IDWAL FISHER

Turbulent Times 10 [The ‘bag bag bag issue].

60 page A5 zine, 8 page A5 insert, 2 x postcards and a one inch button badge with the words Degenerate Waves on it [black 70's computer font on yellow background - not shown].

At least we didn’t have to wait for fifteen years for another issue of the excellent Turbulent Times to appear. That was fifteen years between issues eight and nine in which editor John Eden decided to spend more time with his cabbage patch than with keyboard and pen. The wait is now down to a year which suits me fine.

I heaped praise on issue nine and I heap praise on issue ten. The reason I heap praise is because John Eden has the jaundiced eye that every zine writer needs. Not for him the enthusiastic yap of a wide-eyed teenager whose just been to his first noise gig and is now busy scanning eBay for cheap guitar pedals. Eden even reviews records he cant find anymore. This is more like it. Seat of your pants zine writing with plenty of the self and none of the psuedo wankery, dodgy font shit that ruins many a publication. It almost makes me wish I still did a zine. Well, almost.

In issue ten you get two enlightening interviews with Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs who despite being forever associated with mental imbalance always comes across as the most sensible person you’ve ever met. In the eight page accompanying booklet he holds forth on fascism/anti fascism in music and in the main zine on The Hobs. Both are worth your time.

There’s further interviews with now ex noise artist Elizabeth Veldon which highlights just how Neanderthal some noise fans/artists can be when faced with someone who has a brain and Pete Um who just can’t seem to make his mind up. Concrete/Field and Jah Excretion bring in the rest of the field and lets not forget the impossible to be dull artist Dr. Steg who gets an outing in a piece written by Pete Coward.

Its in the review section where Eden shines brightest though. His pieces on The Extreme Rituals Festival may be two years after the event but who’s complaining? As far as I’m concerned I was glad of the reminiscences and being enlightened as to the bits I missed. Trevor Wishart, The Residents and events at Bexhill Pavilion involving experimental electronic artists of a European bent also get a mention. Best record review goes to a spelling mistake of a band called müllGRMM TÜTEsk whose record he cant find. Its the kind of personal touch you just cant find in mainstream publications. The Wire should give him a job pronto but I dare say he’d tell them where to shove it.

£4 UK - £6 EUR - £7 ROW post paid

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TT10

Pauline Oliveros/David Rothenberg/Timothy Hill - Cicada Dream Band
Gruenrekorder/Terra Nova Music CD

[Gruen 149/LC 09488/TN1410]

The Magicicada, the North America species of the cicada, has a life cycle of seventeen years most of which it spends underground getting old and fat. When they emerge, as they did in the New York Metropolitan district in 2013, Pauline Oliveros, David Rothenberg and Timothy Hill played a series of concerts that incorporated their ubiquitous buzz, the results being that rare thing, a beautiful recording that weaves together both man made sounds and those of the natural world.

But don’t think that this is three improvisors doodling over insect chatter. It is far from it. On ‘The Longest Song in the World’ we have the sounds of Humpback whales, on ‘All Creatures Get It’ Latvian frogs, two tracks have blackbirds for accompaniment, even termites get a look in. Three tracks are plain improv and beautifully done improv at that. All of this being the end result of over three and a half hours worth of live audio edited down to the hour and a bit we have here.

Over the course of eleven tracks the mood is a sombre and serene one where Hill’s vocals, sometimes a panting dog, sometimes a Tuvan shaman, sometimes a deep cycling overtone drone, sit cheek by jowl with both Rothenberg’s fluttering clarinets and Oliveros’ eerie electric V-Accordion.

I suspect that David Rothenberg may be behind all this. He’s the man who plays the clarinet to whales, writes books on how we get our natural rhythm from insects, he’s also the man behind Bug Music, another Gruenrekorder/Terra Nova release in which Rothenberg and friends improvised to the accompaniment of various insects, Hill was also involved in that project and for me it was his vocals that stood out and its the same here. In a Paul McCarthy way he growls, moans, drones and in general uses his voice to terrific effect. Especially on ‘Information National Forest’ where his rapid pants play out to flickering accordion and the sounds of both French cicadas and the Icterine warbler.

What makes this such a remarkable release is the way all three of these musicians gel. Rothenberg’s clarinet is at times a haunting one, a lonesome sound, sparse, fluttering like a bird. Hill manages at times to reach such low vocal drones that you imagine he must have an oil drum for a chest, when they interact with the lonesome call of Humpback whales the results are gaunt and profoundly sad. Oliveros meanwhile is an enigmatic presence one of prodding finger end stabs of her electric accordion, maybe thats her with the muted gong sounds or is it Rothenberg’s Ipad?

Three tracks have no apparent insect sounds, that is they have no subtitle explaining which insect/animal it is thats being mixed and appear to be pure improv which leads to the greater question; was all this improv? If so I’m even more impressed.

My only slight gripe is that the lack of information here. A booklet recounting how all this came together, the gigs they played, a few live pictures would have been illuminating. It may also have told us what that iPad was doing. Updating? Taking pictures? Tweeting? But this is small beer and hardly detracts from what is a remarkable coming together of three like minded people.

www.terranovamusic.net

www.gruenrekorder.de

Astral Social Club - Fountain Transmitter Medications
VHF. LP+CD/DL

Ambarchi/Flower/Campbell - Live at Tusk Festival 2013
Tusk LP/DL

A Friday spin into Leeds for a Wharf Chambers love-in provided an ideal opportunity to give the CD part of Fountain Transmitter Medications its first outing. Climbing in to the limo I inserted said CD, cranked up the volume and gripped the steering wheel for a journey that ended up being some kind of psychedelic version of Death Race 2000. By the time I was half way up the M62 I was beginning to think I’d inserted the wrong CD and was instead listening to the new Merzbow. Not having listened to any Merzbow since a long time ago I wondered if the lithe Masami was now putting out noise drone anthems that not only assailed the ear drums but had the ability to pin you in to your seat like an astronaut on lift off. By the time I’d pulled off the M621 to follow the inner city loop road I felt as if I’d gone three rounds with Mike Tyson. My body was weak from the assault. I feebly turned down the volume hoping that my innate sense of direction would lead me to the NCP behind Leeds market from where I could stagger to the WC escaping with naught but a couple of bleeding ears and a whacked out equilibrium.

It was a few weeks later before I dare get the LP out but when I did I found that things were, in some ways, pretty much as you’d expect them to be in ASC land, swooping beats, glistening glissandos, pumping electronic nodes, the dance thing, the noise thing, the whole bit. But that was just side one, after that things really took off. There are four tracks on side one that you could pretty much nail as ASC but the on the second theres an audible throat clearing before a wailing wall of jarring electronica hits you like your iPhone has just exploded at the side of your head. From there on in its a seat of your pants ride and you best come prepared.

Take away the first side of Fountain Transmitter Medications and what you have left are four tracks that each run to around the twenty minute mark. Its these that give you those small ‘what the fuck’ moments. ‘Diamonds in the Dreich’ dysfunctional electroblasts have Campbell intoning words over them like a Benediction, words that only become clear once the tumult has given way to a celestial shimmer, which in itself gives way to one of Campbell’s biggest orgasm’s yet, a ten minute freak out full of rolling drums, stiff armed power chords and squealing frequencies. ‘Sun Still God’ kicks off with an ever escalating, digital information overload cacophony before opening out into an ever expanding vista. Perhaps the most ‘out there’ track of the lot is ‘Erotic Meditation’ a 26 minute epic rammed with pulsing malfunctioning robot communication, various shards of Kaoss and the sounds of Dewsbury market, at times it had me in mind of Faust’s Krautrock in the way that it has two pulses going at once, one slightly delayed from the other, one in each ear. Yet more orgasms. The whole thing climaxes with not one but two pneumatic drills and Campbell washing his face in the sink. ‘Squeegee Anthem 3’ is the chill out track that mutates into rock-a-geddon where you get to float on heavenly fluffy cotton wool clouds before ten searing guitar solos, all going at the same time, become buried under an avalanche of spasmodic glitch-a-tronics. Fucking hell.

There may be those who dislike Campbell’s more noisy and fractured direction but I cant for a minute think why they would. FTM has more rapture, ecstasy and joy within its folds than anything this side of a pre 70’s free jazz album and I dare you to find anything thats been recorded today that matches it.

‘1 Hour and 47 minutes of Free Ecstatic Sound’ it says on the blurb and they weren’t kidding.

