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.

Bestia Excelente Dos

Emo cow

Sí, Soy Colocado, Or, What Would You Do If I Stuck My Cock In The Warp Drive?

Of course I'm fucking stoned, otherwise I wouldn't be urging you to stop reading this and go and watch the revoiced/re-editied Star Trek clips on The Dayjob Orchestra's youtube channel. The Next Generation clips especially are puke-inducingly funny, the Enterprise's crew reimagined as a group of thick as pigshit, sex-crazed intergalactic drug traffickers with appalling taste in music. That so much care (the voices are almost fucking dead-on, and the choice of words to fit the lipsync so good) has gone into something so unbelievably childish, peurile and aimed squarely at an audience of stoners brings me great joy. A word to the wise tho, don't listen to DJO's music unless you really, really like Dream Theater.

The idiot joy is here

Hynpnagogic Jerks: Part One In An Occasional Series

According to wikipedia, a hypnagogic jerk is "an involuntary myoclonic twitch which occurs during hypnagogia, just as the subject is falling asleep. Physically, hypnagogic jerks resemble the 'jump' made when a person is startled, often accompanied by a falling sensation". Which is odd, because I thought a hypnagogic jerk looked like this:

Yes, it's James Ferraro, purveyor of badly recorded half-arsed quasi new-age 80s-lovin' iron-pumpin' wankery masquerading as a portal to another zone*. I can't believe how many (otherwise sensible) people think this guy is some sort of psychedelic genius. He truly is the fucking lo-fi Stephen O'Malley**.

*a crap one, with VHS colours and a very, very thin atmosphere.

**Coming from me, this not a compliment in any way. O'Malley is a huge fucking talent-vacuum who talks a good game, but consistently fails to live up to his own hype, let alone the adulation showered on him by his cloth-eared devotees.

Bestia Excelente

There will be much new stuff up on the blog in the next couple of days or so, but in the meantime, why not enjoy this picture of a capybara with its excellent face.

El Genio De La Cebolla, O, Estoy En Amor Con Tracy Gill

I fucking love The Onion. Although most people seem to view it as America's Private Eye, to me, it's always seemed to be closer in spirit to the early works of Chris Morris, it's combination of utter ludicrousness, bitingly sharp satire, idiotic (but deceptively clever) wordplay and pinpoint piss-taking of (global to local) media tropes giving it the air of a print/online equivalent of The Day Today/On The Hour/Brass Eye*. I've gobbed so many drinks over my computer through reading an Onion headline at the wrong moment I've lost count**

And then they started Onion Radio, which is as good as you'd expect, and The Onion News Network, which is the funniest fucking thing I have seen in a while. News stories so stupid that they could rip spacetime treated with that special American News Reader grave seriousness, played totally and utterly straight, from O-Span's political coverage (Congress To Hide Nations' Porn From Future Generations...) to the sublime Today Now, a pinpoint demolition of daytime TV featuring the astonishingly mental Tracy Gill, who in one fantastic segment, interviews the author of her own biography with seemingly no awareness of the book's subject or content.

Anyways, here's three of my favourite clips. And try not to spit all over yr keyboards...

Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourist Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier

Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon

New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt And Injury Free

*Although they don't have CM's sheer fucking balls, I mean witness CM and Armando Ianucci's fantastically offensive post-9/11 special which came free with the Observer back in 2002. Can you really see the New York Times or any other big US broadsheet even contemplating printing that for the edification and enjoyment of it's readers? Can't see it myself.

**Note to Mr Jobs: Apple, I love yr computers and the way they don't crash mid-whateverI'mcuntingdoing all the fucking time, but I do feel that yr keyboards leave a little to be desired in the ability to withstand accidentally-sprayed alcoholic beverages. The only good thing I could say about my old PC is that I could throw the keyboard at a brick wall, accidentally use it as an ashtray, spill all sorts on it, and after a few hours drying upside down, the fucker would work. Just a thought.

El Perro De La Cerveza

Go Here immediately and buy their beer, it's fucking wonderful. Particularly the Punk or Hardcore IPAs, the most lip-puckering brilliantly bitter ales it has ever been my good fortune to come across. Punk is 6.8%abv of passionfruity dry-as-Death Valley ultrarefreshment that has knocked my previous favourite hot day ale* off the top of the 'Sun's out, let's make a brown glass bottle pyramid in the kitchen' chart. It even beats a perfect gin'n'tonic**.

