Wednesday 20 February 2013
Friday 17 February 2012
University Radio Falmer Show #4
Originally broadcast 17/2/2012
Playlist:
1. Dinosaur Jr - Raisans
from ‘You’re Living All Over Me’ (1987)
2. Fugazi – Last Chance For a Slow Dance
from ‘In On The Kill Taker’ (1993)
3. The Jesus Lizard – If You Had Lips
from ‘Head’ (1990)
4. The Flaming Lips – Slow Nerve Action
from ‘Transmissions From the Satellite Heart’ (1993)
5. Sebadoh – Soul and Fire
from ‘Bubble and Scrape’ (1993)
6. Enablers – Five O’ Clock, Sundays
from ‘Output Negative Space’ (2006)
7. Oxbow – A Winner Every Time
from ‘The Narcotic Story’ (2007)
8. Slint – Nosferatu Man
from ‘Spiderland’ (1991)
9. Pavement – Unfair
from ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ (1992)
10. Pixies – Gigantic
from ‘Surfer Rosa’ (1988)
11. Melvins – Zodiac
from ‘Bullhead’ (1991)
Download here.
Wednesday 8 February 2012
University Radio Falmer Show #3
Originally broadcast 3/2/2012
1. Sir Lord Baltimore – Hell Hound
from ‘Kingdom Come’ (1970)
2. Blues Creation – Demon and Eleven Children
from ‘Demon and Eleven Children’ (1971)
3. Blue Cheer – Out of Focus
from ‘Vincebus Eruptum’ (1968)
4. Flower Travellin’ Band – Satori [Part 3]
from ‘Satori’ (1973)
5. Pentagram – 20 Buck Spin
from ‘First Daze Here: The Vintage Collection’ (2002)
6. Tin House – Be Good and Be Kind
from ‘Tin House’ (1971)
7. Budgie – Rocking Man
from ‘Squawk’ (1972)
8. Captain Beyond – Mesmerization Eclipse
from ‘Captain Beyond’ (1972)
9. The Stooges – ‘1970’
from ‘Fun House’ (1970)
BONUS TRACK: Osanna – Oro Caldo
from ‘Palepoli’ (1973)
Download here.
1. Sir Lord Baltimore – Hell Hound
from ‘Kingdom Come’ (1970)
2. Blues Creation – Demon and Eleven Children
from ‘Demon and Eleven Children’ (1971)
3. Blue Cheer – Out of Focus
from ‘Vincebus Eruptum’ (1968)
4. Flower Travellin’ Band – Satori [Part 3]
from ‘Satori’ (1973)
5. Pentagram – 20 Buck Spin
from ‘First Daze Here: The Vintage Collection’ (2002)
6. Tin House – Be Good and Be Kind
from ‘Tin House’ (1971)
7. Budgie – Rocking Man
from ‘Squawk’ (1972)
8. Captain Beyond – Mesmerization Eclipse
from ‘Captain Beyond’ (1972)
9. The Stooges – ‘1970’
from ‘Fun House’ (1970)
BONUS TRACK: Osanna – Oro Caldo
from ‘Palepoli’ (1973)
Download here.
Saturday 28 January 2012
University Radio Falmer Show #2
Originally broadcast 27/1/2012
Playlist:
1. Worm Ouroboros - A Birth A Death
from 'Worm Ouroboros' (2010)
2. Neurosis - A Sun That Never Sets
from 'A Sun That Never Sets' (2000)
3. Isis - The Pliable Foe
from 'Melvins/Isis Split' (2010)
4. Black Math Horseman - Deerslayer
from 'Wyllt' (2009)
5. Breach - Big Strong Boss
from 'Kollapse' (2000)
6. Kylesa - Scapegoat
from 'Static Tensions' (2009)
7. Cult of Luna - Receiver
from 'The Beyond' (2002)
8. Trainwreck - Dem Staub Keine Träne
from 'Of Concrete Canyons and Inner Wastelands' (2009)
9. Converge - Dead Beat
from 'Axe To Fall' (2009)
Download here
Things I have learned since broadcast: cobwebs don't "grow", "rifling" through something involves an intent to steal.
Playlist:
1. Worm Ouroboros - A Birth A Death
from 'Worm Ouroboros' (2010)
2. Neurosis - A Sun That Never Sets
from 'A Sun That Never Sets' (2000)
3. Isis - The Pliable Foe
from 'Melvins/Isis Split' (2010)
4. Black Math Horseman - Deerslayer
from 'Wyllt' (2009)
5. Breach - Big Strong Boss
from 'Kollapse' (2000)
6. Kylesa - Scapegoat
from 'Static Tensions' (2009)
7. Cult of Luna - Receiver
from 'The Beyond' (2002)
8. Trainwreck - Dem Staub Keine Träne
from 'Of Concrete Canyons and Inner Wastelands' (2009)
9. Converge - Dead Beat
from 'Axe To Fall' (2009)
Download here
Things I have learned since broadcast: cobwebs don't "grow", "rifling" through something involves an intent to steal.
Wednesday 25 January 2012
University Radio Falmer Show #1
Originally broadcast 20/1/12
Playlist:
1. Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (Live)
from 'How The West Was Won' (2003)
2. Sweet Williams - Clare De Lune
from 'Bliss' (2011)
3. I'm Being Good - NanoParty
from 'Mountain Language' (2011)
4. Broker - Nature's Humans
from 'The Piping Hot EP' (2011)
5. Cousin - Super Toight
from 'And Other Relations' EP (2011)
6. Attack! Vipers! - D-Rail Me
from 'The Mirror and The Destroyer' (2008)
7. At The Drive-In - Picket Fence Cartel
from 'El Gran Orgo' EP (1997)
8. Shield Your Eyes - Drill Your Heavy Heart
from 'Volume 4' (2011)
9. Action and Action - No One Is Born With Disappointment
from 'Pique' (2009)
10. Nitkowski - Harbours
from 'Stay In The Home You Love' (2011)
11. Hookworms - Teen Dreams
from 'Hookworms' (2011)
12. Drowningman - Supermarket Riot
from 'Busy Signal at the Suicide Hotline' (1999)
Download here
Playlist:
1. Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (Live)
from 'How The West Was Won' (2003)
2. Sweet Williams - Clare De Lune
from 'Bliss' (2011)
3. I'm Being Good - NanoParty
from 'Mountain Language' (2011)
4. Broker - Nature's Humans
from 'The Piping Hot EP' (2011)
5. Cousin - Super Toight
from 'And Other Relations' EP (2011)
6. Attack! Vipers! - D-Rail Me
from 'The Mirror and The Destroyer' (2008)
7. At The Drive-In - Picket Fence Cartel
from 'El Gran Orgo' EP (1997)
8. Shield Your Eyes - Drill Your Heavy Heart
from 'Volume 4' (2011)
9. Action and Action - No One Is Born With Disappointment
from 'Pique' (2009)
10. Nitkowski - Harbours
from 'Stay In The Home You Love' (2011)
11. Hookworms - Teen Dreams
from 'Hookworms' (2011)
12. Drowningman - Supermarket Riot
from 'Busy Signal at the Suicide Hotline' (1999)
Download here
Monday 18 July 2011
After an even longer hiatus...
There's very little point in me trying to explain why I haven't written anything up here for nine months. I was at Uni, doing the first year of an English degree, and because of all the free time I became even lazier and more negligent than before. Every thought I had about putting something up here was immediately followed by another, far bigger thought: why bother? I'm sure you recognise this thought; not just as a pair of words, a common little phrase used by everyone in the English-speaking world when faced with a small, pointless, unnecessary task that can be deferred or abandoned entirely without much loss or injury to anyone involved; I'm sure you also recognise the thought as a great mental obstacle that is rarely surmounted, rarely even attempted, or maybe as an equally great mental precipice, that stops dead any course of action as suddenly and decisively as a CIA sniper bullet stops a political dissident while he's striding to the podium amid wild cheers, ready to deliver the speech of his life and change the world for the better. All good intentions snuffed out on the very threshold. No, the vast canyon of Why Bother? won’t let you across, no matter how long your run-up to the edge. It is an impossibly deep hole in the human brain shaped like a fucking question mark, and there's nothing it won't try to swallow.
For a long time I did not bother, and now I will try to bother again. As I already stated, there's very little point in trying to explain why. I blame Ulysses. After I got a fair way through it, words started to seem dumb, flimsy and too easily manipulable. I wrote sentences, looked at them and thought "Oh why the Fiddler's Fuck have I just written that?!" Years ago I would write a sentence and then try to improve it by rearranging it around its axes, sort of like free improvisation with a Meccano set: as much freedom as there seemed to be, nuts were nuts, bolts were bolts, and struts were struts. They had their own functions and they ultimately looked the same regardless of whatever bizarre structure they formed part of. Now it's more difficult; language as a gift of infinite blank jigsaw pieces. Put them together how you fucking like - draw something on top of it later. Where can you start with that? And what kind of awful bollocks will it look like whenever you decide, quite arbitrarily, that it's 'done'?
