25 November 2001

NEU! - NEU! 75 (CD by Groenland / Astralwerks)

The deja vu strikes in highly enjoyable tones and the choons load up the car and drive down to the beach with the buch and Bach for a day of rest and relaxation. Parallels could be drawn between one group and another but that is always unfair to the groups themselves. Yet it must be said that this music is not so much foretelling the future as it is racing like a tachyon for a halcyon place and time. The road then empties into a brooding forest of sound - the slow bass, the tap on metal and the slow rising snake of synth - and there's that guitar, and I really do wish I'd known about all this when it was happening. I would've been the coolest five-year-old around!

The rain falls and the piano reflects it from behind, below, around. Stars indeed shining. Yet then the apache beat (disregarding the thoughts of Ian Astbury on same) kicks in on "Hero" and it's very sad that all we have to offer from the punk rock trenches are no meat, sore throats, and lack of travel to Norway. Oh, but apples with pesticides, yum! And is the hero nothing more but a bag of wind, in the end? The family drives to another place, caressing the not wet wind in the hand as it rushes through the air, stuck out the window and even the bugs do not plague it, so shimmering and cool is it in the slow slow slow while of the afternoon. Oh, and the recording decelerates, too, speeding up for a finale that led ultimately to rancor and misunderstanding and a return to harmony after too too long a time...

Address: http://www.astralwerks.com

MORPHOGENESIS - In Streams (Volume 2, 1997 - 2000) (CD by Paradigm)

The impossibly lovely digipack opens like one of Mr. Prime's flowers to reveal four live actions recorded and yet on first look the overwhelming images are of motion and fatigue. There is a sense of workmanship in these images - the recordings are living beings in themselves - a sense of something happening. Breaths and slowly lowing metals and twisting of gears. In headspace and out of it. The Kunstkopf. Short waves wriggle through and past the other sounds writhing like Mongolian yellow worms that haven't even been catalogued yet. The echo of the hall shadows the proceedings, shattered into ebony fragments at the stringboard's call. How much is processed? How much of these sounds are affected, and is the finger which is at times leveled at experimental music seeking for "honesty", however facetiously?

A sense of whirling in a tube rattles down the pike, along with the sonorous tones of the instrument. Which one? A moot point - all sound is fair game and the hunters peck about here and there, hither and yon, finding this one, bagging that other one, no, over there, the one that sounds like a pachinko game on the slow bus. Into a crescendo now, various tones mixing with scraping and do sounds recognize each other, old friends in the marketplace, as they pass one another in a recording? And now Freddy "Boom Boom" Pachelbel and his Canon enter into the background, playing over the sounds feasting on one another...

A more tentative moving around of sounds plays with a highpitch, fast and inside, splaying behind it. Huntenmusik? The child has six fathers and proceeds to awaken, crying (a little) and transmogrifying into this gas bubble, that violin, that Drano. The ghost of a chants? And the currency of the times - minutes, 19 of them, spins once twice, landing on its edge. Police sirens, now, and voices. Clouds mass across the stage and the Speaker-Eater raises its subjective head once again, threatening, threatening...the thunderclap, and the audience's besides...

Gongs resonate and cheering for unseen sounds resonates, and the zebra cries out in the vast zoo of sound as the band plays on. A massing menagerie blends with the bird outside my window, and perhaps a mouse or two I cannot see. Life and the recording have merged for this one free moment and it's...well, it's quite nice, that.

Address: paradigm@stalk.net

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS - Break Through In Grey Room (CD by Sub Rosa)

I don't "get" William S. Burroughs.

So I come to this recording with a certain amount of naivete. This is the first recording of his I've heard; I attended the memorial for him a few years ago at the San Francisco Art Institute, still didn't "get" it. It was interesting - and I mean that in a good way - but my life didn't change (at least not visibly) instantaneously like I hear all those hoary stories about first exposure to Uncle Bill. He's got a great voice, though. It makes me smile. It's a slightly disorienting experience to hear these old recordings, and I'm sure the disorientation was much more pronounced when first they were released. It's more a time capsule than anything - audiobook in amber? It's herky-jerky and thumpy in its edits, a charm and holdover from the tape era, which undoubtedly still spools somewhere special... There's a "how-to" story about tape cut-up experiments (literary and auditory), the "third mind", future events, and so forth.

And yet, how much of our lives are going to be collected and compiled and collated and kept for future days?

An insight into the world of junkies and heroin follows that one. The vicarious exposition. Master musicians of Joujouka follow these revelations and follows up throughout and does enlightenment get boring after a while? An anticurse incantation emerges thereafter. More Joujouka, more cut-ups, some scratching, and Burroughs calls the law.

It's a little like drifting in and out of someone else's dreams, this record.