‘Live at Tusk’ meanwhile finds Campbell joining forces with Oren Ambarchi and his more regular traveling partner Mick Flower for a further 30 minutes worth of ecstatic free improvisation. By all accounts this set at last years Newcastle staged TUSK festival had the audience at the stage’s edge urging the trio on to even greater and greater heights. What makes this free rolling psych trip even more remarkable is the fact that the trio had only met up minutes before the performance and didn’t really have any clear idea of what they were going to do. What they did do was show that when three like minded people get together you don’t need and any fixed idea, you just go for it. Side two is where the drums come out and the thing rises and falls like a thrashing Godzilla. Flower’s guitar is an ever changing one, strings going up, trashed chords, harmonics strung out, notes fluttering and ringing, Campbell is all electronic squiggle and bleat whilst Ambarchi drumming lurches from rolling thunder to a sustained barrage. First side is all build up with no drums in sight but even that doesn’t take long to achieve lift off. Here I’m presuming Ambarchi layered on more of the electronics giving it a wider sound which Flower uses to fling his guitar about. The rapturous applause at its conclusion, by a no doubt well lubricated North East crowd is, it has to be reported, genuinely wild and raucous. And so it should. These coming togethers don’t happen nearly often enough and when they do they deserve to be recorded, pressed and given a Karen Constance cover. Another one for the Death Race 2000 trips.

TUSK

Fountain Transmitter Medication

[One from the archives]

The small, cramped, sweaty, low ceiling cellar bar that is the Royal Park Leeds witnessed one of its most memorable nights as a lunatic audience stuffed to the gills on dodgy lager and cheap drugs saw Whitehouse rip to shreds any notion that they’re washed up and finished with a performance so intimidating and drenched in animosity it made a random act of violence seem as insignificant as a stubbed toe.

But to get us in the mood it’s Milovan Srdenovic and his perverted Mexican gravedigger blues. Milovan takes to the stage wearing a wrestling mask, black Stetson and an orange nappy. The crowd look nonplussed. Proceedings get off to a flyer with an a cappella version of Islam Uber Alles – ‘Robbie Williams Paki Englebert Humperdink Paki Father Abraham Paki’. The audience lap it up rolling about in three inches of spilt lager and tab ends ruining their black tights and tight bodices. For his first solo gig in three years he treats members of the audience to a rousing version of Drink Myself Sick accompanying himself on nothing but a bullhorn, people sing along bolstered by piss weak lager and the sight of Milovan’s skeleton tattoos. Hell Hole Billy Goat sees the appearance of the Thirdreichalele with its cute swastika sound hole, he strums it like his life’s depending upon it wailing that sick mantra blues country cross ended muzak as he attunes himself to the evenings vibe. Milovan dons various guises including false beards and bad perms as he chicken walks his way to fame and fortune whilst belting out crowd pleasers such as ‘16 Fanny Rags’ with its ungodly refrain: ‘16 fanny rags!!’ After a slight technical hitch he sits down to sing Big Janice whilst playing an electric guitar across his lap with a chapatti and a fork. The crowd love him and will turn up in droves at his next engagement.

The place is filling up some and the smoky haze and reek of stale beer welcomes Anenzaphalia to the tiny foot high stage. Huge waves of low-end hertz are turning my guts to mulch and the PA guy fears for his equipment as the Anenzaphlaia duo give a solid performance of industrial noise ambience. Call it what you will it’s ideal ear warm up for what is to be the night’s coup de grace.

Whitehouse eventually appear clutching handfuls of bottled beers; Bennett is lithe in his leather trenchcoat, bare chest and wrap-around shades. Best looks demonic with shaved head inciting the audience to riot with screams and shaking fists but its Sotos who scaring the shit out of everybody. He stares into the crowd as if daring anybody to start trouble – there’s been a message posted on the internet offering £20 to anybody brave enough to chin Bennett mid performance and it looks like Sotos has taken it personally. He flicks a switch and the room fills with the deafening sound of Tit Pulp. Some pissed up arsehole at the front of the stage is seig heiling Bennett and making a total prick of himself - Bennett takes a big swig of his beer gargles with it and spews it into his face. Arsehole takes this as a compliment and goes wild in deluded gratitude - Bennett signals to Sotos to take arsehole man out of the equation. Sotos dwarfs him and has to stoop slightly, then grabs him by the neck and slowly drags him to the back of the room where he’s dumped unceremoniously like a bag of sodden rags. Sotos returns briefly to the stage and the pressure builds as Best takes hold of the mic and starts screaming like a demented banshee. Things are hotting up. Sotos is looking really pissed off eyeballing anybody who looks like they could mean trouble and then spies some lifeless drunk who’s decided to take in the show sitting on a buffet three feet from the stage front. Sotos leans over him and pulls his buffet out from underneath him sending him sprawling into sea of spilled beer and crushed fag ends. Rock and Roll sneers into view and Bennett’s spewing beer everywhere, Sotos shoves the drunk around as Best goes absolutely fucking mental. Sotos is really losing it now and goes back to his post to alter some imperceptible dial and smashes a bottle in a mad fit as it fails to respond. There’s broken glass everywhere and some of it has found its way into his hand. After a couple of minutes it’s clear that he’s losing quite a bit blood, it’s running from his clenched fist as his eyes glaze with unfettered malice. He stomps around for a while then decides to call it a draw and disappears. Bennett, sensing that something is wrong goes after him and we’re left with a baffled looking Best, swigging beer, altering dials, wondering what to do. After a couple of minutes Best too exits stage right leaving whatever it is they utilise to carry on its wail. Some punters decide enough is enough and call it a day. Eventually the noise subsides to an imperceptible whine, people are looking at each other shrugging their shoulders. Then Best reappears pulling on a fag and cranks things up again. Sotos like samples of abuse accompany Whitehouse like squawl and for the next ten minutes it’s a Best solo show. He laughs at the crowd lapping up the chaos, grinning like some malevolent imp and then finally Sotos and Bennett reappear to a huge cheer. They take their stations and immediately rip into the most ferocious version of A Cunt Like You you’ll ever hear. Its sheer unadulterated venom. Bennett and Best are fighting for the mic in a bid to expend their frustration. Best loses and flails around in frustration baring his manic rictus. Sotos is still bleeding and spraying blood everywhere. Bennett starts making cut throat signals and amid the chaos the plugs are pulled and that’s it.

Outside Arsehole man is rolling up his trouser leg to show off a huge scratch that runs the full length of his shin. It’s seeping blood and already scabbing over. ‘See that’ he says to his mates ‘see that? Peter Sotos did that to me he did!’ He was proud dammit.

A special mention must go to the Termite team and Mike Dando in particular for getting this gig on. Making little if any money and taking big risks for little, if any thanks - these guys are the real heroes of the night. Frequent your local Termite gig and see some real entertainment.

[From the archives]

Noise gigs don’t normally take place in swanky venues. Most noise gigs I attended in this country take place in smoky rooms above pubs, at the back of pubs, in the cellars of pubs.

The final night of this years Termite Festival was no exception. So, jammed in next to someone chain smoking a mixture of dried privet leaves and bindweed your hearing takes a battering and your glass runs dry and then you realize that the bars packed and its going to be twenty quid in a taxi home and tinnitus for the rest of the week – and you keep coming back because there’s nothing else quite like it.

These smoky rooms throw up some memorable evenings. Once again its praise be to the Termite Club for putting on four nights of eclectic entertainment - after last years debacle of having almost no festival at all [due to circumstances beyond their control] this years ran to four nights to make up for it. Alas, a huge bout of apathy on my part [and the fact that funds were at an all time low] meant that your roving reporter could only make it to this the last night.

The Cardigan Arms is the prefect template of how Leeds Tetley pubs used to be; rooms tucked away in every corner, lots of wood, etched glass and marble floor tiles, a big enough bar that you can shout over to your friends in the next room, a bog you could have a gig in [take note Sudden Infant] and an upstairs room that you locate via a windy staircase that has a door with a glass window in it that says ‘Harmonium Room’.

The Harmonium Room is host first to Sudden Infant and its originator Joke Lanz. I saw Sudden Infant earlier in the year at the Entr’acte gig in London and he was stunning. With a contact mic in the palm of each hand he held his hands to his throat and let rip primal screams – later in his set he held his hands on other people’s throats picking up pulses and gulps. Tonight he’ll be let down by equipment failure when half the PA refuses to work but despite it all he still gives a stellar performance of vocal angst before a decent sized appreciative crowd. Silence, church bells, brief blasts of industrial pounding, screams, Lanz prowls his territory rubbing his contact mic’d hands up and down his legs and over his head, producing scarred and fractured templates on which to impale yourself. Dangerous bursts of frenzy juxtapose with stand stock still do nothingness. An impressive performer who in conjunction with his Schimpfluch Gruppe compatriots produces some of the most stimulating, fresh and original sounds to be found.

