We’ve been following the releases of the French group L’Autopsie for some time now, as well as related eruptions such as micro_penis and Sun Plexus, and regular readers will know we’ve reacted with a certain amount of nausea and repulsion mixed in with the musical appreciation. Sebastien Borgo is one of the prime movers and shakers in this rotomontade, and it seems there are no lengths to which he won’t go in terms of breaking taboos, unsettling the listener with queasy sounds and shocking imagery, and doing his level best to unbalance normality in his quest to disrupt the “straight” world. In terms of apt collaborations, today’s item is matched only by the time Sun Plexus made a double-LP with Canada’s finest anti-good taste merchants, The Nihilist Spasm Band – not only do they produce horrible music, but also bellow out rude words at the audience.

As to Smegma, despite owning not-a-few records by this unclassifiable Californian band of monstrous weirdos, I still find I can’t say anything remotely useful about their work or their music. They’ve been active since 1973, tangentially associated with the LA Free Music Society, and it’s well-nigh impossible to say who the members are – because people keep coming and going, they often go by absurd alias names, and even long-serving players may not be the same people they started out as. Like the French group, they too have flirted with outré imagery and nasty-ish album titles, and have successfully transitioned into the 21st century via noise collaborations with Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Carlos Giffoni and other prominent weirdos. For those who want to know which “incarnation” of Smegma appears on today’s record, forget your rock-family-trees and check the Bandcamp page; I will mention that John Wiese, one of the more prolific and abrasive West Coast noisers, is present on the grooves.

The record starts out menacing and broody on side one, then grows hysterical and shocking on side two, ending in a flurry of diabolical shrieks and incessant pandemonium that’s enough to send anyone crazy. It’s all the more troubling for the lack of context, somehow; nothing explained or framed, much like the extreme close-up details of the collage artworks, which make no sense at all yet contain just enough recognisable imagery to confound the poor human brain. You can’t call this free improvisation, or free noise; it’s just some monstrous presence that insists on itself, squatting in your mind like an unwelcome supernatural apparition. The release also includes a witty self-referential self-sabotaging insert, a text written by the French-Japanese artist Samon Takahashi, which does everything it can to undermine the music, the audience, and the framework of music journalism / criticism too; while demonstrating how futile it is for anyone to write about music, it also manages to pull the rug out from the listener’s expectations, especially that segment of the audience who know anything about Smegma and think they know what to expect. Ogrob has played a similar sardonic prank before, on the Musica Acouscousmatica LP, mercilessly poking fun at anyone foolish enough to take art seriously.

Today it has the effect of pre-empting just about any response to Transmissions Des Fluides; maybe that’s the point, to insist that we go in with no preconceptions, and take our medicine without complaining. Either that, or these madmen have jointly decided that modern culture has run out of road long ago, and all that’s left to do is trade bodily fluids, as the title suggests. This record isn’t a friendly jam session at all, but a free-for-all orgy of far-out perversion among consenting freaks. Equally unsettling is the poster insert with an impossible photo of a ruined bridge, with two tiny figures walking across the top of it at an absurdly dizzying height. An indigestible, but unforgettable, melange of extreme sounds and ideas, executed with reckless abandon and flashes of pathological insanity, another nail in the coffin of modern music. (12/11/2024)

Well, he’s not averse to making sounds either – and here as Z.B. Aids he turns in a collection of his far-out experiments using just a guitar and a Walkman, so results are mostly degraded guitar sounds combined with a very singular approach to improvisation and free playing, and (I assume) crazy treatments of magnetic tape. This particular genius commands our respect for his deep underground credentials – few know about him or his work, even his supporters and friends – and despite art exhibits, art books (see above) and a record like this one, it is highly unlikely that the raw unrefined art of Hengray will ever reach the hungry audience it deserves. Or any audience at all, given current international trends intent on snuffing out art in all its forms, and replacing it with ersatz, meaningless pap. Michel Henritzi sums up the achievement of this great man in a single word – “alienation” – and remarks on his “aesthetic of disappointment and entropy”, qualities which are particularly to be savoured in today’s world of bland smiling faces, unearned positivity, and expectations of high-achievement.

