NOCHEXXX / SENSATIONAL: "S.Y.S" PLUS NOCHEXXX INTERVIEW

Thanks to Nochexxx for sending me a pre-Christmas Red Cross parcel fulla assorted goodies, incl. this - his collaboration with (recent Wire cover-featured) rapper Sensational. It's a fucking excellent twelve, in my opinion, one that rocked my record-deck over the Xmas hols and rolled me over into the Noo Year rather nicely. It'll make a great additional to anyone's record-bag.



"S.Y.S" lurches into view on chunky, yet oddly sinuous syncopated beats. It's spacious yet muscular; an athlete with a wooden leg working out on an exercise bike. Steadily pumping, pumping, pumping, thighs burning from lactic acid...he stops to preen himself, check his reflection in a steamed-up mirror, shakes out the sweat and starts pumping again, each successful pedal-rotation celebrated by an odd trombone-like doubleparp. The bike-gears click and ratchet as he pumps, pushes, stops and preens; occasionally his gammy leg gives him some gip, but he pushes on past the pain - the strange inner ache that only he can feel - a film-loop of a never-ending road stret-tuh-tuh-tching out into infinity in his inner-eye.

Prrarhp/Prrarp. Tikk-takka-tooh.

Sensational's flows weave precariously in and out of the beats; his voice a battered old bubble-car sliding between lanes. "Get out the fucking way," yells the cyclist silently inside his mind. But they never collide; it's like an endless cartoon ballet, beautifully choreographed...little cars and vehicles bobbing in and out of each other's paths, a tiny plasticine freeway. City of Tiny Lights.

Sensational's voice is like smoked chicory; his vowels smell of Columbian coffee and weed. Dry roasted cadences. Words slide and roll as he flicks his tongue, licks his lips, lets the words hang and fall. Poetry in motion, motherfucker.

He says: "This is a scorcher from Taunton / This is a scorcher from Taunton ."

Okay, okay: I know he's really saying "Torture," but I'm a West Country boy and I need to believe. Ah, too late: it's hardwired into my ears now. "Taunton", it is, then.

Flip-side "Sinbliss" is a fairground ride stuck on auto-play, a roundabout unable to stop; wooden-sticks instead of hi-hats. Then it all falls away, and someone's pounding on the wall of a metal prison-cell. It's Sensational and he's saying what sounds like "Yacht...yacht...yacht..." the word punctuating each blow of his fist against the cell-door that hems in his mind. I'm feelin' foggy, he thinks.

Then the beats come in and we descend into cough-syrup madness: something that might be a thin butcher's slice through a guitar-sample bwwaps its way along in the opposite direction to the rhythm-track. A lone man elbowing his way through a crowd. Everyone's going the other way...there's something oddly lonely about this track, not the voice, but the music and what it seems to say... *puts fingers to temple* (I'm wearing a swami's turban now; a fake mind-reader doing vinyl-psychometry): I'm getting, ummm... isolation, alienation...

"Yo' rocking wit tha big dawg..."

Seriously, you should buy this shit. Whether you like bumpin' Techno, Hip-Hop or just the perilously strange, you really should buy this shit. The beats and the rhymes mesh perfectly. But in a disorientating, queasy way that flashes forward-backwards to tha abstract quantum.hop of CoFlow, AntiPop Consortium, etc.

Quick, let's talk to Nochexxx before I completely lose my fucking mind:


How would you personally describe the music you make?

N: "Ummm, not sure tbh: electronic club music with ever-changing nods towards some kinda continuum."

Are you happy talking about *process*? Do you have any set methodology for working?

N: "I suppose my process is to let the first sound or idea determine what I feel should come next. I play with sounds and rhythms until my speakers talk to me...it's important I feel bugged out or possessed, otherwise I don’t bother to continue and would rather to rip it up and start again.

"I watched that Brain Eno doc recently and he mentioned something about keeping the world interesting by manipulating your own reality - soundsabout right!"

Do tracks start with a certain sounds or patterns, or do you take inspiration from other more abstract objects / things in your environment (like books, films, something that someone says)? Or are tunes triggered by a variety of sources?

N: "I don't worry about adhering to musical gestures; I prefer to reach out for something close to me (usually it’s an obsession weighing heavily on my mind). I quite possibly have a personal complex, which feels relieved once I have given back to that small minute. it’s my way of paying respect, I think. But yeah, I love my beats and funk, so sometimes that serves as a good starting point. Could be anything really."

What do you think it is that drives you to make music? Is it something you've always done - a gradual, on-going thing - or was there some sort of tipping-point in your past?

N: "'Tipping-point'? I prefer tripping point! I think I have a deep need to create, have done since I was young. I do trip from it and therefore it feels like the most exciting thing I can do right now."

As I get older I'm increasingly fascinated by people who continue to work creatively, often with little hope of recognition or major financial reward...it's an amazing thing to me that certain people constantly find strength in themselves to push onwards and create - these are the people that interest me the most and who often do the most challenging / engaging work, often almost completely off-radar...

N: "Please keep supporting people that operate off the radar. As you know, there’s a few of us here in Cambridge! Shout outs to The Doozer, Pete Um, Man from Uranus and PDA."