Address: http://www.subrosa.be/

NEU! - NEU! 2 (CD by Groenland / Astralwerks)

The euphoria of the everdrive revs up and launches on its way to movement compulsion. The masses are now washed and the head nods in pleasant assent. Wow wow wow wow and swoop swoop. It ends like a coiled snake reeling back into its nest, and is it water or wind that accompanies its cessation? A chasm opens up and it is above this that Mr. Dinger's drumming suspends. Slowly and slower and almost inert it rings, harder and harder and POW! A gunshot outside my window. The morphogenetic fields of intention and peace collide again.

Then the backward mask and the speeding up of things. Scratches of vinyl. Then the same, but slowed down. These re-recordi...wait. Holy shit! No, wait, it can't be. Fucking hell. It IS! This "Super 16" track is featured as the villain's main theme in "Master of the Flying Guillotine", a martial arts film from 1974. A Golden Harvest production, I believe. The Master (a blind, bald, tufted-eyebrow bastard in yellow robes with swastikas on it) seeks the One-Armed Boxer who killed his disciples. HIIIIIIIIII-YAH! There's a mad monkey boy, a demon swami who can extend his arms to unusual lengths, a samurai killer with hidden knives - totally awesome! If memory serves, there's also bootlegged tracks from "Ralf and Florian", or other very early Kraftwerk, in the film as well. The martial arts film with the Kosmische soundtrack - exceptionally stirring and foreboding..."Neuschnee", the following track, possibly also appears on the soundtrack, in a smaller capacity.

A warbling pounding now, intermittent, phasing in and out of this existence. Speeding, slowing, standing still just long enough to be aware that standing still isn't to be desired.

Such is life?

Address: http://www.astralwerks.com

RUSSELL HASWELL - Live Salvage 1997 - 2000 (CD by Mego)

Is there a place in this world that has never been rained upon?

The planet of storms thunders from Mr. Haswell's machines as if the Deluge is upon us yet another time. Is it all pre-recorded, or do the different countries, times, venues and atmospheres inform this work? And how difficult is it to infusesuffuse a noise with one's own personality? Coldsnaps, then a tornado and then the calm before another storm?

Slight tinges of memory encroach and encourage, tiny tones grabbing at the air like baby birds anticipating the feeding mother. The indexing of the tracks takes high pitches and blanks them into crumbling rumbles. The bubbling of magma and the last five minutes of Pompeiian life comes to mind. The wind over the landscape brings a swarm of icicles and can hoarfrost be so very far away? The hiss of the tape adds to the storms spewing from the speakers, and dialogue meshes with the occasional blaat and afteraction conferring. People sure do cough a lot.

Data chatters through the division of tracks and there is an overwhelming sense of dispersal and disbursal - the scattering of sound throughout the land. Yet it seems as though time is made more "realistic" with these sounds. 7 minutes seems like seven minutes. "To be played at maximum volume." And so on. Details of the tracks are buried in the sheen of the packaging (digipack sleeve and CD surface) - to detail a world unseen, ignored, but there all the same?

There is something far-off and uniquely private about these sounds, as though Mr. Haswell holds a seashell that fits only his ear.

Address: http://www.mego.at

NAM JUNE PAIK - Works 1958.1979 (CD by Sub Rosa)

The ghostly strain of dissonant elephants tiptoe through the stringboard of the piano, and, the detuned piano is massaged from the inside and it is only the striking of the keys that is seemingly normal. It is as if the aurora borealis has somehow grouped itself around the piano, the keys, the stool, his stool, the room, the air, the hair on his arms that reach into the piano and drag out more emotions, more feelings left lying at its bottom. It's a piece for Merce Cunningham - music and movement have danced around one another for some time now and it's heartening to see the occasional tango betwixt but why not more often?

It's quite close to a cloudburst, these sounds. May rain? A far-off rumble on the horizon and yet it's seemingly music for cogitation, for planning, for scheming. The brainstorm? "Hommage a John Cage" brings a swath of quick voices, then bells, then ringing singing birds, and others. A tracing tracking a history of musical development? The test tone. And then a literal slight return. A duet of piano and metal ensues. One takes prominence, then the other. A trading of places? And the voice wends its way throughout the sound and fury, a chanteuse on the chartreuse loose, haunting like a bird across the rafters. And the sound of a harpsichord?

From the liner notes of "Etude for Piano Forte", the final piece: "Paik played some Chopin on the piano, broke off, weeping, and got up and threw himself on the innards of another, eviscerated piano that lay scattered on the floor, then picked up a wickedly long pair of scissors and leaped down to where (John) Cage, the pianist David Tudor and Karlheinz Stockhausen were sitting in the front row. He removed Cage's suit jacket and started to slash away at his shirt with the scissors. After doing so, he poured a bottle of shampoo over Cage's head and also over David Tudor's. (As Stockhausen edged nervously away, Paik shouted "Not for you!")."

Address: http://www.subrosa.be/

COSTES - Nik Ta Race (CD by Rectangle)

Bells come ringing and buzzing and oh, that French! It reminds of first listenings to Einstuerzende Neubauten - unsure of what was being said but perhaps something profound...one never knows, so, keep shrugging those shoulders. Irrevocably humorous liner note photographs - salvation in the hovering black angel, the war ends, the fighting ceases and all eyes turn toward Heaven and the ascension. Oh, that scratchin' is makin' me itch, and the perception of M. Costes as a racist is attacked throughout.