So I suppose it was less that I didn’t bother and more that I didn’t feel I could. There’s very little point in trying to explain why. It might seem ridiculous – after all, I ‘could’ before. Writing informal bits and pieces about music/film/life doesn’t look like much of a challenge to whoever is reading those bits and pieces. (Go ahead: read my bits and pieces. They aren’t challenging.) But then I encountered the dreaded pit of Why Bother? opening up like at the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. It was the informality itself that had stopped me, the very same convenience that had previously allowed me to switch off most of my analytical functions and write just like I was talking, y’know, just talking to you about something I thought was valuable enough to be worth talking about. Or maybe not just, y’know, writing like I was talking, but maybe writing like I was writing about what I’d more often just, y’know, talk about. And with the power of hyperlinks, writing about and then showing you what I’d previously only been able to just… you know… talk about. Before coming up to the edge of the valley and knowing only that I must capitulate, it really had been that simple.
It could be simple once again. I can write at more than one register, and the sooner I start the better. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the first year at Uni or anything like that, although I probably should have tried harder to be. It was just laziness. I’m up to nine or ten hours sleep as standard now. It’s fucking disgraceful. All I’ve done today is clean out the filter in the hoover, pay the rent, and this. I haven’t even eaten yet and it’s almost half seven. I really want to go to Metal Monday at the Green Door Store tonight, but I might be too skint. I’ll probably have a shit soon. This entry was only going to be a load of screencaps from the last.fm comments boards and me taking the piss out of people. I told you I could write at more than one register, I just can’t necessarily separate them all out from each other. It’s a skill I should really learn, although as I said, there’s very little point in trying to explain why.
Friday 1 October 2010
After a long hiatus...
Most of these posts now seem to begin with an apology for my absence and laziness, and this is no exception. I wish I had a decent excuse beyond the fact that this is, after all, an arbitrary bit of webspace that I have no real obligation to maintain, but I'm afraid I don't. It's simply neglect. I am very good at neglect. It's a good job I don't have pets or children.
I've been jobless for a couple of months now because I start at the University of Sussex on Monday 4th October and I decided to give myself a bit of time off before my shit-for-brains hits the Higher Education Fan. I've not done much besides spend an awful lot of money, but I have been working on the second Me With Others album, 'Don't Accept, Be Broken'. It's shaping up to be a nine-track, roughly forty-five minute album with bass, percussion, a lovely warm-sounding Fender Jaguar, piano, Wurlitzer organ and, as promised, creamy full-fat vocal harmonies. My old computer died a few months back and I lost a lot of old recordings, but I now have a brand new laptop with a shitload of pirated software for recording, mixing and artwork purposes, and I hope to have the record wrapped up in the next couple of months. Definitely before Christmas. It'll be out by Spring. Maybe. Probably not. Anyway, here's the front cover:
The sketches and text are from old declassified Top Secret military maps of Europe from the early 1940s. For every feature represented by a symbol on the map, they have these little illustrations of what the feature would look like on the ground. Everything from a quick-set hedge to a water level gauge to, er... a "prominent tree". I thought they looked lovely and so now they're the artwork.
No update would be complete without something to do with music, and there are few excellent shows coming up in Brighton this autumn/winter. I'm very much looking forward to Polar Bear next Tuesday at the Komedia. If you don't know them, they are an excellent five-piece jazz group, very distinctive in their quite laid-back vibe and especially the involvement of both drummer Seb Rochford (of Acoustic Ladyland and the F-IRE Collective) and Leafcutter John on live electronics. It's the latter that really sets them apart though; Leafcutter John's interjections are tasteful digital tweaks and effects pedals, and he manipulates not only his own sound sources but the instruments of other band members as they are performed. They aren't particularly improvisational either, so the restraint and awareness is visible onstage. Here's a great clip of them performing "Tomlovesalicelovestom" from their third (self-titled) album:
November also sees the return of the inimitable Dillinger Escape Plan, touring their latest record 'Option Paralysis' with Rolo Tomassi. I don't have 'Option Paralysis' yet but I did pick up Rolo Tomassi's latest, 'Cosmology', which is a very solid record, if perhaps lacking the immediacy of their debut full-length 'Hysterics'. And there's a bit that sounds so much like like The Mars Volta that I can't imagine anyone hearing it and not saying "This bit sounds almost exactly like The Mars Volta". Anyway, it's been eight-and-a-half years (!) since I last saw Dillinger kick the shit out of the Mean Fiddler so I'm very much looking forward to it. If they don't play "Black Bubblegum" I'll confront Greg Puciato myself and call him a pussy. Except I definitely won't because he is terrifying. Here's a couple of videos from those two bands. First is the new(ish) video for Rolo Tomassi's 'Party Wounds', just in case you're not already in love with Eva Spence enough.
And Dillinger's second video from 'Ire Works', the aforementioned "Black Bubblegum".
I've heard that some 'purists' have been less than kind about this song, but let me register my opinion here that they're full of shit. Ben Weinman and Greg Puciato have a great skill and instinct for song construction and they've managed to apply that to some of the most challenging extreme music around. This song is produced in a more 'pop' style: there are few actual riffs, it's not at all guitar-led until the bridge towards the end (where the discords remind us we're still dealing with Dillinger Escape Plan here), and it's unapologetically chorus-centred. But not only is it catchy as fuck, it also seems perfectly in accordance with the band's expanded musical personality - an identity forged mainly through Greg's efforts to break out of the 'screams-only' pattern established by original vocalist Dimitri Minikakis. Their ability to write and produce songs like "Black Bubblegum" as well as tech/hardcore stuff is not only rare but an extremely hard-won distinction achieved through taking big risks. I can only assume they credit their fans with intelligence and eclecticism, and they don't do anything by halves. The Dillinger Escape Plan fucking rocks.
Not too dissimilar to Rolo Tomassi, there's an Italian band called Inferno that I've posted up here before. They seem to be recording a new album at the moment, which is very cool indeed. I hope they get themselves an attractive invitation to come and play in the UK sometime soon. Here's a short video montage of them doing pre-production demos.
This band is great because they sound like they're having an enormous amount of fun making music. The songs are mostly short, tightly constructed, alternately mathy and straightforward in all the right places, and the keyboard sound is really quite distinctive. Their hardcore punk influences are very clear too, which helps them avoid seeming po-faced and 21st-Century-wanky-squiggly-supposedly-groundbreaking-mathcore-trendy. As you can see, I have officially abandoned all prospects of becoming a music journalist.
Another band coming to Brighton this year is the legendary Swans, who will also be playing at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham in about three weeks time. I've been to Supersonic the last two years running and it's fast becoming one of my favourites. It usually happens in July but they held out longer this year in order to procure Swans as the big name headliner. I, however, will be missing Swans in favour of what is sure to be one of the most exciting sets I've ever seen: Hallogallo 2010. This is a new band with Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Aaron Mullan from Tall Firs, put together by Michael Rother of Neu!/Harmonia fame to play Neu! material that hasn't been perfomed in over 35 years. You may be aware that I'm a bit of a Krautrock fan, so this is about as awesome as it gets until they find a way to bring Michael Karoli back from the dead. And Klaus Dinger for that matter. Here's the awesome 'Negativland' from their first (self-titled) album (1972). [Stick with it, it changes gear and rocks the fuck out after a little while.]
The festival has a great pedigree and so predictably the rest of the lineup is pretty fucking sweet too. Of particular interest to me are Eagle Twin, idiosynctratic doom weirdos on Southern Lord, Alan Dubin's post-Khanate project Gnaw, the reformed Godflesh, original drum 'n' bass residents PCM, the always manic Melt Banana and Aaron Spectre's vicious Drumcorps project.
