Hammer of the Gods

Here’s another release featuring the great Jean-Marc Foussat, the Algerian synth player who I regard as one of the unsung heroes of free-noise-improv of Europe. Actually he’s here as one third of the trio Marteau Rouge, with the guitarist Jean-François Pauvros, another overlooked genius whose work I really must try and catch up on, based on his sullen and murky performances here. I see he made a couple of records in the 1970s – No Man’s Land with Gaby Bizier, and Phenix 14 with Siegfried Kessler, and in more recent years has “jammed” with some of the greats of Japanese guitar noise, including Haino and Kawabata Makoto. He may have been responsible for bringing the drummer Makoto Sato to the group, and he’s equipped with a healthy knowledge of free jazz licks. Foussat, as the world knows, wields a VCS III synth, and when his jackplugs and knobs are on the correct setting then few can match him for free-flying, unhinged sounds. Noir (GAFFER RECORDS GR035) is described the first release proper from Marteau Rouge, and was preceded by a live album they made for In Situ in 2009, where they were joined by Evan Parker. The present album, recorded in the studio, was made in 2004 but not released until 2012. (… Un Jour Se Lève, the 2002 CDR, surely preceded them both?). Sonically, this album most reminds me of Masayuki Takayanagi and his New Direction combo; Takayanagi was the guitarist held in awe by Otomo Yoshihide, and indeed by many others including a stunned Henry Kaiser. Marteau Rouge comes close to delivering the same degree of beyond-free deep underground murk, of the sort that Takayanagi wrestled with in his many recordings where he’s tackling a giant octopus beneath the sea. What I mean by this is that individual notes don’t really stand out, there isn’t much recognisable structure, and instead the layers of synth, guitar and drums just pile up and coagulate into a glorious, heaving ruin. Foussat adds plangency, melancholy, and the keening sound of Arabian horns from his synth; most of the propulsive energy is supplied by the tireless drummer, and the incredible Pauvros creates wonderfully abrasive textures, stabs, whines and painful groanings. Just great! Apparently other listeners regard Pauvros as quite a “violent” player, and I can sort of get that, but he’s also capable of sinking into a deep introspective sulk and howling like a Cyclops. I’ll admit the tunes are quite “slow to start”, and the trio generally start kicking heavy butt by the mid-section, and some listeners may lose patience with this. Not me. From August 2013.

One of two items received from Romain Perrot in September 2013 is Les Escaliers de la Cave (DECIMATION SOCIALE / SKUM REX / NARCOLEPSIAHN), which he released under his Vomir cloak. An hour-long blast of abrasive abstract noise is preceded by a five-minute one on this CD. These two may be ‘Escalier 1’ and ‘Escalier 2’, though printed text on sleeve suggests there’s a third track ‘There’s a riot goin’ on’, which I somehow doubt is his tribute to the coked-up paranoid funk music of Sly Stone. Monstrous, unlistenable, Vomir’s work always reminds us of an avalanche, one that takes place in slow motion over a very long time, and where the rocks involved are dense, heavy, and very solid. One’s psyche emerges bruised and pummelled, assuming one even makes it out alive. Vomir sees the world as a perpetual slaughterhouse for our walking hunks of meat, and proposes that we savour the process of being transformed into viande hachée over the course of 60 insufferable minutes. Beautiful cover art by Jacques Noël; suggestive of illustrations from a 1920s fantasy novel.

Large stack of great CDRs from the UK label Quiet World which arrived 17th September 2013. Argh…I am always too late with publishing reviews for these highly-limited pressings, which means by time you read about them, they are likely to be sold out at source. Here’s one great piece of UK experimentalism called Albion Geared (QUIET WORLD THIRTY-TWO) performed by B. Lone Engines, which are the twosome Spider and Ant Blone who come from Reading. The great thing about Spider is he really is a spider, so able to use all eight limbs to perform on musical instruments in ways that puny humans cannot achieve. Ant Blone may or may not be distantly related to one of the many colonies that thrive in the Reading area, and he’s the kind of guy who gets what he wants through formic acid attacks. They previously had a release on the Northampton CDR label Dark Meadow Recordings, and Ian Holloway picked up their “contract” after that label bit the dust in 2012. On this fine album, I was grabbed by the opening track with its spiky and discordant guitar clashes fighting a steely battle of some ilk, but apart from one other instance of it, this turns out to be somewhat uncharacteristic of the whole; their specialism is turning in long and cold tracts of bleak, formless abstraction dronery, the interminable wasteland occasionally punctuated with perfectly-judged details of mysterious brushwork and sculpture, such as a tree painted by Sidney Nolan. This pair have an occluded sense of darkness brewing inside their collective stomachs, and their brand of minimal krautrock-noir is bound to appeal to any night-dwelling creature such as the badger or owl.