"Misunderstanding" can be a negative but how many people in one's lives really count, in terms of these people "understanding" you?

The microphone (mic ta race?) sways under the onslaught of M. Costes' voice, overloaded perhaps like his shoulders with burdens and cares and troubles. Indeterminate voices swirl at his ankles - the voices of the accusers? North Africa calls in, making an appearance. It has been said that in the future, genetics will breed a race that's so universally despised as to take the heat off every other hated race and group of people in the world. Perhaps this will be the race referred to speciously when one says, "I don't care if you're black, yellow, brown, white, green or purple." Yes. The Green and Purple race is definitely next on the block. Well, maybe not the Green people - those would be Martians, and I understand they have incredible lawyers.

Death to Africa, death to France. It's all death, anyway, it's all sand, and the beats hit the beachhead at this point, the bangbang beachhead. It's the foreboding of a drive to an unknown place, the discomfort of meeting something new, the alienation of the displaced native. The Middle Eastern vibration bellydances through the words and song, and is it really about understanding, or about control-domination? Just when it is so unclear, a laugh breaks through the muck and the mire and they do seem to be having fun throughout the recordings.

Address: info@rectangle.org

v/a - Counterintelligence (CD by ECR / SPV)

Dandy emerges with a subtly whooshing hiss. The channel is changed and static rules the roost for a short while. Bells distort into ripples heaving into crackles. The seamless transition leads Aube to his lead, or some other kind of metal; it is not specified. Tones pool to their heights, but slowly, slowly. Rhythms intercede and the ghost of improvisation hovers well above, ending in a clear tap tap tap. Kreidler's rhythms are slightly more conventional - helicopters in the background and the drum beat behind the zowies with the bass as a strong horse, flowing into the fast motorik of Newt, clap clap clap. It is as if zippers are racing down a fabric soaked raceway and the bottles whistle from the bleachers. The music of a drive down a deserted downtown that is not as lovely as our Lulu once painted it.

Voltaic sneaks in on databitten skis, slaloming down the course in seamless energy - the agony of the feet? The flange carries the sounds up to separate parts of sky, and back again. Converter rides in on the wind of the moan of exertion, grainy and sweaty as that may seem, forming a cloud of intention. "Only you can kill the brain". A quote. And grainy beats decapitate, left and right and back again. The hair of the dog whips around and bites down hard. It is not for nothing that this piece is called "Denogginizer". Monolith carries in waves of rougher statics and places them on the table. Contemplative. Sonar's engine seeks and seeks, idling and ready for the rhythmic race through all time. Pail's synthesizers spill out a rainbow of beats, the metallic ring caught in the hurricane and swept up beyond sight.

Mimetic Field hides a woman's voice deep within, speaking from beneath the grassline and up through the fog that expands and contracts at each of her breaths. The mist vanishes at the daybreak of the breakcore beats. Si-[cut].db, whose phrasing of name changes more often than his tempos, brings in a gentle meditation on the Beat and its attendant chilluns - a fine respite and repose. Haujobb? It's reasonably mild-tempered and if there is such a thing as hot-air-balloon-morning music, it has arrived. Nude softly pushes into view a whispered woman and then the hectic beats flood in. Is it this way - the whispers of a woman and the crackling beats - juxtaposed for explicit purpose? Bit-Tonic starts the slow, languorous crawl from the amniotic fluid swirling about her, and up into this world, shedding the carapace and all those little pops and zings that it entails...

Address: 101674.1556@compuserve.com

NEU! - NEU! (CD by Groenland / Astralwerks)

Guitar arches out like twilit sunshadows and the omnipresent beat is there, new dawn, new dawn. Synthesizer languidly moves backwards and forth, the Sunday eveningmorning that holds in rapt attention at the creation of something new. Six crepuscular tracks? Wcka wcka wcka. Wow wow wow. And so on. Then on to the swelling and pitching of the flanged cymbals, split side by side, side-to-side, riding along the hyphens of the moments and all the pop mythos that that entails with its entrails.

And now the rowing of the boat with the Norwegian girl, sad as the icicles dripping their tears across the salted earth. Guitar and tones drift up from beneath the deep, two whales in anticipation of mating, sound travelling as far as it can in the depths of an ocean. Roaddrills attack and in come the sound of distant violins... The tangled tingle of the guitar comes back into play, moving from speaker to speaker, resting then restive and back again. The natal urge of water seems to return, seeking its own level, and the scraping of walls is not so much a statement as it is a return to the purity of the current...

Address: http://www.astralwerks.com

AUBE - Seton (CD by Manifold)

The tentative roughing of the recording - this time out, the sound source is stone. It's packaged between two sheets of stone. Fucking-a right! Scraping repeats repeats and so forth as other pieces of stone make occasional and spectral appearances. The wow of the feedback moves alongside the scraping repetition spinning in slo-mo dervish joy. These tones fade out and other, subtler tones take their place. It's as if stones have been thrown into the pond and these tracks are ripples colliding with one another.