Trombone players are usually good entertainment and Alan Tomlinson is no exception. Watching a short bloke with a beer belly roll his sleeves up, sweat buckets whilst taking his trombone apart and put it back together again whilst making all kind of noises that you thought couldn’t come out of a trombone in the first place, is a good enough reason to turn up next time he’s on the bill. Tomlinson has studied the trombone for years and I dare say he could hold his own in Kenny Balls Jazz Men but tonight he strips down his instrument rebuilds it, closes doors with it, sticks stuff down the end of it and along the way produces everything from low end buzzes to twittering coughs and tweets. Sandwiched between Sudden Infant and MK9 he’s the lighter side of tonight’s show and the nearest thing we’ll get to a laugh.

I miss half of MK9’s set due to bar congestion and get back to find members of the audience sitting in the half of the room sectioned off for the artists with the letters ‘A’ and ‘B’ stuck to them. MK9 is Michael Nine, founder of the legendary power electronics outfit Death Squad. Who I caught the last time they were in Leeds when they scared the shit out of everybody with a spot on Gulf War tirade. Tonight he’s barking into a megaphone to a backtrack of what sounds like overlapping military airwaves chatter. He stops his rant to let the back track build and pulls ‘A’s’ and ‘B’s’ off people [then making them leave their spot] but seeing as how his rants are indecipherable [to me at least] and the A & B thing makes no sense to me either it’s a cold performance lacking in the energy of his earlier work.

Matthew Bower gives us twenty minutes or so of screeching feedback [which is also blighted by equipment failure] before the highlight of the night take up their cudgels. Chris Corsano [Six Organs of Admittance, Sunburned Hand of the Man] on drums and Mick Flower [Vibracathedral Orchestra] at first on some kind of Indian dulcimer and then on electric guitar build some head spinning walls of eastern tinged drone fuzz. Dunno if it’s the first time these guys have played together but should they get together regular enough they’ll build up a decent following. Any live product resulting from this all too short set should be snapped up without hesitation. Maybe they’ll have thought a name up for themselves by then too. The Toddmeitser nods his approval and announces that it’s the best thing of the weekend which makes me feel a little better for having missed the previous three nights.

[even more from the archives]

Hardly has my liver had a decent rest than its back to Leeds to see what state the Undermeister’s shirt is in. The beard is longer, the eyes are redder but the shirt’s still in the same state it was in Glasgow four days earlier. Its good to know you can rely on some things in life. At least he’s smiling, as is main Termite man Mike Dando, the venue is full.

A week earlier I’d seen him taking money at the door of a KK Null/Zev gig at the Brudenell and I almost felt like giving him the Samaritans number. Punters were thin on the ground. The bar and gate ticks on the paying in sheet wouldn’t cover the taxi fare home. It was a depressing sight. But what a difference a few weeks make. The punters of Leeds have come out in force to sit in a smoky cellar bar and see Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock for the first time in ten years and Smegma for the first time in ever. They’ve also come to watch a football match in the upstairs bar which seems to freak out some of the Americans in the party and isn’t that a Mosque over there? Some things take a little explaining. But at least the drone supergroup amalgam that’s filling the tiny stage don’t need any explaining. The bobbing heads and bow driven electric guitars compete with the tribal drums and effect boxes and its kind of messy and hairy and all over the shop but at least they enjoyed themselves and didn’t carry on for two hours which, if reports are to believed, is the length of time they managed to keep it up for in a private residence the previous evening.
 Snotnosed are the light entertainment of the evening. Speeding off his tits the big bald fella’s Hanatarash tribute band begins by destroying a galvanized steel bin using a sledgehammer, then a machete and then his bare hands. He breaks records over his head, dons a Peter Sutcliffe mask [au natural] and throws himself onto the floor screaming and waling and thrashing about like a kid with a Ritalin deficiency. His accomplice sits behind some kind of gadget chain smoking roll ups and looking on like he’s seen it all before. The debris he’s managed to scatter is impressive as are the beads of sweat running all over his cue ball noggin. Performance and exercise. Nice touch. This turns out to be the final Snotnosed gig ever.

Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock bemuse, delight and outrage the Leeds audience with the same show as in Edinburgh. One punter is so freaked by having Joke’s pig mask shoved in his face that he actually pushes him away. He comes and stares at me but I’ve been drinking in Batley and am not scared.

For one number Smegma will play with Herb Diamante. Herb, who I have to admit has passed me by, turns out to be the alter ego of John Godbert an artist and artiste from Stan Laurel country. And after an opening spell in which Smegma really rock the boards with a killer ten minutes noise set, Herb joins in singing in a really fine deep voice. His green suit and red wig mis-match imperfectly his wing backed shades. He fits in well with the Smegma team. I don’t recognize the song but it’s a good one for Herb’s voice and after it’s finished everybody is slapping each other on the back and shaking hands. The audience are whooping and applauding like they’ve not been let out for six months. Breaking their set up into three separate parts Smegma roll about everywhere from loose fifties rock to avant garde bells and tinkles. When voices appear from the crackles on old records everyone backs off to listen intently. Guitars are played with circuit boards, toy keyboards are plugged in, rubber bands are stretched across mouths, trombones, clockwork toys, I’ve never seen a band go through as many instruments. Theremin like structures emit strange bubbles and then we’re off again with a Cramps like stomp.

That Smegma seem genuinely happy to be on these shores only adds to the fun element of the night. Everybody seems to be having a great time; audience, bands and even Steve Underwood who’s sold many a ticket and sold lots of merchandise. The sooner Smegma and R&G return the better.

The Thomas Family - Dub Variations
Crow Versus Crow. CVC001. CD
100 Copies.

Daniel Thomas - Visitors
Cherry Row. CDR006. CDR

A frosty Saturday afternoon and nothing but the sound of hot coals settling in the grate as the world does its Christmas shopping. An ideal moment to immerse myself once more in what is now commonly called 'Extraction Music'. We can call it little else now. The phrase fits. The Bearded Wonder has cast his spell. Extraction it is.

But first you need silence. Our contemplative moments are few and far between, unless you’re a Quaker or a Buddhist or the denizen of some monastic place of worship that is. Sitting in silence is something so few of us do. Industries have been created to ensure that silence is an enemy. Advertising is the biggest culprit. The world is full of advertising and its hard to ignore. The World Wide Web is nothing but adverts held together by porn, drivel and pet pictures. Silence is becoming a rarity.

So I sit in a warm room with my feet up and the rather lovely first ever Crow Versus Crow release in my hands. What better way to break the silence. I will listen to this and Daniel Thomas’ new Cherry Row recording and that will be it for today I will limit myself to two releases. Its what I’m calling ‘Deliberately Restricted Listening’. Why not restrict yourself to one or two works a day? Like you would say a film or a visit to an art gallery. Why sate when you can savor? Why listen to things at random? What are you doing, filling a void? Are you scared of the silence? Are you one of those people who cant bear silence? Have you tried silence lately? Silence will help you think. Its not scary. You should try it.

Instead of listening to music in a random fashion with little in the way of thought or premeditation, choose to listen to one particular piece and then nothing else. Think about what you want to listen to, give it some thought and when you do play it sit and listen to it all the way through with as little distraction as possible. Make time for it.

This idea came to me earlier this week when for the first time I sat and listened to the entirety of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Arguably his greatest work, this 90 minute mass for 260 strong choir, 80 piece orchestra and four soloists opens with, for my money, the kind of music capable of turning atheists into deists [perhaps part of the intention]. But after that first ten minutes I kind of drift off and wonder what that is over there and wheres my wallet and have I paid this and that. Never in years of listening to this work have I sat and listened to it in its entirety. Could this composition, which Beethoven worked on and worried over for four years of his life [and this is as musical genius we're talking about here not some neurotic rock star with an ego problem and a cooing staff of fawning arselickers trying to coax a fourth album out of him], could this man have composed a work that captivates audiences the world over and me just the first ten minutes? So I sat and listened to it. All 90 minutes of it and its true beauty became apparent. It still didn’t make me believe in God, but for 90 minutes I was transfixed. I have learnt to sit still and listen. Its taken me a while to get here but now that I am there’s no going back.

I saw Daniel and Dave Thomas [forever to be followed by the words ‘no relation’] separated by the middle of a table at the Wharf Chambers last week. As Hagman they were first on in a series of bands that pushed the lower end of the PA and in Midwich saw Rob Hayler reach a peak of such joyous head bobbing proportions that I had to fight the urge to rush over and give him a big ‘I’m Happy For You’ manly hug at its conclusion. It was another good WC night.

