I’ve got a lot invested in this record personally. By which I mean I care for it very much. I didn’t exactly buy it when it came out, but I do have an original copy which I purchased by mail order in 1981. It had a deep effect on me. Recently, I was lucky enough to meet Alvaro and interview him about his life in London, and the making of this bizarre record; you can read all about it in issue 23 of TSP. With its attention-grabbing title and the year of its release, you’d be forgiven for thinking the record was an attempt at Punk Rock, or perhaps a strange and misguided bid to cash in on the phenomenon. When you play it, there’s no amplified guitars and very few drums, and no screaming vocals by some cheap impersonation of Johnny Rotten. Yet it’s true to the “spirit” of Punk, I would argue, because it’s such a personal and utterly uncompromising vision, realised by a very single-minded and singular fellow; and with its DIY credentials (entire production paid for from Alvaro’s pocket), it foreshadows a lot of what the post-punk and indie bands and labels were trying to do. Rough Trade, for one, should have supported Drinkin My Own Sperm, and there’s no evidence that they did; maybe it was too radical even for them.

Alvaro doesn’t sing or play punk rock on this record, though. It’s all songs, every one of them based around the acoustic piano. He delivers a species of Latin American inflected folk song crossed with upbeat and very jagged rhythms, sometimes straying into very romantic cocktail-hour lounge jazz. He tries his best to “rock out”, on some songs on the first side, with his very limited set-up: acoustic piano, a non-rock drummer, and the help of a “faik bass”, which in fact is a bass Moog. Through clumsy overdubs that don’t quite match up, and his own drive and determination to keep the song tempo going, Alvaro manages to come up with a crazed form of syncopation that in places defies belief. On the first side, the songs tend to pile up at the end in a delicious riot of overdubs: vocals, nose flutes, crashing piano chords, and percussion, all expressing the turmoil and chaos that rages through Alvaro’s brain. And doing it mostly acoustically, I might add.

Then there’s his singing voice, one of the elements that comes across most strongly on today’s spin. It is full of passion, emotion; in trying to express his despair and anger at the world (be it the political situation or just plain boredom) he twists his larynx into near-impossible shapes, growling and hooting as needed to make sure he’s understood. It emerges as somewhat eccentric, for sure, perhaps even a bit humourous; but it’s genuine. This is something I felt back in 1981, and still feel it today; 99% of other vocal recordings somehow drain this away in the production, to give us an “acceptable” listening experience, but Alvaro managed to keep it all alive and intact, raw and bleeding edges and all. There’s a directness of communication here that is rare enough to begin with, and something that’s even harder to capture on record.

Speaking of communication…I noticed on today’s spin how little of the record is actually sung in English. About half the lyrics are sung in his native language, and though there’s a lyric sheet and translation provided, it may strike one as a little unusual for a record made in London with the hopes of selling to an English-speaking audience. But its also true that this language barrier is not a barrier at all, and the truth of Alvaro’s meaning will be self-evident as soon as you listen. The humanity, the emotion hits first; when you have the time, pore over the lyrics and start to untangle the meanings for yourself, a process which is very rewarding on the superb (though uncharacteristic) ‘Palido Sol’, as close as Alvaro got to making art-rock music in the vein of RIO groups such as Henry Cow [1. Cathy Williams sings on this track.].

I will single out the title track. In terms of its musical construction, it’s got a stark simplicity that would be the envy of any UK cassette band or post-punker who was working so hard and earnestly to reverse the trend of a million excessive and over-produced Rick Wakeman LPs; if that was part of the NME-inspired post-punk agenda, Alvaro achieved the work effortlessly, and with no-one even noticing at the time. This track contains such jaw-dropping dynamics – by which I mean yawning gaps and silences inducing electrifying tension – that even This Heat could have learned a lesson or two. It also boasts Alvaro’s most mannered and bizarre vocals, where in places he’s transforming himself into a monstrous yawping entity, groaning from the bottom of a pit, in order to speak of his own frustration and boredom. Which is the key theme to the song, and the entire album; masturbation, here bizarrely extended into a sex act that involves consuming one’s own ejaculate, is a metaphor for the futility of life. The metaphor is echoed in the song by other grim glimpses of life in 1970s UK; one of them involves listlessly drinking tea, another waiting for the social security cheque to arrive. By the end of the song, both Alvaro and Narvaez are repeating “Cannibalism! Cannibalism!” (in English and Spanish) with incredible gusto, trying through some primitive chanting ritual to keep the horrors of life at bay, while realising modern man’s predicament: we are eating ourselves alive, simply because we’re bored. Today, we do it through Twitter, Facebook, and selfies, but it’s no different; it’s all part of the same quagmire of vanity.

