GENTLEFORCE: "SACRED SPACES"

Great to see our old friend Eli from Sydney back on the scene again. Long-term Kid Shirt readers may remember his Gentle Force blog from 2 or 3 years back. Eli fell off the map for a while, but I'm glad to see he's back blogging again recently (love that installation with Lukasz Karluk!), but - not only that - he has just unleashed his first album - "Sacred Spaces" - as part of the POWWOW series on Feral Media.



Perhaps "unleashed" is, you know, the wrong word; this is - as his working moniker suggests - for the most part a very gentle-sounding album. Actually, parts of it are rather bloody lovely. The music is unpretentious and often somewhat unassuming - and is all the better for that.

I like this record loads better than the Rene Hell LP; though it's extremely unfair to try'n compare two artists who undoubtedly have very different sets of intentions/methodologies/etc I do think there are some rough parallels here in that both are playing in a vaguely similar arena - minimal(-ish) 'home-listening' electronics that for one reason or another reference/echo other older ancestral e-forms...okay, that's a pretty wide berth and I'm undoubtedly stretching things a lo-o-o-o-t here, but I am left wondering why Eli's attempts sound more successful and well-rounded to my broken old ears...

Actually, I'm really not sure why I like this album as much as I do. I know Eli via the internet - never met him in person - so I have no real obligation to say nice things about him or his work, but this CD really was a rather pleasant surprise when I heard it. I'm loathe to mention New Age or early/old school Chill Out since they often carry certain negative/pejorative connotations, but there's no getting round the fact this album carries an echo of those tropes n forms, but - fuck me - it's bucketloads better than anything you'll hear tinkling and a-swirling out of the crystal shops of Glastonbury Town. I think Loki'll love this.

There are at least three really cracking tracks here.

Opening track "Learning To Forgive" sounds like, well, something off Ashra's mid-70's "New Age of The Earth" LP filtered through a post-Dubstep sensibility. (Eli was, in fact, a member of Sydney's Southern Steppa Crew from 2006-08, who ran the Submerged night at the Abercrobie - an early-adopter Austepper)

A hestiant organ-motif circles around tentative glissando-like sounds and deep space-probe drones. When some beats finally appear, they're reticent to the point of being coy.

It's quietly, unimposingly fucking gorgeous.

Virgin-Era Gottsching or solo Peter Baumann meets Sun Electric. Early Orb or Space without the dicking about. Spacious, unflashy and elegantly simple.

Five or six plays and I'm still getting goosebumps.



"Ode To Moritz" is the album's centrepiece and it's exactly what it says on the label: a slowstepping, hiss-and-echo-smeared 13min tribute to Von Oswald. Like parts of the Rene Hell LP very little happens here - things unfold at their own pace - but unlike "Porcelaine Opera" it doesn't feel hollow or uncentred. The piece is magnificantly understated.

The use of hiss n crackle should feel, I dunno, contrived, yet somehow it doesn't. There are points where Eli uses ambi-sonic elements that should, in theory, collapse into cliche, but somehow he pulls it off. I've not quite figured out why some of these things - tinkling piano, low drones, - work when he uses them, yet have me groaning when other folks wheel them out. Like I said, I've got no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt; it just seems to genuinely work when Eli does it.

You know how some pieces of music just seem so...honest - how you can just sense the love that's been poured into them - that the person behind the music really cares about what they're doing and you can feel that vibe rising up off the music? Well, I think that maybe that's how Eli pulls it off.

We've reached a stage in the game where the idea of 'authenticity' or sincerity in music - especially in electronic music - doesn't necesarily matter any more; we can play around with the idea of plasticness or roboticity or autotuned androdyne anti-emotion; we can look back at Grace Jones or whoever and applaud the deadpan distance, the ironic detachment and so forth - I mean, it's not like we're talking about The Blues - but, fuck me, it still shows sometimes when someone actually genuinely cares and they're able - somehow - to infuse that into the music without grimacing and grunting to signpost how much emotional sparkledust they're sprinkling on their product.

I think maybe Eli's an intuitive - he's a (recently) self-taught musician/producer - that he's just going with his gut-feeling here most of the time and it's paying off.

But back to "Ode to Moritz": there's so much high-end fizz and crackle on this track at the start that it feels like you're a fucking grain of dust travelling thru the grooves of a record. Then this repeating noise emerges that sounds like a record skipping against the run-out groove at the end of a hunk o'vinyl - like he's recorded the banging of a needle against the record's inner-edge - but it slowly morphs and unfilters and, in time, it becomes a muted bass-drum.

And there's a wonderful, special feeling of surprise that comes with that realisation - that of having witnessed an act of musical alchemy - an audio transformation vector trick that you blinked and missed - when your brain finally percieves what it is that it's actually hearing.