How did you hook up with and start collaborating w/Sensational....?

N: "MySpace! I just said: “Dear Torture, you’re the greatest rapper on the planet. If you ever want to rap on some scuzzy techno, please holla”. I also asked Kool Keith, but he wanted crazy $$$$. Myspace is great; I hooked up with Zackey Funk that way."

I'm curious what came first - the music or the voice or what? I love the way the sounds track his cadences / flow - rather than just a repeating multi-bar thing for him to work over - the music and voice are v. synergistic; they work beautifully in tandem...

N: "Both ways, to be frank! I produced the tracks, sent them to Sensational; he rapped on it, sent them back and then I did more post-production. I had to re-edit a great deal, kneading it into something concise and market-ready.

I like the fact that your stuff is serious-minded, but there's also a playful streak in some of your work - it's a nice balance; neither devalues the other. It's interesting to me that your beat-based work suggests one strand of influences, whereas elsewhere you're also dipping into old style Musique Concrete/Montage, and also more modern Glitchier-sounding stuff....it's cool you've got a wide restless palette...

N: "Thanks! I love lots of music, including - as you say - Musique Concrete. I own quite a few of those Metamkine CDs, love Luc Ferrari etc - his record "Presque Rien" was a particular favourite."

So, what have you got in the pipeline next? Is there any other stuff on its way that you can talk about?

N: "I have a few records out on Ramp this year, but we've yet to make our minds up what exactly. There's also a Xylitol remix album on the cards. The album will also feature remixes from AJ Holmes, Belbury Poly, Sculpture, Woebot, Pete UM, Strange Attractor, Nochexx, Ommm. And I've also been asked to compile a record for Pete UM, which should be a luxuriously packaged release! Exciting times."

Where can people buy the Sensational / Torture collab. ?

N: "It's dripping out now. http://www.cargorecords.co.uk/release/10192

MEET THE WIFE

GAMEGIRL 009

So, anyway, my dear sweet Kid Kid Shirt - totally, completely, utterly oblivious to all the frenzied media hype surround the iPad (see: previous post) - coincidentally designs her own must-have computer-gadget on wednesday afternoon. She's always got these little projects on the go, and one of them is designing/drawing/redrawing her own ideal laptop/games-console/spy-device. They go though various incarnations and upgrades as she adds that week's gotta-have features and subtracts all the boring-stuff-that-no-longer-interests-her.

iPad Vs. GameGirl 009: yeah, I know which I'd rather have.



And reasonably priced too, I think.

DEFECTIVE BY DESIGN

The iPad / Apple Tablet is the first product by MacFakeHippiesCorp...er, I mean Apple that has ever interested me, tbh. Despite the hype, I was actually kinda curious about what might be in it. I wondered if it might be a tool that I could use, but seems like it's just an oversized iPhone, blahblahblah. Silly me. So I'm back to sneering and sniping at Jobs & Co. from the side-lines again. For a second there I almost bought into The Lie. Sometimes, you just wanna believe.

Some of the apps do interest me, tho. Especially that Renaisance Bassoon Emulator thingy.

Guess I'll just have to learn to play a real one.

Anyway, pleased to see that not everyone on the planet greeted the New MeMeMeMustHavePad with idiot glee: the guys at Defective by Design protested outside the launch. Good for them.

MOON RUG

Weird day today. So, here's a track I made a few years ago. Fake-80's Death-threat Ethno-Pop, innit.


Moon Rug by kid Shirt

Hmm: that bass-gtr don't really come thru on the the ASUS's tinny lickle speakers lol. Reminds me of listening to Radio Luxemberg on an old transistor radio...

KID SHIRT INTERVIEW ON BTI

Ye Gods! (and Goddesses too; in fact, a whole pantheon of the fuckers) It appears there's some sort of - dare I say it - (eeeek!) interview with me over on Not The Real Beyond The Implode. Or rather - Part One of it, 'cos I'm such a fucking gasbag when I get going.

I recognised that Bikini Mutants css cover straight away: our old friend Wilf - now sadly departed and much missed - drew the cover. I'd recognise his style anywhere. Wilf's memorial in St. John's church - with his best pal Steve B the vicar doing the eulogy (he mentioned The Situationists and Jack Kirby in the same sentence!) and the post-funeral gathering on Wyndham Hill for all his old friends, with Wilf's paint-splattered old boots hanging from the trees and Steve banging an old stick like he was Gandalf....well, that was one of the most amzing and emotionally-charged things I've ever been to.

*lump in throat moment* even after all these years.

Thanks to Martin for doing this. He's a card, that lad. Had me in stitches yesterday with his description of cockneyblogger haircuts. Well, I did ask...

Cheers.

Another film-still. An accidental one, this time. My finger slipped while I was editing some footage and I accidentally took a photo w/ my phone. I kinda like it.

Talking to Farmer Glitch today in town. Seems we've both been simultaneously thinking about some sort of knitting-needle-related music-project involving our wives. How weird's that.

