Lunatic Asylum Mix

I don't think I've posted this before maybe some blog I frequent has, I dunno, but I only converted this to mp3 today and geez I like. The first half in particular is gloomtastic and the second half is good too in gabbalerous/hard trancemania style. It's all hardcore. All trax are from Dr Macabre aka Renegade Legion aka Lunatic Asylum aka many other monikers. This is rave music for the Apocalypse. When he gives it a bit of kick early on in the set the bass drum is so fucking thick it's awesome. If you're happy when it rains this doomcore will have you in gloomy euphoria. Bring on the end.

This 3 cd set on Megarave Records from 1999 should be in every gloomcore freak's household. It has tunes from all his aforementioned aliases plus a few others like French Connection, Slut Burger, Negative Burn, Micibri and guests Rotterdam Terror Corps. This would be in my top ten single artist compilations of all time, he being Guillaume Leroux a French bloke.

Patrick Cowley - Muscle Up

I was very pleased to see this new release of old stuff. Patrick Cowley's 2013 archival record School Daze was terrific and this one is even better. This is more archival material from the 70s and early 80s. Some of these tunes were used in porn films. How lucky were these film makers who got to use Cowley's compositions in their pornos? I'm pretty sure if Cowley had lived beyond 1982 he would have become a renowned soundtrack composer. Cats Eye opens Muscle Up by setting a strange futuristic tribal atmosphere with haunting piano and very big and ominously slow drums. The Jungle Dream is an incredibly expansive and humid piece of ambience. It comes complete with jungle sounds and a faintly menacing vibe that something is occurring off in the distance. Conjuring thoughts of danger as there maybe some kind of sacrifice ritual taking place behind that next set of trees. Deep Inside You could be a Michael Rother/Neu outtake with its damn fine treated guitar and krautrock pulsations. Somebody To Love Tonight is neon lit night time synth dub for seedy city streets. Pigfoot is a glorious synth jam with classic funky guitar licks. 5th of Funk is some more mental synth funk/cosmic disco action. Don't Ask is a restrained cop show stakeout tune set in a future urban metropolis perhaps what Cowley imagined San Francisco might have been like in 2017, I mean he died over 30 years ago so... By the time we get to Uhura he's getting really out there into the cosmos. Timelink is Berlin School electronics with a didgeridoo which places the outback amongst the infinite stars, incredible stuff. Mockingbird Dream is a sprawling hallucinatory journey that slowly goofs off behind some unknown planet. Best archival release of 2015.

The Horror The Gloom The Doom

Halloween isn't really a thing here in Australia, despite many attempts by consumerist architects to make it so. I hate it when it gets referred to as an American custom as it quite clearly emanated from Celtic tradition and probably has Pagan roots. Anyway it's a good excuse to get out some frightening and gloomy tunes. I could have posted a hundred or more of these doomcore/gloomcore gems but here's just a handful. 

This one from Marc Acardipane is from 2002 but I only discovered yesterday. One World No Future came out after the 90s heyday of doomcore techno but it's damn fine. There's probably still a bunch of artists creating replicas of the genre and trying to keep the faith today, like there are still drum n bass people etc. 

Frozen is an alias for Miro. I think Frozen only did the one EP, Soul Saver, from 1997 where both of these tracks come from. Miro had a bunch of other pseudonyms Stickhead, Reign, Jack Lucifer, Evidence, Hypnotizer and the list goes on. He made many fine records and continues to this day doing minimal, sometimes quite dark, techno under his name Miro Pajic.

This is another 90s bewdy from Miro Pajic under the alias Evidence. This was on his 1999 compilation Hardcore Made In Frankfurt, probably released a few years earlier on 12".

On The Hi Fi - Recent Synth Soundtrax

CUB - STEVE MOORE
Loving this. This is Steve Moore from Zombi, the synth-prog group who brought us the top faux electronic soundtrack albums Surface To Air and Spirit Animal in the 00s. If you know those records you'll know what you're getting here. This recording is an actual score to a film though. Cub is a retro-synth soundtrack that's so good it doesn't need to pretend it's anything new. This score is the sound of a man and his synthesiser creating fabulous minimal and spooky analogue sounds not unlike John Carpenter whereas Zombi were more like your full on horror prog rock group along the lines of Tangerine Dream or Goblin. Best soundtrack of 2015?

COLD IN JULY - JEFF GRACE
I missed this one when it came out so if you like your synth horror soundtracks, like the above, this is for you. I have come across two excellent Jeff Grace soundtracks previously 2011's The Innkeepers and The House Of The Devil from 2009. I knew this was more synthy than those aforementioned two scores which were a lot more symphonic but Cold In July while tipping its hat to John Carpenter moves beyond mere cloning of ones influences. Jeff Grace feels like a real contender for the electronic score crown. Cold In July is undeniably a post millennial classic synth soundtrack that makes the terrific and very enjoyable music of Umberto, Zombi, Salisbury & Barrow feel like mere fanboys playing at wanting to be their heroes Moroder, Goblin, Tangerine Dream etc. Grace was once an assistant to modern soundtrack legend Howard Shore, hinting at what you're getting here (Carpenter meets Shore meets some mysterious new ingredients) and that something more intellectual might be happening here. Grace has made a synthesiser soundtrack his own like no one has really done since the early 80s. Achieving that is no mean feat and should put into perspective his talent and potential. Somehow he puts new textures into the atmospheres of these tracks and adds a new level of sophistication to synth scoring. I hope Grace continues doing electronic soundtracks as I feel he is on the verge of something great within this field. Cold In July is up there with the best recent soundtracks and gives Mica Levi's brilliant Under The Skin from last year a run for its money. This is some serious synth biz and then some.

