Eva Luna - Moonshake

UK POST ROCK TOP 14: PART 3

Moonshake have got to be one of the oddest bands ever. Not in a 'hey look at me, I'm freaky!' way though. They were kind of really normal which gave them an unsettling edge. You could see yourself in these guys and perhaps what you saw wasn't quite right. You felt like the daily grind of urban life had taken a toll on these people. A duality was at play here with two singer/songwriters tag teaming at opposite ends of the rock spectrum. Dave Callahan was kind of angry and on a vociferous rant while Margaret Fiedler was muttering to herself disturbingly. While Callahan and Fiedler got all the notoriety, this band wouldn't have been half as good without the most underrated rhythm section in rock history. John Frenett was on bass and his style was a marvellous intersection between dub and funk. Possibly the most awe inspiring element of the group though was the drumming/percussion of Miguel Moreland. It is hard to ascertain though how much of this dizzying percussive display is him or sequencing/sampling. I couldn't really give a shit because whatever it is, it's fucking great! Moreland made this band worthy of being named after a classic Can tune. Has drumming on an LP ever captured so much of the percussive spectrum? Moreland's playing can be really fucking heavy but he's also very nimble and can be light as a feather. The percussion here is all that and everything in between. Moonshake created this music which was an incredibly idiosyncratic expression of who, what and where they were at the time. Not only that, this must have been what they saw as a possible future pop template. It was all about strange blends and weird paradoxical amalgams. Moonshake were shouting out against the world and wanting to hide from it at the same time. They had a No Wave-esque negation happening and yet they embraced current state of the (pop)art technology. Reverence for music's past and musicianship was part of the equation too. Moonshake could only ever sound like Moonshake. Imitating this motley crew would be fucking impossible.

Ultra funky deep bass, groovy congas, surreal guitar squalls, flute, layer upon layer of sampled noise, taught guitar lines, saxophone squiggles along with Callahan's classic post-punk snarl are all jumbled into this kitchen sink mix and that's just on the first tune Wanderlust. Disconcerting atmospheres, black holes of dissonance, guitars bent way out of shape and Fiedler's cloying yet creepy vocals battle it out for a piece of centre stage action on Tar Baby. The title of Bleach & Salt Water says it all as this track is an ambient underwater urban dub whiteout. The beat here is whirling through a vortex to a startling degree. Moreland makes 3 minutes 40 seem like an eternity and I reckon I could definitely go another 20 or 45 minutes of this incredible groove. Little Thing meanwhile is rhythmic psychedelia, that's spaced out to the max. Only Moonshake could make a tune so ambient yet so tense. City Poison is like a history lesson in underground guitar noise. This is like a tribute to all the Posts ie. Post-Psych (cf.Krautrock), Post-Punk, Post Hardcore and Post-MBV. The beauty of this tune though is that it only really sounds like Moonshake. How the fuck did they do that? Spaceship Earth's clangorous guitars fly into an intense slide frenzy, then keep infinitely spiralling. Jesus, even Callahan gets melodic here! Beautiful Pigeon finds Moonshake at their most pop. Massive drums tumble wildly amongst the rest of the noise, while the bass stalks threateningly trying to hold things down as Margaret's eccentric whispers reach melodic levels as well. It was the grunge era so this could have easily been a hit but.......(?). They save the best till last, Mugshot Heroine closes this classic LP on a triumphant note. Horns go haywire, the rhythms get incredibly funky, discordant horror soundtrack strings jolt you out of your seat, ghost(town)like trumpets appear and all hell breaks loose.

Moonshake arrived at a sound (jam packed layers of samples that are piled up to bursting point that still feels like a mine field listening to it today) that was nearly pop. When you had a closer look at its dense layers of detail though it was all, well... quite bizarre. It may seem like an almighty chaotic mess but this LP is meticulously crafted down to every last microscopic sound. Producer/engineer Guy Fixsen is probably to be thanked for that. I've listened to this record hundreds of times and trying to write about it has got to be one of the hardest tasks I've ever set myself. Whatever I write will never do Eva Luna justice. You never know what's going to pop up or which turn it's about to take. This is a trip where the turbulence becomes so disorientating it sort of becomes beautiful (sort of....not really....I dunno....does it?).