Also: expect some sort of live 'Noise' shows/performances in Yeovil later this year - we are plotting and scheming, the two of us. It seems almost inevitable that something will happen. (Now that various pundits have declared that Noise is officially well-and-truly "over" it seems beautifully counter-intuitive for us to put on a local show; mind you, West Country Noise is a very peculiar 3-headed sheep; considerably different to its Big City cousins) There are a handful of similar-minded oddfolk round here that have been moanin' that they have nowhere to play, so we are seriously thinking of remedying that. One of the options being explored is a venue that has all sorts of bizarre 19F3 / Thrifty Vinyl cross-over resonances. But we'll see. The Farmer's talking about starting a semi-regular Hacker-Space. A Hacker-Farm.

I like the sound of this.

Meanwhile, after the kids were finally poured into their beds, I spent the evening doing a bit more footage-editing, and then working on an as-yet untitled music-track. So far: morbidly doomy, yet oddly swirly industrial-psych with punishing spring n oil-drum, er, drums.

Watched a bit of "The Amityville Horror". Never seen it all the way through before. Some (unintentionally) great sound-design so far: weird distorted Rod Steiger puke-coughs, whispering wind-voices, a cardoor slam that sounds all wrong...great stuff. Has that coked-up cloth-ear production thing that permeates Tha Mac's "Tusk". Suspect the sound-supervisor was hearing something different to what actually ended up in the film. Or maybe it's me that hears things differently.

I like those close-up shots of flies' eyes too.

And Margot Kidder dancing to the radio in a single leg-warmer. What tha...?

Must go and watch some more.

BUMSKIPPER

Forget Aphex's Analord series, what you really need is the 11-CD Bumskipper set.

More ideas on display here than most people get in a 15-lifetime Karmic spin-cycle.

KEMPER NORTON: "TO IRON JOHN" EP

It is here.

You are there.

1) It's a rave outside the old deserted brick factory: soot and four-on-the-floor smoke-plumes puh--puh-puffing their way up into the sky, the shift-whistle sounding, rusty ghost-trains delivering coal to a 2am siding.

It's Neu! with a skipping-rope; Harmonia riding on a tandem, feet furiously pedalling - pedalling! - against an implausible gear-system.

It's The Tomorrow People dematerialising.

2) There's a piano coming up the road now, its lid wide open. And then everything slooows down and goes all sparkly, like Pandora's Box being opened. We remember...

My memory is like an old telephone exchange: a wire patch-bay made from misconnected party-lines.

3) It's a banjo stuck on pre-set; it's tangled up in its own wires, trying to play a song it once knew. A song that someone once played on it.

But it no longer knows how. It only remembers the rave.

4) It's a quick pep-talk: he...he's briefing the troops somewhere out in the wilds. Out in the woods. Something beautiful - beautiful and sad - sails over the treetops like a silver teardrop; you can hear its motors humming now, see the strange little people inside it talking, chanting, singing...

It's good, this, we decide. Good for morale.

So we walk towards the light to join in their song.



I asked Mr. Norton to pen a few word-thoughts on the EP and he kindly responded. He says:

1) [It's] an occasionally inarticulate conversation with the men's mythopoetic movement.

2) Robert Bly's influential and macho self-help text "Iron John" adapted and utilised a German fairytale about a boy's journey towards self-discovery and opened the door to a world of new warriors, weekend retreats, mistrust of the feminine and the desired end of the "soft male".

3) A necessary response and complement to the female Gaia movement and a valuable tool to aid the crisis of the Western male, or a terrified and reductive cult looking to to rearm and re-assert male authority in practical and spiritual matters?

4) The music (perhaps misguidedly) attempts to mirror this conflict by including warped and faded military brass, penetrative 303 riffs, male genital percussion, motivational synth themes, as well as the feminine wash of shoegaze and ambient. Whether classifying sounds as "male" and "female" in this way is helpful, or is a further way of solidifying and increasing the divide between the sexes is another matter, and we'd like to thank Simon Reynolds and Joy Press for their fascinating and informative 'The Sex Revolts', which was read during the long and occasionally exhausting production of the e.p.

5) It's a free download, with hopefully a CD release to follow: hope you enjoy it! We have a paypal link for any contributions if you so desire. Feedback and contact welcome.

SUSAN KENDALL, STUDENT NURSE

PARTY GIRL HITS PHOENIX

My pal Jayson Densman checks in with the excellent news that his movie "Party Girl" is showing at The Phoenix Fear Festival this saturday! The movie was one of only 11 shorts picked out of several hundred entries - a testament to its quality.

"Party Girl" features music by *ahem* Ice Bird Spiral and myself, majestically mixed n embedded by Jayson into a swirl of trangressive slaughter n mutilation. All in the best possible taste, of course. You'll fucking love it.

You can snag a copy here from the Raw Dog Screaming Press site.

And I promise - scouts honour! - that just as soon as I get a spare second I'll be posting the terrible, terrible truth about the making of this movie.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

SOMETHING SHIMMERS AND IS GONE

A folder of unreleased tracks and old Medroxy Progesterone Acetate demos, courtesy of one of my favourite musicians - Mr. Darren Bauler of Eastern Iowa.

WEIRD TALES FOR WINTER

...and now a brief announcement via @jonnymugwump.

Weird Tales for Winter, innit.

ON NOT BLOGGING

Some bloggage soon, I promise. Been busy.