And slowly the crackle lifts and becomes a sound similar to rain falling on a tin roof. A simple single-finger melody slowly unpicks itself, other elements gradually emerge, but it's all so beautifully underplayed, partially submerged...is that a bass-line over there, is that a...? Yet there's a sense of perpetual motion - of being in a car, of being a passenger in a car moving thru someone else's movie - I see a cityscape, blurred distant buildings...I see Berlin, Detroit...a city as a distant echo of itself....and then everything folds in and inverts, yet expands at the same time; it twists and shimmers, becomes a dream.

It's rather wonderful, is Eli's own personal appropriation/refit of Basic Channelisms into something that fits his own mythology. The last few minutes are drifty, shimmery...a glide on tropical thermals.

How did we get here, out past The Dome?

Where did the city go? How did that happen - how did it just become one more memory like that?

"New Dawn" starts almost unpromisingly - with wind-chimes and distant bird-song - but the track gradually opens itself up into a swirl of sound, a goosebumpy gauze, as if the track - the music - is folding back in on itself (I keep using variations on that phrase, but it feels right in some way), like fabric floating, slowly twisting on the wind. It sounds like a synth is playing or something, but I'm honestly not sure exactly what it is...but...but it eventually becomes subsumed by wavering, wobbly chorus-effects, so that the track seems to flicker and vibrate, an eyeball playing tricks on itself. R.E.M.-music.

And then before you really grok on how he's done it, what sounds like an oboe - but maybe it's his wife Lauren on melodica? - suddenly slides out of the mix. It's like a magic trick. A piece of musical conjuring. And is that a guitar...and a bass guitar too...? I'm not sure, but it's turned into some sort of gorgeous psychedelicised Virginia Astley garden chamber-piece. Sunlight on floaty white lace. A tea-party.

Lovely.

Those are my three favourites, I think. But, you know, the others are pretty good too. A couple of the others are really creeping up on me.

How did he do that?

Because I did what I did - what I always do - because I make judgements and extrapolations that can sometimes misrepresent an artist - I asked Eli if he could make some sort of statement about his own music to act as a balance, rather than just inflict my own biased daydreams - my opinions - on you:

This has been the first release I have done and its something that has taken me quite some time to make. I have taken in a lot of personal experiences, some beautiful, some sad, and tried to re-create these moments through sound. The album, for me, is like revisiting the past and places that I had these special moments at. Some of these places, or spaces so to speak, are real and I can revisit physically, but other experiences are beyond that... they were felt/experienced through dreams or visions. I have tried to capture the feeling and atmospheres that these moments had and channel this into my music. I wanted to make a album that would take the listener sonically to these spaces and for them to hopefully experience something special... something sacred.

Also... I’m drawn to music that has a physical presence. I like music that has weight to it and warmth. I’m drawn to music that, when played at decent volume, you can feel in your body just as much as hearing it. Soundsystem music (dub/jungle/dubstep) has had a big influence on me but also artists such as Earth, Boris, GAS, Eleh, Murcof, Stephen O’Malley, Moritz Von Oswald... all artists that concentrate on making physical music, music that is designed to vibrate the body in various ways. I feel that this is a important aspect in my own music. I want to create music that consumes listeners when they hear it live or at home.

Hope that gives you some insight into what the album is about. I have started to write another album as well as working on a few new projects that will be released under a different name. Will keep you updated.



Earth, Boris, O'Malley, etc...heh: bet you didn't expect to hear some of those names, didja?

I think Eli's created something here that works on a whole bunch of different levels. And even if you just wanna treat it on the most superficial of those - as some sort of late-era chill-out album, then I think he's probably just made one of the best fucking chill-out albums in a long while.

But it's a lot more than that.

It's certainly an album that grows in stature. Keep your eye on this guy.

LUCAS AGUIRRE

*Woah* Some v. nice images here, by Lucas Aguirre.

Thanks to the ever-benign Bradley Sands for pointing me at these.

UNTITLED SKETCH FOR SOMETHING-OR-OTHER

Ah, just dicking around...thinking, doodling, smoking cigarettes, playing around with a photo I took tonight of an old tractor exhaust-pipe and transforming it into a sketch of...something...

ANNAPURNA ILLUSION

Annapurna Illusion

Sat at the evershifting overlap betn The Ecstatic and The Ominous.

Sometimes, like Michael Karoli caught in a neverending multitrack'd dervish-ocd-solo.

Sometimes, not.

"Dance of The Mesozoic":



Also:

Here.

And here.

AAVIKKO

Some Finnish synthpop: yes, of course, that's what I need to motivate and cheer myself up on an otherwise uninspiring monday evening.

Hmmm, perhaps some Aavikko might get the ol' writing juices flowing.

I'd convinced myself that Aavikko had called it a day some time back, but they seem pretty active right now. Good for them.