However, three other artists deserve a special mention. The first is Napalm fucking Death. What else really needs to be said about Napalm? Well, perhaps that the first extreme metal song I ever really clicked with (not counting the Cannibal Corpse bit in 'Ace Ventura') was "Necessary Evil" from their fantastic 'return-to-form' record 'Enemy of the Music Business' (2000), and I've never looked back since. Were it not for that song on a Kerrang! Magazine sampler (April 2001 by the way), my life would be very different indeed. Okay, it could very easily have been much better, but there's just as much chance it might have been worse. Or at the very least, a lot quieter. And quiet is fucking lame. Anyway, they've basically had the best ten years of their existence since that record, the first of a run of five totally ripping, brutal, gauntlet-throwing albums that bring the intensity even to bands like Converge (okay, not live but on record at least). They'll be playing a hometown show on a very eclectic bill, and they're headlining on the Friday night. Should be an absolute fucking belter. Here's a video of them playing "On The Brink of Extinction" at Wacken 2009:
A late addition to the lineup is a band I've been aware of for some time but never bothered to check out - Chrome Hoof. I must have been put off by the sparkly imagery, but then again they're ATP-approved and that's usually a good sign. Someone once used the phrase "disco doom" to describe them to me but I quickly erased that horrible prospect from my mind before it had the chance to really sink in. Then later someone told me that Leo Smee was behind it, and he's pretty cool. He is I suppose better known as the bass player from Cathedral and (occasionally) Firebird, and he seemed nice when I met him at a Khanate show a few years back. So I checked them out today and apart from noting they're a perfect band for Supersonic, I can't really work out what to say. I mean, it certainly is funky, and there's some great vocoder shit going on... I don't know what they have to do with 'heavy' music though, but then that doesn't really matter at all. Perhaps when I get there, presumably pissed, and forget the 'heavy metal' connections via Leo Smee, I will be convinced one way or another. Very interesting band though. Sort of like Guapo doing Chromeo covers. Fucked up.
An then there's Ruins. That's right... fucking Ruins! I'm not sure why, but this one was a real surprise. Yoshida Tatsuya is the man behind this project - he plays drums and vocals behind/on top of some very strange prog/Rock In Opposition/mathy madness (the number of forward slashes here denoting the depth of my confusion). He's collaborated with virtually every reputable figure in the Japanese underground and has been active for over twenty years with Ruins, which is now just a solo project. His drumming is superb and the compositions are utterly insane, usually traced back to the influence of Magma but far nuttier and more frantic even than that. He does sing in a made-up language though, which probably accounts for half of the Magma reference. Here's... something or other by Ruins:
If you go to their unauthorised MySpace site you'll see a track called "Hard Rock", which is a very dense medley of classic rock tunes. Some Hendrix, Led Zep, Deep Purple. Try and spot them all. It's fun.
Hopefully among my next posts will be a full Supersonic review and pictures, maybe even a video montage or something pointless and time-wasting like that. I actually did a half-hour video montage of last year's festival but it was too large to upload anywhere and then my old PC died, taking with it an awful lot of porn and bad smells. Let's hope I get it right this time.
I've been jobless for a couple of months now because I start at the University of Sussex on Monday 4th October and I decided to give myself a bit of time off before my shit-for-brains hits the Higher Education Fan. I've not done much besides spend an awful lot of money, but I have been working on the second Me With Others album, 'Don't Accept, Be Broken'. It's shaping up to be a nine-track, roughly forty-five minute album with bass, percussion, a lovely warm-sounding Fender Jaguar, piano, Wurlitzer organ and, as promised, creamy full-fat vocal harmonies. My old computer died a few months back and I lost a lot of old recordings, but I now have a brand new laptop with a shitload of pirated software for recording, mixing and artwork purposes, and I hope to have the record wrapped up in the next couple of months. Definitely before Christmas. It'll be out by Spring. Maybe. Probably not. Anyway, here's the front cover:
The sketches and text are from old declassified Top Secret military maps of Europe from the early 1940s. For every feature represented by a symbol on the map, they have these little illustrations of what the feature would look like on the ground. Everything from a quick-set hedge to a water level gauge to, er... a "prominent tree". I thought they looked lovely and so now they're the artwork.
No update would be complete without something to do with music, and there are few excellent shows coming up in Brighton this autumn/winter. I'm very much looking forward to Polar Bear next Tuesday at the Komedia. If you don't know them, they are an excellent five-piece jazz group, very distinctive in their quite laid-back vibe and especially the involvement of both drummer Seb Rochford (of Acoustic Ladyland and the F-IRE Collective) and Leafcutter John on live electronics. It's the latter that really sets them apart though; Leafcutter John's interjections are tasteful digital tweaks and effects pedals, and he manipulates not only his own sound sources but the instruments of other band members as they are performed. They aren't particularly improvisational either, so the restraint and awareness is visible onstage. Here's a great clip of them performing "Tomlovesalicelovestom" from their third (self-titled) album:
November also sees the return of the inimitable Dillinger Escape Plan, touring their latest record 'Option Paralysis' with Rolo Tomassi. I don't have 'Option Paralysis' yet but I did pick up Rolo Tomassi's latest, 'Cosmology', which is a very solid record, if perhaps lacking the immediacy of their debut full-length 'Hysterics'. And there's a bit that sounds so much like like The Mars Volta that I can't imagine anyone hearing it and not saying "This bit sounds almost exactly like The Mars Volta". Anyway, it's been eight-and-a-half years (!) since I last saw Dillinger kick the shit out of the Mean Fiddler so I'm very much looking forward to it. If they don't play "Black Bubblegum" I'll confront Greg Puciato myself and call him a pussy. Except I definitely won't because he is terrifying. Here's a couple of videos from those two bands. First is the new(ish) video for Rolo Tomassi's 'Party Wounds', just in case you're not already in love with Eva Spence enough.
And Dillinger's second video from 'Ire Works', the aforementioned "Black Bubblegum".
I've heard that some 'purists' have been less than kind about this song, but let me register my opinion here that they're full of shit. Ben Weinman and Greg Puciato have a great skill and instinct for song construction and they've managed to apply that to some of the most challenging extreme music around. This song is produced in a more 'pop' style: there are few actual riffs, it's not at all guitar-led until the bridge towards the end (where the discords remind us we're still dealing with Dillinger Escape Plan here), and it's unapologetically chorus-centred. But not only is it catchy as fuck, it also seems perfectly in accordance with the band's expanded musical personality - an identity forged mainly through Greg's efforts to break out of the 'screams-only' pattern established by original vocalist Dimitri Minikakis. Their ability to write and produce songs like "Black Bubblegum" as well as tech/hardcore stuff is not only rare but an extremely hard-won distinction achieved through taking big risks. I can only assume they credit their fans with intelligence and eclecticism, and they don't do anything by halves. The Dillinger Escape Plan fucking rocks.
Not too dissimilar to Rolo Tomassi, there's an Italian band called Inferno that I've posted up here before. They seem to be recording a new album at the moment, which is very cool indeed. I hope they get themselves an attractive invitation to come and play in the UK sometime soon. Here's a short video montage of them doing pre-production demos.
This band is great because they sound like they're having an enormous amount of fun making music. The songs are mostly short, tightly constructed, alternately mathy and straightforward in all the right places, and the keyboard sound is really quite distinctive. Their hardcore punk influences are very clear too, which helps them avoid seeming po-faced and 21st-Century-wanky-squiggly-supposedly-groundbreaking-mathcore-trendy. As you can see, I have officially abandoned all prospects of becoming a music journalist.
Another band coming to Brighton this year is the legendary Swans, who will also be playing at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham in about three weeks time. I've been to Supersonic the last two years running and it's fast becoming one of my favourites. It usually happens in July but they held out longer this year in order to procure Swans as the big name headliner. I, however, will be missing Swans in favour of what is sure to be one of the most exciting sets I've ever seen: Hallogallo 2010. This is a new band with Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Aaron Mullan from Tall Firs, put together by Michael Rother of Neu!/Harmonia fame to play Neu! material that hasn't been perfomed in over 35 years. You may be aware that I'm a bit of a Krautrock fan, so this is about as awesome as it gets until they find a way to bring Michael Karoli back from the dead. And Klaus Dinger for that matter. Here's the awesome 'Negativland' from their first (self-titled) album (1972). [Stick with it, it changes gear and rocks the fuck out after a little while.]
The festival has a great pedigree and so predictably the rest of the lineup is pretty fucking sweet too. Of particular interest to me are Eagle Twin, idiosynctratic doom weirdos on Southern Lord, Alan Dubin's post-Khanate project Gnaw, the reformed Godflesh, original drum 'n' bass residents PCM, the always manic Melt Banana and Aaron Spectre's vicious Drumcorps project.