The LP is lively and upbeat on the first side, sad and introverted on the second side; this is signalled to us through the “Heads” and “Tails” titles for each side. Life’s like flipping a coin. The poignant sorrow induced by “The Whip Of Indifference” is a mixture of resignation and rage, reflected in the mood changes of this beautiful piano ballad; soon, that same indifference is felt after ‘Valparaiso’, a song of homesickness for his home town, which after a great build-up by an imaginary impresario in an imaginary nightclub, is greeted with sarcastic applause by an imaginary lone member of the audience. “Stupendo, stupendo,” groans this listener in world-weary tones, clearly unconvinced. Ironically, Alvaro’s audience has probably not really grown that much in all this time (apart from the good people at WFMU, who always give him a warm welcome), but his determination to get his message to the world has not diminished one bit.

Now presented by Feeding Tube Records, this reissue includes a splendid booklet of notes by Byron Coley, where he tells his own story of how he first procured and heard this exceptional record; I’m pleased to note my own TSP feature has evidently been helpful in his research too. Plus there’s a photo of Alvaro I’ve never seen before on the cover. The reissue pays close attention to the details of the original artworks, and even their own additions are rendered in the correct typewriter font; and the lyric sheet insert is included too. We look forward to their reissue of his second LP, Mums Milk Not Powder, where the deficiencies of the original pressing will be corrected. Feeding Tube have rescued another superb obscure oddity, one which surpasses even their reissues of Gary Wilson and Orchid Spangiafora. From 27th September 2015.

poisucevamachenille (OUTLINE RECORDS NO NUMBER) is probably nothing to do with noise, dissonance, or anything avant-garde. In one sense it’s pop music, but very heavily disguised, and reimagined by an intense visionary who cannot resist playing with melody and de-producing his multiple-overdubbed songs at every opportunity. The recording studio is used like a paintbox (the paintbox of Jackson Pollock), exploiting as many crazed and unnatural effects as the creator can get his agile little paws onto, moving freely across fader levers and filter effects with the joyous madness of a Lee Perry or a Xentos Jones. Songs half-resemble synthpop hits from the 1980s or corny folk-ballads from the psychedelic age complete with acoustic guitar strums, but sabotaged by their nonsensical lyrics, and a vocal delivery style where all the words are swallowed and sung through the plugged-up nostrils of a rabid badger. Barely has the tune managed to get into its “groove” before it’s derailed and detourned, by use of phasing, cut-ups, overdubs, foreign materials brought in, or any other technique that can be be deployed to “disrupt normal listening pleasure” (I’m grateful to Jonathan Romney for coining that phrase. He memorably used it to describe Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks.). The production method moves beyond the eccentric in short order; it becomes positively operatic in its excess, and in a parallel universe Ezio Piermattei would have made good as the quintessential producer for over-the-top Italian prog rock LPs around 1973-74. I can just imagine a mix between this LP and Biglietto Per L’Inferno. Such an LP would be condemned by the authorities, slated by the press, banned by the Vatican, and widely deemed too shocking to even exist!

poisucevamachenille is not only twisted avant-pop, though. Using these almost-melodic hooks and riffs that are half-familiar to the ear is one very effective method of introducing the poison into our bloodstream. The record also displays elements of improvisation, over-simplified semi-classical compositions, and found samples from movies or TV (though apparently they are field recordings from Ezio’s trips in Europe). The composition and assembly alone must have taken months of slavish editing work to achieve this wild degree of musique concrète styled effects (on a par perhaps with the early Mothers Of Invention LPs – it’s certainly as powerful as those), yet it also feels effortless, casual, as though the deranged content simply pours out the consciousness of the creator in an unstoppable stream, and all he need do is turn on the microphones. The whole suite has a vicious turn of mind, veering from the wildly hilarious to the deeply sinister and terrifying, often in the space of seconds; I’d feel safer locked in a room with a laughing schizophrenic. This material matters because it is pure anarchy, raw freedom somehow trapped onto the grooves of a record, and made repeatable. With beautiful but inexplicable cover collage artworks by his partner Barbara Gileno, this is a gloriously insane record which I can recommend without equivocation. No wonder they both think of themselves as “dislocationists”…