Stupendous. 

Re-Entry - Techno Animal

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 2

This is a fucking out and out (there) classic of absolute epic proportions. Jesus, was there ever a band name and album title more fitting? Never has a band sounded so primordial, cyberdelic and interstellar at the same time. What was happening sonically here was a journey through the stars that eventually reaches the atmosphere and crashes back to earth. This was infinite yet restricted all at once. Re-Entry was a hell of an artistic feat. Here we had Fourth World music taken beyond the stars and its limits. Techno Animal didn't just reference Jon Hassell (like MBV) they got him to play on two of the album's finest tracks. Real time playing was at a bare minimum here with only Hassell's trumpet and a couple of other instruments used. Then Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin abused those source sounds by pummelling them into shapes barely resembling their origins. The rest of the soundz come from samples that are so deformed there is no way of telling where they came from. Techno Animal get so lost in their machines that it feels like a miracle that they ever make it back out of them.

Today this double cd is still soo irresistible I can barely believe my ears. Re-Entry starts out astronomical and ends up depleted. While on paper it may seem like an absurd and potentially clunky smorgasbord of aural debris, somehow it comes out sounding fucking amazing. It's like they've stolen the soundtrack from a parallel universe. Jazz funk permutations, gonzoid sirens, buckled noise, malignant trumpets, bent hip hop, acid squelches, unsettling frequencies, out of shape drones and nightmarish mutant gamelan are all put through a demented cyber dub echo chamber. Phew...and that's just the first cd. Then on the second cd the beats slow down and dissipate into the polluted air of this vast desolate terrain. Tainted bells appear and a peculiar shape shifting tense ambience takes over. This is where dubbed out contaminated drone-ology reached perfection that remains unrivalled 20 years later. This is undoubtedly a masterpiece and quite possibly the best album of the 90s. 

Evanescence - Scorn

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 1

Someone once niftily described Evanescence as Metal Box meets Bernard Hermann. That's way too neat a summation of the panoply of sonic experiences contained within this cd though. Evanescence was an incredible solitary sonic document of what musicians were attempting within these musical spheres at the time. Sure there is deep dub bass and spooky horror motifs but a whole lot more was going on here. While other UK Post-Rock groops like Stereolab, Pram and Laika were influenced by the great fluid Krautrock beats of Neu and Can, Scorn's beats were informed by hip hop. Along with darker ambient vibes they had traces of metal (Mick Harris & Nick Bullen were ex-members of the ferocious and funny metal band Napalm Death), goth, post punk, industrial, techno and drone-ology. The grooves are infectious and even sometimes mellifluous. Getting lost amongst these deep and heavy riddims is all part of the attraction of Evanescence. I recall being rather confounded upon first hearing this LP due to its musical juxtapositions and I guess, what I saw as contradictions, but that didn't last long as I kept coming back for more. The occasional vestige of a riff even drifts in now and then. Dread was a major part of original 70s dub reggae and on this recording Scorn certainly captured a unique British gloom. A doomed feel permeates the entire record. Unlike other ambient dub acts of the time this was not good time E-head chill out music. It had mysterious lulls into nightmarish worlds containing all the colours of the dark. Scorn at this stage were like a lethargic cousin to UK's darkside hardcore scene and a precursor to future genres like dub-step and hauntology. On Dreamspace Scorn even give us a bit of bass drum girth gabba/gloomcore style, which is fucking wicked. Exodus, one of the stand out tracks, was like a forlorn My Bloody Valentine with an ominous didgeridoo instead of an ecstatic flute. The lost generation of original UK post-rock were trying to push things forward and this LP stands as a testament to that vision to this day. It was quite an achievement and I kinda can't understand why a hundred groups didn't take up this as a blueprint but I guess the future was still up for grabs at the time and bands were forging their own identities, not wanting to be mere Scorn acolytes. The copyists and clones were gathering together over near or in the charts under the banner of New Wave of New Wave and Brit-Pop, nowhere near these outer regions.

