Got two releases from William Wilding, one of them a set of songs, the other a more abstract noise set. Wimbledon art student William Wilding was co-founder of The Native Hipsters, a rather obscure post-punk band who had a sort-of “hit” in 1980 with There Goes Concorde Again (a favourite with John Peel, I believe) on the label Heater Volume Records, which managed only two other singles before folding. I was delighted to purchase the 2001 CD compilation of this odd band’s work, and the later Songs To Protest About also has its charms.
Today’s item Wilding…And The Golden Hammer (MECHANICALLY RECLAIMED MUSIC) is cut from a totally different cloth however, and listeners old enough to remember the quirky charm of that 1980 single might be surprised at the rather abrasive surface that prevails on the 2022 version of Wilding enterprises. The first thing that hits you – like a cannonball covered with sandpaper – is Wilding’s voice, either coarsened with age, or perhaps affected, through his new pessimistic persona, to sound vicious and ill-tempered. He growls in a vicious Thames Estuary accent, such that each song feels like we’re on the verge of being beaten up in a lonely shopping mall by some local bully. After two conventional songs at the start, ‘Meal’ and ‘Hearts’ with their four-beats to the bar and plodding drumming along with ugly guitar riffs, the album starts to edge towards the more “familiar” territory of weirdness that Wilding evidently knows so well. The whimsy of ‘Concorde’ is still quite some distance away, as he portrays various unpleasant aspects of modern society in very primal terms.
The ‘Machine’ song is every bit as bleak and menacing as any given Industrial cassette from 1982 as it takes an unblinking look at a dehumanised vista, while ‘Meal’ offers an equally dismal view of the food chain, reminding us that we’re all food for worms, a kind of post-modern update on ‘Ilkley Moor Bah Tat’. The song ‘Cave’ is even more cryptic, half-sung and half-recit, with sickening noises emerging from the guitar and synth sections, while singer Wilding sounds completely fed up of the human race, depicting its absurdity and depravity with the same skewed outsider genius as Sexton Ming (a comparison I do not make lightly). Oddest of all is ‘Spy’, a 13-minute epic which features the vocals of nonagenarian Margaret Peck. She starts off seriously enough attempting to recite the unusual libretto that’s been handed to her, but the session soon goes wrong as she can’t stop giggling; Wilding is on hand to act as a producer Zappa to her Beefheart every time she collapses and says “This is ridiculous!” The track thus documents its own production, and lays bare something of the process of how records are made; another post-punk trope (e.g. that single by Scritti Politti) that seems to have stayed with our man over all these years.
Cheerfully described by Wilding as “almost normal with drums and quite a regular structure, others are more freeform with a whole mashed up load of noise and stuff as well.” Limited to 100 copies (signed and numbered) with the jokey and slightly rude cover photos.
Second item is a little older (released 2020), carries the unappetising title Hard Noise To Scumrise, and is credited to Wilding and Unwilding, indicating our main man is supported by a number of able collaborators on musical instruments, vocals, poetry, lyrics, and home-made devices…some of these geniuses, many of them with fake names and aliases, may be depicted on the inner gatefold spread of the album, and a less prepossessing set of punky diehards past their sell-by date you could never meet. Yet the record itself is great, a truly absurd and far-out collection of mechanical noises spliced up with musical interludes to deliver a startling and perplexing listen. Wilding and crew derive some of this racket from machines, and make no secret of this – drills, hammers, lathes, engines, coin-sorting machines, lawnmowers and foghorns all surface in the swampy soup, with many if not all of the “samples” found online, on websites curated by enthusiasts who “collect” this sort of thing. Poignantly, one of these machines was in the hospital, captured from an MRI scanner at at time when Wilding himself was admitted for cancer treatment.
When these found sounds collide with the unkempt music of this crew of misfit players, the results can be uneven and mixed, but when things coalesce they do so brilliantly, with flashes of genius and, in places, something genuinely unsettling. It’s a novel approach to the “noise” genre for sure, and arguably much more approachable than the airless and joyless extremes of “harsh noise wall”, assuming that’s still a thing…useful notes indicate the milieu and backgrounds of the oddball contributors in Wilding’s unruly mob, including the instrument builder Yuri Landman (who did it for Sonic Youth and Melt-Banana), American comedian Springbo who’s also an improviser and songwriter, and Lester Square, co-founder of The Monochrome Set, post-punk faves dating from around the same early 1980s period as The Native Hipsters. A decidedly strange and compelling collection of rambling noise results from all this mashing-up and pooling of ill-assorted talents.
Both the above from 13th January 2022.