If we can believe the testimony of the creator himself, his sole ambition is to be an outsider – abstract himself from society completely, live alone in the woods, make grotesque sculptures out of wood for his own satisfaction, and even recklessly fire bullets at inanimate objects in an act of nihilistic elan which aligns him with the Surrealists. But it seems the culture, the environment, and the circumstances are unwilling or unable to vomit out this anomalous growth in their midst, and so he operates in this very exciting interstitial zone striving hard to produce what he may and issue such statements as can be wrung from the neck and strings of his long-suffering guitar machine. I myself have never heard anything like this LP – ten tracks of unclassifiable outpourings, whose sincerity and deep truths cannot be doubted, yet will be rejected instantly by many listeners who fear its awkward, ungainly, ugly forms, shunning it just as they once shunned Quasimodo. I can only suggest you grasp a copy, rub your belly against the ‘Glauque Flamboyant’ and prepare for a lifetime of warped brain-damage and tormented dreams, but you’ll be all the better for it.

Limited to 150 copies and still in print at time of writing, with a poster included. Recommended; a truly unique statement from the DIY deep underground. From 20 Feb 2024.

I am personally glad to see these projects flourishing, especially as it seemed at one point that Borgo – never the most optimistic in his outlook to begin with – was despairing of the possibility of continuing, I think mainly due to loss of a friend and fellow collaborator. As title Régurgitationisme clearly indicates, this is their idea of a “remix” album where sounds and tapes are traded back and forth and re-generated, through audio craft and skills on the mixing desk, into something new and aesthetically pleasing. Well, that’s fine for the “normals” who want to keep their audience happy and sell records, but L’Autopsie have other ideas. In their configuration, the act of tape-swapping is more like diabolical warlocks at a coven throwing unspeakable things – vegetable matter, dead animal carcasses, mould, filth, bones – into an enormous cauldron and letting the flames consume what they may. Then when it’s all over they tip the entire mess over the floor of the forest, having first offended the nostrils and all the other four senses of humanity with their overpowering stench.

This time, the group have far exceeded the terms of their original project – if such a statement holds any validity whatsoever, which is doubtful – and moved into an unholy alliance, seeking out the sickest parts of noise music for a forced wedding with their idea of what “improvised tape music” is. Even the genteel, harmless genre of “field recording” can be polluted by this group of lunatics – if they could find a way of recording raw sewage and an abattoir at the same time, rest assured they would do it instantly. This team-up with the great Vomir has proven to be very productive and effective, reminding me of his exceptional record Saboteur Saboteur which he made with Yves Botz in 2019, itself a benchmark of the unfettered creative juice this remarkable fellow is able to inject into any situation. If you can get a copy of this limited (50 copies) edition cassette, prepare for an hour of sickening nightmares and dark clouds of insanity, for which there is no known cure.

With collage art by Jean-Kristau and screenprinting by Jessica Baum, this artefact is a gold nugget of powerful, menacing sound emanating from the deepest recesses of the French underground. Outsize plastic box includes a piece of rubble in a bag, just to remind you of the broken state of the world today. From 2nd April 2024.

Ice Yacht is one trading name for the affable Philip Sanderson, and he and Rupenus were briefly associated with Alien Brains in the early 1980s (along with Nigel Jacklin, the Zarbi of rock and roll noise). His track here, titled with a sentence that invokes Tristan Tzara, god of Dada mischief, almost has a limpid beauty of the sort you’d rarely associate with “Mr Rusty Lawnmower”, and you can see why commentators and pundits are reaching for their “musique concrète” comparisons to account for this delicate music. Well, I say delicate. Though fragile, there’s still a core of iron fencing wrapped around it, and a core of molten steel surrounding its icy heart. I seem to be describing a giant robot lost in a wasteland, lamenting its fate. In this “dreaming of Dada” epic, Sanderson exhibits a dedication to the task which few modernists can muster, and refuses even the slightest hint of sentimentality, like a teetotaller at a beer party.

In the following piece, I think it’s Sanderson again, this time linking antlers with Guido Huebner who is Das Synthetische Mischgewebe. At any rate there’s a third strain of poison vapour in the lining which is just about detectable, providing all your receptive instruments are set at maximum sweep. The gaps keep alternating with the music, and we don’t know if they’re “sound windows” of the sort beloved of Stockhausen, or actual rips in the fabric of reality. The borderless, featureless chug continues ineffably, until we can’t see our way or even trust our own senses. Huebner is a fellow who I associate with physical objects, old pieces of household junk which he repurposes to make his sounds, even when he always does something wicked to disguise the results and sap the true nature out of everything. Here, he seems to have completely departed from the physical world, to the extent that he no longer believes in the vacuum cleaner or the pop-up toaster; all that’s left is our fading memory of them.