The Thomas Family’s Dub Variations gathers together David’s solo modular synth work with Daniel’s field recordings in three pieces that were the results of recordings made a couple of years back. Its a fine fit with the twittering Honk Kong wildlife [both human and birdlike] proving to be the perfect accompaniment to standout track ‘III’, a 17 minute smooth ride of synth pulse and drone with the odd enthusiastic TG bass splat for company. The way that ‘III’ moves from from random key prod into an urban ritualistic analogue nod fest provides us with the key piece here. Think Pink Floyd’s One of These Days for the Extraction generation with added exotic wildlife. ‘I’ and ‘II’ are much quieter affairs. Here we have desert dust storms, the ubiquitous hum of distant traffic, station announcements, minimalist explorations into the corners of empty factories where the light rarely reaches, bleak affairs made for near silence.

On ‘Visitors’ Daniel Thomas moves away from the Schulze like pulses of this years earlier Cherry Row outing ‘Enemy Territory’ and into Sci-Fi territory with a kick off track that involves movie samples [‘Daniel, somethings happening!’] which in lesser hands could have emerged a tad Orb-esque but no. From there on in things get murky with helicopter rotor blades, synth burble and a series of sparse recordings that only emerge from the gloom when a melody of sorts appears on track five. Track six which at 17 minutes is easily the longest is the beating heart of the thing and like the last track on Dub Variations the reason you need to get this.

It would appear that there is no limit to the permutations available to those Leeds residents partaking in Extraction, to list those permutations would ensure a long scroll down this page. Now is not the time. The Thomas Family is but another welcome addition as is Crow Versus Crow whose Sowerby Bridge base gives us another pin on the vibrant West Yorkshire electronics map. Smashing cover work too, printed card, simple but effective. Looks nice in front of the fire. Not too close now.

Crow Versus Crow

Cherry Row

SSPONNGG 23
Various media.

Reviews of Dr. Steg related work on this blog usually appear after the scans but seeing as there’s about 50 of Steg’s latest offering to look at I thought it best to do the writing bit first. This leaves you to then savour the long scroll down to the bottom of the page without due let or hindrance.

The story so far: Dr Steg has decided to ditch his magazine/mail art project SPON and replace it with SSPONNGG [or various spellings thereof]. SSPONNNGG is whatever Dr. Steg says it is. Here its two A4 zines and in what must be seen to be one of the most over the top SSSPOONNGGG/SPON releases yet: a handmade slipcase containing around 15 A5 zines, various booklets, original artworks, a button badge featuring the band TIRIKILATOPS, a CD of the band TIRIKILATOPS [that refuses to play], an 11 minute DVD collaboration with Andy Paciorek that showcases some of their artwork and has music by Stan Batcow and some hand made postcards. The slipcase itself appears to be covered in lumps of dried meat, tile spacers and other bits of plastic detritus. This has then been liberally daubed in red paint [which was still a bit wet and had the odor of wet paint when it arrived. Dr. Steg moves quickly]. All of this is mind boggling enough as it is and then you look at those tiny booklets and you notice that they are all originals, all of them drawn in Steg’s own spidery hand with a drawing pen whose diameter must be measured in microns. I was in awe.

And still am. There’s no point trying to make any sense of this. It would take a Michael Collins or an Andrew Graham-Dixon or a Brian Sewell to do it justice and wouldn’t you just love to see Brian Sewell take his mind to this lot. For now let us all cast our gaze Steg-ward and hope that the next Ceramic Hob’s single isn’t too far away.

http://www.worldofsteg.co.uk/

Xanntone Zmas Party
18th December 2014. Wharf Chambers, Leeds.
Ihsorak, Daniel Thomas, Astral Social Club.

Dave Keenan’s article about the death of the underground in the recent year end Wire has caused much debate in and around and amongst the bald heads of noise. Its the treading water idealist who leans over a table full of pedals making noises to a group of people who are mostly friends or friends of friends or Facebook associates or Twitter followers and the critics who are no more than the ‘defanged boosters of their favourite musicians’. Its the everybody knows everybody scenario, the chummy bon honomie, the fist popping clique-ness of certain groups of music making individuals who retweet each others successes to the nth degree that appears to stick sharpest in Keenan’s claw, that and the tables. Get thee behind me oh table of foulness says DK, give me real instruments and real people, people who run free with the wind in their hair and lager down their shirt front and needles sticking out of their arms. Proper artists with no fixed agenda or prerecorded cassette sets.

The first Zanntone curated event at the Wharf Chambers would have satisfied Keenan on some fronts but failed on others. There were tables and thinning pates but there was also drums and guitars and nakedness too. In December. Nakedness in December in the not noted for its red hot venue space Wharf Chambers. So I wander around in my big coat counting the punters and it appears that we almost qualify for the #realnoaudienceunderground hashtag by virtue of there being but a dozen people in attendance, some of whom have been at the John Barleycorn since the office shut early for Xmas and are now slobbering on about ducks in Wetherby. Some of those who are showing signs of being full of the festive spirit are the performers themsleves. Including Paul Walsh whose night this is. He’s the one on the left of the photos with the table full of gadgets thus putting him on DK’s hit list, behind him is John Cylde Evans on drums, Neil Campbell on side drum and whatever Evans isn’t and is hitting and stage right Pascal Ansell with various gadgets and, later on, no clothing.

Like the last gig I attended at the WC where Campbell and Clyde Evan’s hit the shit out of stuff for 40 solid minutes under their UK Muzzlers guise, this gathering of minds, that goes by the name ‘Ihsorak’, appears to have been formed with the full intent of making nothing but a godawful racket. For 23 minutes, obvs. They claim they are playing songs, Walsh signaling the end of each ‘song’ by switching off his equipment turning around and waving his arms at Campbell and Clyde Evans like a shipwreck survivor trying to get the attention of a passing ship. When they eventually see him [Campbell has his back to him for the entire set] they finish and then immediately start again making much the same racket as before. Which was all good fun in a pre Xmas lets bash the shit out of some gear kind of way. At times they did hit a Boredoms groove but just as it was getting interesting Walsh did his shipwreck survivor bit and they stopped. And started. And stopped. Somewhere amongst all this chaos Ansell left his gadgets and strapped a guitar to his frame before pulling off his boxer shorts thus rendering him knacker bare. A brave man. I felt the cold and I had an overcoat on but then I’m about thirty years older and have no hair.

Sophie Cooper has had to cancel because of illness which is a shame as I was looking forward to hearing her off kilter songs for the first time. Daniel Thomas does play and eventually drowns out the chatter with a simple but effective evolving synth throb piece, the likes of which I could happily nod away hours to. Whether this was ‘Extraction Music’ ™ I know not, Rob Hayler wasn’t playing out so I couldn’t get a definitive answer.

I’m away before Campbell treads the boards in what is enigmatically billed as the last Astral Social Club gig ‘for a while’. I’m in the car and the sight of all this jollity and the groovy tunes from DJ HO HO HO make me pine for liquor, the likes of which must not pass my lips in case of contact with Plod.

Sleaford Mods - Chubbed Up +
Ipecac Recordings. IPC162CD/LP/DL

Sleaford Mods - Tiswas
Invada Records. INV138LP. 12”/DL [Yellow and Orange vinyl]

I got the call from Underwood. The Sleaford Mods were in town supporting The Specials and there’s a triple A gold plated back stage pass waiting for me. All I have to do is drag my weary bones the ten miles to Leeds. Not easy after a weekend of debauchery in Dusseldorf supping in bars frequented by Joseph Beuys [who once got chucked out of the Fuchsen for refusing to take his hat off] where at five on a sleepy Sunday afternoon I realise that I’m half cut and have to get a flight and then drive home.

Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Long Plastic Corridor’ is laid bare for my delectation. Five types of cheese and a selection of crusty breads, vegan choice on the menu and bottled beers and water in the green room. We nip out for a pint and when we get back we can’t get in the venue because security doesn’t know who we are. ‘Have you checked all your gear in’ security says by way of small talk as we await recognition. Me and Underwood look at each other ‘Yeah, its all in’.

In the real world the Academy is filling up and after a group of teenagers dressed like The Byrds have done their bit the Sleaford Mods walk on stage plug in the lap top and let rip. The audience is mainly bald, mainly white, mainly Fred Perry polo shirts and braces, mainly middle aged, mainly Dr. Marten’s, one of whom knows every word to every Sleaford song. Not only does he know every word he’s jumping around on the balls of his feet, two, three feet in the air, pushing himself up on his girlfriends shoulders until there’s a circle of space around him, head going from side to side, tongue out, off his tits and loving every second of it. Williamson has developed a furious tic which involves his right hand moving in rapid motions between his hip and the back of his head. He leans into his microphone flicking sweat off the end of his nose, rubbing and ranting, walking a few paces in a circle when theres a gap. Fearn is his usual loose limbed vertical limbo dancer, beer in hand jumping forward to press play after a sometimes brief discussion about which songs next. When they’ve done Fearn unplugs his laptop shoves it into his backpack and they’re in the car and gone before The Specials open up with Ghost Town.