And, surely that's not Tomi Leppänen from Circle, etc infamy, I hear you asking. Oh yes. FYI: Tomi's one of my all-time favourite living drummers, the Finnish Jaki Lieberzeit - a human metronome who occasionally rocks a Green Hornet style face-mask whilst playing.

And so, to work!

BRADLEY SANDS: "MY HEART SAID NO, BUT THE CAMERA CREW SAID YES!"

Bradley's new book: My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!

Buy it now!

An "unnamed Lib-Dem Strategist" comments on Nick Clegg's performance in Party Leader Debate #2:

"... we didn't suffer from second album syndrome."

"Second Album Syndrome"? Actually, I always thought it was Third Album Syndrome, but still, an interesting choice of words. Not one you normally expect from a political party.

Is this anything to do with Brian Eno working for them as an advisor? (I think he also provided the music for their recent political broadcast)

RENE HELL: "PORCELAIN OPERA"

There's been a bit of a buzz about the new Jeff Witscher album on Type.



Grateful to finally get the opportunity to hear it, but unfortunately I really didn't like it that much.

Some plus points first: it's, uh, beautifully produced, sequenced, packaged. And it's nice and short. 34 minutes: that's a *proper* length for an album.

Parts of the record are relentlessly dull, I'm afraid. "IV" is possibly the worst offender: it unrolls slowly, not much happens - sure, I get the point of it - but it lacks any sort of poignancy or delicacy; and it's pretty low on timbral colour. I'm sure it's meant to be muted and minimal, but instead it comes off as hollow and uninteresting - a sort of monochrome, one-dimensional Terry Riley-eqsue affair. I'm not getting any sort of narrative whatsoever off this. That in itself could probably be interesting - a track in which all meaning is sucked out - an absence; a negation - but this just strikes me as an exercise in something.

Opening tracks are often meant to ease you into an album: "Razor" starts with a repetively lurching synthsound - which is pleasant enough in itself - but the 'quirky', delay-effected voices that spin in and out of the mix soon start to grate. This track isn't exactly big on ideas. The bubbling liquid sounds that infiltrate the second half of the piece are quite, well, 'nice', but that short-delay sound irks somewhat. There's also a drifting quasi-organ sound that reminds me a bit of a sequence on side two of Kevin Ayer's "Confessions of Dr. Dream" LP. But now I want to listen to that, not this.

"Prize Mischief Hold" sounds like an old Throbbing Gristle B-Side, with Chris Carter dicking around on his Roland while Gen does his nasal-y whine-y thing in the background through backwards reverb, yet more delay, etc. Again, why would I want to hear this when I could go back to the source, listen to an old TG or Normal track? The accompanying PR piece makes great play about how a lot of modern electronics are rooted in kitsch and referentiality (whereas this isn't), but I'm not exactly hearing much here that sounds 'new' or challenging or even particularly interesting to me. This fails for me for exactly the same reasons why a lot of the Ghostbox releases score so low on my own personal Ipsos-Mori Worm.

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be old, y'know: too many things remind you of other things that you've already heard. And - I'm sorry - but mere 'context' or rolling out the H-Word doesn't necessarily transform something a bit lame and half-arsed into The Emperors New Soup, irregardless of what certain philosibloggers might think.

Sometimes I think it's a bit about who your mates are than the quality of the music or its conceptual underpinnings.

Still, I can't fault the production here. But damn it - I can't think of much else to say.

"C. G. Mask" is more of the same: repetitive, minimal synthline, bubbling oscillators and treated vocals. It's all very...nice. But, again, there's something missing from this - it's curiously unengaging...about two-and-a-half minutes in there's a brief Tangerine Dream (Virgin Era) interjection that leaves me wanting to listen to "Rubycon" or something. This is all, so...errrm: frustrating. I can't put my finger on what this LP is lacking which makes the originals so fullsome.

Perhaps it's a sense of adventure or exploration. The idea that there's a future out there waiting to be grasped, rather than a past ready to be recalled or reclaimed.

I'm sure this album'll find a home with people who dig that whole coffee-table electronics thing - safe, middle-stream, middle-class avant. Stuff that reminds you of the good stuff. IF this is pastiche, then it doesn't work for me. If it's not pastiche, then it's startlingly bereft of ideas.

"L. Minx" is more of the same: elements from the previous tracks re-arranged, re-jiggled. More of that annnnnnoying metalicised short-delay sound. The filtered voices don't sound sinister or alien or disturbing or funny; they just irritate.

They don't tell me a story.

Enough already.

Go and buy an old Cluster or Harmonia album or else tell me I'm wrong. I don't really mind which.

FROM THE OFFICE OF KEK-W

Damn! Where did I put those paper-clips?

Time for a spring-clean, I think.

MELUSINE: "STARSHINE TENDRILS"

Darren + Jenna = Melusine.