Been running. Just been running in a Comets on Fire T-Shirt (and trousers too, of course!). Sometimes I dress up as Rocky - in the woollen hat and everything, and run in the rain. No, it's not some post-Christmas/New Year thing; I've been doing it for a couple years. I sleep better when I run; my bowels work better and my guts hurt less; I'm a lot less grumpy. It's good: I get to think, I move...I get ideas. Kids shout abuse at me as I run pass or throw stones, women smile; I see things in the dark. Notice stuff. Imagine.

I bought the running shoes two years ago in a sale. My sister gave me an M&S sweatshirt that doesn't fit. So it's a lo-fi/lo-cost endeavour. The trousers cost two quid - but they're slightly too short, too tapered at the bottom; and if I deliberately wear colourful spotty or stripey socks with them then I look like an off-duty clown. It's a role; it's dressing up, pretending...but also getting stuff done at the same time. This is how I work. Though it doesn't look like work.

Been busy.

Been playing around with this:





It's a still from a film. No, it's not the title; it's a still. Actually, it's not a film either; it's an UnFilm. It's really stupid - really, really stupid - and it's pretty strange too.

I have a bet with myself sometimes: what's the lowest-res footage I can use in a film? How can I fuck with it without using pro plug-ins and filters? How awful can I make it look? How bad? The trouble is: there's a disconnect here with intent, so the audience just think I'm rubbish at making films. Which I am, but not in the way they think lol.

Sooo, it's very messy work. And very slow. I have to be in exactly the right frame of mind; otherwise it just doesn't work and I have to shelve it for a day or two until I hit exactly the right combination of cigarettes, coffee and running; and then my mind switches over and it makes itself. Sometimes I run to the shop to buy cigarettes lol. There's a hill I like to run up. It's a metaphor for something.

Here's another (still, I mean):



That's one of the nicer, cleaner ones. Wish I had more time to do it properly; but sometimes it's good not to overthink things.

Sometimes, though, it's good to think.

Been thinking about this too:

DYLAN'S DRAWING-BOARD

Hail to the almighty Dylan Teague, whose wonderous sketchpad currently includes some prep work for a Rose O'Rion illo to accompany a short text-story wot I recently wrote.

Needless to say I'm pretty damn excited about this!

The completed thing should surface later in the year. More info when I know meself.

MORE MACHINETALK

Another lovely - and rather touching - review of the Werneck - Wretchmond CD, this time by the ever-insightful Loki. I am completely bowled over by yr kind & thoughtful words, people.

Thanks.

SLOOW DOOOOZER

A new batch o'tapes from our pal Bart Sloow, incl. this tasty slab from The Doozer called "Error Engerumong":



Bart sez: "Zonked lullabies and exotic travelogues towards inner hairy space. Taste the saliva carried on the winds that purify these coastal gamelan hymns and watch a new dawn. 70 copies."

Catch Tha Doozer on tour in Feb in the UK w/ MV/EE:

Sun 7th London - Borderline
Mon 8th Brighton - Freebutt
Tue 9th Leeds - Brudenell Social Club
Wed 10th - Newcastle Star & Shadow
Thu 11th Stirling - Tolbooth
Fri 12th Manchester - Islington Mill
Sat 13th Coventry - The Tin Angel
Sun 14th Bristol - The Cube

I think I'm playin' at the Bristol show. More info soon. Hopefully, see ya there.

It's not an exaggeration to say that I've been waiting for a review like this for most of my life.

Thanks for the love, Rob. And for taking the time to think and write about what you were listening to. (You spot-on nailed a bunch of ideas I was playing with, but also added a bunch of concept-twists that have now got me thinking in some new directions.)

And big thanks also - and I mean this most sincerely - to those of you who took a leap of faith and bought the darn thing on spec. I was gonna put a couple taster-snippets up for people to listen to, then I remembered I didn't have any hosting-space any more. But I thought "ah, fuck it, if I don't get on and get this out now I'll never do it..." Then I got snowed in burning CDs, guillotining cards and mailing out copies, as well as dealing with some urgent work that required my attention (hence the apparent lack of blog-related activity). Sorted some free hosting last night, but still haven't had a chance today to upload anything yet due to work and children. Anyways, Marxsbeard beat me to it.

So, cheers to those of you who went ahead and bought this on trust.

Dudes.

Nah, I didn't cheat: everything on this comes entirely from field-recordings, albeit heavily processed, looped, etc. In fact, I built a couple of quasi-cybernetic processing systems from a 15 year-old piece of s/ware I had sitting around and fed the various recordings that Dan and I had made into it, then sat back and manipulated the machinechatter. I recorded the manipulations as if they were live jams - with me tweaking the machinetalk; fiddling in real time - then took my favourite recorded-bits and manually micro-edited them, adding a few Neo-Concrete-esque pitch-twists, snips and curls.

So no cheats. That bit that sounds like a vocal midnight howl of human pain into an overloaded mic is, in fact, some arcane server boot-noise twisted into a malignant new shape.

Thanks for listening.