After thirty years time the country was crying out for another Ghost Town. That it took two forty year olds to deliver it while a group of Byrd look-a-likes jump around to Green Day tunes irks me somewhat. And then there’s that cut and shut ginger nut from Hebden Bridge churning out middle of the road radio friendly pap in the now days of food banks, austerity measures, out of control borrowing [both governmental and household], delivery drivers being made redundant on Christmas Day, bankers bonuses, zero hours contracts, tax dodging mega-corps and Kim Kardashian’s fat fucking arse. I anoint myself with cheap whisky and hammer shut the doors.

Jobseeker is Ghost Town so is Tiswas and Tweet Tweet Tweet or any other song you want to pull off these two releases, [or, come to think of it, anything they’ve released since Austerity Dogs] all of which are becoming the grumbling dissent in the background of a country whose cosy two party politics are being given the ice bucket challenge by a velvet collared clown who likes to pose with a pint and a fag and tell everybody how in touch he is with the common man. All this while wringing his cap in the presence of his future media bosses and trying to forget he once set up an off shore trust fund in a bid to avoid paying tax on his rainy day money.

I heard Jobseeker on Radio 4 last week. This is how far the Sleaford Mods world has changed since I saw them play a freebie gig in a crummy Blackpool boozer at the fag end of 2013. Williamson held forth on why he had to write songs that mirrored todays mire because no bugger else was doing it. I try to keep the car on the road my mind reeling from the fact that a band on Harbinger Sound are on a Radio 4 news programme.

Chubbed Up + collects five recent singles with a couple of unreleased tracks chucked in just keep the completists on their toes. Tiswas has four new tracks with ‘Bunch of Cunts’ being the ugliest and bleakest and perhaps some indication as to the direction the Sleaford Mods are traveling. In it an unchanging sparse beat allows Williamson to give us another verbal salvo with ever more out-there stream of consciousness weirdness, ‘in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion’s off his nut’. ‘The Mail Don’t Fail’ speaks for itself while lame London-centric soft rock stars are the target in ‘The Six Horsemen - The Brixton’s’, ‘They’re so outrageous, they’ve been doing drugs for ages’, definitely the only song in which you’ll hear Johnny Borrell being called a cunt. Worth buying just for that. ‘The Demon’ picks up a sixties funky Blaxploitation vibe over which Williamson rants a virtually non-stop stream of spat out words, a man ridding himself of a brain blockage, ‘din bin din tin tin fuck off min’. The depth is phenomenal. Try listening on repeat. The infectious beats, the words coming at you like a hail of bullets, the laconic delivery on the Six Horsemen, the punk as fuck bass on The Committee, the two minute rattlers, the whomping horns on Fear of Anarchy.

The only way to make this years looming general election anything like bearable is to turn down the volume on your TV and play some Sleaford Mods. With any luck they’ll be using carefully edited bits of Jobseeker as the soundtrack to various politician being pelted with eggs. I’m here waiting.

MK9 - Anhedonic Ideations
Neural Operations 2014 NO 12. 2 x 3” CDR, 1 x business card CDR, 1 X button badge that reads ‘ERROR’ and booklet. 125 copies.

Death Squad - Out-Patient
Neural Operations 2011. CDR 100 copies.

I have a great deal of respect for Michael Nine. In the sometimes murky world of Power Electronics his live shows are never anything less than gripping and what I’ve heard of his recorded work either under his own name or that of his previous outfit Death Squad has always led me to believe that we're dealing with a serious player here. With Death Squad I once saw him play a Termite gig where blood was let as scenes of mass rioting were projected on to a whitewashed wall. Of the several solo gigs I’ve seen under his MK9 guise every single one has left me feeling inadequate, baffled, angry and ashamed. Nine’s ability to make us face up to the inanities of this world; the pointless wars, the wasted lives, the lying governments, the senseless hatred is both humbling and profound. And then here, his own self doubt. A bout of Anhedonia, this being the term used to describe ‘a state of mind where one no longer enjoys the things that used to be enjoyable’.

In Anhedonic Ideations Nine examines a bout of self doubt brought on by a year long struggle with something a bit more complicated than a creative block. During this period Nine kept a diary in which he recorded his thoughts and observations. Some are mundane, some are acutely personal whilst others dig deep into his psyche asking himself questions he can’t answer playing both psychiatrist and patient. Cuttings of this diary, along with black and white images of urban spaces and his own contorted face make up the considerably dense booklet.

Of the two three inch discs the silver one contains a series of audio recordings that Nine made daily over a six month period, each track representing one week. Here we have short blasts of white noise, shortwave interference, static and amp hum. The five tracks on the black disc are Power Electronics in its purer sense with Nine’s slowed vocals going through the distortion machine to a background of electronic disturbance. Here we find more recognisable PE tropes but its Nine’s delivery and his slowly measured American accent that [even through the static] lifts this from the ordinary. On track three his voice comes at you through a distant howling wind. On track four that distant wind is joined by a crackling frequency distortion that goes deep into the depths of the ear canal. On the last track he recites from what I presume is an Afghani schoolteachers account of the effects of US drone strikes, all this to the sound of heavy rainfall and an oscillating low hertz drone. The effect is both haunting and deeply affecting.

The square disc [as its described on the insert] finds Nine reading a paragraph of his diary entry with each disc being unique.

The amount of work that's gone in to this release is staggering, there’s even a typed two inch square piece of paper folded into the side of the square CD that probably came from Nine’s own diary. As a way of working yourself out of a creative cul-de-sac its quite something, as an insight into the mind of an artist working within the Power Electronics genre its probably unique. Either way its an outstanding release.

Out-Patient finds Nine in is his now defunct Death Squad guise. Here we have inmates of psychiatric institutions being interviewed by their doctors, admissions from desperate drug addicts, straight lifts on the benefits of ECT as extolled by the medical profession and cop abuse all daubed with ominous, gestating electronics. There’s also a live track as recorded in Denver in which Nine’s shows his ability to hold down a sustained rant. Impressive stuff.

Nine’s work is disturbing, gripping, personal and the product of a mind that never stops questioning the often seemingly obvious observation that all of humanity is off to hell in a squeaky wheeled Wal-Mart trolley.

Power Electronics has its detractors but they’re usually of the kind that hasn’t listened to any in over twenty years. A dousing of Michale Nine goes a long way towards re-balancing that misconception.

http://mk9.org/

Song From The Forest - A film by Michael Obert. Selected Recordings of Bayaka Music by Louis Sarno.

Gruenrekorder. Gruen 150. CD + booklet.

Let us venture into the Central African rainforest which is where Louis Sarno found himself after hearing the music of the Bayaka Pygmies playing on his radio one night. And off he goes on what must have been an exciting and daunting journey. Twenty five years later Sarno is an accepted member of the community and has a son called Samedi. The film ‘Song From The Forest’ recounts how Sarno brought his son back to New York, from one jungle to another. What we have here is the soundtrack and but a small representation of the 1,500 hours worth of recordings that Sarno has made of the Bayaka Pygmies unique music.

And they do like to make music. When they pass a gooma tree they slap its exposed buttressed roots, when the women bathe they slap the water to make water drums, when they go into the forest they mimic chimpanzees in mock gorilla hunting games, they play flutes, bow harps, they sing laments, greetings and farewells and by the sounds of it have a good time in the process.

Listening to Song From The Forest you are struck by the purity of it all. An hour of this CD will cleanse your mind of years of commercial radio. Its the purity that William Bennet speaks of when he says that the sound of two African’s banging rocks together has the same intensity of a Whitehouse performance. You can hear that in the tree drumming where the driving polyrhythms are joined by a female vocalist who’s breathy utterances give the piece an air of [probably unintended] menace. ‘Earth Bow is another remarkable piece in which a sapling is bent with a piece of twine thats then plucked, a rainforest double bass, as ever accompaniment is in the shape of hand made percussion. ‘The Flutes We Hear No More’ is the sound of two duetting flautist, the flutes now destroyed and gone forever. The CD is bookended by both a greeting and a farewell. The Yeyi-Farewell is a haunting dirge that showcases the Bayaka’s penchant for polyphonic vocals, in-between the coughs and the cicadas emerges a lonesome and yearning voice.

As well as the Bayaka there are pure forest recordings and dialogue from Sarno recounting the story of someone he knew who could walk into the forest and live like a king on the food he caught and gathered. An amazing adventure and an amazing story. Makes not to self to see film.

Gruenrekorder

Basil Athanasiadis - Stray Cat’s Dream [Intimate post-Fukushima Meditations].
Sargasso. SCD28077. CD + Booklet.