"Starshine Tendrils" is still a work-in-progress: here.

Obviously, I'm biased where Darren's work is concerned: but it's interesting to me when - on one side of the musical fence - we're seeing a (very) cautious 'psychedicisation' of Dub/UK Urban Bass, but here we see Melusine (equally cautiously) inching towards placing a quasi-Dub undertow under a multi-layered psych-drone piece.

BLOSSOM RUST TAPES

Blossom Rust Tapes of Wisconsin.

"Light Waveth and Light Darketh": More *twinkle* and smeary mirror-warpage.

"Tonight The Sky Spoke Back": accousmatic chamber-music made by sentient sculptures and mobiles. The sound of personal-organisers and palm-tops having a conversation.

I like this a lot.

YASUDAH SOLO: "RESTMUSIC-433"

Our good friend and long-time Kid Shirt favourite, the ever-busy Yasudah Solo mailed me this morning to tell me he'd just put up his latest video - a collage of recent live performances:



Yas says if you folks like it, then couldja "tweak an erection commentariteit zone hehe..."

In the small hours last night I suddenly remembered that my, er, (*inwardly cringes*) BFS-nominated story "Cone Zero" features a Numbers Station with a v. sinister twist. I guess I must've summoned that up out of my own childhood radio-listening days.

There's no mystery on DAB, etc. No static , no hiss. It's crap. A thousand different local trebly-sounding radio-stations all playing the same shitty mix of 80's Oldies and Cheryl Cole.

You can still buy it here. "Cone Zero", not DAB.

Apologies for the blatant self-promotion, but if I don't do it, then...well, you know. Got to at least make some pretense at making a living out of this!

Ah, fuck it: back catalogue here in the "books by" section.

A really great old Radio-4 program here about "The Lincolnshire Poacher" Numbers Station. Some really terrific (and pretty fucking spooky-sounding!) archive recordings, featuring a guest-appearance from Akin Fernandez, curator of "The Conet Project".

Jeez: I remember sending an Orchestra of Doom demo to Akin back in the mid-90s.

He faxed us back but didn't bite lol.

Also remember hearing these on the radio when I was a kid back in the 60s and being completely baffled - weird glockenspiel chimes or an odd musical fanfare followed by streams of numbers or repeated words in a foreign language thru a smear of static. Still makes me kinda shiver.

THE YETTIES NUMBERS STATION

Sometimes things get a little strange round here.

A few minutes ago I just built a quick digital mangling set-up - as part of Project O - in order to take three sets of random musical bars from a song by The Yetties and use this data to fuel a granulation/transformation mulch-process.

The Yetties are, I should explain, a well-known Folk group from Yetminster, a village about 5 miles from Yeovil just over the Dorset border. Even tho they're from (ptui) Dorset they're local and so fitted my conceptual criteria for the piece. I set the system in motion, tweaking and mixing it to create various soundstreams that I could then record and review. Anything useful-sounding would then get edited and fed back into another array of software and used as a backing-track. I did about 2 or 3 five-minute parses...but nothing really jumped out at me, tbh.

Basically, I'd succeeded in turning The Yetties into an approximation of the closing credits outro-music from Gerry Anderson's UFO. A sort of deep-space drone. Okay-ish, but kind of generic and not what I was really looking for.

The track I'd used as raw source material (though nothing remained of the original) was The Yettie's version of "The Lincolnshire Poacher".

But then, completely by accident, I discovered that "The Lincolnshire Poacher" is also the name of a (now defunct) Numbers Station. Apparently, the station played a couple bars from the song as its station-ident. How weird. I wonder what the etiology of that was?

I'm thinking now that I won't erase the piece from my hard-drive, but maybe instead I'll record my wife reading out some number-strings used by the station and scuzz up the piece - 'radiofy' it - to create an artificial/bogus Yeovil Numbers Station piece.

Sometimes you just gotta go with these things.

AND THIS WEEK'S SURGICAL INTERVENTION IS:

If things were a bit quiet round here last week, then it was mainly cos of this:



A chalazion (cyst) inside the upper eye-lid which had to be cut out. I've had it done a couple times before, but - believe me - excising one of these buggers isn't the most pleasant of experiences. They evert the eye-lid, clamp the eye open with a frame and inject a local into the lid. Then it turns into a sort of Cronenbergesque torture-porn scenario: you have no choice but to watch while the surgeon goes to work with a scalpel on your lid. Brain sends recursive "Eye! Knife! Eye! Knife! Eye! Knife! Eye! Knife!" panic-mantras direct to adrenal-gland while nurses try and stop you running for the door. "Try and stay still," says the surgeon, helpfully, "I wouldn't want to pop your eyeball."

While he was there he fixed another, smaller cyst in the lower lid. Another injection, more slicing. Vision goes pink like an early 60's Corman E. A. Poe movie with trick optics and Vincent Price.