Scorn's Evanescence is magic from the margins.

UK Post Rock - The Lost Generation

In keeping with my recent recent posts about Main, Ice & Techno Animal I thought I'd go into a bit more detail on UK's Lost Generation of Post-Rock. Good ole Professor Reynolds was writing about these groups in the pages of Melody Maker from at least 1991 onwards. There's was an article in the 91 Christmas issue of Melody Maker with no byline that I assume was penned by Simon. It documented the first stirrings of a new (non)scene that included a bunch of disparate musical units committed to taking their music to the limits well away from the commercial alternative business of the time. Cranes were the hot topic with their 91 classic Wings Of Joy but they weren't what was soon to be called post-rock. They were a one off post-goth/industrial band with, and I quote 'a lush Scott Walker/Euro cabaret grandeur.' Anyway AR Kane's (forefathers of UK post-rock) label H.ark get a mention with their roster containing Papa Sprain & Butterfly Child. Kevin Martin's label Pathological rate a mention too with his own great band Techno Animal plus Oxbow (whatever happened to them?). Avant Yanks Cop Shoot Cop and Twin Infinitives era Royal Trux get thrown in the mix as well. But it was future post-rock icons Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis and Main who were the most celebrated/anticipated in this article as some kind of future saviours of what was still being called Avant-Rock. Two years later in 1993 the lost generation were still dubbed as Avant-Rock along with the speculative term Cyborg-Rock, which never really gained any traction. I guess weird non UK bands like Young Gods and The Boredoms would have fitted this category with relative ease. In the UK though more and more groups like Insides, EAR, Moonshake Scorn, Ice, Seefeel were displaying un-rock tendencies in a beyond rock context so this wasn't a classification that was to properly fit. Avant-Rock still implied that the genre was still rock'n'roll at its core despite innovations and modern tendencies. While half of what ended up being called Post-Rock still rocked in some mutant form, the other half was not so rockin. Hence the term Post-Rock making perfect sense.

The thing is this music was already under my skin so by the time Simon Reynolds came up with the term Post-Rock for these bands in an article for Wire magazine's May 1994 issue (reprinted in Bring The Noise pages 186-193) it kind of didn't really matter. I've never really thought about it before but I guess it was named in hindsight as the scene had been going for 3 or 4 years already. As is usually the case with these things a demise was on the way with only a few classics of the genre to be released after 1994. Post-Rock now also included the likes of O'rang, Laika, Flying Saucer Attack, Pram & Movietone. Parallels were being drawn to other artists on the outer musical limits like Paul Schutze, Jim O'Rourke, Thomas Koner, Aphex Twin, Eddie Prevost, Zoviet France etc. In an article in Melody Maker in July 1994 past artists were retroactively inducted into a post-rock hall of fame lineage from The Velvet Underground to Krautrock legends Neu, Faust & Cluster to Brian Eno to Post-Punk groups like PIL, Cabs and The Pop Group to 80s UK noise/bliss rockers from JAMC, MBV, Spaceman 3, Loop, The Cocteau Twins, AR Kane etc.

Post-Rock was all about samplers, drum machines, studios, effects, sequencers, jettisoning the guitar as a riff apparatus and integrating the techniques of dub, 70s Miles Davis, Can, hip-hop, ambient & techno into rock. Guitars were still sometimes used but in more of an unfamiliar and un-rock way. Mixing real time instrument playing with sampling was the raison d'etre for some which gave the recordings a really strange edge. Others opted for a wholly synthetic approach. This bunch of groups rarely sounded like one another, they were on the outside, went out into these zones alone and wore that status like a badge. Some were beat scientists, while others severed beats altogether and space was the place. Anyway that doesn't really sound like Explosions In The Sky does it? This UK shit was the shit! This was the sound of my bedroom in the early 90s while your more accessable rock/pop stuff (Shoegazers, Breeders, Pavement, Mazzy Star, Portishead etc.) from the era made it into the lounge rooms of the share houses I lived in at the time, Post-Rock was not embraced by all and remained in the ghetto of my bedroom (along with strange septic tanks like Slint, Trumans Water, Thinking Fellers Union 282 et al.). This parallelled how Post-Rock was pretty marginalised in the outside world too apart from Stereolab who were quite the cult band.....I suppose.

