Tagged: English

The Fabulous Shirley Bassey

Seesaw of Dreams


Great package from Darren Wyngarde aka Filthy Turd…no-nonsense English noisemaker of prolific proportions…active and social he be, engaging with noise in a physical and sweaty manner, aided by fellow oddballs, not footling around with computers or antiseptic conceptual notions…arrived here in May 2012…two cassette tapes, wrapped up in a magazine spread (and I use the word advisedly), with some underfloor felt / debris / muck thrown in, hopefully lifted from under one of his fetid carpets…neither tape is titled that I can see, although one of them might be called URDWYG THE GOLDERR – CASSETTE PSYCHIC VOLUME 1 …this one is made from a recycled musicassette, wherein El Filtho has recorded his dire diablry over top of pre-recorded elements but not allowed any remnants of original to survive…such cassettes are probably impossible to give away even in charity shops now, who have turned their backs on VHS tapes long ago…the deal with this release is that the item is not for sale or manufactured in conventional sense, and to hear it you must send a tape in your possession to the warlock himself, whereupon he will refashion and refit it with his grim horrors, hand-making all covers, each one unique…at same time guaranteeing to wreck your equipment…a potent spell then…seems he has already enlisted over 50 subscribers to the scheme, each man willingly signing up for a walk to the gallows tree…so far a pretty convincing raid from under the floorboards, subterranean spirits and demons surfacing to take what is rightfully theirs among the sweepings, the leavings, the dust, the neglected cobwebs of England’s collective murky psyche…obvious clue to remark on here is the sex-magic undercurrent, as bejudged by the magazine pages ye see, but also perhaps to some extent by the choice of musicassettes that have been assaulted by the hands of Senor Turdoo…Shirley Bassey, Charlotte Church, Nana Moskouri are among the celebrity victims of this demented stalker in sound…some might read that enterprise as a nasty form of “aural rape”, but I think it’s more like a demonic possession, an inhabiting of female bodies…not to say that is any more wholesome…also a concerted effort to erase and wipe out all forms of bourgeois good taste by any means possible, dubbing over tapes of Mum and Dad music and effacing printed information from record company by means of blue magic marker…two enemies disposed of in this way…the second tape is also hard to identify like any good criminal renegade walking abroad should be, but the word UR is ensculped in middle of the case…would be possible to read title as 90-O-UR-O-A if wrecked on strong drink at time of scoping…it contains subtle but unsettling looping and murmuring effects, quickly degenerating into a pile of echoed and uncertain wail-noise that can freeze the hearts of strong men, many of them blanching or fainting at the prospect…continuous noise with scads of ghastloid vocal elements, which may morph at any time into a devilish prayer or chant, and certainly no good is boded if screams on tape are evidence of anything…now let us turn to the Cassette Psychic item for ear-trial….of course I was not a subscriber to the plan so Darren the Monstro sent me the Shirley Bassey palimpsest on his own account…wrapped in silver foil…note title inside scrawled in blue biro and torn from notebook of a muttering loon…it is disturbing to hear…again surprisingly at first a departure from the intense and caustic noise wall which previous outings from the Northern climes may have prepared us for…instead a low-key and muffled sound disguises some potent and radical tape experiments with voice, echo device, electronic oozings…still a foul and unpleasant experience, reaching into this bucket of earwigs, worms, and other garden effluvia…what will my hand touch next?…edited and hashed up for maximum disorienting factor, one illogical splice after another, baffling documents and sleep-talk wrenched from the mind of a four A.M. insomniac…at times almost comic, but instantly warping into grotesque and amateurish anti-art, with distorted microphone effects and vari-speeded effects, trivial fragments of sound that even the most hard-bitten cassette band of 1982 would have distanced puny selves from…is this making sense? It is unmaking sense…these scrawls and doodles on magnetic tape could be secret messages intended for your ears only, if you can realign your inner radio antennae onto the wavelength. By writing “Stuff For You” to me and drawing red witch on verso, Darrenacious has succeeded once again in casting the runes on me, sealing my doom.

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001AA

The Rector lived in Hampshire


Very eccentric and unusual record here by Socrates That Practiçes Music, one which we’ve had leaning its way in the vinyl pile since at least September 2011, although the limited vinyl actually came out in May 2011. Further Conclusions Against An Italian Version (Bat) (JUNIOR ASPIRIN RECORDS ASP 021) is an impressive art-rock statement by a London group who are completely new to me, containing an uncategorisable mix of content – songs, cut-ups, and instrumentals, with a very English awkwardness and generally puzzling air. The lyrics are fragmented and perplexing, riddles providing glimpses into sometimes rather dismal vistas and inexplicable events, and highlighting the underlying conundrum by simply repeating its hermetic phrases over and over. Lyrically this is easily on a par with Graham Lambkin’s profoundly disturbing texts for The Shadow Ring. Where the tone of these texts isn’t apocalyptic or nightmarish, it’s eccentric to a very extreme degree – ‘The Measures’, which intones sets of statistics for the dimensions of the human body, is so absurd it’s almost funny, but also a tad unsettling. Other songs, like ‘Tommy Dawsey’, impart tremendous significance to trivial and futile details, blurring the edges between madness and insanity. ‘Mrs Hammersmith’ offers an unsympathetic portrait of civil service bureaucracy, and could be read as a political critique or diatribe about society’s ills, but it too soon grows into something very strange. The singer delivers all this in a crisp English accent, emphasising syllables and consonants in mannered fashion, further deepening the strangeness of it all. He has a peculiarly English streak in the tradition of some of the best post-punk vocalists – Edward Ka-Spel of Legendary Pink Dots, Charles Hayward’s singing for This Heat, or that of Colin Newman for Wire. Not a bad set of precedents to pin to your bedroom wall, although Socrates is certainly upping the ante in many areas, partly due to the great conviction and powerful imagination in the execution.

