Mirra

Take one part Parson Sound/International Harvester style slo-mo mong rock, one part prime, blown-out UK psych/noise dirge (think pre-Carved Into Roses Skullflower) and stir in the ecstatic string work of Agathe Max or Henry Flynt, and you have the rough makings of my record of the year (so far): Myrrh, by Myrrh (Soft Abuse).

It really is a fucking beauty. An electric viola and drums duo whose crawling feedback mantras don't so much ascend into the sky as burn a fucking hole through the planet. This record presses more of my buttons than anything I've heard in a fucking age. Blues sodden modal viola riffs, plucked and bowed, slowly rotate round a granite-hard core of saturated drum thud (courtesy of Andie Mazorol), the like of which I've only previously encountered when Stuart Dennison was still a fulltime member of Skullflower, each beat landing like the foot of a very stoned elephant, raising huge clouds of tape dust that coats every surface in volcanic ash before Jackie Beckley kicks in the feedback afterburner and cuts the viola loose with a high and lonesome chainsaw wail, a screaming, roaring, beautiful wall of scorched earth fuzz that sends shivers up my fucking spine every single time I hear it. This is psychedelic mountain music people, and I urge you to seek it out. In the meantime, there's a couple of tasters here to be going on with...

Los Frutos Secos

This record, Muzika Electronic, is the fucking nuts, no two ways about it. A veritable compendium of squelchy, bleepy, clonking loveliness which presses so many of my buttons I feel like a drum machine. Frak, for it is they, have created the finest slab of electro-goo I've heard for ages, and Digitalis are to be congratulated not only for releasing it, but pressing it on the most lurid bright green vinyl I've ever clocked eyes on. I'm not even listening to it at the moment, but I'm almost bouncing in my seat just thinking about it. So what does this bugger sound like then?

Fucking brilliant is what. It's practically everything I love about dance music all rolled up into one exceedingly toothsome cake of fun. Take some proper acid house, stir in a big lump of Detroit techno and a soupçon of new beat, add a dash of Blue Monday/Video 586 style New Order, whizz in a blender with some euro minimal synth stylings and some Krautrocky playfulness, and garnish liberally with Radiophonic sprinkles. And, this is one of the most perfectly cut, beautiful sounding records I've heard in a fucking long time. And it's very, very green indeed. Buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy if you've got a dancing bone in yr body, I guarantee you'll fucking love it. I'd write more but I need to listen to it again. And probably dance like a tit.

Go listen immediately

Globos

The new Terry Riley album is fucking shit. It's an absolute, unmitigated ballbag of a record, and the only reason for releasing it that I can see is that Terry Riley's name on the cover might make a few bob for the label (Tzadik). It's being cynically touted as a triumphant return to his 60s/70s methods, all modal riffs and looong looping delays, shifting patterns of phrase and phase, and while it's methodology is superficially similar, the result is not. Ladies and gentlemen, this is most definitely not the mixture of In C and Persian Surgery Dervishes that the hype seems to promise, but what feels like a pitiful attempt to cash in on the popularity of 60s/70s minimalism by going back to a compositional style TR abandoned over 20 years ago and whacking out almost two fucking hours of parping toss utterly lacking in conception, conviction or purpose, and is possibly the most pointless fucking piece of music I've endured in many years. It's certainly the most boring.

It ultimately falls flat on it's face in two main areas; sonically and musically. Musically this adds nothing to his body of work, coming across as a cynical, slapdash rehashing of old tropes, especially in the light of where other artists have taken these ideas in the previous forty-odd years, twisting the Riley methodology into unexpected new shapes and making it as much if not more a part of popular music practice as the avant-garde milieu which spawned it. Riley's influence is everywhere these days, has been for a long time now, and that's what I find so puzzling about this record; is it just an exercise in nostalgia, the sound of an old stoner having some fun, or an attempt to reclaim, to reassert ownership or provenance of a process for making music?

I can't imagine it's the latter. Terry Riley just isn't that sort of über tight-assed academic composer, he's way too much of a hippy and he's always been way too inclusive in his worldview and musical outlook to suddenly get all uppity about getting ripped off forty-odd years down the line. So, if not a fit of artistic control-freakery then what about the other angles? Nostalgia? Fuck I hope not, 'cos there's no worse reason to make a record than to relive past glories as that's either the subconscious passive-agressive equivalent of the above or wanking in the mirror. So, discounting those unedifying propositions, we're left with the old stoner hypothesis, which is fine in and of itself, I mean, that's how I (and an awful lot of other musicians) practice at home, but it doesn't necessarily lead to music anyone else would need or want to hear...

