El Arándano

Myrrh - Myrrh (Soft Abuse)
Sarin Smoke - Vent (Mie Music)
Cut Hands - Black Mamba (Susan Lawly)
Laurie Spiegel - Expanding World (Unseen Worlds)
Juju & Jordash - Techno Primitivism (Dekmantel)
Gato Barbieri - In Search Of The Mystery (ESP-Disk)
Birch Cooper - I Was A Teacher (Digitalis)
Matt Carlson - All Moments (NNA Tapes)
Matt Carlson - Particle Language (Draft)
Outer Space - II (Blast First Petite)
Detroit Escalator Co. - Excerpts (Peacefrog)
C. C. Hennix - Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage (Important)
Marion Brown - Geechee Recollctions/Sweet Earth Flying (Impulse!)
Ricardo Villalobos - Dependant & Happy (Perlon)
Pharoah Sanders - In The Beginning (ESP-Disk)
Henry Flynt - Ascent To The Sun (Recorded)
Infinity Window - Artificial Midnight (Arbor)
Plastic Crimewave Sound - Flashing Open (Eclipse)
Rara In Haiti - Street Music Of Haiti (Soul Jazz)
Ben Nash/Magic Lantern - Split (Blackest Rainbow)

αMT - La Banda Sonora

Can - The Lost Tapes (Spoon)
Sunflare - Ghetto Blast (Batshit)
Crystal Syphon - Family Evil (Roaratorio)
Ricardo Villalobos - Any Ideas (Perlon)
Tyndall - Traumland (Sky)
Ben Nash/Magic Lantern - Split (Blackest Rainbow)
Eleh/Duane Pitre - Split (Important)
Actress - R.I.P (Honest Jon's)
The Psychedelic Aliens - Psycho African Beat (Academy)
Otis Spann - The Biggest Thing Since Colossus (Blue Horizon)
Ultramarine - Acid (West Norwood Cassette Library)
Doubleheart - Salsa Apocalypso (Nonplus)
Jon Convex - Radar (Nonplus)
Conrad Schnitzler/Ricardo Villalobos/Max Loderbauer - Zug Reshaped (M=Minimal)
Kelan Philip Cohran & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - s/t (Honest Jon's)
Chicago Underground Duo  - 12° Of Freedom (Thrill Jockey)
Shockabilly - Colosseum (Shimmy Disc)
Cristian Vogel - The Inertials (Shitkatapult)
Jim Plotkin & KK Null - Aurora (Sentrax)
The Orb - Okie Dokie, It's The Orb On Kompakt (Kompakt)

Música Para Los Maestros De Reptiles

Portraits - Portraits (Important)
Mad River - Jersey Sloo (Shagrat)
Anna Själv Tredje - Tussilago Fanfara (Silence)
Herbcraft - Discover The Bitter Water Of Agharta (Hello Sunshine)
Herbcraft - Ashram To The Stars (Hello Sunshine)
Sunflare - Young Love (Cubic Pyramid)
Morkobot - Morbo (Supernatural Cat)
Boddika - Acid Jackson (Swamp 81)
Yob - Atma (Profound Lore)
Head Boggle - Headboggle (Spectrum Spools)
Moloko - I Am Not A Doctor (Echo)
Franco Falsini - Cold Nose (Spectrum Spools)
Chicago Underground Duo - Age Of Energy (Northern Spy)
Ufomammut - Oro Opus Primum (Supernatural Cat)
Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. - 1970-73 (Cuneiform)
Shackleton - Music For The Quiet Hour/Drawbar Organ (Woe To The Septic Heart)
Duane Pitre & Pilotram Ensemble - Organised Pitches Occurring In Time (Important)
Bitchin' Bajas - Water Wrackets (Kallistei Editions)
Bitchin' Bajas - Vibraquatic (Kallistei Editions)
Tyndall - Sonnenlicht (Sky)

Sobredosis Del Sonido

Frak - Musika Electronic (Digitalis)
Moebius - Blue Moon OST (Sky)
Fabric - A Sort Of Radiance (Spectrum Spools)
Nackt Insecten - Reality Bridge (Blackest Rainbow)
Tlaotlon - Squirt Image Flex (Trensmat)
Harmonia - Deluxe (Brain)*
VCMG - SSSS (Mute)**
Cluster & Eno - Cluster & Eno (Sky)
Cluster - Soweisoso (Sky)
Panabrite - Soft Terminal (Digitalis)
Suzanne Ciani - Lixiviation (Finders Keepers)
Total - Eternity's Beautiful Frontispiece (VHF)
Revenge - Scum.Collapse.Eradication (Osmose)
Chris Forsyth - Paranoid Cat (Family Vineyard)
Roy Montgomery - Silver Wheel Of Prayer (VHF)
Chris Forsyth & Koen Holtkamp - Early Astral (Blackest Rainbow)
Flying Saucer Attack - Flying Saucer Attack (VHF)
Red Electric Rainbow - Dark Days (Aguirre)
Sunlore - Sunlore (Tequila Sunrise)
T++ - Wireless (Honest Jon's)

*Possibly the greatest Krautrock record of them all.

