The Paper Snail

Numbering is from each entry’s URL. Dates when available. None of it seems to match up!

#6 February 24, 2005: Alan Cummings

Our friend, Wire contributor, and authority on everything essential coming out of Japan (and China!) Alan Cummings starts things of with an exclusive column covering a few ultra-obscure finds: killer releases from Li-Jianhong & the trio of Kan Mikami, Toshi Ishizuka and Shoji Aketagawa. We’re the exclusive distro for these releases/labels, so don’t sleep! Keep yr lids peeled for a whole host of new columists joining us over the next few weeks and months.

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#5 March 31, 2005: Matthew Bower

Matthew Bower has been wrestling pink lightning from electrified strings and circuit boxes since well before most of us had ever conceived of the concept of endless-feedback-as-punk-satori. His fingerprints are all over the furthest fringes of the UK’s avant/noise underground, from early actionist/performance work with Pure that saw him share bills and bottles with the original Whitehouse trio through his experiments with scum/rock in Skullflower and Total, the Theatre Of Eternal Music-stylings of Sunroof! and the heavy flesh/metal of the Hototogisu duo with Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards, not forgetting various collaborations with Vibracathedral Orchestra, Richard Youngs, Sunburned Hand Of The Man et al… no matter what you wanna call it, Bower has been the one of the few UK-based players that has regularly delivered it. Writing exclusively for Volcanic Tongue, he’s here to sing the praises of the ecstatic US noise group The Skaters.

“Eternity’s Diamond Prison System: The Skaters And Their Attempt To Decipher/Tune In To/Declaim The True Sound Of The Universe In All Its Rich Nowness With No Posture No Musical Style No Past And No Future: Eternal Now" or “The Rubberstamp Of Death” or……

Stop messing with my head with your half baked ragas, dull pseudo ethnic arcana, fake folk etc don’t give me ‘give and take’ improv, and please no ‘interesting’, I want full-on universal electric blood or nothing (Nothing is pretty good too), it goes against all notions of ‘democratisation’ of improvising, it seems un/anti natural and un Zen to not just salute the doing, but need a special doing, one that can’t be learned or refined… it’s rough but you’ve either got it or not.

A band I play in was playing some shows in California and we went to San Diego to play a storefront house space with this local trio and they were young and nice in a totally un-world weary way that amazingly didn’t grate on an old curmudgeon like myself but was totally inspiring that they were liberated by all the great stuff they liked (because the I/net and almost total access to all musics hasn’t generally empowered youthful music, but robbed it of aspiration and originality) and when they played in the magical Californian night, our jaws dropped as they tuned into, and rode, and drew magical designs upon, a beautiful raw wave of tuning, honing on the one sound (containing all kinds of billowing motion)…

They were totally possessed by the sound and focussed upon it and dwelling happily under it like a waterfall. To be possessed by the music can be a very bad thing leading to all kinds of gratuitous wallowing, but when in pure service to the wild spirit of the music it is very life affirming to behold.

James Ferraro of The Skaters speaks of his wish to heal us all with spiritual alchemy: “My idea is to translate effectively both the hellish condition of impoverished communities and also the abstract image of poverty mainly those in which I have been immersed in most of my life. I am naturally inclined to do this to pay homage!! I have seen firsthand the effects of poverty and the mental conditioning of those enslaved by this sort of economic system. I am in debt I feel to translate this message as it is quite a universal one as we are all displaced people alienated I think from ourselves and our land. I am naturally inclined to translate the aura of poverty that exists in black impoverished communities as this is my birthplace. I believe black people in America are still displaced slaves and encouraged by social laws to stay slaves. A slave mentality encourages mental slaves and volunteer slaves!! Yet this condition is a very universal thing and can be translated in a broader sense. We are all displaced disillusioned creatures now!! All of us slaves. The truth exists in both, all the bliss, all the agony and all the silver thrones…”

I would humbly offer up these as the spiritual children of Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders, the fact that a lot of their sound is made with broken consumer electronics and effects pedals, to alchemise the voices, the intertwined singing, speaking in tongues and holding up a bright untarnished (or beautifully dusty) mirror to the smiling universe of agony ecstasy playfulness devotional laughter.

#4 June 23, 2005: Tom Carter

Tom Carter needs little introduction to most Volcanic Tongue regulars. As a member of Charalambides and a collaborator with players like Marcia Bassett, Bardo Pond, Ben Chasny and The MV&EE Medicine Show, he has loosed countless skulls with huge fields of heavy E-Bow gravity and an approach to the mechanics of wood and wire that is as flesh-based as spam. His approach to free improvisation has established whole new vectors for intuitive musical thought that have yet to be fully mapped. The guy is also a fucking gent. Writing exclusively for Volcanic Tongue, Tom introduces us to Venison Whirled and Jessica Rylan aka Can’t.

Genres, definitions, all boxes. Humans seek to define & in their zeal reduce the object to irrelevancy. We degrade music by codifying it and reducing it to the familiar. For example: ‘folk’ music started as a term broad enough to connote anything made outside the halls of academia (hence useless for pushing product). Our pal David X gave us free folk, a righteous attempt to reclaim the long-genrefied saw of Folk (capital F, definition frozen into button-down acoustic mediocrity by sixties ad-men) as a signpost to point to Mr. Corsano as well as to Valentine/ Elder. This seeps through the pages of The Wire and down to syndicated weekly purgatory and is now bastardized as ‘freak folk’, a transparent attempt to gift wrap smiling young faces for fans who think they want the ‘new soundz’ when they’re really looking to fill the empty slots in their iTunes playlists. As for the musicians, new artistes pick up their freshly minted shackles and their gtrs and rebirth themselves ad nauseum as fingerpicking (or song scribbling) avatars. (Ms. Foster, Mr. Chasny, Rose, Castro, Lawler, etc. can exempt themselves from this tirade. Y’all rule. You’re welcome). I saw a solo acoustic set recently by a guy who was passing off as ‘original’ a piece that copped an ENTIRE PHRASE from ‘Sligo River Blues’. Repeatedly, so it wasn’t an accident. Give me a fucking break. Anyway- Many have smelled a rat. Many more have kept on slogging away, bringing humanity & therefore folk spirit (if not form) to all kinds of human and inhuman music. I suppose you could call the releases below ‘electronic’ but can we just call it Music? Thank you.

Venison Whirled Venison World Sister Skull Records SSK-1 CD-R Venison Whirled (aka Venison World, named after some godawful storefront deer ‘processing’ shack) is the solo concern of Lisa Cameron, current ST37/ 3 Day Stubble trap beater and ex of Glass Eye, Brave Combo, and many other Texas bands not likely to come to mind while listening to this. Given all the stuff I hear with its intensity diluted by excessive gear-shifting and pink noise digiverb, this is a blast of pure white light. There are three tracks, all improvised to tape with minimal instrumentation. First on deck is “Invocation”, an unassuming beginning of Tibetan bowl/ bass/ bell slithering hum akin to some of the inward moan of contemporary sun gazers like Pelt or Skaters. Nice, but merely a foreshadowing of the telescopic majesty of “Crossroads”, a 16 minute ray of power electronics produced by a contact mic stuck to a busted drum. Sort of like a slow motion psychedelic earthquake on planet snare. The focus of this is simply brutal and you’re just about guaranteed to be mopping drool from the corners of your mouth by minute 12. Last is “Yum”, a heaping pile of single bass feedback that is what I thought Sunn o))) was going to sound like before I’d actually heard them. Amazingly enough I saw Lisa do a bunch of this stuff live 4-5 years ago and can happily report that it was fully formed even then. Just goes to show the health benefits of being embedded in the central TX cultural vacuum (and I oughta know, drifting from there to the land of rarefied hepcats)…

Can’t New Secret RRR No Cat Pic Disc LP Jessica Rylan (aka Can’t) brings us New Secret, a great LP on RRR that boasts some of the most unassumingly attractive picture disk art I’ve ever seen- while most of these ventures shoot for the well trodden Op/ visual overload route, this one opts instead for a pleasantly grey Twombly-ish scrawl on side one, and random snaps from Jessica’s family album (with captions!) on side two. Like the sounds, the whole thing is as warm and direct as an autumn campfire, and comes down the line friendly and without pretence. I’m too much of an electronic dunce to identify what exactly is going on soundwise here, but most of it seems to be vox processed through a home-built synth oscillator filter thing, and comes out sounding like lullabies sung through a disintegrating electric fan. There’s a great vibe here that reminds me of nothing so much as watching TV at my grandmother’s house 25 (or so) years ago, trying to filter words from the grey blasts of static mystery coming over the black & white from faraway stations. The difference here is that Jessica has gone a long way towards making this so completely UN-mysterious (though there’s undecipherable depth and darkness lurking here too) … while most of her noise/ electronic peers lean towards the aggro/ harsh/ confrontational (which when you think about it, is about the most obvious hill to roll the noise cart down), Jessica has instead gone for unaffected and earthy sweetness. An amazingly personal and inviting statement that will almost make you forget the harsh sounds it’s all wrapped in. (Lest you think I’ve forgotten the folk music riffage of my opening paragraph, I should say that there’s a incongruously unprocessed tenor recorder track on side two… and what’s more folk than that)?

#3 November 19, 2005: Greg Kelley

photo w/skull by Chris Corsano

Greg Kelley is the lead trumpeter for Nmperign, Heathen Shame, & Cold Bleak Heat. He was born in New England in the early ‘70s during Autumn. In the late 1980s, Mr. Kelley studied classical music in the South, fleeing North to Boston after his studies ran their course. There followed a short period of intense solitude after which Kelley insinuated himself into local avant-garde circles. The late 90s saw the birth of Nmperign and the beginnings of a period of touring and travel whereupon Mr. Kelley began to meet a vast array of colleagues and collaborators. He currently works in the insurance field and has significantly scaled back his touring and performing regimen hoping to find some kind of focus and to stop the world from spinning around his head so fast. The future sees a plethora of recordings on various media. If you see him in the street or at an international musical event, bring up Werner Herzog, artisan beer or the Shadow Ring and you’re sure to get a rise out of this notoriously dull personage. Here he walks us through the new Kevin Drumm/2673 split LP on Kitty Play.

Kevin Drumm is one of my favourites. From the sparse, odd brokenness of the earlier guitar work to the digital pummel of the more recent material, I’ve simply come to expect great music. And is this too much to ask? After Mego’s Sheer Hellish Miasma people went nuts, screaming Kevin’s name in the streets, nudging next to him at bars for photo ops, impressing both composerly electronic music nerds and knuckle dragging noise fans (not that all of either group are either of those things - of course fucking not!). People got together kind of, except that they didn’t get together at all - they just shared an enthusiasm. It’s not like anyone got along better, but why would they? People hate people. At any rate, Mr. Drumm stepped back, put out a great CD on Hanson that people really liked but some got confused because they thought he was headed for a niche market as opposed to the Universalism of a highly respected European electronic music label. Then came a couple of limited edition cassettes that were also great (I’ve come to expect this, did I mention that?), but were a bit rawer (for Maniacs only!) and confirmed people’s suspicions about anti-Universalism. The composerly nerds became sad perhaps. Or they’d given up. Now the throngs have settled back and are excited about some other new sensation. Kevin can go to a bar and no opportunistic photo ops. Maybe a couple kids who wanna talk about Whitehouse or The New Blockaders. Or they’ve heard Kevin’s into metal, so they might mention Manowar. But it’s cool. Things are laid back. So, why not do a split LP w/ a noise kid from New Jersey? (Actually, I don’t know if he’s a kid or not.) And why not make it great? [There’s no pressure not to, except from like 300 dudes, 50 of whom got the Maniacs-only tapes (FUCKING-A MOTHERFUKKERS!!), the rest of whom got it on Soulseek.] I mean, that was the point from the get-go, right - to make it great? So, what do we get here, besides perhaps Drumm’s best work to date? (I wouldn’t call it ‘better’ than the first CD on Perdition Plastics or ‘better’ than Sheer Hellish Miasma, BUT I still think it’s his best work to date. That doesn’t add up for you? Well, I’ve been drinking.) Track 1: “Totemic Saturation (Live Dungheap For Strobe And Fog)” This piece is the more digital of the two and features a series of looped figures which grind themselves down into pure saturation by the end. A digitally sharpened guitar loop kicks things off with that loping mechanized odd-meter that only a machine can produce. You can kind of rock out to it, but if you catch yourself in the mirror, you realize that your dance is strange and maybe a little bit retarded, but does that stop you? No, it does not. This minimal riff (remember Comedy?) is left alone for a few minutes before the more textural layers of feedback creep into the proceedings. A realization is made: yes, now we are getting somewhere. Slowly you realize that the loping rhythm is phasing a bit and things are getting weird (i.e. awesome). By the time the high pitched feedback squeals come in, you realize you are listening to trance music. Not trance like E and strobe lights (Shit… but there are strobe lights!), but more like ritual. Now you’re getting into it. Don’t look in the mirror now, you’ll only look foolish. The phasing and textures build to the point of saturation and hover there for a bit before finally fading away. Track 2: “Blurry stupor (Section 1)” Track 2 is the real masterpiece for my money and points towards possible future avenues of exploration about which I am quite excited to hear (section 2…3?). For track 1’s 4 or 5 layers (once things hit the saturation point the differentiation becomes, uh, saturated, which is perhaps why it’s called “Totemic Saturation”?), track 2 seems to have about a thousand layers, though things are a bit less clear and the perspective jumps back a few feet. “Totemic Saturation”, like much of Sheer Hellish Miasma, has a very strong surface layer with a strong anterior presence. Though multiple layers (esp. in sections of SHM) provide multiple depths and perspectives to focus on, there is an overriding sense of the front of the sound, with accenting material beyond that point. Blurry stupor is all beyond. A layer of tweaked Nitsch organ/harmonium (which is probably guitar), a layer of New Blockaders crunch, analog synth squiggle, slurred and mumblurred vocals, and scathing guitar overload mix and blur. All these layers are in constant flux and instead of reaching a saturation point we are submerged in a bath of labyrinths. The ear shifts from a hovering background texture to a bubbling or sudden electronic or guitar punctuation (a series of glissandi throughout the piece seem to act at momentary signposts). Focus can shift easily between the forest and the trees. I thought of Xenakis’s La Legende d’Eer but only after the fact and only in the way in which masses of sound move about with density but clarity and not in terms of the sounds themselves – though I’ve often found that sounds themselves are somewhat arbitrary and the way in which they are organized is the important factor. So, here we have both. And I only ask that “Blurry Stupor (sections 2-5) be even better, but I may be getting greedy. I’ve noticed that most of these contributor columns cover at least 2 albums and here I’ve gone on at length about 1/2 of a split LP. So, I should at least mention Side 2, if only to get a C-. But I’m tired, so can I just say that Side 2 (by 2673) is a sweet slab of analog synth noise that I thought might involve a computer or a guitar, but only because it has that hands-off, noodleless stasis that seems more to me like sharply cut/constructed feedback than the knob-twiddling bleep-bloop that I would have expected from analog synth noise? Or that the tracks seem almost divided into EQ ranges, with the first being mid-to-high, the second being mid-to-low, and the 3rd being high? Should I mention Kevin Winter (2673)’s other split recordings with The Cherry Point, Jessica Rylan (Can’t), and others that show discriminating taste in company? Well, yes, I should. Anyway…. I’ve heard the Kevin D side more and the Kevin W side less and am much more familiar with Kevin D’s work, so let me just leave it at this: buy this record.

#2 December 15, 2005: John Olson

John Olson’s Top Five Wolf Parties of the Year

1: Cafe Electric Sau Paulo Brazil / April = Craziest Wolf show of the year/ after doing a totally strange big deal gig with Fennez to the rad SP maniacs, our hosts Gui and Edwardo took us to their small DJ bar the next night for an eve of kidney killing drinks. Shows in Brazil get an import tax of like 60% and imported CDs get the same severe treatment. So this group of brothers and this Gui freak worked on scoring non-taxed new music into Sau Paulo and have parties every Monday at this cafe to play the jams for the locals. After saving enough dough they get to do one gig every 6 months …so the Wolf Brew Crew was lucky enuff to get chosen. Anyhow - we are at this killer cafe getting totally railed and hanging with some of the most killer peeps ever…. one of the Wolf Boyz notice there is a two random amps in the corner so we track down the owner and ask him if we can bust a set….the dude is super stoked and everyone starts texting their crew and in the time it takes for us to jet back to the hotel and grab the nuclear warhead wolf gear the place is packed to the rafters and everyone is freaking out…circa 4am…and as we are getting ready to destroy…Gui says “Wait two minutes - Damo Suzuki will be here”…. So we hang tight until Doctor Mutter enters and bust into a furious hell on earth set with the bar going balls out inzane. Hearing the SP maniac chanting “Kill Kill Kill” during the break of Stabbed In the Face makes me want to break a fucking chair across Roach’s back just thinking of it…… the only town to have a mall of all things Heavy Metal. Amazing…..

  1. New Years Eve/Wolf Practice Terror Tank = Started the New Year off right. Not a Wolf gig but the boyz were there (minus Nepal Dillo) and it was intense!! Eleven fights happened, DJ Roach playing speedmetal through a set up of Gorilla amps, glass, blood, noize. Death KCOMM, Hive Mind, Workbench, Burning Sess Core, 16 Bitch Pile UP, and fucking rare gig by sound murderer Kevin Drumm who brought his own massive PA and fryed the damn thing = killer party/ line up!!!. Raw night - huge cement room was a sound hell pit-after the next day the scene looked like some Law & Order CSI shit. The next big gig at the place was the amazing Hair Police/Wooden Wand/Dead Machines tour start - no violence, but an acid-effected Sick Heath drove his moms VW Rabbit into a fence……hah!

  2. City Center, Torrino Italy Summer Fucking Weird Gig Alert totally = After total busting our balls from a string of intense Italy gigs (complete with fucked up Athens Techno fest gig where the airlines “lost” my normal glasses / so had to wear prescription shades for the rest of the tour total rocker-dork style) our main man Enriq wouldn’t tell us details about our last Italy gig. We roll there and he says “Meet City Center at 5” so I roll down there solo and see Nate talking to a group of dudes in hard hats in the middle of town at the bottom of a deep construction site. I crawl down there and see there is huge blue Alien creatures with bird beaks everywhere holding flames and shit. Damn … this is gonna be weird. As we meet the dude who is doing this ‘art project’ - turns out we are doing sound for a huge city art project and at sundown - we play along to his movie isolated in the middle of the construction site, total city center…with our sound projected throughout the town via intense PA. Turns out during the dig to make a parking lot city center the workers found mass amounts of bones and things from ages ago and the city wanted to hide the fact that it was a special historical zone. So as we set up … people are yelling at us in Italian and when we ask what they are saying the crew says “ah….. terrible…don’t worry about it” - the artist guy takes us to an amazing dinner and the sun goes down so it time to play - as we roll out to the eyes and ears of the city = one of the dudes working / who tells me later he played guitar in Negazione = says “play well, the mayors wife is here”…fuck…. So with ultra intense sound and blue Aliens and dead city center = we do a total sparse metal scrape dog pitch brain drain ectoplasm inzane jam for 40 minutes. Fucking ruled … after we meet everyone and grab some brews and I throw Connelly into a fountain. Weird night man….ruled!! Lost the recording of it as well … impossible to explain and lost forever….

  3. Coachella LA Spring = Started the day off right circa beer baptism 10am and freaking out with Justin and the LA crew. Had no idea what to expect from this fucking gig. We roll there and me and the Conman end up almost fighting half the workers cause the place is so confusing. After we park we roll to the check in trailer, open the door and the first person we see is Danny Devito, he ask Roach if he can use his cell phone and Roach says “Hey- I like this guy- he’s funny”…weird… We finally find out backstage trailer full with Coors light and free shoes … we set up camp outside our trailer which is flanked by Black Star (who were headlining the whole fest) and New Order. We let ‘em know Michigan is in the house leave Coors cans everywhere and generally just look fucking weird. The Black Star crew keeps looking at us all freaked out like we won some kind of sweepstakes or something. Roach takes his shirt off and proceeds to grip two 24 cases of Heineken and carry them around caveman style. Yeah we don’t fit in here. 70, 000 people total. We play dead last on our stage right when NIN is jamming so on the quiet Wolf parts you can hear “Head like a Hole” … funny shit… Romero heard some kids that thought we were Prodigy…funny…. Every Wolf member got total waysted so on the drive back to LA everyone passed out immediately … weird day man…

  4. Pittsburgh, PA - Dec = Last Wolf gig of the year and it ruled. After many attempts - the Conman was able to get Joe Roemer of Marconympha to come out and hang. Ruled…dude is a legend, no one’s like the man…. started off by yelling at cars, knew every drug hooker on the block by name- “Sandra wants to blow me for a dime bag but I ‘dunno… I’ll give a joint for sure,” brought two coolers of brew of all kinds/ no two were same…like he went to the party store and grabbed all the singles he could find…fucking amazing. Met up with the Wolf boys at this show cause the Graveyards were on tour as well and ruled to see Roemer hanging with Ben and Hans … the night ended with Joe playing my electronics and vocals and him picking kids up by their coats and throwing ‘em around. Roemer’s parting goodbye to me and Ben Hell was “Big noise, big feet - monster cock. Do the math." Killer way to end a killer year.

