times, I think it's important to look at South Park versions of popular experimental noise musicians... Here's Masonna:

Lots more here Found via arch digger (though increasingly elusive) Kek, who's politics and Laing-knot tangles with Posterous and Blogger seem to be mostly washing his brainbits up onto the shores of Tumblr again...

The Night Before The Death Of The Sampling Virus

Everyone remembers that night, yeah?

Momus - Huge

He always sounds like him and it's always good. From the new album

Competition: A Dream Of Wessex

A Competition (of sorts) I seem to be accidentally acquired two copies of Christopher Priests excellent novel, reviewed/ranted about here, in this beautiful cover:

If anyone wants a copy then simply send me a youtube link to some musical fancy that you think I'll find agreeable (or disagreeable) and I'll choose my favourite / unfavourite and send them the book... anidiotsguidetodreaming@yahoo.co.uk @lowquay or shove something in the comments box...

Oliveros & Humanity

I'm not even sure it's appropriate to suggest I quite like Pauline Oliveros but a 12 CD set coming soon from Important Records is something to treasure, I think even if you never listen to it. Even if you would never consider listening to it, you should like that it exists. These kind of things make me proud to be human. When Oscar Wilde said "All art is quite useless", this is the kind of thing he meant.

Kemper Norton's Unrequited Love

...there's a joke there I'm not going to say.



tidal drones and surges, always musical, never take the money and run. considered and considerate. a distinct lack of capitalization, in all ways that can be interpreted...

of course, that may be unintended...

go here for volumes

Orbital: Wonky, The Flash & Kant

Well, this little slice of meek bile from Fact magazine got to me...

and it ended up in a mostly inconsistent rant about all kinds of things which I've decided against posting. I dunno, I've been busy and I didn't get round to posting it when I wrote it a few days ago and now... well, those kind of blogrants ony have currency when they are...of the moment...

Here's a few disconnected lowlights:

1) ... now most of the (FACT) features seem embarrassing/embarrassed, like those fitful days when every childrens' TV presenter clearly just wanted to be doing T4 or The News At Ten and just mentally squirmed whenever they had to do something genuinely child-like or child-centric*. The mixes stand alone.

2) ...they've done the hard work, broke the back... we still owe these fucking guys...

3) ...and Waving Not Drowning sort of predicted the poppier chunks of Ghost Box:



4) I mentioned it at the time - but nothing swept in to fill the void..

5) I love Shackleton but he tends to make me want to thrown commuters under trains...

6) (Actually, there's something reasonably joyous about Gentleforce but that's a different kind of joy)

7) Death to Emotional Bulimics!

8) ...and the thing I've always loved is that Orbital never seemed remotely experimental; they seemed entirely, utterly mainstream but in a kind of only slightly alternate universe when the mainstream was a good place to be...

"In a recent FACT interview, the brothers revealed they laid out the LP as a wall plan before they started recording. The weakness of this approach to music making is apparent in the album’s structure, and it feels like they felt forced to crowbar in musical styles that sit uncomfortably with their own sound. So we have “the electro-house one” (‘Where Is It Going’), and “the dubstep ones” (‘Distraction’ and ‘Beezlebub’), all as cringe-inducing as you’d expect."

9) The first part is the weirdest criticism of an album I've heard: the idea that planning the album itself can be a weakness. The cult of spontaneity attempting a sucker punch.

***


...but the key thing is that I can't really hear a bad Orbital album, a bad Orbital track because they are one of those bands that just happened, just flashed at the right moment, with the right people, at the right time... hearing (unexpectedly) the Doctor Who theme at one of my first Orbital gigs is one of the greatest moments in my musical life... it suddenly seemed like I was right, that everyone I knew was right... that we'd won.

Everyone I knew owned the Brown album. And they were all right.

This new album is welcomed with open arms. My children will have to love it. My friends will have to love it. I can't see past it. It may have flaws but I'm playing the fuck out of them, making it as much a memory as the other ones. There's been loads of great stuff released this year but I'll play Wonky more than any of them.