If that notion seems attractive to you, well, don’t touch that dial; there’s more of the Huebster on the closing track called ‘Morceau De Cire’, whose name departs from the all-German scheme. Of the four this one seems to take us closer to the more familiar old-world of old-school New Blockaders, when men were men and all of society was perceived as trapped inside Brutalist architecture and decaying inner cities. I mean we come within an ace of tasting the rust and eating the metal junk that was once the portion of all TNB collectors, but it’s been fed through an all-purpose mincing machine and passed through eighteen blenders, leaving us with a hollowed-out core of nothingness. Whatever glimmer of hope Ice Yacht offered us with his bleached melodies has now been effaced by the heavy fist of nihilism, which might be the point of exile where Rupenus would wish all of us to fetch up, the entire human race banished to live forever inside the dented copper kettle of Doom.

Well, so much for the purely “musical” portions of this difficult long-player. Old-fashioned listeners who like the sound of the human voice speaking words may enjoy the opening track, on which I have so far avoided adding any comment, and I hope I will continue to maintain my silence. It’s credited to srmeixner who is also Contrastate, and is based on a much earlier performance he made from around 2004-5. The spoken word element has been lifted partially from the notorious TNB “manifesto”, the slogan-filled text which is both a statement of intent for the band and a long list of “things we hate” issued by Rupenus and company, and TNB presumably still adhere doggedly to its precepts. I normally enjoy a good collage of overlapping voices, but here the speakers appear to be stranded in some hideous dimension of blindness, their voices expressing a total disconnect, their minds clutching desperately at whatever rags of memory may surface.

In summary, this is a strong and at times very original release, and although the extent and methods of the collaborations are far from clear, I suppose it’s the end result that counts, a result that can only be measured by psychologists with callipers and whisk brooms, sweeping up your damaged brain cells to be poured into a phial. Rupenus continues to insist his New Blockaders “heritage” is honoured, by whatever means possible; but at least on this occasion, he’s not obstinately staying in the same place, the contributors are given ample space to follow their own direction, and there’s a glimmer of light in the overall pallor. It’s also odd that the original manifesto makes plain his “anti-art” stance, yet he’s happy to accept the inevitable comparisons with Dada. These days, nary a TNB review passes by on the internet without the word “absurdist” or “Dadaist” buried somewhere in its textual effusions, and I’m just as guilty of doing it myself. Admittedly, Tzara and Hugo Ball didn’t really intend to have their madcap antics codified into the status of high art by the curators, so perhaps it’s fitting at some level that Tristan Tzara’s name does surface on this record, regardless of how many contextualising clouds may surround it. From 2nd October 2023.

Said handwriting appears on the envelope for today’s absurdist record, a 2-CD set called The Pruttipal Index (FUTURA RESISTENZA RESCD002), and there’s also a personalised greeting card with a rather cryptic message to me from Goodiepal himself. Good job I’m not mentally ill, or I might read too much into that message. At time of writing, I’m worming my way like a demented centipede through the first disc, only to encounter a wild and perplexing array of sonic information: crazed folk-like songs, heavy metal, drum and bass, bizarre minimal electronics, spoken word, and many other boiled sweets bobbing around in the casserole which simply can’t be described. Often a track will contain five or eighteen ideas drawn from the pool of creativity above, and edit between them furiously, adding further to the confusion. In vain does the hapless listener turn to the digipak or enclosed booklet for any helpful information…the covers are strange collages of mixed messages, fragments, and images, much like a Mark E. Smith cut-up, and the booklet appears to be derived from a multi-lingual international conversation that took place on WhatsApp – describing something so obscure and marginal that even the participants weren’t sure what it might mean. There’s information lettered on the discs to distinguish one crazy track from another, but it’s arranged every which way, almost Dadaist in composition, full of Danish words, and names I do not recognise. So far we might as well be getting transmissions from Jupiter.