And now we get to the even bigger problem with Aleph. It sounds like crap. Not lo-fi, just crap. Sterile and digital and cold in all the wrong ways*. And it sounds this way for two reasons: 1. the horrible fucking preset synth sounds which sound exactly like a shit cheapo 80s rack module but apparently derive from a synth which cost 5 grand when new** which Mr Riley has tuned to a particularly inappropriate form of just intonation*** using some of the most unconvincing simulations of real instruments I've ever experienced (and this isn't from a modern perspective, the technology was in place and easily cheap enough to achieve infinitely superior results years before this was recorded), which in tandem with the circumstances of recording results in a thin, shrill, genuinely unpleasant acoustic completely at odds with the deep, detailed sonic environment music of this type deserves.

And what were those circumstances? Turns out this record was recorded as an mp3. A format so completely inappropriate to music so heavily dependent on tuning and harmonic relationships because in compressing the file from it's raw form the data that's lost cannot but be essential to the correct presentation of the music, every sliver of 1s and 0s sliced away thinning the frequency soup still further until all y're left with is this unsatisfying, unwholesome gruel. You can master and remaster all you like, and believe me they've tried, but you can't replace what was never there in the first place, and I don't want to listen to a sketch or a storyboard, I want the whole fucking thing.

The real shame? If this had been recorded using better instruments, on a medium more suited to the music, it would probably have been fucking brilliant. But it wasn't, and it isn't.

*I should point out here that I'm not the analogue fetishist that many think I am, what I insist on is the appropriateness of the gear to the sound that is sought. The only question that should be asked of a mix is does it sound right?

**Korg Triton Studio 88. Very powerful, very shit.

***Can't be arsed to go into the maths at the mo'. I finished writing several thousand hard-fought words on non-standard analysis last week and would like a couple of mathematically minimal weeks to decompress.

Siniestro

Goth. The influence that dare not speak it's name. I'm not talking 90s-onwards gloomy sub-metal bollocks here, but the proper stuff, yer Bauhaus, Nephilims and, most gloriously of all, The Sisters Of Mercy. I may have mentioned my penchant for the Sisters before, but I'll say it again; when they were good, they were fucking brilliant, a lo-fi concoction of equal parts Suicide and Hawkwind with a dash of early Stooges for bouquet, which is a damn fine cocktail in my book. The reason I mention this is that the latest, and possibly greatest, Robedoor LP, Too Down To Die (Not Not Fun) is pure, unadulterated proper goth worship*, and yet not a single review I've read picks up on this. Maybe because the reviewer doesn't want to damage their hipster credentials, or maybe they're just too young to remember when goth was actually a vibrant, musically distinct offshoot of post-punk less concerned with a certain look and attitude than creating a (then) modern reconfiguration of psychedelia, a darker vision which nevertheless sought to offer some escape from the rotten, decaying state of Britain in the early 80s.

But, just for a change, I've wandered off my own point, which is that Too Down To Die is the best goth album of the last 25 years, bar none. Imagine crossing Blood On The Moon/3rd From The Sun-era Chrome with early Sisters and you've got a pretty fucking good idea of what this record sounds like. Spindly, endlessly flanged guitars coiling round a super-mechanical rhythm section, icy synths slowly rise and fall, creating an ever shifting landscape of bad-trip dread, minor-key spacerock bass leads you by the hand through this shifting, monochromatic haze as the low, deadpan voice whispers and croons things in yr ear you don't really want to know. Beautiful, epic and happily, wallowingly world-weary in a way I haven't encountered for a very long while.

Note to hipsters: If y're gonna rip off the 80s, at least try to do it as well as this.

*See also the latest Religious Knives album, Smokescreen (Sacred Bones). I think they should just be fucking blatant about it and cut a split 7" with Robedoor doing "Lights" and Religious Knives doing "Kiss The Carpet"** (both from The Reptile House EP, the greatest goth record ever). Just a thought...

**It's always good to see the penny drop when an over-serious goth finally realises what this song is about.

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...

Música De La Casa

My devotion to techno is a given. We all know that. But what most people don't get about me is how much I fucking love proper house. Not acid, again, that's no fucking secret, but full on, straight down the fucking line Chicago house. I still love the early Orb* shit too, and Mouse On Mars' first few records are beyond compare. So what happens when you combine those three fantastic ingredients?

The new Space Dimension Controller 2x12", Temporary Thrillz (R&S)** is what happens. Along with Impassive Skies by Patrick Pulsinger and the last Actress LP, this record oozes that old fashioned 80s house feel which seems to making a comeback in terms of influence and sound once again. We're in proper fucking E2-E4/Sueño Latino territory here, that fabulous (pre) Balearic krauty electronic sound smacking headlong into slow 4/4 Chicago loveliness, and I mean slow, like house used to be, there ain't much over 120bpm on this, and it's all the fucking better for it. It's 1979, 1986, 1994 and 2010 all at once, and it's just beautiful. Electronic fucking soul, in the true sense of the word.