However, three other artists deserve a special mention. The first is Napalm fucking Death. What else really needs to be said about Napalm? Well, perhaps that the first extreme metal song I ever really clicked with (not counting the Cannibal Corpse bit in 'Ace Ventura') was "Necessary Evil" from their fantastic 'return-to-form' record 'Enemy of the Music Business' (2000), and I've never looked back since. Were it not for that song on a Kerrang! Magazine sampler (April 2001 by the way), my life would be very different indeed. Okay, it could very easily have been much better, but there's just as much chance it might have been worse. Or at the very least, a lot quieter. And quiet is fucking lame. Anyway, they've basically had the best ten years of their existence since that record, the first of a run of five totally ripping, brutal, gauntlet-throwing albums that bring the intensity even to bands like Converge (okay, not live but on record at least). They'll be playing a hometown show on a very eclectic bill, and they're headlining on the Friday night. Should be an absolute fucking belter. Here's a video of them playing "On The Brink of Extinction" at Wacken 2009:
A late addition to the lineup is a band I've been aware of for some time but never bothered to check out - Chrome Hoof. I must have been put off by the sparkly imagery, but then again they're ATP-approved and that's usually a good sign. Someone once used the phrase "disco doom" to describe them to me but I quickly erased that horrible prospect from my mind before it had the chance to really sink in. Then later someone told me that Leo Smee was behind it, and he's pretty cool. He is I suppose better known as the bass player from Cathedral and (occasionally) Firebird, and he seemed nice when I met him at a Khanate show a few years back. So I checked them out today and apart from noting they're a perfect band for Supersonic, I can't really work out what to say. I mean, it certainly is funky, and there's some great vocoder shit going on... I don't know what they have to do with 'heavy' music though, but then that doesn't really matter at all. Perhaps when I get there, presumably pissed, and forget the 'heavy metal' connections via Leo Smee, I will be convinced one way or another. Very interesting band though. Sort of like Guapo doing Chromeo covers. Fucked up.
An then there's Ruins. That's right... fucking Ruins! I'm not sure why, but this one was a real surprise. Yoshida Tatsuya is the man behind this project - he plays drums and vocals behind/on top of some very strange prog/Rock In Opposition/mathy madness (the number of forward slashes here denoting the depth of my confusion). He's collaborated with virtually every reputable figure in the Japanese underground and has been active for over twenty years with Ruins, which is now just a solo project. His drumming is superb and the compositions are utterly insane, usually traced back to the influence of Magma but far nuttier and more frantic even than that. He does sing in a made-up language though, which probably accounts for half of the Magma reference. Here's... something or other by Ruins:
If you go to their unauthorised MySpace site you'll see a track called "Hard Rock", which is a very dense medley of classic rock tunes. Some Hendrix, Led Zep, Deep Purple. Try and spot them all. It's fun.
Hopefully among my next posts will be a full Supersonic review and pictures, maybe even a video montage or something pointless and time-wasting like that. I actually did a half-hour video montage of last year's festival but it was too large to upload anywhere and then my old PC died, taking with it an awful lot of porn and bad smells. Let's hope I get it right this time.
Monday 5 July 2010
Well, there's a new Melvins album so I guess I'd better review it
I've been trying to get everyone I know with a passing interest in rock music into The Melvins for years, with very little success it must be said. I don't understand. It could be that for all their killer riffs, which must be into the hundreds by now (seriously!), the band's tendency to topple over into smirking, wilfully obtuse audio wrangling and/or utterly unlikely codas is just too much to reconcile for the unconvinced listener. But I would argue that The Melvins never asked anyone to reconcile the many facets of their musical character, nor do they expect any listeners to set themselves that challenge. And so when another hulking mutant riff comes lumbering and whip-cracking out of the speakers, only to be rearranged, curtailed or replaced immediately by a funny whirring noise or something, (a decision that more straightforward bands might regard as "riff abuse",) the question we ask is not "Why?", but "Why not?" This may seem like a approach that is antithetical to the idea of critical analysis, but in some cases it's not really so. When we expect certain artists to be a little madcap (David Lynch, to use an almost-too-obvious example), it's up to us to draw our own boundaries between what's 'characteristic' and what's simply frustrating and unnecessary.
And you might guess, then, that I have a lot of time for this band, despite the many things they've done that definitely are frustrating and unnecessary. Like the track "Pure Digital Silence". Like how they split every song on "The Maggot" up into two tracks that are exactly half the length of the song, meaning you can't listen to it on shuffle. (I mean really, why the fuck did they do that?) There are many more examples, including the end of this new record "The Bride Screamed Murder", which is a repeating and slightly downtuned recording of a small child counting slowly to six.
I'm not making a very good case for this, am I?
My point is that this is all part of a very well-established pattern of oddball humour. This is the kind of band that would, for instance, put a ten-minute tympani piece at the end of their most concisely-rocking record "Houdini", which was also their major label debut. Somehow commercial suicide is just part of the joke. You and I might think that the right way to start and end a song isn't with an ear-splitting sine wave dialling up and down speaker-fucking frequencies, and we might even be right, but The Melvins don't care what we think. They don't hate us, they just don't care what we think. And I can get with that. I want my favourite bands to not care what I think about them. It's the only way anything really good ever gets made.
So... the new Melvins record? Well it fucking rocks. Obviously.
And you might guess, then, that I have a lot of time for this band, despite the many things they've done that definitely are frustrating and unnecessary. Like the track "Pure Digital Silence". Like how they split every song on "The Maggot" up into two tracks that are exactly half the length of the song, meaning you can't listen to it on shuffle. (I mean really, why the fuck did they do that?) There are many more examples, including the end of this new record "The Bride Screamed Murder", which is a repeating and slightly downtuned recording of a small child counting slowly to six.
I'm not making a very good case for this, am I?
My point is that this is all part of a very well-established pattern of oddball humour. This is the kind of band that would, for instance, put a ten-minute tympani piece at the end of their most concisely-rocking record "Houdini", which was also their major label debut. Somehow commercial suicide is just part of the joke. You and I might think that the right way to start and end a song isn't with an ear-splitting sine wave dialling up and down speaker-fucking frequencies, and we might even be right, but The Melvins don't care what we think. They don't hate us, they just don't care what we think. And I can get with that. I want my favourite bands to not care what I think about them. It's the only way anything really good ever gets made.
So... the new Melvins record? Well it fucking rocks. Obviously.
Here's them playing some of it...
Wednesday 19 May 2010
From the Vaults #2: Sisters are Ruining it for Themselves
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. To be very honest, I've been losing interest in sustaining this paltry little web presence. Maybe it's frustration at my inability to write anything 'serious', maybe it's just the way the world seems to scream "NO ONE GIVES A SHIT" in my ears on a daily basis, but I'll hold my hands up and admit to a lapse.
I don't have the motivation right now to attempt another long-ish piece, nor will I bother you with my fanboy approval of some semi-obscure rock band or another, so I humbly return to the format of "From The Vaults": in which I dredge up loads of Old Shite from the past and explain why it's funny, bollocks, or otherwise noteworthy.
In the first of these entries I mentioned that my job at the time was to build a few volumes of Victorian-era Irish Feminist writings - clippings, cartoons, letters to the editor, even full novels - that focused mainly on female suffrage but, being Irish and Victorian, also wasted no chance to rail against English oppression as well. All very righteous in principle, though it was far too full of angry revolutionary Catholic rhetoric to be of any interest here. Not to mention all the dour and pious protest poetry, which was tiresome and endlessly shite. No, it was the opposing volume I was later assigned to that yielded the most hilarity: 'Victorian and Edwardian Anti-Feminism'.
As you can imagine, this was a treasure trove of stuffy Olde English sexism and condescension. The most common misunderstanding among the monocled gentry in the (ahem) 'satirical' media was the belief that if women wanted the right to vote, they also must have wanted to act like men in every other way imaginable. Cue dozens of 'hilarious' gender-reversal cartoons spanning almost fifty years from Punch Magazine (example: an old matriarch asking her son's fiancee if she can "keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed". The son stands sheepishly at the door.) I would post a few of these cartoons up but I won't waste your time or cause any unnecessary movement of your scroll-down finger. If you really want to sample Punch Magazine humour you can simply go to a country pub full of wheezing septugenarians and read the corridor walls while you're heading out for a piss.
Perhaps that's a bit of a cheap shot. I mean, the magazine's stance towards female suffrage is not really surprising given that it's named after Mr. Punch, husband of Judy and everyone's favourite Puppet Perpetrator of relentless domestic violence.
The Helen Lovejoy Defence seems to be the most frequent protestation of the many female anti-suffragists that vehemently insisted they shouldn't have the right to vote. Honestly, before I put this book together I didn't think female anti-suffragists even existed. That's not a sweeping statement, it's genuinely baffling to me why someone would stand in the way of their own enfranchisement. A closer look at their testimonies reveals what I should have suspected all along - these women are either startlingly unambitious even for their time, or just rich enough not to care. Here's a grainy picture of a stall set up by a 'Mrs. Bray' to spread the word. The posters read 'Women do not want votes':
I don't have the motivation right now to attempt another long-ish piece, nor will I bother you with my fanboy approval of some semi-obscure rock band or another, so I humbly return to the format of "From The Vaults": in which I dredge up loads of Old Shite from the past and explain why it's funny, bollocks, or otherwise noteworthy.