When Kant thought that appreciation of art and culture ought to be at the non-emotional, disinterested, level, he couldn't have been more wrong.

Electric Sandwich - China

I'd almost forgotten about Electric Sandwich and then that Head Music compilation came along and The Bevis Frond covered their 'smach hit' China... This has too much guitar... skronk/chops for me to really love it but in the right, er, frame of mind, these loplopping drums and the electric fizzles at the edges of the geetar work can be quite transporting...



This is a tiny sliver of Acid away from the Mother's Temple, and probably waaay farther out than those guys...

It was 1972, man... a year that is rapidly becoming a kind of recurring theme / totem for...

(there's no reason. I mean, I was, like, 1 year old for most of 1972... can't see those years being altogether formative unless you count that 6 months I was raised by mandrils...)

Stop needing reasons...

I hate them.

Crocodiles in Somerset

Head Music

This little package came today; not heard it yet but looks intriguing... Covers of krautrock classics from Fruits de Mer records... What could go wrong?

Siobhan Donaghy's Ghosts/\stsohG

I always thought this should have been Number 1 or something. It's perfectly pop but is the best sideswipe at Kate Bush that I've heard - lots have tried this kind of thing but she completely nails it. It came on again a few days ago. Perfect music for dancing around a wood with your munkins:



And then someone did this backwards/\forwards version and I loved it even more. Everyone should be forced to do this for every song.

Carter Tutti Void Knob Breakfast Haniver

Breath was baited at this, apparently, but not mine.

Not bated.

Hardly breath at all.

I mostly dislike collaborations, even when I try to like them, even when I love the collaborators.

Collaborations regress towards the mean, like motionless wrestling or mutual strangulations in the back of army trucks (a personal joke, one intended only for my future self to smirk about; sorry). I blame everyone:



1) Mike Paradinas and Richard James as Mike and Rich on the “Expert Knob Twiddlers” LP. The clue’s in the title,if you substitute ‘expert’ with ‘half-arsed’ - lovely cover though, which simultaneously transcends and drags back your expectations and then makes you feel somehow violated by the shitty bleeps and bounces of the music;



2) the recent Burial and Four Tet releases: Two singular visions transposed into some death-dull murk. There is something sad about this release, like the slightly dull ache I got at the end of The Breakfast Club where the sharp individualists and world - weary teens get safely commodified and re-coded into some homogenous gloop, where all the careful territory they establish over the course of the film is finally eroded*;



3) Whitehouse with Nurse With Wound, in all incarnations where they join their heads, turning even more singular and hair-brained visionary material into the smugly bad, the worst of both worlds, the personification of 'Look Ma! He's bleeding!' power electronic showboating. Again though, I like the cover. It's obvious perhaps but not that obvious, with enough sidestepping to make it seem surreal and Bellmeresque rather than just purely shocking.

I won’t go on, you can insert your unfaves here. The list is not endless but it's surely eminently listable; get yer nerd heads on, shove a list up for all to see. Really not at all hard to see the vapid and the prosaic emerge from even the greatest potentialities.

There are inevitable exceptions but, mostly, the whole is less than the sum of its parts (see also supergroups, see especially supergroups)

Carter Tutti Void's recent release, Transverse, is a little different. The parts don’t seem like parts at all. The fit between Factory Floor’s Nik Void and Chris and Cosey doesn’t seem at all forced and doesn’t diminish any of the participants. No one comes away degraded, no one comes away soiled.

And there was potential. A whole load of cross tangents: generational, instrumental (the two guitars could have just ho-hummed tobgether, whereas actually they play off one another like some old Jazz guys).

Throughout this shortish set, it seems like a genuine joint vision has emerged; one that sounds, if anything, a little better and more singular than any of their recent individual work. This is a genuinely new beast rather than a hastily assembled Jenny Haniver.



