VLUBA: "LIVE AT ERKS"

More Argentine musical madness:

vlubä - another long-time Kid Shirt freepsych favourite - have a new CD out on the Catalan label CIRCUIT TORÇAT.

The music was recorded live earlier this year in a cave using power supplied by a solar-generator. If past releases are anything to go by, expect mucho sonic craziness.



You can buy it here.

DEVIL'S PAW PRINTS

It's been a while since I've seen any bloody hand- or (!!!) foot-prints on the hallowed highways and walls of Ye Olde Yeovil Towne (not as uncommon as you might think! And, unsurprisingly, I'm still keeping me eyes (and mind) open for the occasional outbreak of Devil's Hoofprints or Spring-Heeled Jack type bootspore; anything's possible in the Alt.Yeovil Myth.Space), but this caught me eye yesterday:



Kinda intrigued about the back-story here. Is it a "Let me out!!!" type deal, or a "Lemme in!!!". A rather wide finger-span too.

And is that blood or, uh, something else?.

The wall in question is pretty old. Late 1700s, I think.

I'll let you, dear reader, be the judge.

JAMES LEYLAND KIRBY: POST #1

It has recently come to my eagle-eye'd attention that some of you - and I can scarcely believe this to be true - still haven't bought James Kirby's recent releases.

Of course, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and put it down to a hectic life-style or anterior retrograde amnesia, but this flakey, shipshod behaviour won't be tolerated in the long-term, y'hear? Economic crisis notwithstanding, I expect y'all to rectify this, um, oversight soon as poss.

If not, I'll be namin' names and it won't be a pretty sight.

Oh no.

But, how - oh, dear God, how? - can you ever possibly bear to be w/out these albums? Joking aside, they are pretty fucking wonderful. If there was any justice in this world, then James would be a Mercury Prize nominee. I mean, Bat For Lashes, puh-leaze.



"Sadly, The Future is No Longer What It Was."

Tracks like "when did our dreams and futures drift so far apart?" and "not even nostalgia is as good as it used to be" superficially revisit classic Eno-era Ambient (more specifically, that period where composition/song-writing just begins to dissolve into amorphous drift) - using recognisable tropes like hesitant, deliberately heart-tugging piano-motifs and faux-DX synth-patches that are reverb'd out into near-infinite decay - but James' own unique take generally has a darker emotional undertow than The Bald One's own undertakings.

JLK is far too interested in process to fall into mere pastiche or parody; he can't resist adding his own spectral twists or forcing a chord to pitch-slide itself into something unsettling or even slightly dissonant. Sounds rub up against each other and not always in a nice way; there are tensions, disagrements, detours. If this is Coffee-Table, then it has stains and fag-burns; it incorporates its own mistakes, absorbs them into its structure, in an Oblique Strategies kinda way, of course.

There's a beautiful, quasi-melancholic side to the two opening tracks, for sure, but the music often goes somewhere unexpected - chords don't follow their expected flight-path or a sudden wash of bass undertow almost sinks your nice little Ikea raft. Music For Hammocks, this ain't.

The piano notes seem to suggest melody-lines, but when you actually listen carefully you find it's an illusion - what you thought was the start of some Satie-esque ditty has dissolved before it started; it's collapsed into strings of disconnected notes. A simulacrum of a song. It's like someone trying to piece together a melody from memory; failing; starting again; losing their place; trying again...all the while fooling us into thinking that we're hearing a tune. But it's a broken song. An echo of something we might have once heard. The notes and the neural-connections have evaporated. Disappeared. The gaps in the music becoming as important - as poignant - as the sounds that we do hear.

The title-track is about as un-Eno-ish as it's possible to get: there's an initial rumble of echoed synth distortion that reminds me of the intro of "Nag Nag Nag" which then slowly implodes into a soundthing that resembles toothpaste: it's soft, cleansing, artificially sickening-yet-sweet; a memory of someone I once loved but can't bear to think about anymore; a soured sound turning round and round in my head, decaying; a swirl of rotten candyfloss.

A record like this could only be made now; James deliberately plays with distortion and sonic.artifact, allowing certain sounds to flatten at the top-end; this playfulness becomes part of his palette, his patina, his patter, his artillery.

And there it is again, that trademark thing he does where he allows his sounds to slowly de-pitch, detune themselves and unravel as the track slowly progresses along its path...it imparts a vague sense of, I dunno, queasiness. A sugary ache. A distance, a sense of descent into something...but what? Yourself? Your memories?