I think a top 14 of the original UK Post-Rock is in order. This is when the term made sense, meant something and the music was bloody great.

THE TOP 14
Hydra-Calm (compilation) - Main [1992]
Eva Luna - Moonshake [1992]
May - Papa Sprain [1992]
Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements - Stereolab [1993]
Iron Lung - Pram [1993]
Under The Skin - Ice [1993]
Quique - Seefeel [1994]
Hex - Bark Psychosis [1994]
Evanescence - Scorn [1994]
DI GO POP - Disco Inferno [1994]
Silver Apples of The Moon - Laika [1994]
Herd Of Instinct - O'rang [1994]
Further - Flying Saucer Attack [1995]
Re-Entry - Techno Animal [1995]

*The top 14 has just one record per artist.
These are in chronological order.
This list is by no means comprehensive.
Each of the top 14 will be featured in a future blog post.

**Stereolab, Flying Saucer Attack & Third Eye Foundation all released gems after 1995. I must admit I didn't really follow the next wave of  Post-Rock groups from the UK. I'm actually struggling to come up with any of their names beyond the Flying Saucer Attack affiliates Piano Magic, Crescent and Amp.

On The Hi-Fi (in brief) Part 43

Walberswick - Jon Brooks
Brooks is back just 6 months after Advisory Circle's 2014 classic From Out Here (which I'm still listening to on a weekly basis) with another bewdy. He's keeping up his batting average and getting better with each new release. This starts off in weird electronics mode with Mr Brooks I Presume before settling into synth ambience in excelis.

Songs Of Gold, Incandescent - Dolphins Into The Future/Lieven Martens Moana
Classic themes here from Lievens. This is actually a compilation of rarities from 2010-2014. I mean isn't all his stuff rare. We've got waves, bells, jungle sounds, Pacific Islander choirs, strange electronics, underwater soundtracks, Casio vibraphones, submarine drones and the inevitable scuttling sea creature soundz. Songs Of Gold makes you realise how much sonic territory Dolphins Into The Future have covered over the years without you even realising.

Machines Are Obsolete - Pye Corner Audio/Pathways - Pye Corner Audio & Belbury Poly
(Ghostbox Other Voices Series 05)
A-Side: "Easy listening dystopian sounds. 80s attempts at futuristic soundtracks."*
B-Side: "Future Sailor but not as good like Howard Moon has found the new sound but no he hasn't it's just an old one. It sounds like every single song from 1983!"*

*Special comments from Mrs Space Debris.

Pathways is reminding me of a John Foxx tune I can't quite put my finger on. Chuck in a bit of Kraftwerk and a Giorgio Moroder synth guitar lead break and you've probably got it in a nutshell.

Murder For Hire - Kevin Gates
I was really looking forward to this but there's just way too much screaming dj action on this one. Kevin Gates gets buried beneath all the extraneous racket here. I hope he didn't put any classics on this 7 track datpiff exclusive mixtape because I don't think I can put up with dj holiday for one more second in my life. Why does he have to show up on like every 4th rap mix-tape and why doesn't he shut the fuck up and let Gates do his thang.

Livonia - His Name Is Alive
Who would have thought that this would still sound good 25 years later? My 90s trip has gone back to my 4AD records and sure the 80s was 4AD's decade but they still had some gems in the 90s like their last Cocteau's record, Throwing Muses The Real Ramona, The Breeders Pod, The Pale Saints, Red House Painters and the first 2 LPs from His Name Is Alive. Livonia was their first record and yeah it's really pretentious but fuck it sounded good today. I was expecting to want to turn it off after 30 seconds but I played it twice in a row. This is a strange album. It's sort of outsider folk/loop-ology/random electronics and noise guitars. I wanted to play their 2nd LP Home Is In Your Head which I recall being even better but it's on tape and sadly me house no longer contains a tape deck!

70s Indonesian Meta music

'Every music and melody I love.'

You can't love music much more than that can ya?

