Friday 11 November 2022

The Gerogerigegege - Piano River (2016) C46

 



About this time last year I ordered a Smell & Quim album from someone I'm not going to incriminate by identifying (because describing what someone actually did apparently now counts as 'saying nasty things' about them in the noise twat microcosm), and who took a full eight months to send me the thing for reasons described in a series of increasingly lame excuses; but happily, he actually did eventually get off his fat ass and send me the record along with a bunch of freebie tapes. I hadn't asked for the tapes. He'd promised to chuck them in the package as compensation for the delay, even though it still took another six fucking months for said package to make it to the local post office. I didn't really want the tapes. I just wanted the record I'd paid for before I died of old age, but never mind.

Anyway, the Smell & Quim album was great - actually just about worth the wait. The tapes were of the usual kind which seem to do the rounds in noise circles - a crap plastic wallet containing a loose cassette and usually a photocopy of someone's knob, the equivalent of some postmodern wanker picking an empty crisp packet out of his bin, screwing it into a ball, and chucking it at you with the words, 'here - this is art. You can have it if you like.' Some might suggest such packaging strikes against the hegemony of boringly conventional cassette cases, but it always looks like they just couldn't be arsed to me - same as when I hear the words this is art in reference to anything which patently isn't. Make some fucking effort, dude.

To get to the point, now that I'm good and ready to do so, one of the tapes turned out to be this thing. I've never been particularly drawn to the whole Japanese noise thing, and the only legitimate reasons for anyone ever doing a poo on stage in front of the audience are 1) in the event of the venue lacking adequate restroom facilities, or 2) if you're playing support to the Electric Light Orchestra. Still, I'd at least heard of the Gerogerigegege so I gave it a listen, and as it turns out Piano River is not at all what I expected and is, in fact, pretty good. I couldn't really work out how he generated this noise, but presumably it's something involving turntables. Discogs breaks each side up into five pieces, which I've ignored because each sounds like a single work in five movements to me, just like you get with Beethoven and all of those guys. I assume this is the unofficial version issued by Michael Gillham, although given all the networking, I'd be surprised as to whether it was unofficial in the sense of Sting's I Hope the Russians Love Me Too triple vinyl bootleg (1986). Presumably being the unofficial version, I don't know if the sound quality has suffered. It seems a bit hissy, but then it still sounds pretty good to my ears.
 

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Sunday 6 November 2022

Forced Cohesion (1990) C46


I've never been entirely keen on the idea of split tapes, but I suppose it depends on who is involved, and Forced Cohesion has some justification for billing itself as neither entirely the work of Illusion of Safety nor Runzelstirn and However You Spell It. Dan Burke and Rudolf Eb.er are amongst those involved and it does its job very well, but you're probably best figuring out where one artist ends and the other begins for yourself.
 
Unfortunately this will be the last of the material kindly shared with me by Richard of Chainsaw Cassettes (there were a few other things but mostly already out there and I didn't want to go stepping on any toes), so I'm not sure what you'll find here this time next week, if anything. I have a few things I intend to digitise, seeing as I've had my tape deck repaired, so there will be more at some point.

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Sunday 30 October 2022

TAC - "if it fits....." (1998) C46

 



It's Sunday morning and I was going to write out the sales pitch and post the links for the Forced Cohesion cassette, having not found time to do so on Friday afternoon as has been my habit; but as I'm multitasking, combining the composition of this blog post with listening to next week's tape in the name of quality control, I find I can't remember much about the Forced Cohesion tape thus leaving me with little to say on the subject, and I can't help but notice that next week's TAC recording rocks like a bitch. So fuck it - here's next week's tape one week early in the name of mixing it up, wacky spontaneity, not having a clue what we'll do next because that's how crazy we are etc. etc.