BEYOND THE BLACK RAIBOW - SINOIA CAVES

This slab of synth candy is from 2010 but wasn't released until 2014. Beyond The Black Rainbow is highly rated amongst synthesiser soundtrack aficionados and it doesn't disappoint. Caves is a member of the psych-prog rock group Black Mountain and apparently has another cosmic synth gem under his belt with 2002's The Enchanter Persuaded. Having quite enjoyed what I had heard of Black Mountain on the radio, many years ago, I didn't really know what to expect from this Caves soundtrack but geez it's a real delight. After Umberto released the fantastic Prophesy Of The Black Widow 5 years ago at the height of Not Not Fun's great run of releases, I thought there may not have been any life left in this kind of retro synth gear, how wrong I was. On Beyond The Black Rainbow Caves piles on the tension and cosmic grandiosity. VHS memoradelia and dread fuelled dark ambient are the order of the day here. Eerie intergalactic vistas are intertwined with sprawling cosmic prog workouts to great affect, rejuvenating the spooky sci-fi soundtrack genre. Another bewdy.

LAW UNIT - ANTONI MAIOVVI & UMBERTO 

This one came out a few months back and passed me by so I'm glad to be catching up with it now. I'm not really sure who Maiovvi is but I know he released an album on Not Not Fun last year and recorded a soundtrack for the 2012 short film Yellow. I totally dig Umberto's four albums of faux horror/sci-fi soundtracks From The Grave, Prophesy Of The Black Widow, Night Has A Thousand Screams and Confrontations. It's been a couple of years since Confrontations so I've been wondering where the hell Umberto have been. Law Unit delves into much darker territory than Umberto's previous Goblin/Carpenter-esque synth confections. Some of it heads into industrial/EBM/dark ambient type zones making it a bit different from past Umberto releases. Still getting my head around this new, harsher direction for Umberto but I guess I have to start looking at it as a collaborative tangent rather than a wholly new look Umberto. Having said that, it's not bad though.

Fragments Of Time Part 2

In the comments box of that last post Simon Reynolds asks 'What do you think of gqom?'

Gqom is a genre originating from Durban, South Africa which is stripped down and rhythmic music designed for the dancefloor that's springy, minimal, raw and funky with elements of tribal house, kwaito, hip hop and broken beat. What I had heard of gqom (a Zulu word meaning drum or hit, I believe) up until today I thought was alright. Then I discovered Rudeboyz and they've got some great trax. In particular I love the below Get Down which is like a Basic Channel tune stuck in a pinball machine but trying to break free, I like a lot. The other great trak is Mitsubishi Song by Rudeboyz member Menchess (3rd tune below). This one's got fabulous tumbling rhythms that bounce around amongst the dark minimalism. The other two tracks are bloody good too. All of these tunes have their own mechanical internal logic that becomes mesmerising, v nice.

The Rudeboyz EP is released on a British label called Goon Club Allstars and is one of the first international releases of this regional style that has barely made it outside of Durban. So far gqom has been an mp3 game and here's a bunch of tunes that Rudeboyz have uploaded for your listening pleasure.

Fragments Of Time

I dunno if It's me or not but I have a stack of unfinished posts that I just can't be bothered returning to. Is 2015 too boring to write about? Is writing about music irrelevant? Am I taking myself way too seriously after receiving kind words, tweets and replies from people I admire and respect? Have I started second guessing myself? Had a loss of nerve? Or run out of things to say? Has medication levelled me out so much that I've become indifferent to anything or everything. I suppose rap is still where it's at in 2015, with only a few choice things emanating from other zones. I am waiting for something to come along and stop me in my tracks though. I reckon even the slow increments of innovation in hip-hop are coming to a halt and the rest of the music world has reached stasis point or entered a time-warp. Let's face it I'd be happy if something really retro came along as long as it was bloody awesome, you know like that last Daft Punk record, Urge Overkill circa Saturation or Soft Bulletin era Flaming Lips. If the concept of time's been flipped I don't see why we can't use that to our advantage, at least for cheap thrills. Hey cheap thrills are some of the best thrills. Perhaps I'm not as easily swayed or impressionable as I'm not young any more, then again Random Access Memories was only two years ago...I'd be happy with a new Bruno Mars album at this point. Maybe Retromania is no longer the thesis of our times. The law of diminishing returns has probably killed that party. Should someone write something about stasis? Stasis, I just did. I guess Ekoplekz and Beatking will probably have new records out soon but come on everyone else I can't keep relying on those two artists for my new music pleasures, they can only release two or three records a year.....oh I suppose I can if I have to.

