About me: SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS or SHOWS or GIGS
FRI JULY 17TH ONLY, ISLINGTON MILL, JAMES STREET, SALFORD, 2pm Matinee (£3) and 8pm evening performance with bands (TBC) (£5). Each showing will be preceded by a talk from the film maker (and daughter of Sandy), K.C. Bull.
Before there was "world music" or "fusion," there was Sandy Bull. Bull was immediately established as the ultimate eclecticist, whose albums combined a wild assortment of genres and traditions, from Chuck Berry to Bach, from fourteenth-century ballads to salsa and samba to Indian, African, and Middle Eastern music. His instruments eventually included oud, sarod, six-string bass, pedal steel, and drums as well as guitar and banjo. But the core of Bull's genius wasn't versatility, virtuosity, or even his eclecticism; it was his rage to synthesize. Bach on banjo, bossa nova on oud, and especially raga on guitar: It was imaginative transgressions such as these, with their intermixing in works like "Blend," that made him a true original and a seminal influence on far more famous musicians who followed, among them Jimi Hendrix, Steve Winwood, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. His style was a precursor to those of Leo Kottke, John Fahey, and Ralph Towner; his groundbreaking use of open tunings foreshadowed Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, and the power chords of Keith Richards. After 1964, Bull was taken down by a heroin habit. He didn't return to the style and tuning of "Blend" and "Blend 2" for twenty years, and by that time he was all but forgotten as a musician. His performances became notorious nonperformances, incoherent, stumbling, and solipsistic. Patti Smith wrote, "It was the strangest thing I ever saw. His sense of space and time was slightly science fiction. A leftover junk space." In 1968, an outraged Grover Sales wrote a devastating piece entitled "Goodbye Sandy Bull" and soon rumors began to circulate that Bull had died. Patti Smith again: "Some said he was dead, car crash. 3 notches under James Dean. Some say his end was more decadent. More Paris in the twenties. Slain in some alley. A fizzled goofball brain." Ben Fong-Torres wrote a piece on Bull in Rolling Stone in 1970 entitled "Hey, I Thought You Were Dead." Sandy Bull was not dead. He kicked his habit in 1974 and made a comeback of sorts playing oud in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. But after recording his last album for Vanguard, aptly called Demolition Derby, in 1972, he didn't release another recording for sixteen years. He remained a restless and innovative outsider on the music scene, eventually moving closer to his Americanist roots and settling outside Nashville in the early nineties. But his early recordings went out of print and his later ones were largely ignored. The impact of those first two albums, which he recorded between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, would never be repeated, and scarcely remembered. -Bill Wadsworth
Weekend tickets £15, Day tickets £10 from www.ticketline.co.uk
This year's festival is gonna be the sweetest yet, we hope. We already got some of our favourite noiseniks to commit, so we're reeeeaaaal psyched. Believe in...
Saturday
Motherfucking
Lyon based noise unit - JUST ADDED.
Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides
Sonic Youth supporting, warm-hearted, beautiful flute-and-drums duo.
Nackt Insecten
Glasgow based Sick Head Tapes honcho Ruaraidh Sanchan delivering Terry Riley infused psych drone of the highest order.
Bolide Awkwardstra
Brighton sextet who give us gonzo sizzling free improv. Reeds, tapes, percussion and vocal wail.
Hockyfrilla
Tonal, piercing, zone-out trance noise from Edinburgh's finest.
Blood Stereo
Chocolate Monk superstar Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance making crazed sound poetry and twisted electronics. Anyone who saw their set at the Dec '06 ATP knows this is gonna warp heads.
Usurper
Inspired Edinburghian makers of cracked, scraping, tonal sound-junk.
Helhesten
Grunts, squeals, clarinet drone, tapes and percussion from Upset The Rhythm's finest band.
Family Battle Snake
Bill Kouglias is a genius. With bizarre electronics, stabs of warped tone and an underlying hum of mum-vacuuming-style comfort, he creates joyful depth of drones to similarly joyful reactions.
Beach Fuzz
Dream action trio of Serfs' Tom Settle with GLR's own Fliss Horrocks and Nick Mitchell. You know the drill.
The Piss Superstition
Julian Bradley, formerly of Vibracathedral Orchestra, takes a leaf out of the Lee Ranaldo book of how not to play a guitar like anyone else who's ever played it. And throws in some foot-controlled warped-keyboard blasts and loops.
Sunday
Blues Control
OK, so they play guitar, drums and blues harp, but NYC residents Blues Control are fucking with you cuz they ain't blues. Their music's dripping globules of fuzz and puking lumps of dubbed-out echo, piercing yr eardrums and heating up yr dancing parts.
Tropa Macaca
Portugal's most revered noise unit, with sweet Terry Rileyisms and cascading patterns committed to LPs on QBICO and RubyRed and a new one due on the ever reliable Siltbreeze label.
Bridget Hayden
Former/sometime Vibracathedral Orchestra and sometime Sunburned Hand of the Man member, showing out some seriously deep slide guitar moves and epic head nod vibes.
Hathor Duo
Solar Fire Trio and Beach Fuzz members team-up, providing soaring sax and drums freakout.