As previously stated, I'm barely familiar with the work of Mr. Cox, who trades as TAC, but this one is fucking great - powerfully moody and atmospheric without committing anything too obvious to the general composition. Pierre Schaeffer probably wouldn't have been proud because he was apparently a miserable bugger who regarded his own work as basic experiments rather than ends in themselves, but he fucking should have been, the grumpy old bugger. I've probably said this before, but over the years I've heard so many pitiful efforts akin to some twat rattling a screwdriver around in a kettle for ninety minutes and calling it - ugh - sound art that I sometimes find it kind of difficult to get excited about yet another lengthy recording of someone I probably wouldn't want to meet chucking pebbles at a bike; but TAC is definitely one of the people who not only keeps this sort of abstraction interesting, but genuinely makes a number of the others redundant. In my opinion.

By the way, I haven't bothered splitting it into side one and side two because it didn't seem to need it.
 

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Friday 21 October 2022

60 Minutes of Noise (1996) C60


I really have no fucking idea. I can't even find this one on the internet, and I've never heard of any of them aside from Macronympha and TAC. The title is reasonably descriptive, meaning that most of the contributions are about a minute long, some a little more, some a little less, so the whole is fairly disorientating, although on the positive side, the sheer numbers mean you will almost certainly find something which tickles your ear in an interesting way.

As usual, I did my best to divide everything up into individual tracks, although I suspect you're supposed to listen to the tape as a single bewildering piece. Due to the nature of certain offerings, this involved a certain degree of guesswork so I may have wrongly attributed a few of them towards the end of the second side, but who knows.

 Tracks:

1 - Colin Pascal - Indecision
2 - Rectal Surgery - Blutsturz
3 - Greg Hagen - Recursive Transition Network
4 - Christus Apollo - Vieja Borracha Asfixiado
5 - Not Breathing - Black Overcast
6 - Macronympha - Isolation 313
7 - Audio Braille - Pink
8 - Brian Kaczynski - Imaginary Itinerary through the Particular Universal
9 - Endless Recursion - Fibonacci Government
10 - Tolc - Horn
11 - Barge - Fourn
12 - Twisted Helices - Fur Elise
13 - 000 - Vaul II
14 - AA.23 - Nothing is True
15 - John Sharp - Electro Acoustic
16 - Stellaluna - Holg Neubauten
17 - Cicatrix - Chaetotaxy
18 - Altruistic Suicide - Damage III
19 - Michael Azevedo - Q-IT
20 - Glass Crash - Ragnasik
21 - College of Excellence - This
22 - Black Sky Danse - Circlesaw
23 - Shunt - Where My Mandibula Was
24 - Cazzo Dio - Life Lost, Spare Organs
25 - Kaahnike Texnh - Neww
26 - Theodore Alexander Goodman - $$2
27 - Nevermore - Farsn
28 - Hal Pehlich - Untitled
29 - T.R. Elliot - April Music
30 - Music for Isolation Tanks - Freeform Flex
31 - Felix der Vortrefflichkeit - Der Schlave Fuchs
32 - The Nymphomaniacal Sociopaths - Chainsaw Cauldron
33 - Crackstop - Crackstop Vamp Rap Attack
34 - Shockra - It's Terribly Quiet at Sir Edmund Whitey's Table
35 - B-KO's New Outfit - Role Reversal
36 - Crucifixtion Machine - Nuclear
37 - One Lessone - Hermeneutics
38 - Pathogen - Televised Nonexistence
39 - Tropism - Dinner at the Country Club
40 - TAC - Method of Function 3
41 - Nosebleed Satori - Live at WRUB
42 - The Delinquent Gymnasts - Farmerette
43 - Nuturdless Bin Should Dry - Crunching Tubers
44 - Testicle Bomb - Hell
45 - Norwegian Power Ballads - Vicious Tape Friction
46 - Decibel Orgy - FM in My Extruder
47 - Dyslexis Coup - Dien Bien Phu
48 - Jeff Mielke & Zach Courser - Segayu 52-5/4 II
49 - Malta - The Collard Greens
50 - Scissor - Knotted Cables
51 - Crackstop - The Touch of Ball Lightening
52 - One Lessone - Ripieno Repressa
53 - Caffeine Charlie's Wake Up Service - Sarcophagus
54 - Pain in the Ass - Noise Pollution
55 - Stellaluna - Shortwave Alarm Clock
56 - Shunt - Pox Populi
57 - Bob Marinelli - LI#
58 - G42 - Entropy Free
59 - Circle - Marketing
60 - Montag - Face