Heh. Shaping up to be an interesting month, surgery-wise, what with having a cancerous ulcer thang hacked from mah head a couple weeks back with a customised potato-scraper.

Still, it stops life from getting boring.

Blurred vision notwithstanding, I spent the w/end pushing on and finally put the lid on a biggish writing project. Not that big by some people's standards, but pretty big by mine. (I've still got a couple of novella/novellettes stacked up and circling somewhere over Luton Airport. No wait: they've been grounded by volcanic ash) This all goes contrary to my current philosophy, so have made a pact with myself not to write anything over two pages for the rest of the year.

Still, finishing a biggish, full-on project always leaves me kinda hollowed-out and restless, yet strangely relieved.

Wish I'd read this before I'd written it:



(The disappearance of Execution-as-Spectacle, the de-physicalisation of punishment, abstract shame felt by the dispenser-of-punishment, etc, etc)

Meanwhile, have already started ramping up some other stuff, incl. Project O. Spending this week hacking audio n suchlike; I'd like to post a picture of what we've been up to, but I'd better run this past Farmer Glitch first. Or maybe I'll just wait 'til it's done and in situ.

It's pretty awesome. Plus I get to write an Artist's Mission Statement type thing, which sounds awfully grand and a bit fucking precious, except for the fact that - basically - The Farmer and I are just doing what we've always done. Which is dicking around with stuff.

Meanwhile, just as I'm writing this, Kid Kid Shirt comes running in and tells me she's just earned her Artist Badge from Brownies.

Which is waaay cooler than anything I'm doing.

Yeah.

CATH AND PHIL TYLER

Cath and Phil Tyler play The Cube, Bristol, tonight.

Shared a bill with Phil and Cath a couple years ago: lovely people and extremely talented. Do go and check 'em out.

Yes, it's Folk music. Get over it.

Here's some records by them.

Next Big Thing: A8-sized fanzines.

LINDA LEWIS: "ROCK-A-DOODLE-DOO"

Ah, fuck it. It's that kinda day...

RONNIE LANE: "THE POACHER"

Sitting out on the step in the sunshine with Kid Kid Kid Shirt (aged 5) eating crisps and listening to "Headquarters" by The Monkees. Side two. It really doesn't get much better than that.

Except, for - maybe - this:



A song I keep coming back to. Maybe even a song to live your life by, a philosophy.

And, no, Paul Weller, you'll never write anything an nth as good as this.

An EBM Opera?

Jeez, Martin, you really shouldn't've said that...

Red flag to a bull.

Apple Vs Adobe: Round two.

Why does article not mention HTML5? I know it's still a way off, but it's a fuck-off to Flash.

Confess I know next-to-nothing about Apple's own codecs, etc, probably because I generally avoid their products like a plague bubo.

Being a counter-intuitive guy I'm currently teaching myself Flash even though logic dictates it's probably on its way out at some point, But, hey, so's everything else.

Including Steve Jobs.

ON NOT LIKING CHRIS CUNNINGHAM'S WORK ANY MORE

Weird how...I dunno, how bored I am by the idea of Chris Cunningham.

Maybe "bored" is wrong; maybe I mean "disinterested" or something. I'm not sure.

I mean, I'm sure Mr. Cunningham is probably a lovely and talented bloke who (still) does all sorts of zany, interesting audiovisual stuff, but I...well, I just don't particularly care any more. I'll probably get various mails now telling me how great project-x or y is, or that I really should check out [fill in random title here] 'cos I'll love it.

But, you know, I just can't be bothered. I find myself flicking quickly past pages in magazines that mention him, or clicking the Back button on a browser to exit web-pages that contain his name.

I've no idea why that might be; perhaps it's linked to the Squarepusher Phenomenon I touched on a couple weeks back. It's like, errrrm, certain things just seem to hit a sell-by date in my cerebellum. Or maybe reach a saturation point of some sort. Even though they might still be, you know, 'good', they go past some sort of Interest Threshold and start becoming mildly irritating. I know how fickle and twattish that makes me sound.

It's not just Cunningham, but a vast stack of other things, so I'm not just randomly picking on the poor guy. I guess it's because he's got some new project on the go that his pr profile is going back up, so I've seen his name a bit more recently and that's highlighting the phenomenon. I'll be honest: I can't even bear to read about what his new project might be. That's how bad it's got.

It's fucking pig ignorance on my part, I know. And it sounds really prickish. But I can't help myself.

I'm now more interested in why I might feel this way about certain artists than about the work they do. Yeah, I know: get a fucking life.

It's not just straightforward boredom, it's...it's an odd, abstract, almost semi-apathy type thing and I know if I push myself into engaging with their work any more it'll tip over into full-on irritation.

It's weird and it's stupidly neurotic. This whole thing is something that I've not wanted to deal with or address.

