Hovercraft. Live. Unknown.

This was on the flip side of the Mercury Rev show posted below. Whoever sent it to me didn't record where or when it came from. Judging by the accented voices you can hear at the beginning, this was recorded somewhere in the UK, which probably dates it to 1999 as that was the only year they toured in England (outside of one London show in '97).

There's some tape hiss, but it's quickly drowned out by Hovercraft's ear-scouring levels of demented noise (There may be a good way to remove ambient tape artifacts, but whenever I've tried it, it just leaves the rest of the audio sounding clippy. Besides, as Cat and Girl have said, tape hiss is the only authentic sound).

Hovercraft preferred to improvise live, lurching and swaying between mid-century, abstract industrial training-film music and reverberating, psychedelically mechanistic interstellar overdrive. It could be the soundtrack for a very destructive ballet about a belligerently drunk, hyper-jointed, giant robot stumbling down a dark alley.

Hovercraft

Ifwhen. Null Set.

Sometime after posting All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavor’s Turning Into Small, I got an email from guitarist Merc letting me know that he and drummer Brian Doherty had a new band called Ifwhen. Actually, they’ve been around since 2003, but they do have a new EP that’s available as a free download from their website. I’ve got it linked below in mp3 format, but if you head over there you can also get it in FLAC, plus download their cover of Syd Barrett’s No Good Trying.

Ifwhen doesn’t sound exactly like ANL&LF, but it does sound like its natural progression. The shoegaze and post-rock elements have become very compressed, and the songs are more jaggedly three-dimensional. There’s a geometric feel to it, as if they aren’t playing melodies, but unspooling the schematics of theoretical architecture from an AUTOCAD machine that’s just finished reading House of Leaves.

The logic/programming implications of their name become readily apparent in the multifaceted intersections of sound and direction. Each song is a maze of possibilities being explored simultaneously. It verges on noise, but like ANL&LF, Ifwhen is always revolving around and reflecting a solid pop core through its many twirling prisms. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of ear candy. It’s still highly disorienting—psychotically (psychedelically) schizoid, like listening to Barrett, Belong and Melt Banana all at the same time—but they really are working to fuck your shit up for your own good. They’re trying to change your perception.

And they can do it, too. Unlike most post-MBV bands, Ifwhen don’t compose based on volume, or reverb, or textures, or shades of color. They aren’t feeling things out improvisationally, they’re reconfiguring the actual internal structure of the music. Keyboardist Mary McDowell can actually play in two different time signatures (one with each hand) at the same time. And Merc’s guitar has a way of constantly folding in on itself like origami that never resolves into known shapes. Everything is oblique without being obfuscatory. The hidden song structures will slowly crystallize on repeated listens as you learn to navigate their psychohedron space.

Null Set

The Birthday Party. Peel Sessions.

The only hits the Birthday Party ever landed were to their audience’s guts. “Dangerously unhinged” barely begins to describe their mutant hybrid of punk, goth, funk, improvisational jazz and psychotic-sleaze-blues.

The band seemed locked in a death-battle with melody, thrashing and throttling the life out of it, often sounding like each member was playing a different song to the others. Meanwhile, Nick Cave strutted and preened like a demonic carnival barker daring you to buy a ticket to the most depraved freak-show around.

Their bared-teeth wit and gleeful nihilism sound like nothing else ever attempted. “Wherefore art thou, babyface?”, Cave screeches, summoning the haints and voodoo-dollies that haunt the roots of rock and outlaw country—spavined vinyl gods out for a final, delirious spin.

Peel

Jackdaw With Crowbar. Hot Air.

Hot Air splits nearly equally between absurdist, political, jump-cut, Dada wailers (A specialty on Ron Johnson. See also: The Membranes, A Witness, Pigbros, The Shrubs, The Noseflutes, and Bogshed. In fact, Tris King, Bogshed’s drummer was also in Jackdaw With Crowbar, as was Wilf from Dog Faced Hermans) and post-punk dub workouts assembled in Tom Waits’ junkyard. Weirdly, it works.

Their live shows were immersive multimedia events, with the band playing within projections of experimental films made especially for them. Apparently they’ve reformed, inspired by the ease and immediacy of laptop production (gigs in the 80’s often had to wait while their film maker spliced broken reels back together in the tour van), so look for their gigs if you live in the Leamington area.

Hot Air

Myspace

Website

King of the Slums. Barbarous English Fayre.