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Friday 14 October 2022

Allegory Chapel Ltd - Satanic Verses (1989) C60



Here's another one I'd never heard of and don't know anything about. Sorry. I'm therefore left with just the stuff that popped out of Richard's zip file to go on, which this week, is distinctly meaty and flavoursome, if you'll pardon the simile. Online investigation seems to suggest this was an early, more primitive effort from whichever man of the cloth occupied the pulpit of this parish, and there even seems to be some sneering in that direction; to which I say, bollocks. It sounds pretty fucking good to me and I've sat through a hell of a lot of this sort of thing, which is no idle claim given that I'm now ancient and should probably be listening to Sing Something Simple on Wireless 2. There's plenty of looping here, plenty of layered noise, and also plenty of other details you might not anticipate from something trading as Satanic Verses. Some bloke on Discogs called it death industrial, which seems fair and is less annoying (at least to me) than dark ambient. This also seems to be the one which was never reissued in any form, at least not that I've been able to track down, possibly being an earlier, more primitive effort - as already reported - but personally, I'd be proud of this one had I been involved. Definitely more powerful than watching Damien Hirst flushing his wallet down the bog.

Attentive readers may note that I've welded Trip Again (intro) from the end of side one and Trip Again, which takes up all of the second side, together into a single track. It just seemed to make more sense that way.
 

Tracks:

1 - A Glorious Ascension
2 - Confirmation
3 - Destruction in the Temple (the Rape of Kali)
4 - Trip Again

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Friday 7 October 2022

D. Burke Mahoney - Oneirataxia (2013) C46

 



I know I always say I don't know nuffink about this bloke, but this time I really don't know nuffink about this bloke. I gather that he may be Canadian, although admittedly I'm basing that entirely on mailing addresses for two of the labels which have issued his work. Poking around a bit, I notice that Untitled, an earlier release, can presently be found on Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud; and there's a collaborative album on Bandcamp if that's of interest to any of you. The music, as you will hear if you download this thing, is something in the general vicinity of ambient drone, or possibly droning ambient, a genre I enjoy, but about which I struggle to find anything to say beyond whether I like it or not. For what it may be worth, I like this, and partially because it reminds me of recordings made by the late, great Andrew Cox, so please feel free to take that as a recommendation.
 

Tracks:

1 - Intrinsic Light (Eigenlicht)
2 - Holding Back / Pushing Ahead
3 - False Awakening
4 - Kekulé's Dream
5 - Continuum (Out There / In Here)
6 - Sleep Inertia (F)
 

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Friday 30 September 2022

Neil, Richard, Simon, Stewart - Durian Durian (1992) C46



The cover, although informative, isn't visually arresting so the above is a picture of all four persons involved superimposed over one another, somehow amounting to Stewart Walden and a few blurry wisps, which represents the music only poorly but at least gives you something to look at.

The four persons were Neil Campbell, Richard Youngs, Simon Wickham-Smith, and Stewart Walden. Neil Campbell you may remember from ESP Kinetic, SWANC (with Stewart Walden), Vibracathedral Orchestra and others, the first two of which are represented by adjacent material right here, if you would be so good to have a look in the index as linked at the foot of this page. Richard Youngs was something to do with Omming for Woks, whom I remember from somewhere or other, and all of them have been in the A Band at one point or another.

Durian Durian seems to result from all four of them recording sounds entirely independent of each other, with the whole lot then mixed together - simultaneous playback, so I gather - resulting in this tape. Anything involving Neil Campbell is usually worth a listen, and this one is no exception.

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