Musically, we’ve got a fairly skewed approach to rock music and electropop songs, where the aim is not to uplift but generally to darken the mood where possible. There is the skeletal “angular” riffing on the guitars that also characterises the post-punk mode. There are short but incredibly beautiful piano fugues; and there are eerie backing vocals like a choir beaming in from a distant radio set. The production technique on the record knows how to use this “distancing” effect sparingly, but to great effect; it all contributes to the abiding sensations of unreality, of dream-like content. Then there’s the use of cut-up and mangled tapes, also used with economy. The LP opens with a twisted tape melange that welcomes the listener to the Italian Version world, letting us know we’re entering a realm of great artifice. ‘I am Alive Order’ is one of the more grotesque tape experiments, a paranoid vision not unlike Mark Stewart and Maffia, where the radically time-shifted and layered voices evoke a horrifying military disaster. Side one ends with an unexpected fragment from a lecture on English monastic history that could be taken from a 1970s schools and colleges programme. And on ‘Ruthless Rake’, the voice element is dropped in to accompany the music, and seems a slightly more benign episode involving a very English woman creating a tape-recorder letter to a friend; its vision of pastoral calm in a garden is quite at odds with the sinister tenor of the music. It’s all part of the deliberately mixed messages sent out by this odd record, with its well-crafted mix of the ugly (terror, madness, absurdity) with the beautiful.

Socrates That Practiçes Music is mostly the work of Andy Cooke, who wrote all the songs, plays keyboards and guitars, does the singing, and recorded and mixed the record with the help of Nathaniel Mellors. Alex Ellerington is the drummer in the group, there’s the guest vocalist Alexander Friske-Harrison on one tracks, and the cellist Dan Fox adds some delicious moments of resonant string work to ‘The Measures’. I’m very grateful to independent label Junior Aspirin Records for releasing this curio and sending a copy, and it seems quite at home with the work of label-mate The Rebel, whose astonishing LPs of disturbing songcraft we noted in TSP #20. It remains to mention the macabre collage cover, with a large bat suspended across a stone circle vista with a yellow ground. With its supernatural undercurrents, it vividly suggests haunted English countrysides and has led other writers to pick up on the M.R. James vibe of the record. So, if you’re a fan of ‘Spectre Vs Rector’, you need a copy of this!

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Jazz is the new WWF


Arrived 20 December 2011, another envelope from the Helsinki jazz label TUM that impressed us quite favourably in January. Juhani Aaltonen and Heikki Sarmanto are two big names in the Finland jazz world and have been playing together since 1964. Conversations (TUM CD 024-2) is a two-disc set of saxophone and piano improvisations from this venerable duo, including some original compositions by the pianist Sarmanto and a couple of Schwartz-Dietz standards that ought to be familiar to anyone who ever heard a jazz record made after 1940. It’s flawless playing throughout, even if not especially innovative, and Aaltonen comes across like a slightly mellower version of Trane when he was in an introverted, meditative frame of mind. Sarmanto is a melodic genius, and he’s quietly working overtime to add no end of melodic flourishes and glissandoes on his keyboard with modest grace and expertise. You can tell he’s an arranger; he seems to be sketching out scores for a full orchestra as he plays the keys. The cover painting is suitably autumnal with colours that match the wistful and burnished mood of much of the music, and was executed by the Finnish abstract painter Juhana Blomstedt.

From 16 December last year, we received Not Far From Here (PFMENTUM CD065), a set of impressive jazz-based improvisations by the Los Angeles musician Dick Wood, who composed and led the sessions as well as playing the flute and alto. He’s built a strong small combo with the cornet player Dan Clucas, the trombonist Dan Ostermann who sometimes adds a “space mute” to his trombone, the drummer Marty Mansour, bassist Hal Onserud who joined by way of Cecil Taylor, tenorman Chuck Manning, plus live electronics from Mark Trayle. Together, these energised and expert players harness mucho free jazz energy while also managing to negotiate all the wild twists and turns of Wood’s freaky, pretzel-shaped compositions; some startling dynamics on offer throughout all six tracks, showcasing instruments in highly imaginative and unconventional ways, all of which makes for a very satisfying listen. More often than not with this set I bethought me of a 21st-century update on Art Ensemble of Chicago with the added hookery-pamookery of digital whoops from the Supercollider electronics section, but it seems Wood has a very large range of musical ambitions in mind which feed into his elaborate mind-circuits, not all of them from the jazz world either. Blues, avant-garde composition, and Zen philosophy are all strong forces which Wood intends to marshall in his private army. In fine, a glorious listening experience of jazzy brass toots, percussion, bowed and scraped bass sounds, and generally mutated loopiness managed with the sparing use of electronic treatments and breathy growling effects. I like the lively stop-start angularity of ‘Cook The Books’, but if in need of something more “out there” you might enjoy the electronics-heavy diablery of ‘No Known Knowns’, which samples the voice of US defense secretary Rumsfeld and combines it with the octokoto instrument (a hand-made modified zither) of Dan Clucas. In the semi-shady mystery world of this cut, the rhythm section manage to sound positively cynical and blasé at the same time with their ramshackle percussion and resigned bass sighs. The record also boasts an exciting, bright sound, for which we must give due credit to Scott Fraser, the technician who recorded it at Architecture in LA in just two separate sessions. The mangos are in!