This might or might not have something to do with the National Gallery of Denmark, where (allegedly) our man Goodiepal has been installed in a gallery room since 2012 and hosting all manner of “free activity”, which could mean almost anything. He even claims to be “squatting” there, as if he wasn’t invited and he’s doing it all illegally, but it doesn’t matter anyway since the museum has no money. I can guess from all these clues that The Pruttipal Index is a very collaborative endeavour which features various crazy Danes, non-artists and non-musicians, and probably similar outcasts from the rest of Europe too, but we’ll probably never know for sure; I suppose, in my limited experience, some creators who come close to breathing this same sort of unhinged mayhem and perplexing art-prankery are the Chocolate Monk CDR label in the UK, and Ogrob and his crew in France (and associated releases by Astatine and others, and the work of the Doubtful Sounds label). I’ll admit that in the final analysis I have no idea what to make of The Pruttipal Index, but I still love it – I enjoy listening to it and I enjoy being baffled by it. The efforts of Goodiepal to remain mysterious and unknowable are really paying off, even though we do know his real name and everything, and in his own zanoid manner he’s managed to pull off the same “cloak of invisibility” trick as the mysterious Xentos in the UK, the master of the slippery eel. (For further info, may I refer the reader to my 2020 review of the Mental LP).

One day, when my brain is feeling less scrambled, I will broach the second CD and let it fry my noggin, and also see what happens when I insert the cover-mount USB key into a suitable slot. In the meantime, I leave you with Goodiepal’s message to me: “I have gotten to[o] old to play alone and about 7 years ago I started a band & we moved to the Balkans.” And you know what? He’s right! Moving to the Balkans is about the only way left for any of us to go. From 25th April 2023.

Arrgh. Ugly! We’ve heard this fellow at least once before and often been somewhat terrified by his performing persona; when he barks out his raw and fragmented street poetry in his very distinctive voice, it induces an immediate sensation of alarm, and hairs on neck start to bristle. He’s so insistent in his delivery, and the words he spews are so nonsensical, that he projects as an obsessive, mentally ill schizo homeless man, but also one who probably carries the answer to everything inside his tormented brain, as he forms unconnected words into powerful compacted images of utter absurdity. Plenty of instances of that horrific voice emerge on this CD, often distorted and over-amped and further treated by tape-mangling and speed wobbles, and this time they’re spliced with micro-second edits of noise, music, and found sounds, aural detritus, everything adrift in the great trash-heap of the universe. This is cut-up art of such raw crudeness that it even makes earlier famous instances seem like cultured fine art – I mean Bladder Flask, Hastings of Malawi, or Flee Past Ape’s Elf. Dai Coelacanth refracts images from a corner of broken, run-down English society, and seems intend on rubbing our noses in something we don’t want to know about. It’s one of those rare records that actually conveys a sense of stink, of decay. You could drive yourself insane trying to decode this slew of information, and after a while you realise your own brain has become a sort of garbage compactor, attempting to turn straw into gold.

Included in the envelope from an address in Stoke on Trent was an A5 book of prose by Dai Coelacanth called Ghoul Town Tales three, and just reading a single page is enough to cause permanent blindness and brain damage. I realise I’m not making this effort sound particularly likeable, but I’m convinced there’s a lot of truths, however unpalatable, buried in this confusing dog-vomit of abrasive sound. From 16 March 2023.

Richard Rupenus sometimes drops me a concise email about his releases and reissues, and wanted me to know that the Sonoris label had also reissued P16.D4’s Distruct, a 1984 master-work by Ralf Wehowsky which included contributions from Bladder Flask, NWW, Die Tödliche Doris, DDAA, The Haters, Merzbow, and others. Yes, the 1980s – a time perhaps when experimental music felt different somehow, more radical, shocking, even a shade more dangerous. As to this benchmark cut-up record, I wonder how much more I can find to say about it – I feel I covered it fairly well in 2001 and again in 2018, when we heard this bizarre slapstick remix version of it called Le Scrambled Debutante & Broken Penis Orchestra Play Bladder Flask. Playing it today, it feels a lot more approachable than it used to for some reason; what once were breakneck speeds now feel more manageable as I strap on my seatbelt, and what once appeared to be shockingly illogical changes and edits of unrelated material now feel they are part of a very subtle master plan. I shan’t say that I’ve cracked the “code” of Bladder Flask, a task beyond human endeavour, and in any case the original aim wasn’t to build some kind of sonic structure – quite the opposite – through cut-ups of short pieces of analogue tape, a huge diversity of source material, and a madcap approach to assembly, it’s more likely to be saying something about the nature of chaos, and about our futile attempts to make any sense of the completely random nature of the universe.