#1 January 29, 2006: C. Spencer Yeh

C. Spencer Yeh has long been a one-man underground out in Cincinnati, Ohio, formulating some of the heaviest post-Dream Syndicate metal this side of Faust, putting on shows, hooking up with itinerant improvisers like Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano and John Olson and releasing a ton of deeply defiant shit via his suave Drone Disco imprint. Yeh is also a sub-cultural thinker of some renown and his knowledge of various obscure musical/filmic byways is fairly staggering. Here he sweats a whole lot of brain-muscle over Australian harpist/improviser Clare Cooper’s new solo CD, Gut.

Clare Cooper is a young harpist from Australia. After (having the pleasure of) meeting her, I’ve determined that the harp is a truly difficult instrument to play - and I don’t necessarily mean technically. I mean anticipating the reactions one would usually receive from folks when revealing one’s main poison of choice is harp. Seems like besides being prepared with a palmful of blisters, one has to have a pretty good attitude. Maybe even a bit “cheeky”. It’s rare company as far as most know (Zeena Parkins? Rhodri Davies? Alice Coltrane? But mostly… Joanna Newsom??), and most venues can’t necessarily summon a harp the same way one could grip a piano or two mics (one for the violin, one for the voice) or a coldcut spread. Maybe it’s the sheer level of nerve wracked up to even begin to consider tackling such an imposing instrument… Aaanyways, her first solo disc - Gut - maybe it hit at the right personally, but damn if it isn’t fantastic; a killer surprise. Right there, while drinking morning coffee and throwing a jam on from “the pile,” I decided on the spot that this album was a platform on top of which I could spin around my vague issues about “improvisation” at the time in Autumn ‘05. The first time through, what had truly struck me wasn’t the music itself (don’t get me wrong – the sounds were what sat me down on the couch initially, instead of cleaning the kitchen) but its basic formal qualities – a frackin’ “solo improv CD” clocking in at around LP length – forty minutes or so, with an attention to sequencing that seems more akin to the usual “narrative” song-based concerns than whatever the “usual” approach towards a solo improv CD is. Which isn’t to say that the content itself is fancily typical harping gestures with some sharp angles; as the liners note “explorations in grit, texture and time” – maybe Joanna Newsom meets Organum (except without Joanna Newsom). Maybe Organum meets Clare Cooper (except without Organum). What would one expect if handed a “CD of solo harp improvisations” on the street (are there even that many to pass around the couch)?? and etc. Not to say all others are devoid of similar concerns, but we know our prejudices – a CD packed to the rim with demonstration after demonstration that you’d maybe hear the first third of at least five times, and wouldn’t even know the end of the disc if it had stand-up done in chicken voice. Perhaps I should frame Gut instead as just a solo album from a harpist, but I’d be fronting if I didn’t deny all the baggage I had checked in with me. In any case, sure, ultimately not the revolution but frack it, but I dug the disc. Here’s the brief rundown, beginning and end: The lead track features what I’m guessing is the guzheng (a Chinese harp) being flirted with (Cooper switches between this and yr average large-sized wiley harp), and from there, various levels of intellectual/instinctual sonic investigation which, if cranked to the right volume, can quietly ruin lifestyles. Especially if you are a professional harp tuner, or the gracious true owner of the instrument. No electric mini-fans used to wrestle the sounds, nor loop stations to freeze oneself in time – just closed eyes, hands, maybe notched sticks, and a little of that good ol’ bowing. Skipping to the end – the wrap-up track is simultaneously exactly what’s needed after all the previous destruction. Not to say that it strictly serves as yr average “hey I can play” track, but rather a certain release/gush/blast of sound that reminds me of the devastatingly unchoked closer on Kevin Drumm’s “Guitar” disc. Or the beautiful tumbling waves of cold human like Nobukazu Takemura’s “Icefall” track on “Scope.” As mysteriously elegant and dark as the rest of the album, with the right amount of focus. The music slips away and what’s to do with a “short” CD except play the damn thing over again. To truly round things out, the disc itself comes in a lovely Dual Plover..? case (with a soft fuzzy insert to lovingly protect the disc – kinda like Hair Police Blow Out Your Blood!) repping a great illustration rendered by Cooper herself (that somehow sums up the air in and around the disc quite well). A cottonmouth set of lips spewing the letters G-U-T; take a listen, read my above ramblings again, and figure it out for yrself. I have not heard anything else that Cooper is involved with (there is a duo called GERM, but apparently Australian 3"CD-Rs play counter-clockwise.?? It didn’t work on my Aiwa from Best Buy), but word on the street has it a second solo disc is going to drop at some point in the future. Clare, along with her double-bass wrestling dude Clayton Thomas, keep the action alive out in Sydney Australia, organizing tons of regular events as well as a regional improvisation/sound festival. If you search around on the internet, you can find video clips online of both shredding the frack out of their respective instruments. So check this disc out, buy a frackin’ ton of ’em so that she can afford to fly over to the Midwaste U.S. and jam out sometime soon. In the meantime if you run into Cooper on the street, just ignore the harp and instead squeeze some juicy Keiji Haino stories out of her. P.S. - thanks to Chris Wolf for some maniacal 2 AM discussion/help with this write-up.

#7 March 12, 2006: Matt Krefting

Matt Krefting plays in a whole bunch of the most routinely defiant northeastern rock and roll bands, including The Believers, Duck (who recently opened for Whitehouse), Shackamaxon, Face/Ass and Son Of Earth/Flesh On Bone Trio. His knowledge of the more ‘esoteric’ aspects of the David “Dave” Bowie, Asmus Tietchens, Klaus Schulze and Whitehouse catalogues is second to none, as is his poetry, prose and always beautifully applied nail varnish. He is one of the hardest-thinking, deepest listening and most aesthetically stupe sub-cultural linguists you could ever hope to meet, a truly beautiful man. Here he is on Whitehouse, a central long-term obsession.

“I’ve not much patience with mild or tidy pleasures.” -Président de Curval, 120 Days of Sodom

Whitehouse is one of the most important bands in my life. Since the very first time I heard them, they have challenged and astonished me in a totally unique way. I was introduced (as with so much great music) over at my dear friend Scott Foust’s late one night. I remember being struck right off at what an unsettling atmosphere the music had. There was a sense of tension and danger that was unlike any other music I’d ever heard, as well as an outrageously sick sense of humour. It all seemed so brave, intelligent, and sonically patient in a way that made it stand head-and-shoulders above much of the other noise material I was familiar with. This stuff wasn’t just interested in shocking; it was interested in exploring and provoking. I spent much of the next year buying up the CD reissues of the older records, digging into the harder-to-find stuff over at Scott’s, and playing it all constantly.

William Bennett has been mining the depths and pushing buttons in an astounding and completely singular way since the release of Come’s brilliant “Come Sunday” single in 1979 (the year before this young Krefting was born, and when Bennett himself was only 17 or so – he started Whitehouse in 1980). This music is massively confusing and aggravating on the one hand and hauntingly beautiful on the other. I find this stuff endlessly fascinating and affecting. How does it work? Why does it work? I’m a gentle soul, kids, and yet I find myself returning time and time again to these records about sex crimes, serial killers, genocide, depression, anger, and alienation. And none of it seems corny to me in the least. Despite the harsh noise and the disturbing lyrical content, this is still amazingly emotional, human music. Perhaps that is Whitehouse’s greatest strength: to go head-on into the darkest places we know, and to stay there, to make sense there and only there. In “Mindphaser,” (off the debut LP Birthdeath Experience from 1980), Bennett moans “The agony/ the ecstasy/ Feel the pain / the pleasure/ You like that don’t you.” Whitehouse understands that at their most extreme, these feelings can be so similar. Passionate hate can become passionate love can become passionate violence can become passionate acceptance and I’ll be damned if once you’re in there, once you’re really in there, you don’t have some kind of blinders on, and all that matters is that moment right there in front of you.

The nine (!) records Whitehouse cut for their own Come Organisation imprint between 1980 and 1984 are utterly amazing. These early records are so simple and so powerful. The title track to Erector remains an unfathomably huge musical influence on me. The simple coming and going of sounds, the almost subsonic rumble, and the fact that it is such a very patient piece of music (I know I’ve mentioned patience before, but I can’t stress it enough – Whitehouse has never been afraid of using space and distance to create atmosphere) all play into almost everything I record now. Through the use of reoccurring sonic devices (low, rumbling tones, the sounds of running water, high-pitching screeching feedback), Bennett lays the sonic groundwork for exploration of all manner of deviancy and degradation. I think it’s easy to overlook sometimes how compositionally innovative much of this music is. Take New Britain for example. As the record goes on, the silences between the tracks grows longer and longer, so that by the end we feel like we’re waiting forever for the next burst to begin. What a simple technique to build tension and expectation. Our most basic fears are exploited.

Whitehouse took a number of years off, but since starting the Susan Lawly label in 1988, Bennett has continued to evolve and hone his vision. While in many ways I think the early records create such a world of their own that it’s hard to imagine anything even slightly approaching them, the records that have followed have all been worth checking out, and there are enough moments of pure genius scattered across them to make it utterly necessary to be a Whitehouse completist. The vocals on the version of “Just Like a Cunt” from Mummy and Daddy alone are worth so much more than certain noise careers as a whole that you’d be a fool not to go all the way with this stuff. I feel as though the last bunch of records are all improvements on each other, and that just seems so refreshing: a group mining weirdly specific psychological and emotional territory and still pushing it further, still willing to re-examine itself.

I realized, when finally seeing the band perform late last year that much of the vitriolic spouting done by Bennett and cohort Philip Best (who joined the group in 1982 at the tender age of 14) could just as easily be directed at themselves as at anyone. Tears came to my eyes during “Cut Hands Has the Solution” (from 2003’s Bird Seed) as Best asked questions like “Have you ever hurt yourself to make somebody sorry?” or “Have you ever told on anyone? What somebody has told you not to tell.” Think about it: who HASN’T done that at one time or another, who hasn’t betrayed someone’s trust in some way? Bennett and Best are not excluded from their own venom by any means. The music is way too emotionally complex for that. It’s hit me only recently that part of the brilliance of Whitehouse is a strange, warped compassion. I have friends who can deal with Whitehouse for the most part but hate Buchenwald because of its Holocaust-based themes, but for me, what struck me right off about the record was the overwhelmingly mournful and melancholy tone it has, how sad it sounds. I love Dedicated to Peter Kurten because it is so willing to see things from Kurten’s point of view, so willing to try and understand him on some level. Bennett makes huge leaps in order to see people usually viewed as monsters as humans. And I don’t think that means he’s taking their side, I don’t think that means he’s condoning any of these actions, I don’t that means he’s glorifying them or holding them up as examples, I think it’s his way of exploring these things. Ah, shit, I said this stuff confuses me and it does, I don’t even know if I agree with myself anymore here, but I’m asking these questions, I’m thinking in ways I hadn’t before.

And so this is music that invites us to know ourselves fully, to go to dark places and have sick fun there, to be very frightened there, to lose ourselves enough that we come back changed. Who wants to be the same old boring fucking person they were yesterday anyway? So let’s not reject the dark any more than we reject the light, let’s use it all to learn. Let’s use this art to understand more. I’m not satisfied, are you? I can’t wait to hear the new record.

ps-While I’ve got your ear, I have to say that I’m ashamed to have left Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine off my “best of ‘05” for this site. Stupid Krefting!

#8 August 19, 2006: Angela Sawyer

For anyone who has ever ventured inside the door of New England’s premier avant/psych/punk record emporium and all-round swell hang-out – Twisted Village records – or even picked up a music rag worth reading, Angela Sawyer will be a name that rings instant bells as one of the most consistently entertaining, passionate, widely-listened, smart, stupe voices to come out of a culture that would regularly pass off mere cultural critique as the real ooh-poo-pah-doo. But we know different, and so does Angela. We’re flattered to have her on board, so much so that we threw the doors opened and asked her to write us about whatever was on her mind. She said it was Weird Voices and handed in the wildest/longest column we’ve had to date.

The Weirdest Voices in the World

Crooners are cool. Me, I love the shit outta Frank Sinatra. Follow the sweep of his intricate, immaculate phrasing and you will open the gate to the mental version of Disneyland. But as you and I know, Mr. Frog’s Wild Ride is not the only ride in the park, and it is not really all that wild. Go on over by the Haunted House, and you’ll find the barks, bellows, honks, howls, rasps, roars, screeches, shrieks, sighs, squeals, squeaks, wheezes, whispers and whoops. You say you wanna hear ’em scream? Follow the alphabet below.

Abruptum - Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me (Deathlike Silence) CD 1993

Testicle-in-a-vice champs, hands down. Abruptum sound like a drunk Keiji Haino singing over a teen-metal practice tape played on a boombox. If you think about it, Haino’s rather dippy to begin with, so the fact that somebody invented a stupider version of his schtick is pretty impressive. The story behind this band is also one of the best ever. They were a duo, consisting of a Swedish dwarf named It (nÇe Tony SÑrkÑÑ), and his best friend in corpsepaint, Evil. Word has it, it was It who first thought up an inner circle of elite black metal bands, which eventually became the Satanic Black Circle. I’ve also been told the inimitable It evinced the ’tortured’ performance on this album by literally nailing his hand to a table. Whips, and cutting up your back only to pour salt down it have also been rumored. Wonder of wonders, the band broke up after just a few years. Apparently, some other black metal dudes threatened his family, so It had to take a break, move to Finland, and sell all his chainmail. It later made a solo album dedicated to Evil, and they both ended up in other, more down-to-earth metal bands. These days, It claims he feels “more free than ever before” and swears he’s a towering 5'2". Could a band so ridiculous be real? You can write to Evil himself (nÇe Morgan HÜkansson) to find out: Box 609, 601 14 Norrkoping, Sweden.

David Seville/Chipmunks - The Chipmunk Song (Liberty) 45 1958

Known better by his stage name David Seville, Ross Bagdasarian invented the Chipmunks. He first hit the biz in 1951, when he and his cousin wrote “Come-On-A My House” for an off-Broadway show. After producer extraordinaire Mitch Miller forced it upon Rosemary Clooney, it became a huge hit and Ross was given a job at Liberty Records. He released a few singles as Seville, and got Patience and Prudence signed to the label. 1958’s “Witch Doctor” marked the first time Ross recorded his voice at 1/2 speed (the tape recorder which made it possible had just hit the consumer market). Ross’ uncle had also just moved to Walla Walla, Washington, inspiring the tagline “walla walla bing bang”. The novelty hit big and the money from it thwarted an impending bankruptcy for Liberty. Around Christmastime that year when their cash had again run dry, Liberty asked Ross for a follow-up. Bagdasarian’s four-year-old son Adam had been bugging him about presents. In addition, Ross had recently slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting a chipmunk, who legendarily stood up and chattered at the car. The result was “The Chipmunk Song”. Alvin, Simon and Theodore were named for record label honchos Al Bennett and Si Warnoker, plus the engineer for the session, Ted Keep. Bagdasarian also appeared in minor film roles, including an obsessive pianist in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Upon his death in 1972, Ross Bagdasarian’s eldest son, Ross Bagdasarian Jr., took over as the voice of the Chipmunks. He still releases their recordings today.

Dezurik Sisters - Arizona Yodeler (Vocalion) 78 1938

Dutch sisters raised along the Mississippi river, who grew up on a farm and imitated the animals there, especially the chickens. Their laser-sharp harmonizing and helium-high voices made them stand out even when country yodeling was as common as dirt. After an appearance at a county fair in Minnesota, they were invited to be part of the house band for the WLS National Barn Dance radio/stage show. Over the years, this weekly exposure led to performances on other nationally syndicated radio shows (who sometimes billed them as the Cackle Sisters to stave off contract disputes), as well as six sides for Vocalion and a movie appearance. Carolyn married WLS house guitarist Rusty Gill. Her sister Mary Jane married Augie Klein, the WLS accordion player. Both girls took a year off in 1940 to have children, and worked through WWII while their husbands were overseas. After a car crash in 1947, Mary Jane retired and was replaced by her younger sister Lorraine. Then in 1956, during a Midwestern fashion craze, the sisters and their backup band dropped their country songs and ran out to buy Bavarian suspenders. They soon became one of the polka sensations of Chicago.

Bo Diddley - Beach Party (Checker) LP 1963

Do you know Bo? Did you know he can bark like a dog? Not only is this record full of charbroiled blats of stomping hard rock, the song “Bo Diddley’s Dog” ends with a singularly accurate impression of a slobbering coonhound. Duchess & Jerome Green make the scene. Plus, like all good live records, the audience is piped in by the engineers at the mixing board.

Harm A. Drost - Speech After the Femoval of the Larynx (Folkways) LP 1964

Head of the speech department at an Ear Nose & Throat hospital in the Netherlands, Harm A. Drost has long spent his days writing papers like “Adductor Spasmodic Dysphonia and Botulinum Toxin Treatment”. In the imaginations of weirdos and record geeks however, ol’ Harm is a noise overlord. In an attempt to help laryngectomy patients adjust to their new world, he created one of the weirdest and most famous records on Folkways. It’s filled with ducky singing, lip pops, electronic buzzing, and a ton of screwed-up croaking. Also notable are painful anecdotes from patients, who lost all their friends and had their businesses go under as soon as they started talking like Kermit the Frog. Harm’s obvious passion for speech irregularities makes him a bit fussy. So give the poor bastard a break when he contends that those fancy artificial voice buzzers are just for people too stupid to learn to burp their way through every word. Harm also wrote a book in 1977 called Speech and Language: An Audiovisual Training Programme for Children with a Slowed Down Speech. It’s written in Dutch, and currently available from Amazon.

Paul Dutton - Mouth Pieces (Ohm) CD 2000

I refuse to be afraid of sound poets, even if they might be oxymorons. Dutton is the goofiest and least academic sound poet around. He’s been working in Canada with the Four Horsemen since 1970, and is pretty much just a regular guy who likes country records and yelling. This CD has a great drone number called “Hiding”, and I concede that it’s prim enough to make an NPR exec happy. But Dutton’s specialty are the tracks that have daffy conceptual punchlines, like “Jazzstory”. That’s the one where he squawks out hot free jazz, naming the names of each instrument, and using those same names to evoke each of their textures. No electronic effects or processing, no feedback, overdubs, or fades, and they have to tell you so right on the record cover because otherwise you might not believe it.

Leif Elggren/Thomas Liljenberg - 9.11 (Firework Editions) CD 1999

A fantastic fifty-eight minutes and eighteen seconds of two guys, laughing. Sometimes they chortle. Sometimes they snicker. Sometimes they giggle. Sometimes they sound like they’re faking it and then the fake laughing cracks them up again. The only thing they don’t do is stop. Supposedly a companion to their book of fake letters to celebrities (which is maniacally funny in its own right). I’d say this is far better defined as a testament to Elggren & Liljenberg’s ability to make a roller coaster of sonic energy out of nothing. My UPS deliveryman, who remained deaf to everything else he heard emanating from my environs, adored this record and wouldn’t stop bugging me about it until I made him his own copy. Elggren also has a record on the same label that’s nothing but snoring.

Essential Logic - Aerosol Burns (Cells/Rough Trade) 45 1978

16 year-old sax player, Lora Logic (aka Susan Whitby), answered an ad in the local paper for a punk musician and ended up joining X-Ray Spex. She got kicked out after a year, apparently because singer Poly Styrene thought she was getting too much attention. Logic tried art school for a couple of months, and then formed her own band and stepped up to the mike. Poly’s then-infamous hoots on “Oh Bondage Up Yours” were instantly made as threatening as margarine. Lora’s squealing was an inspired cross between Sid Vicious-style intonation and her own sax honking. And even though she ended up joining the Krishnas, you can still curdle a jug of milk if you leave it near your speakers while playing this single.