I haven't heard a record which pushes these particular buttons in quite this way a long, long time. You can chuck in some early Jimi Tenor/touch of Prince too, given the utterly shameless keyboard solos contained within, and y're still only halfway to grasping the fucking goodness of this release. The drums on early house have a rawness to them that you don't hear very often these days, and damn, the bass. The fucking bass. It's wonderful. A funky sawtooth fart that's been absent from this world for far too long, and I for one welcome it's return to our stereos and dancefloors. In a just universe, this would be huge. It won't be, but it fucking should. It's even got vocoders and people whispering the word "ecstasy" in the background. And it's pressed on lovely splattery purple vinyl too.

Buy it. Dance like a cock. You'll thank me.

*Anything up to and including Orbvs Terrarvm.

**Yeah I know. An artist name like that, on that label and y're thinking bad trance. Couldn't be further from the truth.

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.

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.

Módulo De Luna

Look at that fucking artwork. Looks like Luigi Serafini knocked up a cartoon self-portrait during a relaxing shroom break while he was creating the Codex Seraphinianus. That fantastic and ridiculous artwork, coupled with the fact the band are called Moon Unit, and the album entitled New Sky Dragon, probably has led you to believe we are back in the land of the deeply psychedelic. And you'd be right on the money.

This is, hands down, the finest fucking freakout (well, pair of freakouts) committed to vinyl in quite some time, a proper fucking rocket-ride through the universe's burning brain. Moon Unit are a trio comprised of Andreas Jonsson on synth, Peter Kelly on drums, and Ruaraidh Sanachan* on guitar. No bass player**, and none is needed here. In fact, the extra low-end a bass would have provided could possibly have rendered the whole thing a little more earthbound, weighing down the sunbound spacepod of sound instead of allowing it to accelerate up through the atmosphere to it's natural home, the cosmos.

Sonically speaking, this record had me nailed almost straight away, what with it sitting in a Lagrangian point perfectly balanced between the propulsive end of Krautrock and the singing, stinging, spiralling high-end mind erasure of classic UK underground blug. Think Electronic Meditation era Tangerine Dream (when they was vicious***) duking it out with Sunroof!, or Vibracathedral Orchestra with Jaki Liebezeit on drums. Ash Ra Tempel with a raga-noise boner.

Two twenty minute tracks, Internal Future and No Money No Nothing, is what you get. Both ever-ascending whirlpools that start slow, guitar and synth stalking each other, circling and intertwining like dancing cobras as the drums lay down rolling, metronomic rhythms which push the lead instruments to twist ever higher, picking up speed like a rocket pushing itself slowly off the launch pad and just accelerating harder and harder, imperceptibly at first, seemingly crawling towards the sky on a flame of modal fuzz, faster, higher until it hits escape velocity and bursts through the Van Allen belt, careening toward the stars until finally the engine cuts out and we're in freefall, weightless, awestruck by the synth nebulae and guitar novae that fill the sky from here to there.

*AKA the loon behind the fantastic, but very different Nackt Insecten, who I recommend unreservedly to all devotees of cosmic mung.

**No fucking Doors jokes please, this is real psychedelia.

***Seriously, TD's first album is a masterpiece of freeform psychedelic fuckyou that has been rarely equalled since, particularly by themselves. If you haven't heard it, well, y're in for a shock, no wibble, no sequencers, no synth at all, just awe-inspiring fuzztone murder (Edgar Froese) with rolling, smashing meth-drums (Klaus Schulze), lashings of organ, and gratuitous globs of electric cello abuse from the genius that is Conrad Schnitzler.

Perfección Psicodélica

40 of the greatest seconds in psychedelia begin with the moment in Defecting Grey by The Pretty Things where the hippy nonsense abruptly transitions to one of the most savage freakbeat/garage psych riffs of the 60s, replete with one of Phil May's snottiest deliveries ever and a viciously treble heavy lead guitar that'd take yr face off at twenty paces. It's fucking fantastic, but, as I said, only lasts 40 bloody seconds before the flower children reappear and piss all the good work up the wall. Which is why On The Road South by The Stereo Shoestring is my favourite moment of blatant rock thievery ever*, not to mention one of the greatest fucking tracks of the psychedelic era. They took the few brilliant seconds of an otherwise hopeless piece of 60s folly, and turned it into 2.16 of the most balls-out speed-driven acid mayhem, giving even Blue Cheer a run for their money in the fuzz overload stakes, and outdoing everyone in terms of wah wah abuse until their ears bled. The singer doesn't quite reach Phil May's level of spitting disdain, but with the fuzzgun explosions detonating all around he doesn't really need to, he's a little more melodic, more flowing, interspersing the original riff with frantic spoken word during the one part of the song they actually wrote to break up the repetitions of the original. It's a total fucking drag race of a song, encapsulating an awful lot of things I love about the music of the 60s with none of the fucking shit and I urge you to seek out it's magnificence forthwith.