Telly, movies and blogs all seem to be offering less. I used to love the blogoshere back in the day. The early to mid 00s were its heyday it seems. When the likes of Blissblog, K-Punk, Woebot, Gutterbreakz et al. were writing about stuff like Grime, Dubstep, electronic music of the time, old stuff and even rock, it was great. I wasn't even into any of the music really but their excitement was infectious. I don't even know what I was listening to then (ye olde afrobeat compilations, I think?). I mean Friday nights were all about gettin drunk and listening to The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and AC/DC. I thought music was over for me but I liked the fact that innovation and progression were still happening, so I still kept an eye on it. I thought maybe something new would come along that I liked eventually. It did come slightly with Hauntology, Hypnogogia, Altered Zones type stuff and Ratchet. Now it's like Philip Sherburne is the only one attempting to document the new (see this Energy Flash post) but even he appears to be struggling to get blood out of the stone. Good on him though, at least, for trying. I think I came to this blog game too late. In my first couple of years of blogging there was still a shitload of great stuff being released but it has been petering out and in 2015 well geez.....

CHBB

Here's something that has sat in my i-tunes unplayed for a long while. My version doesn't sound quite this good though. So my mp3 might be a bootleg or a demo, I dunno. The Electro Maggot played a version of this track the other day. The actual physical item of this, which is a 10 minute cassette from Germany in 1981, is impossibly rare and fetches big $$$ on e-bay. CHBB only did 4 releases all of which were 10 minute tapes that I am led to believe were only issued in runs of 50. Anyone can find that fabulous Liaisons Dangereuses LP from 1981 in some form or another but these four tapes are sort of The Holy Grail of German Post-Punk. So CHBB are Chrislo Haas and Beate Bartel. Krishna Goineau joined these two later to make up Liaisons Dangereuses but obviously wasn't part of CHBB, so that above youtube title is slightly misleading. The 4 CHBB tapes have never been reissued and I'm not even sure they're anywhere on the web any more. They're just not some obscure collectable though, the music is excellent and right up there with the Liaisons Dangereuses album for innovation. One of CHBB's tunes showed up on that Metal Dance 2 compilation a couple of years back. Who knows if there will ever be a proper reissue of the nine tunes contained within these infamous four C-10s? 

It's pretty good, innit? Thanks for reminding me Electro Maggot.

This one's a mad killer tune from the first tape. I'm pretty sure if you stripped this down to the synth and drum machine it'd pretty much be techno in 81, wouldn't it?

This is gold from the 3rd tape

Classic post-punk tropes from the first tape.

And here's a little bit of a classic from Liaisons Dangereuses that was also on their one and only self titled LP.

Gerry & The Holograms

Holy shit this is the best old music discovery I've made in 10 years I reckon. I'd not even heard of them until 2 days ago. This is so damn good I can't believe my ears. All I know is they were from Manchester and this was released in 1979. New Order were surely fans as they nicked the melody for Blue Monday. Thanks to Finders Keepers Radio for the heads up on this, it featured on their synth spezial. You can download the entire Absurd catalogue, which consists of 10 or 15 singles or something, from Jonny Zchivago here. He also hints at Martin Hannett's involvement on these recordings. There is no mention of Absurd or Gerry & The Holograms in that biography on Hannett though. 

Finders Keepers Radio

I was surfing the net in search of something musical to excite me the other day and I thought "Have Finders Keepers released any 'old stuff' this year that I might have missed?" I don't remember the answer to that now. I did however discover these Finders Keepers Radio Podcasts. The 10th anniversary show reminded me of where my head was at in the mid 00s. The only current stuff I was into then was Animal Collective and Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti give or take a Deerhoof or two. I didn't engage with Grime (except for a little bit of Dizzee & Lady Sovereign on the radio, call me commercial) or Dubstep at the time so I got into this weird old stuff that was being reissued by Finders Keepers and the likes of Trunk Records. This was also around the time Ghostbox started too, but that was new music and a whole other story. I definitely recommend listening to this podcast but it's a weird old game for sure. So you go back in time 10 years and hear stuff that was already old by like 30 years then. Talk about atemporal. Reminiscing about reminiscing about stuff that was unheard by you but reminiscable by others from around the globe. I just had a look at my cd collection and realised I had over 30 albums released by Finders Keepers!!! So obviously, I like what they do a lot, although now this stuff feels doubly old. I can't imagine head honcho Andy Votel listening to Young Thug, Kevin Gates, Future, Beatking etc. now, but in 30 years time they'll be able to go back and neatly pick out what was awesome, an anomaly or really strange about the state of current southern rap though....er maybe that's a bad example....maybe they would discover a bizarre scene from Uzbekistan that was influenced by 2010s southern rap, that's more like it. What Finders Keepers are on about is hindsight, alternative histories, retro-eclecticism and diggin deep because most current music sucks.

Andy Votel's voice is incredibly close to that of another (in)famous Manc Jonny Vegas. I keep picturing him as Vegas. 808 state's Graeme Massey gets a second act on these podcasts as a possible cult comedian because he plays this character Tape Worm which is hilarious, I mean I assume it's him, it could be Votel, I dunno. The host Pete Mitchell puts me in mind of slightly hipper Alan Partridge.

THIS WAS GOOD
Well Hung is a Finders Keepers compilation of funky Hungarian pop from the 70s. A few years after this was released I got talking to a woman who was perhaps 15 years my senior from Hungary. I showed her this on my I-pod during a uni lecture and to my surprise she sang along to every tune and then gave a run down of who they were, what they used to be and where they were now. She thought it was really weird that I was into this shit.

Top 3 LP Covers Of All Time

I was filling in a questionnaire about best LP covers the other day and found it really hard. My conclusion in the end was that movie posters are much better pop art than album covers. What surprised me most was how much I didn't give a fuck about the artwork for albums. Perhaps movie posters are better because they promise so much yet the actual movie rarely delivers on that promise. Movie posters as an entity unto themselves seem like a much more successful artform than the poster as part of the combination with the movie or album artwork by itself. Album artwork really seems to be an afterthought doesn't it? Music doesn't need it's sizzle to be sold because it speaks for itself.