Hellhammer - Apocalyptic Raids (Noise) LP 1985

Before starting Celtic Frost, Thomas Fischer was just an unlucky teenager whose Mom had moved him to Switzerland. But he and a couple of friends loved Rush, Kerrang, Motorhead, and Venom (whose 45s they played on 33rpm, to get to the essence of their heaviness). So they got themselves some really heavy stage names, a really heavy Rickenbacker bass, and a whole lot of really heavy leather & eyeliner. And then they tried to write the heaviest song in the whole world. It worked. They eventually recorded the hamfisted “Triumph of Death”. Too inept to play their instruments, they hit the musical lottery with an utterly momentous scream. ‘Dambuster’ vocals indeed. It’s probably the greatest bray in recorded music history, and deservedly kicks off the song, the band, and the whole world of contemporary metal.

Pierre Henry - Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir (Philips) LP 1963

Teenaged Pierre started out as a drummer for classical orchestras. He wrote a couple of pieces, and then met Pierre Schaffer in ‘44, whose experiments in musique concrete were just getting underway. By the time of this piece 20 years later, musique concrete was a full blown movement and there were electronic & tape studios up and running around the world. Henry had far outclassed Schaffer as a composer and been on his own for years. However, the solo Henry still had no cause cÇläbre to rival Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge or Varese’s Poäme êlectronique. Enter a squeaky door in a country attic. The door is generally regarded to be the star of this piece, while the sigh merely sets up the punch lines. But endless minute variations on a single sound are Pierre’s calling card, and he squeezes the whiz outta cheese whiz during every minute of this number. Just count how many different kinds of rattles, scrapes and toots he gets out of one single little puff of air.

Junko - Sleeping Beauty (Elevage de Poussiere) LP 2004

Singer from Hijokaidan (translation: Emergency Exit), commonly known as Patty Waters, cubed. Her solo record is a monolith, and it is absolutely true that it will make you go blind if you play it loud enough. Junko spikes the punch with piercing whoops, drives everything with amazing energy, and sports complete control of all those scratchy edges. The b-side is also the a-side backwards, as though hearing the damn thing forward hadn’t obliterated you already.

Helen Kane - I Wanna Be Loved By You (Victor) 78 1928

Helen began performing at age 15: a tiny, roly-poly singer with a silly, squeaky yelp. Her lack of pitch and thick Bronx accent kept her from being a headliner, but she soldiered along the lower echelons of vaudeville for several years. She changed her last name when she was married for the first time in the mid 20s, and kept the name for its showmanship even after her husband was long gone. In ‘28, during a typical appearance at the Paramount in Times Square, she performed one of the hits of the day (“That’s My Weakness Now”), and decided to toss in a little scat line. “I just put it in at one of the rehearsals,” she reflected later. “It’s like vo-de-o-do, Crosby with boo-boo-boo and Durante with cha-cha-cha.” But Helen’s boop-boop-a-doop made her a sudden star. She was soon raking in 5 & 1_2 grand a week to appear in Oscar Hamerstein’s Good Boy. And in it she introduced her megahit “I Wanna Be Loved By You”. A countrywide fad ensued, with dolls manufactured in her image, look-alike contests, and heaps of radio and nightclub performances. In 1930, animators Dave, Max, and Louis Fleischer decided to satirize Helen’s overwhelming popularity with a caricature. They assigned a staff animator to draw up a girlfriend for their character Bimbo the Dog. As Betty Boop slowly became the main character in the Fleischer cartoons, her popularity began to outstrip Kane’s own. Although Helen continued to perform on & off for the rest of her life, a two-year-long lawsuit with the cartoon company effectively ended her national stardom.

Leo Kupper - s/t (IGL) LP 1981

Kupper tells you in the liner notes that he has just invented Phonetic Music, which looks to be a French cross between musique concrete & sound poetry. He’s very interested in codifying vocal production, and so includes some amusing diagrams of an epiglottis, nasal cavity, larynx, etc. However methodical the means, this fantastic record positively bubbles over with wild spluttering, purring, & gargling. Each side has both a gentleman and a lady present, and while side a lets the sibilants do the talking, side b tosses in a bit of processing.

Joan LaBarbara - Tapesongs (Chiaroscuro) LP 1977

Throughout the 70s, Morton Feldman, John Cage, and pretty much every other composer you might think of wrote their voice pieces specifically for Joanie. She can circular sing, sing two notes at once, and make a whole host of other glottal clicks, chirps, and trills. This album is where she first began to make multitrack voice pieces, and also to try out orchestral compositions that drew upon extended vocal techniques rather than merely containing them. It also contains her most pithy, not to mention pissy, song “Cathing”. “Cathing” is a tape piece that takes off from a nasty 1977 interview with a singer who disliked the then-current avant garde. Best guess I’ve ever heard is that the interviewed singer is none other than Cathy Berberian, but nobodys talking.

Menstruation Sisters - Triple Bogie on a Ma Pa Hole (private) 3x7inch 2002

Nik Kamvissis (aka Nik the Greek, Nick Rizili, or The Black Throated Wind) sounds like he might not be a person. I prefer to think he doesn’t exist at all. It’s much more likely that Oren Ambarchi works nights at an Australian zoo. This would explain how he got himself a mockingbird, who appears in a duet with the aforementioned Mr. Wind on this record. It would explain things even better if it turned out that Ambarchi just captured a small monkey and twisted its head around in exorcist circles a few times, before pressing record and letting the thing loose.

Emmet Miller - I Ain’t Got Nobody (Okeh) 78 1928

Miller is the real killer-diller. Nick Tosches wrote a whole damn book on this guy, and I don’t think for a second that I can outwrite the Brando of music critics. Gotta slap the high five here though, as Miller’s wild, crazy-ass cackle of a yodel is astouding to behold. Copied by Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams & Bob Wills. Played with the Dorsey brothers, Teagarden, Krupa & the glorious Eddie Lang. There’s also more info on yodels here: http://www.wfmu.org/~bart/yodel.html

John Lennon/Yoko Ono - Two Virgins (Apple) LP 1968

Did you know that the female voice is supposed to be processed in a different part of the brain than the male voice, and that it takes milliseconds longer? No surprise then, that your brain, no matter how long you give it, cannot process Yoko. This particular album is improvised, so no, it’s not quite as tight as Life With the Lions. But who the hell are you to complain? Forget the naked pictures and the zen-sex-at-dawn crap that goes along with this record. ‘Cause when the queen of scream opens up her mouth, she sounds like a freakin’ cockatiel on crack.

Ros Sereysothea - Collection Vol. 1 (Khmer Rocks) CDR 2004

Outside the US-Euro conglom, thin & screechy female vocals tend to get the respect they deserve. There’s a jillion girls who can make you cry with the whines they push through their noses. But Sothea is the whiner who will make you cry the hardest. These days, thanks to http://khmerrocks.com, you don’t even have to travel eight thousand miles and make vague gestures at a cassette stand. There’s still very little information available on Sothea, except the kind you get from Cambodian cab drivers. But the story goes that she was raised in the countryside, unable to read or write. She was in a local band with her parents, singing duets with her brother. Enticed by the money of the big city, Sothea and her brother moved to Phnom Penh & landed jobs at nightclubs. By the mid-60s the king had named her the Golden Voice of the Royal Capital. She notoriously ran through several men, most of whom thought being a singer was sleazy. In 1975 after the capture of Phnom Penh, Sothea was taken to a Khmer Rouge camp. Before long, her celebrity was discovered and she was required to sing communist party songs for officers in addition to regular camp work. A marriage to one of Pol Pot’s assistants was arranged in 1977, and clashes between this husband and the leader of the camp led to her death.

Sonny Sharrock - Black Woman (Vortex) LP 1969

For our purposes, Linda is the real story here. The damn album shoulda been under her name to begin with. After all, who cares about some guitar dude when there’s a feral hyena in the room? Linda’s orgiastic wailing takes more from horn guys like Pharoah Sanders than singers like Abbey Lincoln. So sometimes she plays with the band and sometimes she steps out front. Sometimes she sings clear tones, and sometimes she just emits spastic wails. Either way, to this day even those people who will tell you they like the weird stuff instantly hate Linda. So use this as a litmus test to make sure your friends aren’t just a bunch of namby-pambys.

Joseph Spence - Good Morning Mr. Walker (Arhoolie) LP 1972

The king of the incomprehensible, with a voice that shovels more gravel than a bulldozer. Spence coughs, snorts and growls his way through every syllable, grunting against the rhythm of his guitar playing. This one’s my favorite of his, recorded when ol’ Joe’s caterwaul was 61 years aged & stinking ripe. Most folks spit up their lunch soon as they hear his version of “Sloop John B”. Spence spent most of his life traveling back and forth between Nassau and Andros. His style was cultivated during a 1930s stretch working as a sponge hooker. Known in the Bahamas as rhyming, a similar style had already developed when those farming live sponges from the mud shallows couldn’t get home for Sunday services. Instead they would improvise call-n-response songs to well worn bible verses. Spence was discovered by Alan Lomax in 1935, then rediscovered by Sam Charters in 1958, and yet again by Kweskin Jug Band’s Fritz Richmond in 1964.

Stackwaddy - Bugger Off (Dandelion) LP 1972

Blasted blooze vaguely in the vein of Beefheart or Edgar Broughton, but played by actual dumb construction workers. A total classic of stoopid boogie. Frontman John Knail’s “singing” voice has a texture like someone ripping up bedsheets. Curiously enough, that’s not even the benighted sir Knail’s most prominent vocal hallmark. “You Really Got Me” & “Willie the Pimp” also feature his weird truncated grunting. Where most rock or metal singers would explode, this guy simply ejects. And it’s bound to make you giggle at least once. Knail had no interest whatsoever in arty hippies, and was therefore pleased to hurl beer bottles at audience members who weren’t paying enough attention. John Peel reported that he once jumped down and beat the living shit out of a couple who were busy making out in a corner. And lo, I therefore charge ye: Don’t Make War. Don’t Make Love. Make ‘Waddy.

Dayle Stanley - A Child of Hollow Times (Squire) LP 1963

Dayle is a Joan Baez type from Boston (hometown props). She topped Broadside magazine’s best of local list the year this record came out. She would be merely a typical strident folkie, except that Dayle decided to insert a freaky cross between a yodel and a rolled ‘r’ in half her songs. This makes her the female answer to Robbie Basho (who is definitely one of the hottest howlers), except that she only has two albums. So far as I know, nobody on earth knows what happened to her. Q.E.D., my money’s on pregnancy.

Patty Waters - Sings (ESP) LP 1965

Everybody knows this one, but it can still make you bleed under your skin. The strangled blurt at minute 8 is the obvious mindblower (out of 13 mins, in “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”, in case you’re a greenhorn). But it’s a moment long about minute 12 that remains my personal favorite. That’s when Patty really sounds like she’s smokes 2 packs of Parliaments a day & just fried up your testicles for breakfast. She serves ’em with a smile too. Backup band on this record is Burton Greene on piano, Steve Tintweiss on bass & Tom Priceon on drums. Besides the two ESP records, there are also two recent albums, one in 1996 (not so bad) and one last year (downright awful, and not the good kind). Trivia buffs: Patty hit #2 for best vox in the 1967 Downbeat poll. And you can tell your Mom that she was not just some untrained hippie college student. Really, Waters did do some near-pro straight jazz singing, and studied in Los Angeles under Herbie Hancock & Miles Davis for a few years before moving to NYC.

Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers - The Colored Sacred Harp (New World) CD 1993

Sacred Harp, aka shape note singing, is a type of musical notation for acapella church choirs, invented in the late 1700s. It has a limited number of symbols (4 or 7, depending on which church you attend). The symbols can be sung at any pitch, and everybody tunes themselves to each other. Lots of the songs in the various shape note songbooks are rounds or have rounds tossed in somewhere. The whole thing is not too dissimilar to how the Ellington band’s famous cross-voicing could still work even though half the band couldn’t read charts. This particular Sacred Harp tradition splintered off in the early 1900s because all the other shape note songbooks would only print songs authored by white people. The songbook they use was published in 1932 and most of its songs were written by Judge Jackson, or one of his twelve children. In fact, several of the judge’s descendants perform in the choir recorded here. All of the above may explain why so many members of this choir seem to be ground sloths of the early Oligocene epoch. More than one of these hoary geriatrics can spew wet moths from their ancient lungs, and the result is a genuinely grizzly polyphony. Take special note of the expectorant bawl 40 seconds into track 9, “Jesus Rose”. That guy was definitely already dead when the tape rolled.

Various - Cajun Country: Don’t Drop the Potato (Vestapol) VHS 1990

Mushmouthed cajun fiddler Dennis McGee was born in 1893. So at the time of his appearance in this documentary, he was about as old as Jesus. He performed during the 1920s and 1930s with accordionist AmÇdÇ Ardoin, and for decades with his brother-in-law fiddler Sady Courville. McGee recorded for Vocalion, Brunswick, Melotone, and Swallow, and is most famous for 1929’s “Madame Young Donnez Moi Votre Plus Jolie Blonde”. This became the best-known standard of the genre even though it borrowed the tune of another notable cajun song “Allons Danser Colinda”. McGee finally kicked the bucket in 1989, but not before he was filmed here by Alan Lomax, toothlessly howling a funeral-slow, incomprehensible, keyless, and arhythmic “Jolie Blonde”.

68 more wailin’ records

#9 September 3, 2006: Neil Campbell

photo by www.palmereldritch.co.uk

Neil Campbell was a key player in the UK underground before anyone was dope enough to even posit its existence. Alongside friends and collaborators Richard Youngs and Matthew Bower, Campbell was one of the first players to intuit a post-punk/DIY aesthetic that drew on the primal/liberating modes of free jazz without so much as a trumpet in his gub or a concept in his brain, tacking drone-think, psychoactive minimalism and primitive sonic environs together in a way that felt so completely natural and directly related to the source that for a while he was one of the few UK players you could point to as evidence of any kind of indigenous rock tradition that hadn’t been pansied by UK pop/vaud schtick. These days there are legions of free/folk/drone/noise kids in the UK – and beyond – who have further streamlined and elucidated the kinda raunch alphabets that Campbell first invented as a solo musician, a member of The A-Band, Smell & Quim, Vibracathedral Orchestra and Astral Social Club and a collaborator with whoever you wanna dream up, but his music – not to say his constant boosting of new artists – remains a central, restlessly alive part of where modern underground rock is and is looking to go. So, hats off man. Here he is.

When I first thought about writing this, around the start of this year, I’d not heard many people blether on about what a great thing Karl Bauer’s Axolotl band is. His underground peers were getting all the kudos, and you know I like them all just fine - The Skaters are the unfettered stormtroopers of 21st century soul music, D Yellow Swans throw super-gristle-ised slabs of tecto at the moon, Burning Star Core is kinda the new Faust, Wolf Eyes is kinda the new Venom, etc etc etc - but up until comparatively recently there has been something supremely humble and homely and quietly just “there” about Axolotl that maybe made it a little trickier for critics to wax hyperbolical about. Conveniently enough, now I’ve finally got my arse in gear to write this, Axolotl’s recent recordings have been more confident and expansive than before, and more people than ever seem to have their ears open to them, so now’s the time to dip in if you’ve ever wondered before. So what’s the deal? I first picked up on Axolotl with the first CD for Psych-o-path records - great stupid name for a label, axolotls are one of my favourite animals, and the press bumf suggested an affinity with Black Dice, so I was there. And I was not burned, as I so often have been before, by the hype. That CD opened up into a real heart-warming stew of electronic splat, violin rasp and cool tone-float - blissed, but edgy too. I was intrigued by the range of ideas on there and the way the thing had a weight without anything screaming in my face, but needed to know if it was a one-off or the start of something beautiful. The answer came in the form of the mighty slabs of tone-generator Kluster-fugged spin-cycle pandemonium on the Axolotl/D Yellow Swans/Gerritt collab CDR and, most especially, the “Oranur” CDR, a gorgeous 25 minute suite where rinky-dink kitchen percussion rattled off Karl’s violin on the more forward-moving tracks and floating tone clouds salved my weary brain on the near-static moments. Genius moves, but releases both impossible to find now. Like so many right now, Axolotl moves fast, consorts widely and doesn’t appear to have much interest in crafting “masterpieces”. To catch him in full glory you’ve often got to snap up small-run CDRs and LPs before they disappear - yeah yeah yeah, I know everyone’s always trying to shift their crap quick with the limited edition schtick, but it’s worth grabbing everything you can with the Axolotl name on. For instance, the “Object phantom” CDR on Spirit of Orr is worth months of your time, ballooning huge and happy tones that massage the same part of the brain as Terry Riley, Harmonia, Sunroof!, Gas, you know the score. But… 100 copies? Jeez, who the hell is ever gonna find a copy of that for sale these days? Whatever, I’ve never heard Axolotl suck, so everything out of print is worth grabbing, whether eBay or soulseek is your bag. If you were wanting a good place to start these days, I’d check the recent 12" on Gipsy Sphinx, “Chemical theatre” - it’s the point all earlier Axolotl releases have been aiming for, and achieved fleetingly, stretched out to fill 2 long tracks that satisfy my deep-soak mind like not much else since Wolfgang Voigt disappeared a few years back. But even better, wilder, warmer, more human - like the best ecstatic music, it drags you in and takes you there, but there’s the option some days of being able to stand back and admire how its feet are mired in the dirty floor crash pad struggle to pay the rent and get laid and get the portastudio to work properly. Maybe if Wolfgang had wandered not into Köln club scene oblivion, but instead into the German forest his Gas records alluded to, spent a few months eating acorns and hunkering down on a bunch of strange strings, refracting the results through a primitive stack of looping equipment, real boombox tape-saturation mindset, he might have been hitting some similar spots. The Voigt thing’s pertinent, as I know Karl’s a fan, and I’ve been smitten too. Top of my head, I’d say M:i:5’s “mikrofon”, Gas’s “Pop” and All’s “Alltag” are his apexes, but a few years ago the guy seemed to be effortlessly redefining music with almost every one of his many many releases. And if you can keep up with the Axolotl release schedule, you may be wondering if Karl isn’t capable of working at the same level of easy invention. Different scene, but same balance between mundanity and quest for oblivion, same grace and speed of movement. A bad place to start would be the Mouthus/Axolotl collab LP, perhaps my least favourite of Karl’s releases, recorded a couple of years ago on Christmas Day. Ferkristzake! Didn’t these guys have a party or families to go to? But even this jam really gets going on the second side, when the churning dunderhead sludge and alien insect electronics morph into a real boss swirl. It pretty great actually, but just feels to me like it’s more Mouthus than Axolotl, so you’d be missing out on the full Bauer bang, assuming that’s what you’re after. And if that’s not what you’re after, what the hell are you after? And the Skaters/Axolotl split LP seems to have disappeared as soon as it was released - my original idea was to use its existence to blether about all things Axolotl here, but what’s the point in waxing long on long-gone wax? In a just world Catsup Plate would go for a repress, but there are only so many hours in Rob Carmichael’s day, so give him a break. But is it any good? Does a bear shit in the woods? OF COURSE it’s good. Great, in fact. The Axolotl side is right up there with his best work, an elevated and excessive loop splurge in three parts that upgrades the more delicate earlier sound with his new boisterous energy vibration, and works for me regardless of time of day, season, playback medium, mood, whatever. I first had a dub of it last winter, when I spent much time on the graveyard shift with our new baby. In the middle of one night I threw it on while feeding young Magnus, nearly dozing on the settee, with our cat also sat on my lap, all three of us huddled primordially to keep warm. My sleep-deprived brain couldn’t work out if the sound seemingly percolating under the second track was the cat purring or the music - it all fitted so perfectly. Turns out it was the music, which points to the kind of humble genius at play here. Crank up the same side armed with whatever stimulants float your boat and it’s a skullfucking rollercoaster yawp of homebrewed psychedelic intensity, a flaming freewheeling brain-juggernaut, a real trip and all that, but it works its head-spinning magic equally well at middle-of-the-night no-volume. I’ll tell you again: it’s really really great. And The Skaters take it to another level with the casio toy piano on the flip, as you may imagine (and you’ll have to imagine it if you haven’t grabbed a copy by now), but you don’t wanna hear another 40-year old British guy cop a feel of James and Spencer’s collective arse here, do you? So, praise the lord that Psych-o-path has just dropped “Way blank”, another full-length, and fairly widely available Axolotl CD on the world. The scope here is wider than the recent vinyl, with more disparate approaches on show. Sure, there’s the obvious invigorating monochord bliss of the opening track, “Pneuma”, which is based around what sounds like a skipping CD, wallpapering the glitches with ever-escalating loops and loops and looping wordless chanting loops before abruptly pulling the plug after 5 minutes. Amazing. A lesser soul might have kept it steadier and kept it going as a full-side jam, but Karl’s keeping it focussed here. And, sure, it’s maybe only a skipping CD, but it’s skipping around on the maximum-pleasure fifth harmonic, creating a big warm power-chord. Like I said earlier, it’s the Axolotl transmogrification of the rickety broken down quotidian into something vast and elevated that really does it for me - “musica mundana” is the old term for Harmony of the Spheres, but could just as easily be translated as Mundane Music, y’know? The purring cat story isn’t just my imagination, I’m sure - Bauer has a wide open ear to the sea surge of sound out there, and a staggeringly intuitive grasp of how to drop that sound onto you, there, in the comfort of your home, now. Yeah. Elsewhere the churchy shimmer of the title track and the freaked fourth-world thrum of the closing track “There are sometimes miracles” hit all the beauty spots that you’d expect an Axolotl recording to hit, but Karl boils the tonality up into some pretty ear-cleaning and unexpected noise in between that really keeps your brain on its toes. It’s real top-end joy that, like the best of Bower’s work, reclaims power electronics and new age from the posers who blight both musics, open and smiling and trashing the chasm between them, no tightrope, no sweat. Can you get to that? C’mon hippy, c’mon macho man, throw off your shackles! Get with the modern sound! OK, OK, I’ve ranted long enough. I love these records. You should all give ’em a whirl. Karl’s a great guy too. Buy him a beer if you ever run into him. But what we need now is a whole new set of Axolotl releases. If you’ve seen him play recently you’ll know he’s been driving his set using these tiny and beautifully-tuned dulcimers, rippling through the usual barrage of loops and electronics, and I’ve heard nothing in the way of documentation of this set-up. So, give it a few months and the blast of “Way blank” may seem as antiquated as the first Axolotl CD does when played alongside his newer recordings. Karl’s muse is still moving fast, his soul is heavy, ancient, but his brain is a twenty-first century one. And to paraphrase one of the great minds of last century, you better lookout, honey, because he’s using technology. No time to make no apology. Yeah!