The English trio of power-jazz players Hession Wilkinson and Fell opened many ears to what the English could really do with the free jazz mode, particularly in 1992 when Foom! Foom! was first released and even veteran jazz writer Byron Coley waxed lyrical at that time about the raw blastage coming from Alan Wilkinson’s bell. Now here they are again on 2010 date released as Two Falls & A Submission (BO’WEAVIL RECORDINGS WEAVIL44CD), and the passage of 18 years has done absolutely nothing to dim the fire nor crack the binding of these three, as the opening cut ‘First Fall’ bears witness – over 32 minutes of uninterrupted sustained jazz-improv energy which is as welcome as a roaring bonfire in the middle of a cold and damp May Day field. The album and track titles are derived from the metaphor devised by drummer Paul Hession, who sometimes likens the act of improvising to a wrestling match. By his reckoning, the trio of Hession Wilkinson and Fell have a “playful, grappling style”, and it’s this very physicality which asserts its unignorable presence on almost every minute of this disk…you can almost feel the three players interlocking their very bodies, if that isn’t too indelicate an image. There’s something about Hession’s drum rolls in particular that seem to suggest acrobatic back-flips and rope-bounces aplenty as another body flattens against the canvas, but mostly it’s the way the rhythm section work together that creates an endless flow of forward-moving complex musical information, an express train packed with a delegation of University professors and toting 5,000 doctoral theses piled in the caboose. Meanwhile Wilkinson, switching between alto and baritone with the gusto of an Italian gourmet visiting the sweet trolley, exhibits a huge range of techniques – crazy overblowing shrieks, sad and mysterious basso-burbling, sonorous growls and grunts, and (mostly) endless streams of free-thinking diatribes flowing through his supple fingers at a speedy rate of knots. It’s pure streams of abstracted emotional wallop, set to a syncopated beat that makes every sinew in your body pop. In short, the album is a hip throw…from the hippest of the hip!

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The Wounded Kings: In the Chapel of the Black Hand


The Wounded Kings, In the Chapel of the Black Hand, Sweden, I Hate Records, IHRCD096 (2011)

Since I reviewed this band’s second album The Shadow over Atlantis, The Wounded Kings have changed a great deal and not necessarily for the better. They lost a member and then expanded to a 5-piece proper band with a female vocalist. The music has changed to a more traditional English doom metal style with witch-like vocals and apparent influences from Italian horror films of the 1960s. If you weren’t aware of what TWK had been up to before hearing this album, perhaps you should remain in ignorant bliss: In the Chapel of the Black Hand is not a bad recording, it’s quite powerful but compared to The Shadow …, it’s just not distinctive or original. I’ve heard there is a trend for doom metal bands to feature female vocalists with witchy voices and if that is so, I wish TWK hadn’t joined that particular bandwagon; they have become just another drop in a big pond of clone bands. As if to reassure me, In the Chapel … even reverts a little to that earlier album’s style in one of its middle tracks but I’m not so easily comforted.

The opening track “The Cult of Souls” starts strongly with powerhouse riffs and ominous organ but the lyrics aren’t anything out of the ordinary and the song keeps to an even keel. I always think when you sing something dedicated to Dionysus, you should include reference to the mad maenads who followed him and reputedly seized young men in a frenzy, rending them apart limb by limb … ooh-ah! But TWK don’t go in for frenzy unfortunately … “Rites of Oblivion” is another slow, doomy juggernaut with slashing chords and more of Sharie Neyland’s wobbly singing: the lady has a narrow range but her tone is good and seems spot-on, and she does a great trade in long howls. Cold, sinister organ, a spiky oily-sounding lead guitar and sluggish riffs conjure a thick, evil black atmosphere with a slight psychedelic feel.

The brief instrumental interlude “Return of the Sorcerer” is a throwback to older TWK work with slightly bleached guitar chords and enthusiastic lead guitar work. It’s a good break from the conventional doomy music to be enjoyed while it lasts. Final track “In the Chapel of the Black Hand” announces itself triumphantly with some impressive riffing but it ends up sidling back into conventional doom metal territory with wobbly, woffling lead guitar and Neyland’s half-spoken / half-sung vocals warbling about something lurking in the darkness and bumping up against her … yes, it turns out to be evil …

It’s likeable but across the Atlantic Ocean, the US doom metal band Blizaro has done far superior work in this sub-category of trad doom with a great sense of humour and affection and that’s just a one-man band. To The Wounded Kings, I say: surely you can do much better?