Even so, something more is getting through to the Pinsent brain this time…perhaps I’m seeing more of the inherent humour this time, and certainly appreciating the way that tapes are largely free from “processing” or filtering, suggesting that the creators may have been consciously avoiding the trademarks of classic musique concrète technique and preferred to let the snippets speak for themselves, with the true genius of Bladder Flask emerging simply from the overlaying and connections between so many ill-fitting elements. I can even enjoy the vulgarity of it, the farting noises, the forced laughter, the air of the zany and the infantile spew around my ankles, without feeling the need to climb onto my high-horse of cultural snobbery. Another selling point of this CD is that we now have more detail – very precise detail – about who made the recordings, and when they did it. For years I’ve assumed Bladder Flask was all the work of a teenaged Richard Rupenus, but brother Philip Rupenus was also involved, as were three other mayhem merchants – John Mylotte, sometimes called Sir Ashleigh Grove and founding member of Metgumbnerbone; Nigel Jacklin from Alien Brains (famed UK noise pioneers who were released on Snatch Tapes; Rupenus was a guest member); and Sean Bredin, who also played in Metgumbnerbone and other groups involving the same circle of friends, such as Masstishaddhu who made one record for United Dairies in 1988.

The bonus Bladders amount to an additional 29 minutes of music – I thought they were previously unreleased, but in fact they surfaced not long ago on a Kommissar Hjluer project and as a seven-incher on Anomalous Records. Even so it’s great to have these bonus manifestations of the Bladder Flask mentality in the toaster – or is it? The long piece, called ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’, is spectacularly unpleasant – much denser than the original LP, almost airless, forming a clotted tangle for the ears and the brain. There’s the same jumble of aural information, but there’s too much of it happening at once, without any breathing space given to the poor over-worked listener. It’s also nastier; the racking cough sounds throughout won’t win any new converts to the cause of experimental music. That said, there’s still a persistent alien-eerie quality to this poisoned gumbo which may be exhumed from a depth of around 960 feet, if you can break through the crust of the silted earth with your shovel.

The other two extras, ‘I Am As I Have Spoken’ and ‘Zzzeut-Zzt-Zzt-Zzt (Pour Chapeaux, Manteaux Et Parapluies)’ are easier to digest, the former making considerably more use of spoken word fragments and also somehow implying a menace, a shrill violence which hasn’t appeared to this point. The latter piece is just plain horrifying. It’s as though Rupenus were turning his melt-ray on everything about the world he doesn’t like, particularly conventional music, and he won’t stop until the objects of his hatred are dissolved into ashes and mud. The mangling of popular song is an unexpected trope here, not a thing I’d ordinarily associate with Rupenus, but he brings his own distinct personality to this well-worn move. Even the liner notes are interesting; I suspect now they’re a cut-up of extracts from previous reviews of the record, which means even my prose might be buried in here somewhere. Missing in action is the original front cover found image of the distraught young man with a revolver at his desk, and his pained expression that always made me think he was contemplating blowing his brains out. Which is probably what this still-strange record is trying to do with your brains, so approach with caution. From 6th March 2023.

The cassette tape is called Diese, Nichts & Solche and was released as FRAG55 on the Hamburg label Fragment Factory. We’ve previously received and noted a few artistic gems from this imprint, including tapes by Ice Yacht and the impressive conceptual statement Musique Inconcrète by Italian genius Torba. Unlike these, Eckloff’s tape is neither approachable, nor at all easy to decode. The disturbing, visceral collage image on the cover is one barrier to the unprepared civilian, harking back to the sort of gore and nastiness we used to get from industrial cassettes in the 1980s, but it’s also evidently informed by a knowledge of 20th-century visual art – whispers of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Bellmer, and George Grosz could all be traced in its torn contours, but nothing takes us past the initial shock of that image, the stark reminder of our own mortality.