**Vince Clark and Martin Gore getting their techno wiggle on. It's fucking fantastic.

El Aeroembolismo

Takehasi Kosugi - Catch Wave (Phoenix)
Richard Youngs - Amaranthine (Mie Music)
Richard Youngs - Core To The Brave (Root Strata)
Rrose - Artificial Light 1969-1909 (Sandwell District)

C.C. Hennix - The Electric Harpsichord (Dieschatchel)

Up-Tight & Anla Courtis - Hamamatsu Power (8mm)

Matsuo Ohno - I Saw The Outer Limits (EM Records)

Henry Flynt - Purified By The Fire (Locust)

Henry Flynt - Glissando No.1 (Recorded)

Cut Hands - Afro Noise EP (Artecnico)

Function - Ember (Sandwell District)

Majutsu No Niwa - Sylvania 7027 Live (8mm)

Temporal Marauder - Makes You Feel (Spectrum Spools)

Joan La Barbara - Voice Is The Original Instrument (Lovely Music)

F.C. Judd - Electronics Without Tears (Public Information)

Lula Côrtes & Zé Ramalho - Paêbirú (Shadoks)

Dominique Grimaud - Les Quatre Directions (Locust)

KPLR - Untitled (Digitalis Recordings)

Marijata - This Is Marijata (Gapophone Records)

Chief Brigadier Olu Oni & His Marathon System - Juju Marathon System Vol. 1 (Klimt)

Arrodillarse

Agathe Max - This Silver String (Xeric)
Demdike Stare - Elemental (Modern Love)
Astral Social Club - V.E.N.U.S. (ASC)
Boddika - 2727 (Swamp)
Loop Haunts - Ark (Black Acre)
Pinch & Shackleton - s/t (Honest Jon's)
Ashtray Navigations - Dedicated To The Sensory Armarda (Memoirs Of An Aesthete)
Jonas Reinhardt - The Prime Revealer (The Great Pop Supplement)
Land Of Kush Egyptian Light Orchestra - Monogamy (Constellation)
Distance - Repercussions (Planet Mu)
The Necks - Mindset (ReR Megacorp)
Charalambides - Exile (Kranky)
Elektro Guzzi - Parquet (Macro)
Skullflower - Carved Into Roses/Infinityland/Singles (VHF)
Flower/Corsano/Hejnowski - The Count Visits (Hot Cars Warp)
The Last Hurrah - Spiritual Non-Believers (Rune Grammofon)
Renegade Scanners - Hands On Future (Lal Lal Lal)
Forma - Forma (Spectrum Spools)
Jenny Hval - Viscera (Rune Grammofon)
Robert Lippok  - Redsuperstructure (Raster-Noton)

Comida Para Orejas

Astral Social Club - Generator Breaker (Dekorder)
Decoy & Joe McPhee - Oto (Bo Weavil)
Cian Nugent - Doubles (VHF)
Nirmala Rajasekar - Song Of The Veena (Innova)
Skullflower - Fucked On A Pile Of Corpses (Cold Spring)
Ashtray Navigations - Electronically Rechannelled Band & Street Choir (Apollolaan)
Truant - The Truant Accord (Memoirs Of An Aesthete)
Barn Owl - Lost In The Glare (Thrill Jockey)
Eric Carbonara & Jesse Sparhawk - Sixty Strings (VHF)
Debashish Bhattacharya - O Shakuntala! (Tugboat)
The Haxan Cloak - Observatory (Aurora Borealis)
Prince Rama - Shadow Temple (Paw Tracks)
Up-Tight - The Night Is Yours (Sloow Tapes)
Robedoor - Too Down To Die (Not Not Fun)
Hey Colossus - RRR (Riot Season)
Whitehouse - Bird Seed (Susan Lawly)
Human Eye - They Came From The Sky (Sacred Bones)
Richard Youngs & Simon Wickham-Smith - 20 Years (VHF)
Birchville Cat Motel - Came A Great Stallion Whose First Leap Sparked The Celestial Star (Don't Fuck With Magic)
The Piss Superstition - A Themepark For Whatever Happened Before (Memoirs Of An Aesthete)

El Toro Arenoso Pt.1

Sandy Bull. One of the finest and most original guitarists America has ever produced, and for my money anyway, by far and way the best of the first wave of the so-called "American primitives*". "Blend", the appositely titled opening track to his first LP, Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard) is a twenty-odd minute dialogue between Bull's extraordinary acoustic guitar and the unstoppable invention of Billy Higgins' drumkit and assorted percussives, which manages to absorb modal jazz, blues, Indian, Middle-Eastern and Nubian influences into it's untouchable whole, at times coming on like a psychedelic acoustic Bo Diddley jamming with Can in a souk. And this was in 1963.

Yes, you did read that right, 1963. In the same fucking year as the fucking Beatles wheedled and whined their insipid way into the world's consciousness, and Coltrane was still a year or so away from A Love Supreme and tentatively dipping his toe into freer, more turbulent waters, Sandy Bull was... somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere better. It's one of those records that's just too damn early, too fucking far ahead of the pack, that it seems to sit outside of the normal timeline, like a digital watch accidentally dropped in 1920 by a careless time-traveller. If this had fuzz on the guitar, it would be the exact music that Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were trying so fucking hard to make in 1968. Those free-flying raga-tinged freakouts that came a few years down the line? They started here, and very few have ever come close.

More on the eclectic, erratic, eccentric genius of Mr Bull very soon, for now, I'll leave you with the full version of Blend for yr delectation, delight and other words beginning with "d".



*What a fucking stupid term for playing the acoustic guitar. I can't decide what I hate about it most; it's utter meaningless in the face of the sheer harmonic and technical sophistication that musicians like Jack Rose or (in his early days at least) Leo Kottke employed to conjour such dense, complex clouds of sound from their instruments**, or it's semantic and lexical dubiousness, reeking as it does of such lovely concepts as "noble savage" and the like, the term's implied presumption that music rooted in folk, blues or early country is somehow backward and unsophisticated. I don't care that the sainted John Fahey himself*** coined the term, apparently in homage to the French Primitive painters, it still rankles with me, with it's aura of condescension and it's unwitting borderline offensiveness. It displays that same fucking patronising 50s/60s attitude as all those sniffy white folk fans who got all up in a froth when black people dared to play the blues on electric guitars because it wasn't "authentic". It's all fucking folk music, get over yrselves, and yr silly fucking ideas.