Eno would never use a soft, mid-song bottom-end growl like this. For a minute or two it feels as if we're trawling the bottom of some mile-deep oceanic abyss, crawling along - a bottom-feeder prowling in the dark, tendrils and mouth-parts sifting the mud for edible debris until a synthpatch (re-)appears, like a faint a ray of light drifting down through the murky water. A thin smear of sound that wavers and wobbles like a tender current. And we slowly float upwards again from the depths...

Remarkable stuff and I'm still only three tracks in on the first album.

"stay light, there is a rainbow a coming" is all subliminal sub-bass grind and roil, like stowing away on some vast earth-drilling machine manned by angels...a colossal subterranean ship corkscrewing its way through a superdense Dantean para.inferno. Ghostly, ghastly and corrosive: so very, very solid. A Halo of Rust. Music of the Inner Spheres.

I'm going to stop now; I think you get the idea.

It's a really crass thing to say, I know, but if you're a writer or an artist then this album is a superb, infinitely re-usable resource: it's perfect for thinking, for imagining, for dreaming...

It invokes memories of The Unrecallable. Thoughts of Times and Places that fell down between the cracks, that never quite existed.

Nothing else around right now comes this close to getting it sooo right.

Except his next two albums.

More on this soon.

JAMMING / SOFT ROBOTICS

Via Paul Pope @pulphope :

ANLA COURTIS / DADDY ANTOGNA / LOS DE HELIO

Anla Courtis is an old Kid Shirt musical fave, an extremely talented and prolific fellow much admired for both his solo output and his time with the remarkable Argentine band Reynols. Anla checks in with some news of a recent-ish collab. with the legendary drummer "Daddy" Antogna.

Daddy drummed with such wonderous early 70's Argentine Rock bands as Ave Rock and Orion’s Beethoven. Despite being confined to a wheelchair for several years he has recently began drumming again with Daddy Antogna & Los De Helio, a band that will be of much interest to those of you whose tastes lean towards the more progressive end of the Rock spectrum. Anla contributes some blistering gtr licks - very different to the sort of activities I normally associate with him: playing guitar with a broom, sampling chickens and whistling kettles, etc.

Their first album "Viva Belice" is out now on Viajero Inmovil Records.

Hopefully, Anla will be solo-touring the UK next year. If he does then you'll hear about it here soon as I know myself. Would be lovely to get him to play at The Cube.

UM POP

Really diggin' this piece of Mess.Pop.Poetics/Broken.Wonkaraoke by Pete Um aka Um. "The Perfect Disaster": short, sweet, Quantum Melodic/Non-melodic: it ticks a lot of the boxes that need ticking right now.



He also has a copy of ridiculously rare "Threads Of Life" by Alco, for those of you with some cash to burn. I'd buy it if I'd dodn't have to, y'know, eat. Meanwhile, buy his merch/records n make him a happy man.

ANNUVER SKETCH

SKETCH

SPACE ART

Was briefly Tweeting about this vinyl LP earlier this evening, but caved in and decided to blogpost the cover (or rather, part of it) of this superb junk-shop find:



The LP came out in '77 on Ariola/Hansa and is a terrific set of Non-New Age electronics and drums, courtesy of Frenchmen Dominique Perrier (keyboards) and Roger "Bunny" Rizzitelli (drums. Hmm: is it just me, or does that sound like a not very French name?) who later toured and worked as session-guys with JM Jarre (to be honest, I've never been a fan of Jarre's stuff; this is waaay better, I reckon). Style-wise it's a cross between, errrm, late-70s era Froese with a smidge of some of Moroder's non-Disco work; actually, it has a bit of a lowish-budget cinematic feel in places, reminding me of various 70's e-scores - not-quite Carpenter, more, I dunno, like some of the 70's/80's Zombie/exploitation film soundtracks, but without the overtly 'tense'/horror elements.

There's some really nice spacey, almost haunting atmospheric/abstract pieces on display here (hard to describe exactly what it is they conjure up), but the album's also pretty big on melody and emotion too. Oh, and rhythm as well: there's also some great e-Rock drumming. ("Klaus Krueger! Harald Grosskopf!") Imagine a sort of minimal, irony-free version of Air.