In the first of these entries I mentioned that my job at the time was to build a few volumes of Victorian-era Irish Feminist writings - clippings, cartoons, letters to the editor, even full novels - that focused mainly on female suffrage but, being Irish and Victorian, also wasted no chance to rail against English oppression as well. All very righteous in principle, though it was far too full of angry revolutionary Catholic rhetoric to be of any interest here. Not to mention all the dour and pious protest poetry, which was tiresome and endlessly shite. No, it was the opposing volume I was later assigned to that yielded the most hilarity: 'Victorian and Edwardian Anti-Feminism'.
As you can imagine, this was a treasure trove of stuffy Olde English sexism and condescension. The most common misunderstanding among the monocled gentry in the (ahem) 'satirical' media was the belief that if women wanted the right to vote, they also must have wanted to act like men in every other way imaginable. Cue dozens of 'hilarious' gender-reversal cartoons spanning almost fifty years from Punch Magazine (example: an old matriarch asking her son's fiancee if she can "keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed". The son stands sheepishly at the door.) I would post a few of these cartoons up but I won't waste your time or cause any unnecessary movement of your scroll-down finger. If you really want to sample Punch Magazine humour you can simply go to a country pub full of wheezing septugenarians and read the corridor walls while you're heading out for a piss.
Perhaps that's a bit of a cheap shot. I mean, the magazine's stance towards female suffrage is not really surprising given that it's named after Mr. Punch, husband of Judy and everyone's favourite Puppet Perpetrator of relentless domestic violence.
The Helen Lovejoy Defence seems to be the most frequent protestation of the many female anti-suffragists that vehemently insisted they shouldn't have the right to vote. Honestly, before I put this book together I didn't think female anti-suffragists even existed. That's not a sweeping statement, it's genuinely baffling to me why someone would stand in the way of their own enfranchisement. A closer look at their testimonies reveals what I should have suspected all along - these women are either startlingly unambitious even for their time, or just rich enough not to care. Here's a grainy picture of a stall set up by a 'Mrs. Bray' to spread the word. The posters read 'Women do not want votes':
You'll notice the odd irony in how Mrs. Bray has joined a pressure group to prevent her own political voice being heard. I've been trying for hours to think of a suitable simile for this illogic, and the best I can come up with is also the shortest: it's like screaming to be gagged.
One of the most astonishing snippets is this quote from Lady Henriette Haversham, whose ability to succinctly patronise half the world's poulation is unparalleled. Check it out:
I can't help but feel a bit sorry for Lord Haversham, what with his being married to such a wet dishcloth of a woman. Still, I don't suppose she bothered him much unless she needed rescuing from a wasp or something.
Anyway, here is the prime example of the Helen Lovejoy Defence, as promised. This made me laugh so hard in the office that I actually had to hide it under another stack of papers and not even look at it while I was scanning it. It's such a great example of emotionally manipulative propaganda I can almost hear Josef Goebbels taking notes across the pages of history. Behold!
More posts to come as I try to kick this blog into gear again, including: Mediafire links to lots of old recordings I've been involved with, the recent breakup of ISIS, and possibly some sort of Plurals long-weekend mini-mini-tour diary.
Monday 22 February 2010
Do We Clap Now?
[interspersed with a few photos and clips from the archive]
On a particular Friday afternoon in October I was walking home from work in rather a hurry. This in itself is unremarkable - any journey to or from somewhere I wouldn't usually volunteer to be will make me irritable and my pavement-hopping speed far too brisk for most of Brighton's meandering pedestrians. On this particular Friday afternoon, however, I needed to get home quickly because a friend of mine was playing the early opening set of Brighton's experimental music and sound art festival, Colour Out of Space. One of the meandering pedestrians I cut past was a squat, bald old man speaking very involvedly into a dictaphone. He was looking into one of those shops that sells trinkets and crystals and chakras and lots of holistic nonsense, and I walked past him thinking, "Weirdo." You see, when I'm in a hurry, everyone blocking my path is insane.
Skip forward a few hours, and I see him again. This time he's onstage at the Sallis Benney Theatre, sitting at a table with miscellaneous bits of noisemaking debris and hidden little boxes to manipulate their sounds. He's playing an empty Coke can with a horsehair bow. Four other middle-aged gentlemen are sitting at tables onstage too, playing an array of unidentifiable things, creating an acoustic/electronic collage that totally enraptures a full venue, myself included. This, as it turns out, is Friday night's headline act: Morphogenesis. They are veterans at this kind of thing, and it is a special occasion. Looking them up today, I noticed that one of the albums I recommended on this blog last year actually came out on their record label.
The Jim Morrisons hassle the awkward Volks crowd, May 2007:
You may have guessed what I'm getting at here. I saw a man on the street who I decided was a weirdo and it turns out that I happen (at least loosely) to be a fan and patron twice over. Obviously it means I judged him unfairly by his appearance, but does that then mean he isn't a weirdo after all? Not necessarily. Does that then mean I am also a weirdo? Or, perhaps, actively pro-weirdo?
Every so often I find myself kneeling on a stage, howling into a microphone and looping together the sound of my voice into huge cavernous drones of faux-mantra harmonic gibberish. Four other people do similar things around me, with keyboards and laptops and dozens of assorted effects pedals, and then we fade out and fuck off after a maximum of twenty minutes. I suppose at these moments, when I am doubled over, sweating and grinning in my workshirt, I also look like a fucking weirdo. This is, of course, the world of "experimental" music, where nothing is at is seems or should be or looks like it's going to be. Where trendies and hermits collide. Where chin-stroking anti-musical theorists can still be genuinely confused by what they're hearing and seeing. How did I stumble into this? One day I was listening to Slayer, then what? Contact microphones, cathartic ramblings and a suitcase full of mangled electronics. Fantastic.
It's what we do - Plurals at Komedia, Feb 2010:
There are so many ways into this huge meta-genre that it surprises me how obscurist and esoteric it is perceived to be from the outside. But then again, when you're presented to something from the more aggressively strange end of the spectrum it's difficult to make the link, to somehow connect it with the more formal musical styles it may relate to only in theory. For instance, the stuff I'm talking about is almost all improvised around an idea or setup, and roughly the same can be said of process music*, acid rock or a 12-bar blues solo-swapping jam. All of these are fundamentally restrictive but allow for something unexpected to occur; indeed, unexpected things are bidden to occur, and made an equal partner in the performance alongside whatever is prepared for that performance. I'm not claiming that it all works in this way, but certainly the stuff I like does.
On a particular Friday afternoon in October I was walking home from work in rather a hurry. This in itself is unremarkable - any journey to or from somewhere I wouldn't usually volunteer to be will make me irritable and my pavement-hopping speed far too brisk for most of Brighton's meandering pedestrians. On this particular Friday afternoon, however, I needed to get home quickly because a friend of mine was playing the early opening set of Brighton's experimental music and sound art festival, Colour Out of Space. One of the meandering pedestrians I cut past was a squat, bald old man speaking very involvedly into a dictaphone. He was looking into one of those shops that sells trinkets and crystals and chakras and lots of holistic nonsense, and I walked past him thinking, "Weirdo." You see, when I'm in a hurry, everyone blocking my path is insane.
Skip forward a few hours, and I see him again. This time he's onstage at the Sallis Benney Theatre, sitting at a table with miscellaneous bits of noisemaking debris and hidden little boxes to manipulate their sounds. He's playing an empty Coke can with a horsehair bow. Four other middle-aged gentlemen are sitting at tables onstage too, playing an array of unidentifiable things, creating an acoustic/electronic collage that totally enraptures a full venue, myself included. This, as it turns out, is Friday night's headline act: Morphogenesis. They are veterans at this kind of thing, and it is a special occasion. Looking them up today, I noticed that one of the albums I recommended on this blog last year actually came out on their record label.
The Jim Morrisons hassle the awkward Volks crowd, May 2007:
You may have guessed what I'm getting at here. I saw a man on the street who I decided was a weirdo and it turns out that I happen (at least loosely) to be a fan and patron twice over. Obviously it means I judged him unfairly by his appearance, but does that then mean he isn't a weirdo after all? Not necessarily. Does that then mean I am also a weirdo? Or, perhaps, actively pro-weirdo?Every so often I find myself kneeling on a stage, howling into a microphone and looping together the sound of my voice into huge cavernous drones of faux-mantra harmonic gibberish. Four other people do similar things around me, with keyboards and laptops and dozens of assorted effects pedals, and then we fade out and fuck off after a maximum of twenty minutes. I suppose at these moments, when I am doubled over, sweating and grinning in my workshirt, I also look like a fucking weirdo. This is, of course, the world of "experimental" music, where nothing is at is seems or should be or looks like it's going to be. Where trendies and hermits collide. Where chin-stroking anti-musical theorists can still be genuinely confused by what they're hearing and seeing. How did I stumble into this? One day I was listening to Slayer, then what? Contact microphones, cathartic ramblings and a suitcase full of mangled electronics. Fantastic.