Sometimes the when and the where are just as important as the what. I first heard King Of The Slums on a Walkman as I wandered along a canalbank in Wigan through the teeth of a winter evening downpour. What I heard slotted into the moment perfectly. . . though I'd heard nothing remotely like it before.

Sour, twisted guitars framing austere power-riffs, a lone violin sobbing to itself on the outskirts of melody, and that voice; cold and desperate as an Ancoates drizzle, informing me that he would disappear up his own backside or end up breeding whippets.

'The Pennine Spitter', along with 11 other excellent reasons why KOTS are one of the most compelling bands on the planet, is here on this summation of the band's career to date. 'Barbarous English Fayre' is a rasping litany of tattoos, gasworks, shaving cuts and squeaking prams. A haunting, savage voyage into the underbelly of English life.

For England, and specifically the North, is the love / hate object they return to constantly. It's this obsession, and subsequent use of images like Britannia, The Union Jack and Enoch Powell, that has seen them occasionally smeared as fascists. This is a dim and insulting slur. KOTS sing of this country entirely without gloss and sentiment, without political hectoring but with an ironic and trenchant realism.

In 'Bombs Away On Harpurhey' they explode the myth of Thatcher's 'go for it' culture (as if it needed exploding) with a sparking, snarling grace. In 'Venerate Me Utterly' the shabby dreams of the luckless are evoked brilliantly. Love, ambition, failure, all are viewed with the same pitiless, sardonic eye.

The absence of a lyric sheet may prevent you from realising that Charlie Keigher is the best unknown lyricist in Britain. Ordinary phrases ('Mere slip of a lad', 'You're not much to look at') are invested with a new and menacing meaning while the music has an alien beauty all its own.

The new stuff is stunning. 'Up To The Fells' is as wild and sombre as its title. 'Full Speed Ahead' is their most powerful and direct statement yet. It might even be a hit. Ha!

Forget the Euro art-bores and the pimply Yank college boys, outside of the mainstream King Of The Slums are practically peerless. In five years' time you'll be claiming you loved them. So do it now.

Stuart Maconie, 1989 NME Review

Les Rallizes Dénudés. Heavier Than a Death In the Family.

Haters might say they only know one song, but Jesus Fucking Christ, what a song. They certainly play it like it's the only one anyone will ever need to know. Mizutani discovered how to mainline a migraine and make it a mystical experience. For a band that primarily exists as legend, it's a relief (and a wonder) to discover that they might be the only group that live up to (and exceed) the rumors.

The guitar is a thunderhead of coruscating, liquid white light; loud like nature. Mizutani's cool, detached vocals are so drenched and buried in reverb, they sound like they're being reflected off a thousand smashed mirrorballs. The bass and drums keep everything locked down by playing sub-genius to the guitar's solarized brilliance. Like—if a bass made only one noise that signified itself, if it were its own symbol on a one to one scale and whacking it with your hand made it say its own name; or hitting a drum made it say "drum" in its own hammer-stupid simplicity (not even like having found the primal groove or universal beat; just a satisfyingly, idiot simple thump). It's the Louie Louie oversoul.

Heavy

V/A. Oz Days Live.

The second disk is really the only reason anybody ever looks for this album, as it houses both The Taj Mahal Travellers and Les Rallizes Denudes in what must have been one massive mind-fuck of an evening. But I’ve written about them elsewhere, so I’ll tell you about the real reason you need this: Dr. Acid Seven.

Side one is clogged with otherwise completely forgettable folk singers and Group Sounds bands that may have known how to dress like rock ’n’ rollers, but didn’t have the first clue how to play it. Dr. Acid Seven easily bests them all on Track 4, a thick slab of biker rock that singlehandedly makes the case for the importance of hard drugs in music. This guy makes the whole record worthwhile. Especially on Track 5’s sublimely good-natured drunken sing along. It’s a lanky, strutting song (with kazoo solo!) that happily ambles on down the road feelin’ great, while Dr. Acid Seven (who I imagine as a stilt-legged version of R. Crumb’s “keep on truckin’” guy) gets progressively wilder and sillier with his vocal acrobatics. It would be worth learning Japanese just to be able to properly sing along with this. Proving he can do “pretty” just as well as anybody else, he gets serious on track seven, going back to his futen days with a beautiful, delicate Japanese folk number. This is apparently his only legitimate appearance on record. Unlike the tidal wave of Les Rallizes Denudes releases, I haven’t been able to find any other bootlegs of him in action, which is a crying shame.