I picked it up for a quid last week, but only just got round to playing it this evening while I was doing a bit of writing. I think this might be on the deck quite a lot over the next couple weeks. Def. worth grabbing if you spot it cheap.

Actually, today was a really excellent day for record-shopping; I picked up some terrific 2nd-hand vinyls - including two or three pretty rare/obscure LPs - for, well, not-very-much-money. More on those another day. I've got a ridiculous backlog of vinyl to listen to right now. Some really great stuff.

I think there might be a reissued CD version of this LP with the same cover, but it has some different tracks on it (from their other two later albums?) wh/ is possibly called "Onyx".

SONIC SANCTUARY AT THE CROFT

*FREE* Sonic Sanctuary Noise Show @ The Croft, Bristol, 3pm tomorrow:

BIOBRICKS

Biobricks.org: open-source organism-design and building.

Yeah, totally: like, wow, wtf.

THE WISDOM OF KID KID SHIRT

"I'd rather go to Typing Club than be a witch. But if I could do both then that would probably be best."

"Tesco has far too many lights. And they're on all the time! They should switch them off and stop messing up the world."

On Michael Jackson: "He wasn't a wuss. He just looked funny because he had some bad papier-mache done to his face."

On MJ's "Thriller": "Did he ever do any other songs?"

On Julian Cope's WW2 Rock n Roll General Look: "He's really unfashionable. Too much black. He should wear more colours. Doesn't he know people are wearing colourful clothes these days?"

WAITING FOR MY TEA TO COOK...

ANOTHER FRICARA PACCHU 7" THAT YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

"Stories of The Old": 'n earlier EP by Fricara. Can't remember when exactly this came out; earlier this year? Last year? Having a senior moment.



On "Bianca's Beachparty" an Escherstaircase of synthetic saxophones march alongside a Glitter-Band-in-a-Roland-Groovebox stomp; this doesn't make me think of beaches particularly but rather a high-spirited processional hike through the foothills of Switzerland, everyone holding halberds, the flags of imaginary dukedoms being waved, etc. It's all very jolly and good-natured.

"Upsidedown Wind" is more ponderous-sounding and slightly dissonant, like The Residents covering the theme tune to, uh, Bagpuss or summat. A squeaky/squawky quasi-acidic synth doodles over something that might have once been an Eno piano-line from 1974. The Winkies are nodding out in the background. Effortlessly melodic-yet-tuneless; I looove tracks that seem to so easily straddle the unstraddle-able. Quantum music: there is either a tune or not-a-tune depending on which direction you look at it from. On paper this really shouldn't work, let alone sound so terrific.

At half-time it's: Finland 2 - England 0

"Text-message From Beyond" starts off sounding like a cat with an itch it can't scratch. There's Rave on a couple miles down the road; I can hear the bass-bins and sampled stabs underneath bubbling synths and some sort of gtr duel between Bob Fripp and one of Eno's old treated 'Desert' Guitars.

Maybe I should play this at 45rpm: oh no! That's just completely mental lol! Mental, but scarily plausible. Hi-hats sound like sandpaper. After a while it sounds like a copy of the Guitar Hero 18 game come to life. Bweee-neoooow-wruuumng. Careful with that axe, Pacchu.

Comes with a rather fantastic book of (I think) Fricara's drawings, paintings and found photos, etc. Tho I wonder if Roope might've also had a hand in helping to assemble this?

Can't remember where I bought it. Fonal, probably.

CHERI: "MURPHY'S LAW"

C.O.D. : "IN THE BOTTLE"

LUNCH CIRCUITS

GAZ

FRICARA PACCHU: "LUCY"

A newish 7" EP of mangled, beautifully overwraught Guitar n Groovebox-driven SpazRaveElecktro anthems from long-time Kid Shirt Finnish fave Fricara Pacchu, who's a sometime member of Maniacs Dream.




As tough and gnarly as a bucketful of iron-ore nuggets. Blocked-drain sturm und drang.

No, wait: flip the flipping thing and it sounds like some Chinese Kick-Boxing Epic gone Musique Concrete; a koto salesman on his way to a rave in a clapped-out Vauxhall Vectra. Oddly melodic and strangely touching. This is followed by what sounds like a vintage John Carpenter s/track excerpt but w/ a churning cement-mixer drum-sound. *checks needle for fluff* Nope: "The roil/the concrete is boiling": Grrrunch-Grrrruntttch! Orbital fruit-machine noises and a distant choir. Beautifully strident, the song marches off into the sunset on pneumatic robo-legs.