#11 May 20, 2007: Mike Bernstein

photo by Chris Gray

Mike Bernstein is a central cog in the Northeastern USA art/noise scene. As a member of Double Leopards he brought a sophisticated feel for primitively re-wired electronics and hi-jacked music software to the table, lending their already fathoms-deep sound a couple of miles more boom. As a member of Religious Knives alongside his partner Maya Miller and Nate Nelson from Mouthus he has convincingly formulated new approaches to rock song that would incorporate the most advanced noise syntax. As co-owner of the Heavy Tapes imprint he has been at the forefront of the analog renaissance and has set new standards for homemade art documentation, an area of interest that he has further expanded upon via his curatorship of the current Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now exhibition at Printed Matter in New York City. We’re pleased to welcome him as a Volcanic Tongue columnist with a very personal piece on Bootleg Culture.

“Live Every Time” By Mike Bernstein

It started at a head-shop/record store next town over called “Prime Cuts” that my Safta (Grandma to you) misheard as “Chaim Putz” when we asked her to take us there. She waited outside in the car while my brother and I went in to spend some of that beautiful grease that we always got floated when Safta was around. I wandered around and checked out CDs in long boxes, some dusty records, and some truly righteous t-shirts while my brother looked through a binder, filled out forms, and waited around for…a cassette? Turns out he was picking live Grateful Dead sets out of a list of chronologically arranged recorded shows that were available for something like $2.00 each and copied onto Maxell Chrome c90 tapes. He would pick the date, they would copy it for him in the back, use a pricing gun to mark the date on the tape (it doesn’t cost 1, 210.69, it’s 12/10/69) and then he would copy the set list out of the book onto a J-Card of your choice (Calvin & Hobbes, Dancing Bears, pictures of the boys, etc.) and he would walk out with a whole new show he’d never heard before. I thought the band was weird for supporting the tapers, got generally mystified by the whole experience, and then started to buy my own pieces. It was an easy bike ride from my house. I’d pick based on the song titles, even if I didn’t know what they sounded like or were about. Simple things intrigued me – “Beat it on down the line” was always abbreviated as “BIODTL” and I was very intrigued on what a “China Cat” and a “Sunflower” had to do with each other and how a –> could really connect them. What kind of connection was that? I learned how to listen to a band live by listening to these tapes. They’re always live; live every time. Your walkman is a time machine and so is your turntable. I loved the applause, the stage banter, and of course, the songs. Some of the tapes were recorded so well that the transparency was almost frightening. Others are noisier, rife with conversation, exploding with applause, shock, and amusement. I wasn’t deep enough to make it through a Dark Star –> Drums –> Space 45 minute side yet, but the depths of the tunes, the great ones, really got to me. 15 years later I’m still obsessed with collecting live shows. I’ve never been to any of these gigs, but I’ve read about them, studied pictures of them, and pretended I was there. Some bands and the rare solo performer just transcend “the gig,” but it’s a mixture of complex emotions that draws fans to pursue these recordings. It’s more than just collecting. It’s the closest thing we have to musical transubstantiation. The bootlegs for some bands, like the Dead, are popular because the band played so often, and recorded so little in the studio. Others are so guarded with their lives or ideas that people can’t help but be curious. What do they reveal when you can get a real sense of the environment when they’re playing? In my opinion this is why Dylan’s “Great White Wonder” was the first popular rock bootleg – because the dude was so inscrutable! You know that if people were camping out outside his house that they were collecting his live shows. Dylan might have considered both of those things trash at the time, but his live work still continues to astound. His shiniest moments, including the epic tour with The Hawks in 1965-66, the Basement Tapes work (kind of a bootleg in this sense, but still private and mouldy as anything in the basement of Safta’s house in Queens), and the unbelievably rich Rolling Thunder tour from 1975-76 are rife with timeless classic moments of pathos, joy, and musical discovery. Live! As many times as you can handle it. Neil Young is another great example of an oft-bootlegged performer who was free and easy in so many contexts that his fans needed (and still do need) some crib sheets to get ready for the next time around, even if they ended up being useless half of the time. Neil is famous for being justifiably but perhaps excessively controlling about his recorded output, and the examples of his live performances on unauthorized LPs are rare but very powerful treasures – He makes jokes! The audience cracks up! He’s up there alone, with a piano and a harp around his neck, wearing white jeans, a white t-shirt, and suspenders. His hair is short, his eyes are red. He’s alone. Part of collecting bootleg LPs is not only getting closer to the band, but getting closer to the fans. Deadheads, for instance, made awesome looking “fan club” and “giveaway” LPs of live shows which heavily feature crudely drawn skulls, scrawled wasted aphorisms, and no dearth of grinning bears. Neil Young fanatics crudely and sometimes disgustingly hid their obsessive releases with garish covers of tropical getaway scenes and red-lipped vaudevillians. Don’t ask. The shows that they cared about end up being the shows that you care about. Some call it piracy, theft, greed, whatever. What is it that draws someone to release a live show on LP? I don’t care, but the results are the real deal – re-contextualized pictures of your heroes. Cheap. The tops for me, live, are the obvious ones…I’m easy. The Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Rolling Stones. Not to mention Throbbing Gristle, The Fall, Joy Division and Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Bad Brains, and also Jefferson Airplane, Trad Gras Och Stenar, and man, Coltrane, Miles Davis, and recently Wooden Wand, Hair Police, Aaron Dilloway, and Vibracathedral Orchestra, amongst others. But the best live, on wax, are the Dead, the Velvets, and Neil. No doubt about it in my mind and I have stacks of horribly packaged, poorly pressed and unevenly recorded documents amongst the few princely examples of high quality recordings (packaged “simply” but “effectively” – that triple LP set from Germany, for instance, or the official looking Bottom Line joint) – to prove it. There’s certain kinds of record shops that you can just tell will have good bootlegs as soon as you walk in. There was that one in Brussels where the ROCK section was so swelled with live shows that I ran out of time halfway through the H’s. In NYC there’s Subterranean, which has Television and Velvets posters all over the walls and has as many live albums as studio albums for most of the bands listed above. The dusty ones will almost always set you up – by now I’ve trained my senses and my spine tingles when I cross the threshold, usually onto a wooden plank floor and often to the chagrin of the shopkeeper who is all but passed out in a rocking chair. Mooncurser, we’ll miss you. I’m not shy about wishing I was there. It’s a well documented fact, personally bolstered by my own (admittedly wimpy in comparison) experiences “on the road” and “in the studio,” that you take it to a whole new place when you have to play it live every night. When you’re trying to make it happen like that, on that scale, it usually does. I like sections of my record collection to have some real depth. The breadth of any collection should be wide within its given niche, but it’s the depth, for me, that has proven most evocative. Having the studio albums, the extra tracks, the singles, and live shows all next to each other and available allows you to see the cubist view of the artist. It’s an almost profane desire that we have to understand as much as we can about the artist whose words and sounds impress us so deeply. Lately though, in the past few years I would say, I have been obsessed on a new level – beyond imagining myself in Wembley Empire Pool in 1972 with gloves on because it was so cold, watching the Dead’s first and second shows in their Europe ‘72 tour – one that frightens me but compels me equally. I started to download the shows from the above performers, which are posted all over the internet for free in uncompressed formats which sound amazing. All of the people who used to trade tapes now trade CD-Rs and download on both public and private networks. Everything is digital which means everything can be shared. And shared it is! Some of the resonance is missing, and I still prefer vinyl when I can get it, but this kind of trading has made the disparate pieces fit together that much more easily. I have found clarity in a lot of these recordings which are passed around this way – tapes or LPs that I have of shows from the 60s and 70s have been submitted to the virtual meat-grinder and emerge spotless! While LPs can often be made from whichever recordings the label could get their hands on, only the highest quality recordings are traded in these networks. This doesn’t mean you can’t hear the applause and laughter, it just means that no songs are skipped, nothing is edited to fit the side of an LP, and you can generally hear all of the instruments and a good strong vocal. The Dead took their live mixes very seriously. They knew it was how the real fans heard them, in a concert hall. Anyone can download this stuff and I’m posting some links to where it can be gotten from, along with a list of favourite bootleg LPs, easier to get CDs, and some reading material. Be sure to check mp3 blogs as well for this material – they have flourished as a fantastic resource to anyone obsessed enough to care. Bootleg LPs: Quicksilver Messenger Service “Maiden of the Cancer Moon” (contact me if you’re selling this) Grateful Dead “Rampens Revenge,” “More Cosmik Messages,” “Mountains of the Moon” Bob Dylan “Great White Wonder,” “The Complete Basement Tapes” Velvet Underground “and so on…,” “Live 1966,” “Sweet Sister Ray” Neil Young “Live at the Bottom of the Hill,” “Live in San Bernadino” Great White Wonder Rolling Stone Article 1969 http://www.punkhart.com/dylan/disco/gww.html GDLIVE http://gdlive.com/ Grateful Dead on etree http://db.etree.org/bs_d.php?year=1972&artist_key=2 Archive.org Dead Shows by Date http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Grateful%20Dead%22&sort=-%2Fmetadata%2Fdate&page=57 Neil Young / Rust Radio http://www.rustradio.org/tracker/ Dylan Tree http://bt.dylantree.com/ General Source for Live Shows (good Velvets, etc.) : http://www.tapecity.org/ “California Acid Folk” Vinyl Rip http://lost-in-tyme.blogspot.com/2006/12/va-california-acid-folk.html Glastonbury Festival 1971 Bootleg http://lost-in-tyme.blogspot.com/2006/10/va-glastonbury-fair-festival-1971.html California Christmas Album (including QMS, JA, GD, etc.) http://lost-in-tyme.blogspot.com/2006/12/merry-christmas-people_19.html Quicksilver Live 7/10/68 http://lost-in-tyme.blogspot.com/2006/12/quicksilver-messenger-service.html

#12 June 10, 2007: Alan Licht

See here

#13 February 10, 2008: Lasse Marhaug

photo by Gunnar Marhaug

VT is psyched to welcome on-board Mr Lasse Marhaug as a new contributing columnist. As well as being one of the most prolific and bloody-minded of European avant-thugs, Lasse is a fucking encyclopaedia of obscure lore regarding the kind of Industrial/avant/punk/noise releases the average VT reader lies awake dreaming of. His own Pica Disk label has had a pretty much flawless run to date, with a massive box set compiling the best of his prodigious cassette album output sitting alongside releases by fellow spirits like Birchville Cat Motel, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants. As a musician you’d be here all night listing his many groups and collaborations, but projects like Jazkamer/Jazzkammer, Nash Kontroll, Del and Testicle Hazard remain his highest profile gigs, supplemented by an on-going series of collaborations that includes work with Merzbow, Maja Ratkje, Mats Gustafsson, John Wiese and Oren Ambarchi. He is also one of the nicest avant garde connoisseurs you could ever share a cigar with. We asked Lasse to hip VT to his favourite unknown Norwegian recordings and he handed us our asses back on a plate.

THE BEST NORWEGIAN MUSIC YOU’VE NEVER HEARD BJØRN FONGAARD Galaxy (1965)

Norwegian sound-art/tape music isn’t very well known compared to what our neighbours the Swedes were doing in the 60ies and 70ies. It’s a shame to admit it, but there simply weren’t as much happening here as around the scene of Fylkingen, EMS and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. We have Arne Nordheim, famous within Norway, and who has reached a new audience abroad through the reissues of his 60ies electronic works on the Rune Grammofon. Nordheim was great. No doubt about it. And he is still going strong. But my favourite Norwegian sound-art piece is Galaxy by the composer and guitarist Bjørn Fongaard. Fongaard passed away in 1980, and left behind him a large body of work, both written music and recorded electronic pieces for tape/guitar. Sadly much of this music is unavailable. In fact much of his written music was never recorded (or even performed) due to classic performers at the time being unable and unwilling to read his unfamiliar notation. Galaxy from 1965 is his masterpiece. A 12 minute tour-de-force of prepared manipulated guitar. Imagine a mixture of Keith Rowe meets Tod Dockstader. Far-out, trippy and beautiful. But surprisingly Fongaard was not part of the hippie-avant garde generation of his days. From an interview I’ve seen with Fongaard done for Norwegian TV in 1971 he comes across as an elderly man, dressed in suit and tie, keeping a dayjob as a mathematician, who had developed a strict compositional method for his guitar excursions. He seemed unaware of what was going in the sound-world around him. Isolated. Perhaps here lies the explanation of why Galaxy sounds so alien and fresh even today. The piece was released on LP as part of a compilation called Electronic Music From Norway in the early 70ies, and in the 80ies on a compilation from the Norwegian composers society. Both long since out of print.

FAMLENDE FORSØK Ars Transmutatoria (Eldricht Records, LP, 1990)

Famlende Forsøk was the trio of Brt, Lumpy Davy and Chrisph. Their name roughly translates to something along the lines of ‘stumbling efforts’. But their debut album from ‘90 is anything but that. Famlende Forsøk was part of a prog/punk/hippie/freak scene in the south of Norway, documented on cassette releases on their own Shit Tapes label. They started out in the mid 70ies, doing tapes and the yearly Sprø Musikk (Crazy Music) festival. So by the time this LP came out in 1990 Famlende Forsøk had already been going for a long while. Not many bands take ten plus years to get their debut album ready. But man was it worth the wait. Ars Transmutatoria is the best Norwegian album of all times in my book. An amalgam of tape cut-ups, backwards recordings, trumpets, bells, loops and a long list of acoustic instruments. In a way it could compare to the atmospheric works of Nurse With Would (perhaps 80s Coil also). It sounds incredibly rich and with depth, and although it’s all abstract soundscapes the music is rather catchy, and I find myself going back to specific tracks. But what makes FF so unique sounding is the voice of vocalist Brt. He sings/talks in Norwegian, with a very distinct southern-Norwegian dialect, which probably limits non-Norwegian speaking audiences to fully appreciate the album. Brt’s vocals are both hilarious and creepy at the same time, delivered with a dry deadpan sense of humour. The lyrics deal with abortion, Norwegian arctic explorers and biblical themes. The main subject is said to be alchemy. Another re-occurring topic is H.P. Lovecraft, and the band would spend the next 13 years completing their second album, One Night I Had A Frightful Dream, a concept-album based on interpretations of Lovecraft’s writings. Early demos of this album that circulated were very promising (I released a live recording of the material on my TWR Tapes in ‘95), but sadly when the album finally arrived the lyrics had been translated from Norwegian to English. Brt’s heavy English accent doesn’t quite work as well as his Norwegian, and thus the album was a minor disappointment for me. Still, it would be impossible to surpass Ars Transmutatoria. Originally released in a handsome gatefold sleeve, limited to 500 copies, and long overdue for reissue.

WHEN Svartedauen (Tatra Productions, CD, 1992)

When is the solo-project of Lars Pedersen, known for his work in Norwegian art-rockers Holy Toy in the 80s. His When project seems to be his own musical playground, as every album seems different from the other. The later works have been prog-rock/pop vein, but Svartedauen, his third album from 1991, is a pure 38 minute musique concrète sound-collage. Svartedauen translates to The Black Death and the album is an abstract sound-journey of the plague entering and ravishing the Norwegian countryside in 1349, killing two-thirds of the Norwegian population within a year. The album was inspired by a series of haunted and eerie drawings of Theodor Kittelsen from 1900 on the subject. Pedersen has made a soundtrack to it. Fans of Norwegian black metal will recognize the Kittelsen art as the same that adorns the cover of several Burzum albums. A little known fact is that Burzum, and most other black metal musicians during their church-burning heydays, were big fans of this When album. Listening to it with that in mind it actually makes a lot of sense. Svartedauen in many ways manages to evoke the feeling of doom and medieval dread that the rock-Satanists attempted with distorted guitars. It’s a scary and uncomfortable listen.