This doesn't sound anything like his set on the record, but it's still a pretty bad-ass clip of Acid Seven, Keiji Haino, Kenny Inoue, Masato Minami, Shime Takahashi, and Takashi Mizutani at Hibiya Yagai Ongakudo, Tokyo, May 1974.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Oz Disc 1
Oz Disc 2

Masahiko Satoh & Soundbreakers. Amalgamation (Kokotsu no Showa Genroku).

As the revolutionary, but already stagnant rock spirit of the 60’s Group Sounds began to fade, The Japanese turned onto the 70’s by reconnecting with its already well established and well respected experimental underground and jazz scenes. The New Rock had emerged—wilder and hairier than ever before—with bands like Foodbrain, Flower Travellin’ Band, and of course Les Rallizes Denudes. Now the stars of that movement joined more avant garde composers for a slew of wildly disparate releases known popularly as “Super Sessions”. Inspired in equal measures by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, the Super Sessions bands aimed for the ultimate freak-out territory like only hard-core college-educated music-theory nerds can do.

Actually, the origins of Amalgamation are a little more prosaic. A music magazine asked readers to send in essays about the kind of music jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh should make for his next record. He wasn’t that trilled with any of the suggestions, so he and his mates picked two and decided to fudge something in between. The result was far beyond anything anybody else had produced up to that time.

Assembling Detroit hard-bop drummer Louis Hayes, guitarist Kimio Mizutani, and the Wehnne Strings Consort, Satoh led them all through a complex mix of sizzling guitar noise, brutalist horn bursts, and detuned radio static. Satoh himself played three different ring-modulated Rhodes pianos built specially for this session.

Side one is like a musique concrète mash-up of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and Nick Mason’s side of Umma Gumma crashing headlong into interludes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and a caffeine-frazzled horn section.

Side two is more organically built, starting out with traditional Japanese instruments that are gradually overtaken by chopped up jazz drumming and a squonking, froopling horn. Somewhere along the way, the drumming gets more tribal and the horn becomes a flute. Natives are performing a snake charming dance in the dry grass, but it summons an angelic voiced woman pop-scatting a Popal Vuh lullaby to A Whiter Shade of Pale’s pipe organ instead.

As avant garde as the whole proceedings were at the time, it also strikes me as the type of experimentalism that would have gone over well with the upwardly culturally mobile Americans who subscribed to the Harvard Classics’ Twenty-Foot Shelf of Great Books back in the 50’s. I can easily see it having inspired one of the more visually abstract portions of Fantasia—something that today’s elites would think of as solidly middlebrow despite the revolutionary intentions that created it. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but a lot to be gained if you dig it.

Amalgamation

Masahiko Satoh website

Finally Punk. Casual Goths.

Erin Budd, Stephanie Chan, Veronica Ortuno, and Elizabeth Skadden play perky, spazzcore, freak-punk. Karen O and Beth Ditto are apparently big fans, although Finally Punk aren’t making anything as radio friendly as either the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Gossip. They’re more of a no-wave riot grrl outfit—in it for the gleefully ragged joy of playing your guitar like (or perhaps, with) a cheese-grater. Like the Vivian Girls crossed with Wavves crossed with a defibrillator, Finally Punk favor sharp bursts of dissonant, primitive lower-than-lo-fi noise. They cram twenty-six songs into just less than thirty minutes, and a shriek-tastic stab at Nirvana’s Negative Creep is the poppiest moment on here (it’s also excellent). Casual Goths is actually a collection of the band’s first three limited edition EPs, so you can hear them progress from primitive (but not alienating) roots to a more complex, (though still tangled-in-barbed-wire) anti-pop structure. The album is pressed on a beautiful slab of marbled raspberry vinyl, and comes with a CD of all the tracks, plus video footage of their on-stage mayhem. Buy it while you can.



Download Link removed. Go buy it, folks.

Finally Punk on myspace

Buy it from Germs of Youth records

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. +/- Rob's House 7".

S.I.D.S. describe themselves as “a synth-punk trio from Atlanta. No electronics-lite here, just great driving punk rock done with keyboards, in the tradition of the Screamers and early Tuxedo Moon.” I’ll add that The Liars, Devo, and Throbbing Gristle also probably feature prominently in their record collections. Kind of dancy, kind of dark-wave, heavily distorted songs with frazzled bullhorn vocals shouted from the end of a very long corridor and vaguely evil John-Carpenter’s-Halloween-synths overtop a more intricate than expected, high-register drum kit.