Seriously, though, this is one of the most wonderfully playful pieces of electronic 'Pop' I've heard in a while - tho I'm sure Kevin...er, I mean, Fricara probably had something entirely different in mind. Or maybe he didn't.

I wish Richard James made records as interesting as this.

Strangely, this feels far closer to being the 'true' offspring of that late 70's generation of one-fingered synthesists who were parading their wares on Synth Britannica on fri night, than, uh, *gruffly mumnmnmnmbles some names unintelligibly into tea-cup of people whose music he doesn't like that much but who seem fairly popular amongst various, er, youngsters in their thirties and forties*. Mordant Music are fairly cool tho.

I think this works so well because it comes from somewhere else - not just geographically - but from a Free-Rock/Improvisational zone that has gradually, since 2005, 2006-ish, been turning into something else - something more rooted in beats, linear rhythms, etc. Some folks have been started upgrading from fucked-up junk-shop Casios to cheap, disgarded 1st-gen Grooveboxes, Electribes, etc, so that a generation that mainly/mostly bypassed the Rave epoch, due to their age - or were disinterested in it - are now (sometimes unintentionally) plundering this era and plugging certain Rave, Acid House and New Age soundshapes n ideas into an open-ended stoner/free rock/psych template/mind-set. Over the last 3, 4 years we've started glimpsing traces of this cultural migration in, errm, the Skaters' solo/side projects, the post-rave Cousteau-isms of Dolphins into the Future, etc, all sorts of unexpected nooks n crannies in the sub-underground. It's (mostly) being driven by a mixture of cheap, disgarded 90s hardware and young 'uns deliberately square-pegging/venn-diagramming/overlaying assorted 60s/early 70s sounds/tropes onto their late 70s/80s/early 90s counterparts. Or vice versa.

Anyway, it's a great EP; you should buy it. Finnish music still rules. Fiercely.

Available via Vauva.

THE BEAN

GHANA SPECIAL (SLIGHT RETURN)

So, yeah, many thanks to Jim for sending me the 2-CD distillate version of this LP set (wh/ I kinda mentioned before):



It really is super-muff. All the stretched-out wah-wah n percussive action you might probably expect is present and correct, and the call-and-reponse vocals n horns, but there's much, much more to it than just the more Funk-orientated cuts: this is a musical microcosm, a cross-section thru an entire culture. A slice of history.

All sorts of unexpected things happen along the way. So while "Din Ya Sugri" by Uppers International might surf a bumpy B-movie Funk-vamp the surprise is Christy Azuma's almost thin, trebly-sounding vibrato vocals; they sound almost counter-intuitively Anti-Soul, almost folksy; if the record had been made in the US in the 70s then the vocals would have almost certainly been belted out/growled/howled - the 'performance' aspect of vintage Soul/Funk always taking great pleasure/pains to establish a clear direct linkage between authenticity of feeling and, uh, the vocalist's emotional-output knob.

If you ain't feeeeeeelin' the emotion then it ain't 'real'. Anything less than 10+ is bogus, but after a while it becomes a caricature; a form of acting. "When Smokie sings, I hear...nothing."

This sort of nonsense reaches its apogee with the nasal, novacaine-numbed self-parodic Unsoul of Beyonce n Co. Sixth generation vocal 'soul' tropes acted out w/out conviction or a clue. White-bread R n B. It doesn't even need autotune to robocise itself, to remove the last vestiges of humanity, gender, spirit.

Ms. Azuma side-steps Trad.US.Soul traditions - not because she doesn't care enough or can't sing - but because it's not her idiom, her mode of expression. And in doing so she creates something uniquely and refreshingly soulful - to my ears, at least.

And she's not the only vocalist here who will sound 'wrong' to Western ears muted by iPods and too much X-Factor - yes, they'll sound too 'understated', too reedy, too sharp or flat to fit our jaded classical notions of bullshit soulfulness. And, yes, the production lacks the 'fullness' - the frequency range you'd expect from 70's LA orch or seshguy recordings, or Trevor Horn, or [fill in your own name].