Of possible interest:
Hum Of Gnats review
Podcast from 27/01/2012

One already senses that Piermattei is a self-taught maverick with ideas so potent that only he can express them, notwithstanding the contribution of Napo Camassa. I click forward to ‘Hex-Exercises in Stalinism’ to endure a shape-shifting bed of rattling china plates for percussion, on top of which eerie unnatural horn or electronic voices make their plaintive moan. Again, we have the sense of a framework that is barely hanging together, a fragile sculpture or mobile built of spindly wire which is somehow defying gravity as it spins and rotates its beautiful colours and planes in mid-air. In the time it’s taken to write that sentence we’ve already shifted into a halting acoustic guitar tape-loop that stutters and clops, having emerged from the warp of a Terry Riley-styled organ figure. Now come half-hearted ghostly voices whispering what might be two stanzas from a lost 1960s pop song about lost romance. There’s also ‘Hey, Rube!’ which applies tape delay to scattered woodwind notes, combined with a bass guitar that has clearly wandered into the wrong building, a spooky cheap organ drone, and other foreign effects. Five minutes later we hear a sneering pop singer chanting from behind a distorting sheet of glass, then fragments of atonal free playing electric-guitar mayhem. Scattered liberally with precious moments of heavy-duty psychotic weirdness within beguiling open-ended structures, this record is just too good to be true. Piermattei may be using his own personal version of the bricolage method (although frankly, I have no clear idea what he’s doing), but it’s done with imagination and skill, and he’s not simply another prankster with a sampling device and a computer. This record is a hand-made work of skewed mutant genius, its fragmentary nature in a direct line with such important records as The Faust Tapes. CD in jewel case is decorated with puzzling texts and collage images. You need this record!

The Sound Projector Radio Show 10th September 2010

1. Roger Nusic And The Vague Sunshine Orchestra, ‘Can I Come in and See You’
   From Hello Lovers…, USA RAINFOREST RECORDS RR 010 CD (1993)
2. Revd Fred Lane and Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs, ‘Fun In The Fundus’
   From From The One That Cut You, SHIMMY DISC EUROPE SDE 8911 LP (1989)
3. The Shaggs, ‘That Little Sports Car’
   From The Shaggs, USA ROUNDER CD 11547 (1988)
4. Roky Erickson And The Aliens, ‘Creature With The Atom Brain’ (1980)
   From I Think Of Demons, UK EDSEL RECORDS ED 222 LP (1987)
5. Davis Redford Triad, ‘Solar Aquarius (Slight Return)’
   From The Mystical Path of the Number Eighty-Six, USA HOLY MOUNTAIN 8655-CD (1997)
6. Smegma, ‘Fish Story’
   From The Smell Remains The Same, USA ANARCHYMOON RECORDINGS ANOK 18 LP (2007)
7. Ed Askew, ‘Ask The Unicorn’ (1968)
   From Ask The Unicorn, GERMANY ZYX MUSIC ESP 1092-2 CD
8. Barnes & Barnes, ‘Cemetary Girls’
   From Voobaha, USA RHINO RECORDS RNLP 013 LP 91980)
9. Golden Sunrise with Sky Saxon & Ya Ho Wa 13, ‘Voyage’ (1977)
   From Fire, Water, Air is Djinn, Arelich,Pythias, Octavius, Sunflower, HIGHER KEY 006 CD
10. Revd Fred Lane and Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs, ‘Mystic Tune’
    From From The One That Cut You, op cit.
11. Alexander “Skip” Spence, ‘Books Of Moses’
    From Oar, USA SONY MUSIC SPECIAL PRODUCTS A 9831 CD (1991)
12. Irene Moon, ‘Untitled’
    From Excerpts From Field Station A, USA NO LABEL 10″ LP (1997)
13. Fredrik’s Cosmic Spaced Out Blues Band and Orchestra, ‘Get it out of your system’ (1976)
    From Beyond The Black Crack, UK PARADIGM DISCS PD 06 CD (1998)
14. Sun Ra, ‘I Am Strange’
    From USA NORTON RECORDS 45-153 7″ SINGLE (2009)
15. Dion McGregor, ‘A City So Nice’
    From Dion McGregor Dreams Again, USA TZADIK TZ 7404 CD (1999)
16. Copernicus, ‘They Own Everything’
    From Deeper, USA NEVERMORE INC. NEVERMORE 208 LP (1987)
17. The Tinklers, ‘I’m Proud to be a Citizen of the Roman Empire’
    From Casserole, SHIMMY DISC EUROPE SDE 9132 CD (1989)
18. Daniel Johnston, ‘Despair Came Knocking’
    From Hi How Are You, USA HOMESTEAD RECORDS HMS 117-1 LP (1988)
19. Pearls Before Swine, ‘Rocket Man’ (1970)
    From The Use of Ashes, USA WATER 112 CD (2003)
20. Wild Man Fischer, ‘Merry-Go-Round’
    From An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, USA BIZARRE 6332 2 x LP (1968)
21. Ya Ho Wha 13, ‘Yod He Nau He’ (1974)
    From Penetration: An Aquarian Symphony, HIGHER KEY 001CD