Sure I had a few other favorites but below are my top three LP covers of all time and the music is awesome too...just slightly magnificent.

Big Fun is surely the best LP cover ever. The soundz within are bloody exceptional too!

In Concert is quite possibly my fave Miles record.....uh and that cover!

An amazing trilogy of funky ghetto pimp shit that really suits the tunes. The album sleeves for In Concert & On The Corner were once described as 'tastelessness' by Canadian jazz magazine Coda, ha...the last laugh is on you Coda, tastelessness never tasted sooo good. Don't you love how people with a different taste to you describe it as no taste as if there couldn't possibly be an alternative to their specific tastes. Stupid. I love these Corky McCoy cartoon covers more than the covers Mati Klarwein did for Miles Davis but they're great too (see below), if a little tasteful.

How good is the Live/Evil one? Fucking mental.

The two different styles of cover art really sum up where Miles was at, at the time. A culture clash of high culture and trash. Davis was making mercurial epoch defining art and designing sonic templates for future genres to plunder but he also really wanted to be down with what was happening on the bad ass fonkay streets. He wanted to eat his cake. I think he did and then some.

Portishead - Third - ?

Why am I writing about this now? Old news I suppose but....I dug it out the other day and gave it a spin. This LP was universally acclaimed and ended up in a lot of best of the 00s lists. I don't recall any reviews at the time but it seemed like everyone liked it and thought it was a good idea. Portishead moved away from the trip-hop and headed into much whiter zones. I mean Beth was always white as a ghost but in a Dusty/Janis wish I was black kind of way. Was she once a Janis Joplin impersonator? With the hip-hop and soul samples turfed here for tributes to Can, United States of America via Broadcast, Pram, Silver Apples and whatever else they were referencing beyond track 6 etc. it all seems a bit odd. It's a bit like, I dunno, The Stereophonics releasing a jungle album. On Third, it was like Portishead wanted to rewrite their own history and state the case that: We too could have been a UK post-rock band circa 94. Third would have fitted pretty neatly into that category. The best thing about Dummy though, was the fact that they weren't indie or post-rock or Brit-pop. On Dummy they were stark blue eyed soul with hip hop beats encased in a dub mentality. It felt pretty new or at least of it's time with their re-situation of John Barry with bleak torch singer amongst dubbed out trip-hop. I think their debut and the underrated follow up were quintessential 90s records that are still worth listening to, depending on how much time you spent in Cafes in the mid 90s that is. So why all the plaudits and respect for Third? I can only think that perhaps the 00s were worse than I thought and people were grasping on to anything. I mean it's tasteful and everything but.... fuck by the time they get to Deep Water's country twang, I wanna smash the fucking stereo in.

Cherry Moon On Valium....again

Sorry this isn't something new, just the old Cherry Moon On Valium mix from 2011 but I just watched this for like the 20th time and I never get sick of it. They should do another mix. I converted this to mp3 and put the audio into my i-phone a couple of years ago and it is one of the most played things ever on my phone. I keep meaning to make a compilation of all the original tracks at their real speeds, I think I've probably got half of them. Then just looking at the track list I realised there's a few I haven't recognised in their slowed down form. Anyway I posted this ages ago but hey it's fucking timeless, innit?

Young Thug - Best Friend

Diggin that vibe....on this. I love everything about Young Thug, his moves, the way he wears his clothes, his videos and...Oh yeah his singing. He is so cool and funny. There's also something disturbing about him which adds to his greatness. Best Friend is from the mixtape Slime Season which was was released this week but apparently he's got a whole other album ready for release! More on Slime Season once I've got me head around it. Slime Season isn't as mental or rough as 1017 Thug but it sounds real good though.

He's really killin the sound and vision combo isn't he?

He's sold me. Get me some lean. Every other rapper pack up and go home.

Funny bastard.

On The Hi-Fi - Part !!!

The fog has lifted slightly but I feel like I can barely string a cohesive sentence together. I'm strugglin to get past 'I like/don't like' sort of writing at the moment. Deep analysis might be out the window until my brain gets flowing again. Sometimes it seems you need to be a musicologist to review this (above) kind of shit but no, I'm gonna give it a Space Debris crack. This is very bloody good. Before we had jungle we had the polyrhythmic mentalness of this Latino shit. Some of this music is as outre as Miles in the 70s while some of it sounds like it could have been off the soundtrack to The Love Boat. Many a legend is to be found on this comp that came out 20 years ago including Palmieris Charlie & Eddie, Joe Bataan, Ocho, Grupo Folklorico etc. This new version has an added cd with 8 tracks that weren't on the original collection.  Do I need to mention Cuba, Boogalooo, Salsa Classic, Puerto Rico, New York, Fonkay or whatever? This is Superfly, sometimes soulful, jazzy, summertime and everything else in between! Makes you want to drink cocktails in the sun and dance like you think you are the greatest dancer ever.