Hardcore is to Punk what it name implies; harder, faster, louder***. 9.2%abv of hops, bitterness, hops, some more hops, bitterness and hops. God, it's good. There is bitter, there is IPA, then there's this. 150 (at least) IBUs§ of everything that makes a beer great, with nary a hint of the syrupiness (whether in texture or taste) that is unfortunately so often a feature of higher abv brews. It's so bitter it makes you dribble. And dry? Neat Campari or Manzanilla sherry (mmmm salty wine§§§) can't hold a candle to this fucker. Possibly the finest beer in existence.

*Cooper's Sparkling Ale, proof that, contrary to popular belief, the Aussies can make a decent beer. It's appallingly drinkable, and also has that sharp passionfruit edge that so many good, properly dry pale ales have. Weird thing is, I can't fucking stand passionfruit, never has a flavour/aroma been meant to exist as a backnote, a tint, as much as passionfruit. To me, in a beer, it's like civetone in perfume, in the background, in small quantities, it smells gorgeous, but you wouldn't stick your nose up a civet's arsehole...

**Hot day.

Big glass (3/4s of pint should do you).

Ice, made in the bottom of the freezer, lots of.

One and one half to two parts good gin (Tanqueray, Plymouth, Bombay Sapphire, Gordon's Distillers Cut. No crap. Sloe gin is acceptable.)

One and one half to half a part good tonic water.

Lemon zest, and a slice if y're feeling poncey. Lime is not acceptable in a G'n'T.§§

I'm a fussy fucker, what can I say?

***but unlike it's musical equivalent, not without subtlety.

§International Bitterness Units scale. Info here.

§§Quince might be tho, anyone got a quince tree?

§§§Seriously. Manzanilla is brilliant stuff, I generally don't like sherry, even most Finos taste a bit 'off' to me, but a good Manzanilla is astonishing. Like alcoholic sea.

Tómelo Lento

When it comes to electronic music, much as I adore the abstracted kosmische wibbling of Cluster et al, joyfully prostrate myself before the synthetique altar of Lard Free, Heldon, Spacecraft and other French loons and revel in the clanking otherness of British electronic music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop through Cabaret Voltaire/TG etc and up to the early days of Acid, nothing electronic quite floats my boat like good fucking Techno.

Now I know Techno is somewhat of a broad church, so I'd better define my terms before the trainspotters come out of their mushroom-scented dens and berate me for not toeing their particular party line. So if you disregard anything where the kick sounds like a distorted rubber ball bouncing off a hollow wall at over 145bpm, mindless euro-gabba shit, anything that smacks of hardcore and sounds like a fucking hoover*, y're getting there. Think Juan and Derrick, Blake Baxter and Eddie Fowlkes. Think m_nus and Perlon. Think Basic Channel and Modern Love and Warp** when it was still a label with a heart, think Tim Wright and Christian Vogel and the funkier end of Tresor. Got it?

I like it funky, I like it subtle and I like it beautiful. I don't mind fast, but it's impossible to make a drum machine groove once you go over a certain speed, witness the artistic dead-end that drum and bass fell into, eventually it had to slow down and mutate into something entirely different to progress. I don't mind hard, but not when that's all it is, unless y're Richie Hawtin or Surgeon, it's extremely difficult to give a gatling gun snare and jackhammer kick any groove whatsoever***.

I am rambling, I know, but there is a point. And it's this. My old mate Ergin, no mean DJ and musician himself, has started a site dedicated to the slower end of our beloved Techno, showcasing tracks new and old, from forgotten (should-be) classics by the likes of Carl Craig and Robert Hood to more obscure beauties that slipped under the radar (there's a killer Purveyors Of Fine Funk tune on there) and recent stuff that you should be listening to. It's a new site, so give it a while to get more content up, but what's there already is mighty fine, so get yrselves over to Slow Techno and enjoy.

*Didn't like it then, really hate it now. Grooveless, joyless shit.