#14 April 27, 2008: Heather Leigh Murray

Heather Leigh has single-handedly re-invented the pedal steel guitar as a sonic disruptor par excellence. Her early work as one half of the Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast duo was spectacularly disobedient, combining an instinctive feel for non-idiomatic improvisation with the reification of various psychedelic states in sound and a feral understanding of the concept of extended technique. But it was her work with Charalambides and her duo with Christina Carter, Scorces, that really put her name on the map, playing on Charalambides heaviest side to date, the monolithic Joy Shapes, while inventing some of the most instrumentally barren yet emotionally weighty music ever to sail on electric strings over a bunch of amazing Scorces sides. Her solo work combines the No Wave brutality of early Teenage Jesus with the sanctified strings of Washington Phillips and the vocal energies of Patty Waters while her work with Taurpis Tula alongside David Keenan and Alex Neilson re-directs her abilities in a cranky avant-garage direction. Her last solo album, Devil If You Can Hear Me, was one of the most high-wire reconciliations of song-forms and total musical freedoms while her forthcoming double LP with Scorces on Not Not Fun sounds like the real heavy meta. A lifetime record collector, Heather had seen more key underground groups by the time she was 18 years old than most fanboys take in in their lifetime and we are psyched to present her beautiful eye-witness account of the legendary Harry Pussy show in Austin, Texas finally released on CD by Sister Skull. Radiation Nation: Harry Pussy Live in Austin, Texas 1997

When I first heard this was coming out I was like, “What?! THAT show?! That fucking wild show in ’97, I’ll never forget that show!” and here it is. And it sounds exactly like I remember it. This is one of many times that I saw Harry Pussy, but I had never seen this line-up of the group before. With Dan instead of Mark in the ranks, it was a whole new pussy to me. It was one of those really humid Texas nights. It had to be during the weekend cause Austin’s notorious Sixth Street was blazing. I remember Bill Orcutt telling Christina Carter and I that we sounded like English students because we were complaining about rowdy college dudes crawling loudly across every street amidst cheap jewellery stands, spray-paint artists and drunken obliteration that would even have fluorescent Newcastle honeys aghast. He was right though, we sounded like a couple of whiners! It was such a weird night too. That strange way where everything is kinda off, people have faraway glassy looks in their eyes. You’re cracking a different surface. The venue was The Blue Flamingo, a total hole in the wall, very sleazy and super small. I knew before Harry Pussy started they were going to vibe with the fucked-up energy of that place so perfectly. So yeah, this disc, it takes me back to that time completely. The music that night was totally overblown, the audience going more and more insane and just screaming their heads off, falling into inane heckles of the band, “louder!” “fuck you”, “(insert various puns on the word Pussy)”, the music ripping through a tiny, completely packed room, beer/cigarette/piss smells abound. It’s so weird to even hear my own screams on the recording, a totally enthralled member of the audience like everyone else there. An image that totally sticks with me was a point when Adris was in the middle of the floor, rolled into an atomic ball, her incredible voice screaming, hard from the throat, completely matching Orcutt’s fierce and totally ecstatic guitar playing while Dan’s thumping bombs vibrated the walls. The air was so thick, all those stinky Austin boyz around me, completely lacking in good looks or personal hygiene. You can hear Adris screaming to the audience on the disc something like, “fuck you!…you’re all really boring and really lame and you don’t know how to dress and you look like a bunch of fucking college brats”, knowingly riling ‘em up, but also just goofin’, talking shit. I’d seen Adris fuck with an audience like this before. The looks on the boys faces were half, “what the fuck is this chick mocking us?!, trying to show us up, uh no, a chick can’t be this intense AND sharp!”…to “holy shit! this is the best music I’ve ever heard in my life, I don’t care if she’s abusing me or not, I’m into it!” I remember thinking, was it like this seeing The Stooges? Teenage Jesus? I always thought Harry Pussy were completely free, and sonically it was totally psychedelic and free but after seeing them live so many times I knew there was no way it could be completely improvised. Harry Pussy were tight, and not in some dumb geek way of giving an accolade based on technique either, technique is not something I’m really concerned with when I listen to music, but every time I saw them do songs over the years, especially consecutive shows, they played the songs almost exactly the same way every night. They were ON IT. To hear them belting out one of my recorded favourites of theirs’, the cover of Kraftwerk’s Showroom Dummies at this Austin show brought back memories of my first exposure to Harry Pussy. It was their self-titled record on Siltbreeze. I already loved Siltbreeze as a label at that point and just bought whatever was on it. I remember being totally confounded by the cover. Slam dancing? Is this going to be a hardcore record? That record was all I had to go on when I first saw them live. It was on a tour with Charalambides, who were already friends of mine since I met them at Sound Exchange, my favourite Houston record store and the place I spent a ton of time and all of the money I was making holding a part-time veterinary clinic job. My boyfriend and I basically followed some of the tour till we ended up at the first Siltbreeze festival. We stood outside the club, too young to get inside, and waited for one of the bands, I think it might have been some of the Strapping Fieldhands in the end, to sneak us in through the stage door of the Khyber Pass. We loved almost everything that weekend musically and as kinda kids on the sidelines, we soaked up the atmosphere, it was super impressionable, almost like going to your first concert and hanging with the band backstage afterwards. But way better. And it was Harry Pussy that made the biggest impression on me. I can’t underestimate the influence they had on me, musically of course, but the whole ethos of going for it, pushing boundaries, it felt almost revolutionary to a seventeen year old. But THEIR MUSIC! They encompassed so much of the music I love, punk, free-jazz, rock, they sounded totally fearless and free. Bill Orcutt’s guitar playing is without a doubt an influence on my playing, I still consider him one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Everything about his sound was just perfect to me. Amphetamine gnawing, those sudden sliding dips, so nasty and sexy, rhythmically a rainbow across the ears. And Adris, I mean how could anyone NOT be floored by her presence, musical talent and complete abandon. Her natural playing ability was stunning, but I think she was especially influential for a young woman like I was. I was already playing free music myself by the time I saw Harry Pussy, but only private solo recording and with Shawn McMillen in Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast. So to see a woman doing this live, Adris totally validated my own desire to have the confidence to go live as a woman musician, just being completely true to your own personal vision. Hot and rockin’. Rock music, it’s my favourite music, and this was my favourite rock band, most definitely my favourite band to see live at the time. Period. No matter what show they played, I always got that kinda giddy, an almost anxious feeling of not knowing what was going to happen but knowing whatever happened I was always booked in on that ride wherever it went. Gladly. And this Austin show. I remember there were spans of time where the audience started swaying and falling into each other like this great nebulous mob, it felt huge, almost historic, total madness, anything could happen! I remember Bill walking out afterward and saying “Geezus, it was like Shea Stadium in there!” It felt Dirty and Epic in some greasy dive in the middle of toe-head county hee-haw. I didn’t know that this would be the last time I would see Harry Pussy. Fucking Harry Pussy. Maybe they really were the greatest rock group of all time? This CD brings back that time for me. Those early Siltbreeze festivals, the Dead C touring the East Coast, catching those shows they did with V-3, I could go on and on listing all those early shows and records that had such an affect on me. There is a part of me that can’t help but be nostalgic for those days. I think “mid-90s? oh yeah, that was JUST in the mid-90s, right…there…but..” yeah, it’s not just right there. It was already a long time ago really. But for me, those were my late high school/early college years when my tastes were refining. I think so fondly of those days, pre-internet really, when I had to trawl zines for information, reviews of records you were probably not going to actually ever get to hold in your hand. Or a mystic ad, taunting you while you’ve already started building a legend about the release in your mind. And so here I am, 11 years later, still raving about Harry Pussy.

#15 May 23, 2010: Tom Lax

Tom Lax with legendary Acid Archives entrant David Welsh, April 2010

Asked to put a behind-the-scenes name to any of the key underground labels of the past couple of decades most record buyers are unlikely to get any further than Mr Tom Lax. That’s cause Lax doesn’t just run a label. Through the particular bent of his curatorial vision he’s been responsible for the articulation and the development of an ethos that predates and prefigures the New Weird America and that continues to influence the way underground music is recorded and presented. During Siltbreeze’s first golden age he signed almost everyone that mattered, The Dead C, Harry Pussy, V-3/Jim Shepard/Vertical Slit, The Shadow Ring, The A Band, Charalambides, Un, Tower Recordings… a label run that’s as historically potent and uniformly dazzling as anything you might wanna name – ESP Disk, BYG/Actuel, PSF, Xpressway – and in its reactivated incarnation Siltbreeze has once more become the focus for contemporary experiments in rock form. Lax is also a wise-ass par excellence, a critic with the kinda personality last seen in the Bangs/Meltzer/Tosches circle but with a breadth of reference that would’ve shamed all three. And even when he’s sticking a toe up your own ass, it’s hard to feel anything but a weird sense of pride. I hear he’s also a great cook, and one day I hope to sit at that table. We’re more than psyched to re-launch our contributor columns with Tom’s obsessive dissection of one of the most puzzling and endlessly allusive records ever to make it to the Siltbreeze catalogue, The Dead C’s classic Clyma Est Mort.

Cowbell Need Not Apply: The story behind the making of the Dead C’s Clyma Est Mort

For 18 years the debate as to whether or not Clyma Est Mort is a ‘real’ ‘live’ album has simmered among erstwhile Dead C hagiographers. I have maintained consistently that it is (since I was there) but that’s due more to provocation than adherence to fact. True, it’s not a conventional live LP, but LIVE they did play and thus the results of the REAL event were recorded. “But Mr. Narrator,” you must be saying to yourself at this juncture, “surely it can’t be as simple as that?” And you would be correct, little sodbuster, so let’s shed light on the back story of this thing and break down how it all transpired. The footnotes of history whimper for closure.

My first trip to New Zealand spanned six weeks. It was all very exciting, I couldn’t wait to meet the people with whom I’d been corresponding for the past four years and (of course) to see all the great bands that made up the excellent Xpressway roster. Bruce Russell made a trip to the US in the summer of 1991 to press the flesh w/the assorted hegemonists chosen to license an array of X/way titles; during his all-too-brief stay in Phila, he insisted I make my way to his country (and home) as soon as possible. Done and done, sir. I arrived at Christchurch airport Sunday March 29, 1992, where I was greeted by Robbie Yeats and Michael Morley. It was a very warm welcome and they immediately felt like old friends. With me was the 50-count box of Harsh 70’s Reality double-LPs I managed to lug halfway around the world (their delivery to me in Phila the day before I left was a most pleasant surprise). So everyone was riding high, and best of all, a Renderers concert was that night at a local pub. Things were getting off to a fabulous start.

Days later we made the trip to Port Chalmers, where I put faces to the names I had heard and read so much about. Outstanding, this was truly going to be the trip of a lifetime. I envisioned a Dead C concert (perhaps a record release party) or better yet, a showcase of Xpressway artists – Dead C, Terminals, Plagal Grind, Sferic Experiment – all playing for ME. Captain America was in town and he was putting them on the map. I figured any and all would be only too happy to perform, a small token for all the enthusiasm, hard work and money I’d surrendered.

But I figured wrong. The days turned into weeks and not a goddamn thing happened – musically. Sure, I was still having a ball, but what the hell? What about something at Alastair Galbraith’s space? Or the legendary Chippendale House? Nope. Nada. It wasn’t gonna happen. Was I disappointed? Fuck, yes! But the way everyone there felt, organizing something at such a late date (by now, near the end of April) was impossible, and besides, what’s the sense of playing live when only one person was interested (Xpressway love at the local level being something of an oxymoron)? I believe out of sheer guilt, Dead C agreed to hold a practice for me at Grey Street (a large ramshackle house and residence where a front room functioned as a rehearsal space) and sometime between that decision and the actual event a plan was hatched to reinvent said rehearsal into a live concert. As I recall, the gist of Clyma came from The Fall’s Totale’s Turns LP (I mean, just look at the front and back of the jacket). But it morphed into more than that. “Wouldn’t it be great,” went my posit to the band, “to make a live LP and satirize Totale’s Turns in the process?” Record the upcoming Grey Street sessions, work through songs, overdub as needed, add some clapping (I’ve got some large hands, but let’s be serious, there are only two of ’em), make edits, clean the thing up at Fish Street Studio so I could take it home (return to which was swiftly approaching) and release it to a befuddled public. There was also the matter of cover art: same design as Totale’s, with different title and ‘tour’ ‘dates’, the back reinvented from Dead C’s perspective (South Island vs. North Island) by their ardent supporter, T Totale XXVIIII (I’ve always loved how idiotic the mucking of the Roman numeral nine looked).

Needless to say, this was all very much up everyone’s alley. A Dead C practice wasn’t something anyone was clamoring to do or hear (besides yours truly). If they were gonna have to make a racket, it might as well be for something more than some simpering American who felt he’d been short shrifted. I’d love to say the idea to record and release this LP was hatched to pay for my trip, but that notion was never in the mix. Harsh 70’s was barely out and the rest of the band’s catalog to date was still fairly available. Who was gonna care? I’d press up 300, glue on the covers and hope they sold. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

photos: Michael Morley, Robbie Yeats, Bruce Russell

The session took place over the course of a weekend. Basic tracks were laid down on early Saturday afternoon. The band was going at it full stop. I gotta tell ya, if that was a fake live performance, you could’ve fooled me. Hearing “Sky,” “Power,” and “World” in the flesh made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The rest of the tracks were improvised. It was awesome, but at some point it was determined we had ‘enough.’ After a short refreshment break, overdubbing took place. On Sunday the band went about editing and sequencing. Then there was the small matter of applause: where to lift it from? Where to graft it onto our album? Some punter appreciation was snagged off a live Renderers cassette, chosen perhaps because Maryrose mentions Bruce by name, the details now too foggy. We all laughed hysterically once it had been spliced in. At some point Sunday night, it was ‘done’. Now it had to be transferred from the Tascam tape to quarter-inch reels at Stephen Kilroy’s Fish Street Studio in Dunedin. But first let’s play it back and have a listen. Starts out ominously enough. No denying it’s a Dead C record. It’s builds, gets more intense. Hey, this is pretty fucking good! Cut to Maryrose’s introduction, hilarious! “Electric” is so witchy, then “Power” kicks in, followed by the “hardcore” numbers. Wow. This is better than good, it’s great! “World” just blows me away. In a way we were all impressed by how stunning it came out. They had nailed it. The crude cut to audience nonsense. We laugh. So cornball, but isn’t that the point? “Das Fluten” comes lurching in, the aimless, psychedelic, Sun Ra vibe absolutely perfect for a closer. We all look at each other. You know something? This isn’t great, it’s AMAZING! Something that was hatched as a self-effacing piss-take had inexplicably transformed itself into a bloody fantastic LP. We couldn’t get to Fish Street fast enough.

After dinner on Monday we all piled into Bruce’s car and drove the 10 miles up to Dunedin. Stephen was waiting for us and together we six (counting the bottle of McCallums whiskey) convened around the studio, where everything got threaded and spooled. The tapes began to roll. The atmosphere was giddy and jocular. This was some heavy shit. Pretty damn impressive. Is it me, or did this get better overnight? I’ll always remember it as a thoroughly fun and satisfying experience. A ‘live’ Dead C LP. Ridiculous! Was there anything funnier in the world? I guess you had to be there.

photos: Bruce Russell, Robbie Yeats

Around 11pm the chicanery was finalized. The tapes were boxed, labeled and packed, ready for liftoff the following morning. A drive back to Port Chalmers, what about a nightcap? A ‘wrap party’, if you will? Bruce demurred (work in the morning) but Robbie, Michael and I headed off to Chicks Bar. I believe it’s a sort of hip venue nowadays, but then it was a den for surly locals and wayward sailors. I got the distinct impression these guys (Morley, anyway) weren’t tight with the publican. After a couple of nervous pints, we retired into the night. A round of congrats followed by heartfelt farewells ensued and before long I was in Auckland, then L.A. then home in Phila.

After a day of re-acclimating myself (culture shock) another mind bender presented itself: Harsh 70’s was practically out of print. Even the last of the Helen/Bury LPs had become spoken for. What the fuck? Great news, for sure. With a couple of well-timed checks rolling in, I was able to get Clyma off to Hub Serval (a now-defunct record pressing plant where the majority of early Siltbreeze released were manufactured) post haste. By mid-June it was ready. I spent a morning on my sidewalk, spray-mounting the front and back covers, wearing a charcoal-filtered breathing mask (so as not to inhale fumes and airborne glue). Fun? Oh, yes, the likes of which you cannot imagine. Eight weeks prior, the original pressing (on Proletariat Idiot) of 350 copies seemed like a reasonable number. Now? Well, let’s see.

The thing sold out in a day. Customers were downright ANGRY that they couldn’t get copies. “You have FUCKED me,” one letter read. And while it sucked to be him, I wasn’t so keen to don mask and glue up a bunch more record jackets. After a quick (expensive) call down to PC, it was decided to hell with the bootleg design, let’s just do it as a legit Siltbreeze release (SB-16), 1000 of which were made. This time the buying and selling was not so fanatical. It went out of print, eventually; by about 1996, it wasn’t so easy to come by. By 1998 the band and I had parted company. Any plans to reissue it – regardless of format – were nixed. At the turn of the century, a WIRE scribe listed it as one of the top whatever crucial releases not available on compact disc. The sway remained nil. Over the past few years copies have changed hands for respectable sums. As recently as 2009 a visitor asked if I had any copies to sell. I did have one Siltbreeze edition, still sealed, that he was welcome to. Sixty dollars. I felt weird asking so much, while to him it was a bargain rate. No hard feelings, anyway.

photo: Grey Street porch, April, 1992; Michael Morley, Kim Pieters, Peter Stapleton

Since the origin of Clyma Est Mort was basically that of a lark, the ensuing artwork, titles, runoff grooves etc. were (more or less) a series of inside jokes, some of which I’m not certain even the band members really understood. It’s no The Name Of The Rose and unraveling and dissecting the whatsis won’t take long. Here goes:

As stated before, the overall design was lifted from The Fall’s Totale’s Turns live LP. We just localized it to suit the desired aesthetic.

“THE DEAD C” was letter pressed by Michael Morley and myself during the course of the sequencing. Michael then hand wrote the rest of the text.

Clyma Est Mort is a pun on Gong’s Gong Est Mort. Clyma was a cat that had belonged to MM and had recently died.

Harrington, Greystoke, Curriemeade, Koputai are various hamlets and locales on the Otago Peninsula. They are most assuredly NOT on anyone’s touring circuit.

“Te Wai Pounamu” is Maori for “South Island” where Port Chalmers is.

The Careys Bay Young Drinkers Club, where Mr. T. Totale XXVIIII is an honorary member, is not a drinking club per se, but a quaint, local pub in the village of Carey’s Bay, a mere five minute drive from Port Chalmers. It was the main watering hole while I was visiting; it was civilized and had a dartboard (I was an avid dartist at the time). I won’t bore you w/the darting abilities of the Dead C and their cohorts, but I will tell you I never found winning to be an intrusion. For all the fun that we’d had there, it seemed fitting it should be mythologized in the liners.

Now for the titles. I can’t remember exactly where “Sunshine” came from. Most likely it was a series of lyrics in MM’s songbook or, for all I know, they could have come about spontaneously. I could never imagine connecting lines about “Heavy Metal Guitar Shows”, “Tom Hanks & His Dog” and body shaving into a single narrative, but then I never claimed to be an artist.

“Sunshine” staggers into “Dirt For Harry,” intended to take the piss out of one of the Grey Street residents who’d come home one day talking about this new Sun City Girls LP she’d heard called Dirt For Harry. Whuuut? “You Mean Dawn Of The Devi?” someone asked her. “Oh,” she said. “Is that what it’s called?” Keeper!

“Sky” is one of the band’s greatest rockers and is found on Harsh 70’s Reality.

“Electric,” with more Michael’s recited lyrics and all-improvised music, I think is a gnarly motherfucker.

“Power” can be found on Trapdoor Fucking Exit, still cassette-only at the time, of which maybe about 100 copies existed. Back then, the crickets were louder than the fans.

“Highway” is the one Dead C track that most aptly exemplifies the description of the Dead C’s sound as “a garbage truck backing over the abyss.”

“Ein Kampf, Ein Seig” is like a goddamn blitzkrieg – again. Literally translated, the title means “One Struggle, One Victory” but I like to think of it as “Propaganda’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

“World” is, to date and forever, my favorite Dead C track. Another version later surfaced on the Shock CD World, Peace, Hope et al. but to my ears, it doesn’t get any better than on here. The whole trip and effort in making this blasted thing was worth it just for this song alone.

“Das Fluten, Das Fluten (Oh Mama I Can’t Go)” has flutes on it, so there you go. This was a Bruce Russell knee-slapper. It has something to do with Captain Beefheart shouting “The Blimp, the blimp!” and then muttering “Oh mama, I can’t go." Pull your copy of Trout Mask Replica, spin the track and you’ll hear what I mean. Blimp was changed to Flute, then Fluten, then Das Fluten, as the German language title ‘theme’ was now so quixotically amusing. Get it? Or are those tears streaming down your cheeks belying another interpretation?

The run off grooves on Side One read “Beautiful Single Pulse Hell.” Has to be MM; what it means, I can no longer recall. But I still dig the sentiment. Side Two reads “Clay Carroll – The Hawk / Where’s Porky Now?” Clay Carroll was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team in the ’70s. His nickname was The Hawk. At work here is a bit of faux Cockney banter. Remember, it’s a Fall theme; Clay Carroll came out of Kay Carroll, who was the Fall’s manager for many years. I know, fascinating. The Clay Carroll thing was all me. Those guys had no idea what the fuck I was on about. But at that point, it was all a big hoot. Let it ride.

“Where’s Porky Now?” is a reference to Porky Prime, the legendary lacquer cutter / audio engineer who used to inscribe in the runoff grooves he worked on “Another Porky Prime Cut.” It’s a tribute to Porky, Rough Trade, The Fall, Pere Ubu, all of those who sailed before who had made a band like Dead C possible and a piker like me to believe in them.

photos: Clyma Est Mort master tapes

I have yet to answer the question of the legitimacy of Clyma Est Mort as a live album. Upon its release, it fooled no one. And I doubt it’s going to fool anyone now in its (technically) third life. But who cares? It’s a cool record, a document of the band at a crossroad. Embedded here are germs that later turned up on the Vs Sebadoh seven-inch EP, Whitehouse and Tusk.

