From Dai Coelacanth we have the hour-long CDR credited to Ida K and called Pterodactyl Graveyard (choc.540). It’s on the Chocolate Monk label, and where better, home to grotesque absurdities and playful noise antics for many years.
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.