WERNECK - WRETCHMOND: “ONEIRIC HARDWARE”

OoooKay, so the Werneck-Wretchmond CD-r "Oneiric Hardware" is now up n ready to go. Forty minutes of machine-based strangeness. It's electronic music, kinda. Review copies have been despatched (shout me up if you're def. gonna write about it on yr blog; use some of the music in a film, ballet, etc lol)




Here's an extract from the Official 19F3 Press Release:

The first release from West Country-based Non-Boutique Nano-Label 19F3 is Oneiric Hardware – a CD of manipulated field-recordings sourced entirely from server-arrays, hard-drives and PC peripherals from Belo Horizonte, Brasil and Yeovil, Somerset.

The resulting pieces are a curious fusion of the mechanistic and the organic: a series of REM-sleep sirensongs built from whirring servos, damaged cpus and haunted read-write heads. Ghost-Industrial Music.

Sound-files rub up against each other to create accidental textures, rhythms, harmonics and voices. A chance meeting on a PC World Customer Service Desk of a zip-drive and a storage drum. REM Vs. RAM.

File under: machines that go bump in the night, ferromagnetic nightmares, head crashes, somnambulant automata, data archeology/salvage, disaster recovery, nocturnal back-ups, random-access retrieval, Music for PS/2 Ports.

There will be a special bonus floppy-disk edition of this release if there is, uh, sufficient demand.

Track Listing:

1. SCSI-Based Sleep System No. 3.
2. Hippocampal Blade Array.
3. The ERA.
4. Diabolo 31.
5. Winchester (1973).
6. I, RAMAC.
7. 2.5tb Polysomnographical REM-Partition.
8. Aethernet.

Like all 19F3 Project/Product-Objects the music on Oneiric Hardware is co-owned by the contributors. It can be bought directly from 19F3 and is available for licensing and so forth to friends/allies/etc by some as-yet still-vague Post-Capitalist Micro-Distributive Barter-Exchange mechanism (Dudes’ Charter). Physical media will be used wherever possible. Your co-operation in not putting this music on the internet is much appreciated. I Know It’s only Rock n Roll, But…etc, etc.

Professor Dan Poeira owns the Sole Everything Rights to this release for the Southern American Continent. Play It Loud, Play It Proud.

More on the 19F3 manifesto and forthcoming releases v. soon incl. the much-delayed, but amazing compilation CD "Local Horse Artist" wh/ features a plethora of freakish talent from Finland, Flanders, the US, the UK, Australia and Argentina. I had various problems with producing / replicating the cover-art, there were tracks that I wanted to use, but couldn't track down the artists to get permission (or bands had split); all compounded by a serious lack of spare time on my part. However, I now finally (as of about a week ago) - as Marx once said - control the means of production and distribution, so: "Nano-Label Ahoy!!!!"

I'll be selling copies of this CD (and others) at live shows (tho not performing material from it); meanwhile, you can score a copy directly via the Kid Shirt blog. Just press the button below and send me a little piece of your soul; it really is that easy, sinners.

I've tried to keep this product-object as cheap as possible, but I do need to at least recoup the cost of printer-ink, CD, stamps and so forth. Hopefully Two Quid plus postage (a quid in the UK; two abroad) isn't too painful. Wish I could do it cheaper. Some of the future releases will be made from recyclables, where possible (and I'll try and make stuff as handmade / customised as my schedule allows). Always happy to personalise stuff, if possible. I'll probably do the odd, surprise one- or two-off versions of things.

Oh yeah: there's gonna be a bonkers ltd edition of "Local Horse Artist".

CD Price (plus Postage)

UK PLUS POSTAGE £3.00 NON-UK POSTAGE £4.00

SATAN LIKT MIJN HIELEN

Speaking of which...


SYLVESTER ANFANG II 'Satan likt mijn hielen '





Aurora Borealis

VINYL PLAYLIST 09/01/10

Ah, fuck it...the gin's flowing, so I've re-booted that last post into a kinda playlist for this evening...mostly vinyl with one 'lil cassette. If the pictures look kinda weird and blurry then that's because I took them next to a functional disco-light lol - cos that's how I like to listen to this stuff.

















That Yes album is completely ripping me stupid right now and I make no apologies for that...right, onto the next batch of LPs. The evening's still young.

I should mention, however, that my youngest daughter - Kid Kid Kid Shirt, aged 5 - is labouring under the misconception that The New Seekers are actually Silvester Anfang... the cover has her completely fascinated. She keeps staring at it, as if she knows...

"Dad, is that your band friends who came over from another country and stayed...?"

Hmmmm: yep, I can see the similarities.

The New Seekers: Funeral Folk recording acts.

ERR ON THE GOOD SIDE: A COMPILATION OF LINGUA-FRANCAN SOUNDS

Many thanks to my good friend Hellvete for throwing this 'lil ali_fib compiled beaut in my direction.

It comes via Three:Four Records.




"Chambre 1" is a v. lovely 4-track piece by Theirry Muller performed on an old piano and filters, w/ a provenance that dates back to the late '70s: it reminds me (just a bit) of the Durutti Column ep "Deux Triangles" where Vini Reilly switched from gtr to piano. I'm a complete sucker for that whole slightly-hestiant-minimal-pieces-done-on-damaged-pub-pianos type thing. What's that mean, do you think? - what does that say about me? - I'm not sure I'm entirely sure. Is this micro-piano-genre not some sort of Post-Satie shorthand for something? Piano miniatures that are shorn of frippery and surface charm, dry-cleaned of quirkiness...look! the notes are hanging in the air, persisting like motes of dust, as if suspended there by will-power alone...