One other thing to lay on you before I sign off: had these guys played an ACTUAL live show, this record never would have existed. Weird, but true. A presumed lack of motivation (we’ll never know for sure) on their part (to please me) led to the production of an elaborate practical joke which in turn became a highly ferocious and much sought-after album. Ya can’t make this shit up! But it never hurts to try.

Tom Lax Philadelphia, Pa 2010

all photos by Tom Lax

#16 August 15, 2010: Matt Valentine

The author in his element

Matthew Valentine’s Child Of Microtones imprint was one of the first labels to fully explode the CD-R format, combining deluxe packaging with exploratory psychedelia and extended rural glam. He was the brains and the conceptual clout behind Brattleboro’s legendary Free Folk Fest in 2003, an event that was pretty much ground zero for the contemporary underground and that gathered alla the emergent tribes in the same spot for the first time. But really MV has been a key player since back in the day, with Tower Recordings being a central component of Siltbreeze’s first wave while his editorial duties on the sadly-defunct Cock Displacement buzzed a whole bunch of brains. But it’s his work with partner Erika Elder that has best brought together his various obsessions, minting a recording process known as Spectrasound that exposes the most sidereal aspects of the jam while fusing Dead/Allman Brothers-style improvisations with free jazz, raga, folk and blues in order to mint a visionary take on underground modes. MV is free folk. He’s also a wordsmith par excellence, an inspired writer (check out his first novel, Small As Life & Infinitesimally As Pure) and filmmaker (The Temptation To Zoology) and an active proponent of the up country good life. We’re lucky to have him. Here he’s reminiscing about the April 2010 No Floor Tour in anticipation of his headlining shot at VT’s Subcurrent 2010 fest. Look out for the winner of the top ten middens….

“no floor tour” road memories

it was an indian winter inverted, we’um were livin’ the good life on the road known as the “no floor tour”, ceilings all around. rollin’ as a double bill with the flower/corsano duo it was a solid core spirit, ergonomic vibe/ethos. no crew, no nonsense…everything in house except the booking agent. that would be VAL-COR, a new contender in the pie game. our merry bands were rich in spirit and the belts were loose and tight, just like the jams. we were pure entropy, and good ol’ VAL-COR seemed to have a grip on the routing, guarantees, door deals, backline elegance and muscle. go figure. it was a rocket out of the gate as we managed to be too heavy for ‘grey matter books’, shutting that joint down for future live gigs as well as sending a long time valley impresario to the hills to recover and collect his collective unconscious. this was the first hoot, primary stage. foundation/grounation of MV/EE/MICK FLOWER/JOHN MOLONEY with J MASCIS hookin’ up for the environments jam. t’was super fine that J just happened to have some extra amps around as somehow the vocal PA blew up, yeah that kinda energy loudly floatin’ around. loudly. so captain Tim grabbed the hi-watt and we sang like angels, more tube glow than afterglow. from there we sailed into the rustbelt via the silent barn, g. lucas crane hooked us with late night taco knowledge and when zuma ate some kinda ear on the sidewalk with the tortilla as his plate after the show i knew we were onto somethin’. a night i’ll never forget playin’ with meg baird and nonhorse. did the nocturne corridor out to pocono air and continued further at daybreak to the sweet oberlin. awesome hang with the dilloway tribe and one of the top ten middens i’ve ever had the privilege of lying in, but alas, still no floor. then came the sweet slow glare toward the big D. hooked up in grand motor city style with old buds and heads, greg baise layin’ out the great book and JC layin’ out the great RA and late night bar. we raised one for sure intergalactic. cruised agave, positively jammed even got to hook with ben hall at his most beautiful eatery. long may he serve a plate and bang on. guitars continued skyward when coasting thru the border, and i mean we practically did not even stop. 6 dudes, a pooch and a van with tattooed carburetor. was kool and a positive moodbox. we almost took a wrong turn and got to try it again just for kicks, but we didn’t wanna push it or hold it back like fernando saunders so we rolled to the boat. TO and the (don) valley of parallel worlds..ahh good ol’ toronto. got peeped, got to jam the first of two with DOC and good ol’ eric chenaux even took some time out from rat drifting to sit in and blow some mean harp. an awe inspiring port with or without storm. of course we had a late night hang with senior back at the rodeo ranch, always feels like a home game away. did the long ball the next mornin’ out to montreal where we were greeted by relief only montreal and steve/mauro and the sala can pitch. VAL-COR got gone with the habs and royal mountain treatment. even had mojitos delivered backstage…minty set and amps sounding way better than tube screamers. comin’ back down again is always a trip and crossing somewhere out in the boons gave good ol’ USA a chance to really tear into our meat. i guess mick tasted hip cos they got a mouthful of candy but couldn’t even find nectar to hold us. so long so long…we waved our flag, flew the free folk and jettisoned some more rearview miles to be hugged warmly once again by saratoga. always nice to see the tapers pit loud and proud and the springs bouncing inside the amps. another sweet night with some great home cookin’ and vibes. baptized with ol’ sulphur all the way but didn’t have to bet too much soul at the track. super yankee, ayup. we headed out after a colloquial breakfast feast toward boston’s chinatown. rollin’ into that metro with mo’low giving an impeccable guided tour is always a turn on for the synapses. still no FLAW. you can literally HEAR the distinction between boroughs/towns. i was beyond proud to jam in the nom d’artiste loft, turned out it too would ramble into the realm of past tense shortly after. an UNBELIEVABLE night with fireside hospitality provided by poon village/forced exposure kristin. the embers stared deep with humility, dogs ran kinda free and we slumbered underneath the volcano. the gigs were done but the jams were certainly continuing. thanx to nature mick was sequestered out in our open arms and we had a summit to attend. this months elixir was whiskey outside of the kentucky limits. non bourbon. we laffed it up and hit blue ribbon for road sustenance. called ahead to clear mick as a guest and from there all we did was some home comfort restoration with the soundtrack of our lives, bed ins all around. who woulda thought zuma would let it rip in FE near the court and the YOD space in the same day. no deposit, no return - redemption in so many ways. matt “mv” valentine

#22 Late 2012: Spencer Clark

We’re very proud to end 2012 with a column from one of our favourite contemporary musicians/artists/occultists, Spencer Clark of The Skaters/Vodka Soap/Monopoly Child Star Searchers et al. Spencer’s practice has become increasingly influenced by artist/occultists like Kenneth Grant and Austin Osman Spare so we asked him to talk a little about the turbulent dream visions that have inspired his work in 2012, as well as the development of his own personal symbolic subconscious. We also asked him how Pinhead was getting on. Fine, he said, but he’s up to his old tricks again, for sure.

MEETING PINHEAD

Attention EARTHLINGS, the new album on Underwater Peoples is the “Bee’s Knees”, really, the thing folds out and there is art inside, no joke. This might be the last Monopoly Child for a while, so enjoy it. I hope the listener will invite themselves to see the transformation of a symbol that I wished to be projected amongst the stars. I wanted to talk about my next work here, and like the last time Heather and David asked me to write something, I had to again speak of an encounter with the OTHERSIDE….

This last summer, during a momentous change in my life, I had a DREAMWEEK; where for about seven days straight I had a continuous dream of downloaded input. These dreams were of a new realm of dreamtime, they were endless sermons night after night, within the same setting, and they were regarding the FUTURE…

Before we get into this I want to speak about what got me into nightmare dreams in the first place. When I was 8 years old I got chased around by Freddy a lot. Like every night , Freddy stabbin’ and slashin’. He really has done as much for dreams as Jung. One night I was at my friend’s house watching the making of Nightmare On Elm Street 3(DREAMWARRIORS). We went to bed, and I began to have my usual Freddy chase scene. This time he caught up to me and slashed me right across the face, and it hurt, like for real, as it did sometimes. But this time I woke up, I was on the floor, and above me on my friends bed was his cat (TONY), who jumped down upon me and scratched me just where FREDDY did. I still have this DREAMSCAR, as it is a reminder of work accomplished. Now back to the current affair.

I awoke in front of an alter in a immense room of golden brick, with pots of pouring liquid metals-smoke blowing from out of the ground. A place of supreme concentration, but for sure under the EARTH. The walls were gold with strips of stone that had HR GIGER ALIEN WALLPAPER. A golden small nut, like nuts and bolts, that levitated and moved around the room, was a pod that seemed to collect thoughts and vibes from me while it travelled. It would stop and float in place, right in front of my vision and simultaneously PINHEAD’S voice would begin to speak and tell me of the FUTURE. He was attempting to induct me into this realm. “YOU SHALL KNOW THE FUTURE OF MAN, WHICH IS WITHOUT FLESH”. He always spoke to me in the same tone of voice that he uses when he says, “WE HAVE SO MANY WONDERFUL THINGS TO SHOW YOU”. PINHEAD loves the work he does, he’s like a guidance councilor for flesh.

After he was done speaking the golden nut would speed around the room and read my reactions. The whole time I felt in a graceful and intense submission, like there was work that needed to be endured.

Without divulging most of PINHEAD’S actual rap notes, it is easy to relay that he believed a NEW DAWN was coming and that I was not ready for it. He wanted me to know that the symbol for human beings is changing. It’s not going to be the same anymore. HE means there will be less material reality, no doubt.

At the time, and still, I have been reading this OUTSIDE THE CIRCLES OF TIME, by Kenneth Grant, that has at many points directed me to understanding this dream. Pinhead is the OTHERSIDE’S manifestation of a messenger. Monsters appear as messengers in your dreams, because they want the person to really wish to hear the message, to get past the difficulty of being so frightened. In CONTACT when Jodie Foster arrives in the Alien world, they create a scene for her that she is comfortable with, a painting that she made of the FLORIDA KEYS; the ALIEN that came to speak with her was her dad. The OTHERSIDE needs representation that this world will respond too.

PINHEAD represents pure thought, as he is about erasing the flesh. Modern Technology seems to be about the same thing. The ridding of physical material. I began to be more excited about being apart of the future. I decided to get a computer and record a new album on it (psyche!). No really, the dreams were frightening, so I decided that I had to incorporate this advent into my life.

I started making music for PINHEAD, giving it to him, sending it mentally to a hidden place within my dreams (the place is a landmark in San Diego, its a place where I go to find Objects of desire). In return he sent me a gift (pictured in the second photo), which I think was him sort of trying to be like, I like your style and I get your vibe. He manifested that boogeyboard with his portrait on it (the first time someone tried to take a picture of it, their camera broke, I am not joking). He is sending me three more bogeyboards, which I realize look a whole lot like African Spiritboards. So we had a correspondence. The dreams stopped and I have invited him into the studio. He’s actually spending Christmass with us. Dude, when he opened his first Hanukah (DRAIDLE 12) gift, he started to do that Pandora’s box shit and rip it open with rusty chains and giant fish hooks, I was like “PINHEAD, NO!” Our collaboration will be entitled “A NEW IMAGE OF MAN” and the reality check is to continue to embrace this frightening world and to correspond with it.

#10 (No Date) Wooden Wand

James Toth aka Wooden Wand is the finest songwriter of his generation and one who has simultaneously managed to transcend the seemingly in-built limitations of a genre – that of singer/songwriter - that seemed all but dead on its post-punk feet while further bolstering it by drawing deep on a host of influences (cultic jams, free jazz, biker rock, avant garde art fuck) not usually associated with a focus on one man and his guitar. He has long been a major player in the post-Tower Recordings cultus, firstly with his free/space/avant/blues collective Golden Calves and then as the leader of Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice, a group that works to beautifully reconcile the twin poles of his muse, the freeform freakout of The Red Krayola, Amon Düül, Siloah and NNCK and the tradition of the loner balladeer as transmitted by Dylan, Cohen, Young, Spence and Chilton. His recent records with the Omen Bones Band and The Sky-High Band represent the absolute peak of his alchemical songwriting abilities and alongside the work of Matthew Valentine and Josephine Foster represent the apex of the unadulterated New Weird America/free folk sound even as it makes mincemeat of such puny critical shorthand. Recent side-swipes via his Hassara and Zodiacs/Zodiac Mountain offshoots have seen him sink another fist into the stream of private American motorpsycho nitemare sound and look set to launch a thousand future satellites while his curatorship of such key imprints as Polyamory and the righteously vinyl-only Mad Monk helps to further articulate his retro-futurist vision. We are proud as fuck to welcome him as a Volcanic Tongue contributor and especially touched by his beautifully personal recollections of the formative influence of Matthew Valentine on his overall career arc and the personal resonance of the duo’s latest masterwork, Green Blues.

When I was around 19 or so, Tower Recordings were my favorite band. I was lucky enough to be living in Westchester – a recent transplant to nearby Purchase College – when TR was just getting going. Within weeks of moving in to our dorms, Tovah immediately got a job at the local record store in stones-throw-away Port Chester, The Vinyl Solution (R.I.P), and that’s where we met MV. MV co-managed the store with a hard and imposing fellow named Jeff Loh, who’s love for The Rezillos was only matched by his taste for fine wine. (I later got a job at ‘sister store’ Exile On Main Street, where I would meet many names familiar to the VT catalog, but that’s another story). MV, Jeff Loh, and a guy named Eric McCarthy were older and wiser than us, and, since Tovah and I fancied ourselves connoisseurs of underground music, they would quiz us / drill us on things the way older types delight in doing when they wanna take you down a notch, tough love style. First they’d ask us easy questions that bordered on the insulting (MV once held up Wire’s Pink Flag – you know, the one with the damn pink flag on the cover - and asked us “what’s this record called?”) but the questions began to grow more difficult (“Have you guys ever heard Dando Shaft?”), and following these brief lessons under their collective tutelage, Tovah and I would return to Purchase with our noses higher, our circle of friends smaller, our grip on the counterculture ever tighter. We’d take what we learned from MV and our other new record store friends and report these findings to the indifferent university at large via our radio show, Last Train To Cool, where we’d act like if you couldn’t answer our call-in trivia questions about The Dead C, Faust and Albert Ayler, well, you were just lame. No one ever called in. One day Tovah brought over a tape of what was going to be Tower Recordings’ seminal (in my opinion) record, The Fraternity of Moonwalkers. “It’s really cool,” she said, “but it’s weird to hear my boss singing about jerking off and shit.” I became obsessed with the album, playing it over and over again. I had never heard anything like it. I bought up all the unique-looking Tower Recordings singles that were collecting dust at the store, and even got hip to MV’s great Superlux label (R.I.P), checking out killer releases by The Hat City Intuitive, Memphis Luxure, and Pacebreaker. I even remember the day copies of Fraternity of Moonwalkers came in to the store – Jeff Loh commenting sardonically on the photo of MV on the back cover. “Not his finest hour,” he chuckled. I was inclined to agree. Soon I started going to a shitty club in the meat packing district of New York City called The Cooler (R.I.P). It seemed for a while that every other Monday night Tower Recordings would play a gig there, usually with openers Hall of Fame, who I also liked a lot and became friends with, and I made it a point to be there whenever I could convince someone – usually Tovah - to drive. These were historic shows. This early incarnation of Tower Recordings, made up of MV, Helen Rush, S Freyer Esq, PG Six, and the sorely missed Spanish Wolfman, consistently blew my mind. The band all seemed like bizzaro specialists in their own way, each member coolly holding court on stage, seeming at once intensely focused and palpably unaffected. It felt very special to me, like they were my own private Velvet Underground. I always brought packs of Purchase kids with me to these gigs, usually folks I was auditioning / feeling out for a role in my band, Golden Claves. TR soon became the barometer - if a potential recruit / prospect dug Tower, they were in. If they ‘didn’t get it,’ I wrote them off entirely. These are the same days I swore I’d never date a girl who didn’t own a decent record player. Ah, youth! Notably, a girl named Erika Elder, a friend of a friend and fellow early believer, once joined our immediate crew on one of these early jaunts. Aaron Rosenblum and Matt Krefting were regular fixtures at these gigs as well, though they were practically babies at the time! It wasn’t long before my band, Golden Calves, began being taking cues from TR the way only naïve newjack teenagers can – tastelessly, ham-fistedly, and without humility. You might say our particular brand of reverence was akin to a bulldozer plowing into a gas station. Listen to the records, hear for yourself. I cajoled Tovah into singing some songs with us, and got some of the more ‘avant garde’ players I knew to join the band, while I played acoustic guitar and sang. I was also way into Jandek, The Godz, Strapping Fieldhands, and The Shadow Ring by this point, but my geographical ties to the mighty TR made their unique influence the most formidable and obvious. We even opened for TR and Hall of Fame at the Cooler a few times. And totally sucked each time. I was studying Ulysses back at Purchase, but TR was all the esoteric mindfuck I ever needed. I sometimes wished I had an Annotated Tower Recordings to crack all the codes and decipher some of the more obscure MV-speak generously tossed off within each of the songs. I recall listening to Tower’s third album, Furniture Music For Evening Shuttles, on the bus on my way to the record store in Mount Kisco, and getting severely bummed out. No way I’d ever do anything this good. I also remember presenting a slightly inebriated MV with the Golden Calves / Hall of Fame split 7” I’d just put out. Our track was called “Closed Captioning For The Blind (Ten Dollar Bash).” MV saw the title, looked at me, smiled, and said “You oughta be paying me royalties, man.” Like I said, tough love. By pure accident, most of the Golden Calves crew eventually moved into the Port Chester loft that formerly inhabited most of Tower Recordings when many of them were attending Purchase years earlier. This huge loft – dubbed Fusion Specialists (because that’s what it said on the door) – was where a lot of the early Tower Recordings stuff was recorded, and, fittingly, it’s also where we recorded a lot of the early Golden Calves stuff. Eventually, MV began to regard Tovah and I more as friends than fans, which happened to coincide with us starting to do our own thing and not rip him off so mercilessly. That tough love shit works. I tried to keep up with MV’s output over the years, but it got increasingly difficult, as many of the VT readers surely know. Whenever I’d see MV or EE I’d buy up whatever they were selling, but as our meetings became less frequent, I relegated my MV collecting to whenever I could trade Nemo something or had a credit at VT. There have been some COM / Bummer Road sides that I love dearly, but whole chunks of the discography that I’ve missed entirely. Recently, my good pal Andew Kesin sent me a care package of some of the new Ecstatic Peace releases, including the new one by MV and EE with The Bummer Road – Green Blues. Folks, I’d never feed you any bullshit, at least not on a forum this esteemed – this is a remarkable record. Objectively, it’s probably better than Fraternity of Moonwalkers, which is itself one of my top ten favorite albums of all time, but since I’m now old and jaded, I’ll just allow that Green Blues is ‘as good,’ and let that be that. The album feels like a culmination in many ways. MV, bless him, still sings things like “I inhaled a vortex last night,” EE’s double tracked vocals are sweeter than ever, and Mo Jigg’s harp environments continue to further distinguish an already great band. This is also the first Bummer Road disc where you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt, “shit, Nemo is a pretty fucking bad ass guitar player.” All the while, MV’s intrepid vision of skewed folk-blues remains singular and inimitable. Trust me on that last bit. I owe MV a lot. He taught me why Canned Heat is one of the best bands in the history of rock. He allowed me see why The Urinals, Flux of Pink Indians and the Swell Maps were infinitely better than all the Maximum Rock and Roll / HeartattaCk horseshit we were listening to at the time. And he’s still teaching me things, with this monster of a CD, easily one of the best of this year, and a perfect ‘10’ in a vast and intimidating discography. It makes me glad to have a story to go along with it.

#21 (No Date) Adris Hoyos

photo by Graham Lambkin

Adris Hoyos needs little introduction for serious VT heads: for many years she was at the centre of the goddamn tornado that was the late Harry Pussy, formulating along with guitarist Bill Orcutt one of the most radical re-visionings of rock form of the late 20th century. Her concept of the role of the drummer pretty much revolutionised any idea of accompaniment or keeping time, re-inventing the kit as a lead instrument with all of the potential for nuance, violence, soul-scraping ecstasy and dunder-headed violence of fellow skin-thinkers like Ikuro Takahashi and Robbie Yeats. She was also as foul-mouthed as all hell and funny with it, her between song riffs and audience baiting providing some of the many highlights of Harry Pussy’s raggedy live career. In order to mark the release of Harry Pussy’s monolithic collection of early recordings, One Plus One on Palilalia, we could not be more excited to present an exclusive column from Adris who gives her side of the Harry Pussy story via a track-by-track ‘analysis’ of One Plus One.