And the beauty of this release is that it’s as if we’re seeing the monstrous birth as it happened. Of course, we know that, really, this live performance, this pulse, has been carefully considered and worked out way before they come out on stage but the illusion of the birth is right there (fans of Throbbing Gristle will remember the anecdotes swotting back and forth about the genesis of Discipline) and very compulsive.

The four ‘movements’ (hate that phrase but it’s hardly ever been more apt) on display here show not just intentionality and purpose but a kind of hive mind (not Hive Mind) approach that works incredibly well. No one steps on anyone’s toes; instead they miraculously circle one another, adding splashes of colour or extra beats or extra drones or degraded vocals (I assume that’s Cosey). This is a really brilliant release in all senses of the word. It shines. It pulses.



*it seems fairly amazing that The Breakfast Club hasn't been remade in the slew of other 80s remakes. It fits the creeping horror genre better than the other teen movies of the time and seems ideal as a sort of commentary on the sense of loss (abandonment) felt by people of my age as the old divisions (student/nonstudent, Goth/Punk, Hippy/Raver etc) disappeared and were replaced (maybe post Nirvana?) with what people then called (incorrectly) Postmodernism but which is actually just a slow drift towards a reassuring similarity. The Breakfast Clubs is the tribes coming together without the expected (in the 60s) sense of wonder and shared understanding/ aesthetic / ethic but with an increased sense of a deathly hollow.

See also: (the supposed) voter apathy, the loss of a genuine Left, the creeping of neoliberalism as the only viable option for all the major political parties in the UK (though, perhaps, this has been overstated in the sense that the 'true' divisions were never perhaps true.

I...

Oh, and did I mention it's a great album? Everyone should like it.

Alexander Tucker - Third Mouth

Well, you knew this was coming. Dorwytch hinted (OK, explained) that Alexander Tucker was moving closer and closer towards a kind of English pastoralism and now he’s got to Third Mouth, where the drones and buzzes move still further away from the longer forms of his early albums and head towards smaller, yet exquisitely designed, packages of psychedelic folk. This is like someone’s swallowed Rob Young’s Electric Eden, spent a few long nights reassembling the component parts (alongside a few glasses of wormwood and mead ) and then regurgitated the lot as a fully formed corn dolly. This is a good thing.

There’s places where he’s definitely got a touch of the Vashti Bunions (“A Dried Seahorse”), where it’s 1967 eternal and the fingerpicking and cello trails keep the caravans (and Caravan’s) moving. “Rh.” is meant to be electronics only piece though I keep hearing descending cello notes and heavily filtered drums alongside the drones – it reminds me of a friend who went a little crazy by listening, non-stop, for 48hrs to Bach’s pieces for unaccompanied cello.

I say a little crazy, I mean batshit mental.

He ate several posters of Ian Botham right off his wall. And a fair amount of wallpaper too. He never explained why.

This is not to say that there's craaaazy scrapings here; there's much that is plaintive, meditative, twilight leaning: the tinkles of baby keyboards on “The Glass Axe,” the early (is that a unicorn?) T- Rexisms of “Third Mouth”... and these gently picked figures blend well with the other stuff, the Celtic drones and jaws harpings of “Andromeon,” for instance. In fact, the latter reminds me a little of much-ignored medieval ambient Front Line Assembly side project Will, only without the booming kettle drums.

C'mon. Will. You remember them. They had kinda gabber girl hair and round glasses and long leather coats and played big booming sonatas of the kind of thing that got people a little nervous and convinced that they might be Nazis. Will. You remember. They were good.

It seems unfortunately likely that Alexander Tucker will more or less be ignored again, despite making the best undiscovered 1967 psychfolkrock album you’ll hear all year. You can't help but feel that if he were instead a band and had an associated army of imagery alongside that people would find it easier to get on with; maybe find it easier to buy a t-shirt, write in on their army surplus satchel (Do people still do that? Yes, I saw two people with those kind of scrawled bags in my class this morning. I even saw The Cure written on one of the bags, which made me smile). But none of this changes the fact that Alexander Tucker’s made the album you want those albums in Electric Eden to sound like, an album that’s worthy of much more attention than it’ll get. It's a gentle masterpiece.