The music is elegaic, damaged in some way; it intentionally presents - by virtue of its stucture and form - the idea of something that's partially broken, yet which still continues, persists...

What does it say about us as people - as a species - that we would want to be made to feel this way, to remember...? What evolutionary advantage is there is allowing ourselves to embrace something that hurts us so? Why do we respond so readily to music like this? Is there an error in our bio-wiring that lets us wallow in melancholy - or the idea of melancholy (the letting go of responsibility, of aggression and drive...) - or is that just part of what makes us human: our ability to empathise and feel? To remember.

Ben Nash's (untitled?) track is a darkly luminous swirl of sound - a voice coming from the end of an 18th century corridor; a wing of the house that doesn't exist - the soundtrack to an indolent malaise; slow-motion delirium. Everything is turning so slowly now - it's rotating, as if inside a metal drum - everything sounds so distant, so far, far away. Yearning, churning. An over-medicated Raga.

Duane Pitre's "Study for "The Carpenter"" is a chamber-piece for sine-waves - Forcefield's "Lord of The Ring Modulators" shrunk-to-fit in the wash (with extra softener/fabric-conditioner) - tone-generators in a zero-g salon. Shifting, shifting...

On "Osschaart's Kiste", Helvete ("all hail! all hail!") rises from a medieval smoke-pit on a throne of hissing, spitting pig-fat and furry overdriven guitar fuzzzzzzzz. The sky darkens, turns a bruised-plum purple as the night ripens with expectation. There's wood smoke everywhere. Drums beating. The priestess lets her red gown fall away...and on her breasts there are...there are a pair of grotesque little mouths with razor-sharp teeth. There are boils all over my face now. Women wail. I scream.

His new album is a total fucking blast; more on that soon.

I like the Mike Wexler track ("Nomadic"); it sounds like a distant lost cousin to some Joe Boyd thing, but sharper, more, uh, modern. He sings like a young Marc Bolan. I wish he'd sung more on this. Nice strings.

Sir Richard Bishop goes all kinda Spanishy on an acc-gtr and I feel like I should be coming down a mountain somewhere. Heat haze streaming off the road. The smell of straw. High-end string n plectrum-klinker dancing in motes of sunlight on a camera-lens. (Nylon strings?) Unflashy, but v. effective, yeah.

Now, this I really like: Liberez. Dunno what...this...is...//...it...it's modulated gtr-crackle? No, a voice breaking-up thru malfunctioning baby-monitor. A gtr sooo far away that it sounds like a chicken-loop, cluh-cluh-clucking to itself in the next village. A baby crying three or four miles away that turns out, possibly, to be a grown man wailing. A slow, slightly ominous double-bass thruuuumnb. So (for the most part) understated, so unexpected.

Later a 'Jazz' drummer from the local Working-Men's club joins them, thwacks the traps and things heat up for about, oh, all of 40 seconds, then the whole thing disappears dn the road on the back of a flat-bed lorry. WTF? An unexpected joy this one.

el-g: not really a fan, I'm afraid - met him briefly in Belgium; nice guy, etc, but - still, "Forgiftad Gava" kinda won me over w/ it's meanderingly absurdist alt.cabaret lilt; a song that trundles along like a Gyspy caravan with a broken wheel; part singalong curse, part trapped-in-a-cupboard lupine love-song. Echoes of James Toth if he had been spiked with some Balkan hypno-drug and forced to sing falsetto in a 1930's side-show. Kinda catchy, if you're borderline psychotic.

Ah, and Jakob Olaussen and Sus are on this too. Ah, riiiight.

THE ESSENTIAL WORSHIP CHILL-OUT COLLECTION

Christian Chill-Out Music. For when you've been partying like a motherfucker for weeks and you just have to, y'know, bring things down a notch or two.

MINUS TEN DEGREES OF SEPARATION

So, it's like minus-10 degrees in Yeovil and my wife and I are trudging back from town, bloated and out-of-our-minds crazy on cah-cah-caaaaffffeine and charity-shop shopping - me shuffling forward, zimmer-like, in me pensioner's orthopedic zip-up woollen boots and we pass Brian the Gravedigger (he of Mobile DJ Infamy) in shorts and a T-shirt...like he's strolling on the fucking beach in Jamaica.

"Brian! You mad fucker!" I yell at him.

"No bike today, then?" he laughs, striding down the rink-like road as I fall over for the 86th time that morning. I'm thinking of hiring a stuntman, you know - a fucking stand-in to take over my basic day-to-day duties. A body-double.

Speaking of Brian:

SOUNDSYSTEM!!!!!

"Proper job".

SMILE...

BOX OF TRICKS

Hands up those of you sad enough to know what this little baby is. I'll be handing out bonus-points or No-Prizes or something later on...

I've had it for more years than I'd care to think about or mention.

THE DOOZER: "GREAT EXPLORERS"

So: The Doozer...yeah, The Doozer.