Contact: I Hate Records, info@ihate.se, www.ihate.se

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Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black


As part of my musings today I consider a photograph I took on Friday of a Lego Giraffe in Berlin. All of us like to think we’re seeing something special on our travels overseas, but with the internet and digital cameras and everyone immersed in a rising tide of instantly-available images, I find some of that magic is wearing a bit thin. I need only click on to Flickr.com to discover multiple images of the Lego Giraffe from multiple contributors, each of them probably equally unexceptional, with mine being the most banal of them all. Before digital cameras, I suppose it was only the poor bloke who worked in the one-hour photo place that experienced this awful disenchantment brought about by a plenitude of interchangeable views of the seven wonders of the world. By sheer volume and repetition of images, the specialness and unattainability of experience is being worn away, its erosion measurable in bits and bytes.

An artist ought to give us a special view of the world. Today for me it’s possible to imagine a surreal vista of green sunlit fields of Cambridge in June, overlaid with a view of the Savannahs of Africa, a 1930s photograph of mud flats in Mississippi and the floodplains of Thailand as presented by National Geographic magazine. It’s a kaleidoscopic vision, but it’s coherent – all the geographical features match up. Hard by is my guide C Joynes in his sun helmet, his acoustic guitar and banjo under one arm, and a clutch of albums under the other – English folk from the Topic label, 1960s free jazz on Atlantic, old 78s by Skip James and Charley Patton, his mind constantly making cross-references between these and with the Folkways LPs of Indonesian and Asian music provided by friend Simon Loynes, who is within hailing distance. Images swim back and forth, birds fly backwards reversing time with their wings, mighty trees sink into the ground, and spectres rise from unknown locales. All this is accomplished in short, compressed musical utterances performed with the grace and lightness of touch of a true master.

Hope some of this conveys how delighted I am with the new album from C Joynes, Congo (BO’ WEAVIL RECORDINGS WEAVIL46 CD) which arrived here in October 2011, the follow-up to Revenants, Prodigies And The Restless Dead released in 2009 by this same label in a similar “house style” package. C Joynes continues to make gloriously beautiful instrumental music and, just like two years ago, I am barely able to write anything useful about it. In creating his crystal-clear blends of stirring melodies inspired by the folk musics of the world, Joynes plays mostly acoustic guitar and possibly the banjo, maybe some slide guitar on one track; he’s joined by his team of collaborators including Patrick Farmer, Dominic Lash, Simon Loynes and Richard Partidge, here credited as The Marsh Arabs and adding delicious touches of percussion, bass and stringed instruments. The violin work of Partridge is especially welcome, adding its scrapy and mournful drone sparingly at key moments, causing hairs to rise on the back of the spine. Further exotic voicings are added by Loynes (a.k.a. The Doozer) with his Indian Tarang, and his Phin (lute-ish) and Khaen (harmonica-ish) from Thailand. These additions are subtle, understated, not a jarring mix or a mannered contrivance; all natural, all good.

Bruce Russell, famed New Zealand guitarist and musical connoisseur, contributes the sleeve notes to this one and he joins the long list of writers, myself included, who are amazed and astounded to the point of being flummoxed at Joynes’ fluency with a wide range of international musics from the past and presents configurations of our wonderful globe. On this album Russell can hear exciting confluences of Indian, African, English folk and American bluegrass music, delivered by Joynes with his characteristic playing style – assured, measured, accurate as a diamond, and with no attempt at flashiness. Joynes is not attempting to bewilder the listener with an indigestible stew that mixes up genres, styles and indigenous musics simply for novelty’s sake. It’s not incumbent on us to decode all the resonances and layers of meaning, nor to attempt to spot the joins (pun intended) where the early country blues tune cross-bred with Martin Carthy leaves off and the Java gamelan music informed by Congolese drumming begins, and I’m not a musicologist in any case. Joynes has done all that work for us, and with his intelligence, discrimination, intuition and sheer raw talent, is carefully and quietly crafting a fully-articulated musical vocabulary that is quite unique and his alone. No purist he, one who insists on preserving ethnic music through slow fossilisation. Nor does he need to extemporise on his guitar at length with 20-minute guitar-orchestra symphonies; he packs dense volumes of information into tunes some two or three minutes in length. We can be assured, as we listen, that there is an honesty and authenticity to every note he plays, and all we need do is open our ears and let the beauty come streaming in.

I would add that on this occasion, what comes over very strongly is a sense of warmth and compassion as well, and it’s embedded in the very musical forms they play but also in the collaborative playing which is much more to the fore than previous releases that have tended to showcase Joynes solo. In his trusted team of cohorts and friends, Joynes is constantly arriving at a shared view of the mysterious other-worlds in past and present incarnations, and they are able to pass this on to us, giving us magical glimpses of ‘Joseph in the Sea of Corn’ or the terrifying ‘Ghosts of the Field’. As with previous releases, the musical tapestry is enhanced by a rich array of visual and written clues, scattered about the artwork of the release, and I will leave you to discover and interpret these in your own time, but the patterns continue to emerge – nature, fields, birds; musicological studies, tracing of sources, unlikely and unexpected connections; travel, geography, transport; personal and poetic names for things, such as ‘The Beast of Elham’ which is just too wonderful a name to simply be another musical instrument. Through these combined and oblique magical forces, Joynes welcomes you back into the world of the living and invites you to open your eyes and share the joy of simplicity.

