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

Mercury Rev. Astoria Theater, London. 11/2/93.

A volcanic upwelling of psychedelic magma. A slow motion film of Neil Young crashing the Death Star face first into the unicorn sequence from Fantasia. A circus of jelly-bodied squid wobbling around the ring on unicycles, cards fluttering in the spokes.

It's the David Baker years, when a slippery black-light liquid ran thick in their veins. Back then, they could even out-flame the Lips.

1. Very Sleepy Rivers
2. Syringe Mouth
3. Something for Joey
4. Chasing a Bee
5. Meth of a Rockette's Kick
6. Boys Peel Out

Astoria

Update 10/7/10: VoltronsHead made a video for Meth of a Rockette's Kick, which you can now sample below.

Wingdings III. Symbol of Infinity.

Much sharper and more rockist than most other neo-somnambulists, this is possibly the densest and most psychedelic of the three Wingdings releases. It's also my favorite. I especially love the Sha-Na-Na echoplex calliope 8:30 into Side A, followed by the partially sentient Commodore 64's built-from-memory approximation of The Association's Everyone Knows It's Windy. Side B is similarly awash in subliminal memories of tunes that have been peeled and re-fitted over Wingdings' unique framework (the best being The Walk/Japanese Whispers era Cure pastiche at 8:40), like an alien borrowing someone else's face.

Symbol of Infinity

Wingdings. Wingdings II: Zarathustra's Puzzle.

So it turns out that Wingdings is Sam Meringue, of Matrix Metals and possibly Explorers and Flashback Repository. He also worked with James Ferraro on one of the 90210 projects. Wingdings I was pretty 1980s-radio-through-a-loop-delay-and-effects-pedal dipped in Lamborghini Crystal's beer, so that makes sense. Each of the subsequent Wingdings releases seem to develop more song-like structures. Wingdings II has a definite beachy feel to it—sort of like Rangers and Ducktails playing the Hokey Pokey at a roler rink on the boardwalk. There's so many layers of sound and I'm pretty sure they're referencing all sorts of cheesy, good-times songs (at the very end, they just space out on the Witch Doctor song. Oo Eee Oo Ah Ah, Ting Tang Walla-Walla Bing-Bang and all that) that have been processed through Dylan Ettinger styled memories of neon-lit futurescapes from bad 80s sci-fi films. It's quite enjoyable.

This one is by request for Glangel. Thanks for the email.

Zarathustra's Puzzle

V/A. Something's Burning In Paradise Again.

The volume drops off a bit between the Field Mice and the Volunteers, though not to unlistenable levels. It's just a shame because the Field Mice's cover of the Feelies' Loveless Love is wonderful, and I don't think I've ever seen it anywhere else. I looked around, and everybody's copy seems to have this fault. Apparently it was original to the tape.

1. Poke It With A Stick - He's Bloody Happy
2. Throw That Beat In the Garbagecan - Just 16
3. The Wildhouse - Everything I Hate
4. Shrug - Fear & Violence On the Last Bus Home
5. Thrilled Skinny - Pop Star Prat
6. The Locations - I Keep Wondering Why
7. The Vinegar Blossoms - Quality Seems Totally Foreign to Me!
8. Those Naughty Corinthians - Butter Mountain
9. The Keatons - French Bench
10. The Field Mice - Loveless Love
11. Bobby Scarlet - Steppenwolf
12. The Windmills - 360 °
13. Charlotte's Web - The Train for June
14. Apple Moths - Everything
15. The Volunteers - Long Wavy Random Arm (Do It)
16. The Losers - Down at the Bottom Where You Belong
17. The Harbour Pilots - Orchid Sunrise
18. Debonaire - The Distance
19. This Poison! - Driving Skills
20. St. Christopher - Our Secret

Again

V/A. Something's Burning In Paradise.

There's a thesis in here somewhere for anyone who wants to analyze the fetish/artifact nature of releases like these. I have no idea if the sound quality was better in first generation tapes, but something about the xeroxed quality of the (already lo-fi) music makes it seem more authentic and valuable. It's like listening to ancient field recordings of blues musicians on 78s; if you could travel back in time and make fresh, digital copies, it would suck all the life and soul out of it. It's the found quality that makes it feel so special (doubly so, since most of these bands never went on to anything else). I half wonder if any of these tapes were made in the first place. It seems much more likely that each and every one appeared ahistorically in a dusty shoebox underneath a bed in an abandoned flat.

1. The Pilgrims - Chemically Yours
2. Emil - Raining In My Heart
3. Another Sunny Day - I Want You
4. Thrilled Skinny - Love Rut/Knee On Sea
5. Slob - Mister Ugly
6. Mousefolk - Grannies Cake Crisis
7. The Ruth Ellis Swing Band - I Would Have Saved You
8. Remember Fun - Cold Inside
9. The Candy Darlings - Southern Line
10. The Paper Tulips - Not Fair
11. The McTells - This Afternoon (Version)
12. James Dean Driving Experience - Drop Dead Darling
13. The Wilderness Children - 15 Minutes Fame
14. Emily - Really Mad Dogs (Dance Mix I)
15. The Librarians - Irene Handl Knew My Postman
16. The Benjamins - The Way Things Are
17. Buy Off the Bar - There's No Fridge On The Bristol Bridge (Live)
18. Girl of My Best Friend - Throwaway Girl
19. The Driscolls - Groovy Little Town (Acoustic)
20. The Mayfields - Season's Pass
21. St. Christopher - To The Mountain

Paradise

Wingdings. Wingdings I: Return to Earth.

Windings traverse the same sunny, intergalactic, hypnagogic, scrambled-tape recesses of space as James Ferraro and Matrix Metals. There are two more Wingdings tapes available from Outer Limits Recordings, all of which come with extensive inserts that read like Dr. Bronner's spaced out cousin explaining his theory of everything.

Return to Earth

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