Label: Ronin Format: CD
There’s no denying 23 Skidoo their place among the innovators at the interface of Eighties post-Industrial Funk, World Music and general experimental groove development. It’s one of those mysteries and licensing which has no doubt kept their back catalogue out of print for more than a decade, so these re-releases on their own Ronin imprint are thoroughly welcome, and it’s always nice to have a long-awaited return into the roots of modern musical forms emerge to wider availability.
Seven Songs, co-produced by the unholy trio of Genesis P-Orridge, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Ken Thomas (for some reason masquerading as Tony, Terry and David), has many of the hallmarks of a time when the serious work of mashing all forms of music up against each other was well under way, but not yet glossed-up and over-marketed as it is now. Johnny and Alex Turnbull, Sam Mills, Fritz Catlin and Tom Heslop stir up quite a feast of short-span delay chaos on the opener “Kundalini”, and things progress into the Fourth World of Afro-Funk and brass from their. Riding on intricate weaves of home-made and ethnodelic percussion, Seven Songs creates a template for excursions into general global musical chaostrophy, as voices from the aether, distended shrieks and yelps, ponderous chimes, bass reverberations, brazen shards of trumpet and the eerie windings of relatively primitive electronics summon the shamanic, atavistic possibilities of electric amplification and dreamlike tape editing.
Supreme among the rhythmic pieces is “IY”, a shuddering yelp of indecipherably-lysergic vocals, euphoric congas and honking sax which is one of those damned Funky piece which goes into the big surreal database of moments when the band can be imagined blissed-out in a timeless landscape grooving for all their worth as the multiverse circles around them. Yes, it really is that infectiously motive, and not weighed down with the sheen of digital production which makes it simultaneously of and out of its time. Terrific, and no wonder it helped bring 23 Skidoo Indie chart-topping success with the album.
Urban Gamelan finds the group two years on, recording on a Hawkwind refugee Dave Anderson‘s Foel Studios in Wales. Anyone who has ever moved to rural Wales (or pretty much any remote part of the world) will probaly concur that it has an odd effect on the processes of thought and artistic creation. Having got their darker emotions (and music inducty interest) out of the way on the disturbing The Culling Is Coming, the Turnbulls and Catlin teamed up with bassist Sketch for the first side of the LP to make some seriously groovesome music. “F.U.G.I” rides on a vocal sample of suitably polemical “GI – Fuck You!” yelled somewhere in the Apocalyptic fields of South East Asia as a tremendous Funk bass hook drills a precise rhythm over the determined percussion. “Fire” Reggifies proceedings inna Morricone style out of gunshots and into a swarm of vampiric growls and vocals which owe something more than a little to the tape-delayed whacked-out ramblings of Lee Perry in his duppy mode from Schizzo-P, and sits well in the company of Adrian Sherwood and Wadada‘s Dub fusions of a few years previously when Suns Of Arqa got the bass-heavy end of cross-cultural Psychedelia really flying.
The remainder of Part One continues with some sturdy percussion, and brass workouts, where the mellow bass walks around a shifting scree of trilled notes and the ever-looping and recursively-skewed beats. Part Two heralds 23 Skidoo’s take on the sound of scrap turned into Gamelan which provides the album title, clattering and gliding across a variety of metallic instrumentation for a tightly-woven selection of Westernized takes on the music of Bali. It should of course be noted that one of the more popular forms of Gamelan for many years was itself a hybrid brought about when an American film producer visited the island in the Thirties and made his own contribution to the form for cinematic purposes. The results 23 Skidoo achieve here are as hypnotic as anything produced in the “authentic” style, energetic rounds clicking and springing from each other into a dynamic frenzy of resonant trancey runs over the hubcap gongs and hyperkinetic klang. With passages of more reflective ambiance propelled on an exuberent group performance whether on bamboo xylophones and scraped or shaken instruments, the album gradually reveals just why its sought after status as a collector’s item was fully justified.
-Antron S. Meister-