It's fascinating, the amount of varied sounds Nakajima-san obtains from one sound source. But is it the sound sources themselves that inform the recordings, or the techniques and machines with which he extracts the sounds? Pursuing his quarry? And now the return to the workplace of the "rhythm". Might he have an innate sense of timing? Or are all the machines helping him? Not to cast aspersion, of course - we all need our machines. Yet, as repetitive as the beat is, it does change from time to time, almost imperceptibly. Now comes a scratchy kind of scrambling, running across the wavecrests of a low rumble. Then a different beat, dancelike in its orientation. It moves into another age, implying eternity...

Address: http://www.manifoldrecords.com

ORAL CONSTITUTION - Bibelpreik (CD by Artware)

The voice of the woman harbors like a wall in the background as the voice of the man overloads the microphone and their dance is underpinned by the melodies of the times. Guitar and Gustav Dore's woodcuts linger in the background and which circle of friends is this? Occasionally, in experimental music, there are these communal dynamics (cf. Faust, Current 93, Baader-Meinhof, Scratch Orchestra) that exist for a time and are spoken of fleetingly yet with great reverence ever after. Oral Constitution seem, from these meager documents, to be such a memory.

Rick Rubin says folk music is the new punk rock, but Mr. Rubin isn't signing Oral Constitution, so pfui! on him. There is a sense of separation, of "going away", in the strains and echoes of these pieces. The drumming marches out from the forest and phases in and out of this existence, along with the occasional speech squeak and creak. Much echoing, on to the unexpected yet inevitable end...

Address: office-artware@t-online.de

FENNESZ - Endless Summer (CD by Mego)

Interesting.

We in Los Angeles have to suffer through the endless re-viewing of this surf escapade. It's expected. It's part of Western (literally) cinema, much now like a muscle in the face that one uses but forgets exactly what its purpose is. And yet these sounds scuttle like the smallest parts of that film - ones that are never popularly noticed, even after a hundred viewings. These sounds remind a bit of watching a line of ants while sitting on the sidewalk at the Hollywood Christmas Parade. They've been there all along. They are spectacular in themselves.

Grains of sand push their way past the microphones and muddy up the eddies of the sounds surfing from one point of the melody to the next. It is unclear if there are extracts from the original soundtrack occurring throughout this vacation but it would follow. Snatches of guitar are repeated and etc., like going over some old postcard from the ends of the earth and wishing we were here. Or is it the halfheard strains of not going into the theatre but standing outside the door and listening to the waves crash ashore? Shaking and shifting bells and vibras make their way through the ether of the record, calliope singing on the pier as the wooden horses race into the eternal but not the infinite.

The wavecrests spray their seed in white gouts and it's all here, chronicled in a summer that can truly be endless and unchanging, as long as your CD player holds out. Infinite repeat. The CD repeat comes in at various angles, exploring various parts of sound - striking out for the beach and seeing how far it goes, in which direction? Or is it riding one wave after another, switching paths to catch the biggest, gnarliest and most awesome curl? The vinyl crackles and pops as though the surfboard is being dragged across the sand to catch that last big wave, that one, over there, engulfing and water covers water covers earth...

Address: http://www.mego.at

LUSTMORD - Metavoid (CD by Nextera)

A cold pervades, hanging over the day no matter how deep the sunlight. Beams of light freeze and shatter to the ground as in this release there are voices but from where? Is an atmospheric piece of music affected by the seeming intrusion of a voice? And is the situation of "atmospheric" or "soundscape" music suffused with the implication of "escape"? Of stepping outside oneself, of subsuming into a stretch of sound and reviling the relived life? Steps make their way toward the speakers - a painting of a man walking toward a house that comes closer on each re-examination of the scene.

At times, the feeling of Japanese or Italian cinema pervades. It haunts the pulses and tones and hollow halls and scraping that rise like monolith monsters from the silvery disc spinning so very quickly. The wind through a reed disperses into the larger breeze and reverberation and the feeling that something is coming, comes nearer... The sound of the wounded animals don't ring entirely true and where is the call sold for hunting humans?

It is not for nothing that the word "film" holds multiple meanings. More often than not, it is a thing that covers the eyes for changes in perception...

Address: http://www.nextera.cz/

RUFUS HARLEY - The Pied Piper of Jazz (CD by Label M)

Charming the snake of jazz, the pipes lead the tones on a dance of hitherto unheard-of proportions. Bongos and drums - bongs and drugs? Methinks not. "High on life" seems more the fit. This is one of those recordings from the "outré" days of releasing - something so strange and unexpected that it is immediately endearing and entearing.

A jaunty voyage. The sounds from the bagpipe (always singular) lend a different kind of atmosphere entirely to the jazz backing and in comes the shaking of the tambourine. Vibrating organ and further combos reveal how integral the bagpipe is when it's gone. Hup! And the trombone blaats, urged further by the wizard behind the curtain of history...