It's what we do - Plurals at Komedia, Feb 2010:
There are so many ways into this huge meta-genre that it surprises me how obscurist and esoteric it is perceived to be from the outside. But then again, when you're presented to something from the more aggressively strange end of the spectrum it's difficult to make the link, to somehow connect it with the more formal musical styles it may relate to only in theory. For instance, the stuff I'm talking about is almost all improvised around an idea or setup, and roughly the same can be said of process music*, acid rock or a 12-bar blues solo-swapping jam. All of these are fundamentally restrictive but allow for something unexpected to occur; indeed, unexpected things are bidden to occur, and made an equal partner in the performance alongside whatever is prepared for that performance. I'm not claiming that it all works in this way, but certainly the stuff I like does.
Merzbow (drums) and Keiji Haino's erratic and extremely noisy set at Supersonic 2008
And I think that's what drew me in to begin with. Music is exciting when chance is allowed into the room, but in reality chance is always in the room - what we do with it as part of a collaborative event is down to the receptiveness and willingness of both parties, the performer and the audience, and of all the individuals within them. Musicians who are only satisfied with 'ideal' levels of ultra-professionalism/perfectionism are often on the sticky end of chance as a result. But when people get it right, it's often exhilarating. For example, I went to see the psyche rock band Comets On Fire a couple of years ago and they played such a brilliant show that we wouldn't stop calling for an encore. The house lights had gone up and people were filing out, but we did manage to get them back onstage for another song. Somehow the fact that the band played on in a fully lit room, and clearly against the curfew, made the performance change. A psychological barrier broke down. People were sitting on the edge of the stage and the distance between the players on the wide, deep boards of the Scala made it seem surreal. The amps and the drum kit were tiny towards the back curtain. For the first time, it felt more like we were in the same room as the band rather than just at a gig. It seems like an obvious point, but it made a huge difference.
Petals has a waistcoat and a suitcase full of noise:
A lot of the avant-garde stuff and the noise and the sound art I've seen (which is nowhere near enough for me to be speaking as anything more than an intrigued punter) essentially multiplies many times over this receptiveness to chance. The majority of the players are kind of tinkerers too, and many homemade devices and sound manipulators abound. The sonic probabilities and possibilities unfolding are so endless that every set is kind of... bespoke, in a way. Myriad slabs and scrawls of sound can be magicked out of virtually nothing at all. Another example: at the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch a couple of years ago I saw Sutcliffe Jugend. At one point in their set it was so ear-piercingly, unbearably horrible and nasty that I decided to find the source of the noise. I followed the chain of effects pedals, metal boxes, laptops, endless wires wires wires wires amps switches tables chairs, to find that it was all coming from a humble jack lead, held nakedly in the air and touched, on and off morse-code-like, at the very tip.
Some of this stuff is borne of extremity and catharsis and perversion, and some is playful and dadaist. This is no different from any other creative art. What is different, though, is how it forces the audience to decide almost straight away whether or not they think this is a valid expression. It almost grabs you by the collar and demands, "Is this really a performance? Does it tick your boxes? What would you prefer this to be?" This is not really what happens at an alt rock show. Looking around the room, I occasionally notice people bemusedly unwilling to allow their faces and behaviour to answer those questions. You can tell it by the way they glance at friends and strangers as if to ask, when the sound from onstage has finally died down, "Do We Clap Now?"
A dutch lunatic in a posing pouch destroys a toy laptop to the deafening strains of Michael Jackson's "Earth Song"
Tim Cementimental's most renowned circuit-bent creation: The Ghost Box
*I know that process music is quite fundamentally not improvised, but it does allow for unintended things to happen as a result of the processes themselves, the room, the equipment, etc. I'm thinking about the Pendulum Music thing as an example.
Monday 26 October 2009
September/October ramble Pt. II
Following on from the previous post, I should probably veer away from chillis and antiquarian books and back towards music. There's plenty to report on the subject too.
A few posts ago I wrote about Cave In ending their "indefinite hiatus", and since then they have been gratefully re-re-received (the extra "re" is for 2006's "Perfect Pitch Black") by their Boston, Mass. hometown fans at a sold out show followed by a few more bookings over the Summer. I shelled out £17.00 for their new 12" EP "Planets of Old", and it's pretty damn good - raw, slightly techy in places, with some very big nods to the sludge (read: slow) and hardcore (read: fast) roots of their music. They've even resurrected the old logo from the days of "Until Your Heart Stops" and "Beyond Hypothermia", which should give you some idea of what they were going for with this one. The odd thing about Cave In these days is that they seem to want to return to a point of inspiration sometime before they wore themselves out with the RCA contract, but from which point? I'm as unsure as the band seem to be, but that doesn't make the music any less enjoyable. It's coming out as a CDEP sometime next year, so make sure you pick it up and don't pay quite as much as I did.
More HydraHead Records related news - Oxbow's debut LP "Fuckfest" has been reissued in a nice sorta vinyl-style cardboard sleeve and slipcase. It's a far cry from the more recent material that I know best, but a great album and a way overdue re-release. Oxbow are a difficult band to classify but for the benefit of the uninitiated... (fuck it, I'll put this in the Music HackSpeak Box):
And then we come to the Shrinebuilder record. I rushed back home with the CD (spotted a couple of days before the official release date in Resident Records), cranked the fuck out of my stereo, sat on my bed and proceeded to spend forty minutes squealing and giggling like an excited little girl. It's awesome, both in the "fuck yeah!" colloquial sense and literally awe-inspiring. Four of the most distinctive and consistent musicians working in underground rock and metal today, and somehow it actually does sound as good as the sum of its parts. To hear Wino and Scott Kelly alternate verses while coiling long threads of guitar together, to the point where they can't be told apart, before Al Cisneros comes in with his Om-mantra monotone over effortlessly hypnotic riff-cycles... well, I'd better stop now before I explode into a pile of ashy superlatives. I was never in a million years going to be able to look at this record impartially for a proper review, and thank fuck for that. SURRENDER YOURSELVES! ALL HAIL SHRINEBUILDER!
A few posts ago I wrote about Cave In ending their "indefinite hiatus", and since then they have been gratefully re-re-received (the extra "re" is for 2006's "Perfect Pitch Black") by their Boston, Mass. hometown fans at a sold out show followed by a few more bookings over the Summer. I shelled out £17.00 for their new 12" EP "Planets of Old", and it's pretty damn good - raw, slightly techy in places, with some very big nods to the sludge (read: slow) and hardcore (read: fast) roots of their music. They've even resurrected the old logo from the days of "Until Your Heart Stops" and "Beyond Hypothermia", which should give you some idea of what they were going for with this one. The odd thing about Cave In these days is that they seem to want to return to a point of inspiration sometime before they wore themselves out with the RCA contract, but from which point? I'm as unsure as the band seem to be, but that doesn't make the music any less enjoyable. It's coming out as a CDEP sometime next year, so make sure you pick it up and don't pay quite as much as I did.
More HydraHead Records related news - Oxbow's debut LP "Fuckfest" has been reissued in a nice sorta vinyl-style cardboard sleeve and slipcase. It's a far cry from the more recent material that I know best, but a great album and a way overdue re-release. Oxbow are a difficult band to classify but for the benefit of the uninitiated... (fuck it, I'll put this in the Music HackSpeak Box):
There we go, hopefully I won't have to do that again. Anyway, they're doing a few shows over here in November, including the Engine Room down here in Brighton. We're all very excited about that.
Also in September we had the weird, devastating and wonderful Kayo Dot in the UK. Well, actually we didn't because of the (possibly) over-zealous UK customs officials, who denied entry to all but three of them. Luckily the three included the main man Toby Driver and his most frequent collaborator Mia Matsumiya (the violinist), as well as a gruff-looking metalhead dude that, as it transpired, played clarinet and keyboards. This trio toured as a stripped-back version of Kayo Dot, a sort of alternative 'reading' of the band's sound, and were billed as Toby Driver's more minimal project Tartar Lamb. Very good as it was, it's a shame that customs intervened and robbed us of the full band. I've heard numerous times about this constrictive litigation. I think it's something to do with work visas, although it's obvious the upholders have no idea that the likelihood of a band actually earning money for touring abroad is virtually nil, especially at this level. You might well expect me to start ranting about this being yet another example of infrastructural difficulties for non-professional musicians, but frankly the bullshit comes with the territory. It shouldn't be the case, but it is. Maybe try explaining DIY ethics to the Foreign Office. Let me know how that goes, I'll be at home waiting for Travelling Troubadour Tax Breaks to be instated. (I'm joking of course, but I bet even carnies get a better deal.)
I just realised this is turning into a HydraHead wank session. I should do something about that, er...