LIVE IN ALCALPULCO - DDAA (1981) (Tape 2)
Well I was not expecting this. I had previously heard DDAA's Nouvelles Construction Sonores Sur Fondations which was a lengthy drifting sonic art collage released in 1991. When the opening tune Ready With The Answer came on with it's rubbish bin percussion and mental guitar I was so shocked I thought this was a different group altogether. It caused a flurry of research and no it wasn't two different groups, it was the one and only DDAA. As far as I can tell they were a 3 piece who had formed in France in 1979. This release is surely where Sun City Girls got all their inspiration. Live In Alcalpulco is fabulously minimal stuff that sometimes sounds like a Middle Eastern no-fi Slint gone acoustic with drums made of cardboard. Then it goes psych post-punk like a No-Wave group stranded in the desert jamming while imbibing mushrooms then incredibly inventive drones, space invader noises and gamelan-esque percussive sounds enter the fray. The crowd of two like it a lot and clap enthusiastically (surely this is a faux-live record). I thought I was hip to all the under-underground classics by now, but no way, I was not even aware of this double cassette until today. Subterranean Gold!

I have been waiting for a new release from Gesaffelstein since his classic Aleph from 2013. I guess this isn't the true follow up to that masterpiece of 'beautiful paranoid atmospheres, bangin streamlined EBM and Cold Rushes.' It does have the cold and paranoid atmospheres but not so much the bangin club tunes. I assume Maryland is a horror film because this is quite the grim soundtrack. An hour earlier my brain had been comparing Burzum's ambient black metal tunes to those of the mid 90s electronic doom/gloom-core variety ie. Miro, The Mover, Reign etc. so it was weird that this turned up as surely Gesaffelstein loves all that stuff. Wall Of Memories could be a Burzum track with it's simple but bizarre piano phrase that is chilling to the (hard)core. Could a horror score be album of the year two years in a row?

*The Space Debris airwaves have been featuring the aforementioned Burzum plus the likes of Bathory, Ulver, Celtic Frost, Wolf Eyes (??), Bene Gesserit, Skin, Swans, Crime & The City Solution, Clint Ruin & Lydia Lunch, Terror Danjah, Isolee, Ricardo Villalobos, Arthur Russell, Future, Young Thug and er.....Gong. A little old school hip hop has been on the decks too including the likes of LL Cool J, Schooly D, EPMD, Slick Rick, NWA, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Dr Dre etc. with a blog post coming up on these ye olde artists and the current state of Hip-Hop.

2015? Part 2

Simon Reynolds chooses this as his pick for 2015 so far here in my comments. Atlanta's Future was the kingpin of weird rap before Young Thug came along and remains just as relevant as Thugga. They both come from the same church ie. Lil Wayne worship. His 2012 album Pluto was choice as was this year's Beast Mode mixtape which I wrote about here. Future had a couple of other good mixtapes Dirty Sprite, Astronaut Status and Streetz Calling but last year's official album Honest was a tad disappointing. Fuck Up Some Commas originally appeared on the Monster mixtape from last year as well as on 2015's DS2.

Turn On The Lights is classic anthem from Pluto.

Real Sisters was on Beast Mode as well as appearing on DS2.

This is the closing tune on Beast Mode.

Future featured on this great tune from Jeezy last year which made my end of year list.

Anyway back to now....the Mrs chooses this as her 2015 pick. Goin back to Live To Tell vibes on this one fo shizzle.

Same name different song. Vocally he's a bit reminiscent of Billy McKenzie doncha think? He kinda does with deep tech what Daniel Bedingfield did with 2-Step Garridge on Gotta Get Through This sort of...maybe....I dunno.....does he?

I think he originally did an acoustic version of this anyway....

Hard for me to go past this one from Beatking for 2015.

Oh and I really like this...sure it's got a bit of Dre/Snoop circa 92/93 RJ & Choice have their own swagger though which raises this tune beyond mere pastiche, is it not awesome? Iamsu! is a star. Call me retromaniacal....... 

Iamsu! with RJ & Choice again....

2015 - How Shit?

I've gotta say 2015 has got to be the worst music year since fuck before the 2nd World War, I reckon. I'm stuck in 90s musical zones (see above) myself and don't particularly care that my listening isn't drifting back to the now. In fact I want to stay right in those places when and where the possibilities seemed endless. Me and the Mrs discussed a furniture shop closing down near our house the other day and ended up in the terrain of "Is that it then? Music's finite so i guess furniture is too." I was saying how these retro interior design shops had become so uninspired and formulaic, why would anyone want to spend money on this new old shit when there's plenty of old shit anyway?. The retro eclecticism, of the products in these shops, is disappearing up it's own arse at an accelerating rate. Is it that no one is game enough to say right here's a new style? So we just continue down these tasteful but conservative aesthetic avenues? Nobody's killing their idols. There's way too much reverence. We lived through a modernist time but that has gone. Where are the generation gaps? The kids don't even want one. Teenagers don't seem to exist anymore, kids don't leave home until they're over 25 now. You used to leave home and disassociate yourself from your family and become a whole new you, severed from the past. Emma went to the Bowie exhibition in Melbourne last weekend and said there were kids sans parents there. I thought what the fuck? These youngsters are going back 40 years. In 1985 diggin the 60s seemed old but it had only ended 15 years prior. When I was 17 (by then we had Public Enemy, The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jnr., Acid House, Hip-Hop etc.) I wouldn't have been caught dead being interested in a culture that was 40+ years old. Strange days indeed.

*This is raw thought data that's still being processed in my mind.