Diese, Nichts & Solche may contain three new compositions across its two sides; the interior of the cassette I hold isn’t at all informative, and the Bandcamp page streams just two tracks. All we’re told is that Eckloff’s work is positioned at the “intersection of concrete music, language and field recordings” and is pretty much dedicated to reflecting, or expressing, the “sheer absurdity of our times”. Absurdity, I can dig – it’s one of the words I invariably reach for when I try and account for the bizarreries of Column One. The B side, which I’m streaming first today, could be read as an avant-garde sex tape – a female voice gasps and pants orgasmically, a male voice chuckles with ghastly triumph, and there’s a rhythm to the work that could only be described as “coital” – bouncing bedsprings assisted by beats from a set of bongoes. You’ve rarely heard such a joyless depiction of the sex act; emotionally cold, futile, grotesque, and mechanical. In fact the mechanical grind carries on much longer than it should, hardly bringing us any closer to a moment of jouissance. I don’t want to hear that hollow masculine chuckle ever again; it’s like some sadistic hunter from the 19th century savouring the death of his quarry the fox. This is followed by a shorter piece, spoken-word (mostly in German) with very strange sound effects collaged in; a didactic lecture of some sort perhaps, illustrated in an academic conference room from Hell with the world’s worst audio-visual presentation. A variety of speaking voices pass through this radio broadcast from another dimension, and the calculated genius with which Eckloff assembles his materials is considerable. He’s not interested in creating a messy jumble of disconnected edits, and instead juxtaposes his fragments with the clinical skill of a mad scientist. At this point, I may be grateful that I don’t understand German; it might drive me mad too.

Switching my attention (and shattered consciousness) to the A side, I can now see why it tripped me up on first audition; small, disconnected sounds scoring very high on the what-is-it factor, as if depicting an imaginary performance piece too extreme even for Otto Muehl, punctuated with some appreciative bleats from a contented sheep. We’re strapped into a barber’s chair to suffer the diabolical haircut (hear the shears clicking away), and voices arrive, and drift in and out, including the man who advises us we will “drift off into nothing” who also appeared on the B side. Surreal – to the point of sheer horror. Nurse With Wound never came close to achieving this degree of unhinged psychosis. With this tape, Jürgen Eckloff is indeed realising his plan to “deconstruct language”, and he does it by undermining the spoken word with these strange intrusions of sound art, field recordings, and very sharp editing. He doesn’t get his results through noise, shock, or outrage; rather through stealth, quietly sapping the listener’s sense of normalcy with his understated yet profoundly odd sounds. Evil genius at work.

Eckloff is also a film-maker. Seems he’s been making strange art movies since 2005 – some of them can be seen on YouTube. A lot of them appear to be quite short experiments, but Die Versuche des Naum Kotik is a full-length 92 minute item. At first glance you might think this is a genuine documentary about a very obscure artist or creator of some sort, but in fact the whole thing is a very clever hoax, albeit an extremely convincing one. Part of the hoax is to claim the movie won a prize at the World Film Carnival in Singapore for the year 2021; there is such an award, but this film was never nominated. The film-maker “Kärma Burg” is simply an alias for Eckloff, and the technical crew (also alias names) are friends and members of Column One. (The best fake name here is ‘Eyn Lump’.)

The highly confusing story is presented as a layered riddle of sorts, puzzling over the provenance of found photographs and cryptic inscriptions on them, expressed as a series of quasi-documentary narratives and anecdotes to advance the fiction about the creations of Naum Kotik Junior. Along the way you’ll be treated to some memorable black and white footage, showing Kotik wandering in the forest in between extreme close-ups of the bark of a tree (with a toothbrush in his mouth). Or the artist working at his desk on a mysterious project. All the voiceover material is served to us painfully slowly and spoken in a monotone, perhaps so we won’t notice that none of it makes any coherent sense. There’s also the sound and music contributions from ‘Robot Schaminski’, furthering our sense of descent into an absurdist and grotesque fiction. Not to mention the episodes of stop-motion animation using old 19th-century engravings, like a darker take on the hermetic movies of US artist Harry Smith. Again, plenty of 20th-century art and cinema quotations to savour, including Svankmajer for sure: Eckloff’s approach to stop-motion animation of dolls, metal, card, newspaper, and wooden objects is drawn from the same well of dark poetry and grim fatalism. There are also hints at a sexual perversity that would have made Hans Bellmer blush.

I personally found this curio somewhat repellent and horrific at first, but I’m slowly coming to appreciate the sheer dogged oddness of it all, the relentless way the creator follows every turn of his twisted imagination to the bitter end. The clever part of the hoax has been to refer to the real-world Naum Kotik, a Russian crank scientist who in 1908 published his findings about the non-existent N-Ray, some form of invisible electro-magnetic radiation or energy field that could emanate from the human mind or body; although completely nonsensical, it preoccupied the brains of French scientists for a while. As the fictitious grandson, Naum Kotik makes not a few references to this force and how it influenced his photography and film-making. In the end, the point of this film is not to take us in with its deception; rather I expect it’s intended as another metaphor, or series of metaphors, for what Jürgen Eckloff is doing with his work – particularly the part concerned with the deconstruction of language. Here, he seems to be doing his level best to subvert several targets and cultural assumptions at once – history, fine art, cinema, the science of physics, and common sense itself. Prepare for a bewildering ride, an intense well-crafted psychological melee from this latterday Surrealist.