I have no idea what Alexander Tucker looks like. After a consistent run of increasingly great albums, I really should. He's building up such a head of steam, such a body of work, that lots of people should know what he looks like.

But...

Thee Satisfaction

Bands with 'Thee' in the title will always suckle up to an old Psychick Youther like me, will always be worth a listen (or the more important second listen) and this is no exception.

(actually, most of the bands with 'Thee' in the title have been pretty awful; it's a pretty piss poor hit rate to be frank but...)

Enchantruss has the kind (which makes a spin, perhaps, on medieval magick and hospital corners) drunk-doop-dub backing vocals which can't help get you at least curious and the phrasing just keeps spilling, making what I suppose is notionally a Hip Hop / Psychedelic Soul hybrid into something a little more... off.

And QueenS has an insistent mantric lost groove that reminds me of being in Asian jungles, listening to German DJs fucking around with old soul records and trying to find the manic Tetsuo machine breath at their heart. QueenS might not be for you; it's not really a song from a genre I ever listen to but...

I dunno, there's just something...



Thee Satisfaction - Enchantruss

Thee Satisfaction - QueenS

Cerrone - Supernature

For the video, really; though disco is creeping back into my playlists...

More mice-men in videos please!

And more Rolls Royces!

Ekoplekz – Dromilly Vale EP

A little sliver of electronic gargling from man of the moment, Ekoplekz. If you want to know which moment, you’ll perhaps have to remember that Dromilly Vale is Nick’s imaginary recording studio, a hybrid of King Tubby’s on Dromilly Ave, Kingston and the Radiophonic Workshop’s Maida Vale studio in London.

(there's an interview with Nick and an explanatory podcast here)

This is 1973 re-imagined uchronically; maybe Dick Mills and Lee Perry did hang out, swapping tape delays, pressing buttons that weren’t theirs; maybe John Baker just couldn’t stop putting some of his jazzy tangles all over Augustus Pablo’s melodica lines; maybe they swapped close-miked pocket protectors over Rum and Pineapple…

But if all that’s making you think this is just gonna lope along like a comedy walk then be prepared; this can get quite… noisy in places. “Jugglin' for Jesus” will frighten the cat inside your brain with its high pitches, sheer edges and aggressively gloopy style while “Dick Mills Blues” overdrives itself into trails and “Dromilly Vale” itself could easily have pitched up somewhere on Side 2 of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report.

Ekoplekz wears his influences on his table-top of wires and boxes but he’s got a singular vision and he’s tapped a rich seam. On this release, he’s attempting to find a groove in the heart of those Sea Devil whistles and he almost finds it. He’ll keep looking.

written for Freq



On Public Information Recordings though probably not anymore since I'm coming waaaay too late to the party here...

Donna Summer - Wasted

Keep turning back to this song... she just sings the word 'wasted' so perfectly... perhaps not the 'wasted' she intended or I mean but this transcends individual wasteds and ends up meaning them all; the odd little thereminish solo doesn't hinder her any either... and the beats are so gloopy...

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.

Call out to old readers, via John Maus

Picture via here

A long time ago, when the internet was still quite small and the music blogs could be counted on a whorehouse worth of hands, I posted a track called Lost by a band called Future Fear. I can't remember why I had it or how I found it but it sort of lurched at me one day and I posted a link to it. I didn't know anything about the band (it didn't seem there was a band) but the music was sort of lost and a little Goblin-bleak, slightly detuned and fitted in well with the electrical death-set I was fixed on at the time...

The old post is here, look long and hard if you've followed this blog since 2004 (What? No one?? Fuck...)

...and then, at the weekend, 8 years later, I get a some mysterious messages sent by John Maus via Twitter asking me to contact him... he had a story to tell...