'I love Rolling Stones/I love Led Zeppelin.' 

*Funnily enough after that last post about The Doors I went to bed and put on this album for some reason and this is the first track. So this is Panbers from the fabulous compilation released a few years back (2011) by NowAgain Records called Those Shocking Shaking Days: Indonesian Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock & Funk 1970-1978. Anyway this is my 3rd perhaps final contribution to Blissblog's Music Music series. Great tune eh?

Music About Music Part 2 - 60s Cali

Mamas & The Papas sing about the 60s Cali scene although weren't they originally from New York? It's really hard to watch John Philips now since he's become a rotten scoundrel in my mind after finding out about the alleged incest he committed to his daughter. I can get past these sort of things usually with the music but I think it's seeing him and the image he projects ie. a sort of innocent non-threatening lame yet money hungry hippie. Hey the rock world is full of scoundrels (cf The Stones, Led Zep, Gary Glitter etc). The thing with someone like Gary Glitter he seemed so mental it wasn't such a stretch what he got up to. Anyway innocence is very questionable in rock innit? It seems the more you project innocence, the more you are hiding how fucked up you are (cf. The Beach Boys, The Cocteau Twins).

The Beach Boys sing about an earlier version of themselves. How LA is that?

Love/Sex as music or is it the other way around?

How fucking good is Carl Wilson's voice! How much do you wanna punch Mike Love in the face though? Better than The Ronettes version, I reckon. No Brian in the clip. The other dude is Bruce Johnston. He wrote some fine Beach Boys songs like Disney Girls, Tears In The Morning etc. In the 70s he ended up collaborating with Elton John a fair bit. He even sang backing vocals on Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Oh...................how could I forget?

'For the Music is your only friend/Dance on fire as it intends/Until the end'

*What a unit! What A performance! Jim's Swagger! Fucking funny too.

Olympic Mess - Helm

HELM - Olympic Mess
I haven't read about Olympic Mess and I can't really recall other people's or even Helm's own ideas about his other records or whether I've read anything about him longer than a sentence. So if this is some kind of of conceptual music that needs theoretical guidelines that is not going to work here. I really enjoyed the Silencer record from a couple of years back, but don't recall what I thought of last year's The Hollow Organ, can't have been too crash hot. I do recall being quite bored by the reissue of his debut LP Impasse from 2008 last year. I thought that was pretty generic. To put it in a nutshell this one is atmospheric loop-ology, the softer side of electronic noise and manipulated enervated drones that roughly traverse similar zones to Tim Hecker. I can't really detect any kind of wake for rave vibes here ala Lee Gamble which I keep thinking will pop up as he's from London. Oh right, it has just clicked, is this some kind of tribute to the scars that the 2012 Olympics have left on his hometown? I know after the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne the Olympic Village became a kind of slum/no go zone after it was turned into public housing.

Anyway it all travels along quite nicely in a kind of rough formal minimalist style with the best parts vaguely reminding me of Labradford and someone I can't quite put my finger on, maybe Philip Glass. Then by about halfway through the thought pops up 'How much more of this stuff do we need in our lives?' I think the answer's in the question. Then by the time we get to Strawberry Chapstick Helm pushes my patience to the limits with some whispering fuckwit prattling on...oh.....I think we're supposed to be intrigued by this. On Silencer Helm had some really good rhythms so I don't know why he hasn't continued down a more beat orientated path. I can't help thinking why don't I just get out my early Main records and listen to those as they were far superior drone-dub-noise-scapes.

*Main: Continuing my recent 90s rediscoveries of arty German electronica and the good end of US post-rock (ie. before the noodling fusionists wankers showed up). Main were part of the first/lost generation of post-rock which was from the UK that also included such favourites as Pram, Seefeel, Disco Inferno, Scorn, Moonshake, Ice, Laika, Bark Psychosis, Techno Animal, Ear and a few more. Main were fantastic for a while, particularly on their first 4 EPs Hydra, Calm, Dry Stone Feed and Firmament. This was a great little run from 1991-1993. I recall feeling really ripped off by Motion Pool their first full length LP though which was only half great. Oh the pre mp3 days of the early 90s when you were young and poor, a cd was a big investment. Man it would get you down if you bought a dud album. That money could have gone towards booze, drugs, tickets or cigarettes. Like Robert Hampson's previous group (before creating Main with another bloke) Loop, some bands suit the EP format much better. Four great EPs is better than most groups manage in their lifetime anyway.