**Go and listen to Jack Rose's Raag Manifestos and tell me there's anything primitive about this music. Well, you can if you like, but you'd be wrong and I'd probably just tell you to fuck off.

***Sarcasm. Of the heavy handed kind.

Música En Movimiento

Chrome - Red Exposure & Blood On The Moon (Lilith)
Sandwell District - Feed Forward (Sandwell District)
Aril Brikha - Deeparture In Time (Art Of Vengeance)
Módulo 1000 - Não Fale Com Paredes (RPM)
Cut Hands - Cut Hands (Susan Lawly/Very Friendly)
Shackleton - Deadman/Fireworks (Honest Jon's)
Elemental - Messages From The Void (Runtime)
Haxan Cloak - Haxan Cloak (Aurora Borealis)
The Necks - Silverwater (ReR Megacorp)
Africa HiTech - 93 Million Miles (Warp)
Red Square - Thirty Three (FMR)
Clare Cooper - Hammeriver (Mikroton)
Honkeyfinger - Invocation Of The Demon Other (Hoarse)
Vladislav Delay Quartet - Vladislav Delay Quartet (Honest Jon's)
Electric Wizard - Black Masses (Rise Above)

Optical*8 - All Over (God Mountain)

Moon Duo - Mazes (Sacred Bones)
Richard Youngs - Beneath The Valley Of Ultrahits (Jagjaguwar)

Berg Und Talfahrt - A Night In Sana'a (Armored)
Shifted Phases - The Cosmic Memoirs Of The Late, Great Rupert J. Rosinthrope (Tresor)

Música Hielo

This week I will do all the emailing people and other things I was supposed to do last week. Stuff ran away from me a little last week, in a very good way mind, you know how it goes. But I'm a little bit the worse for wear today. Hanging in rags, to be honest, but fuck it, it's all in a good cause. Anyways, in lieu of writing anything vaguely coherent except to say Thursday night was seriously fucking good, I'd like to point yr attention to this excellent Radio 4 programme on the extraordinary, beautiful music at the Geilo Ice Festival in Norway performed entirely on equally extraordinary and beautiful instruments sculpted entirely from ice. It's up on BBC iplayer for a few days more I think, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Music That Melts

La Vuelta De Hombre Plástico

Polyrhythmic acid* techno clusterfuck is the term that springs to mind when listening to the title cut of Richie Hawtin's latest Plastikman 12", Slinky (m_nus). Which, if yr inclinations lean even remotely in the same directions as mine, is a description which should have you at least slavering, if not in a state of total arousal. This is most definitely not the more introspective Plastikman of Consumed or Closer. Oh no, because as you can see, this has a white cover, the old stretchy geezer on the cover and the wibbly red and black lettering of his earlier, more lysergically inclined slabs of plastik, and that sort of cover on a Plastikman record promises one thing. Squelch. And fuck me does it deliver. The 303s on this record are just sopping. Protracted dripping sawtooth ooze liberally slathered (all in completely different time signatures) over the best goddam drum programming I've heard in a fair while, rhythm and leads entwining and disentangling simultaneously like evolving organic knotwork, nothing staying still, hats and snares and 303s slipping and sliding round the loping flickering groove the whole thing pivots on. It's essentially the sound of machines fucking, and by far my favourite fucking track of 2010.

The b-side's pretty good too.

And that's about as close to a 2010 music roundup y're going to get from me.

*House, in this case. Although...

Escuchar A Través De Mocos

Richard Pinhas - Metal/Crystal (Cuneiform)
Demdike Stare - Voices Of Dust (Modern Love)
Barn Owl - Ancestral Stars (Thrill Jockey)
Factums - Alien Native (Siltbreeze)
Shed - The Traveller (Ostgut Ton)
Ascend - Ample Fire Within (Southern Lord)*
The Pink Noise - Dream Code (Sacred Bones)
Moon Unit - Hell Horse & Heady Stratus (Blackest Rainbow)
Newworldaquarium - The Dead Bears (Delsin)
Borbetomagus - Live At In-Roads (PSF)
Shackleton - Fabric 55 (Fabric)
Orthodox - Sentencia (Alone)
F - Energy Distortion (7even)
Magda - From The Fallen Page (m_nus)
Cabaret Voltaire - Mix-Up (Mute)
Bitchin' Bajas - Tones & Zones (Important)
C.H. District - Conclusion (Tympanik Audio)
Effi Briest - Rhizomes (Sacred Bones)**
Downliners Sekt - Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation/We Make Hits, Not The Public (Disboot)
Hey Colossus & The Van Halen Time Capsule - Eurogrumble Vol.1 (Riot Season)

*I've had this record for ages, but hadn't really given it my full attention. I have now, and wish I did earlier, as it's probably the best thing Greg Anderson has ever fucking done, and one of the most original doom albums of the last few years. Seriously fucking brilliant.

**Yes, I am aware of my occasional goth tendencies. Don't care. I will love Bauhaus and early Sisters until the day I die, unrepentant and proud.

Vela Pasar

BBC Radio 4 is one of the broadcasting wonders of the world, and I am, and have been for years, totally addicted to it's peculiar and unique mix of programming*, particularly its amazing documentaries and site specific audio portraits, its peerless coverage of science, history and the arts**, but also because where else in the world could you possibly hear Dame Joan Bakewell learning to beatbox?

*Except the Archers. I hate the fucking Archers. And its stupid fucking theme tune.