*cf. Can's Father Cannot Yell and the Velvet Undergrounds' European Son.

Jarabe De Aire

It's really fucking hot. Anything involving more movement than going to the kitchen is frankly not on the agenda at the moment. The air is like fucking syrup today and there's not a lot of wind to stir it around, which is why I'm listening to appropriately gloopy music. Which can mean only one thing. Not Krautrock, either too sleek or too spacey for a day where the atmosphere appears to be clotting. Not even my beloved Swedish mong-warriors, Pärson Sound/International Harvester et al are the right kind of blug for weather like this, no, what you need when yr head feels like it's full of treacle, is mad French people with synthesizers and drugs and no sense of taste or shame whatsoever. In short, Frogprog is the shit. Lard Free's debut LP is a case in point. It's wrong on so many levels you need new dimensions to measure the level of duh that's embedded in its grooves, it's also utterly fantastic.

Take the first track, "Warinobaril", the drummer sounds so stoned that he could fall off his stool at any moment, a fruity bass guitar wanders around a deeply pedestrian riff, whilst seriously fucking parping saxophones call to each other like slightly rubbish whales. After a cosmic oompah eternity (2 minutes), the guitarist, of whom nothing has yet been heard has obviously finished his spliff, and crashes into the song at three times the volume of everything else with a clanking atonal chord and then hurls notes around like a chimp chucking it's shit at tourists at the zoo. The rhythm sections takes apparently no notice of this fact, apart from the bass playing increasing in fruitiness, but eventually the sax player gets the idea and blurts his lungs out for a bit as well, soon though, the sax returns to its pervious parp incarnation and the guitar slowly dissolves in pools of feedback. It's ridiculous, but executed with such solemn seriousness that you can only admire the balls of people who thought this was a good way to introduce their music to our ears. It shouldn't work, it just shouldn't. But it does.

Things on the next track get even better, five minutes of tweaking metronomic synth action with a rolling foghorn sax accompaniment that culminates in a ludicrously wibblesome analogue freakout, then abruptly turns into three and a half minutes of gooey guitar led electric free jazz mayhem. The rest of the album is just as schizophrenic, going from the wronger than wrongdom can be of "Livarot Respiration" with its unspeakable combination of sub-Popol Vuh Fender Rhodes, truly horrible guitar* playing and a sax solo that sounds like Pharoah Sanders mellow stuff played by one of the aforementioned rubbish whales, to the cosmic idiocy of "Acid Framboise"**. A return to the stumpy drum world of the first song, with a synth bass line played by someone with no sense of rhythm and who's just discovered the filter, and is determined to let everyone know it while the guitarist slowly morphs from Manuel Gottsching to Ray Russell over the course of its 6 or so excellent minutes. Truly an album with something for everyone who appreciates the finer points of psychedelic wrongheadedness.

Amazingly, the second album, "I'm Around About Midnight" is even better***. And not just because of the appearance on guitar, bass and synth, of Richard Pinhas, shameless feedback lover and leader of the mighty Heldon (who if you've never heard, you really fucking should). Beginning with the Terry Riley meets Goblin minimalist zone of "Violez L'Espace De Son Refrigerant" that leads beautifully into the amazing "In A Desert - Alambic". Again we're back in the land of looping rhythms and saxophones, but this time, they sound tighter, more focused. They're not mucking about this time. Mr Pinhas makes his entrance on guitar on this song, letting loose a stream of seemingly infinitely sustained notes that just sail through the rock formations of the beat. There's the metronomic, apocalyptic "Pale Violence Under A Reverbere" which prefigures the gothic future threat of Chrome's "Third From The Sun" by a good few years and the beautiful, transcendent piano and fucking big moog of "Even Silence Stops When Trains Come" which ends the album in an almost Alice Coltrane space.

The third album, the inventively titled "III" is also fucking ace. Beg, buy, borrow or download them all, and the next time the air turns to jam, you'll have the perfect soundtrack to a muggy mind.

*Seriously, it's fucking revolting, like smack-era Eric Clapton just wandered in and plugged in.