Also available as a limited vinyl LP with a silkscreened cover.

1st March 2012 update: C Joynes writes to point us here and tell us “If Congo had an annotated bibliography, it’d look like these two mixtapes.”

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The Voice of Unreason


Univrs. (RASTER NOTON R-N 133) by Alva Noto is a record which I would like to think celebrates the joys of typesetting – Univers is everyone’s favourite font – but in fact it’s a follow-on from a previous release Unitxt, and has something do with the properties of a universal language. Given Carsten Nicolai’s very digital predilections, you can bet his conception of language and universality has little to do with quaint notions such as Esperanto, The United Nations or international détente (how very 20th century, my dear), and instead features the microchip and the modem as the mandatory basis for all communications henceforth. As is customary, Alva Noto does a son et lumière version of this record which also involves computers, digital images being manipulated by audio signals and projected on a screen. One digital language mutating another, as it were; I seem to recall this particular trope was meat and drink to Farmers Manual and Hecker over ten years ago, but in some cases artists who followed this path of interchangeable digital information ended up with endless streams of gibberish on their records. Not so our Alva Noto, whose impeccable logic always produces clean and rigourous music, like a diagram for club music, expressed as unadorned thumps, clicks and burrs.

I have a lot of time for Hate-Male, the English creator of very extreme and very loud noise music, even when faced with the rather unsubtle and near-crass imagery that he sometimes uses. The cover for Total Fucking Hate (DOGBARKSSOME DISCS DBSD18), with its lurid pulp paperback gouache image of a fearsome moll in a red dress with an armful of murderous hardware and an expression you could use to sear a ribeye steak, is certainly quite – erm – memorable. The music is pretty hard to recover from, too. On these 11 tracks, one experiences the familiar sensations of tumult and catastrophe normally reserved for earthquakes and collapsing buildings, but in between the now-commonplace harsh noise bursts Lawrence Conquest is making strong use of the human voice, sometimes sampled from records or used as the voice of a mechanical man barking out unintelligible commands, such as on the very effective and nightmarish ‘Live In Vegas – White Night #1′. Guest player Jennifer Wallis adds vocals to the album, maybe here and on ‘Live In Vegas – White Night #2′, but if so her tones have been subjected to some ultra-insane processing method that renders her quite inhuman. Powerful stuff. We also have the lengthy rhythm and echo attacks, such as ‘Under the tent of their rough black wings’ and ‘Taste The Poison’, which are both very heavy going – the noise-listener’s equivalent to a 40-mile forced march in the desert with full military kit. Throughout, Hate-Male is at all times wild and full-on, but also very thoughtful in executing his absurd and crazy dynamics; he uses the digital delay like a paintbox, and he can manipulate tones to ensure that certain abstracted curls and shrieks are foregrounded, so they really stand out sharply from the background fuzz. Among noise-men, many of whom are content to push their pedals to the floor and keep them there, this is a rare talent.

Get Lost (EDITIONS MEGO 123) is the title of a Mark McGuire collection showcasing the solo guitar and synth work of this young American player, fairly well-known by now as a member of Emeralds, the electronic drone-ambient trio from Cleveland. Not especially experimental, this one; a highly melodic release produced by carefully crafted overdubs of stringed and keyboard instruments. The Mike Oldfield of the present time, perhaps, although McGuire doesn’t have quite the same gift for a memorable tune.

On same label as McGuire but a guitarist of quite another stamp is Bill Orcutt, the Harry Pussy guitarist whose return to the performing and recording arena is a well-told tale by now. In February we raved about his A New Way To Pay Old Debts record for this label which compiled some of his earlier private press records, and now here’s How The Thing Sings (EDITIONS MEGO 128), seven new home recordings made in San Francisco. Titles like ‘Heaven is Close to me Now’ and ‘No True Vine’ may put you in mind of Rev Gary Davis, but the comparisons with early pre-war blues have been done to death by now, and in any case they won’t stand when faced with this onslaught of biting, aggressive free guitar improvisation. Orcutt’s technique is to play like a condemned man, packing as many notes as possible into each musical moment, using lots of shorthand and abbreviations, compressing the vital information into taut and urgent phrases before they wheel him away to fry in the hotseat. Plenty of hammering on, string-pulling, unexpected flurries of strumming which stop equally unexpectedly; it’s almost an alarming listen. Lovers of Derek Bailey’s music will find much to admire in these fragmented, tuneless clusters, but even Bailey stopped short of putting so much raw emotion and sheer volumes of angst into the steel strings as Orcutt does. And if you like to share another man’s pain, you’ll love his vocalising too – unrestrained yawping with no attempt to form recognisable words, adding to the sense of near-demonic possession. Essential record, 34 minutes of electrifying acoustic playing that instantly forms a cage of barbed razor-wire around your head.