**And the Shipping Forecast, obviously.

Una Noche Con Amphetamine Reptile

I'm just in an AmRep frame of mind at the moment. 20 records any self-respecting muck fiend should own and which have been on extremely heavy rotation all week. Yum.

Helios Creed - Boxing The Clown
Cows - Peacetika
Today Is The Day - Supernova
Surgery - Nationwide
Hammerhead - Into The Vortex
Tar - Jackson
Halo Of Flies - Music For Insect Minds
God Bullies - Dog Show
King Snake Roost - Things That Play Themselves
Helmet - Strap It On
Lubricated Goat - Psychedelicatessan
Boss Hogg - Action Box
Unsane - Scattered, Smothered & Covered
The Thrown Ups - Seven Years Golden
Cosmic Psychos - Blokes You Can Trust
Vertigo - Vertigo
Casus Belli - Tailgunnrageles
Love 666 - American Revolution
Melvins - Honky
V/A - Anything with the words "Dope, Guns 'n' Fucking..." on the cover

And talking of muck, my idiot ISP informs me that uploading will actually, definitely be working by Saturday. So then you can drool at my guitar godliness/throw stuff at the speakers shouting what does this cunt think he's playing at? More crap later. I have wine...

Helios Creed: Lactantes Púrpura

Even though Lactating Purple was the last of the three records under review here to be released, I've decided to put this up before the Boxing The Clown article, because these three records (massive pretentiousness alert!) feel like a triptych to me, and the centrepiece which is BTC is best viewed in the light of, and between the outer panels, namely The Last Laugh and this glorious bugger of a record, the exceedingly bizarre, yet curiously catchy (by HC's standards anyway) Lactating Purple. It's the most traditionally (again, I'm using that word advisedly here) song-oriented album of the three, and the first to feature what would become his (almost) regular band for the next few years, but it's recorded before they'd settled into the more fixed style his records would display for the next few years.

It's the first with a four piece line-up as well, instead of the previous ever-changing power trio, consisting of the man himself (obviously), Paul Kirk on bass, Paul Della Pelle on drums and Z Sylver on synths and sampler, the slightly higher emphasis on synthesizer lending the record a more Chromeian feel than the previous two, as reflected in the cover art which is a fucking dead ringer for one of Chrome's magnificent sci-fi collage sleeves, yet still retaining that totally fried atmosphere of the previous two LPs, just contained within some of his more coherent and concise songwriting as opposed to the more freewheeling feel of much of the previous LP. 

In that, it feels more like a sequel to The Last Laugh, especially as it launches off with another triple header, beginning with the sublime title track, a mid-paced monster featuring some his most densely effected vocals ever, something of a hallmark of this particular release, the (for HC anyway) guitars not quite so prominent, but still squallingly fucking odd spiralling together with the synths to create an tapestry of sublime oddness where it's hard to tell what's what, and we all know how I love that shit. This leads into Flying Through The Either, a piece of psychedelic, weirdly ambient chicken scratch funk smothered in some of the most filtered guitar imaginable and underpinned with that almost ancient feel that creeps into his music courtesy of Z Sylver's droning synth overlaid with seriously fucked with spoken word that smacks into one of those whirling backmasked Chrome jump cuts and launches into Ub The Wall, where that lysergic angle grinder guitar finally roars in with a fucking murderous intent pushed ever higher by the fucking hurtling rhythm section and an hysterical vocal just on the edge of feedback until the whole thing unexpectedly flies backwards again, only to return with increased aggro. I love it so much, just one of the finest ways to open a record I've ever heard.

Next up is the whirling maelstrom of Nebuchadnezzar, another middling speed track featuring yet more astonishing guitar/synth interplay that rides in on some of the best vocal fuckery I've ever heard, then the slower, darkly melodic Modular Green which boasts a vocal so heavily flanged that you may well be sick and acts like this album's parallel to Nirbasion Annasion. The next real standout though is track 7, The Radiated, two minutes of angular spacerock that harks back to the rhythmic complexity of BTC, contains more great guitar than most fucking albums, ends with a fucking big explosion and sets the tone nicely for the next song, Spider. A genuine so-fucking-wrong classic, which crawls along on a bed of profoundly fucked riffage, a spinning, almost Fripp like guitar line and a completely screwed and pitchshifted vocal which tells a warped tale of fuck knows what kind of cosmic degradation before ramping the speed up into a rolling muted riff driven groove that eventually just flies out of orbit before dropping you into the most fucked track on the LP, the gloriously titled Martian Sperm & Bagpipes*, which seems to be an attempt to beat the world record for the most gratuitous flanging and phasing, the vocals pitched even fucking lower and every sound circling and twisting round every other in a desperate attempt to communicate... something. The LP ends on an elegiac note with Amenti, all slow motion synth and guitar held down by the minimal rhythm section, slowly bring you back down to earth in a quite wonderful manner.

*Probably best not ask. 

Helios Creed: La Última Risa

Now my devotion to Chrome's masterpieces Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves isn't exactly a secret. But it occurs to me that I've never written about Helios Creed's solo stuff on here before. Which is a little odd given that he's probably my favourite guitarist ever, I'll freely admit that sonically he's influenced me more deeply than any other musician and is certainly the one who opened my ears further than anyone before or since to the infinite possibilities of using a stupid amount of effects pedals*, and crucially, possibly even more so than Matt Bower et al, branded into the core of my musical being that going too fucking far is a damn good place to start.