**UK Post-Rock: This was like 100 times better than The US version, 95% of which wasn't even real post-rock anyway. The term somehow got switched and just ended up meaning anything post-Sonic Youth/Stereolab/Tortoise. Godspeed You Black Emperor weren't a post rock band. They were a prog band. Don't get me wrong I like me a little prog and GSYBE started out with a couple of cool records. More on what post-rock really was and the bollocks it became at a date TBC.

Music About Music

I guess this is a bit like an Aussie Rock'n'Roll (The Velvets tune) done in an old wave pretending to be new wave style that reminds me of one of those New York cats who was a solo old wave into new wave type dude. Too tired to check the net and figure out who I mean. As I think I've said before New Wave was such good music to have as a preteen. I still love it and the more nooo the better.

Was this nooo wave hard rock for the FM airwaves? Or was it just a pumped up/revamped of version of Glam? Whatever, it was bloody great pop music for the child I was at the time!

Now we're going meta meta. Don't you fucking hate the word meta and its overuse by fucking try hard turds who think life is a bloody University essay? (er...did i just describe myself?) This music here is about other music and I don't mean the words. I mean the sounds (the music & melody) are about the music David Roback and Kendra Smith love ie. The Doors, Glam etc. 

Never seen this video before but by the looks Kendra must have already left the band and that is a young Hope Sandoval at the intro (with Dave) who must have already replaced Smith prior to the name change to Mazzy Star.

I think I mentioned recently that this LP is one of the greatest examples of good record collection rock. Garage Rock, Blues, Psychedelia, Folk, Glam, T-Rex, The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Doors, Jefferson Airplaine are all chucked in to make Happy Nightmare, Baby one of the best LPs of the 80s. One of the few arguments for Retromania (along with Urge Overkill's Saturation, Hoodoo Gurus Stoneage Romeos) because it's one of the best LPs of all time. The glittery laconic tripped out vibe here is extraordinarily sparkling on this record and is pretty much unmatched by anyone including their predecessors or peers, making this rare and a unique case of a band bettering or at least equalling their influences. Bands used to add to and often surpass their influences (cf. Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Church, My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel) thus making them palatable and pretty awesome not mere copyists with the occasional listenable tune (cf. White Stripes, Tame Impala et al.). REM might have been influenced by The Byrds but fuck they didn't really sound like them, did they?

I must be wishing I was stoned, drunk on tequila and relaxing in the hot sun with this LP booming from the Hi-Fi out into someone's backyard. I'd love to be kicking back on a banana lounge, being wasted in the warm early afternoon sun without a care in the world instead of being stressed out, not wanting to go to work tomorrow, freezing my bollocks off as my dog eats my wallet (funnily enough he left the pet insurance card intact and in pristine condition) while barking his head off and that's not the half of it. 

This whole post was meant to be some kind of response to Blissblog's music about music but I got sidetracked and my puppy has driven me mental. I just want to keep listening to Opal but it's too late to get faded er...and I don't do that anymore. It's Sunday night and nearly time for bed. I wish I was 22 again and didn't give a fuck about anything!