That's better. I guess I must have some kind of hipster/metalhead split personality, judging by the two festivals this Winter I'm most excited about... Ten Years of ATP at Butlins Minehead, and Damnation Festival at Leeds Student Union. It will be my third ATP and my first Damnation, and the lineups for both are eclectic and brilliant. ATP is boasting probably their most star-studded lineup ever - it's really quite ridiculous, including: The Mars Volta, Explosions In The Sky, Melvins, Sunn0))), Mudhoney, Six Organs of Admittance, Modest Mouse, The Breeders, Múm, Bardo Pond, Tortoise, Shellac, Dirty Three, Fuck Buttons, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Battles, Devendra Banhart, The Magic Band (yes, Beefheart's Magic Band, with Drumbo and Zoot Horn Rollo)... I don't actually like all of those acts of course but whichever way you look at it, it's a huge lineup. It's basically a list of bands I should really know a lot more about by now, which bodes well for a festival.
Similarly with Damnation - it's only Electric Wizard I know a great deal about. Most of the others fall into awkward categories like "I've only got one of their records" (Destruction, Firebird, Rotting Christ, Lockup and Mistress in my case) and "I saw them supporting __________ a few years ago" (Jesu, Charger). Hopefully the bands I'm unfamiliar with can catch my attention - Negura Bunget, Nazxul, The Gates of Slumber, Mithras and A Storm of Light.
The downside of such good lineups is that the inevitable clashes are even more frequent. I've had to make some horribly ruthless choices in the past... Anthrax vs Meshuggah... Porn (with Thurston Moore and Brent Hinds) vs Os Mutantes... Four Tet vs Squarepusher... the list goes on.
I was also very pleased this month to find From The Dust Returned. An extreme metal review site that's open-minded, literate and detailed is a major discovery for me, as most sites are badly designed and full of Uber-Necro shut-ins from the Ukraine and Deathcore teenagers who can't spell properly. The site's creator has recently drawn up Top 20 Metal Records lists for every year since 1982, and he certainly knows his stuff.
There's been a new Gong record since my last update, and naturally I had to buy it straight away without regard for my ailing bank balance. It is fabulously silly of course, filled with the usual references to pixies, teapots, witches, mystical planets, drugs, human brotherhood being compromised by warmongers et cetera. All the "political" stuff is as wooly as can be expected from a shamelessly hippyish band like Gong, but I barely notice the cheesiness any more. There's some great hypnotic unwinding deep space rock jams on it, and Steve Hillage is back in the fold. Enough said. They're playing at the Brighton Corn Exchange at the end of November (last date of a pretty big tour), and I'll have to make damn sure I'm stoned for that one. They're the best space rock band with a 76-year-old frontwoman of all time.
And then we come to the Shrinebuilder record. I rushed back home with the CD (spotted a couple of days before the official release date in Resident Records), cranked the fuck out of my stereo, sat on my bed and proceeded to spend forty minutes squealing and giggling like an excited little girl. It's awesome, both in the "fuck yeah!" colloquial sense and literally awe-inspiring. Four of the most distinctive and consistent musicians working in underground rock and metal today, and somehow it actually does sound as good as the sum of its parts. To hear Wino and Scott Kelly alternate verses while coiling long threads of guitar together, to the point where they can't be told apart, before Al Cisneros comes in with his Om-mantra monotone over effortlessly hypnotic riff-cycles... well, I'd better stop now before I explode into a pile of ashy superlatives. I was never in a million years going to be able to look at this record impartially for a proper review, and thank fuck for that. SURRENDER YOURSELVES! ALL HAIL SHRINEBUILDER!
Finally, ISIS rolled back into Camden Town courtesy of the fine folks at ATP, supporting their most recent album "Wavering Radiant". It was the eighth time I've seen them so surprises weren't in abundance, but it was a reliably fine and gutsy performance - heavy as fuck and very compelling. All but one track from the new album were played, and I finally lost my cool about half way through 'Threshold of Transformation' when I barged through the stock-still beard contingent waving my camera above my head, screaming "yyyeeeeaaaahhhhh" and headbanging with no regard to spacial awareness whatsoever. Fuck 'em, it's not my fault they never noticed that ISIS are actually a band borne of nasty, cavernous sludgecore. We then managed to spoil someone's fun by screaming the lyrics to 'Carry' at the top of our lungs, before a rare airing of 'Altered Course' capped the night on a high.
It was also very significant to me that I was with the same two friends that I'd persuaded to come along to their Mean Fiddler show in support of "Oceanic" on Saturday March 15th 2003, six and a half years ago, still one of the best shows I've ever attended, and one that converted us to a style that has since grown and developed into something influencial, genre-straddling, powerful, genuinely progressive and unignorable. It may be a little over-analysed these days*, but it's been a hell of a lot of fun so far and long may it ride.
(Next post will be a review of Damnation Festival with photos and videos!)
*I got talking to someone outside the gig who said he was studying Modern Classical music and doing his thesis on the band. Though admitting that I wouldn't know Modern Classical music from a horseshit sandwich, I said I couldn't see how ISIS can have much in common with his course. He disputed this strongly, saying there were all sorts of connections. I then suggested that the connections might not be intentional, which he again disputed. He said I should come to an exhibition/performance somewhere in a couple of weeks to see what he meant. I had to fight my urge to grab him and shout "I'm only in it for the RIFFS!", and although I'll definitely look deeper into his argument, I didn't want to tell him that I already had tickets to see a folk band that night.
Friday 25 September 2009
September Update Pt. 1 - a Chilli Festival comes to town
(N.B.: I started writing this post with the intention of making it quite short, simply a few unconnected things that have happened lately and are coming up soon. But typically I went off on one and now I can't bring myself to abridge it. It starts off with a list of what's supposed to be in one single post, but I decided to leave the list in and just do several posts instead so I can add pictures, links etc. and make it a little more digestible.)
More general updates and tidbits to end the surprisingly sunny and optimistic month of September 2009, including:
(to be continued...)
More general updates and tidbits to end the surprisingly sunny and optimistic month of September 2009, including:
- UK Customs deny alternative jazz-rock
- Dave fails to self-promote again, promotes other people instead
- HydraHead re-release Oxbow's long out-of-print debut album 'Fuckfest', average level of awesomeness increases all-round.
- Winter festival season gets exciting
- Dave becomes a film snob, enjoys it, and assumes you want to know about what CDs he's bought recently.
- Scott Kelly (Neurosis) plays his new band and invites you to argue about the first four Metallica records.
Now I'd like to revert back to the more comfortable First Person and continue, hopefully with a few more readers in tow thanks to the Tucker Max-style self-reference that seems to impress today's more discerning blog-followers (but probably not). Firstly, what can I say about the Fiery Foods Festival that came to town last weekend? Fucking phenomenal. I didn't even know it was happening until the day before, and then I got drunk and forgot about it before bed. I was woken up by a text message: "Chilli festival. Where's my sock?" Holy shit! No hangover could dash my hopes today.
It was merciless from the very first stall. These people simply do not fuck about. If you're the kind of person that buys that "Cool Salsa" shit with your Doritos, stop reading right now. I've since discovered that there's two kinds of stall on the chilli festival circuit. There's the rustic, culinary, homespun sort of stall - the people that make chutneys and sauces from ingredients they've grown in an allotment, package them up in quaint little jars and supply to those upmarket grocers that no one can really justify shopping in unless they live in Seer Green. These stalls were my favourites. Everything on them tasted wonderful and was made with real care by people with a proper talent for spices.
The other stalls are the ones that care not for your personal safety. They don't do pansy shit like "presentation" or "taste", they just line up their garish and frightening arsenal of sauces into a spectrum of spiciness that goes from Pretty Damn Spicy to Immediate Stomach Ulcer, and wait for victims. Wearing matching shirts and standing with their arms crossed, they scout for greenhorns to deceive with massive understatements like "That one? Yeah mate, it's got a bit of a kick to it." Then they refuse to hide their own smugness as people stumble away, spluttering and crying and sincerely wishing they were dead.
I'm being dramatic, of course, because this was definitely one of the best days of the year. All the saucemakers put out broken crackers and rice cakes and little sample dishes for us to try. I came away with a jar of half-relish, half-paste called "HHH" (standing for Hell Hot Habanero). It was from one of the 'culinary' stands, Mr. Vikki, who was definitely my favourite. Four of his sauces had been selected for stocking by Fortnum & Mason, and deservedly so. Please check this guy out if you are so inclined - I reccommend HHH, the King Naga (his hottest), and the Hot Coriander Sauce.