**A retro curio in itself. First issued in 1971 (maybe the year I was born) on his Hunky Dory LP then was later released as a single in 1973 when Bowie had reached stardom. It became a massive hit in the UK.

The Munch Bunch & Other Kid's Telly Theme Tunes

Sounds like something off Ariel Pink's Pom Pom, I reckon. The Mrs has been singing this all day so I checked it out. I don't recall it at all...maybe it didn't make it to the telly screens of regional Victoria in the 80s. We only had two channels...

I vaguely remember this though.

This the only other one I recall. I'm pretty sure this show was actually French but dubbed into English. I would have been none the wiser back then though. The rest are a journey into Emma's childhood tv mind.

Loving Button Moon's theme. "I am the moon" "Howard Moon"... The Boosh guys must have loved this.

Silver Apples Of The Moon - Laika

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 4

Fuck I loved this record when it came out in 1994. I was already into UK post-rock shit and just starting to get into jungle. I saw this as a terrific amalgam of the two. Maybe we didn't really need it but it was ticking all my aesthetic boxes at the time. I'd been big on Margaret Fiedler's previous band Moonshake since they had released the Second Hand Clothes EP in 1992 followed by the classic Eva Luna LP that same year. Big Good Angel from 1993 was the last Moonshake record to feature Fiedler and was a classic for her to go out on. I must admit I never followed them after she left. The Laika project had me very excited though. Along for the ride were ex-Moonshake bass player John Frenett and producer Guy Fixsen. Chuck in Lou Ciccotelli on percussion, My Bloody Valentine's Colm O'Ciosoig as a digital editor and even Louise Elliot from Australia's great Laughing Clowns on the sax & flute. How could you go wrong? You couldn't, Laika didn't!

Silver Apples Of The Moon kicks off with Sugar Daddy and you can feel the city streets with it's sampled noise, rain and trains. Then a sultry propulsive beat kicks in while classic 90s bleeps drift into the mix as Fixsen and Fiedler sing together. Fixsen, who had produced Moonshake, takes on a more prominent role here. As well as co-engineering, he co-writes every tune with Fiedler, sings, plays synth and other instruments including vibes, marimba, melodica, the sampler and even guitar. Laika were about unison whereas Moonshake had been about tension. Fiedler mirrors Fixsen (or is it the other way around?) taking on all the same roles in the band ie. engineering, sampling, playing all the same instruments etc. Next is The Marimba Song which has a trippy, tropical and Can-esque vibe. This tune introduced the band to the world as two versions of it appeared on their debut recording, the Antenna EP. Let Me Sleep has frenetic beats, unbelievable bass, spiralling layers of free sax/flute and a general air of cluttered urban space. Coming Down Glass is an ultra spaced out funky wind-up toy hip hop jam with flute squiggles. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded backwards.

If You Miss starts out oppressive before a vibraphone appears to brighten things up but then it flitters back to darker terrain and continues to fluctuate between the parallel universes of isolationism and blissed out ambience for the rest of the track. In the meantime the hypnotic beat maintains an amazing flow motion. 44 Robbers has Margaret rapping kinda awkwardly like Debbie Harry, taut guitar lines that sometimes veer off into noise, Pacific(state) Island soundz and an incredibly tight rhythm like The JBs. Red River could be a Moonshake tune with it's squalling sax, tense noisy guitar shapes, claustrophobic minimal bass and tumbling out of control beats. Honey and Heat is a mesmerising off kilter urban dub tune with see-sawing samples. The samples here are meticulously crafted and create an entirely unique peculiarity. Expansive rolling rhythms, loopy flutes, eerie samples, choppy guitars and Guy's whispered vocals all contribute to the strange twilight of Thomas. The delightfully jazzy, almost surf instrumental Spider Happy Hour brings proceedings to a close.

Like a lot of UK post-rock's lost generation a duality was at play on this album ie. alongside the urban intensity was also a swirling intergalactic vibe. This often gave the music a disconcerting feel which made you want to come back for more so you could experience the discombobulation again and again. On their next LP, Sound Of Sattelites, Laika would rocket off into the stars completely, leaving the squalor behind them in a vapour trail haze. Silver Apples Of The Moon is a time capsule of intersecting mid 90s musical zones. A real curio. 

Rowland S Howard Lane

It's real. Rowland S Howard got a Laneway in St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria named after him. I no longer reside in Melbourne so thanks to Darcy B for the picture.

I died first. Where my bloody laneway?!!!

Rowland was of course in a little band The Birthday Party with another bloke called Nick Cave. Now when's Tracey Pew getting his laneway, I wonder? Howard played guitar, occasionally sang and wrote some of the songs on the below classics.

PRAYERS ON FIRE - THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (1981)
The Birthday Party at their best. Here they were still a little bit arty and very funky. They were traversing the depths of depravity though. When I think of this album I think of Tracey Pew's bass, which is just plain filthy, pure sleaze. Then there are snippets of lyrics like 'Fats Domino on the radio.' Sung by a pained Nick Cave as is 'Ice cream and jelly and a punch in the belly.' Then we've got the clang of Rowland's mental guitar that is actually meant to sound like that. Prayers On Fire is an unholy racket and absurd fun for all the family.

JUNKYARD - THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (1982)
This is The Birthday Party at their most raucous and psychotically over the top. Junkyard is ferociously chaotic from go to woe. The noise reaches fever pitch on tunes like Dead Joe, Blast Off and Big Jesus Trash Can. This cacophony is some of the most uncompromising rock ever produced. Sex and death roll around in this putrid blues. The Birthday Party may have inspired a legion of z grade imitators but no one could match their intense sonic assault.