And it turns out that Future Fear was a sort of imaginary band made up by John and Ariel Pink (he quite sweetly asked me if I'd heard of Ariel Pink) as a sort of joke, sort of not a joke. All good except... well, John had long lost the master tapes for this song and it'd been playing on his mind... he'd searched through all the tapes he had, googled it, trawled through the mp3 archives but no; the song was gone... no one he knew had a copy... it might be that I had the only copy of this song in existence!

Except... you guessed it: I can't find it either... there's a few places (old ipods etc) that I've yet to look (i have to find them first) but... it's probably a goner, a lost little gem...

So... does anyone remember downloading this song from here or somewhere else? Please get back to me (or John Maus, if you prefer)

It's these little stories that make me keep this going, even if it's just a dalliance here and there...

Anyway, here's a John Maus inspired/inspiration mix via here

KP1 // John Maus Phase Mix by Know Phase

Ship Canal - Please Let Me Back Into Your House

This came in, slipped under the door like a thin slice of cranial pie...



A friend of mine was prone to petit mal seizures, seizures of absence, slow-wave spikes. They'd often occur in the middle of a sentence; she'd just... go away for a few moments, sometimes long minutes, sometimes the last word she was saying would simply repeat and slurrrrrrr ad infinitum: "The thing with Feynman is that he he he he he he he he he he he he he he..." and then sometimes she'd pop back, continuing the sentence, sliding seamlesssly into the world again "...always knew exactly which knot to start untying..." while at other times her eyes would close and she'd drift away for a few more moments, the echoe dying, the dark coming in.

My favourite track on Please Let Me Back Into Your House, Ship Canal's debut on Kek's nonnanononboutique label 19F3, reminds me of her.

Fog (what is it with fog these days? I'm hearing fog everywhere) and shipwrecked audio and Lilith drones crossover and pulse and then this voice, this slurring, cracked voice appears, a man swallowing himself with language; a kind of absence with automatism, like an electronic divination, a table turning... it's one of the best things I've heard all year; it just works (cf these guys - in fact, these releases might be rough twins) in a way that lots of this kind of stuff just... doesn't.

If it catches you as it caught me - 7 AM, wind, rain, mist - then this will speak to you. It's dredged music, perhaps incomplete (I like the way some of the female siren sounds just kind of cut------ when you'd expect them to drift away) but powerful and quite... beautiful, in parts.

I've seen Ship Canal's kit: ugly PCs, ugly-hackkneed software, ugly cables... but he's making a right Schwitters out of this slop, this detritus. The last release on 19F3 (I take it we're not counting the Hacker Farm stuff - the politics of consciousness always seems tangled where Kek's concerned!) was the gentle machine chattering hum of the Werneck Wretchmond release (which I covered here); this new one is a step (just one step) away from the machines towards a very human breakdown...

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.

Psychological Strategy Board

Machine hum; ghost train clanking...or ghost trails... fogfucked mornings at the edge of the world;fishing boats rattling lobster pots against the shingle... the sea just about to swallow everything whole...http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Submarine noises; not sonar, the hum as it works its way through the swell... then the sound of a minor meltdown, the systems failing...

Humans may have been part of this recording but there's just a smear left, a ghost trail... this could be by the machines alone... you can't hear someone stabbing at the laptop, at the synths, twiddling the knobs of the Monotron... I'd be suprised if Paul and Jonny were even in the room when this music came out... they'll pretend they were (no one wants to admit the otherwise horror, the unspeakable creating the unplayable), they'll take the plaudits ("Oh yes; that particular tone took 3hrs of programming and is related to a parrot sound I heard in the forests of Barcelona...") but we know the truth; this is the result of the humans setting an agenda and then the machines interpreting it in their own way...

(You've been) Savaging Spires (again...)

Savaging Spires - When The Devil Says He's Dead

Talked about these guys here; not wearing me down yet.