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Kev Nickells interviews Bristol* noise merchants Thought Forms about their new album Ghost Mountain, among other things: jwplayer(‘jwplayer-0′).setup({“width”:480,”height”:270,”primary”:”html5″,”image”:”http:\/\/freq.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/Thought-Forms-Ghost-Mountain.jpg”,”file”:”http:\/\/www.freq.org.uk\/audio\/Thought_Forms_interview.mp3″}); *Or are they…? Listen in to find out.
> Print this page I have a deal with a mate that if either of us ever manage to shout out ‘Baker Street!’ in the middle of a John Butcher performance, that person will receive a crisp £10 note and a hearty pat on the back. The irony being that, even if either of us weren’t excessively polite gig-goers, we’d still have problems remembering how to speak. Butcher’s entirely one of the most compelling performers doing the rounds at the moment, and is very much well worth catching if he’s visiting your locale. So a couple of caveats: first, some free improv is a bastard to write about so if this goes a bit purple prose, blame the music. ALWAYS blame the music for the writer’s downfall; secondly, most people who are familiar with the scene are well aware of Butcher – he’s probably the most well-known, well-respected of the second-wave of free improvisers. Continue reading John Butcher – Bell Trove Spools/John Butcher, Derek Bailey & Gino Robair – Scrutables/John Butcher & Rhodri Davies – Carliol [...] An arena, London 2 March 2013 HERE IS A RUBBISH PICTURE THAT LOOKS LIKE GIRLS ALOUD HAVE AN ACTUAL TANK THAT HAS DISCO LIGHTS RATHER THAN WEAPONS AND IS THEREFORE ALL QUEER-FRIENDLY AND SUCH:
The arena is a complete bastard. I’m no Belgianologist, but it could fit Belgium in it, twice. The beer cost me roughly four million pounds and was watered down foamy rubbish. The staff were pleasant enough. But it’s an inhuman aeroplane graveyard hanger of a space filled with hatred and inhumanity. Here is another crap picture of the Girls Aloud tank:
There are many things this picture fails to capture. One of those things is that Girls Aloud are on a massive shiny floating sign which reads ‘GIRLS ALOUD’, in capital letters. Another thing it Continue reading Girls Aloud (live at an arena) [...] Tmymtur -Yusei ENSL AMDC
Anyway, this being a recording apparently composed of the sort of frequencies we can’t consciously hear but do supposedly lend a certain physical presence, my interest was Continue reading Hacker Farm – UHF/Tmymtur – Yusei [...] Fingertips
So, I’m sure everyone really enjoys the caveats around authenticity, but let’s ignore that momentarily – these were among the first ventures in the late ’50s and, while there’s mild intercessions of chintzy easy listening, there’s enough full-blooded material here to keep this CD away from the faffier side of your collection. Some of the tunes have Western tonality on Eastern instruments, some of them take an Arab-style motif and blow jazz Continue reading Ahmed Abdul Malik/Chick Ganimian – Oud Vibrations [...] Autostatic
Which piques any of the adjectives I could throw at it. I was going to say something about it sounding like Can being done over by NWW, but ultimately, magical toilet wins out. It’s a 40 minute one-track, one take improvisation (from what I can gather) and it’s probably the best thing I’ve heard from them thus far (though I know they’ve got a lot more malevolently lingering in the vaults). What or Continue reading Non Ferric Memories – aW hOOn hAw / aW bOOn pAr [...] Mute
Problem the second: this isn’t really something I want to be reviewing on my own. This is the sort of thing that demands listening groups where people of a certain type (dodgy haircuts,social awkwardness, preference for ale but not quite racist enough to be in CAMRA) natter about how awesome it is. Can Continue reading Can – The Lost Tapes [...] Crammed Discs
They’re also handsome swines. And they appear to have a dancer with one leg. And they look cool as fuck. And they have dancers. And they look like they’ve not long been able to grow beards. Basically, entirely awesome and correct behaviour. The promo flappery talks about them being similar to Konono No 1, but that feels like a bit of a superficial thing to me – this is drum-lead music, rather Continue reading Jagwa Music – Bongo Hotheads [...] Sub Rosa
Opener “Fear” has some lush (and gorgeously recorded) fritter and textures, and plenty of layers dipping in and out; moments of repetitious, percussive guitar sounds ceding and ebbing with more Continue reading Erdem Helvacioglu – Timeless Waves [...] Striate Cortex roundup (Part 1) – Jan M Iversen/On The Wrong Planet/Petals/Sleepwalking/Star TurbineStriate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds – Plurals (whose SC release, I’m assured, is their best record to date), Bambikill, Petals, Dead Wood, joinedbywire, the sadly missed Joey Chainsaw… I think there’s a great caprice around these records – when they came in the post, I almost didn’t want to listen to them. The packaging is just so entirely gorgeous. A response to record industry atrophy, perhaps – no-budget labels can’t compete with the big guns but they can make desirable objects. With these, it’s a real shame Continue reading Striate Cortex roundup (Part 1) – Jan M Iversen/On The Wrong Planet/Petals/Sleepwalking/Star Turbine [...] Earache A-side – “You suffer…”
This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better without triggered drums/ it’s old/ it’s new/ they’re from Birmingham (good)/ they’re from Birmingham (bad). To answer each in turn: don’t care, fuck off/ don’t care, fuck off/ fuck off, don’t care/ fuck off don’t care/ meh – why not fuck off?/ fuck off you sexless geek/ fuck off you sexless geek/ fuck off/ fuck off/ Birmingham is AWESOME/ Birmingham is AWESOME, fuck off. And because I’ve had a million conversations about it, and Continue reading Napalm Death – Scum (Full Dynamic Range 2012 Edition) [...] Terp