On Deus Ignotus (EPIPHANY 06), English folk singer Andrew King moves away from his recent sea-faring themes in song and makes a return to what he knows best, that is highly personal interpretations of gloomy old ballads and songs sung against industrial-music style backdrops with tape loops, drums and drones. I can’t resist any record which is front-loaded with two all-time great ballads, ‘The Three Ravens’, a song about carrion birds who find a knight’s dead body in the field, and ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, a supernatural winter-time song where a mother’s drowned sons come to visit her for one night. For the latter, King’s sepulchral and quavering tones are aptly suited to the grisly and unsettling content, and he transforms that ravens ballad into a sort of inverted battle-anthem with martial drums and declamatory chanting. Other traditional ballad material in like vein on the record includes ‘Edward’, ‘Sir Hugh’ and ‘Lord Lovell’, but the material that represents something of a departure from the norm is that inspired by texts from the gospel and church singing; this includes ‘In Upper Room’ and ‘Judas’, the former King’s interpretation of a poem-novel from the 1950s by David Jones called The Anathemata. I need to research these properly, as they look fascinating. For all these astonishingly innovative and unusual works, King is joined by the musicians Hunter Barr of Knifeladder, industrial music veteran John Murphy, and Maria Vellanz, who adds some devilish violin work. The entire record is an intoxicating mix of industrial music, traditional folk, religious song and psalmery, and interminable harmonium drones with doomy drumming, and with its mixed content and wide variety of singing styles, it refuses any sort of easy categorisation. As usual, it’s all tied together by King’s concise annotations, citing his sources and inspirations, drawn from music, literature, and history; 24 pages of information, libretto and images, set in tiny 8pt type, for you to digest and enjoy. King’s music is an acquired taste (like the voice of Peter Bellamy), but it’s hard to overlook the depth of his scholarship and the originality of his ideas. I support him totally, and this – which apparently took over nine years to realise – looks to be one of his best works.

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English Second Language


Two years ago when I had a stab at posting something on The A Band, my meagre writings were rewarded with a series of lively comments from many cheery souls who I took to be members of the band themselves. I think since then they must have taken pity on me, because last month I received this astonishing CD compilation on Agdam Records. It features seven tracks of “archive material” provided by various members of The A Band, including Stewart Walden, Neil Campbell, Stewart Greenwood, Minty Cracknell, and many more, from the dates 1987 to 2007, representing home recordings, live shows, side projects, and other snapshots from the maddest family album that was ever compiled by man. It includes some work by side project Sepopeplel, a fine piece of rumbly live noise combined with sweet accordion and clarinet music from 1998; and Well Crucial, a 1986 “conceptual precursor” to the A Band and offering a crazed piece of radio plunderphonics that demonstrates much about the collectively twisted sense of humour of this ultra-underground English combo. There’s a brief 2004 live set from Neil Campbell showing he is still the peerless master of psyched-out drone firestorm fiddling, and a ghastly acoustic lounge-music satire from 1990 called ‘Morons’. Actually that doesn’t even begin to describe what’s going on with this strangely-recorded episode of overlapping spoken-word freeform poetry and acoustic guitar mayhem.

These are all dazzling enough examples of home experiments, tape manpulation, live performance, noise and sheer daring madness. The major set pieces however are 23 minutes of divine alien-reggae music from Gay Animal Women, a 1989 track from this multi-media affair led by Stream Angel. Apparently this is just an excerpt from a much longer piece of live performance art involving numerous singers freaking out in bouts of ‘semi-verbal ecstasy’, while Stream Angel and Richard Youngs create avant-garde rock steady riddims fighting against reverb effects and tape loops. The hopefully-untutored musical geniuses who stood on the stage here would also become major players in the anarchic A Band; when you hear music as superbly bizarre as this, all the stories you hear about them could just turn out to be true. There’s also a 32-minute slab of more recent wild noise, recorded in 2007 at Warrington, including 13 of the japesters at work sawing, blowing, thrashing and wailing their lungs out in a dense melange of completely insane chaos. You’ll feel enlightened and liberated enough just hearing this slice of genius, so just imagine what it was like to have been there at the time. This workout represented a return to live work after a 15 year rest for the crazed apes, and the press notes proudly describe it as a “timely restating” of the noise they have been unleashing into the human menagerie since the early 1990s. Essential release for anyone interested in free improv, noise and truly imaginative experimentation from intelligent and gifted outsider geniuses, but mainly just for anyone who wants to experience freedom through music. My unending gratitude goes out to the wild-eyed genius of Agdam Records who sent me a copy of this; “Hope it intrigues”, and that’s all he wrote! 500 copies in a handmade card wallet; try emailing zeropoint_uk [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Also: Neil Campbell’s no-nonsense post, and some mp3 samples, here.

