KID SHIRT: January 2009

JEAN BRUCE: HIGH TREASON

Found this - a soft-hardback, fer crikeysake! - in a Devon holiday-site gift-shop cum convenience-store last year, sat on the shelf, by the window, looking lonely. Reminded me of the wonderful bounty-ful goodness of hangin' in Bonus Books, Yeovil, in the late 60s/early 70s when such wonderfulment was a'plennyful...featuring super-spy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath - aka Special Agent OSS117. Written in 1949, this is a 1967 re-print by Corgi Crime; gosh, you don't think Ian Flemming might've, you know, borrowed from this...

Nah, surely, not. It's crap, actually - sorry, mes amis francais....

History only remembers the winners.

Nice silencer, tho.

ANOTHER KIND OF WINTER

LAURA OLDFIELD FORD AT HALES GALLERY

Laura checks in with news of a show at Hales:

LONDON 2013, DRIFTING THROUGH THE RUINS.

Private view: Thursday 29 January, 6-8pm (oooops - a tad late on this - sorry!)

Exhibition dates: 30 January – 14 March 2009

"Hales Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of gallery newcomer Laura Oldfield Ford.

"Oldfield Ford, originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, completed a fine art Painting MA at The Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism.

"The main focus of the show is more than one hundred ink drawings that Oldfield Ford has recently produced as part of an ongoing project chronicling the impact of regeneration on London called 2013, Drifting through the ruins.

"The drawings form a broken narrative, focusing on part of east London currently being cleared for the 2012 Olympic site and documents the city as palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing. Oldfield Ford has made many walks (or ‘Drifts’) through these abandoned areas and imagines them populated by the semiotic ghosts of failed utopias in the year 2013. ‘The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates’.

"Her work has developed from the cheaply produced Zine, entitled Savage Messiah and it’s sister website which has become a regular vehicle for her psychogeographic explorations of the metropolis. Each episode explores a different region of London, focusing particularly on those areas that are earmarked for significant structural change. The resulting text and pages of intricate drawings become a document to Oldfield Ford’s experience. The completed issues one to ten will be available for viewing during the show, which form a subjective mapping of the city from Heathrow to Hackney Wick.

"Something that would appear quite ordinary for most, provides Oldfield Ford with poetic contemplation and possibilities from which her drawings can develop. It is this balance between the politics of the ‘kitchen sink’, prevalent in so much of the best British Post War art and the physiological vibrations from the past and future city that Oldfield Ford skillfully taps into, that make this work so relevant right now.

"Alongside the show of drawings and Zines, Oldfield Ford has planned a night of films exploring psychogeographic themes and the launch of her new Zine accompanied by a live broadcast from Resonance FM and a daytime walking tour around Stratford and the perimeter site of the Olympics, with members of the London Psychogeographical Association and We Are Bad collective."

Event dates:

Saturday 21 February, Drift Walk

Thursday 5 March, Film Night

Saturday 14 March, Zine launch

RIP JOHN MARTYN

I saw Martyn on the "One World" Tour (77? 78?) and it was pretty spesh. He played solo with a bass sequencer-unit and a delay that pumped his guitar-lines out round the hall - they had wired up some sort of Quad speaker set-up so that his rhythms bounced, panned and orbited around the audience. I think it was Martyn's response to hanging out with Lee Perry and listening to Dub.

I've never seen an artist get so wrecked yet still sound so beautiful. He smoked 4 spliffs on stage, one after the other, and emptied an enormous bottle of wine down his throat during his set, but never played or sang a single bum or sour note - he was Apollo and Dionysus in the same package.

I bet he was a fucking pain to live with, but boy could the guy ever play back in his glory-days. And that voice...

TRADE UNION BANNERS

And, of course, Trade Union Banners:

WOEBOT ON RESONANCE FM

BROTHER GEORGE & FRIENDS

More Masonic Aprons n stuff:

ANTI-MINIMALISM IN ART: WELCOME TO THE NEW UGLY

I started writing something in the comments-box below as a response to The X, then decided to post it instead:

Actually, I'm really into the idea of fussy art right now - needless complexity; macro/meta; cluttered; multi-imaged stuff; Anti-Minimal; codified...

Bring back coats-of-arms; heraldry; pub-signs; art that contains a series of distinct, symbolism-loaded, disconnected images...a sort of faux-medievalism vs. symbolist grotesquery filtered thru Basquiat, etc...the visual equivalent of Prog, maybe? Or perhaps even Dub. Something where the joins - the sellotaped edits - show through so that there's a fracturing of idea n image, but unlike (most) collage-work or photomontage, the visual is a singularity, albeit a splintered one, its components divided by space, white paint, gaps...

I like the idea of formalised ugliness...a luridness or wrongness of colour - like in food photography (by this, I mean: photographs of plates of food outside Greek tourist-trap restaurants that have been bleached of their significance by the sun). Kodakchrome, Technicolor, analogue colour-processing and printing, chemical pigments...spectral linkages created by an unnatural conjoining of image.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S MASONIC APRON

I wouldn't mind getting one of those to do the washing-up.

IBS PLAY KRAAK FEST '09

I guess it's okay to mention this now. Yep, Ice Bird Spiral to play Kraak...!! Shurely, shume missshtake...

I know the Kraak guys like to keep things under their hats, but since there's now an advert for this in Wire, etc I guess it's okay to spill the beans. Cheers to Steve n Tommy n...

Great line-up (and I'll come back to this nearer the event), but...

Henry Flynt! Fucking Henry Flint, man. How awesome is that! (Okay, so mayyybe I'm just a little bit excited)...