Propulsion from an unlikely place in history, into an uncertain future, all the while espousing the credo that "intention breeds attention"...

Address: http://www.labelm.com/

ASH RA TEMPEL - Friendship (CD by Manikin)

Crepuscular.

The dawn floats in, into the sea and down from the mountaintops, you rise and make coffee or tea for someone that you know will be gone soon - but, one doesn't think of such things in times of breakfast or breaking a fast. The sounds well up from beneath the water from the faucet and as water seeks its own level, so too is this exceptionally fine fuck music for mornings tinged with spring and edging into summer. Tendrilled fingers wend their ways over the guitarspace as the drumming enters from a desert someplace.

Three very long and loquacious tracks on this album. The shaking of the rattle, intermittently, skips over the synth wash and bassline holding it up, like abandoned cities in the Mojave. Now a curve of classical guitar, pulled out of the dry air like a bullet in flight. The guitar soars and cores in finality, elegiacally writing a cloudbank across the sonic skies. To re-emphasize - it's great fuck music, especially at lower levels, and your plants will grow because of it.

Address: http://www.manikin.de/

DEAD VOICES ON AIR - Dead Voices on Air Live (CD by Invisible)

"It's like a garden party, isn't it?"

The sounds speed up, playing and re viewing, tiny spiders that build up an empire for Our Mark and whatever spirit and feeling he brings with him on the road. The shivering traps of the drum and / or bass plays occasionally opposite the bent circuits and horn of Niels van. The head nods in windwashed assent, the pants shake in terror of the bass pulses at occasionally emerge from the speaker-eater. One wonders if an alternate project ("Live Voices on Air: Dead") will emanate from the coffin as it is lowered into the ground.

"...it was actually "Sweet Home Alabama"..."

Singing in a low way couples with strings and fading static. The anthemic strains of that chord progression come through the fog, and are there certain chord progressions, or strings of notes, that most people respond favorably to? The goosebumpery of the situation makes itself manifest as those notes occur, just then, and gone again.

The sunburst of cacophony interrupts, erupting and riding its own chaotic wave for a while, until the Voice comes back into the proceedings. And the drums return, collapsing beat and all. Then, after the panic of the nighttime passes, very slow tapping and breathing, a runner at the break of day, passing through this way because it is so peaceful. It changes again, the runner now chased by an angry Doberman, through the otherwise quiet streets opening into the morning air

Address: http://www.invisiblerecords.com/

REPTILICUS - Crusher of Bones (CD by World Serpent Distribution)

Animal mewling or violin is transmitted - it is unclear which. A ship breaches the mist and its drum sings out, rings out. A metallic tone, and a cowbell moseys on through, both intermittently. The ritualistic aspect of experimental music has gone underground perhaps it is as it should be? Those thighbone flutes are strictly black-market, maan. The percussion continues, marching the entire tribe up the mountainside and what about the view from the sides? Images of fire (or is it an image of the flame?) conjure from the plastic spinning its dervish fervor. Modern-day mysticism?

Now come the more modern rhythms. And merged with the emergent firecrackers on the July 2nd, 2001 that this was written, it becomes even more bound in time than usual. It's all very heavy stuff (but not necessarily stuff and nonsense) and just what constitutes "belief"? And how does one make it apparent that one is filled with this ecstatic state? Ringing repetition and much drumming, now.

Distortion of melody and still more drumming, etc. The singer urges one and all and sundry to "Call Me Jesus". Well, if you‚re not going to back yourself up, who will? The zowie laser beams join in, and the dancefloor could be graced with the presence of these songs but 1990 was a banner year, perhaps only because it ended with a "zero"

Address: http://www.worldserpent.com

IRMIN SCHMIDT & KUMO - Masters of Confusion (CD by Spoon)

The tap and thud of the modern bass drum, proceeding apace quick as a bunny. "Goatfooted Balloonman" and the springheeled jack can be seen racing after balloons that edge higher toward away. A nimble thread across the piano, all the while. Up floats the balloons, free at last, mired in the ether of radio static and contemplative clouds of piano watching. A more aggressive beat hones in and crows across the backdrop of the piece, accelerating and speeding the proceedings. "Burning Straw in Sky" descends with drips and whispers, filigree of organ drone and the promise of more to come Piano and beats, piano and beats, piano and beats and a certain innate sense of interplay and improvisation. And then the dancing spider of notes, suspended and tense. Back come the beats, and the unusual odd ambient odes.

I can see the reflection of a seagull through the window behind this computer screen, and that's how the sounds move a bird in flight, reassuring but not entirely predictable. Interesting that three tracks on the record are from European live actions of the reasonably near past tense. Breaking glass. In the underpass? A touch of the dub pervades still the best music to listen to whilst driving through paranoid London Rhythmic snatches of breathing and bells and piano is the underpinning, "gentle into that night" indeed.