I bumped into the Pickled Egg guys several years ago (2004? 2005?) outside a show and they had their stall all nicely set out and it'd been a while since I'd been out and about and I thought: Oooh. Yeah, right. I was doing a couple bits o'writing for Bizarre magazine at the time, so I got chatting w/ them and picked up some bits n pieces n sheets of paper 'cos I thought a piece on their label (Daniel Johnston, Volcano the Bear, etc, etc - I mean, they've been at it for, like, ages...prowling the margins, broadcasting non.rock, alt.pop, outsider.songwerks n such) might hit a spot, but nothing really came of it. Sometimes I find those bits of paper under my desk and, you know, they're still at it, Pickled Egg...still monkeying around, ploughing odd-shaped fields and making a beautiful nuisance of themselves. Elbows: more power to theirs.

Consider this post a...I dunno, a bus that finally arrived, years too later. "Sorry" just don't cut the mustard sometimes.

So, yeah: The Doozer. He's turned up a couple times on this blog. Seen him solo-live a while back - he's good live, see, but even better on record, I reckon; he gets to spread out a bit, stretch his musical wings; things get fleshier, yet also blurry-ier; they go in and out of focus more, but still... - then it turns out he knows Pete Um n Nochexxx, and then he makes contact and the very same day I find out I'm actually appearing on the same bill as him sometime next year. The world's getting smaller by the minute. Soon it'll be smaller than Yeovil; soon you'll be able to keep it in a jar like Kandor.

So, uh, yeah: The Doozer.

This is his latest 'record':



I like it a lot. The use of apostrophes wasn't meant to be sarcastic or ironic or nuffink; it's just that...I'm old n stupid and the word "record" has a special, magical resonance to me and I don't like CDs much, and this...well, this is a record. It's not a CD (even tho it is) or a "release"; it's a record, as in an album, y'know, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. But at the same time, this isn't 1973 any more (tho it still is, somewhere or other) so this really isn't a record. Well, not quite. It's a 'record'.

"Great Explorers" is, as the title suggests, a travelogue of sorts - not a wildlife safari, but a gentle amble through the backstreets of yr home town, pointing out and assigning equal weight to the banal and the wonderful - a somnabulant meander thru misplaced memories, connecting random dot-to-dots to make a series of new, unexpected pictures from sheets of blank paper - it's dreamtravel; a softpsych pop.ramble; a quest to complete an imaginary map. But all done during your lunch-hour. While eating a sandwich.

A Sand Witch.

I really don't wanna make comparisons with that Other Cambridge Sound - with Syd and Robyn and so forth - other folks have pointed that out already, but the references are there and almost unavoidable: it's most noticable on opening track "Nothing Like The Hero" - but it's enunciation mostly; the way he sings with his nose, rolls certain words down the back of his throat; Doozer's music has a gentle, curious dark(ening) quality at points (hard to explain what I mean by that; a sense of approaching inner confliction, perhaps), but it's not suffused with melancholy like Syd's; it doesn't possess that sense of confusion, wrongness and loss - I really would'nt wish (or project) that on anyone.

"Everywhere you go, everywhere you go / Everywhere you go, the wind blows".

Plus, it's just - well - a lazy comparison to make, the Syd Thing..."Nothing Like The Hero" is lovely, fer sure, but just as you settle into its gently lilting, almost lolloping wake, just as you think you've got a handle on its soft hazy half-melody The Doozer wrongfoots you with a wonderful, rattling multi-tracked gtr break that sounds like Josef K wading through a field of (liquid) corn-syrup.

"Everywhere you go, everywhere you go / Everywhere you go, the wind blows".

"God Does Not Need Light" is fucking wonderful: a young Ringo Starr at the peak of his (vocal) powers ('71, '72) backed by some ramshackle picked-up-off-the-street junk-shop band: buoyant wah-wah gtr blips, ziggy-zaggy off-radar percussion that sounds like a stoned Salvation Army rhythm section, and just the most catchy counter-intuitive chorus ever: "I...am...just a being / I...am...just a being".

And, again, a mid-song breakdown that just doesn't make sense in the context of any known/established Psychedelic Musical Continuum: like the gtr-break on the previous track there's something oddly Post-Punk about this: a bubbling Farfisa-ish organ, hissing hats, off-kilter rhythm-gtr - it sounds curiously early-80s; a snippet from some forgotten Belgian alt-cabaret band on Les Disques du Crepuscule that's been cut-n-pasted in from another place, another song. It doesn't belong, yet it does. Like I said earlier: it's a travelogue, of sorts.

My favourite song of the year, so far.

"Hornbill". Yeah, well:



Just when I'm starting to stitch a picture together of my own (words like polyrhythmic, polymelodic are starting to congeal in my mind) the album goes somewhere entirely different. Restless legs, innit.

"Brother Lazarus" sounds like Ivor Cutler accompanying Richard Youngs; it's slow and measured, stately and incredibly moving. An unexpected gut-punch.

"Semut 1" is detuned vintage synth-modulations and Public Information Film snippets; an alternative docu-drama that wouldn't sound out of place on a Ghost Box or Mordant Music comp.