I was marvelling at Mr. Vikki's stand when Dan made me aware that he was suffering quite acutely. He'd already fucked himself up a bit ("Blair's Ultra Death") within five minutes of us being there (as had I with the "Dragon's Blood"), and it looked like he'd done it again. The cause of his discomfort was a little jar of something called "Pure Pain Paste". I had some of it, and it fucked me up a bit too. Then I noticed the carved wooden skull with horns sitting ominously on the table like something out of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'. It was drawing attention towards two savage-looking sauces. "Be Damned" was a really fucking hot one and actually quite tasty (as was the sweet but violent "Trinidad Scorpion"), but my mistake was to take a reccommendation by a couple of massive muscly dudes that looked like they could shit broken glass every morning without wincing. "Try the '10 Minute Burn'" they said. I can tell you that ten minutes is selling it somewhat short.
The next day we came back with Duncan and several pints of milk. We were told that fatty things like milk, ice cream and cheese were best for soothing the burn, and to avoid water. Duncan is a Mekon so he had to make do with beer, but we slammed our milk bottles down on the counter of Scorchio (UK-import home of the infamous Dave's Insanity Sauces) and informed them that today we'd come prepared. We tried a few more things and pretended to be seasoned chilli-maestros, which was fun, but quite honestly I didn't have the same gung-ho spirit as the day before. The other guys did though, and we were all in varying degrees of pain before long. I learnt that the "10 Minute Burn" had been removed from the display because two people had passed out that morning, which I relayed to the Scorchio folks. They asked me whose sauce it was and I described the stand. "Oh yes, that must be Gerald." they said. Suddenly the idea of a Travelling Chilli Carnival Community became too awesome to bear.
We got talking to a couple of other reckless folks and I suggested they try Gerald's "The Beast" sauce. They approached us again a few minutes later, laughing and in serious discomfort, proclaiming Gerald to be "some kind of dark underground chilli sadist."
Tasting some of these chilli sauces is a bizarre experience. A paste called "Fist of Fire" increased my heart rate and turned me bright red immediately. The "Mongoose" sauce sent me stumbling around light-headedly, like a 12-year old glue sniffer. Sharing voluntary intense pain is a weirdly gratifying experience, so make sure you go to the next Chilli Festival and fuck yourself up.(to be continued...)
Tuesday 8 September 2009
From The Vaults #1
As some of you may know, my job is to scan books. I scan them to .tif format files, photoshop the scratches out and send them on their merry way to a publishing house of some kind. At the moment I'm building a book from scratch - it's about Irish Feminism in the early to mid 19th Century. But I digress, my point is that occasionally I'll come across something in these old books that really needs saving for one reason or another. Some snippets are hilarious, some offensive, some just plain brilliant. Here are a few of these dusty old gems:
Look at the table. It's chronological, but the mid-to-late 19th Century (Bucke's own era) is vastly over-represented. His own initials are bang in the middle of the list (#33) , surrounded by the initials of other people that he was, coincidentally enough, pretty well acquainted with. Now, call me a cynical old bastard, but it does look an awful lot like Dr. Bucke simply had Delusions of Grandeur on an overwhelming scale, not only ranking himself alongside Socrates and Moses on the spiritual enlightenment scale but roping another bunch of self-regarding Victorian cock-ends into his drawing room to sit around in a circle and profoundly discuss how they're all, like, totally super-enlightened right now.
If that wasn't ridiculous enough, check this out. I think he's arguing here that enlightenment to 'cosmic consciousness' is a kind of evolutionary process, if not necessarily in strictly Darwinian terms, and in some cases can lead to insanity rather than anything positive. Not too controversial in itself, but during this section he drops a truly priceless bit of classic racism, with some very very specious reasoning thrown in for good measure. It's a fucking marvel.
There’s so much wrong with this logic that I can’t even be fucked to start. What I will say though is that, in 1901, widespread psychological evaluation was probably not one of the most pressing concerns of the black community. And while we’re on the subject, I doubt that Victorian-era Canada** could offer much in terms of a representative sample anyway.
Maybe I’m wrong, I dunno. He does have a Wikipedia page after all.
This one’s from a batch of books we got about the 18th Century Scottish social economist Adam Smith. You may have noticed him on the back of a Scottish twenty quid note. One whole volume was dedicating to the context of his theories – extracts from contemporary journals and such. I found some great stuff in there, including this Georgian-era depiction of a city of vices. It’s called ‘Gin Lane’.
It’s nice to see that gin’s not changed in 300 years, eh?
And now for the piece de resistance. Quoted heavily in this volume are the works of Daniel Defoe, notable of course for writing ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and a fella called Arthur Young. Both men traveled Britain extensively and wrote in great detail about their journeys and the subcultures and specifics that could be found across the land. This is an extract from Arthur Young’s ‘Southern Tour’, published in 1768, in which he ‘reviews’ the inns and taverns he stayed at during the trip.
Just a quickie to finish with, and I promise this is awesome. It’s from a batch of books sent to us by the Naval and Military Press detailing the first-hand accounts of Australian WWI soldiers, mostly Light Horse regiments. These guys saw some very nasty fighting, particularly against the Turks at Gallipoli, and later on the Western Front alongside mostly Canadian and American troops, pushing the German army back across North-Eastern France and Belgium in 1918.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the Real-Life Rambo: Sergeant Stanley Robert MacDougall, 47th Battalion, A.I.F.:
Fuck yeah.
* It was only when searching for the link to Walt Whitman's Wikipedia entry that I saw how awesome he looks. He looks like Dickens, Father Christmas and Socrates all rolled into one awesomely bearded human-shaped unstoppable ball of awesome (see right):
** The first time I went to write "Canada", it came out as "Conan". Psychological analysis on a postcard please
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Rambling update, not quite pointless
For the third time I will start writing this blog entry, and I really hope I can finish it this time. The thing is, I used to write this stuff (somewhat) discreetly during work hours, and now my job has changed and it's not so easy to get away with any more. And also, because it's such an achingly monotonous job they let us listen to music on headphones. This means that if I'm hunched in the corner typing away with music on and my boss approaches and looks at my screen, I won't know she's there.
Right now my bosses are far away, so I'm in the clear. However, as it's been necessary to remove the headphones, I have been forced to listen to a very long and explicit conversation between a couple of co-workers, involving sexual conquests, lesbian encounters, quite seriously illegal virginity-loss and other hilarious and distracting personal information, freely bandied around by a vacuous slag and the alarmingly unsubtle slimy bastard attempting to shag her on a rebound of what sounds like three days. So yeah, I haven't got very far.
But anyway, I thought I'd share a few links this time round. I've been to a shitload of great gigs recently that I will get round to summarising eventually but for now, here is a list of better stuff to look at:
Angry Chair - This website fucking rocks. It's a huge directory of rapidshare links to some great underground and not-so-underground music, with over 2500 albums/EPs/demos/vinyl rips/tape rips etc. The most well-represented genres are stoner rock and doom metal, but there's all sorts of stuff there. And also it's where I found out about these guys:
Inferno - This band fucking rocks. They call themselves Sci Fi Grind 'n' Roll and I couldn't explain it better. There's some really catchy bits on this record, liberally peppered with fairly cheesy prog keyboards (that's the Sci Fi bit), but most of it sounds fairly extreme and more Converge-like. Except that Inferno sound like they're having more fun.
The Krankenhouse - This place fucking rocks. It was the venue for Rip This Joint's triumphant Summer alldayer last Saturday, and it's a converted nursing home that is now an art space/venue/semi-squat and general place of excellence. I could go on forever about how great that day was, but I'll just say that this is a very positive use for an otherwise derelict space and it's really worth going to if you have the chance.
NB. The urinal is made of a gutter, some perspex, a hosepipe and a sponge. Just a heads up.
Keepers of Metal - This website ist fucking krieg. It might be even bigger than Angry Chair actually, although it's in Spanish, cluttered, and full of spyware and dead links. However, it has a really spiffing collection of not-especially-famous extreme metal bands - the albums that you'd have to go to Resurrection Records in Camden and cross your fingers for - the bands that appear on the back of cutoff denim jackets that are far, far superior to your own.
As long as you can wait for the clunky bastard site to load and fend off a crash or five, this one's worth delving into. It's a nice opportunity to hear more horrible spiky-sounding bands like Behexen, Xasthur and Thorns if they eluded you the first time round (as they did me). Plus I now regret not buying Exhumed's 'Gore Metal' album when I was fifteen, because it fucking rips.
Anyway, I'll end with a few things I've learned since the last entry:
- I should already own 'Gore Metal' by Exhumed by now.
- If you think Bjork should be forced to smash a policeman's head in with a metal cash box and then get hanged for it, this is the film for you.
- If you think Willem Defoe deserves to have his testicles shattered with a fucking great slab of rock, this is the film for you.
- If you know you'll be spending the day in a squat, steal napkins beforehand.
- Don’t stand anywhere near the band Monotonix if you have a drink in your hand. See below:
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