Speed, much breaking of glass, a race weighing heavily, and conclusion. Who could ask for anything more?

Address: http://www.spoonrecords.com/

TWILIGHT CIRCUS DUB SOUND SYSTEM - Volcanic Dub (CD by M Records)

Returning from the recent trip to London, this music played over the speakers of a used Jaguar that eyed in the street in prerequisite paranoia and as the cctv cameras played one-eyed hypnotist. Dub operated as a perfect soundtrack to the possibility and panic that lay down nearly every other street In The City. Hearing these songs brings back that time of curiosity and mystery and appalling echoing suspicion. The sodium lights of early evening, illuminating the collision of car into the double-decker bus in which I was riding; the person I met that started all of this inquiry and the autistic child and the violent yobfriend that could have come home at any time. Waiting for a train in the rain, in vain. A sense of furtiveness and death lingering in the air in the form of the mad cow disease, and how that thing lies dormant and comes back after years, an echo in time from a time when feeding the gorgeous baby colt seemed like a good idea. Zow zow zow zow zow. The endless pulse of the underground and the choob rats that scurried through England's faded dream. Thank Christ there are no soul-singin‚ divas herein well, wait, I hadn't met any of those in England, so it follows. It further reminds me of Europe because in Norway someone said what I had done was to invent "street dub". And 2-second delay pedals are becoming increasingly difficult to find

Address: http://www.twilightcircus.com/

MR. DORGON & LAURA CROMWELL - Providence (CD by Gutbrain)

"We moved recently so, we're going to do some songs about moving."

Drums and saxophone and the happy couple rides Rhode Island to a terrible edge. How many of these sorts of improv noise encounters are improvised, and how much orchestrated? A flailing autistic is still an autistic. Will we arrive at a point of dividing the definition of improvised and orchestrated music into minutes, seconds, moments? They seem to be a happy couple, judging from the inter play and photo graph on the cover; between the lines. One wonders if they look at each other while playing. There is a certain level of build to the proceedings, creeping through the leaves like a jungle creature, snaking in and out and finally, slowly eaten by the Mokele-Mbebe.

Whistle like kettle overboiling and the cymbal hisses in methodical assent with the sustained prying for attention. They march in measured steps, a "Runaway Train" gathering speed but is it the journey, and not the destination that's important, in this case? Now on to "Stethoscope", and the playing is suitably muted and reverent, lest one scream into the instrument in question. A gathering up of thoughts, through the instruments themselves? An animalistic lowing and keening, as though duly protesting the trip into the frying pan, as played by Laura Cromwell's cymbals. Walking out of the room, then hurriedly back in the soul of "Wad Tad Scrod Cod" sings like a buzzsaw cutting another buzzsaw, and not in half, but in quarters. Alert the media. Now comes the plod of the pad on the drum-machine, bells and mbira that is "Turtles".

8-string bass lowers the boom with "4WW", grinding a fine mist of schmutz across the proceedings, threatening to leak out of the surface of the disc itself. Moving.

Address: mrdorgon@yahoo.com

SEDAYNE - The Proximal Indo-European Sounds of Sedayne (cdR by Sedayne)

A whistle, rattle and something else besides.

That "something else" is what gave rise to the spate of ritualistic experimental groups in the 1980s (:zoviet*france:, Psychick TV, Korpses Katatonik, Sleep Chamber, Alien Brains, Metgumbnerbone, Masstishaddhu). The folkloric tradition blows through the thighbones of murdered men and the crop circles in the fields of Northern England, and Sedayne is from those last two aforementioned groups. The vague atmosphere of the exotic, hanging like rough incense, pervades these songs (not "tracks", or "pieces" per se) devotional and charming and exceedingly good fuck music. It's only fair at low volumes your plants will grow stronger because of it. Not because of your rutting, I mean. Oh, will you turn that music down!

Are the images of a fading past preserved in the blood of some? Stuck squarely in the recesses of a person's mind, refusing to let go? Is nostalgia a living thing? And yet for all the somber mood and mystery, sometimes the frown turns upside down, travelling elseways through a furrowed brow and emerging as a smile. Musically speaking, that is. A slight twitter of birds now or is it rats? Such was the sense of humor that suffused these groups in the 1980s. Sedayne sez:

"and very different to (Masstishaddhu's) "Shekinah" too, although both are possessed of a similar droning darkness largely thanks to the crwth, a mediaeval bowed-lyre which I like to think of my main instrument - it's there on "Shekinah" but here it finds its true home - especially with the foxes in (the track) "Now / Here"..."

"Hometime (for Cherry & Mbizo)" saunters down a pavèd path, voice matching the call of the horn and entering into a hall of bells. Resonance flows into the atmosphere, mixing with it, atomizing and inhaled as a cat smells a mouse or you hold a lover, reveling in the overarching sensation of the exotic.

It crystallizes the feeling of looking over a high cliff and realizing with all your heart and soul that you never, ever have to fall over the edge.