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Impressions of a Golden Age


How about these three Cardiff freaks who call themselves Bear-Man and produce a startling and vital jolt using drums, guitar and electronics…self-titled cassette tape of their unkempt live music is Phantomhead Recordings N.18 and the great line drawing cover depicts a fantasy version of the three young players depicted as hairy wildmen or semi-apes seated anxiously on a sofa, said furniture situated conveniently in midst of forest environs with much wildlife (living and stuffed) abounding. Press notes here are keen to stress that Bear-Man situate themselves in the “free improvisation” genre only after much soul-searching and internal debate, and insist on their right to break free of that label and occupy as many musical genres as possible. I’ll endorse that right quicker than you can say ‘Giant Afghan Dancing Owl Boys’, a visionary title which also happens to be the opening track here, and sounds like the result of much cross-fertilising between various marginal strains of performed noise and avant-rock music. What with all the animal rites and ‘Mono Fang’ teeth on offer here, I’m prepared to believe this band are in fact a troupe of semi-rustic Druids with a penchant for animalistic shape-shifting that connects them to their Cro-Magnon roots. Badger dances, deer skins…what sizzles the palate is their wild and super-heated dynamics in the group interaction, the guitar of Simon Jenkins slicing its way into charged air with all the ferocity of a buzzsaw, while Richard Mathias spontaneously generates crazy electronic sounds as surely as if he were siphoning the jet fuel from a passing flying saucer, no doubt found in their ‘Nazi UFO Glade’. Drummer Phil Jenkins hammers out urgent telegraph messages on the snare as though he was the signalman on board the Lusitania. It’s busy, cluttered work, but they all give each other tons of space as well. In all, a splendid burst of vibrant and spiky musical activity which I recommend. For more on the artwork (which happens to be executed by the label owner Ian Watson) see www.uhohwatson.com.

Also from Cardiff, got a couple CDRs from the Phonospheric label. One of ‘em is by Ian Holloway, that droning mystic whose work has caused quite an indentation in our soft brain tissue, and here he is with a wispy 37 minutes of airy clutterment entitled Passing Through Occasionally (PHONOSPHERIC THREE), a daytime flight through certain recesses of the mind and decorated with uncanny forest imagery on the cover. Holloway’s got at least two or three layers of music, field recordings and atmospheric debris going down here, spinning like juggler’s plates and all superimposed and cross-folded in a light-filled tableau that is utterly beguiling. Snap into this partial-daydream world when real life weights heavily on thy sternum, and drink deeply at Holloway’s mountain stream. Slowtime (PHONOSPHERIC TWO) is a creation by the label boss Adrian Shenton, beckoning us in with that golden cover that could be a vision of a spectral mountainside. Shenton’s music and track titles confirm he’s one of those dreamers who stands rooted to the spot when besotted by nature’s grandeur, be it a sunset or other natural manifestation of God’s plenty, and takes plenty of time to stop and stare. He mostly creates melodic semi-ambient keyboard one-chord drones that are effective enough, and sometimes combines them with a field recording (e.g. running water), although my favourite moments are the most austere, such as on ‘Possessed By Mountains’, which is a cross between a helicopter ride and a shamanic flight. With economical means, Shenton hints at grand themes and will impress you with his sincerity.

Where Adrian Shenton’s spiritual leanings are implied, they are more discernible on the work of Stuart Sweeney, an English composer whose 16:9 (OOMFF 1001) has many a musical high spot to commend it. I was intrigued here by the cover image of an empty sunlit house, and the digipak opens to reveal more votive imagery in the shape of religious icons on a cathedral ceiling. From what I can gather, Sweeney builds most of his music in his Apple Mac using some home-made percussion, field recordings, and presumably banks of keyboards to create the profound and moving drone music on these 12 cuts, although guest Paul Archer contributes voices and Pete Whitfield plays strings on a couple of tracks. While the press notes hint at cinematic soundtracks and landscaping, I think what we have here is an unashamed romantic composer, creating music with as much Englishness and inspirational content as George Butterworth or Vaughan Williams, which hopefully will come as some relief to those listeners who are getting fed up with abstracted, process-based laptop music that isn’t “about” anything at all other than the means of its own creation. I won’t say this release is an unalloyed triumph, as some cuts are quite routine ambient music and Sweeney’s Achilles heel is his tendency to occasionally lapse into tweeness; but when he’s completely in touch with his angelic muses, then watch out and marvel in his golden glories. And like Shenton above, there is no doubting his sincerity and conviction.

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English Jazz-Rock of the 70s

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The Sound Projector Radio Show 1st April 2011

  1. National Health, ‘The Bryden 2-Step (For Amphibians) Part 1′
    From Of Queues And Cures, UK CHARLY RECORDS CRL 5010 LP (1978)
  2. Hopper / Dean / Gowen / Sheen, ‘Seven For Lee’
    From Rogue Element, UK OGUN OG 527 LP (1978)
  3. Hatfield and The North, ‘Strand on the Green’
    From Hatwise Choice, UK HATCO-CD73-7501 (2005)
  4. Robert Wyatt, ‘Team Spirit’
    From Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, UK VIRGIN RECORDS VGD 3505 2 x LP (1983)
    Recorded in 1975.
  5. Hatfield and The North, ‘Son Of There’s No Place Like Homerton’
    From Hatfield and The North, VIRGIN VJD-5020 CD (1989)
    Recorded in 1973.
  6. Phil Miller, ‘Hard Shoulder’
    From Cutting Both Ways, UK IMPETUS RECORDS IMP18615 LP (1987)
  7. Hatfield and The North, ‘Stay Jung And Beautiful’
    From Hatwise Choice, op cit.
  8. National Health, ‘TNTFX’
    From D.S. al Coda, USA EUROPA RECORDS JP2008 LP (1982)
  9. Soft Heap, ‘Terra Nova’
    From Soft Heap, UK CHARLY RECORDS CRL 5014 LP (1979)
  10. Matching Mole, ‘Dedicated To Hugh, But You Weren’t Listening’
    From Matching Mole, UK CBS 32105 LP (1972)
  11. Hatfield and The North, ‘Thanks Mont!’
    From Hatwise Choice, op cit.
  12. Kevin Ayers, ‘There Is Loving / Among Us / There Is Loving’
    From whatevershebringswesing, UK EMI / HARVEST SHVL 800 LP (1972)
  13. Robert Wyatt, ‘Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road’
    From Rock Bottom, UK VIRGIN RECORDS VGD 3505 2 x LP (1983)
    Recorded in 1974.
  14. Soft Machine, ‘Esther’s Nose Job’
    From Backwards, USA CUNEIFORM RECORDS RUNE 170 CD (2002)
    Recorded in 1970.
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Extended Holiday Blues