I had to really force myself to even write this.

METAL MICKEY ANNUAL 1982

"TO KATHY ON CHRISTMAS 1973 FROM LIZZY DRIP"

Definitely Canonical!

An Open University tee-zeer.

FRANK STALLONE: "PEACE IN OUR LIFE"

"Tomorrow's an angel / watching us all".

"Rambo 2" makes a reference to "The Quiet War", so is therefore canonical.

Shit!

Just realised I may have accidentally made some EBM records in '88/'89...

Need to find a time-machine quickly and re-write history.

If you suddenly find you've got more heads than you woke up with this morning or your family start resembling dino-hominids, then that's my fault. Sorry.

*Starts airbrushing photos frantically so that it appears like he is wearing a shirt - a grey military-looking shirt - but a shirt nevertheless*

Posterity is not yet ready for my nipples.

RAIME: S/T EP

Blackest Ever Black is a brand new label that comes courtesy of my old FACT.mag mucker Kiran Sande. And - unlike my own nano non.boutique-imprint 19F3 - this is a *proper* record label: y'know, real vinyl n everything.

The first release - an EP by Raime - is due to drop later in the year and verrrrry interesting it is too. Althought it ain't the full-on mulch of Dubstep and Doom Metal that set my Kek-sense a'tingling when I first saw the name of the label, I have to admire the restraint demonstrated by it's creators in denying any obvious macho impulse.

Kiran mentions the word "devotional" in his email and that probably nails the first track to some extent.

"Retread" is the sound of haunted cloisters - morbid Gregorian chants - a skeletal choir slowly rising up through the flagstones of an abandoned medieval cathedral in time to a minimal, relentlessly-undeviating drum pattern. Love the clarinet that briefly appears and seems to float over the altar; reminds me of vintage mid-80's Coil. Reverb and digital delay a-go-go.

On "This Foundry" (some sort of Test Department/Einstürzende reference there, maybe?) the drums are more clunky and clattery-sounding; a fractured bass-synth pharps between circling fragments of a psalm. Slowly, the different elements start to shift into focus, almost threatening to lock into a groove - but it's like ghosts trying to dance; phantoms from different decades moving through one another, never quite occupying the same physical space. Niice.

"We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage of Many Systems" is equally smeary and unhurried: luminous shapes slowly emerge from under a gauze of reverb - Skull Disco smashed on sleeping-tablets; a loom of light. It's like the audio equivalent of a Marian Zazeela lite-show, sounds shifting back and forth - a glacial lava-lamp underpinned by drummers from some futuristic Zero-Click anti-tribe. I think this is probably my favourite. Yeah.

The twelve hits sometime in September.

A ringtone of John Cale's "The Jeweller"...?????

Man, that's so wrong...

REVOLTING COCKS, ETC

And we're off and running:

Loki kicks off The Official EBM-Binge with a reminiscence on Revolting Cocks.

HACKER FARM ROAD-TRIP

Off to a car-boot sale with Farmer Glitch in a minute, but - fools that we are - we are *eeeek* taking our children with us. Anticipating some sort of pre-teen insurrection involving ice-cream and old He-Man toys. Or a middle-aged tug-of-war tween the Framer and I over some obscure Rhumba 78 and a vintage Nintendo games-console lol.

Actually, I'm on a mission to buy the crappiest EBM record I can find.

Then we're off, hopefully, to do some field-recordings in a milking-parlour. Animals, agricultural equipment: that sort of thing, while the kids fall flat on their faces in cow-pats. Kids and cow-shit: it's a little known law of physics.

All in a day's work for the Hacker Farm crew.

NATIONAL EBM WEEK

Loki on Twitter: "EBM has to be the least cool genre ever, right? All those ski goggles and shouty camp."

Well, long time readers will be aware that I looove Belgian New Beat. EBM was its grunty, sweaty, stripped-to-the-waist, homophilic, slightly-less-porn-obsessed Euro-cousin. I liked it less than BNB, though sometimes it's a slightly hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. A record pitched up or down slightly could easily switch genres.

There is a strange vibe floating in the air this morning - I can sense it: yessss floating there, a cheesy one-week zeitgeist just out of reach - and this is all Loki's fault:

I want to hear lots of EBM records this week. It's time has come. Again.

Your mission, dear reader: throw your fave EBM tracks in the direction of Kid Shirt...find some cool, lost EBM in your local charity-shop and post it.

Make an EBM track!

Last one to take his shirt off and make grunting noises is a rotten egg!



(I'm so used to hearing the pitched-down BNB version of this; that mix positively gallops. There seems to be a new 2009 mix which is kinda slowish and Gothicky. Quelle surprise! How many times (and in how many forms) has this record been released!?)