Wabi-Sabi is a complex and hard to define Japanese principle that roughly translates as the finding of beauty, simplicity, emptiness, economy and humility in natural objects and processes. There’s a lot more to it than that but spending half this review explaining it would test both your patience and mine. Better perhaps that you go to Japan and find a small tea bowl that makes you go ‘ahh’. That’s wabi-sabi. Mrs Fisher’s a big fan. Or you could read Mr Athanasiadis’ more eloquently detailed explanation in the accompanying booklet.

Basil Athanasiadis gives himself the task of trying to capture the essence of wabi-sabi in a series of compositions that range from Cage like prepared piano works to the inclusion of traditional Japanese instruments and the voice of his Japanese wife. I’d say he’s done it such is the lightness of his touch on pieces like ‘Youki’ an eight minute composition for piano that contains clusters of delicately struck high notes and the equally light Utakata in which the 20 stringed Koto plays foil to a more traditional violin.

The first nine tracks are a series of compositions called the Book of Dreams where prepared piano and flute create atonal atmospheres of the kind heard only on late night Radio 3 programmes. This is Webern played as if Webern had lost his sturm and drang and instead found his arigato goziamsu. The edges have been softened and even me, someone with a virtually pathological hatred of the flute [Ralph Hutter in early Kraftwerk days aside] can find the stark beauty in such work.

‘Little Songs of the Geisha II’ finds Athanasiadis’s wife Shie Shoji adding her delicate voice to the sho and the violin and as you’d expect the results are an austere collection of four song/poems that lie halfway between a geisha house and one of John Tavener’s more minimalist works.

Although not mentioned by name in the press release or the lengthy booklet, John Cage looms large here as evinced on the ten minute plus title track ‘Stray Cat’s Dream’ where a slightly more lively version of Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ stands there for all to see. Its one of my favourite pieces of Cage’s and the one you go to when you get into arguments about how Cage couldn’t play or compose. Its beauty lies in its simplicity which is of course one of the concepts of wabi-sabi.

http://www.basilathanasiadis.com/

www.sargasso.com

I don’t normally make new years resolutions but after careful thought and consideration it became obvious to me that the Idwal Fisher blog needed a shake up. Well, obvious to me at least. So how better to usher in this shiny new election year than with a clean sweep of the old thought process. Out goes the ‘I review everything I get sent’ mantra of the last six years and in comes a more laissez faire attitude.

From today if I do get something sent I promise I’ll listen to it but I wont promise I’ll review it, so yes the review gates are once more open but please don’t expect a quick response. I have been known to sit on things for over a year before cogitation took its natural course.

From today I will review whatever takes my fancy be it something I bought in Oxfam or the new Pynchon novel. I used to like reviewing the odd chazza LP so why not bring those days back and if that Vomir release has to go in the opposite direction then so be it. Bring on the Round The Horne LP and that flexi disc that came as an Encyclopedia Britannica promo with the Michael Aspel quiz on the b-side. Derek Bailey playing with David Sylvian? Why not. And that Ethiopian jazz CD courtesy of Awesome Tapes From Africa that’s been doing the rounds the last few weeks now, I feel it needs a post. And Super Noise Penis, the Smell & Quim/Cock E.S.P. 7" I’ve just dug played for the first time in donkeys. Smashing.

I shall still champion the underground [even if Dave Keenan’s has had it locked in the naughty cupboard for the foreseeable future] as this is where I feel most at home. Things will be a lot zippier round here too, not so much time spent pondering over structure [not that I ever did that much in the first place] and seeing as I’m on FB now in full blown Idwal Fisher mode, for better or worse, there’ll be some cross pollination there.

I have a little more time to myself these days and I always get more done in the winter months so expect a spurt. Or maybe not. All this could change come the summer and Test Match Special [always a distraction] but for now this is it. This thing that your looking at. It will continue.

I’ll be linking this to the contact and submissions page so it doesn’t get lost.

@idwalfisher

idwalfisher [at] dsl [dot] pipex [dot] com

A recent dig in the seven inch bin in Cleck Oxfam unearthed 15 flexi discs that some poor sod had carefully collated and inserted into the sleeve of a promo for the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's the Encyclopedia Britannica, which for anyone under thirty years of age was the 24 volume leather bound stripped down Wikipedia, which if you lived nowhere near a library, was what you looked in if you wanted to find out what Iceland did. That's if you could afford the six months wages that it cost to buy them. The Encyclopedia Britannica wasn’t just an encyclopedia it was furniture, an heirloom, something to look at when there wasn’t anything on the telly.

Flexi discs are a rare sight these days. Lyntone, who used to produce the vast majority of flexis in the UK shut its doors in 1991. I did hear of a pressing plant in America run by proselytizing Christians who used flexis to spread the message, but I never did find them. Apparently some people within the noise world used them, no doubt leaving many a transubstantiating God botherer wondering if he’d just screwed up the pressing.

If you ever see any flexi’s, buy them. If you see the Readers Digest flexi’s give ready money there and then and take them home where with any luck you’ll get to hear Max Bygraves tell Brian Matthews that people are fed up with rock n roll and all they want is a nice tune before playing a medley of Max tunes including the obligatory Me and My Shadow. You’ll hear Christopher Howell tell you in his ever so slightly posh, plummy RP English accent the exciting news that there’s a six LP box set of light classics awaiting you as a scratchy ten second burst of Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba erupts from your farty speaker. Or you can hear Humphrey Littleton trying to be as enthusiastic as he can about yet another Glen Miller box set. And on it goes.

Readers Digest flexi’s were promo tools [RD called them ‘Audition Discs’] for their hulking box sets. These leviathans of the box set world would often run to ten LP’s. I’m guessing that most of them ended up in the chazzas because their arthritic owners could no longer pick them up. Titles like ‘Wonderland of Sound’, ‘Golden Hit Parade’, ‘Music For You’, ‘Wonderful World, Wonderful Music’ contained selections of Classical Music’s greatest hits, vast swathes of easy listening, musicals, country and western, some if not all of it performed by Percy Faith and his Orchestra whose version of ‘Please Release Me’ would accompany us on Reggie Drakes Sunday afternoon mystery tours [that’s another story].

And don’t forget to tell Readers Digest whether you want the mono or stereo version and don’t let the crackles on this flexi disc put you off as the records you’ll be getting are of a much higher fidelity.

More aromatic effluvia came in the way of a double sided Faces flexi as given away with the NME and a six inch blank faced flexi that came with 70’s Hot Car magazine. This contains a stilted, well rehearsed conversation between Murray Walker and Anthony Lanfranchi before Lanfranchi drives an F1 Car round a track telling us what gear he’s in and which corner’s coming up next.

Meanwhile back at the Encyclopedia Britannica Michael Aspel is asking Phil and Sheila Barnsby why they thought buying 24 volumes of soon to be out of date information was a good idea before setting us an exciting quiz on the b-side. The 70's really were that shit.

Ø+yn & False Sir Nicholas.

Ø+yn - Tentaculeando a la Puna.

Ø+yn & Uton - Sacred Geometry and the New Mental Order

You know that thing I said about downloads? Just forget it. Ø+yn gets in touch. He’s from Argentina. Plays lo-fi, folk psych, musique concrète, drone, sitar abuse, a southern hemisphere Filthy Turd with bent swannee whistles and songs gone wrong. A demented Penguin Cafe Orchestra with Simon Jeffes off his tits waving his fiddle in the air like he just don’t care. Man.

I get confused with downloads. I never know where I am with them. Give me something I can get my hands on and take down the chazza when I’ve done with it. But I’ve got to bend and go with it. Just go with it. Listen for a while. Its no big deal. Delete and move on. Save some shoe leather. Give the guy some exposure because he deserves it.

And he’s not Mikka Vaino and someone whose initials are YN collaborating. I have no idea what that’s all about.

These three albums are a low key Vibracathedral Orchestra rattling bin lids and tree trunks, theres India in there somewhere and those grinding low key drones that sound like they’re coming out of a box that has a handle on the side thats almost a Klaxon. ‘Los Músicos Ciegos de Cuzco’ from the ¨Tentaculeando a la Puna¨ album is banjolele Greek Rebetiko attack as the march of a thousand bazoukis do battle in the background. ¨Tentaculeando a la Puna¨ is the best of three. It has adventure in its step, shamanic rituals played out on wastelands, scraped strings, an air of desolation, the odd moan, things going round your head aswarm as Ken Dodd blows down a six foot piece of four inch downpipe.

Some of these came out on cassette. You can work it out by following the links. Its what I did. Its what you have to do in the crazy world of instant download. Good stuff.