But fuck: that's a good thing. No, really. I've been listening to some early/mid-70s 7-inches of classic Philly Pre-Disco jams recently and loving the high-end action - the trebly strings and hi-hats; the harmonies - the 'thinness' and the lack of bottom-end action. It's kinda cool. No: is cool. It's counter-intuitive again, but it really works. Dance music without a bottom-end or a fuck-off bass-line. We'd just forgotten how great things are that sound, well, different. We'd got closeted and too comfy in our lil' bubbleworlds.

So, yeah, to listen to some of these Ghanaian jams you really need to check in yr expectations along with the hand-luggage.

I'm especially loving the tracks where the sounds seem to rub up against each other and create an unexpected dissonance; a vocal refrain might collide with a guitar-line, or scraped percussion seems to go slide in and out of time with the bass gtr or the backing-vocalists. Polyrhythmic drift, innit.

? and the Mysterions style organs surface in amongst a galloping pony-trot riddim - some distant, tinny-sounding take on a JB B-side - with the vocalist talk-singing like he might have just, possibly, once heard Dillinger's "Cocaine in my Brain" on a crappy transistor radio, the signal drifting in and out of range.

Some of the tracks are gentle - jaunty almost - catchy in some weird quiet little earworm way that makes you wanna hit the replay when you realise how much the track has lodged itself in yr brain, even tho you thought you weren't paying much conscious attention. Others have a lilting Caribbean flava, as if they're some vague, related-by-marriage cousin of Congolese Rhumba. The Ghana/Cuba Connection in full effect.

Check out "Obi Agye Me Dofo" by Vis a Vis with its uptempo Reggae/Ska-fluenced jump-up rhythm with woozy horns and a - yay! - synth solo. Awesome stuff and funky as fuck. On the final furlong the horns even sound like they're playing some (even more) twisted version of "Wheel Me Out" by Was (Not Was).

Elsewhere Fela Kuti puts in an appearance, but he could've stayed at home, to be honest - this album swings rather wonderfully without him.

"You hypnotise me...you pulverise me...baby."

Great song; great album.

A hit!

THE U2 LIGHTING-RIG HARNESS AND OTHER TALL TALES

Following on from yesterday's post:

Here's a pic taken a few days ago of Jayson D hanging gawd-only-knows how many feet up in the air, in a lighting-rig suspension-harness, suspended from one of the legs of U2's Effel Tower-sized stage-set (aka "The Claw") in the new Cowboys Stadium. Jay's in the 'pod' in the middle of the three and was roped in as Bono's personal spotlight-guy.

(Pic courtesy of J's Pal Tom Young)



Long-time readers will be aware that I'm not much of U2 fan, to put it mildly, and if I'd been in the harness - God forbid! - I would've been up there with a fishing-rod trying to lift The Sainted One's hair-piece during the middle-eight of "Levitate" lol.

Still, shit like this endlessly fascinates me - the Carbon-UberPositive Footprint of Big Rock Tours, etc aside - Rock ephemera: the logistics, the infra-structure and tour craft-skills that sit behind the showbiz stuff, the two hours of bangbashkeraangohyeahbaby. Jay said it took two and a half days to set up and dismantle the stage-set.

Two+ hours up in the air in a 'gravity safe' harness and noise-cancelling headphones, tracking Mr. B.Vox and processing complex lighting cues. Next month it'll be a promo.vid for some Texan Thrash.band or some new cool self-funded cinematic project: he's an extremely interesting cat is that Mr. Densman.

"PARTY GIRL" TRAILER

Here's a brief trailer/taster for Jayson Densman's forthcoming new film "Party Girl", which I know you folks are sooo gonna enjoy when it drops.



Trust me, that's one lady you really don' wanna mess with.

And, yes, there's some music by Ice Bird Spiral mixed n mulched up in there somewhere.

HAIR POLICE, FAMILY BATTLE SNAKE, RAJINDER, ETC

PEVERELIST: JARVIK MINDSTATE

"Jarvik Mindstate" - the debut 'album' by the forward-thinking Bristol-based producer Peverelist is due to drop any day now and - unsurprisingly - it's rather wonderful: an emotive and futuristic collection of beats influenced by...well, pretty much everything from early Detroit Techno and Jungle through to the post-Garage 2003-2006 era of classic Dubstep. It's bold and ambititious and you really should buy this when it comes out. It's Next-Level Shit, innit.

Pev sees this as more of a collection of tunes - "a snapshot in time" - rather than an album in the traditional sense of the word. Though I reckon it all sits together very well as a body of work.