There are three albums in particular (out of many) that will always be the killers as far as I'm concerned, the untouchable triumvirate of 1989's The Last Laugh, 1990's Boxing The Clown, and 1991's Lactating Purple (all on Amphetamine Reptile)*. A trio of albums that fused together every disparate strand of psychedelia and spacerock, filtered through a vicious hardcore/punk sensibility, occasionally refracted through an angular proggish prism, sometimes infused with a deeply unsettling almost mediaeval ambience in their (admittedly rare) quieter moments all wrapped round a noiserock core of unswerving viciousness and nailed to the fucking floor by whatever rhythm section the mad fucker had got on board for that particular album. Helios Creed used to go through rhythm sections like Spinal Tap go through drummers or the Melvins through bassists, and weirdly, his records were all the better for it then. He never seemed to attain the same heights of ultrapsych lunacy once his band actually coalesced into a stable unit.

The first of the three, The Last Laugh, featuring the rhythm section of Jason Finn (drums) and Daniel House (bass) starts with a three part blast that recalls the disjointed structures of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves, kicking off with the straight-for-the-jugular Some Way Out, a careering piece of psychedelic hardcore, powered along by that fucking guitar sound, that stuck wah'ed chainsaw that just cuts through yr brain like a monofilament garrotte with the heavily distorted and filtered vocals of Mr Creed insanely gargling through the maelstrom and then suddenly, with no warning, cuts straight into the unsettling ambience of The Dream, all heavily reverbed backward and acoustic guitars, massively detuned chant and and atmosphere of real hypnagogic dread before slamming back into The Diplomat, a mid paced spacepunk cut with some fucking astonishing guitar that sounds like a writhing psychedelic hydra during the solo. Track 3 (I'm not going to go into all the tracks here, I just want to whet yr appetite if you've never heard this shit), Nirbasion Annasion, is one of his greatest moments, like spacerock turned inside out, beginning with a wonderful persian sounding guitar line, it's rolls into full power on an insidious, sinuous bass line and minimalist drums as the man himself unleashes a torrent of just fucking amazing acid guitar lines forwards and backwards (and as ever with Helios, it's sometimes hard to tell which is going which way, or if it's one, two or four guitars), intertwining with each other and the bass to create a philosophers knot of a track, with his relatively buried, and as usual, heavily processed vocals adding to the glorious confusion. It's just brilliant, and deeply weird. It's everything spacerock promises to be, but almost never quite becomes, except when this man pulls his acid soaked finger out of his arse and gets it right like he does here.

Side 2 is just as fucking good, leading off with Late Bloomer, a track drenched in the same paranoid Ballard/Dick atmosphere that was soaked right through Chrome's Third From The Sun, before kicking into the deeply unsettling Where The Children Are. One of the most traditionally structred songs on the album, yet one of the most disturbing, (along with Road Out Of Hell which ends side 1), it's a seemingly innocuous slowish rock song, well, at least until the guitars really get going. The phasing bandsaw is back with a vengeance, allied with a howling, crying solo line that splinters and recombines as Helios deadpan intones the lines "As you wish upon a star, wondering where yr children are" and other lovely sentiments, it's not a song you necessarily want to examine too deeply, there's an undercurrent of reined-in violent perversity to it that's never explicit, just felt as a deep unease in the back of yr throat. The tension built up by that piece of masterful freak horror is perfectly defused by the next song, the most playful track on the LP, The Rant, which is sort of what would happen if you took a fast 60s r'n'b or soul number, preferably one that tells you exactly how to do the monkey, or the watusi, or the boogaloo, and rerecorded it with a Venusian harcdore band. Fantastic madness, and it contains some of the best fucking guitar you can imagine. There's not a duff track on the album, and it would be a stone cold motherfucking classic if it wasn't for the LP that followed it, Boxing The Clown, a record which I can safely say, that if The Last Laugh blew my mind, then Boxing The Clown gave it the single best musical fuck it had up until that moment, and which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

So yeah, part two will be coming when I have the time as I suspect this week could be a bit chaotic, and I can't be arsed to write any more this evening because those lovely blue valium tablets someone very kindly gave me last week have just kicked in and I'm starting to giggle at everything, so yeah part two very soon. And yes, I'm much less discombobulated now, and that's not because of the valium, but because I now know what I really needed to know before. Cryptic? Yeah, but you know me.

I wouldn't normally post anything from youtube without any visuals, but I don't have Nirbasion Annasion on any digital format, but the man himself has posted the bugger up there so I'll make an exception as it is such a fucking amazing piece of psych. Enjoy. Or run away...



*A live engineer once sneeringly asked me do you think all those pedals are really necessary? To which he received one of my two customary answers to the fucking stupid things some live engineers come out with, that is to say a look of withering contempt coupled with a skull fracturing blast of phased to fuck feedback, followed by the one word answer "yeah". The other answer is just "oh fuck off", it depends how much of a cock the engineer is, and what sort of mood I'm in at the time.

** The preceding LP, Superior Catholic Finger (Subterranean) is fucking excellent too, as were the two  LPs that followed these three on AmRep, Kiss To The Brain and Planet X, but that's for another day and another article.

¡Tranquilízate!*

I'm somewhat discombobulated today, for reasons I'm not going to go into at the moment, so forgive me if I wander off on all sorts of ridiculous tangents and nothing makes much sense. Although let's face it, that wouldn't exactly be a first for this blog.

Last night was spent in the most civilised surroundings of Cafe Oto, at a night called Otobahn, which turned out to be the perfect place to decompress after a day of wildly oscillating moods, none of which were particularly pleasant, not that I'm falling back into my old ways, it was just one of those days that needed a good end to it to shave off the spiky aggravated edges of my overactive brain, and spending the evening with a couple of my favourite people, drinking excellent beer** to the accompaniment of some rather fine music, live and dj'ed, seemed to be exactly the right solution. There were a couple of live acts, a solo analogue synth set by John Chantler which started slowly and hesitantly, but grew and evolved into a deeply thrumming krauty deep space mung out with tickly arpeggiations. I wasn't that impressed at first, but like I said, when he got into his stride, the billowing ambience of the modular synth provided just the right sonic tint to the night, an enveloping, yet unobtrusive warmth that coupled with good conversation and the aforementioned ale calmed me right down, and allowed my racing mind to catch up with itself and let me think clearly again.