Address: sedayne@sedayne.co.uk

v/a - Harcourt (CD by Pehrlabel)

A strange compilation of various new small sounds, from California by way of France. Une: Oldine brings slow, reflective guitar notes and gentle drumming beside, exiting with a whisper into the drone. Un Automne à Lob-Nor sneek in seamlessly behind this, unfurling slowly like a jellyfish and the tap on drums so gently is a heartbeat many hundreds of feet long. Winding a watch swims alongside, watching at odd intervals. Phlegm hawk horns and faintly louder drums, making music with which to gaze out over valleys from high buildings, reflecting and resurrecting. Is slow-fi the next recording rage?

Deux: Aspic "Dam-I-1" shows how the neurons fire in a beaver's mind as it builds that dam. Dam! Dots and beeps, dots and beeps. For Blue Baboon, it is a rhythmic swirl of signals from the mind of a bacteria, then bacterium, then multi-cellular thing that hiss hisses alive and taps its way across the cloudtops. Darky catches itself in the skipped disc groove and flails its trebly tendrils hither and non in a frantic attempt to be free. The high tones, much like in classical music, are soothing unto soma and the bass notes amble along amicably behind them. Ultra Milkmaids dock in the deep space of oceans and send out their bassy signals along with some skittering and panicked fragments of sound. A slight rattle, and the sounds creep out as their have come in gently, puzzling and warm.

Address: pehrlabel@yahoo.com

HIM - New Features (CD by Bubblecore)

Much saxing up the gentle drumming that doesn't awaken the person trying to have a nap on a hot autumn day. A live feeling, sensation of the spasm band (New Orleans division), as innocuous things are elevated to the level of Instruments and more has been stressed about jazz than its sense of community; of communing. It's all very cyclical and measured and it seems like they‚re all having a good time.

There's a certain breathy, naturalistic rhythm to the proceedings, and it's strange to think that all these tracks were assembled from various places (in various lives) and times, and not all performed immediately, at once, fully-formed. Or, are they? And now a feeling of falling slowly through a glazed hole, with saxophone feeding the morphine drip, steady heartbeat of soft drumming all the way down

Long curls away from funk drive through the motor city street, startled by the occasional horn whispers from the alleyways and led astray further by the dulcet Rhodes. The dishwashing fuck music continues as you roll over in bed, caressing the Ms after a long night of enjoying things few and far between, looking out through a window you need to dust as you realize how much you wanted once to learn how to play drums, bass, alto sax, slide guitar and Moogerfooger. And then you turn, turn it up, and return to bed.

Address: http://www.bubblecore.com

v/a - Easy Tempo, Vol. 10 (End Titles) (CD by Easy Tempo)

Time, once again, to don dark shades and wonder where to have coffee tonight, where you and she cannot be seen by prying, gossipy eyes. Now, if someone's eyes are spreading gossip run, run quickly! You don‚t need that kind of supernacheral trouble! Piero Umiliani sets the stage with a jaunty jalopy of sound, bouncing on malefemale vocals ma nah ma nah, and the organ and wire percussion speeds us along on our Vespa quickly, or the world will end! Either that, or, at the very least, you'll be fashionably late.

Bruno Nicolai's menace of horns juxtaposes with sultry femme vox and strings and do the trains run on time if exposed to this propulsive-yet-lackadaisical music? Ennio Morricone, ah yes, signore. The usual? The usual. Vittorio Paltrinieri's "Rhythm of Life" brings together a couple of minutes of lively vocal blah blah blahs, melding into the French chanteusery of Philippe Sarde's "On Ce Voit Ce Soir". Wee wee! Slow dancing before you go out to fight SPECTRE. As you saunter out to your Aston-Martin, Carlo Rustichelli's "Swing e Sesso" gives you fortitude la vita sessuale after those spies are histoire. Many soothing harp sounds and police chases abound. Piero Umiliani, Armando Trovajoli, Carlo Pes, Stelvio Cipriani, Gino Conti, Armando Trovajoli oh, it's all too much, too late, too suave and too debonair for my nimble fingers to get out into the world, but if you see this re view, you know that you should acquaint yourself with all Easy Tempo releases volare volare ichitare!

Address: easytempo@gpa.it

THE NEW BLOCKADERS - History of Nothing (CD by Siren)

Sheer sheets of onanistic sound from Richard and Paul Rupenus (also known as the Muckle Brothers) ruin the rack and explode across the consciousness in the form of this la(te)st retrospective CD. Imagine what it would've been like to hear this in 1982, when it was completely new and very few frames of reference were hanging on any wall, anywhere. "Blockade is Resistance" of course. They stretch across these last twenty-five years, in various forms here as TNB, there as Funeral Danceparty, then Metgumnerbone and Masstishaddhu like a strafing run, "Avaunt! Avaunt! Avaunt!", into the face of convention and artifice.