"Up and Down" is Kid Kid Shirt's favourite: she's 9 and digs the song's buoyancy, its off-kilter Syd-like swirl; it's sing-songy, yet slightly sad. Initially, it's nothing you can quite put yr finger on, but there's a distant sourness lurking beyond the superficial fairground giddiness, a frustration at love not returned quickly or fully enough: "I waaaant you / and everything you do..." And then the chorus: "Up and Down / And round" makes the song's queasy musical motion painfully implicit; this is a song about ducking and weaving, dodging and diving, hedging your bets, avoidance...the painful to/ing-and-fro/ing that blights many a misconcieved relationship; ill-aimed trajectories; a failure to connect. And the singer/protagonist's language darkens as his anger rises to the surface.

It's also catchy as fuck.

"Great Explorers" sounds like a more song-based extroplation of "Semut 1", but it really starts to take off a couple minutes in: folding in on itself, finding some unexpected inner reserve of strength it strides off across the scrublands in its shorts to give someone a jolly good talking to. It founds like a lost Velvet Underground instrumental circa 1969, if the VU were a group of middle-aged Ghanians who had borrowed an old Korg synth.

Oh, and:

"I'm tooooooooo ooooooooooooold for public transport!" 'Nuff said, except for a woefully so-wrong-it's-right semi-flanged guitar-solo. Oh, and:

"I'm tooooooooo ooooooooooooold for public transport!"

Two more tracks to go, but - oh no! - is that my wife outside, knocking on my door? She's come to take me to Taunton for the day. She says:

"You're tooooooooo ooooooooooooold for public transport!"

And I say:

"Transport, transport, transport..."

And, so, I have to go.

But this is a fucking little gem of a 'record'. And you should check it out - even though your head is prob saying "I don't need any more CDs, any more unplayed songs on my hard-drive..."

'Cos this is where things started going wrong; we allowed ourselves to get buried in the crap - in a mound of mp3s - and started seeing music as data, as something we were entitled to take for Free, without putting anything back in. We started taking all the good stuff for granted.

Buy it while it's still there.

While something's still there.

IMITATION OF LIFE

Thanks to John Effay for bringing this piece about the apparent 'evolution' of prions to my attention. I loove this sort of shit.

As I've mentioned before in a past post: viruses aren't actually living things; they're mostly aggregates of DNA/RNA and proteins. However, they do 'evolve' - change through time due to environmental pressures (natural selection) - and this gives the illusion that they are alive in some way. Scientists and writers often talk about viruses as if they were alive - it's an easy habit to get into - I think that the presence of one or other nucleic acid (the chemicals of "Life" ye gods!) in their structure-system and the fact that they use them to piggyback a host cell's replicative systems adds to this illusion; it makes them seem as if they are 'parasites' of some sort - albeit v. minimalist ones. If they are parasites, then they're chemical ones.

I find it a lot more exciting that they're not alive; that systems can be (are) self-organising.

Now, prions are purely protein-based; there are no nucleic acids involved. They're the next step down from viruses in terms of complexity. They don't replicate (make copies of themselves) in the same way as viruses; instead they convert the non-toxic analogue of themselves into the toxic/'infectious'/biologically disruptive prion form by inducing three-dimensional changes in the structure of their benign protein-cousin. It's like a game of Tig: "Touch: you're It. Touch: you're It." and so on. So, what we see as an 'infection' is actually a mass stereochemical change - a mexican wave - that sweeps through a protein population. Chemical shapeshifting.

Of course, this happens all the time in chemical systems, but we only notice it when it manifests itself as illness. What has now been identified is that, perhaps, there are more than two possible prion shape-states in a population - that there are other other forms which occur in far lower numbers, but these become the predominant form when they are moved to a new/different chemical environment which allows them to flourish (natural selection). They seem to 'adapt' or 'evolve' - to take over - when circumstances allow.

What has actually evolved here is language - the word "evolve" has itself evolved over time to absorb new implications, to include, for example, sub-sets of biological matter rather than entire living things. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Charles Weissmann, who said: "On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and adaptive change in prions as you see in viruses." However, I think my reservations to that statement are mainly in the churlish realm of semantics, though, not bio-science.

What's so surprising (to me, anyway) is the way that scientists seem sufficiently surprised by these findings to make statements like "This means that this pattern of Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active." Well, duh. Darwinian principles do seem to apply on a multitude of levels any system - (biological, chemical, physical, social, theoretical) - where entities within a population in that system can exist in varying 'states' of potentiality - it really wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find they were universal.

But maybe we - as living, sentient things - are just trying to project our own 'livingness' onto The Inert. Anthropomorphising the universe by reimagining it in our own image. Maybe that's the only way we can make sense of stuff.

Still, if we do live in a Multiverse or an infinite n-D bubble-matrix or whatever we're calling it this week, then might not universes themselves be subject to Darwinian space-time principles? Only the most stable and robust will persist and become populated with physical matter.

Anyone who's tracked the changes in UK Bass music thru D n B, Speed-Garage, UKG, Grime, Dubstep, Funky...can see Darwinian responses to environmental changes (Too 'blokey', too 'girly', Police busts, changes in drug preferences, smoking bans, too 'blokey' (repeat: cycle)). Is this not the basis of the Reynolds-Fisher Dancemusic GrandadNuum? We even use the world "evolution", as if Music carries memes, tropes, ancestral DNA and is itself alive.

Which, of course, it is.