Pev can be found here, on Blackdown's monthly Pitchfork column talking about "Jarvik Mindstate".

I guess this is the point at which I should probably mention that I, uh, created the album cover artwork (which was then beautifully laid-out and assembled by John). There's a small taster for it at the top of Martin's column.

Many thanks to Pev for asking me to do this; it was v. cool and flattering that he trusted me with this task - and also pretty brave of him to try and break some visual molds as well as musical ones.

...Oh, and while I'm here, just a quick reminder for you to also score a copy of Blackdown's excellent "Concrete Streets" 12" - a record that I've mentioned before and which is a firm favourite inside the Tardis-like interior of Kid Shirt's micro-sixed 1973 pocket-universe.

Newspaper Club.

MagCloud.

"IT'S A KEK PROJECT"

Some design work stuff: Errr... The skull of W. G. Grace. "It's a Kek Project" lol.

The stuff I chuck at him would be enough to make most people weep, but he just gets stuck in and chips away at it, chisels it into shape.

He's a game old lad - a hard grafter - is that 2nd Fade bloke.

This one'll be a corker once we eventually wrap our heads around it.

Hopefully, our Colin Tubb strip will be appearing soonish too...

I seem to have drifted into writing comics again - it's kinda accidentally intentional; I've sorta let it happen to me rather than chase it, so things seem to be developing organically, at their own pace...

I seem to have four, maybe five things that have suddenly semi-concurrently popped into my head w/out me wanting them too, which is always the best way. They're all different too. Some will fizzle out, I'm sure, but comics have started interesting me again, for the first time in a while. I even *ulp* fancied drawing one again, but I really don't have the time right now.

I think my daughter's enthusiam for illustrated strips and stories is partially responsible for reigniting the pilot-light. Dan Poeira's also partially to blame.

I've been mainly thinking terms of small stuff - it initially started off with the idea of two- or three-panel newspaper style things built as micro-arcs or recurring themes: iterations and repetitions...running jokes that slowly shift. You can't beat Charles M Schulz. Or Krazy Kat. Or, uh, Doonesbury.

I wanted to start tiny; go old School. Then something else came along that suggested a one-page format - a series of 5-panel slow burn gags with an existential twist. I was enjoying keeping it small, y'know: Anti-Spectacle. It's Counter-Intuitive.

When everyone else goes Graphic Novel on yo' head, then slowly walk away and head off in the opposite direction.

Start from scratch, strengthen yr skills. Tighten up.

Small and slow.

I'm really psyched about this project.

I believe in you, dog.

I'm the best pal you ever had, Julian.

DM me.

Text me.

I heard the mixes for "Everything Changes". Junk it. Bin the album.

I'm telling ya: we could do something sooo much better.

Really blow some minds.

Forget Phil Ramone. I'm your man.

I'm here for ya, Julian. I truly am.

I'm sat by the phone, man.

Give me a call, Julian. And do it real soon.

The mixing-desk's switched on. I'm ready to rumble. Let's make Rock n Roll History.

You and me, pal.

You and me.

J, don't be a stranger to me, y'hear?

Rock n Roll Make-overs: it's what I do.

Julian - dude! - just send over those new song demos. NOW.

KID SHIRT: Ready and available - as ever - to produce the new Julian Lennon album.

Julian, you only have to ask.

THE SAINTS: "(I'M) STRANDED"

An Aus.Punk classic from back in the day; boy, The Saints' first album is a total classic; my old copy's almost worn one-molecule thick from 3 decades of needle-abuse. "Messin' With The Kid": what a fantastic grinding slow-burn song. But here's the title track (kinda weird playing/posting this with Blue Oyster Cult banging out in the background (my teenself wouldn't approve, I'm sure); still don't like Grand Funk Railroad tho):



"Awright."

WILL POWERS: "KISSING WITH CONFIDENCE"

When I was much, much younger I had a huuuge crush on photographer Lynn Goldsmith.

This would've been a year or two after I finally got over the fact that Viv Albertine of The Slits would probably never go out with me, despite the fact that I'd had a picture of her blu-tack'd to the airing-cupboard door for, eerrrm, at least three years until my real-world girlfriend suggested that I should, uh, get a life.

Actually, I did get to meet Viv briefly in the flesh - for about 150 seconds - in '79, I think, at a Pop Group gig. I don't think I ever got over that.