One Plus One: Report on select songs from the record

#1. Forming

#2. Like a Paving Stone Sounds like early ‘Cocaine.’

#3. I fought the police Police theme so prevalent in punk thrown on top of the blues.

#4. One Plus One

#5. My Cocaine is in the Sun Sounds like ‘Stop Go’ How does one guitar make so much noise? Drums heavily plodding along in a moronic way. This is classic HP. Bill is all over the place. This song really reminds me of “People Get Together Now,” which is one of my favorites. Before the catchy song writing, there is just this raw noise that would become catchy. If I had to classify HP, I would call it a blues band. The twangy pull of the guitar on this trace. The drums in their over drawn simplicity just seem to confuse. Before the catchy lyrics, there was just this raw bluesy guitar. You can hear the rhythm of the guitar, the back and forth long drawling pull and the faster riffing. Except that the drummer is so bad that it breaks this up and you lose track of whatever pattern you were just hearing. Thinking about the blues, you can’t understand half of what the singers are on about… This is what makes Bill’s singing so good. Before HP was a noise band, I would say they were a blues band.

#6. A Simple Mind Perfect ending. This is pure noise in it’s speed enthralled with hard core bursts of indeterminate screaming. What was Henry Rollins saying? Oh wait… If it starts with any kind of catchy rhythm, it is broken up with this splurge of hardcore suddenly getting faster and lost in a mesh of anger about nothing. The drummer is just bored, thrashing about the symbols and hitting those highs. A long drawn out pull of the guitars and stop. Ian Mackaye puking up his breakfast.

#7 Tight Fit Punk rock song if there ever was one. One of my catchier hits if I do say so myself. That hight note, when the symbols just blend so perfectly with the guitar. One minute and 9 seconds is all you need for a song.

#8. This is my Voice OK. Someone is having a bad day. Someone spent too much time watching Darby Crash. Who needs to do any thing more than hit the drum really slowly? Raymond Carver wishes he could have taken minimalism to this extreme! One of the greatest drummers of all time. Again, the singer spent too much time listening to “Manimal” and it really ruins what could have been a great song.

#9 It’s Cold and I don’t know what time it is. Again, you can hear echoes of ‘Mandolin’ on this one. Really a band that had one song if I ever heard one. This is ‘Cocaine.’ Not the second track. This is such a great blues band. That long pause before the words ‘Cocaine’ has so much tension No one knows what note they will hit next. A high B? My one critique of this song is that the drummer is just plodding along in a random mix of phony emotion, pretending that this fast romp through the bass drum is going to fasten someone’s heart. But that guitar – that long pull of the guitar – leaving you with this long smooth feeling of French Chicory Coffee. So perfect.

#10 The way we were Classic HP that would later be translated into the hits. Bill’s got a terrific voice. Just a sliver higher than the symbols are hitting. That long drawn out ending. The song obviously drawing to a close, but the drummer not paying attention and hitting that snare a few too many times before he remembers – oops – it’s the end of the song. My bad.

#11 Domestic Disturbance Feedback to that muddle of voices. Perfect start. To describe this is to be wordless. Shut up and fucking play. If this were a painting, it would be a Jackson Pollock. That long slow mellow feeling of the paint brush dripping Jack Daniels all over the canvas. I like the juxtaposition of the long drawn out notes alongside the very fast, sharp playing. Drums that don’t move the song forward but instead accentuate one note of the guitar. Drumming style that leaves you with a sense of ennui. The hiss of the amp buzz streaming through sand.

#12 Nazi USA Now through a time warp Now through a time warp Nazi USA My favorite! The hits! I live for the hits! That’s why I get up in the morning. Straight out of the Germs repertory. This is one of my favorites. I can’t say enough about how I love a catchy punk song. There’s been some terrible drumming on the record. But here, the drummer finally does some work driving some kind of rhythm. Some thing is wrong with the singer’s head. And he is singing about it in this great punk rock way. Classic punk song. It moves. It’s got interim turmoil themed lyrics. All around great teenage angst feeling. Justin Bieber would be jealous. Side 3

#13 Not Bright This one is only 18 seconds. Later re-written as “Chuck.”

#14 Improbable People

#15 Our Song Great HP song. No hit here. Just the long guitar pull that mellows you out and makes you want to go to the pool and drink a Pina Colada. Drummer doing an excellent job following this kick ass rhythm and then stopping. Again, one of the great minimal drummers of our time.

#16 The way we were Lovely Blues from the HP boys. A beautiful love song about two lovers torn apart by the strong winds of Hurricane Andrew. She was from the mountains of New Zealand. He was from Atlanta. They both had blond hair. Doomed to fail from the beginning. Great opera retold in a sad, sad song.

#17 Not Your Blues

#18 I Fought the Police Start off, Drummer is playing a different song. To this lovely melodic blues riff, the drummer is pounding away like it is 1962 Get a life. Complete dis-congruity. This could be better split into two songs. But when the singing comes in. The guitars so wild and the drumming pulls up to it. You forget where you are. You even forget your parents are screaming at each other and you have to turn in your homework tomorrow.

#19. Vigilance You need to have had a bad day to appreciate this band. Beautiful, rhythmic piece that speaks of a pop song. The band is at it’s best when it falls into a rhythm and the guitar player pulls away from the rhythm in a blast of blues inspired fission that just returns to the flow. You can rock yourself into a semi stupor on this one and then float above the blue sea waves that are just glistening with clutters of oil spill algae infested sea weed. Rock on. I love it when the guitar hits really high notes and the base drum pounds along this moronic splinter of a beat. When the moronic drum beat loses you, you can just get lost in this wild wave of a guitar.

#20. An Excuse to Leave cough side 4

#21. Bad Faith Fantastic guitar playing. I love this rhythm. Nice simple pop song that falls into a fast guitar riff. Concentrated fruit and spice notes that leaves you feeling so mellow and refreshed.

#22. On The Couch cocaine redux. So simple. So slow. It doesn’t matter what the drummer does as long as he keeps the mood of the guitar player. Who cares if you hit the symbol or the snare? Just give the silence a moment to rest when the music calls for it. This is a very sad song, and it makes me question why does anyone make the guitar twang like this? And why does this evoke any kind of emotion?

Track 23. Like A Paving Stone Why are the guitars so high in the mix and the vocals so low in the mix? The song is like someone asking you a question, only to forget the answer and then asking it again. Ad infinitum.

Track 24. Scenes From A Marriage Music of the future should be this sad. Why are pop songs so prevalently happy? What ever happened to sad songs? The kind of song that makes you not want to get out of bed in the morning. In retrospect, I cannot imagine the drummer doing anything different from bashing the crap out of the cymbals. The contrast of the high cymbal notes and the bang of the snare. To hear it recored on the walkman is to hear it like you were there. I am out of paper. Why do we make the choices that we do and are our feelings just as random as making a choice between vanilla coke and pepsi light? What I like about this record is that I can put it on and mellow my mind. Someone once said that this band was just a hobby for me. That really hurt my feelings. At that point in my life, nothing had gone right. Everything that I did was a failure. But the only thing that got me up in the morning was the thought of playing music. And that seemed enough to get me past another day.

If I could encapsulate what it felt like to play this music into a few sentences – It would be to pull from Charles Baudelaire -

“Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you think of going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and there you would invigorate yourself like a lizard. This city is on the sea-shore; they say that it is built of marble and that the people there have such a hatred of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There you have a landscape that corresponds to your taste! a landscape made of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!’ My soul does not reply. … At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: ‘No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!”

#20 (No Date) Bruce Russell

It’s all but impossible to consider the New Zealand underground without in some way giving the nod to the magnitude of The Dead C and specifically Bruce Russell’s contribution. Russell has worked harder than anyone to formulate a new bottom of the world rock aesthetic, whether live in the field with groups like The Dead C and A Handful Of Dust, as a critic, as a curator and as a label owner. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other label outside of Siltbreeze and PSF that has so completely articulated an original aesthetic as much as Russell’s Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum imprints. And he was there long before you were. His guitar formulations feel like the ultimate extension of 1960s free/freak modes into prole art garage rock while his criticism – somewhere between the scabrous unholier-than-thou intellectual ferocity of Roland Woodbe and the hermetic formulations of Giordano Bruno – remains some of the most insightful and far-reaching of the post-Noise era. To celebrate the release of the landmark compilation, Time To Go – The Southern Psychedelic Moment: 1981-86, Russell has penned a special VT column focussing on the genesis of the NZ underground.

TIME TO GO - THE SOUTHERN PSYCHEDELIC MOMENT: 1981-86

March 2012 sees the release of this compilation on Flying Nun. In a way, I’ve been working on it for my whole adult life. Even by the most conservative calculation, I’ve been working at it for six years, since I first pitched the concept to Roger Shepherd before he bought the label back from Warners. He came over for a chat one day when he was looking at putting together the Flying Nun ‘box set’ of CDs that he did in 2006 for that company, and I suggested he pitch my idea to them. That went nowhere, but as soon as he had bought the company back, a couple of years ago, he said ‘now we have to do that compilation of yours’.

I find myself in a funny position here. Compiling ‘my back pages’ thusly is, in quite a personally meaningful way, a return to my youth: not just because of the vintage of the tracks. Before I’d even written a line of rock journalism, and years before I recorded a second of my own stuff, I knew I could ferret out interesting music and persuade other people of its value – however improbable. And so I used to spend a lot of time doing just that, at a time when obscure music was much harder to find in New Zealand than it is now. Professionally, I also pride myself on my ability to compile music in a meaningful way, one that adds to the experience of listening. But I think this is the first compilation I’ve ever done that doesn’t contain any of my own output. I’m ‘in’ this one solely as a fan, rather like my 21-year old self in 1981.

I go on at length in the liner notes about the background to this music in NZ history. So I won’t bother now. But I have to say that at that time it was something of a radical leap to argue that popular music from this country could be anything other than a second-rate imitation of other people’s music. And I guess that despite having taken a big interest in NZ music over the preceding couple of years, it was not until after Flying Nun got going that I actually really got converted to the new cultural reality.

Appropriately enough that happened in November 1981 as I was finishing up my third-year exams at Otago University in Dunedin. I’d heard the Clean’s first single often enough, and quite liked it. And I’d seen them in April of that year and been quite perplexed by them. At that point their sound was still like standing next to a 747 on the ground as the engines warmed up. They were a lot more like the Gordons (who I’d seen the previous summer in Nelson, the holiday shithole I’d grown up in) than you can readily imagine. The Gordons gig was one where you felt the sound of the band so physically that crossing the dance floor was like wading through hot treacle full of bathing manatees.

My 1981 student association ID card. I recall was really pleased I looked so much like Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to assassinate John Paul II. I recall thinking at the time he deserved another shot.

But in November 1981 I persuaded my flatmate to take a night off and go to the other end of town to this tiny bar in the Empire Tavern where bands were starting to play. We went to see the Clean. Of all the profound ways in which my life had changed in that epochal year (and since the preceding Christmas I’d become an enemy of the state, among other things), seeing the Clean was the biggest. I can still recall the certainty with which I knew then that they were at that moment the best fucking band in the world. I still don’t understand how I knew it, and in many ways I’ve spent a significant portion of the last three decades trying to disprove that hypothesis, but I haven’t done it yet. Maybe the Fall were better that year. But the fact that the last sentence contains ‘the Fall’, and starts with ‘maybe’, should alert informed readers to the enormity of what I was experiencing. It was like falling in love.

Skip forward to the end of the period under review in this compilation with me for a moment. I was in London, England. NME had released the allegedly ‘epochal’ C86 cassette. I checked out quite a few of the bands compiled there, as well as a bunch of others, and concluded that Britain had only two or three bands at the time which could stand up in the company of the best New Zealand had to offer. They were mainly feeble posers in leather trousers. So home I went, to get on with my life and try to do something to help my country be a little less of a boringly pleasant sheep and dairy farm than it had been for the preceding century. And the rest, dear readers, is ‘history’, at least as far as I’m concerned. A history, in my case, dominated by the Dead C. and related activities; which have, I immodestly believe, done a fair bit to achieve the goal outlined in the preceding sentence-but-one.

In London, at my 26th birthday party in 1986, flying the friendly skies with Richard Ram of Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos. Richard had recently seen Spacemen 3 in a Rugby pub, but was so under-whelmed he didn’t mention it till about three years later. I think we went out and saw My Bloody Valentine after this, back when Kevin Shields still had a bowl-cut. They were utter shit, and I could never take them seriously after.

So to return to Time to Go (it’s a Clean lyric, by the way). For me, there are a few points to make. It’s not just a Flying Nun compilation. In some ways it was quite hard to determine what actually was a Flying Nun record, in that period. In some cases bands put money into manufacturing, as well as often covering recording costs. In that way, the Gordons’ album was actually released by the band, but later re-pressed by the label. Several of the tracks on this compilation were originally records distributed by the label, but not released by it. I could have thrown in more obscure things that were not on Flying Nun or distributed by them, but in the end, one way to limit the selection to a manageable level was to give preference to label releases. So the Puddle’s ‘Junk’ is in, and the And Band’s ‘Interstellar Gothic’ is out. Either one would have ticked the box marked ‘George Henderson’, a box that this compilation certainly had to tick. But I chose the one on Flying Nun.

It’s very definitely not a Dunedin compilation. If I had wanted to perpetuate lazy journalistic myths, I could have compiled the whole thing from Dunedin alone. But I’ve spent at least the last 25 years championing the peculiarly Christchurch strand of psychedelia which otherwise looked likely to escape wider notice altogether – so why would I want to stop now? In 1985 I reviewed the first Scorched Earth Policy EP in Garage (download the full run of these fanzines as PDFs from the Flying Nun site) and wrote a full page outlining the whole Victor Dimisich/Pin Group/Vacuum back-story to the record. I had to, because even then no one in New Zealand (let alone elsewhere) knew that these bands were as central (if not more central) to Flying Nun’s very existence than any number of ‘Dunedin sounds’.

This music was less about punk, than about what came before. Many of the key figures in that first wave of bands were 60s kids. John Halvorsen of the Gordons was actually active in teen beat groups in the mid-to-late 60s, in Ashburton, of all end-of the-world hell-holes. Look it up on the map, but that won’t tell you what provincial New Zealand was like back then. The sheer cultural deprivation of the town is unimaginable today, and yet they still have a disturbingly high teen suicide rate.

So in my opinion it’s the psychic discharge of pent-up frustration and inchoate rage that explains this music. The people making it were fed up with doing what was expected of them by a narrow-minded and conformity-mad society of people that presented as wowsers and drank like navvies. It also wasn’t about some posing vinyl-trouser-ed scene, as ‘new wave Auckland’ was around the same time. The thing that struck any remotely attentive observer was that these bands were hardly even aware anyone was watching. This music was so far from being ‘career oriented’ that it wasn’t even ‘audience oriented’. Listen to ‘It’s Cold Outside’ by the Victor Dimisich Band in a blindfold test and try to guess even what decade it was made in. Apart from some tincture of Television, it’s hard to guess between about 1968 and 1998. It’s that kind of ‘it came from the sky’ vibe that frankly defies categorisation. You can smell the reality. These people were very literate in rock music terms, they were literate in literary terms too, and they took drugs. It was what we did to rebel. Listen to ‘Russian Rug’. You don’t produce that kind of whacked-out blending of Pierre Henri with ? Mark and the Mysterians, without engaging in the desperate ‘datura-to-San Pedro’ sub-sub-culture which characterised the South Island of New Zealand at that time: and we invented home-bake heroin, don’t forget.

Throw in massive youth unemployment, impending economic collapse (by mid-1984 the government was weeks from bankruptcy, it was Greece with all the trimmings), and you have a memorable time to be alive – ‘and very heaven to be young’ as Wordsworth (or Steve Coogan) put it. So those were desperate times. And out of it came pop music that ‘advanced beyond the given’ (thanks Herr Lukacs) and aspired to make or say something more, something real. There was a feeling that things had to change. It was – truly -‘time to go’.

This project has been my attempt to pay homage to the times, to the people - many of whom have either passed on, or simply failed to thrive – and to the place. There’s a reason for the legend. This is it.

Bruce Russell,

Lyttelton,

March 2012

#19 (No Date) Graham Lambkin

Graham Lambkin 1992

Graham Lambkin has long been one of the most enigmatic and individually creative players to come out of the UK underground, bridging original UK DIY styles with an interrogative approach to rock, sound art and language. Starting out as The Cat & Bells Club he formed The Shadow Ring with Darren Harris, whose unique vocal stylings and surreal lyrics birthed an atmosphere of suburban ennui that was the perfect complement to the music’s usurpation of classic prole/punk styles – detuned guitars played percussively, cheap keyboards prodded, nod-out rhythms beaten out on household furniture… the group played a key part in the creatively accelerated years of the 1990s underground alongside other players associated with the Siltbreeze label – Harry Pussy, Charalambides, The Dead C et al - but their own restlessly inventive drive soon took them somewhere else entirely, into a very lonely, dark and profoundly beautiful zone of deconstructed language and austere synth stylings across masterpiece albums like Lighthouse, Lindus and I’m Some Songs. Since then Lambkin has curated the Kye imprint where he has continued to join the dots between avant garde art praxis and hands-on DIY, releasing sides by everyone from Call Back The Giants (featuring his old bandmate Tim Goss) through to the contemporary composer Moniek Darge. In order to celebrate the releases of his new LP on Kye, Amateur Doubles, a beguilingly personal ‘soundtrack’ work, and to see the year off with a bang for VT readers, we are extremely proud to present a column where he sets out, for the first time in detail, the precise genesis of The Shadow Ring and the making of their classic first album, 1993’s City Lights.

AMATEUR DOUBLES

Twenty years in the game, and I still don’t know the F chord. The last time I had a guitar in my hand was when I dropped mine into the dumpster behind our apartment building nine years ago. Now I’m not even interested. Much better to leave it to those who can genuinely make their strings sing. But of course I didn’t always think this way. There was a time I owned three axes, and abused them several times a week, often in the company of my dear friend Darren Harris. These carefree, indulgent sessions, which spanned the years 1991-92, lead us to believe that we could/should form a band - trading initially as The Cat & Bells Club (or The C&B), then Footprint, and The Shadow Ring shortly thereafter.

In some regards this decision was inevitable. Music and records were always a big attraction. I can still recall my 10-year-old self, hunched over the hand-me-down mono cassette deck as it chewed its way through Hunky Dory, Lionheart, and whatever else I could liberate from my sister’s bedroom. A few years down the road it was the John Peel show, Blast First, Record Collector magazine, indie fanzines, Audion, and then one day… Forced Exposure. However much I thought I knew about music before (underground or otherwise) suddenly blew out the window like the froth off a pint of bitter. Now, here truly was a brave new world, packed to the drawstrings with intrepid explorers, most of whom had somehow, circumnavigated all my musical expectations. Harsh 70’s Reality; Explosion in a Shingle Factory; Lake; Iys; Spirit of Yma, all offered wildly original solutions to the problem of how to make music. This was a eureka! moment for me, and an excellent means to syphon off any disposable income at hand.

Aladdin’s Cave

Aladdin’s Cave

Our first baby steps came in the shape of three privately distributed, micro-edition cassettes: The Cat & Bells Club (yellow j-card), The Cat & Bells Blub (pink j-card), and Footprint. Fine of course, but not real records. Making that happen would take a far greater challenge to our commitment, involving the coughing up of some serious dough. We clubbed our resources together and took the plunge. It also seemed reasonable in light of this upgrade, to rechristen ourselves for the vinyl market. The answer was already there in one of our earlier tracks: Kent Custer, from the second C&B cassette. The songs deals with a fictitious pest who revels in the madness of an untidy kitchen: ‘Firstly, the shadow ring’s flag the way.’ The shadow rings in question being the hard to remove scum lines found around the inner rim of any well used coffee/tea cup. Perfect for us and our grimy little operation. We even had a sleeve design all ready and waiting. All we needed now were the songs, and a label to release them through.

The name Dry Leaf Discs came to us by chance. On the day we were discussing label name ideas, I received an anonymous package in the mail, stuffed with dried oak leaves. It was strange and seemed fated, so we went with that. Our grand debut on wax, the Don’t Open The Window b/w The Heavy Foot Of The Lark 7" (DF001) was a crude affair, even for us. Two rag-bag instrumental knockabouts for charity shop guitar (replete with hand scratched Led Zeppelin IV symbols) tea cup, tray, spoon and Casio, all captured on TDK C-90’s by the faithful Vestax MR300 4-trk, a.k.a. S.H.P Studios (St Hilda Portable). It didn’t really matter to us if it sounded like crap - that wasn’t the point. It was our creation, our own version of music, and it was a thrill to make. So, on with the show.