**A Morgen Und Nite frogprog favourite.

***I know. Hard to believe, but nevertheless true.

Cuatro En El Planto

God damn I fucking love this record, the first LP by the downright extraordinary Austrian trio Elektro Guzzi (Macro Records). Seriously, I am in awe of this record, and I really don't say that very often. Elektro Guzzi have done something I've always wanted to do. They've made one of the finest techno albums I've ever fucking heard, using nothing but bass, guitar and drums. No synthesizers*, no samples, no sequencers, no drum machines, no overdubs. And no attempt to disguise the nature of the instrumentation, the drums sound like drums, not a drum machine, you know y're listening to three people playing live, not something pieced together on a sequencer grid. Don't think for a second this makes EG's music any less precise than if it was created using the traditional, electronic methods, this isn't a band, it's a fucking organic machine, a twelve limbed group mind with a metronomic drive that makes Can sound sloppy.

They'd been together for 5 years before making a single recording, (a 10" on Macro with, as on the album, Patrick Pulsinger co-producing and running the desk), and you can tell as soon as you hear the opening track "Hexenschuss" that they probably didn't get out much in those 5 years, so finely honed is the telepathy between these three musicians, a slowly evolving filtered bass riff and astounding straight down the line four on the floor drumming pushing the track ever forward, as the cymbals skip just like they should around the beautiful, chiming, clanging guitar stabs and swipes and it just builds, almost like the Necks at high speed, squelching bass and spiralling echoes rising in intensity and frequency and five minutes later it's over. Far too soon. You want more, you are now completely hooked on Elektro Guzzi.

I am anyway, hopelessly addicted. Any band that can take two of my favourite, and seemingly diametrically opposed, things in music, the simplicity and flexibility of the improvising power trio and the machine funk precision of proper fucking techno and marry them in such an utterly convincing manner, to produce something this taut, this composed, this arresting, is worthy of my love and my money**. I love the fact that there's no attempt to make the bass or the guitar sound more synthy, bass guitars have a very different kind of low end spank than synths do, the initial attack of finger or pick on string can produce a real gutpunch in a way that synths find hard to match, no matter how low they go, a synth can massage yr liver, but a bass guitar can kick a hole in it, and there's no mistaking Jakob Schneidewind's bass sound on this album, no matter how filtered or fuzzed it is, for a synthesizer. It drives the music forward in a very different way than a synth would, even playing exactly the same line, because that very physical part of how the sound is produced is readily apparent on this record, you can hear the fingers, the string, the impetus, in a way no synth can ever quite seem to emulate convincingly and, along with Bernhard Breuer's jaw dropping drumming***, it gives the music a distinct physical presence that's very unusual in a traditionally electronic genre .

Bernhard Hammer's guitar though, is what really surprised me, no riffs as such, no melodies as such, it often functions more like tuned percussion, soft, almost Sonic Youth like bell chimes, gamelan and steel pans in a hall of mirrors, pops and cracks and whirring machinery, bowed harmonics swelling like clouds growing and the sound of rulers pinged on desks, there's more so-called extended technique on display here than on the last 400 fucking free improv records I've heard, and all of it far more convincingly utilised. When he finally does play something vaguely "normal guitar" like on "Franz", the LP's final track, it's an almost shocking moment because you've spent the last hour immersed in this glowing, shifting rhythmic landscape you've almost forgotten y're listening to a trio playing live and it's jolting, the most traditional guitar sound on the record becomes one of the oddest. Very few musicians can pull that off, to take a listener so far from their traditional expectations of an instruments role, that the sudden reversion to type makes yr brain double take, a perceptual backflip which makes everything seem upside down.

Fuck it, what else can I say? Well, getting Patrick Pulsinger to mix the fucker was a masterstroke as well, the album sounds fucking fantastic, somehow warm and sparkly, and most definitely live. Just go to their myspace and watch the videos, download the live set on Resident Advisor, a single 47 minute beast of a live set, buy the album, and come join me in my new habit.

As Nice Pete would say,"good music, well played by men"§.

*Like it used to say on Queen LPs.

**And my bad pilled-up dancing.

***Seriously, the man is un-fucking-believable, like a funky orrery.

§From Achewood, the brilliant cartoon strip by Chris Onstad, which gave the world my favourite fake book title ever: Deconstructing Hawkwind Mythology.

Culpo Tramadol

Teeth Mountain's self titled album (2008 Night People) is a record I've had knocking around on cdr for a while, but hadn't really taken much notice of before. For some reason, I picked up the LP version of it today whilst idly browsing, having completely forgotten that I already owned it, and bought it on a whim. I'm fucking glad I did. Apart from the fact that it sounds a lot fucking better on vinyl than on cd, I haven't got as much sheer fucking joy from a record in ages. It's glorious bouncy mung of the highest order.