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Taming Power - Selected Works 2000
Early Morning Records. EMR 007. 10”. 200 copies

Taming Power - For Electric Guitar and Cassette Recorders
Early Morning Records. EMR 010. 10”. 220 copies

Taming Power - For Electric Guitar, Cassette Recorders and Tape Recorders
Early Morning Records. EMR 011. 10”. 220 copies

Taming Power - Twelve Pieces
Early Morning Records. EMR 017. 10”. 525 copies

The story so far: Neil Campbell sends some Vibracathedral Orchestra records to Bruce Russell for trades and in return receives several Taming Power releases. Campbell is so blown away by what he hears that he gets in touch with Taming Power who turns out to be the solo project of Askild Haugland a Norwegian, who to the complete indifference of seemingly everybody except Bruce Russell, has been recording and releasing his work since the late 80’s, mainly on vinyl. Via his Early Morning Records label Haugland has compiled quite a list of recorded work and when Campbell asks him, ‘What you got left?’ Haugland says ‘all of it’.

Campbell raves to Hayler. Campbell bungs me a Taming Power CDR comp that's an unlimited Early Morning Records promo tool designed to whet your appetite but when I see its a slimline CDR with dodgy Gerhard Richter cover art my heart sinks a little. But you don’t dismiss Campbell recommendations lightly. Its when the vinyl arrived that the enormity of it all hit me.

Its not just that Haugland has been sat on this motherlode of abstract, drone and noise for so long, its the whole thing, everything; the hand drawn labels, the hand written track titles that are always the date on which they were recorded, the mundane photo’s for cover art which on early releases are simply glued to the sleeve [apologies for the scans by the way] and then the sounds themselves, the sometimes caterwauling howl of tape recorder feedback, the staggering intensity of a guitar going head to head with reel to reels’, the bleakness, the darkness, the emptiness, the feeling that you’ve stumbled across an entire genre of music that you never thought existed before. I’m still stunned as to just how esoteric, far out, weird and mind-boggling this all is and all the time Haugland just keeps on doing what he’s always done, recording and releasing. To little fanfare. I’m pretty certain that all that's about to change. The West Yorkshire No Audience mob has picked up on it and the word is beginning to spread. If I was you I’d get in touch before all those low numbered runs disappear for ever.

You can read about that first Taming Power delivery here. You can read Campbell’s proselytizing letter to Hayler here, you can read Hayler’s thoughts on the matter here.

And one release at a time we have:

For Electric Guitar, Cassette Recorders and Tape Recorders: Filigrees of fluttering, distorted electric guitar notes put through a tornado. An unfurling blast of static and degradation which envelops both cassette and tape recorder until it eventually plateaus out into a blissful coda, the ringing guitar notes eventually appearing at its end.

Selected Works 2000: Tape recorder feedback. Painful stabs of dueling analogue equipment capable of disorientation and imbalance.

For Electric Guitar and Cassette Recorders: An electric guitar ringing like an old clock that's chiming wild hours. The B-side twists the form into more surreal shapes. A slowed down Terry Riley taffied into strained drones.

Twelve Pieces: Here Haugland lists all the equipment used; electric guitar, Casiotone MT-36, zither, drilbu, drilbus, dingsha, singing bowls, harmonica, metallophone, voice, tape recorder, cassette recorder/s and like the similar double 'LP Twenty One Pieces' the mood moves from an analogue church organ sparse [the Casiotone] to soporific gamelan, a Largactil infused tubular bell.

Everything here feels as if its been ingrained by dust, muck in the grooves, a film of dirt that covers everything creating a patina that gives Haugland's compositions a sound that makes them his own.

earlymrecords [at] yahoo.no

http://www.sonoloco.com/rev/emr/emrframes.html

Phil Julian - Trace
Harbinger Sound LP. Harbinger 80.

Courtesy of the Sleaford Mods sightings of the words ‘Harbinger Sound’ are now common place within certain sections of the mainstream media. Whodathunk that one? This leads us to the sight of the Guardian's Alex Petridish pointing out that the Sleaford Mods also share a label with the likes of Olympic Shit Man and Cremation Lily. That’s a short lived noise band and a Power Electronics act that once upon a time wouldn’t have got a mention in anything more exalted than a messy copy and paste zine now on show in the Guardian’s Friday culture section. The times they are a-changing.

As far as I'm aware Phil Julian has yet to grace the pages of this nations daily press, but he does share a label with Olympic Shit Man, Cremation Lily and now the Sleaford Mods. He’s shared it since his days as Cheapmachines. Cheapmachines being, from what I’ve heard, work that troubles the noisier end of the spectrum.

Under his own name on ‘Trace’ he creates held in check high frequency feedback, tortured drones and rummaging sounds that could only be contact mics attached to stubborn cutlery drawers. There’s three compositions with ‘Arrival’, the track that takes up the biggest chunk of side two, being a drone capable of causing a vacuum. Its the standout track. Heres where the tension thats apparent on the entirety of this release reaches its peak as two straining analogue fog horns, a tone apart, become ever more complex as the thing evolves into its final exhaled breath.

The side long opener ‘Open Form’ although not as immediate is equally as intense seeing analogue effervescent insect chatter giving way to ghostly whines and those clattering spoons. The five minute ‘Corona’ is tempered synth buzz and an oscillating drone that spirals out of natural hearing range.

Recorded at EMS Elektromusikstudio, Stockholm during 2013 we can only wonder if something Scandinavian rubbed off on Julian such is the sparse nature of his work here. Chuck in the equally matching Eddie Nutall cover art and you have a quality release. Just don’t expect a review in the Guardian any time soon.

http://cmx.org.uk/

Eye For Detail - Midwich Remixed

The end of 2014 finds me and Mrs Fisher in Scarborough's old town. Where for a week, with no internet, in a three storied 'Fisherman’s Cottage' that looks suitably narrow and Georgian from the outside but holds all manner of hideous idiosyncrasies once inside, we do little else but read books and take long walks in the winter sunshine. The views across the south bay and the spectacular winter sunrises will live with us for years but to see that sunrise you have to kneel down in front of the top floor window first. To get to the top floor you have to climb two sets of narrow stairs while clinging to bannisters and railings for fear of falling backwards and to certain A&E. For this is the biggest problem with our ‘Fisherman’s Cottage’, it hasn't got one level surface anywhere. The kitchen slopes slowly down towards the sea from the front door. The bathroom drops two foot on one axis and one foot on another. Going to the shower from the toilet you have to actually lean forward and swing your arms to generate a modicum of inertia that will allow you to make the journey in one go. Of the twin beds available I foolishly pick the one in the corner of the room and discover on the first night that its has a left to right list of around 15 degrees meaning I spend most nights with my right leg flung over the top edge of the bed in a bid to stop me ending up on the floor. Now take in to account the fact that I have a cold that comes complete not only with a runny nose but a fuzzy head and a blood/alcohol level thats more alcohol than blood and you have some idea of the difficulties in navigating this residence. For seven days me and Mrs Fisher move around like passengers on a listing ship, clinging to each other as we pass on the landings or passing tips on the location of loose floorboards or sections of spongy lino. Its like being trapped in an Escher diagram with a view of Scarborough in the background. But hey! at least it wasn't cheap what with this being Christmas an all.

And lets not forget the boiler that releases a deathly rattle from its locked cupboard every five minutes or the fixtures that fall apart if you touch them or the shelves that you cant actually put things on for fear of them dropping to the floor and ending up at your feet or whichever corner of the room happens to have the lowest point. Or the doors that swing open of their own accord or the patches of damp that inhabit most corners or the TV that has a screen that’s about the same size as the new iPhone. But at least its warm and it needs to be because outside its absolutely fucking freezing.

On New Years Eve we wobbled down from the Alma to the Leeds Arms where at midnight we locked arms with the locals in a drunken bout of bon honomie. When new years day came around I found that I hadn’t got a hangover. No, instead I discovered I’d been poisoned. I guess its much the same thing. When I did lift my weary frame form the wonky bed it was past midday and the chance of seeing the local lunatics jump in the North Sea for their new years day swim had gone. After a brief visit with the outside world where freezing cold horizontal rain lashed into our faces we hunkered down for the rest of the day in front of the fire.

It was here that I decided now would be the time to give Eye For Detail a spin. I’d listened to bits of it before but the delicate nature of some of what I’d heard told me I needed to give it my fullest attention. Such was my mental and physical distress that I was able to listen to all three hours and forty minutes of it with but one break, that being the time I got up to put the kettle on to replace vital body fluids.

Eye For Detail finds 27 artists/projects/people remixing Rob Hayler’s Midwich material and, this is the best bit, its all for charidee. If you pay the five pounds thats been asked for this three hours and forty minutes worth of wonderment [you can give more of course should you so wish] it will all go to the Red Cross. When Rob hit the £100 mark a while back he made one of those huge cardboard cheques that you see being handed over to lottery winners and sent it off in an extra big envelope. Eye For Detail has since gone on to make even more money [I’m not sure how much but its more] and gathered praise by those who’ve heard it.