The second lot, Regolith, laid down a very enjoyable, but for my tastes when it comes to this sort of stuff, slightly too quiet set of droning psych blues with two electric guitars and laptop***. I really wish it had been louder, and the mix a little more balanced, especially towards the end when one of the guitarists cut loose with a fucking great solo which was almost swamped by the muddiness of the mix, I mean, this was proper Quicksilver shit, and I want to fucking hear that. I could understand it if they were going for the subliminal thing, but it was too high in the mix to pull that off, yet still too low to make the impact it should have. Not their fault, and we all know my opinion of a lot of live engineers§, so I know who I blame. But even with those shortcomings, they played some beautiful music, and I'm a sucker for e-bowed slide guitar, which their set contained in bucketloads, and the laptop processing etc. was so tightly enmeshed and integrated into the whole weave of sound it never came across as gratuitous technological icing, which is the impression I often get from laptop musicians in a live context. Not here though. Good fucking stuff. Louder next time please.

There was some great, eclectic dj sets from Mapsadasical, Radioolio and others too, a nicely random mix of sounds electronic, acoustic, freaky and beautiful, again, not at full club volume, but at just the right volume to fill the room without anyone needing to shout, and the conversation never obscured the music either, like I said, a civilised night out, and it's the only night I've been to that had its own cryptic crossword. Which you can have a go at here, although it might prove impossible to crack if y're not a krautrock junkie...

So yeah, a really nice evening, and one that I really hope won't be a one-off, apparently it was put on in place of a cancelled gig, and I for one am really glad they did, because a space like this, that's not a full on club night or a full volume gig, isn't in a grimy pub or dingy venue§§ for once, but in a good place, full of good people and fine sounds, with great food and drink, is something that's been sorely fucking lacking for a while, somewhere that's almost as much about being social as it about the music. It was pretty damn packed too, so even though it was free entry, I'm betting Cafe Oto did alright last night. And with that in mind, I'd like to be amongst the first to humbly request the lovely people who run Cafe Oto to make this a regular fixture, and not just because I want to dj there, but because it was a genuinely excellent night in exactly the right venue§§§. It even had a rather nice flyer:

Fuck me, no tangents, I must be feeling more relaxed. Oh wait, here comes one.

I must also recommend that you get hold of a copy of Nigel Kneale's utterly fantastic, and unintentionally hilarious, 1976 series Beasts, I actually thought I might rupture something laughing, fucking awesome television. The rats...

*No, not the Valium...

**Particularly the Kernel Brewery's excellent IPA Citra. Fucking fantastic stuff.

***Which for once, didn't bug the shit out of me. I have a slight issue with laptops on stage, for many reasons ,some of which are deeply irrational, and none of which I can't be arsed to into here. I will at some point in the future when I next get pissed off by the sight of someone staring at a screen on stage.

§For those who don't, it's not particularly nice. To put it very mildly.

§§Not that I object to those things, as you've probably gathered, but it's nice to have somewhere to go where you can just fucking kick back.

§§§Like when Kosmische was Upstairs At The Garage. It was never quite the same anywhere else. Good, but not the fucking joyous pill fuelled great rush through space Kosmische could be when it was UATG. Probably because most other venues wouldn't let us get away with half the shit we did there. Like crate-skating, which I'll explain one day, suffice to say it's a very specific method of dancing which you should never attempt when y're off yr fucking tits, but also something you just wouldn't attempt even vaguely sober, fun, but with the risk of injury ever present. Yeah, sure, UATG was a shithole, but dammit, it was our fucking shithole for one night a month for a fucking killer few years. More on Kosmische soon...

Movimiento

As you know, I do love my techno. And I may have mentioned before how fond I am of the work of Marc Houle, which is to say very. The man is a fucking genius, whether as part of Run, Stop, Restore* or solo, there's a level of after-hours funk to anything the motherfucker touches that I just don't get from anyone else in the glorious world of techno. No one else can take the classic Detroit template, strip it down this far, and come up with something that just fucking moves like this. And when I say this, I mean his latest LP, Drift (m_nus). It's simply amazing.

Just fantastic. Pure Detroit minimal, but even less so, yet so much more. Sometimes all you have is a kick and bassline, evolving almost imperceptibly, with just a clap or a brief synth explosion every now and then, and not as relief as you might expect, but exactly the opposite, filtered and eq'd in such a way as to build the tension instead of relieving it, often allied to a slow burning drone or a sparse treated and repeated vocal reinforcing what's already there as opposed to complementing or completing it and making yr brain and body just wind up that little bit more before those hi-hats spin up to speed and the fucker just drops and you have no choice but to fucking move.

Any record whose synthesizers sometimes put me in mind of Reproduction-era Human League**, contains guitar playing that veers from Elektro Guzzi meets early Prince choppy funk to blatantly ripping off The Sisters Of Mercy circa Kiss The Carpet*** whilst mainlining that four on the floor staccato groove that I crave so badly, all helicopter hi-hats and kicks and bass slung so low they're actually fucking underground, ever accelerating down that mythical nighttime highway Juan Atkins discovered all those years ago is alright by me. To put it mildly.

Watch this:



*with Troy Pierce and Magda. It's exactly as good as that sounds. Possibly even fucking better. Both of their EPs are absolutely essential.