Supposedly, the live version of the band includes a cardboard cutout of Sid Vicious playing a pre-programmed Yamaha keyboard. Awesome.

Plus Minus

SIDS on myspace

Coelacanth. The Chronograph.

Joseph Beuys collected objects he considered "psychic batteries"—piles of peat blocks, a copper cast of a mammoth's tooth holding a heating element—which, if hooked directly to a tape recorder, might have made the noises on this record.

Coelacanth manipulate environmental recordings to impenetrable effect, until they seem to consist not of known elements but of the talismanic patina those elements acquire through decay. It's ambient, though not in the usual lovely, drifting, post-Eno manner. They've completely sidestepped any known maps of musical structure. I'd call it minimal, but only in the sense that—once broken down into its sub-atomic elements—this is the finest division of anything that might still be called music.

After the Taj Mahal Travelers, this may be the most way-out thing I've posted. It creates its own sound-space, integrating itself into your environment rather than floating overtop or hovering in the background. It's just there. As Marge Simpson once profoundly said, "Whatever it does, it's doing it now".

Everything sounds fragile. Like with William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, we're immersed in decay, but where his tapes made beautiful, tragic opera out of the sound of their own death, Coelacanth is content to draw chalk outlines around the dead bodies of microscopic, deep-sea bone machines.

A Peculiar Stone or the Iron Molecule makes speaker hum sound organic, if not a little bit creepy. Something's happening in the dark—a blind wraith reaching for a tin bowl on the stone floor of an abandoned building. But only for a minute. Eventually it settles into something like the circuitous wobble of crackling vinyl. We may very well be listening to the vastly amplified sound of oxidation. Method of Extracting a Live Wire might be a deep-sea recording of some new form of planktonic life. How Bodies Become Phosphorescent whirrs and squeaks like an army of miniature scissors snipping away at a rusty playground whirlygig, collapses into the dead-eyed tapping of some exoskeletal machine scratching out a graph that records the flow of silt through a sieve, and then spins clockwork gears behind the pulsing, high-pitched drone of cricket violins. Vaporization of a Convergence unleashes all of of Coelacanth's tiny monsters at once, chittering away until they gently burrow into the sea-floor with a deep sigh.

Unlike a lot of experimental bands that fuss over field recordings and abstract sound, Coelacanth never lose sight of aesthetics. The Chronograph always remains strangely, magnetically listenable. While not conventionally pretty, or even concerned with creating its own kind of beauty, it does patiently transport you into some undeniably unique and rewarding realms.

Chronograph

Coelacanth website

The Dipers. How to Plan Successful Parties.

This is terrible. I learned nothing about organizing first-rate shindigs. These guys from the A-Frames and The Intelligence obviously just don't give a fuck.

Successful Parties

The Velvet Underground. The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes.

Amazing Fact: Lou Reed wrote and recorded the original dial tone you hear upon picking up a phone.

The blow-out of blow-outs, this bootleg comes to us from a fan plugging his tape recorder directly into Lou's guitar amp. Vocals and other instruments are there, but way in the background. The result is that you get nothing but Reed mainlining fuzz and feedback, which works to extraordinary effect on wild raves like I Can't Stand It, What Goes On, White Light/White Heat, and Sister Ray, but isn't quite so impressive on their quieter numbers (which are few and far between). If you're a fan of noise terrorists like Les Rallizes Denudes, you'll probably get a lot more out of this.

Disc 1
Disc 2

Prolapse. Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes.

Prolapse’s early sound—furious, demented, loud and raw—has been honed into an unsettling, trance-inducing, dubbed-out soundscape. It’s an atypically beautiful album that manages to pile on shards of jagged guitar noise, but still make it shimmer. It’s menacing, angry music—mechanically ragged, full of white noise and despair—but buoyed by driving, krautrock grooves. Like PIL and the Fall attacking Transient Random Noisebursts era Stereolab.