Imagine Can and Pelt fighting in a sack. On spacehoppers. Well, it's a big sack. Big enough for Mick Flower and Tony Conrad and Faust to jump inside and join in the fun, whilst Henry Flynt pumps nitrous oxide in from outside and Parson Sound get pissed in the woods nearby. It's got honking great string drones and looping banjos and Liebezeit grooves played by stoned lemurs. Not to mention harmonicas and chord organs and much tape-fuckery. And it looks like this:

That's also what it sounds like. Just like that. Only more Appalachian. And not a little German. Also, note the enormous yellow cat at the bottom of the sleeve. It looks really angry, and not just because it's been dyed yellow and is having it's ear fondled by a huge disembodied red hand. It's angry because you haven't listened to this record. A record which sounds like it was played by giant hillbilly meerkats with a penchant for Krautrock who live in a multicoloured cave and worship idols of Arnold Dreyblatt's Orchestra Of Excited Strings. Probably whilst bouncing up and down on spacehoppers and dribbling a bit. With the cat egging them on. Why wouldn't you want to hear a record that sounds like that? Exactly. So go and get it, and the big yellow cat won't wreak it's horrifying revenge on an unsuspecting world.

Nuevo Alto En Fuego

Oh yes, it's that time again. New High On Fire album time. I am, to say the least, slavering for this, especially now the Hakius is communing with the bears and Al Cisneros has disappeared up his own mystical fundament like a metaphysical ouzelum bird, it's down to Matt Pike, guru of the guitar gurn, and the man who made deck shoes metal, to keep the fucking Sleep flag flying. And does he? Well, in about three quarters of an hour, I'll have the answer. It must be said, the (now traditional) Arik Roper sleeve is truly, fantastically, stupidly metal, and this bodes well.

See what I mean? That is metal. You can't really get more fucking metal than that. None more metal. But is it any good? And more to the point, does it compare to their earlier stuff, given that Mr Pike spent a fair while mucking about with the briefly reformed Sleep?

-------- 45 minutes, a couple of large Ardbegs and spliffs later --------

The answers? Yes. And fuck yes. It's fucking brilliant. For the first time, the whole album is fantastic, it doesn't sag for any of it's 45 minutes. Even Blessed Black Wings, which contains three of my favourite songs ever* and has a similar effect on me to good crystal meth, had it's low points, stodgy lulls that dragged parts of the album down and made it a merely great slab of muck as opposed to the outrageously scabrous earfuck it could have been.

Well ladies and gentlemen, this is that scabrous earfuck. Leaner, meaner, harder, faster, just more fucking savage. This gallops out of the trap and doesn't fucking let up, there's a lot less of the pissing about and interludes that marred Death Is This Communion for me, the first HOF album that just didn't, to these ears anyway, cohere into a whole, didn't flow from beginning to end. No such problem this time.

They've also solved the other problem with DITC, namely Jack Endino's slightly bloated, cumbersome mix**. The fast bits just didn't rampage like they should on the last LP, and Jeff Matz's bass didn't seem to mesh properly (in a sonic, not musical sense) with Des Kensal's battery (somehow the phrase 'drumming' doesn't quite do justice to the polyrhythmic artillery bombardment that DK regularly unleashes), just sounding a bit too flabby to deliver the kick to the solar plexus you expect from HOF. But, here, with Greg Fidelman producing, this is more live sounding than any album they've done with the possible exception of Blessed Black Wings, and, as you might expect from the man who produced Slayer's World Painted Blood, viciously taut. The drums just smack you round the face, and the bass sound, jesus it's good. A focused, growling drill of a sound, with a nice amount of sub that doesn't fuck with the mix, that becomes one with the kit because frequency-wise the two elements compliment each other as opposed to impinging on each others territories, the kit never swamps or rings over the bass, the bass never obscures the kit, and musically, Kensal and Matz are just fucking locked.

And equally one with the rhythm section is Matt Pike. The man is simply (high) on fire (sorry) here. Jaw-dropping, audacious, mental as ever, he ramps up the intensity and the speed to levels only glimpsed on a few tracks on each of the previous LPs and rips out those switchback riffs and loopy, careering solos like a man possessed with Matz and Kensal shadowing and playing off his every fucking move, each musician pushing and lifting the others onto another fucking plane. This just kills. At times they approach (pre Crack The Skye) Mastodon levels of bludgeoning complexity, but without drawing attention to how clever or difficult any of this shit is. Mastodon's overt technicality can often be their downfall, veering into unpleasant prog territory because it's so cleanly done, no matter how nasty they try to be, that you can't help but notice the virtuosity instead of the fucking music, but this never happens here. No other band could alter the time signature of a riff so many times in quick succession without it sounding clever clever, without losing the overall flow, because no other band does it with such simultaneous insouciance and overarching aggression or a sound this damn raw. This is rollercoaster metal, wrongfooting you without you knowing why until you go round again and again until you chuck.