From 2nd November 2022.

With its devil-may-care approach to mic placement, this CDR spins us back to a more innocent time (early 1980s) of UK cassette bands making home experiments in the kitchen by any means (and utensils) that come to hand. While he briefly samples the music of minimalist composers Glass and Riley, he does so very irreverently and doesn’t even deign to spell their names correctly. He also does a “cover version” of a song by The Shadow Ring, a very bold and welcome move, as the work of this important UK trio from Folkestone can only benefit from more exposure within the culture, although his clumsy keyboard work on ‘Lindus’ is, if anything, not quite primitive enough for the task at hand.

Clicking onto one of Gobbing’s websites, I find he describes his act as a “dada noise improv thing”, alludes to his working method as “high speed dada cutup nonsense”, and self-deprecatingly sums up his output as “STUPID music”, exuding a healthy non-art sensibility that indicates he doesn’t take himself entirely seriously. He’s made dozens of records, available through his Bandcamp page, and there’s evidence of numerous live sets and split releases since 2017, all evidencing the same streak of demented weirdness and zany surrealist antics. I’m tempted to file him alongside fellow luminaries such as Dai Coelacanth and Filthy Turd / Darren Wyngarde, who also produce scads of nonsensical-genius cassettes, though Territorial Gobbing occupies his own patch of the crazy streets of MadHouse Britain 2021. For one thing, he’s not especially “noisy”, and achieves his mind-sapping effects in more subtle and devious ways. An excellent release … and we look forward to hearing more.

Alter Ego here with Cold Biology (LF075), six tracks of low-key electronica and rhythm box chuntering with track titles referring to species of plant life for some reason…Alter Ego has appeared on this label with self-titled item dating from 2016, but we don’t appear to have a copy in our files. Press blurb describes this sullen, strung-out music as “sediments, fungal life, extracted sounds from the life-cycle”…what I’m mostly hearing is some mutant form of ramshackle post-financial collapse minimal avant-techno, where the beats are struggling to stay alive and the sequenced layers can hardly breathe in the poisoned air. It’s as if someone were trying to recreate Mego and Raster Noton records, using only a broken photocopier from 1973.

Mouth Worker has been showing up on the old TSP sensors since around 2015 and we found a lot to savour in his demented vocal-and-noise roarers, Rose of the Desert and Tomb Mystery. His plan was to use voice samples in among gobbets of noisy detritus, subjecting everything to intense distortion, creating nightmarish glimpses of psychological horror thereby. Just two long tracks on today’s item Probable Reuse Vol. 1 (LF079), which in theme and method is aiming to extol the virtues of recycling, perhaps implying that he’s now repurposing found sounds from an extensive library of samples, or using cast-offs and other remnants to build a crazy-quilt of noise. The first item here starts as a fairly affable looped riff, standing on the edge of turning into a pleasing melody, before it gradually descends into a semi-industrial Hades of grind and scuzz. Nice bit of jet-engine noodling for sure, but lacking the sheer menace of earlier Mouth Worker barbs. I got more of the nastiness I crave from the second track, which manages to combine an icy desolation with grisly robotic growls, sketching out a highly dystopian urba-scape in fragmented glimpses. The shortwave radio voices here add a particularly chilling frisson. With “bomb damage” cover art and its cold, distant stance, this release manages to convey a healthy dose of futility and despair.

Also in same envelope is a cassette release by same Mouth Worker called Shredding Anxiety (CC106). This was released in March 2021 on the very good Bristol label Cardboard Club, an imprint which works very hard to keep alive the spirit of 1980s DIY culture, opting to print all artworks in black and white. Compared to the eco-friendly recycling job above, this “angsty” item is a much more maximal beast, and once it starts pumping out thick layers of audio slurry then the pipe refuses to turn off, suffocating the listener in multiple layers of distortion, loops, and horrid drones. While not particularly “noisy” in the sense of brutalising table-noise harsh wall, this tape still passes on the same sense of gloom and despondency as Probable Reuse, yet there may also be a slightly “therapeutic” dimension. If its creator does indeed suffer from anxiety attacks, making grotesque organic noise music like this might be the best way to purge oneself of these unwanted mental episodes. Recommended listening to help you kick start the brain on a rainy Monday morning.