**Don't get me wrong, they still release some glorious records, like Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus, and especially the latest Autechre LP, Oversteps, which is a flat-out masterpiece, but for every piece of electronic wonderment they put out, there's a fucking Maximo Park (why do this band exist?) or Battles§ tipping the goodness scales in the wrong direction. Warp used to have a label identity as strong as Blue Note or (early) Impulse!, but now they're just another big anonymous label and it's a damn shame.

***If I want velocity and heaviness I'll head for the grindcore section of my collection. This is supposed to be dance music, not an exercise in endurance, and if it ain't funky it fails. Mind you, there are very few things that are as funny as watching pilled-up twats trying to dance to really fast D&B or techno, so I suppose it does have some function.

§I know, lots of you like Battles, and while I admit they're a much better band than the aforementioned Maximo Park (not that that's particularly tricky), I can think of much better ways to spend my time than listening to a mechanized Yes featuring guest vocals by Alvin & The Chipmunks.

¡Nos Estamos Hundiendo!

I am utterly speechless in the face of the single most fantastically stupid question ever asked by a politician. I'm not going to even hint at what US congressman Hank Johnson enquires of a senior naval officer at about 1.10 in, just don't be drinking anything around that time, unless you want to spray yr screen with the beverage of yr choice as yr incredulity tendon snaps under the strain.

Go here, and weep as our world slides further and further away from reality...

Una Observación

Having measles as an adult is fucking revolting. I'd give it a miss if I were you.

¡La Máquina Que Va Ping!

Demdike Stare - Forest Of Evil (Modern Love)

Elephant 9 - Walk The Nile (Rune Grammofon)

Coconuts - Coconuts (No Quarter)

Tongues Of Mount Meru - Ocean Of Milk (Important)

Ben Nash & Sophie Cooper - Alchemy (Blackest Rainbow)

Magic Lantern - Platoon (Not Not Fun)

Jailbreak - The Rocker (Family Vineyard)

Mouthus/Bulbs - Split LP (Important)

Burning Star Core - Papercuts Theater (No Quarter)

Vibracathedral Orchestra - Joka Baya/Smoke Song/The Secret Base (VHF)

Ashtray Navigations - The Beak Stuck Out Of The Snow (Memoirs Of An Aesthete)

Arnold Dreyblatt - The Adding Machine (Canteloupe)

Charanjit Singh - Synthesizing: 10 Ragas With A Disco Beat (EMI India)

Elektro Guzzi - Elektro Guzzi (Macro)

Edward Larry Gordon - Celestial Vibration (Universal Sounds)

Yellow Swans - Being There (Type)

Supersilent - 9 (Rune Grammofon)

San Proper - Keep It Raw (Perlon)

Sightings - City Of Straw (Jagjaguwar)

Fiend - Agla (Trendkill)

Cabezas Abajo, No Absurdo, Cójale Lodos

Do you like wallowing in muck? Sonically speaking of course. I know I do. Do your earholes expand with delight when you hear such names as Noothgrush or Facedowninshit, Grief or Charger, Fleshpress or Eyehategod? Mine do. In short, does sludge float yr boat? If so, I suggest you get yr electronic arse over to Hebosagil's myspace where you can download their last two records, Colossal and Cosmic, both titanic slabs of massively distorted mindrot that should slake yr sludge-gland's thirst for filth nicely.

Estupidez De Domingo

Earlier today, if asked, I would have said my favourite song/album title of the moment was Wizards 'n' Shit by Big Swifty*. Then I downloaded this...

Now that is what I fucking call an album title.

It's by mid-90s Japanese maniacs Coa, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone into Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Altered States, Naked City, Ruins, early Boredoms or who has a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

*Aka Shri Swifty & The Mandali Of Mantra, whose sole album Canals Of The Atlantean Plain is one of the great unacknowledged masterpieces of tonefloating kosmische blug**, criminally ignored by everyone, possibly because they were from Florida, possibly because they had such a fantastically stupid name. If you like electric-era Pelt, or Tony Conrad, or wibbling French and German freaks, or Taj Mahal Travellers then I suggest you go here and download the fucker.

Also, if anyone has a copy of Big Swifty's album Akroasis for sale or download or is willing to burn me copy, I would be eternally grateful...

**Blug: Similar to mung, only with more drooling.

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.