And that brings us to the one thing that some people just can't get over with High On Fire. Matt Pike's vocals. Personally I love 'em, that ludicrous devolved almost incomprehensible proto-Lemmy roar of his just suits the primitive sophistication of this music perfectly, particularly given his lyrical penchant for magnificently stupid tales of demons, amulets and bloody war. I haven't seen the lyric sheet yet, but I could swear that he yells the words 'salty nimbus' at one point, and frankly, that moment alone is worth a few quid of yer hard earned. The track titles are, if anything, even more sublimely stupid than usual, Holy Flames Of The Fire Spitter, Bastard Samurai and (definitely a contender for most foolish track title of the decade) Ghost Neck being just three. What in the name of fuck makes you call a song Ghost Neck? What does it mean? I'm looking forward to getting the lyric sheet with the proper release a whole fucking lot, just so I can find out who wields the Frost Hammer.

So yeah, I quite like it.

*Devilution, Cometh Down Hessian and Silverback. There's way more of that vibe on this record than anything else they've done.

**I know, lots of people loved it, and preferred it to Steve Albini's diamond hard engineering on Blessed Black Wings, and those people are entitled to their opinion. Even if it is wrong.

Apparently, God Is Good. Shame About The Fucking Music Though

Anyone who knows me knows I fucking love everything Om had done up to and including Pilgrimage. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Gebel Barkal 7"*, but I thought ok, new drummer (Emil Amos) , needs a little time to settle in, he's a bit stiff but he's got some serious shoes to fill and coming from a band (Grails) whose music is far denser in both arrangement and instrumentation than Om's stripped to the bone minimalist doom probably isn't used to his playing being so exposed, and is possibly over-compensating for this by playing too damn much**. I also thought (hoped, prayed), that the clicky 90s drum sound was just down to the circumstances of the recording. Essentially, I'd heard a dodgy track by one of my favourite bands and was trying to convince myself that this was a temporary aberration, a brief lapse caused by a major upheaval in personnel.

It wasn't. At least not if the new Om album is anything to go by. It sucks balls. Badly. Almost everything that made Om beautiful seems absent. It's half-arsed, badly mixed and stinks of patchouli. Whereas the Om of old could weave magic from just a bass, a drumkit and the most ridiculous lyrics in rock history delivered in a monotone chant, creating an nonsensical occult otherworld of devotional doom, the new Om pile on the extra instruments like a hippy hot for enlightenment, trying out every guru in town in search of The Way. There's a fucking unspeakably shit flute solo at one point that sounds like it was played by the worst kind of classically trained twat trying to be "spiritual" (seriously, it's fucking horrible), and it's prissy funklessness sums up one of this album's three main faults; (what feels like) a lack of confidence in their material, buried under a mound of sitars and tambouras, bongos and tablas, guitar and piano in an attempt to cover up the fact that there are no new ideas on this record whatsoever.

Seriously, whereas Al's chant used to be unbroken throughout the verse, sounding like the meter of the words had been arrived at through a combination of the length of a breath and the rhythm the words rode on, now it's just sung like any other song, and the basslines that the songs would be carried by are buried in the mix, probably to disguise the fact that most of them are not just reminiscent of, but plainly identical to, the basslines on Conference Of The Birds*** with one note raised a semitone here or there. I've got nothing against repeating yrself, or reprising or quoting an earlier tune, but only if the new version adds something, lifts it into something higher or recontextualises it into something utterly new, all of which this record utterly fails to do. Al's weird quavering baritone is mixed far too high, draws too much attention to itself, sits on top of the mix instead of inhabiting it as an instrument, and he's just not got the voice for that sort of presentation. The vocals were always as much texture as anything else on the previous LPs, but here they're in sharp focus and it just don't work. Al Cisneros (somewhat disingenuously in my opinion) has always been at pains to point out the essential meaningless of his lyrics previous to this point, his ransacking of the world's sacred texts for words and quotes meant to evoke, not to preach, meant to evoke a flight from this plane to another, hence the huge number of allegories and metaphors for death, flight and rebirth that litter his lyrics, and when they were on equal footing with the music, it worked, conveyed a sense of the transcendent, the immaterial, a glimpse of the other, but upfront and leading the way they have the opposite effect. They become the focal point, no longer part of the holistic weave of the music, and it relegates everything else to background or ornamentation.