*My mini reviews taken from here.
**More on Rowland here and here and here and The Birthday Party here.

What's On The Hi-Fi Part $?

DJ Extreme - 1994 Jungle Volume 10
I can't seem to get out of 90s zones. This is a cracker of a mix. I've been working my way through DJ Extreme's mixes at Hardscore. Listened to all his 92 and 93 hardcore mixes and now I've reached Volume 10 of his 94 Jungle mixes. This is a fabulous trip into the 90s. We've got funky drummers, half-time bass lines, divas, ragga muffins, chipmunk traces, r&b dudes, sinister synth stabs, washes of ambience, drum splatters and just plain mental bass. This mix is worth it for the array of bass lines alone. You tend to forget that in amongst the euphoria of 90s hardcore a darkness lurked just as much. This mix contains big names like Dillinja, Ed Rush, Doc Scott and DJ Phantasy as well as 2nd and 3rd level playaz. Jungle was so good in 94 the B, C & D grade artists are fucking great too. The quality went deep and the beat science rewards were endless. Volume 10 isn't relentless with the beats, space has it's place here as well. Sometimes you think the darkness is going to envelope the whole set and the drums are going to conk out. That never happens though until the end, I guess. Big Ups to the Extreme.

DJ Extreme - 1994 Jungle Volume 9
Here's another DJ Extreme mix which is a bewdy too. This mix starts out with gold ie. DJ Dextrous & Rapid's Rapid. The House Crew, Tango, Marvellous Cain, Dillinja and D'Cruze all pop their heads up in this ace mix. I can't get enough of this shit and let me tell you there is a bounty of it at Hardscore. Time-stretching, remnants of hip hop, traces of 70s reggae, Ragga, Rave sirens, Amens, House, ethereal lulls, elastic booming bass, dubbed out divas, cymbal splashes, bleeps, mini ponds of euphoria, occasional swells of thick bass goo that leap into the drum n bass future and much more feature here. What's amazing is how different Volume 9 is from Volume 10 which is a testament to the genre's flexibility and breadth of vision and probably why the Hardcore Continuum would continue on for another decade before running out of steam. "They played that bloody Jungle music all night!" And why wouldn't you with choice tracks such as these.

The Church - Hologram Of Baal
Ever since Reynolds posted those Go-Betweens & Church film clips a week or two ago it has been hard to get out of these Aussie zones. You might have noticed I was/am quite the Church fan. I seem to have lost 1996's Magician Among The Spirits so I gave this another listen and wow what an underrated little gem this is. By 1998 they had probably lost at least half of their 80s fan base but that didn't mean they weren't still making legendary music. By this stage of the game we'd all ditched the paisley shirts and pointy shoes long ago but The Church continued on their merry way making druggy journeys into sound. I guess their only contemporaries at the time were Mercury Rev (a friend once described Yerself Is Steam as The Church meets Butthole Surfers), The Flaming Lips and Spiritualized. The Kranky label had been releasing psychedelic space rock for a while too by this stage but the Church weren't following trends. They just did what they did best and made one of their best LPs while they were at it. Hologram Of Baal is The Churchiest of 90s Church LPs. It solidified their 90s experimentalism while containing all of what made them great in the 80s making this an album of consolidation for the band. This LP is like a Church progress report of where they had come from, where they had been and where they were going. More gold.

BRICC BABY SHITRO - NASTY DEALER
Now this is a state of the art rap mixtape 2015 style. With most mixtapes you can usually tell which region of America it's coming from ie. Drill & Bop (Chicago), Ratchet (California) trap/weird (Atlanta/The South) etc. but Bricc Baby Shitro throws them all onto this mixtape making it hard to tell where he's emanated from. It makes sense then that he's from LA but now hanging out in Atlanta. Even though Bricc Baby's got a handful of producers here, the mixtape remains pretty cohesive. Having Young Thug on your mixtape is a blessing and a curse. Thugga will give your recording a higher profile but he's most certainly going to upstage you no matter who you are. That puts the starpower of Young Thug into perspective ie. no one in the rap game can come close to him and this has been the case since his 2013 classic 1017 Thug. Anyway this is a genre mixtape that considers the state of where hip hop is in 2015. You may not like having this plethora of rap sounds all in one place but it's almost definitive of the year or at least the decade in which it was made.

2015 Ennui: When's That Rainy Day?

OR WHAT I'M NOT LISTENING TO IN 2015

The unlistened to cds, LPs, mixtapes, net DJ mixes and soundclips are piling up. There's not enough time or energy in my life. I am in no way a collector for the sake of having things, being a completest etc. If something's shite to my eardrums it goes out of my life pretty quickly. Then there's the magazines, webzines, blogs and books that aren't getting a look in either. Oh.... and that circus in town that I haven't been to (Was I gonna go to that? Well there is the off chance that a lion may eat its tamer or an elephant running amok)......and I've got 7 unfinished blog posts that have been sitting in the draft box for a good while now.

Let's start with the new, old and new old LPs & cds that are piling up.