During that three hours and forty minutes I was lifted from my cups by the calming sounds of Clive Henry doing his best not to get too noisy. Eye For Detail as morphine for hangovers. Highlights abound; Foldhead surprised me, and no doubt a few others, by resisting the temptation to go nuclear and delivering instead a sci-fi wasteland where desert winds on distant planets blow to no one. I was happy to see someone revisit Tiny Muscle, an early Midwich work thats long been a favourite, it being that perfect cycling head bobber, here its given a wonderful ear panning lift and added granulation courtesy of Piss Superstition. Under the Weather [or a variant thereof] is a chill out anthem gone wonky in the best possible way twisting the thing into shapes that it shouldn’t go but does. YOL shows he’s capable of delivering on the remit by retching and stuttering the word Stoma [a Midwich track of course] into a dictaphone. Quite stunning. And not only a stunning collection of work but a benchmark of some of those known to work within the ‘No Audience Underground’. A starting block for some, me included, with quite a few names being unfamiliar to me.

Those names being:

Dale Cornish
Aqua Dentata
In Fog
dsic
Clive Henry
Brian Lavelle
Van Appears
ap martlet
Foldhead
Chrissie Caulfield
DR:WR
Hardworking Families
John Tuffen and Orlando Ferguson
Panelak
Simon Aulman
Paul Watson
possett
the piss superstition
Michael Clough
Neil Campbell
Devotionalhallucinatic
Michael Gillham
Daniel Thomas
Breather
YOL
ZN
Andrew Jarvis

My go to hangover album, as they say somewhere.

https://midwich.bandcamp.com/album/eye-for-detail

Andy Tom-Fox - Copulation Music [2003]
CD. ANDY02

Andy Tom-Fox - Vessels for the Infinite [2003]
CD. ANDY01

These two Andy Tom-Fox releases were found over ten years ago by a Finnish cartoonist in a skip round the back of a record shop in Finland. Being an inquisitive type he looked in the skip and there lay boxes, yes boxes, of Andy Tom-Fox CD’s all of them unsold, unloved and awaiting the day they went to landfill.

He sent me them to me because he knows I like the quirky and the strange and the unclassifiable which are three attributes all applicable to Andy Tom-Fox. You could also add sex obsessed, bonkers and surreal. I played them, thought them suitably strange in a ‘he can’t even sing’ kind of way and put them on a shelf where for the last ten years they have laid undisturbed.

And then last week I dug them out again. I have no idea why. Perhaps my curiosity was peaked by seeing them once more. The first time I heard them I don’t remember them having any particular effect on me other than for the fact that Tom-Fox’s singing voice wasn’t really a singing voice, more of a singing/talking voice that came across like John Lydon channeling Dot Wiggins from The Shaggs and that some of the track titles were a little odd, ‘Jesus Wants to Know the Women’, ‘Date Rape Pill’, ‘Hymen and the Scanty Panty’. And that he seemed to be obsessed with sex. Did I mention the sex?

My interest once again piqued I played Copulation Music and while it was playing I decided to visit his website fully expecting to see a ‘not found' error message which is where things started to get weird. To my utter amazement Andy Tom-Fox’s website is alive and kicking but only in a very basic way. The only thing it shows is his latest January 2014 release ‘Soulmating’ [with the ‘O’ being made up of the medical symbols used for distinguishing the sexes] and that's it barring five images of Andy Tom-Fox, four of which are similar to what you see above and one of which is a blurry image of him in a shower cap holding a cat with a guitar on his lap. No contact info, no back catalogue, no links to Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, nothing. All we have is each of the five pages showing an image of his new album which you cant even get because theres no contact info.
So I Googled Andy Tom-Fox and I got two returns, one which is his website and one which is a youtube video showing the sleeve for ‘Vessels of the Infinite’ as the last track from the album ‘The Fifth Apostol’ [sic] plays, a video that has had but seven plays since being posted in November 2014. There is a Facebook page for the musician Andy Tom-Fox but it’s absolutely dead apart from one like and no Discogs entries. Go figure.

So far so weird. But what makes it really, really, really weird is the music itself. His band can certainly play, of that there is no doubt, think Devo, The Desperate Bicycles and run of the mill commercial radio pop and rock all jumbled up in to a generic mush, a mish-mash of styles all played competently but over everything, stamped with the words AWFUL is Tom-Fox’s caterwauling out of tune, painful to the ears vocals.

His voice is strained. Its more than strained. He sounds like he’s dying. Play this to your mum and she’s tell you that this man simply can not sing but then some people lay that on Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen and it hasn’t done their careers any harm. No, Andy Tom-Fox really cant sing. His voice is flat and tuneless, he holds notes for too long until they waver and ultimately grate. When he’s half singing, half talking he gets away with it but when he opens up its painful and after a while its nothing less than terrible and unlistenable.

And then there’s the lyrics which for the most part are sex obsessed and surreal. There’s no lyric sheet for Copulation Music which is a pity as its the best album of the two but here’s a sample of what you can expect on Vessels for the Infinite [all spelling mistakes left as is]:

Will Y be a last one of the only one? Y will turn back time full nine years turn them into nine hours on compact discs [Full Nine Years],

Others have some of that coce, some of that speed,
But these girls, they are stranger, they grow much taller,
Very much bolder. They are the getamine girls,
Get me some, get me some, get me some, get me some,
Get me some getamine girls,
And they landed on my face like a true atomic race.
If Y don’t get me some fast, the shakes’ll tahe all over, Oh yesh! [Getamine Girls]

And Jesus sais: Fanny desperate pink hole like steaming hot jungle under the eyes portraiting watercolour paintings, breathes salmon and seachells with coconut coating. Seven sigarettes and a modest dring; your sex organs float in the air, lips thick like oversize concrete doors.’ [Jesus Wants to Know the Women]

I see London I see France Totally ta-di-da Low-riders it’s butts not breasts I remember Sunset and Wine. I have been there, but I can’t remember a thing. I’m the one who mede European women rude and lame. Liberating shapeds. Bebroom adventure. Sexy singles. What x shoes should I wear with pastel dress. The wine opener would have been that voluptuous sport girl’s from the pool. A little white lie to keep me alive. [Hymen and the Scanty Panty].

‘Hymen and the Scanty Panty’ also carries the sound of breathless bedroom fumbling in the nearest Tom-Fox gets to sounding like Roky Erickson. On ‘God of Hollywood’ there’s the constant sound of a yapping and howling dog thats obviously not a dog and is obviously someone from the band pretending to be a dog. Tom-Fox has obviously soaked up some punk in his time too which is best heard on ‘Date-Rape Pill’, a four minute bar chord thrash on an unaccompanied electric guitar over which he sings ‘I don’t leave no aftertaste, I don’t need no aftermath’. And check out those album dedications; ‘This album is dedicated to everybody who always died too soon’ and ‘This album is dedicated to all new mothers’.

What this leaves us with is one big unanswered questions; Is Andy Tom-Fox a real person playing in a real band or is this all some kind of wind up? Does that butter wouldn’t melt fizog hide a beast with a ten inch todger? And if he is a real person why doesn’t he want us to hear his music? Why keep a website going and leave no contact info or any indication as to a back catalogue? And whats with all those ‘Y’s’. Is that the Prince influence or is he deep down a Genesis P-Orridge fan and all this is the work of some Industrial pranksters who for ten years have been perpetuating the Andy Tom-Fox myth in the hope that one day some damn fool writer would pick up on him and write about him?

There is an email address. Its on the back of Copulation Music. I’m writing him now.

Andy Tom-Fox, available in skips in Finland and, it would seem, nowhere else.

http://andytomfox.com/2014/01/

Turbulent Times 10

Cicada Dream Band

Astral Social Club - Fountain Transmitter Medication. Ambarchi/Flower/Campbell - Live at TUSK.

WHITEHOUSE/ANENZAPHALIA/MILOVAN SRDENOVIC ROYAL PARK CELLARS – TERMITE CLUB LEEDS 29/9/01

Sudden Infant/Alan Tomlinson/MK9/Sunroof!/Corsano-Flower Duo. Final night of the 2005 Termite Festival - Sunday November 27, 2005

Smegma, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Snotnosed, Skaters, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Matthew Bower [and probably a few others]. Termite Club. Royal Park Cellars, Leeds 25th April 2006

The Thomas Family and Daniel Thomas

SSPONNGG 23

Xanntone Zmas Party

Sleaford Mods - Chubbed Up + / Tiswas

MK9 - Anhedonic Ideations / Death Squad - Out Patients

Song From The Forest

Basil Athanasiadis - Stray Cat’s Dream

One Direction

Readers Digest Audition Discs.

Ø+yn

Taming Power / Early Morning Records

Phil Julian - Trace

Eye For Detail

Andy Tom-Fox