Filthy Turd – Peculiar Woman Carelessly Psychic
Debila Records. 3'' CD-R. 30 copies.
Urdwyg The Goldrr - Cassette Psychic Volume 4
Recycled Cassette.
Makakarooma.
Recycled cassette.
A year or two back I donated three large boxes of cassettes to the Filthy Turd Foundation. A gig at the WC provided the opportunity to offload the best part of what must have been well over 500 cassettes and there in the twinkling of an eye went what must have been well over 500 cassettes that I hadn't listened to in donkeys years and would probably have never listened to again as long as I'd lived for ever and ever amen.
Until, inevitably, they came back. But this time spray painted and containing the righteous sounds of Makarooma and Urdwyg The Goldrr. That's The Filthy Turd to you or Darren or Pig or the Vile One or that masked man in the Bongoleero’s. He's the wearer of many guises all of them fitting like the proverbial Alvin Stardust glove.
The recycled cassette is Filthy's weapon of choice. It circumnavigates the need for sleeve manufacture, catalogue numbers and for the most part track titles and even album titles. The man is a Discogs completeists nightmare and for this we all give thanks. Not for him the tedious task of hand writing each issue number with silver tipped pen ensuring that each potential owner has a unique item. Filthy ensures that each potential owner has his own unique item by hand blathering the thing in spray paint over a swathe of old cassettes. Hence I get Urdwyg The Goldrr - Cassette Psychic Volume 4 on a cassette Paul Williams sent me donkeys years ago containing Merzbow, Masonna and the Japanese Comedy Torture Hour inside a sleeve that Jase Williams sent me donkeys years ago mentioning some Mary Millington flexis and a two channel mix of The Tape Beatles and someone called Aggo [I think?]. I dare say all involved are more than happy to see their work recycled so. The Makakarooma release comes on the Marriage of Figaro inside a smeared Enigma sleeve. We can only guess at what Mozart would’ve thought of his work being dubbed over by Makakarooma.
Urdwyg The Goldrr - Cassette Psychic Volume 4 is where Urdwyg, with Dictaphone to the fore, wanders the waste lands of Burslem calling for his dog amid a fug of lo-fi noise that could either be the wind blowing down his condenser mic or the howling of the lost souls of Stoke on Trent. These are the distorted ramblings of a 21st minstrel his lute replaced by a Dictaphone, his tales of derring-do replaced by the Dalek bark of incomprehensibility, the skip in his step replaced by a drunken stagger. And then, when it's all finished, comes the squalling dirge of whatever it was that was there originally. Monstrous in its execution, debased in its intent. We have nothing to compare.
The last time we saw Makakrooma they were supporting the Sleaford Mods. I've seen the video evidence. Someone banging a slave boat drum with monotonous regularity, Filthy stage right with his chopped in half busted guitar, head back, flailing out of tune chords that mutate in to vortexes of feedback, another guitarist, that man Jarvis, just hitting the damn thing. A masked singer of sorts dives in to the crowd and gives them the microphone hugging them and thanking them for their contribution. Puzzled faces abound.
As ever with Filthy related projects the boundaries blur but with Makakarooma a continuous rhythm of sorts eventually emerges from the layers of murk. Its not pretty and its never, ever, ever going to be anything but. But this is the way it is. At times I swear I could hear Metal Urbain underneath the shitstorm but with everything being buried under years of accumulated tape muck this is only an educated guess. Feedback. More feedback. Grabs of spoken word. Dissonance. Hurt. Noise. Farts of an electronic nature and pinning it all to the tatty tap room dartboard of life is a fat brass dart with the words ‘Filth’ written down the side.
After all this fumbling around in the lo-fi dark the leap in sound quality on the 3” CDR comes as quite a shock. Here a thousand edits of various Filthy Turd detritus are Sellotaped together to make one totally uncohesive whole. Filthy sings about the ‘Spidery Girl’ and intones manic mantras whose words will forever remain hidden. There’s even a touch of the Whitehouse’s with Filthy reciting tales of strange beasts to the thumping clatter of synth in overdrive. Guitars appear for milliseconds amid distorted walls of feedback, dogs whine as their nails scrape parquet flooring, dogs bark, Filthy barks, Filthy gargles, bangs things, hits things, slows things down and speeds them up. Edits of live performances are jammed in between random Dictaphone utterances.
What we have here is a living breathing Dada thing. Filthy Turd as the ghost of Hugo Ball wandering the streets of Burslem on an empty Sunday morning creating his art out of nothing but the most basic of instrumentation and a fervent imagination. Catch your breath and be amazed.
I've lost count of the number of Filthy related items I've received [and reviewed] and have no wish to go back to relive them. Instead, like Filthy, I live in the present. For these releases are living breathing things of the here and now. Take them to your black hearts and love them.
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