All the above from 27th July 2021.

On The Grand Panjandrum (SOUR ORANGE RECORDS SO009C), Phizmiz forsakes the lush production surface in favour of a much more gritty and direct style – these 20 short songs are recorded with a very basic set-up, guitars, drum machine, bass and cheap organ to accompany his sneering vocals, as if he was working on an old steam-driven TEAC PortaStudio, and the artiste comes close to reinventing himself as a contemporary version of R. Stevie Moore or Deep Freeze Mice. Even if he isn’t using that old technology, I’d imagine you have to make a bit of effort to sound this way using today’s digital tools, whose settings mostly tend to assume you always want to sound clean and perfect. Right from the get-go, this tape exudes distortion in the sound and abrasive qualities in the tunes, chord shapes, discordancies, and most of all the venomous singing voice. Just about every one of these songs is “disguised” as a piece of power-pop with punky edges, yet under the charm there is concealed much sarcasm, plaint, bitterness, and subversive swipes at society. Many contemporary hot topics fall under the cruel tongue of Ergo Phizmiz – the theft of our personal data by big tech companies via SmartPhone is accurately lambasted on ‘Shareholder’, and ‘The Man From Brimwood Farm’ is unsparing in its details about animal slaughter. The title track, and other songs like ‘Holocaust Denier’, address the general stupidity of the populace with a deadly combination of humour, sarcasm, and virulence – our man has several bitter pills he wishes us to swallow, but he sugar-coats every one of them in an approachable pop music radiance.

While the production may deliberately tend towards the crude, the elaborate song construction is ingenious, and the performer’s breathless style indicates how effortless he makes it sound, concealing the complexity. He doesn’t stint on craft, neither in the songwriting nor the finished recordings. Interestingly, I see that some of the lyrics were “collaged from books”, according to a throwaway credit line, which suggests than when he’s not inventing these incisive stabs at contemporary UK society (and proving a possible worthy successor to Mark E. Smith), he’s drawing inspiration from the Burroughs / Gysin cut-up method, hopefully filtered by way of David Bowie. Scrambling common sense this way is just another tool in his box to help realise his absurdist visions. He’s joined on this release by Depresstival (who might be Lottie Bowater, the multi-media creator and activist) for occasional vocal forays, and the barbed colour collage printed in nauseating colours is by Zachary Zena Giberson.

The “collage from books” method continues on Elmyr (STRATEGIC TAPE RESERVE), again featuring vocals from Depresstival. This one’s more or less cut from the same cloth as The Grand Panjandrum, but the musical style is less like DIY garage band and more like a deliberately clunky version of techno / dance music, using more keyboards and wonky synths, performed at a deathly slow pace and with all the joins showing. So far with this assessment, I guess I’m taking a cue from the press description which reads “premium avant-garde package holiday resort entertainment”, and the ridiculous cover collage which shows our man posing in front of some Anti-Ibiza nightmare and clutching a portable synth. There’s also a few vicious Spice Girls take-offs, on ‘Music For Wannabes’ and ‘The Tea Is Silent’, which in 2021 might seem an odd target at which to take aim, but there you go. This bit of celebrity-bashing aside, the targets of his bile are generally harder to discern this time, with sometimes murky and buried vocal lines, bizarre titles and scrambled lyrical content (as noted, derived from printed texts), plus the use of samples from movies to add a further twist of confusion. The abiding feeling is that this tape is the vision of one driven half-mad by the state of the sick world.

With less sugar-coating for this outing, Elmyr might seem off-putting on the surface, but in substance and execution it’s that bit more experimental and avant, pushing out into unknown areas off the map, displaying great skill and invention in the areas of tape collage, distortion, and general mind-muddling techniques used to support the lunatic plan. Depresstival’s contributions are just perfect here; while Ergo sounds by turns exaggeratedly weird, exasperated and appalled by what he sees, she opts for a cool and toneless delivery that cuts to the bone, devastating many foibles and follies with her impassive voice.

Both the above from 15th February 2021.