Coming back to the added instruments, what bothers me is so many of them sound like afterthoughts, the piano and guitar especially. The guitar playing is appalling. Stilted, souless, pointless. Amazingly, the piano is worse. It sounds like they were in the studio and someone noticed one of the rooms had a piano in it and said "oooh, let's put that on it" just because they could - I was a studio engineer for years, and this would happen all the time with instruments in the studio, but pianos, especially grands, seem to have a weird effect on some musicians, they had to have the big piano on the record even if they could barely play the fucking thing - it sounds like an afterthought, it's clunky and ham-fisted, ruins any atmosphere that was there before it's entrance (same with the guitar) and the way it's mixed completely fails to integrate the piano into the soundscape. Which brings me to the second huge problem wth this record: The mix.

It sounds like it was mixed by an idiot with no ears. And recorded by one, which is odd, because it was recorded by Steve Albini, who also did Pilgrimage, which sounded like the walls of Jericho falling in very slow motion, whereas this sounds like a revolting cross between Pink Floyd and Current 93. The drum sound, and this is one area I normally expect Albini to shine****, is just horrible, a halfway house between Scott Burns' patented clicky early Death Metal sound and Phil Collins' gated 80s horror. Now knowing Albini, he's probably just recorded the drum sound the way Emil wanted it recorded, but it's lifeless, cold and undynamic, and at points, sounds suspiciously like it's been brickwalled, a practice that's way too prevalent these days, possibly because these days there's less and less of us who actually understand the art of recording shit properly. As I've previously noted, the bass is often much lower in the mix than before, and for a band that (ignoring overdubs) is at it's heart a bass and drums duo that smacks of a lack of confidence, and it also robs the bass of it's overarching harmonic contribution to the sound which has previously been utterly essential, god fucking damn it, if someone is playing a beautiful old Rickenbacker bass, I want to hear that it's a Rick, that gorgeous combination of thrum and clank that only a horseshoe pickup equipped instrument can put out. But it just ain't there, the bass sound is anonymous and ignorable and that's a fucking sin. All the overdubs just sort of sit there, floating on the top like scum on a stagnant lake, starving the music of oxygen. It all just sounds so careless, like a couple of hopeless stoners***** sharing a pair of headphones mixed the fucker at home in about the time it takes to listen to after a couple of massive chillums.

The worst thing though? The really big problem? You've got the wrong fucking drummer Al. I've seen people describing Emil Amos as more jazzy, more complex than Chris Hakius. Please. The Hakius is (yes, we've been here before, many times) the jazziest drummer in Doom. Too many people confuse technicality with 'jazziness' (stupid fucking word). The beauty of the old Om was their ability to play the same thing in so many different ways without ever losing that rolling, loping groove that held it all down, and the sound of a beautifully resonant down tuned kit interacting with the bass, but with Emil's higher pitched kit, that sonic interaction is lost. Sure they play pretty well together, but it doesn't lock in, doesn't sound like one four armed beast. Listen to some early 70s electric Jazz; Old Om is like Michael Henderson and Al Foster in Miles' '75 group, new Om is more Rick Laird and Billy Cobham in Mahavishnu Orchestra - more complex, but sound and fury signifying nothing as opposed to an organic evolving rhymthic octopus. When others describe Emil's drumming as jazzier that just suggests to me that whoever wrote that doesn't know fucking shit about jazz. Most of his fills sound like slowed down thrash fills, all parade ground flams and paradiddles, and he just can't fucking lock into Al's groove. And for me that's the absolute crux of the problem, this Om has no flow, it's stiff, boring and desperate to overcompensate for those shortcomings.

And don't even get me started on the hippy christian clapping circle bit. David Tibet meets Iron John. No one needs that in their lives.

Rant ends.

*Sneaked out on the Sub Pop Singles Club because it sounds like a shoddy demo. Don't even get me started on the b-side 'Version'. Dub does not mean adding a crap melodica solo and rubbish echo, I know they're American, but please...

**Common drummer ailment, symptoms normally allevaited by beer, weed or being shouted at.

***Amazingly, this album isn't as bad as Live Conference - The new Om playing the old Om's finest moment and fucking it up royally. Don't go there.

****Albini can be a little lacksidasical with guitars and other stuff occasionally, but normally the drums sound a). like a drum kit - which is fairly unusual in itself, go and listen to someone playing a drum kit, then listen to almost any record from the last 30 years, there's not much resemblence - and b). wonderful; resonant, woody and clear. Go and have a listen to Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey for a record where the drums and vocals sound like heaven and the bass and guitars just.. lack something.

*****I may be a complete fucking pothead, but I never, ever mix battered. It's not worth it, you just have to mix again the day after when y're vaguely sober.