A few months later one of my flatmates - Boots Sharkey - danced with her at The Dugout one night when I was away up in Reading seeing The Mekons or The Teardrop Explodes or someone.

I never forgave him for that.

*Ahem* Yes: Lynn Goldsmith...

Ms. Goldsmith can relax; I'm not about to stalk her or anything - I'm all grown up and married and stuff now. Tho I suspect I could never interview her w/out stuttering slightly.

Lynn is, of course, a legend in Rock Photography circles.

She is, also, Will Powers:



"Will I spoil it / with my over-bite / Will our noses bump / in the moon-night?"

I remember hating this record when it came out - I was probably still into James Chance, Blurt and assorted post-Ze, Touch- and Roirtape Disco-noise residue. Pop for me meant jagged whiteboy Funk, Paul Haig records and Belgian girls singing Bossa standards over drum-machines.

"Kissing with Confidence" sounded smug. Not like me w/ me Dostoyevsky paperbacks and me Industrial Records back-catalogue; nosiree, *I* wasn't smug...

Sure, I knew it had Todd Rundgren on it and Niles Rodgers; but Carly Simon ? - bleeeuurh! - get that damn song away from me!!!

Of course, I adore Carly Simon now. She's the Queen of Kook. Well, actually, that would be Melanie, but you get my point. Carly's written some spiffing songs and there's something pretty neat about her voice...

Needless, to say I love this single now too. Ah, how the years roll on, eh?

I love the way it turns into a List-Song half-way through; a litany of places you could kiss - things you could do - once you'd taken the Will Powers Kissing Kourse: "In the school-yard / at the front door / at the laundr-o-matt / at the drug-store / at the car-wash / in the back-seat / at the Dairy Queen..."

Damn, but Lynn Goldsmith sure looked great in camo trousers and a halter-neck. Uh-ho, now I'm ruh-really st-st-stuttering.

I once copped off in the early 80's with a girl called Lynn - a quick snog at the disco. A one-off deal. China Crisis was probably playing in the background.

"When it came time to kiss goodnight / I almost fell apart"

The fact that she was called Lynn was a complete coincidence, of course.

SOME BOOKS

Coaxed me scanner back into life again for a few minutes, so here's some recent junkshop finds, starting with - well, I'm not a fan of Frank Herbert, but great title and a classic Bruce Pennington cover. I didn't know Bruce was born in Somerset. Class!

(You can't go wrong with New English Library, can you?)











...and ending with an early 60's Israeli-published SF book. It's pretty rubbish, but I looove the fantastic cheaply-produced cover that looks like an early colour Xerox that's been left out in the sun too long. (The digital scan actually makes it look like a *proper* book! In the flesh it's more like an oversized no-budget hand-printed pamphlet) It reminds me of some assorted whacked-out self-published Crank Literature books I've got stashed away here somewhere.

CIERRA YVYHI: LIVE 1975

Imaginary Cierra Yvyhi bootleg album:

LIZARD BRAIN #0

Issue #0 of Prof. Dan Poeira's new comic (or "toner-drenched treecorpse" lol!) Lizard Brain is now up on Issuu.

If I hadn't been busy making music, writing, raising kids, blahblahblah I would've prob. submitted something myself.

Dan is currently getting extremely drunk and listening to Slayer at some whoppin' gert Brazillian Comicon where he is attempting to lead Ben Templesmith astray lol. When he gets home and sobers up I'm sure he'll happily expand on his personal distributed.product philosophy/methodology in my comments box.

Meanwhile, enjoy!

TERROR DANJAH: GREMLINZ

A couple weeks ago I finally got round to splashing out on this 'andsome triple-vinyl set via Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label.



Monster, monster beats. "The horror, the horror..."

Classic mid-00's Grime stripped of MC-rhymage, of the skipping/backflipping wordplay, the cockahoop vowel-catapaults - The Goading, The Boasting, The Threats Made Explicit - leaving just the instrumental backdrop. The 'plate, the musical platter. The Urban Beat Vista.

Except there's no "just" in this; the music is a thing unto itself: an entity, a being in its own right. And it's all there scattered in amongst the beats: clues...tiny bkwards-looking references to Jungle, squarewave Rave-synths n stabs, Arcade Games, microscopic Breakbeat interjections, Sheffield Thug.Funk, pitchshifted Kraftwerkian vocoder.spurts, even some unknown variety of Almost-Electro...glimpses of the past, a quick shifty shufty over its own shoulder while the drums lurch ever onwards into the night, into some futuristic urban Stygia. A dark, Robo-Gangsta Long-Nite-of-The-Soul.