Linda Steelyard sings like she remembers some lovely melody, but her ghostly vocals have grown frayed and tense, constantly stalked by Scottish Mick’s garbled ranting (always lurking just under the surface of the melody, subliminally muttering about all the things in the world that are out to get you). Truthfully, the closer you listen to what she’s singing about , the more Linda starts to sound just as insane—a shell-shocked little girl babbling a stream of unconsciousness (like mindlessly listing every variety of shoe she can think of in Essence of Cessna).

An archaeology of between-station, late-night, extreme-conspiracy-theory art rock.

Ghosts

Prolapse on myspace

Doddodo. Limited Express & Marousa Splits.

She's a dada-core glee-club, here to give your hard drive a new haircut.

Splits

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Donomichi.

Like a bag full of overly caffeinated ninja-weasels running riot over a roomfull of broken casios, slicing and splicing thirty years of hip-hop/electro/noise, Doddodo has no use for genres or conventions. Public Enemy, Austrian waltzes, Add N to (x), harpsichords, random sound samples, and cartoon music get gleefully fed into a plunderphonic blender until they come out sounding like the Sound of Music fed through "Willy Wonka's Nightmare Emporium and Pants Shittery".



Only....a lot more fun.

Donomichi

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Doddodo. Sample Bitch Story.

I normally don't repost stuff I just found on other blogs (h/t Autofunction), but this was so insanely good, I couldn't resist it. Once again, using nothing but a sampler and a casio keyboard, some Japanese kid manages to make an album so immensely fun that it obliterates everything else. Celtic flutes, calliope music, old-school record scratching, j-pop, rap, and video game music gets spliced and layered overtop a frenzy of stellar break beats that might be what the Boredoms would have sounded like if they'd been around in early 80's New York during the mutant disco/rap/no wave scene.

I've tracked down a couple more albums that I'll be posting in the coming days.

Sample Bitch

Official site (in Japanese)

Doddodo on myspace

Boris. Smile. Live at Wolf Creek.

Back when I was in film school—a thousand years ago—the reigning theory was that Godzilla represented a nuclear-age version of divine punishment. Japan's shame for a "dishonorable" sneak-attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately for losing the war is paid for through Godzilla—who is both created by the bombs dropped on the island and periodically revisits that destruction upon them. Of course, Godzilla is also seen as a tragic hero by the Japanese, something that doesn't make sense if he is only there to punish them. It's likely that he doubles as a figure for Japan's post-war feelings of powerlessness—feelings that it cannot act out turned inwards towards themselves.

As a band that sounds like they may have been breast-fed by Black Sabbath, Boris have always walked with a dinosaur sized footprint, steadily redefining what it means to be heavy on countless records and eps. Veering from gravity-warping, sludge-tastic drone to their trademark garage-rock, psych-metal sound (all motorcycle chains and black exhaust), Boris have their monster heart set on tearing the knobs off the amplifiers and sonically pummeling you into gooey rapture. Captured live, they tear hell for leather through an album full of hook-laden, riff-shredding, head-banging, devil-horns-hands-in-the-air, rawk. Absolutely brutal takes on Buzz-In and Pink are larded with atmospheric drones and a gorgeous, fragile rendition of Rainbow.

But then...oh god...then they got to the final two tracks—a transcendent, near-thirty-minute exploration of [ ] preceded by You Were Holding an Umbrella—that positively crush everything that came before them. I don't know what Umbrella is actually about, but if Godzilla himself had composed a song to capture the interplay between his heartbreaking sorrow at having to destroy his homeland and his radiant pride in restoring its honor by being an agent of divine retribution and national seppuku, he couldn't have done a better job. This song could raze entire cities.

It's a double album, but the second disk was too big to fit into one download, so I had to split it up.

Disc 1
Disc 2.1
Disc 2.2

Boris' official website

Boris on myspace

Bogshed. Step On It.

Bogshed's first official long player, Step On It is just a tad more focused and controlled than their usual level of derangement, but they still pack it full of unplayable guitar riffs, bludgeoning bass lines, and opaque sloganeering. As always, it's magnificently, aggressively awkward.

Step On It

Unofficial Website

Bogshed on myspace

Bogshed. Morning Sir.

"I once ran into a pillar and knocked myself stone-cold out, dancing to Bogshed."
(someone reminiscing on the web)

That sounds about right. I should hope similar tributes occurred at every Bogshed gig. They poured a boundless amount of energy into their mayhem, and listening to them is likely to inspire a similar lack of self-regard for personal safety. Rock out 'til you knock out.

Morning Sir

Unofficial website

Boghsed on myspace