The next logical step was to record an album. In an effort to advance our sound we brought a used floor tom, a second (electric) guitar, and a xylophone. We also decided it would be wise to recruit an extra pair of hands. Only two people ever came for an audition - one, a 16 year-old blues fanatic (whose name escapes me), and the other, our old school friend Tim Goss. The blues fellow arrived and played a few licks, but quickly became confused and angry as we fell in behind him, probably believing himself to be the victim of a cruel prank. Tim came with less to offer, but despite showing some early promise, didn’t quite gel. Tim of course returned to our story a few years later, but back in 1993 we were still at square one. So in light of these disappointments it was decided that we would just invent a band member. Someone malleable and compliant with our needs. Someone who wouldn’t stick his oar in, or rock the boat. Someone like… Klaus Canterbury. Pathetic of course, but we didn’t care. Now we had our very own R. Totale, and we were ready to record.

7st Hilda Road

7st Hilda Road

Sessions were always very cordial. We’d warm up with a few Holsten Pils, whatever else was going around, and on the weekends Lambs Navy Rum. We’d briefly go over what the track should sound like, how many of the four channels to use, maybe a few lyrics, some mic placement, and then away we’d go. Everything was always first take with no rehearsals. Done. Next. The more we played the more we became conscious of what we had, and what we lacked. Influences were often easy to spot - Recent discoveries such as The Godz weighed heavily, as did pretensions towards The Fall, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Deram-era Bowie. But some were less obvious. Darren and I were infatuated with Joe McPhee & John Snyder’s Pieces of Light LP (brought blind for £3 off Stefan Jaworzyn’s legendary Scumlist) and tried very hard to copy some of Snyder’s moves. Another obscure one was a private press folk/cabaret LP by The Joanne Duo called Together, brought in a moment of boredom from The Spastics Society. This was a fascinating record; poorly recorded, poorly performed, and with those terrible home-photo snaps on the back, and that amateur layout. We couldn’t get that thing off the turntable. The sleeve notes to City Lights loosely paraphrased those of Together: ‘This is the first album by The Joanne Duo and it follows close on the heels of an E.P which proved very popular with audiences in Britain and all over the Continent of Europe’. vs. ‘Stand up and count them were words of mine when D.L.D. first unveiled plans for this, the debut LP - it follows several months after their single ‘Don’t Open The Window." et al.*

Masters

Masters

After a month or so of regular get-togethers, we found we’d amassed more than enough material to fill an LP, and so set about selecting tracks from various sessions, and running them into sequence. We ended up with what we thought was a good balance between instrumentals, songs and abstract stuff. I can’t remember which plant we used to manufacture the LP. The previous 7" had been done at Porkys, but the run-out groove on the LP doesn’t have ‘another porky prime cut’, etched into it, so I don’t know… What I do remember is that we were invited to watch the record being mastered. This was performed by veteran engineer Brian East at his home-cum-studio on the coast of Sandgate nr Folkestone. Darren and I were received on the appointed day and given a tour of the workshop. Brian then did his bit whilst his charming and lovely wife ferried in a stream of McVities digestives and hot tea. Brian was awesome - patient and funny, and not at all thrown when our racket kicked-in over his colossal sound system. He regaled us with tales of his time working for RCA in the 70’s, and some of the big sellers he’d had his hand in. The Shadow Ring were just one more feather in his cap.

Whilst we waited for our record to come back we worked on the cover art. A wrap-around paste-on was cheap, easy and it looked cool. The drawing on the front was based on the interior of The Leas Club - a popular drinking hole at the time. It was a great place to get anything you wanted, and they had a well appointed bar. They also had snooker and pool upstairs, darts, and a main stage for bands. Darren wrote out the liner notes, we had the thing printed, and we were good to go. About a month later we were sitting around watching the then brand new morning quiz show, Supermarket Sweep, when the phone rang. It was the pressing plant informing us the vinyl was ready for pick-up. I had my friend Simon Jefferies drive us up in his van, and we sped back to the coast, proud owners of DF002. To ‘promote’ the release of the LP, we ran off 50 color xerox posters, each a grotesque collage of mugshots, back gardens, old christmas cards, high spirits and low ethics. We didn’t really know what to do with them, so they ended up just being folded and randomly inserted into some of the sleeves. But that was the extent of it. There were no live shows (and where would we have played?) no radio airplay, scant press. Most of the copies seeped overseas, and were distributed in the US via the good graces of Jimmy Johnson, although Fisheye and Grim Humour/Fourth Dimension did handle some minor distribution on the homeland.

The Leas Club

The Leas Club

So what have we got then?

Double Standard Easing gently in with this 4 X guitar instrumental. Two channels of electric, and two channels of acoustic (one steel string, one cat gut). Although Darren and I were both excused from traditional concepts of skill and technique in our playing, I do still like our guitar sound on this - simplistic and subdued, with just the right amount of nuance. Jeff Beck shudders and puts on his sweater.

City Lights This was one of the earliest tracks recorded for the LP. A hangover from the Cat & Bells Club sessions, this was Kent Custer tarted up with a fresh lyric and a cleaner, calmer sound. For whatever reason this seems more at peace with itself than some of the other tracks from the era, almost optimistic. No one’s left the confines of the bedroom, but at least someone’s noticed a window. The title was pinched from Lou Reed’s sentimental homage to Charlie Chaplin. Darren and I were both huge fans of Lou, in particular The Bells, and this track seemed to sit like an island of calm in the otherwise tumultuous seas of its parent LP. The drum sound here was modeled on Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Chariots of Silk - one floor tom pounded monotonously in an effort to win Phil Spector’s ear. City Lights turned out to be our best-loved song, earning two cover versions (Rautavaara, 1995, Blessure Grave, 2009) and a Vietnamese fan-made promo video, viewable on YouTube.

Ohh Ahh Of all the Godz’s knock-off’s on City Lights Ohh Ahh is perhaps the most unwelcome. An uninspired pillage through the Contact High songbook, hung on the nose of Pow R. Toc H. This hasn’t aged well, and was possibly not in the best of health to begin with. The only redeeming feature is the punched-in electric guitar noise mid-way through that I still think sounds kinda cool.

Cape Of Seaweed Mankind’s destruction of life on land, and its inevitable retreat back to the depths of the sea. Less ecological admonition, more acid flash on the beach. Some typewriter clatter and a little bit of staged chat just about hold things together

Lyin Eyes Darren Harris re-imagined as carefree folk troubadour. No idea why this mercifully-brief throwaway was given the (permanent) green light.

Cold Coffee Double Standard’s darker sibling. The same multi-tracked guitar set-up as before, but this one came out with a great deal more menace. Brooding and restless, this draws Side A to a close under its canopy of gloom. What a downer. Cold Coffee was also the name given to a testing home cocktail at the time: equal parts gin, Jamaican spicy rum, Smirnoff Blue Label vodka, and a splash of pine household disinfectant. You can see a shot of our ‘bar’ on the bottom of the promo poster.

Here Come The Candles The title of this one was lifted from the Mandy Morton & Spriguns track According to Matthew. Darren and I were both great admirers of Spriguns (of Tolgus) - Jack with a Feather being another boombox perennial at the time, but you can find According to Matthew on Magic Lady. Our Here Come The Candles is a guarded, emotionally confused preamble through the unimagined hells of marriage>divorce. Hard to understand why we felt compelled to comment on such alien terrain; our own ’little black books’ being conspicuously bereft of data.

Faithful Calls A biscuit tin drum roll heralds the arrival of the longest track on City Lights. Something of a Frankenstein’s monster, Faithful Calls welds some seriously purple, sub-Bolan-esque prose against a bed of aimless acoustic clatter, broken up by the intrusive arrival of Darren’s wild and woolly sausage-fingered Casio solo (which we liked as it reminded us of a rough ’n’ ready sea shanty), and a long free blast of baby listener intercom feedback. These handy devices were rescued from the skip behind the local Do It All, and they proved to be loyal and effective aids when we needed to add a bit of grit to our soup. The ‘poetry bit’ makes a brief return before the din subsides, and we all catch our breath.

White Eyes This supremely moronic track is considered by its author to be one of the better things on the side. The mumbling vocal never actually verbalizes either word in the title, but when played back it sounded something like “white arm and white eyes”, or “why are you white eyes?”… There’s also what appears to be a whispering voice, which comes in around the 55 second mark. We were never able to trace its provenance. This track would’ve made a great 45. (There’s still time Graham, there’s still time)

The Visitor Opening with a confirmation by the fake Spaniard, S.Fritz, The Visitor is the closest we sailed into matters of the cloth. Religious iconography would occasionally crop up in lyrics around this time, and here, a long overdue Christ returns to Earth, only to be met with blanket apathy. This infuriates him, and sends him scampering back to the spiritual safehouse from whence he came. Things get a bit silly in the middle section, with the frantic pounding and whooping (I would never again allow myself to become so excited on record) but for the most part this is a harmless period piece. Tom Lax always insists this was the track that sold the Shadow Ring to him. Tom, you’ve got mail.

Snowbirds Of Alkatraz^ The LP closes with another nod to the Joanne Duo, taking their reading of Snowbird (the Gene Maclellan classic) and running it through the Shadow Ring mincer. It seemed apropos to send this paradigm of freedom flying back to the isolated confines of The Rock. Unseen and unappreciated. That’s life.

Graham Lambkin today -happy, healthy, relaxed

#18 (No Date) Spencer Clark

photo: Charles Berlitz as RIPLEY with ACE VENTURA; 2011

We first encountered Spencer Clark when he and his musical partner James Ferraro somehow succeeded in hypnotising us into booking The Skaters at one of VT’s earliest Subcurrent festivals. In the event we were more than happy to be suckered as they were one of the highlights of that year, playing a set that felt like it was gonna levitate the roof right off the building. Since his work with The Skaters – still one of the most influential bands of the modern age – Spencer has worked under many different guises, from Vodka Soap through Black Joker, Monopoly Child Star Searchers and Fourth World Magazine but his back catalogue is united by his overarching interest in altered states, in the reification of hallucinatory environments and the possibilities of channelling aspects of the self and others via specific cultural portals: 80s pop detritus, surf movie grimoires, Fortean pulp, Typhonian slimers… His music combines aspects of exotica, minimalism, drone and environmental recordings with a blurry, psychoactive and expressive use of fidelity that is extremely potent. He is also one of the most chiller dudes you could ever share a pineapple with, combining a laid-back party attitude with a natural aptitude for inspired occult thought and an umbilical to Sirius that he can turn on and off at will. We asked him to write something for VT to tie-in with the release of his new Fourth World Magazine release, The Spectacle Of Light Abductions, and he gave us a fantastic piece about his encounter with an icon of American advertising, evidence of alien activity and the inspiration behind his new LP.

The last time I came back from Europe to the American Crunchtree I was feeling really fresh. As always, jumping back into Joe Plumbers cage match is like turning on the Looney Tunes Intro. Coming out of the airplane tunnel - everyone starts talking real loud and smiling with huge grins, it’s like being born again. Moving at Euro speed in Disneyland gives me a light hearted gifted intensity, that might otherwise be a little afraid. I cruised back into San Francisco, and it was my girlfriend’s birthday. We went to an expensive hotel in the Oakland hills called the Monte Claire, or the Clairemont. I have this sense (that some people take pills for) where I seem to recognize anyone I have ever seen, like a for real likeness fixation. We were in the bar, she was looking really nice, and her girlfriends were about to arrive. We were drinking cocktails and I was thinking about how happy she was, when I saw this older man sitting with another older man at a table across the room. This first guy was really recognizable and I mentioned it to her, like he was famous, from somewhere. It reminded me of San Diego, but I couldn’t figure it out, and she didn’t like when I made shit up, so I quit it.

George Zimmer

Her friends arrived, and now there were four good looking girls and just two guys. We went outside for a cigarette, and soon after these two geezers just followed us out. They wanted to mingle for real, and they began to approach us, and well, the guy who didn’t look too famous came up and was like – “Do you know who this guy is?” – and just as he said it my brain flashed and I remembered him, it was George Zimmer from the suit company Men’s Warehouse. This company is really big in California, and probably elsewhere as well. George Zimmer is the spokesman, and the CEO, he appears in every commercial, which are on all the time, saying “You’ll look as good as I do, I guarantee it”. This dude is definitely, if you haven’t met him, a DREAM DEMON, meaning he looks super iconic, and is, to someone who knows 90’s TV in Cali. He was really stoked to talk to us, just jiving with the ladies, and his confidant, who was like his agent or something, was kind of a freak, and was trying to impress upon everyone the gravity of the situation. Other people started to gather, and a spectacle was created, we were now sort of out of direct contact with this icon, so I was getting a little bummed, because I wanted to talk to him, like back to America in the Dream Zone.

But definitely, as we cruised back inside he came to our table immediately, no brag style, but the girls were looking really nice, in dresses and all blonde hairs. He sat more or less near me, but the chat zone was super boring, like everyone was sort of speaking to him as though he was a baby. Celebrity shock is cool, but its like, cool to really talk to them, most of them always say something pretty out there. So I kind of had to butt-in, and I asked him what he was doing this weekend. He immediately responded with “That’s funny you should ask, I am flying to Florida to see the Space Shuttle launched”. So, I am like straight out of Europe, like my own fantasy zone still intact, and I hastened to ask him, it just shot out of my mouth: “So do you believe in Aliens?”

Edgar Mitchell

So he goes into it heavy, he mentions that he is going to visit his friend, Edgar Mitchell, who was an astronaut that walked on the moon. He and his space buddy were in this organisation that was, and I don’t remember this part super well, but they were in this organisation that was into learning about and discussing the Ether, the space in space. So the suit CEO takes me aside and mentions to me that when Edgar Mitchell got back from walking on the moon, he felt very odd, and was sure that he had seen some stuff in space, like he had even felt other beings up there. He had some friends in the CIA, as of course all astronauts have connections; so he went to his friends in the CIA, and told them how he felt, and mentioned that he had risked his life for his country, and asked them if any beings from other planets had visited Earth.

So, George Zimmer is a pretty straight guy, and he looks at me, like Fortune 500 style, and tells me that Edgar’s CIA buddies told him that one time an Aliencraft did land on Earth, but only once, and never again had it happened. They said it was that one event in Roswell, and that it did happen, and that two aliens crashed in one ship, one died on impact and the other was experimented on for two weeks, and then died.

This was really heavy, because it seemed like Zimmer was talking about that we had sort of meddled with the Alien and maybe had something to do with his death. He gave me his card and told me to call him if I ever needed a suit. It was straight up crazy though….

When I started working on this record I really wanted to make sounds that had a positive relation to outer alien consciousness. The record is about using the alien metaphor for something higher and human; as though our experiences with Aliens are personal experiences with ourselves, a sign that we have made in the sky, so as to impress. I went to Salt Lake City to meet this guy Kit, he has this archive of footage from the Mormon’s Spectacle of Light Festival that happens in the stadium that’s featured in pictures on the new record. I spoke with him about how I was into the stadium ritual that they did, with all the flashing lights and colored fountains; I told him I wasn’t going to do anything harmful with the footage but that I was going to use it to make a new story.

I think that the Alien question reminds me of that movie Jacobs Ladder, where Tim Robbins is like always wondering what’s going on with himself, and why the outsiders (Aliens or monsters) plague him, he keeps looking for answers and then realises that this whole event is him working on ascending to heaven. I just keep thinking that we are experiencing visions of ourselves. And plus, when I asked the George Zimmer suit CEO guy if I could by him a drink, he was like, “No thanks man, I don’t need the stuff, in this great state the weed is so good I don’t need alcohol…”

#17 (No Date) Mattin

It’s no secret that here at VT we put equal weight on the avant and the rock and when it comes to avant rockers Lou Reed remains the goddamn king. The whole VT aesthetic simply wouldn’t exist without him. What with alla the pasting he’s been getting for Lulu, his new album with Metallica, we hadda rise to his defence. Not that he needs it, you understand, or probably even appreciates it, but the quality of the criticism, not to say the bandwagon aspect of the mud-slinging, well, it kinda sticks in our throat. Ever since he tried to haggle with us over the purchase of a Magic and Loss t-shirt that we insisted was not for sale at the last Instal festival, we have had a profound respect for Mattin’s commitment to Lou Reed fandom so he was the first person we got on the line when we needed someone to set the record straight. Mattin’s back catalogue remains one of the most rigorous – and routinely ass-blasting – marriages of avant garde and rock aesthetics, from his amazing reconstructions of sociopathic oppositional rock with Billy Bao, his solo experiments with language and compositional binds, his stunning new study in surreal aleatoric riff damage with Exquisite Corpse, not to say a ton of collaborations, he continues to bolster the tradition by breaking out and freaking with it. We’re proud to host his review of Lulu, a piece that underlines how Lou Reed’s week still beats (insert random Pitchfork band here)’s year.

Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu

The beauty of our times: this record is the most hated record ever and it has only just been released. Lou Reed and Metallica took a risk and Lulu is generating some of the most passionate and intelligent writing on the internet. For sure the cruelty of the reviews matches the cruelty of the record. Both seem to be an ethnographic study of our times. One of the reviewers said that Lou Reed and Metallica are amongst the most perverse musicians around. Why do people get surprised when they get the ultimate perverse record? So perverse that you cannot take it? There is a famous saying in downtown New York which goes: if you are a Lou Reed fan you must be ready to go all the way. Yes, he is going to take you to places that you have never dreamed of, even in your worst nightmares. If you are a Lou Reed fan you go through shit, shit records, shit playing, shit covers, shit lyrics… He takes you psychologically to the wild side even if you might be comfortably playing the record in your cosy home with a cup of tea. He is going to make you reconsider your values of judgement to the core and beyond. Once you go through this then you might agree with Lou when he says about Lulu: “This thing is the best thing ever done by anybody”. And he insists in an interview that he is not being egotistical. I am a Lou Reed fan and I believe him. When Lou does something he puts himself into it 100% and as we know this is too much for the majority of human beings, from his solo on “I Heard Her Call My Name” that made him the best guitarist ever by bridging feedback noise rock with a Coleman free jazz sensitivity to Metal Machine Music where the guitar did not even need a guitarist (artistic de-subjectification probably taken from Warhol’s filmmaking: he didn’t need to be behind the camera). But here we get a blunt and confident Lou Reed happy to have a partner to rock with. And this is what Lou Reed and Metallica are becoming: Rock’n’roll animals in the perverted zoo of the internet. Yes, Lulu is about sex. It is a 69 between Lou Reed and Metallica. Lou’s tongue is a chainsaw with rusted links (for infection and maximum durability). Metallica gets cut in two and will never recover. They say in interviews that now that they have discovered improvisation with Lou they will implement it on their 10th record. Who knows, maybe next year Metallica will play at the Konfrontatitonen festival? Lou has previously made amazing noise with the guitar but that has already made it into the proper canon of Noise (as an established genre of music). Now he uses his voice as a device for achieving unreified noise which still contains alienation. But this is not concrete poetry, somehow it sounds even seems more abstract, it is relentless, beautifully out of tune and it hurts. And then the lyrics: sniff your shit in the wind, coloured dick, pathetic little dog… these sentences are snubs to any form of taste. Reed lyrics achieve a level of vulgarity so brilliant that it will probably beat the number of quotes that a single record can get on the internet. Yes, James, you are a table, where Lou can rest his fuckin’ feet on. What Lulu produces is a radical equalisation: a teenage Metallica cover band are the backing group to a drunken 100 year old ranting about how viciously prostituted a prostitute was who he met when he was 14 while angels in furs play violins and the neighbourhood dudes in a basement are making noise while looking at amateur German porn which contains some scatological moments. In fact on this record you get the whole canon of interesting music: drone wrong, Henry Chopin-style language deconstructions, improv-thrash, heavy literary cock rock, contemporary classical Brainbombs, geriatric-metal… The headfuck continues with the gender politics: what could be more queer than a young feminist girl shouting for sexual liberation in the body of an old male Jew with cut legs and tits? (Whether this body has sperm or not is another question…) Lulu is more Lou Reed than Lou Reed and that surely means that this is the best thing ever done by anybody.

Mattin/Anti-copyright