Outstanding free jazz and improvised composition on Universal Sounds (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-0453) from tenorman Odean Pope and a fabulous small group which somehow manages to include Marshall Allen from the Arkestra on his alto and electronic wind instrument. When you’ve got three drummers (Warren Smith, Craig McIver and Jim Hamilton) on board then you can’t go far wrong, and while Pope blows his notes to create a reliable stormy chaos-monster on cuts like ‘The Binder’ (13 minutes of steaming dragon malarkey), on a wet day like today my preference is for the spooked-out, smoked-up and serpentine works such as ‘She Smiled Again’, ‘Go Figure’ and ‘Custody of the American Spirit’, a highly notable composition, versions of which open and close the set. In fact on both the variants of ‘Custody’, the rattling percussion, sneaking bass footpads, and declaiming voice of Warren Smith add up to a sinister brew that almost casts a malevolent curse on the past. A very percussion-heavy album, where the “drum chorus” effect makes for interesting comparisons with Pope’s numerous Saxophone Choir records. Fine record, a good dose of stern yet lyrical Afro-American message music.

English gentlo-whimsters Hamilton Yarns could also be said to produce a species of jazz-inflected music, but it’s one that’s been thrice-filtered through all of Robert Wyatt’s 1970s Virgin albums. 18 songs of “romantic disillusionment” appear on Hello, Sparkle! (HARK! 013), where as on their previous record the conversational singing voices of the boys and girls are very much to the fore, their world-weary and defeated tone propped up by ingeniously minimal acoustic instrumentation. Pianos, acoustic guitars, recorders co-mingle with excellent selections of found field recordings, all of which paint watercolour images of tea on the lawn near an English churchyard, but a raincloud of gloom is always in the corner of the blue sky. With a little more spirit in their performances, Brighton-based Hamilton Yarn could be an interesting update on the Henry Cow / Slapp Happy collaboration Desperate Straights, but the abiding aesthetic here is mostly fey and wistful, the landscape littered with broken dreams and thwarted hopes. Limited CD (50 copies) with a screenprinted cover.

Andreas Bick offers the furthest extremes of heat and cold which the natural world can throw at him on Fire and Frost Pattern (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 074), two suites composed from sound events created by geysers, volcanoes, colliding icebergs, ice buckling, snow falling on foil, and so forth. Both works are structured to begin with the loudest sonic element in his hard drive (the volcanic eruption wins hands down for the Fire piece), and then proceed to direct the listener through an astonishing journey, where we experience these wild and raw forms of nature from a comparatively safe and privileged vantage point. The listening experience still conveys some sense of danger even so, and also tells us how little we still understand or really know about the planet.

Bill Orcutt used to be the guitarist in Harry Pussy, whose feral and nihilistic approach to super-punk noise in the 1990s have made that band something of a diamond in the mouth of many an extreme music fan and tended to put their original records in a price band beyond the reach of all but the most ardent collector. In 2009 Orcutt suddenly returned to music and made a very limited single and an LP for his own Palilalia label, but don’t worry if you missed these sold-out items because they’re now both reissued in full on A New Way To Pay Old Debts (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 119), along with four previously unissued cuts. Orcutt plays an instrument described here as a “4 String Kay”, which emerges in sonic form as about the most vicious, mean-spirited and lethal acoustic blues guitar you’ve ever crossed the dirt road to avoid…there’s a cover version of a Lightning Hopkins song on here, but as a long-time collector of pre-war blues music, I can honestly report I’ve never heard a single blues record as rawly angry as this growling red-eyed lizard. The bass string, tuned to the lowest available E or variant thereof, is attacked mercilessly to provide crude rhythmical effects and a devilish monotony bordering on the psychopathic; the other strings are deployed to produce primitive jazzy bursts and freeform eruptions, all recorded in ways to make your ears hurt and make you feel like you’re walking barefoot across shards of broken glass. Occasionally, Orcutt will add his demented vocal whoops to the recording, at which point most sensible listeners will already have boarded a plane to Oakland. Totally great masterpiece of modern psyche-shredding blues noise! If you’re looking for the evil dark brother of John Fahey, he might just be alive and well in San Francisco.

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