"Pain! Sweet pain!" LOL

EGGBOY LIT.FLASHBACK, ETC

Hmmm, yeah... sorry I keep posting YouTubes - seems kinda flimsy - but been digging this piece by Eggboy that Pete Um flung out into th'ether earlier:



I was Tweetin' a bit about this earlier - and 'pologies for repeatin' - but what I liked about the music and the imagery was that (and I mean this in a totally non-pejorative way) is that they're both very unassuming - unflashy, yet kinda quietly touching - it's soft n drifty - a little dreamlike - but also quietly propulsive. I dig the sense of onwards motion it invokes. Its implied inner narrative.

But what really got the hairs climbing up my arms was the fact that both the music and the vid seemed at points to uncannily soundtrack/physicalise a short story that I'm currently grinding down to its end-point. Watching/listening to this was like seeing a work-in-progress trailer for something that's currently only being shown in the inside of my skull. Yeah, I know I'm only projecting my own intentions on someone else's work, buuu-ut there are a coupla blink-n-miss-'em scenes that are almost frame-pure re-enactments of things I typed up a couple weeks back. Weirdly synchronistic.

Irregardless of all that, it holds up v. beautifully as a piece in it's own right.

I'm told that Ed (right??) specialises in blurred/damaged photography/8mm work. Nice one. Another ally in the anti-digital war. (Well, kinda...after all, we're all slaves to YouTube, etc)

The EggLab. Another Cambridge boy, or so it seems. nuffink wrong wi' that.

LO-FI IBIS

SURFIN' TURNIPS: "CIDER COMMANDO"

Heh: and they said Cidercore was dead:

FAKE AUTO-DELETIVE NEIL YOUNG SONGS, ETC

Been having a few musical dreams recently. Kinda sad to admit that I dreamt about this a couple nights ago:



(Wasn't the original cover-art actually designed to fade away? - just like my memories of the dream have also partially faded. Auto-deletive music is something you normally associate with someone like Basinski or The Caretaker, not Neil Young, yet the word "fade" (and "memory" and "past") features quite a bit in his own personal mythology...)

I think I may have had one or two other Neil Young dreams down through the years, but they've completely gone now. Can't say he features frequently in my musicaldreamwyrld.

In the most recent dream, I was given unprecedented access to - or might have even been present during performance or recording of - unreleased/unheard tapes sourced from the Time Fades Away tour...

My own memory of the music that I heard during the dream (basically, bogus Neil Young Ditch-Era songs) is now pretty foggy, but I can just about remember this weird rolling Boogie-riff thing that was oddly forshortened by a couple of notes so that it never quite resolved itself and kept changing its time-frame/tempo - going in and out of phase with drums, etc - with a drunken Young-esque howling falsetto-cum-croaking vocal: "You keeeeeeep awwwn / you jus' keeeeeeep awwn / keeeeeep awn goin'...awhhhhhhhhhwwwwllll...!" with discordant harmonica interjections that sounded like they were being flanged or something, and the whole damn thing sounding like it was recorded in a pea-soup fog with a booming brass-band/circus bass-drum sound.

Most avant thing I've heard in a while tbh; and it suggested a whole bunch of possibilities and 'otherness' to me at the time. The other songs are long gone from my synapses now.

I'll've completely forgotten about this song too by this time next week.

And the post also.

HENRY COWELL: "THE BANSHEE"

PROJECT O IS GO!

Got a package addressed to "Ken W" yesterday.

See! It's starting to happen: I'm starting to transmogrify now - I'm turning into new jap alterno-ego Ken W! - and I have no control over it.

Been meaning to post the last couple evenings, but the mysterious Project O (no: not the soundtrack to Calamari Boy O...) suddenly kicked off for us Hacker Farm bods, thus requiring the remainder of my elderly attention-span...

This is one of the, uh, local-based projects I mentioned a few weeks ago and it promises to be verrry cool indeed. Farmer Glitch hath been toiling over a white-hot soldering iron making stuff...now ideas and audio (yes, much, much audio; many hours, in fact) doth need to be generated in a relatively short period of time. But we are off and running.

More info as n when this comes together; maybe some in situ photos or something...

This weekend we're trying to get some, er, fairly unusual field-recordings done that will hopefully fold into the project, also maybe some scavenging for physical raw materials....

RIP MALCOLM McLAREN

TV DOA

TV blew up this evening - which doesn't bother me much tbh; but kids are on Easter Holiday, so we could be looking at a major insurrection unless this situation is at least partially remedied. Actually, the fucking thing was only three years old - in fact, I had one TV that lasted 19/20 years! What are they making them from these days? Fookin' flatpack cardboard? - and yes, I know, I'm starting to sound like Mark E. Smith.

So, Chris gets the old portable TV out of the attic that I'd bought for my mum before she died. It's 13+ years old and has been sitting in a damp old roofspace for Christknowshowlong, but - fuck me! - she plugs it into the Freeview box and the damn thing works.