Moritz Von Oswald Trio - Sounding Lines

WHAT'S ON THE HI-FI PART 42

MORITZ VON OSWALD TRIO - Sounding Lines
Always avoided Moritz Von Oswald Trio as I read somewhere that they were like a jazz trio. For some reason the words 'Jazz Trio' make me feel a little bit sick which is funny because I'm not averse to a bit of jazz. I guess jazz trio brings to mind trad sax, scatting, drum solos etc. Not the ultra minimal and restrained voyages into rhythm and occasional faint bits of dissonance that make up Sounding lines. I mean I haven't listened to jazz in a long time (apart from 70s Miles Davis) but I was once really into John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Don Cherry and John's Mrs Alice. MVO Trio only really get about as jazzy as Can ever did. Speaking of Can there is quite a Can-esque feel to many of these trax. Some of Sounding Lines evokes the less furious side of 70s era Miles. The best parts though are when Moritz conjures his own Basic Channel vibes with 90s German stylee dub influenced techno like on the fabulous epic opening tune Sounding Line 1. Sounding Line 4 is classic ambient dub-tech that could have come straight off BCD except it has real drums. Even Hauntology is invoked on Sounding Line 5 (Spectre) with it's dreamy library electronics and slight faux jazz soundz, I didn't even know what it was called when those thoughts crossed my mind until I looked at the track listing and thought 'uh huh! I'm onto something there.' After a bit of library-jazz-funk, a drum machine appears along with some gaseous squelches on Sounding Line 7 and causes a ripple of nostalgia that makes you wanna get out those old Basic Channel tunes. This is an incredibly enjoyable microbic beat odyssey, quite the little surprise then that I'm really glad I checked it out. I didn't think it was gonna be anywhere near as good as it is. I might even go back and check out their other albums.

*Conjures, evokes and invoked all in the same bloody paragraph! Jesus Christ! What's with that?

ROME - Rome
So while we're feeling 90s zones, here's one I gave a spin recently after finding all those 90s German cds due to the Mego reissue of General Magic & Pita's Fridge Trax Plus. Anyway Rome aren't German but American and this came out on Thrill Jockey. During that rummage I came across other er...post-rock from America such as Cul-De-Sac, Directions In Music, Ui, Jessamine, Labradford, Tortoise, Bowery Electric & Sabalon Glitz. This is the only one to get any airtime so far (can't bring myself to listen to one song wonders Tortoise) and it complements the MVO Trio record perfectly as Rome were also a trio and the most dub influenced US post-rock group. This 1996 release is the only Rome album who came and went in a flash. I have no idea what happened to them after this. Their self-titled cd is quite the underrated little gem though. This is something along the lines of dub applied to US underground noise, making it a one off artifact. The music here is closer to Cabaret Voltaire and PIL's post-punk dub gloom than say US post-rock or German dub-techno though. Even that's not really a fair comparison as Rome were really fucking original and unique. I once read an article on Kevin Martin's dub noise band Ice in Lime Lizard in the early 90s and Rome were more along the lines of what I thought Ice were going to sound like. I can't believe how well this shadowy experimental dub un-rock stands up today. This LP is a terrific ghostly haze. Rome is forgotten but should perhaps be unforgotten. Now I'm wondering if they had any other releases worth checking out...I'm sure they had a 12" that never crossed my path plus a tune on Macro Dub Infection 2, otherwise I think that was it. At least they didn't hang around too long and get boring.

*It turns out Rome is unforgotten as this album was posted on the I Hate The 90s blog a few hours ago which I came across after writing this post while searching for other Rome material. The blog confirms there was just another 12" called Beware The Soul Snatchers where Rome were reduced to a duo plus they had a tune on the compilation In Memoriam Gilles Delueze on Mille Plateaux from 1996, which I never tracked down despite it being highly regarded amongst Wire writers at the time. I would suggest downloading Rome's Rome LP from i-tunes though where it's available but the elusive 12" isn't. Perhaps that shall remain a mystery to me till my dying day.

**Ice: I ended up really loving them. Under The Skin (1993) is one of my favourite records from the 90s and Kevin Martin's duo with Justin K Broadrick, Techno Animal, had a really amazing double cd Re-Entry from 1995.

***Don't get me wrong DJed the one classic song from Tortoise is a top tune. Its just that nothing else they did was ever as good. I mean did we need a lounge version of Slint's Spiderland that was the first Tortoise LP? Millions.... was DJed with a bit of math-rock and 90s electronica filler  chucked in. Then, I dunno, wasn't TNT a muzak version of Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians? John McEntire from Tortoise did an incredible remix of Stereolab's Les Yper Yper Sound though, which featured on the choice 1996 Virgin compilation Monsters, Robots & Bugmen.

The mysterious Rome 12" eludes me.