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.

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.

Here's them playing some of it...

From the Vaults #3: As you may have guessed

Did you guess? I did.

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 real reason for this post was to upload an example of what I have decided to call the 'Helen Lovejoy Defence'. This is, of course, something along the lines of: "Won't somebody please think of the children???" Unfortunately these silly histrionics are not just coming from the male critics, I guess mainly because men had far more pressing things to do back then than worry about the day-to-day welfare of their own children. Those old-timey moustaches don't grow themselves, you know.

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.

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.

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.