I finally got a copy of this like 20 years after it was compiled. This was one of the first things released on Soul Jazz. I think this is some kind of anniversary reissue. Nu Yorican Roots!: The Rise Of Latin Music In New York City In The 60s also on Soul Jazz was fucking gold, so I'm looking forward to listening to this....one day

This should be good...found it on a trip to Adelaide a month or so ago. This came out a few years ago on Soundway. I love a bit of cumbia. Soundway's previous Columbia! was great, as were the 3 cds in their Panama! series ..... should be good ..... one day.

Been looking for this for like 10 years. Warner Jepson's Totenantz arrived in the mail the other day. That cover is awesome! ....don't really know what to expect from this one, which will be a nice surprise....soon....maybe.

This one arrived with the above....can't recall when this was reissued but it was made in like 69 or 70 or 71 or 72. Sonic Youth obviously ripped off the Perspectives Musicales series (of which there 10 LPs, the EMI ones I'm talking about) artwork. Another surprise package.....

Another one that's taken me like 10 years to get and I still haven't played it.....

Well at least I've heard this before but this is like the first proper reissue of Carlo Maria Cordio's classic soundtrack Rosso Sangue from 1981. Looking forward to hearing this in it's complete form....at some stage.

This one I know and love too....but I still haven't played it in it's full audio glory, having only had a crappy mp3 version previously.....oh well.....when's a rainy day?

I was very excited when this arrived but it remains unplayed....could be the first one to get aired. This is a 2015 archival release on Sonic Boom's Space Age label.

God I finally shelled out the cash for this only a few years after it's release. The Lost Tapes arrived a couple of months back..... how can a triple cd of lost Can recordings remain unplayed for so long?

Now this has been in line the longest. I bought it from Beatport when it came out earlier this year. The first Volume was in my best of 2014 list yet this 2nd Volume is yet to rack up any i-tunes stats. Is Deep-Tech still a thing? This has been on my phone for months.....geez....what's going on?

On it's way......another 2015 horror reissue. This one I've never heard but when it arrives it'll have to get in the queue.

Then there's the rap mixtapes...... OMG there are so many!

I'm surprising myself a lot since I started writing this absurd post. How on earth have I not listened to this? I don't even know if Barter 6 is rated or not. Young Thug featured so much in my Best Of 2014 list that I cannot believe the sounds contained within this mixtape have not reached my eardrums yet.

HBK Gang featured a hell of a lot in my Best Of 2014 list as well. Kool John's $hmopcity was one of the best albums/mixtapes of last year so like the above Young Thug it's totally unreasonable that this has had no airplay round at my place yet!!!

Cash Out, Young Dolph, Tink, Teeflii, Lucky Eck$, Boogie, Sauce Twinz & Sosaman, Denzel Curry, TM88, Katie Got Bandz, Bankroll Fresh, Snootie Wild etc. etc. have all released mixtapes/albums of note apparently. Downloaded, not played.

Don't even get me started on the DJ Mixes, articles, books.....

I could go on. My blog would be great if I'd listened to all of the above and written about them wouldn't it? Perhaps I should set myself the task of writing about every one of these releases once heard, surely that is why I started this blog in the first place.

Hang on....I almost forgot this one (below) from last year, which has been in the queue the longest....inexplicably I might not ever listen to it.

Heyday - The Church

Tim's Ultra Rough Guide To Rock Part V

The Church - Heyday (1985)

Quite the befitting title right here. Cherished among fans of The Church, Heyday's full of great tunes like Already Yesterday, Myrrh, Tristesse, Columbus and the blistering live favourite Tantalized. On Night Of Light and Youth Worshipper they reach Forever Changes levels of sophistication with fabulous horn and string arrangements. The Church made the 80s version of the 60s awesome, hang on that's not really fair is it? Although this is probably their most 60s inspired set, it's those shirts that make you jump the gun to such stupid conclusions. There was a lot of 70s, 80s and future Church idiosyncrasies at play here too......... It was most definitely 80s music though, you know like The Smiths were an 80s band. They may have had influences from other eras but just because it didn't sound like Nik Kershaw doesn't mean it wasn't quintessential 80s music!..... er.....that goes for both bands. Still you can get out your pointy shoes and paisley shirts and relive this classic LP. Funnily enough I had a paisley shirt on today, and straight black jeans but unfortunately I don't own a pair of pointy shoes any longer, I had to just go with me brown suede boots. I'm sure Marty Willson Piper would have been proud of my outfit though as would Steve Kilbey, I reckon.

They were the coolest. No doubt. This makes you wanna roll a joint and enjoy your life.

In the classic tradition of AC/DC, playing on the back of a truck for your film clip. Priceless!

This video is sound and vision perfection, doncha reckon?

*A fucking phenomenal live version of Tantalized here. Talk about kickin out the jams, wow!

**I've written about Heyday before here.
***Tim's Ultra Rough Guide To Rock series is taken from the HIGH CULTure website.

Seance - The Church

Tim's Ultra Rough Guide To Rock Part IV

Séance from 1983 is the third Church album and, like their two previous LPs, it's a classic. This time they get Nick Launay to produce. This is a strange combination to be sure and some fans were shocked by the studio affects, particularly the drum sounds, on this recording.  About half of the record is studio trickery, strings and keyboards added to their usual dual guitar interplay. The other half is fairly true to their trippy jangling live sound. Séance is a moody and atmospheric affair. Steve Kilbey travels darker terrain than usual, which is fine because there isn't a bad tune to be found here at all.

*Track 5 Travel By Thought here.