Not only that, but - despite being a, I dunno, a 14" CRT (the tube's deeper than the screen is wide!) - both the picture and the sound are, uh, far superior to the bloody flatscreen that just went fzzzzt. Once again the lie that digital-is-better is torpedoed out of the water.

Not sure if I can even be bothered to replace the old one. Fuck it: I like having a tiny analogue telly again.

Anyway, the point I was going to make was: while plugging it in, I catch the arse-end of Romancing the Stone and what about that bit, huh, where the Kathleen Turner writer-novelist character is coming back from the grocery-store and everyone in her neighbourhood - even the bums! - is cheering/clapping/gladhanding n congratulating her on her latest novel as she passes them on the way back to her appartment?

I mean, that soooo happens to me everytime I put a new story/novella/thing out there.

The local hoodies all cheer n highfive n knuckle-joust me as I pass: "Duuuude, you are the king of Faux-Jewish Meta.Fict - word!", "Way to go, bruv! Keep pounding them keys! Me and the guys think you're the bomb - don't we, fellas?" (*muffled background cheer from nearby boarded-up crackhouse*), "Your blog's a hoot, man; cracks me and me mum up right proper! She thinks you're well lush, by the way! Can she Blu Toof ya sometime?"

Yep, bang on the number, that scene. And, yes, Blu Toof is a local term for a certain sexual act.

In fact I'm about due to wrap up m'latest 'opus', so can barely wait for all mah local homies to shower me with their blessings and good wishes. It allus brings a lump to me throat knowing my whole neighbourhood is rooting for me.

Awww, you guys...

ESSENTIAL READING

"NEW YORK CITY BOY"

EXILE ON MIDDLE STREET

A good day for celebrity doppelgangers in Yeovil today.

First: a shifty - possibly confused - looking Terry Pratchett was spotted skulking outside the estate agents, complete with wide-brimmed hat and everything! Even a sort of multi-tiered waxed Burberry coat-thingy. How wackily tres Pratchett!

Having once stood next to the real-deal once in a book-shop in Salisbury ("Hello, I'm Terry Pratchett," he said to the lady behind the counter while she was right in the middle of serving me. Huh? Wait your turn, shorty!) I can confirm that this lookalike was also similarly height-challenged. It was quite uncanny, really.

And, in the coffee-shop - ye Gods! - surely that's Keith Richards circa 1971!!! "Exile on Main Steet" n all that...

And not just Keef, but with him: a slightly-gone-to-seed ex-60's model/Anita Pallenberg type wife in tow, plus three kids - all boys! - and all with miniature replica Jeff Beck haircuts!

"So, yurrh, I'm, ahr, getting a new-ww band togevver, in't I, maaan."

Teabonics.

Or maybe that should be "Teabonnicks" or something.

There's a dictionary of Teabonic Terminology here.

"We are awake now" LOL. Barely, though, by the look of it!

Proud to be a Soiciallest Radicle, you marooons.

MY MORNING

Very aware that it's April Fool's Day today, but here goes...

Anyway, it turned out to be Basal Cell Carcinoma, which - despite the ominous-sounding name - rarely metastasises. "It's the nicest cancer you can have," laughed the oncologist. But it does tend sometimes to ulcerate, leaving raw pits in the skin, etc. So slice n dice, it is, then.



Turns out the guy in my practice who specialises in the dermatology stuff is part of an award-winning UK skin-oncology team. Yet he's based here in tiny little Yeovil! Who woulda thunk it? Plus, he's a lovely bloke!

So, it's an out-patients type jobby. "I had visions of you using some sort of potato-scraper on me," I tell him. The nurse laughs and says, "yes, that's exactly what it is!" She offers to shave off all my hair. "G'wan," she goads me, revving up the shaver. "Lemme at it." I've very tempted.

So he scrapes and scratches away until he's done, while (somewhat surreally) Eartha Kitt singulates on the CD-Player in the background: "Muuu-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-d-d ab-b-o-a-a-aoa-aoa-tuh the bo-y-y-y-yyah..."

(The doc takes some before-and-after photos for his records, so I ask him if I could have a copy. "I know it seems daft," I tell him, "but I'm an, uhh, 'artist' and, well..." But, bless him, he emails some hi-res jpegs over to me. I'm going to use them in something...)

Job done!



He then cauterised it with silver nitrate.

Ow. ow. ow. Owww.

No Captain's hats (or berets) for me this weekend! "Thank God," mutters wife when I tell her of scuppered hatware plan.

Silver nitrate: I'm like a living photograph now.

PLOGUE CHIPSOUNDS

Wow. Plogue Chipsounds Blog. Via Mr. Bauler.

Fascinating stuff. And code too!

CAP'N JAMES

More Captain's Hats in Pop: