Axemen

More Axemen for the holidays! Yay!

More Axemen!

This is from 1985.

Axemen Gold from the telly in 92!
Boys dressed as girls!

Mutant Sounds

I have been lookin' at Mutant Sounds this week and remembering how good it is. We are so lucky to have a resource like this available to every man & his dog. I could spend the rest of my life downloading stuff from here and not go anywhere else. The cult of the new still holds sway with me though. I buy records, tapes, cds, dvds and digital downloads of new and old stuff. I always will. Mutant Sounds has introduced me to some great stuff I never knew about though, like the French Cosmic prog of Spacecraft and Archaia.

 It has also given me the chance to listen to things I've never been able to find like Smegma's Pigs For Lepers and Nino Nardini's Musique Pour Le Futur.

 This week I'm into Static Effect who I'd never heard of last week and I'm diggin' their tape (well mp3) Dead Game in Any weather. 'Fourth World gone malarial' is how they described it. How could I resist?

 I think it is the best sharity blog I've come across. I'll have to have a little think about who the runners up are. I also think, apart from their great music, part of their appeal is they only upload stuff that is no longer in print unlike many other blogs. I'm also amazed at the knowledge  they possess about the most subterranean of artists. They are giving the world a parallel history of music which really makes rockcrit consensus stale and lame. I really like the idea of these underground artists reaching all these people they never could have imagined. Particularly those who recorded and made 20 copies of a tape/record in the days before the Internet.

Masters Apprentices

Elevator Driver

Masters Apprentices

1968

This was the first single after the departure of guitarist/songwriter

Mick Bower. It's actually writen by Brian Cadd.

How about the film clip?!

The Masters Apprentices

Writing about them the other day made me dig out the reissue (on Aztec Music) of their debut album and what a bewdy! You can always edit albums these days, so there is no need to listen to the filler covers. I like their version of I Feel Fine and Dancing Girl though. Anyway it's all about Undecided, War or Hands of Time, Buried and Dead, But One Day, Hot Gully Wind, Theme For a Social Climber and She's My Girl - Classics! They really had a good thing goin' with the dual guitars, Jim's snarling vox and the raw production. Then there's the singles Livin' In a Child's Dream/Tired of Just Wandering and Elevator Driver - Also classics!. Can't say I dig Brigette but the b side is ok, Four Years After Five. It's around this time (before the recording of Elevator Driver) that their main songwriter MJ Bower lost the plot and retired from the Masters. Which ended the raw psychedelic tinged R&B phase of the group (ie. pre Glenn Wheatley). Mick Bower went into nursing I think. In 1968 Mick Bower released a further single under the name The Bucket which featured members of The Others & Blues, Rags n Hollers, I can't help thinking of you was released on Festival and then that was it. Bower's recording career was over. What could have been?? Does he have a SMILE hidden away somewhere?

Buried and Dead

Masters Apprentices

1967

How cool is the drummer?

Clinton Walker

RE: Clinton Walker. In his book The Next Thing wrote of(f) all Alberts Productions (this would include JPY, ACDC, The Angels, Flash & The Pan etc.) "I personally reject it as refried boogie."  He must have changed his tune though because he did write a biography on Bon Scott, unless he was in it just for the money. You would, I expect, need to be somewhat engaged by the man and his music to be able to write a book about him. Anyway Alberts mustn't have forgotten the above quote because they did not want a bar of him and his book.

Meat Puppets - Lost

 

Meat Puppets - Lost

Another theme tune for me and my life. This is the 2nd in the series see the 1st one here.

Headless Chickens - Gaskrankinstation

the lady news

Mixtapes.

Couldn't get into her new LP but I love her new mixtape on FACT.



dodgy 80s r&b

  One of the the best things about the interweb has to be people doin' mixtapes. There's heaps but I've found some beauties. Ariel Pink FACT 152 & Oneothrix Point Never FACT 162 were the shit, dunno if you can get 'em anymore. There is some kind of mixtape archive somewhere on the net. Oneothrix also did a good one called Needle Exchange Mix which included  Cleaners from Venus & Rush.

The best mixtapes of all for me though are from Pontone. Specifically the Spectral Cassettes Volumes 1-6. This is one of my ffavourite music discoveries on the internet. The first time I heard Dolphins Into the Future, Oneothrix, Infinity Window, Brother Raven, Spare Death Icon, Panabrite, Dylan Ettinger etc. Spectral Cassettes got me excited about electronic/ambient/soundscape music again, Volume 2 is seminal!. All Six are rippers.

 My other favourite mixtapes are from the brilliant Hauntological group (one person really) Moon Wiring Club. They have set the bar high with their Tapes. Incredibly thought out mixes which could have only come from the brain of Ian Hodgson. Which include great dialogue from dodgy old British films and spooky  music from any era as long as it's creepy.



Spectral II Glorious!



 I can't remember which came first, so there was The ASDA mix which was available at The Wire website( sexadelic eurogrooves). Then the summer vibes of Elementary Ice Cream Sunstroke Headache Mix (bringin' the bad vibes to summer). The Jayston Mix is another beauty(I cant remember where it came from). Lastly FACT had a mix at the end of last year to celebrate Clutch It Like A Gonk's release. Out of the four I can't decide which one is best. I like them just as  much as his records.

.

Aztec music

R.I.P. AZTEC MUSIC

What a great reissue label with fabulous packaging and liner notes on each release. I'd never heard a lot of those records. I'd heard tracks by Buffalo, Kahvas Jute, Spectrum, Tamam Shud, Madder Lake etc. from the fantastic Golden Miles Comp on Raven Records.

But it took Aztec to reissue the full LPs. It made it cheap to hear Coloured Balls (I wasn't gonna fork out $100s of dollars for these 2nd hand). Buffalo's 2nd and 3rd LPs are particular faves Volcanic Rock and Only Want You For Your Body. I couldn't believe that every 2nd suburban household didn't have copies of these.

Buffalo: The original hipsters.

The cultural cringe is still in full effect in Australia. Aztec helped redress the balance a little. The X and Died Pretty reissues were great. Great stuff from the 60s as well, The Masters Apprentices and The Twilights. The 70s was their thing though and I guess the biggest revelations for me were the reissues of Tamam Shud's Goolutionites and The Real People and Kahvas Jute's Wide Open. Clinton Walker in The Next Thing pretty much wrote off everything Australia produced including AC/DC until punk arrived, how wrong he was! (didn't he end up writing a book about Bon Scott?! Fuckin twat). I was amazed at these 2 incredibly unique rock statements from early 70s Sydney, Australia. So it's a shame that Aztec has died. I thought I still had much to learn from them.


Gold

apocalyptic gold

Axemen

Axemen