What's surprising it how busy - how ornate - these tracks are; it's like a declaration of intent: only the most deft, the most vocally acrobatic need apply for lyric-spittin' duty. Well, okay, maybe ornate's the wrong word, but there's a superheated frantic-ness on display here at points, an (Oliver) Twist-iness presumably designed to inspire an MC to new levels of verbal virtuosity. This ain't just some batch of lazy, stripped-back FruityloopedGrimeBeats slung together - an exercise in Distopian Minimalism - the music playfully twists and pivots, sometimes with a disconcerting, almost organic level of dexterity. But T.Danjah can also turn on the broody, creepy fairground ride sound too when it suits him. Bad Buoy Guignol.

For urban music, it also strangely fits a Somerset autumn; the sounds are well-suited for cold, dark, murky evenings; for rain and mould and leaf debris, Carnivalia and morbid horseplay.

(But it's Science-Fiction Music too: A Science-Fiction of Now, or rather: a Present that has only just slipped thru our fingers. We can still taste it, remember its touch even as it shifts away from, leaving us standing there in its wake, saying, "Cor! Did you see that? What was that?")

(I can feel it; I can feel Time moving forward again. What can that possibly mean?)

Maybe I sometimes wish the music just a bit more ominous or baroque - but that's a personal thing - a preference, not a criticism - I know I'm deliberately missin' the point when I say that: after all, this music was designed to be a vehicle, to carry a human voice as its passenger. This is a series of (wrong word, I know, but...) 'beautiful' handmade envelopes that once held messages, containers that we can now appreciate as a complex, multifaceted objects in their own right.

What went wrong? I dunno. I really dunno enough about Grime history to say for sure; I'm just a po' country boy who only had dial-up when it all blew up, tho it held an incredible fascination for me - did the music get buried beneath the MCs as well as by the police? I dunno.

I wish...I wish I'd bought more Danny Weed twelves than the meagre 2 or 3 I've got stashed here somewhere. Is it wrong of me to now want a comp. of Danny Weed instrumentals?

These tunes could have only been made in England - well, London, actually, and a very narrow slivver of London, at that; they're a snapshot of a particular place and time; beats that could have only been made during an all-too-brief period of musical history.

A time when Grime was king.

SPACE TRANSFERS

You can't be in my gang 'less you wear transfers, see?

Space transfers.

CIERRA YVYHI: UNKNOWN SONG

Just had a piece of junkspam zombiemail - an attachment titled "Unknown Song" (which I didn't open!) from a robotmailer called Cierra Yvyhi.

I deleted it before it made me PC part o'some gangsta:network and conscripted it to lay siege to an online betting site or summat, but who in their right mind wouldn't wanna hear "Unknown Song" by Cierra Yvyhi...???

Already I'm fantasising n mindriffing what that might sound like: some sort of reclaimed 18th century ballad by a Moldavian avant.gypsy.psychtress, or a reconstituted Atari.Gloom.band from Freeport, Maine.

Cierra Yvyhi: yeah, I'm down with her/it/them.

FLURB #8 NOW ON-LINE

Oh, completely forgot to mention: issue eight of Rudy Rucker's excellent eMag FLURB is now up n runnin'.

Go check pronto! You'll find some v. fine speculative writing there from names both familiar and new.

HAPPY IDUL FITRI

Happy Idul Fitri to all my Indonesian readers!

Have a good one!

MOTORHEAD/GIRLSCHOOL = HEADGIRL

Jason just reminded me about this one:



"I remember the first time I took her to a cheap motel" lol.

Kelly Johnson - sadly no longer with us - was a terrific guitarist.

DENNIS WATERMAN: "I COULD BE SO GOOD FOR YOU"

"PARTY GIRL" CREW LAMINATE

Many thanks to the mighty Jayson D for making and sending me this:





"Victim" lol!

"Party Girl" is officially wrapped and in the (body) bag. I saw a work-in-progress cut of the movie about a month or so back and it looked fucking awesome. More news on this verrrry soon!

SELF-PORTRAIT ON CCTV (WITH BURNING MATCHES)

GERTCHA!

Ahhh, very sad to hear earlier in the week that Chas and Dave have announced that they've split.

The world seems a sadder place already.