Meanwhile, in breaking news, our pal Edgar Wappenhalter gets his photo taken with Kevin Ayers! Kevin Ayers...!!!

(Sorry, I'm coming down with a dose of that weird over-excitable italics-flu that's going round right now...)

IT'S NOT MY BAG

I hate buying anything in Marks & Spencers - I try to avoid the damn place completely, if possible - but every time I go in there the fuckers give me another Bag For Life.

I now have so many of these that I'm like a cat, with nine or more lives in the bag; metaphorically, if not literally: cartoon ropes snap and falling safes and pianos crash down on me from above, leaving me undamaged; I bounce off the bonnets of hit-and-run drivers with little more than a scratch. Everytime, I just get up, dust myself down and keep walking (cue: background music by Chumbawumba). And still they keep giving me more Bags For Life.

How many more bags? How many more lives?

Do stuntmen buy their microwavable meals in M&S?

EVAN PARKER, ETC

Tonight at The Cube, Bristol:

(Sun 25th / 7.30pm / £10)

Evan Parker, Chris Corsano, John Coxon and John Edwards.

INTERBELLUM: MANSFIELD, LOUISIANA

Thanks to Bruce and Tom for pointing me at this simple, but beautifully effective video for "Mansfield, Louisiana" by Interbellum (courtesy of Annie Feldmeier Adams):

There's some other vids by various FSS acts here.

W€$T €$$€X INQ@£@B انقلاب

Some friends of some friends sent over this link a few days ago: West Essex Inqalab انقلاب

I have to say that I really love "Dollar Signs 4 Eyes" - I keep playing it; there's something oddly touching about both the song and the performance, tho hard to quantify exactly what. "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." I like the way the male and female voices almost blend into one, but not quite...but that guy's voice, like a weirdly unnerving cross between Robert Wyatt and Genesis P-Orridge. Auto-critical Pop...polemic with a heart, I guess.

"Who are you?" I naively asked, shouting out into the shadows.

"It's a small group of people from Ilford, Stratford area. 1 or 2 of them were involved in The 'West Essex Zapatista'," came the enigmatic answer. "They're looking 4 gigs."

SLOOWJOB FESTIVAL

Sloowjob - Festival

Sloowjob - Psychedelic Dreams At Play

EMBRYO [d]
JULIE MITTENS [nl]
PETER WALKER [us]
GNOD [uk]
GEOFF MULLEN [us]

+ films by Matt Valentine, Heidi Diehl, Roberto Opalio, Marja Mikkonen en Erik De Jesus

Sat 28 march 2009, Netwerk / centrum voor hedendaagse kunst, Aalst (16:00 7-10 EUR)

Ever since their debut "Opal" from 1970, seen as a master piece of psychedelic music, EMBRYO traveled around the world for the last 40 years with a mix of kraut rock, psychedelia, jazz and in recent years lots of ethnic music. Music as a life style, and open ears and minds for unexpected meetings with exotic surroundings and headstrong musicians such as Mik Quantius and No Neck Blues Band.

PETER WALKER is a monument. In the sixties he released two legendary albums, "Rainy Day Raga" (1967) and "Second Poem to Karmela" (1969) on which he combines the eastern influences of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan with American folk. He teached Jim Gurley (Big Brother and the Holding Company) his first guitar chords and cooperated with LSD guru Timothy Leary. In recent years Walker mainly focussed on flamenco. Expect an instense trip with one of the masters of nylon strings.

GNOD is a cosmic collective from Manchester who are constantly looking for new boundaries. In a swirling universe full of delay, distortion, wahwah and fuzz they destroy minds and reap souls. Dudes jammed with White Hills and stuff. Gnod bless Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Sun Ra and Acid Mothers Temple. Expect the unexpected. Gnod have mercy.

JULIE MITTENS still is The Netherland's best band, which was noticed by labels as Rococo and Holy Mountain. The intrumental jams of this guitar/bass/drums trio send loud feedback blues, hammering rhythms and hypnotic bass lines to the point where their free rock disolves in an intoxicating psychedelic harmony of electric spheres. Slow drones spread their tentacles over deserted grey landscapes, a scratched surface of resonating strings and buzzing amps.

GEOFF MULLEN brings together guitar, banjo and analog synth to psychedelic abstractions, New England reverb and weird noises. He has cooperated with Family Underground, Kris Lapke and Pumice.

FILMS

Eric de Jesus (USA): Born Of Jackals (2008)/ My Heart And I Agree (2007)/ History of WHH (2007)/ Easy Commercial (2007)Dreams and reality become one during a lazy afternoon in the fields. Taking it easy.

Marja Mikkonen (FIN): Rondo (2006) / Marraskuun Lohtu (2005) / Lyömätön Perhe (2005) Abstract, experimental films with soundtracks by Musta Hevonen, Boris Morgana en Horst.

Heidi Diehl (USA): Moon Void Of Course (2006) Tour diary of a 13 week long American tour of Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, including jam sessions in the desert. (I've seen this - and it's really excellent! - Kek)

Matt Valentine/Erika Elder/Gabriel Walsh (USA): The Temptation Of Zoology (2003)Surrealistic and psychedelic short film referring to the same abstract mythology and visions in which Matt Valentine's lyrics and music unfold.

Roberto Opalio (IT): Light_Earth_Blue_Silver(2008) Existential journey of an alien in the mountains. Soundtrack by My Cat Is An Alien.

HEATHEN UPRISING

ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER

RIP TONY HART

Aww, fuck. Now Tony Hart's gone and died too...

I was lucky enough to see "Vision On" - the programme fronted by Tony and Pat Keysell - when it first started back in the Sixties. It was terrific stuff. Here's a comp. of some of the semi-regular features: