Vile Plumage - Plays The Burslem Crypt Sound
3” CDR
Worm Lion - Sunshine Is Moonshine
3” CDR
Burslem comes across as some kind of nether world where the Styx meets purgatory at 9 a.m. every morning outside a wet and windy Job Centre. People shuffling around in tatty puffa jackets the padding making its bid for glory via torn holes accrued from too many close shaves with shabby chain linked fences. Dominos pizza boxes flattened to a mucky blue and red lie in grubby streets where feral kids peer out from hooded sports gear their fingers black from a surfeit of nefarious activity. Day trippers there are none in the soul sapping market that once sold farmers fresh and now sells covers for iphones and football club bath towels.
I’ve never been. I bet its lovely really. Andrew Jarvis and Darren Wyngrade are known to us via various musical guises [and if you don’t know them by now then its to the back of the class with a pile of tapes for you] but together, as Vile Plumage, they offer up cassette tape re-workings as their sacrificial chicken. Live performances have proved irresistible with the pair donning skull and ox masks to wave ghetto blasters of urchin noise in our faces. I re-listened to their recent Todmorden Unitarian Church gig and was amazed at the sonic display they had created. On the night, playing without a PA, the sound appeared as if some kind of foul miasma had crept under our nostrils but once put to disc the thing took on a life of its own. Everything is in the detail.
Plays The Burslem Crypt Sound is, as with other VP releases, re-workings of re-workings of re-workings of sounds they create themselves outside boarded up pubs and railway stations, car parks and public toilets [maybe] - dubbed into infinity noises that have lost all trace of their originality. Upon all this murk we get the mad mans holler, the shamans ritualistic throat gargle, the bogmans lament, EVP emitted as if from the very depths of said crypt. There’s more; there go the shuffling zombie hordes, the smudged dead squiggles of a dying noise gadget, the twang of a guitar with two strings on it [both out of tune], the crazed bashing of dustbin lids. At its end it all gets a lot clearer but don’t let this fool you. Its noise Jim but of a very different hue. Don’t look for any deep and hidden message. If you want clues watch Hammer Horror films, read sleazy 50’s detective novels, listen to rockabilly, visit Burslem on a Sunday afternoon in January and count the abandoned styrofoam chip cartons. Stay warm in the high street bookies. Soak up the vibe. Its all there.
I get the feeling that Worm Lion may have been slipped into my sweaty palm by Jarvis at the recent Filthy Turd/Jarvis/Panelak Sunday afternoon jamboree down at the WC. Nothing is ever clear. My mind is muddled. Maybe things were meant to be this way? No labels. Bands that appear for one release never to see the light of day ever again. Scribbled name on black paper but whats this on the CD? Turn it ever so slightly and the ‘N’ from the end of Lion and the ‘M’ from the end of Worm give us '23'. Oooooohhhhhhh ... spooky. Maybe this was given to me by a member of the OTO? A member of the OTO who’s from Stoke-on-Trent and who happened to be in Leeds on a Sunday afternoon at a Filthy Turd/Jarvis/Panelak gig? Google fails me and so it should. Not everything should be found and tagged and bagged.
But I’m still backing my senses. I feel the hand of the Filthster hovering over this, this murk. This moribund song sung on a one stringed bass guitar going thud, thud, twangggggg. This irritating squeak. This tone that leads you to believe the TV’s died. This scraping up from off the TNB floor.
The madness never stops. Don’t try and stop it. Its no use.
Vile Plumage