… I remember when I first heard drum n’ bass, on Peel, sometime in the 90s. It was weird and scary and made me feel a little bit sexy when being sexy was a weird feeling but was also a little bit intimidating. This record’s a bit like that. It’s nothing like D’n’B though. It’s some great shuffly Ethiopian rhythms that make me want to travel around Africa drinking too much with amazing people who don’t seem to mind that I dance like I’m being controlled by particularly dense insects. It’s also got basslines that are straight out of the Mark E Smith book of bowel-peturbation, circa ’86. I don’t really Continue reading Ililta! – New Ethiopian Dance Music [...] (Not on label)
And it’s steeped in a lot of those dreadful and dreary tags that make you think of dogshit music students yet to realise that sex is better than conversations about string gauges (‘postrock/mathrock’) BUT it’s a LITTLE BIT sexy because they’ve bothered to keep it smart but not ‘wahey, look at how clever we are’ smart – you know, just lads getting on with it. “Damp Standard,” middle track – Continue reading bandcalledMAC – Send Her Back to Jesus [...] Fire Right yeah, so – Pulp. WHAT I REMEMBER of the time of Different Class is that there was a bit of a sense of them being very much a “ooh, follow your dreams, keep plugging away and eventually you’ll make it” thing, in terms of what the press were saying. Which was nice of them. As if to say ‘even if your entire output is utterly shite, maybe you’ll write a pop song one day. So I didn’t bother venturing much further back than His n’ Hers, assuming that the older stuff wasn’t popular for a reason (ie, ’twas shite). What a dickhead I was. (I still am, in many ways, just not that one). I don’t like this idea of bands’ early stuff being better though. That’s bollocks. The Fall are the best band ever (that’s an actual fact, by the way) and their first few albums are Continue reading Pulp – IT/Freaks/Separations [...] Important
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So the blurb reads that Yusei (“Spring voice”) is all about frequencies that you can’t hear, up in those registers over 20kHz beyond human hearing. Which reminds me of those audiophile tropes about how analogue LPs transmit sounds well beyond human threshold which make for ‘fuller’ tones and all that jazz. I’m perennially ambivalent about these ideas – I like the idea that somewhere in the hinterland between physics and psychoacoustics there’s a semi-appreciable difference in acoustic presence. But I’m always cautious that audiophiles tend to be dogturds of humans battering boorish ‘quality’ into the ears of the not-particularly-bothered. Apophatic in the face of audiophiles, perhaps.
Oud Vibrations. It’s a pun, you see? You do? Good. So, the fluff is that these are two of the earlier ventures by jazz hands into Arabic lands and this is a two LPs on one CD of two chaps who worked with Arabic stylings. There’s a faint sense that they’re both jazz sorts borrowing from Arabic ideas, but it’s essentially two fairly different records.
“It sounds like someone flushing a magical toilet over and over” – this courtesy of my dear partner. She then mimed flushing a toilet for a bit, did a puzzled face, then decided it was the Victorian style of toilet with the flush you have to stand up for, rather than lean towards the cistern.
Problem the first: a month or so really isn’t enough time to deal with this. What I really wanted was a properly stodgy, fagend cash-cow studio slurry. Selfish, but it’s much easier to go ‘while there’s highlights on discs 2 and 3, ultimately it’s for the Can fanatic’. The review writes itself. Of course, that’s not the case, and I’m left with an album that’s better than EVERYTHING EVER because, of course, it’s Can and Can are better than EVERYTHING EVER.
The sleevenotes talk about this band being derided for being from the poor part of town; the sleeve is shouting luridly at my hangover and I think I’m going to go blind. I can’t help but feel that this is Tanzania’s answer to Happy Hardcore. Moreover, all the songs are towards the pulmonary-antagonising side of tempos, and tend to get faster.
Timeless Waves apparently started life as a ‘sonic work’ for a multi-channel installation of some kind (though the notes are unclear as to whether it was a conventional performance or gallery deal). I can get a bit sceptical of these things translated to disc, but luckily, Erdem Helvacioglu’s done a good job of making it into a more album-shaped whole. It’s loosely themed around a set of common emotions, but it’s thankfully ambiguous in that intention – there’s enough mettle to this to keep it aside from something comparable to ‘this is using the colour blue because blue is a sad colour.’
FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute.
It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome!
Buh…yeah. -rock suffixes are lame. But this is good. GOOD I tell you. Ole’ timey two guitars n’ drums-core. Possibly fans of that K Records fallout where the melody lines were just about poppy but the B string on one of the guitars sounded just out enough to be right and a bit queasy. Y’know, Sleater Kinney, Urusei Yatsura, that kind of thing. But instrumental. No vocals and no need.
Oh, caveats. They’re buggers right? Yeah. Well, here’s one anyway – without wanting to get into the ‘how do ‘we the west’ appropriate non-Western music?’, there’s always a massive problem writing about this sort of thing. I’d not suggest that my lack of knowledge of Carnatic/ Hindustani music is in any way an impediment to enjoying/ talking about Indian classical music, but I always get this feeling that it’d take me 20 years to get near putting this in some sort of context. Ustad Abdul Karim Khan has a phenomenal tone, lovely range, the ornaments to the rags are phenomenally delivered, the recording has been re-mastered brilliantly considering it sounds like one mic in a dusty room some point before the 2nd World War (!). But I’m taking it as read that he has the reputation he does in India for good