**Who penned two of the greatest lyrics in the English language:

"Dehumanization is such a big word,
 It's been around since Richard the third" (from Blind Youth)

and,

"With concentration, my size increased" (Empire State Human)

If you don't own a copy of Reproduction, I suggest you rectify that situation as quickly as possible. It's fucking ace. The reissue includes The Dignity Of Labour EP, where for two and a half glorious minutes the League seem to be in telepathic communion with Cluster, and it has the 7" version of Being Boiled, the greatest anti-silkworm farming piece of electronic music ever.

***Two things. Early Sisters Of Mercy fucking rules.  And why am I seemingly the only person who heard that title, and the song itself, whose first thought was "ah, a song about an unpleasant cunnilingual experience". I mean for fucks sake, the chorus contains the line "Next time I'll look before I kiss the carpet". Which is sage advice indeed... I guess this is why I never became a goth. No sense of fun some people.

Excedido En Número Uno A Siete

By some weird quirk of fate or coincidence (yr choice), out of the 8 flats in the building I live in, 7 of those have at least one musician living in them*. However, they are uniformly of the classical stripe and, horrifyingly, more than one of them plays the fucking clarinet**. There's also a cellist, a harpist, 2 pianists, a conductor/composition lecturer, and a flautist***. Sometimes, walking up the stairs to my lair at the top of the building, I hear beautiful random music when 2 or more people are practicing, Ivesian collisions of melody and time signature, unexpected harmonies and wonderful discordancies, diffracted round doors and reflecting off the bare white walls and ceiling of the narrow stairwell. When it's harmonious it's almost like having an Eno installation in yr house, which is really quite a good thing. Sometimes it's multiple fucking clarinets, which is not, well unless one of 'em is playing Messiaen. I wouldn't mind that.

The walls in this building are old and thick, which means you can make a hell of a fucking racket without disturbing anyone, unless of course you fling all the windows open, but aside from then, you can only hear the sound of other people in the stairwell. As I said, I always notice, and often stop and listen for a bit, to the music of the stairs, and I wonder if everyone else does it too. I also wonder what they feel and think about the sounds that emanate from the top flat of our shared home, noises made by a musician who shares almost none of their musical values save those of precision and striving for excellence (however you view either of those nebulous concepts).

Because we live and play in utterly different soundworlds. Right down to first principles, the way we make music is simply not the same. Neither is better, or more correct, just very, very different. Not that there aren't odd and unexpected crossovers, they just tend to happen by accident, similar conclusions reached by disparate means, like Leibniz and Newton with the invention of the calculus§. Take tuning. My conception of tuning is based upon a completely different set of assumptions (or axioms, if you want to be a ponce about it) to those of the classical musician (of today anyway, tuning was a much more fluid thing, even in the classical world, in the past). I'm not going to go into details, because I'd have to get seriously maths on yr arse, and no one's reading this blog for equations§§.

But, as I am prone to do, I digress. I really would like to know what yr average classical clarinettist thinks when they walk up the stairs and hear the sound of Bach wafting out of one flat, mixing with the sound of "Dumping The Fucking Rubbish" by Whitehouse or Albert Ayler at full bore, let alone the howling violence that can ensue when I'm playing guitar, from my place. Probably "what the fuck are they doing up there?" or "I didn't see any roadworks outside", but then again, I've never had a noise complaint so who knows? And it's not just idle curiosity, I'm seriously interested in other peoples reactions to unfamiliar sound/music because, as you know, I crave it like smack, and find others responses to it constantly surprising (and occasionally inspiring).

I mean, the gap between music that people are willing to accept, and even enjoy, when it's presented as soundtrack/accompaniment as opposed to being the main focus of attention is often huge. For many, it seems to me anyway, dissonance/harshness/just plain weirdness is perfectly acceptable when it's used as manipulation, an intensification of affect, a way to cue the subconscious into viscerally reacting to the images/action on the screen/stage/whatever, and will even wax lyrical about how amazing the music was, how they'd never heard anything like that before, but are then appalled by the same music when they hear it again removed from the visual context. An example; a huge fan of 2001 (who shall remain nameless), who loved the music in the context of the film, absolutely loathed the same Ligeti pieces (Atmosphères and Lux Aeterna) when I put them on at home, especially Lux Aeterna, which she memorably criticised with the words "turn that fucking wailing shit off", yet during the film told me it was one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring things she'd ever heard.

And that's what interests me so much, these differences in perception of a piece of music, of sound itself, in different contexts. Maybe I'm wired differently, just far more sonically oriented than other people (or just plain obsessed), but for as long as I can remember, listening has held greater importance than sight for me, even over the visual (then again, I can't see shit without my contacts in), possibly to a slightly debilitating degree at times - I know I've missed things I could/should have seen at the time because I was paying too much attention to listening, because other people have pointed it out to me later§§§ - although I've got better at the balance these days - but when you've got ears like a bat with eyes to match you gotta work with what you've got.

I know I'm off on one, that'd be the wine (or possibly my amusing cold medication and sleeping tablets which essentially constitute a solid version of purple drank), but bear with me, it will get somewhere eventually. Possibly. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, ears and eyes and brains and shit. It strikes me that an awful lot of people (this is not a criticism, just an observation) don't (or won't, or can't, or choose not to) view the visual and sonic aspects of perception as complementary but separate, possibly because of the visual bias in our culture, hearing seems to be viewed as an adjunct to sight as opposed to what it actually is, a far more highly developed, innately more sensitive faculty (in terms of frequency, we can hear nine octaves give or take, but we can see less than one, to give but one example), or maybe because, when we're conscious anyway, hearing is involuntary, you can close yr eyes, but no matter how hard you try it's incredibly difficult to truly block yr ears, you don't have to look, but you have to hear, even if you really don't want to listen.