The pieces sound entirely complete, as if they just stepped out of the stereo for the first time. Much wealing and squealing and upheaval of sound. The odd rhythmic snatch. "X-Nihilist Assault" the titles only tell half the story. This is the hard rain that's promised to fall this sound is a rage against loneliness in one of the loneliest places on earth while pursuing one of the loneliest forms of expression. Unbelievably unrelenting, it seems to be produced on an occasional conveyer piles of metal, storms of static, in no discernable order. It starts, and when it stops, it stops. And the titles: "Viva Negative!", "Epater Les Bourgeois" ("To Impress the Middle-Class"), "Hit Damage On A / B Over X"

Totally interstellar, completely vital, utterly timeless.

Address: daisuke@aij.or.jp

KAMMERFLIMMER KOLLEKTIEF - Hysteria (CD by Afterhours)

A high-pitched crackle like the malfunction angel coming to take your stereo away. Dulcet bass repetition and skittering percussion make a strange and uneasy juxtapose of quite lovely and what's-that-noise? A warbling, wobbling sense of trying to move around in the world. Now a homey sort of gentle creaking, a tentative whistling, and then the sax and drums another run through the deserted streets of the city in the afternoon. It's a very interesting kind of fuck music the kind which needs a happy medium (volume-wise) in order to operate properly. Well, if you‚re using it as fuck music, that is.

And what is music used for? How insidious is music in the Modern Age how intimately have we grasped it to our hearts and injected it into our lives at large? Must it always have a purpose? Or can it exist solely as a work of art it is what it is but just what is it?

There is an unusual gentleness in the sounds without resorting to the complete shyness of ultra-minimalism or the blank page. It's as if insects are communicating all around the speakers and wondering which way to move, down a the tumbling waterfall of squeaks and creaks. Strings skip by like a CD as metal reverberates and the waterfall empties into a crackling, brighter land of hope and multiple EPs.

Address: afterhours@eva.hi-ho.ne.jp

OLIVE GRAIN - Olive Grain (CD by Ace Fu)

An extended string into guitar drone and echo as a female voice walks alongside it, picking it up as it falls down into the addictive bliss that is the Delay Pedal. Burning with a lighthouse flame, it moves off into the distance and it is unclear whether the sound will sweep this way very soon again. Next: a lilting little girl talks about her birthday and this is the sound of a record album of memories gone over and over again, backward and forward reflecting on unhappier times but necessary all the same. Bell and horn complete the séance.

"Vowels" almost Tuvan in its full-throated man vs. woman understatements. More woman-moaning and slow plucking of the guitar besides. Very pastoral Sunday morning makin-the-waffles kind of music. It's all very simple stuff, very quiet and wallflowery, even as its shadow precedes it and one wonders where it came from in the first place.

Moody and brooding, slowly and low. A world-weary "And so on" infests the sounds but remember this, you fringe rockers: for all the depth of gloom or heighths of sunlit wonder in your work, somewhere, someplace, you have made a laser beam illuminate your thoughts, your songs, for hours on end. Can you fucking believe it? Well, you should.

Address: http://wwww.acefu.com

RAMLEH - Too Many Miles: Complete Singles 90 95 (CD by Dirter Promotions)

The undeniable locomotive propulsion of the electronic 1980s leads into the careening wrecking ball that is Ramleh (the name of the prison in which Adolf Eichmann was held and the site of a crucial battle of the Crusades in the 12thcentury). It seems that most are familiar with the guitar-based form of Ramleh, and this compilation of singles serves to bear that conception out. Gary Mundy and Philip Best are credited on this release, but lest we forget the hard work of Anthony Di Franco, Stuart Dennison and Stuart Rossiter. All tracks engineered by Ian McKay (not the Fugazi guy).

Asked recently about the paradigm shift into guitar work, Gary Mundy replied:

"I started out as a guitarist and then around 1982, became intrigued by keyboards to such an extent that I gave up the guitar completely for 18 months or so. However, I soon began to realise that, for me, the guitar is the most expressive instrument that exists and although I still use keyboards in my work, the guitar is what I enjoy the most and do the best. As regards subject matter, the 'power electronics' era was violent music and the lyrics and imagery were therefore violent also. The guitar-based music I have been involved with has either been in collaboration with others and in these situations I generally do not write the lyrics, or else it's been predominantly instrumental music. In general the subject matter suggests itself as a result of the music created rather than a subject being chosen and then music created for that subject. I have tried subject-led music but it has generally been less successful."

It's as if the guitar at times becomes a flexible, pliant instrument stretched out in scads of scree and so forth. Most of the vocals are unintelligible, or otherwise inaudible. Like driving through a late night city blackened by the shells of unemployment and humidity this is not a bad thing. Feedback and very simple drumming it's a sound thats divorced from almost everything else that was happening at the time. Madchester, shoegazing, grunge it's too occult and eccentric to have been welcomed into any of those "camps", such was the village mentality back then. Is? All for the best, all in due course.

Curling licks of feedback flames burn into the walls at high volumes and temperatures. As time passes if these songs are presented in chronological order it seems that all in the group have continued to explore and exploit the possibilities of their respective instruments.

Address: dirter@lineone.net