Our hearing seems to be hardwired into the limbic system, to the un/subconscious mind to a greater degree than sight, and if I was going to go out on a limb (as this is not my field of expertise), I would guess it evolved first, an extension of the ability to sense vibration or movement in the environment, which I'd imagine is where our conscious tactile senses evolved from too. We generally have so much less control over (the perception of and willed interaction with) our sonic environment, and it pushes our buttons in such a primal, basic manner, bypassing so may of the perceptual/intellectual filters we see the world through, cuts to the quick in way sight doesn't, and maybe that atavistic side to hearing is what relegates it to a position below sight in the worldview of so many. You can't see out the back of yr head, but you know when y're being followed, and it's the ears, and possibly unconscious tactile inputs that alert you to those things, and maybe it's those very ancient facets of our sense of sound that create the very visceral reactions to unfamiliar sound and music, almost provoking a fight or flight response.

I've never encountered any other artform which can provoke such a deep sense of unease and discomfort when confronting the unknown whilst bypassing the intellect (for want of a better word) as music. I've heard certain pieces of both music and film described as harrowing, but if asked why the film was harrowing, people know why, can put it into words, conceptualise and describe exactly why it was so horrible, but with music, that often isn't the case, it's a case of "it's nasty" or "it just feels wrong"^, and maybe that lack of conscious control over what is heard and our reaction to it, as opposed to what is seen, is the key.

Or maybe red wine + codeine + promethazine has bent my brain out of shape so far I've taken leave of reality and am talking vast dungloads of pretentious bullshit. Reality's a vastly overrated and (from my physicist's eye) misunderstood concept anyway in the first place. But fuck it, that's a rant for another day. And different drugs.

*Yes you sarcastic bastards, I am including myself. The 8th contains a financier (who works in sub-prime mortgages!) and a psychiatrist. Bloody Hell.

**Clarinets, and their effect on my life and others, is a rant for another day.

***I may not be the biggest fan of the flute, but I'm sure as shit glad it's a classical flautist and not a fucking hippy with a bongo playing friend.

§Given the amount of mathematics buried in theories of music, this isn't such a glib comparison as you might think.

§§I would, if I wasn't writing it, but then again I really, really love that shit. If you really want to get into tuning, go to this wikipedia article, then follow the links there and elsewhere until yr head falls off. If you really want to know I use Just Intonation (for the acoustic stuff) and variations on Meantone Temperament (electric stuff), gotta love them wolf notes, and I do not necessarily use a fixed tuning centre; i.e. A=440Hz.

§§§Sometimes, this annoys me, particularly when if what I had missed had been pointed out to me at an apposite time I might have had a much better night...

^I've never been called a cunt for suggesting we watch a certain film and someone else finding it disagreeable, but I gave up caring a long fucking time ago if I receive abuse for putting certain records on. Like I say, atavistic as opposed to reasoned reactions.

Duende

Driving in London can be, to put it mildly, a somewhat aggravating experience, which is why I try to a: avoid it if possible, and b: tend to listen to the less, shall we say, psychotic bits of my record collection (or the radio) in an attempt to lessen the frustration levels of driving in our beautiful but wildly haphazard maze of a city. Well I had no choice in the matter, as some of the tools I needed for todays industrial lunacy are not allowed to be carried on public transport*.

So drive I did, and I do believe that there must be some sort of fuckwits convention occurring today, given the level of general ignorance and random insanity that I witnessed and occasionally dodged this afternoon. But, just for once, none of it annoyed me, and not just because of my vastly improved mood and outlook, but also because I flicked the stereo onto BBC Radio 3, and heard the first notes of what is undoubtedly one of the most wonderful pieces of music ever composed, Berg's Violin Concerto**, and I knew no matter how apallingly anyone drove, no matter how many times I was cut up by some badly-suited prick in a Mercedes, BMW or Audi***, that while the sound of that achingly beautiful piece filled the van, I was immune.

Because it's an amazing piece of music. It manages to infuse the often forbiddingly dissonant world of serialism with a breathtakingly elegiac lyricism, bridging the avant-garde and traditional tonality in a completely seamless manner which very few other pieces can match, not that dissonance is absent, or that the clashing timbres that the orchestral music of the post-Schoenberg lot were so fond of don't occasionally erupt with great power, that's all in here, but, because of the astonishingly precise way they are employed and arise in the course of the piece, the care taken over the balance of the instrumentation, the pacing, rhythmic shifts and sheer dynamics, it never becomes overly strident, the 12-tone process never overwhelms the emotional impact.

Which is what floors me about this piece of music. I'm probably fussier about orchestral/chamber music than almost anything else, I mean, no other spectrum of music contains a period of over 150 years where I hate almost every single fucking thing I've ever heard from that era§, and no other musical arena is so hidebound by rules, conventions and hierarchy as the classical world, three things which you've probably guessed get my goat a bit, but I digress. The emotional density of this track, the amount of meaning it manages to convey through it's luminous textures is massive, and moves me in a way that only Messiaen§§ can match in this sphere of music. It's a piece deeply infused with great love and compassion, a profound sadness and a huge amount of joy, and the sonic promise of transcendence in it's glorious end. It's a life in sound, stunningly realised.

*Best not to ask.

**Also, go here and have a listen.

***What is it with people who drive German luxury cars in this country? Do you get a special arsehole license with the car?

§Classical and a large proportion of the (particularly early) Romantic period. Can't fucking stand it. You can't begin to conceive of how much I loathe Beethoven. And Mozart. Everything I hate about music neatly encapsulated. At least it got good again when Debussy, Ravel et al turned up for the party.

§§OK, I'll give you Morton Feldman too.