Trinity
Manchester's answer to a beautiful, acid fried commune. Give these guys some beers and watch them collapse into a shambolic ecstatic, pulsating, bass-heavy, grooved-out power unit.
Stephanie Hladowski
Unbelievably from the present day and Bradford, no less, this is the voice of days and traditions long since obsolete from mainstream social function. Her 10" on Singing Knives is truly awesome.
Chora
Our second Sonic Youth supporting duo of the weekend, this time bringing us glorious clatter and wail drone gamelan.
Ross Parfitt
Sheffield based sound experimentor with a new tape due out on Lotus Birth, offering up palindromic experimentation with exquisite attention to detail.
Gnod
A shifting, Manchester based unit of K-hole cowboys, traversing the spaceways and nodding their heads to Sun Ra and Sunburned alike.
The Family Elan
Sunblushed fusion of folk musics from Chris Hladowski's glorious saz.
The line-up is now full. You can buy tickets from www.ticketline.co.uk or here:
Sat 12th December, Islington Mill, Salford, 2pm, £5
Manchester Zap!
Ohhh the idea that Manchester has some kind of burgeoning underground 'scene'... Is there really some kind of collective mentality to the idea of producing/hearing far-flung musics in the city? Nah, we don't think so. And this event isn't about celebrating collectivism for the sake of scene-making. The idea behind bringing together the bands we dig from the area is more about putting on an amazing, cheap day for everyone where the local bands are able to take a decent share of the profits instead of simply turning up as a 'support act' and getting paid as such. Any bands that do play will be selected purely on the basis that we like them - not because we believe they represent, beyond our own tastes, something sacrosanct or impenetrable that other music makers in the city don't. This day simply represents the bands we have enjoyed over the past five years in the city and, for us at least, it's gonna be a mind zapper. We hope you'll come down and dig it.
Our love of Neil Hagerty's work goes back to around 1993, when we first discovered the Cats and Dogs LP by his former group Royal Trux. The formation of The Howling Hex in the wake of that band's upsetting dissolution was something that Royal Trux fans approached cautiously, simply because the latter had seemed...well...just so impenetrable, so infallible, so indestructible. But we were wrong to show such fear, because, year-after-year, The Howling Hex have provided us with some of the most outlandish, twisted and bizarre rock records around. (Some say 'better than Royal Trux', as if that's a healthy way of thinking...) They have taken slight deviations from well-trodden paths as well as seeking out completely new musical territories and it's usually a safe bet that the latest HHX record will sound nothing like the last. In this case, we're not sure, because we haven't heard the master yet. But it's ready. The album is 12 songs long (four penned by Hagerty) and is en route to GLR HQ as we type. We can hardly wait.
Update: the master has arrived and it won't disappoint. It's everything we've ever wanted from a Neil Hagerty record, except it's not really a Neil Hagerty record, it's a pure HHX piece. The guitar playing is in riff territory and there's pretty much no soloing. There's tons of bizzare, horror movie synth, multiple singers, pop songs, This Kind of Punishment and Doc Wor Mirran style coldness, electric piano, primitive drum machine, whacked-out repeato vibes, Twin Infinitives type layering of sound madness. It's simultaneously a very brutal, but also very pleasing record. You will find yourself lost in this weird sci-fi epic and be very surprised when the 35 minutes is up because it feels like iyr completely lost in it and time passes by at such a high speed that its passage is hardly noticeable. Holy shit, what a buzz that we get to put this out.
Hastily, and somewhat misguidedly perhaps, titled, Tomato Tomato, for those of you who haven't worked it out, is a dialectal joke about Yanks and Limeys. That's because, between June and November of 2009, we'll be releasing six 7" singles, each in a limited run of 300 copies, by a British or American dwelling band/artist. You subscribe to the series for £30 (UK) and, every month for six months, we send you a limited 7" that won't be available anywhere else. The first one's almost ready (MV&EE), so we're verrr excited. We just got the finished cover through and we're waiting on a revised master CD for pressesing. So it should be within a matter of weeks now. More to come from BEACH FUZZ, PART WILD HORSES MANE ON BOTH SIDES, C. SPENCER YEH, HEATHER LEIGH MURRAY and EX-COCAINE. Subscribe here:
A Wake Two Indiscriminates CD-R, Ltd to 80 copies (ROWF12)
Out Now
Inspired in part by the track Friends by Royal Trux, this is two guitars played relentlessly for 40 mins and recorded to a mono tape recorder. It sounds pretty tripped-out and there are some half-melodies buried amidst the chaos. This is the version of A Wake without Barry Dean (aka Infinite Light) on drums, but he'll be on the forthcoming LP, Extended Life Extension Plan, which should be out on Golden Lab around September/October. For now, you can buy Two Indiscriminates right here:
We first came across Australian two-piece xNoBBQx in Piccadilly Records last year when the Siltbreeze vinyl reissue of their first CD-r appeared on its shelves. The Siltbreeze label being a bastion of all that is great in terms of dirgy, lo-fi, transcendental unmusicality, we were thus intrigued to hear this slab. And, we have to say, it was one of the greatest shop-listening experiences of all time. Here was a duo, probably of fully grown men, bashing away at their instruments in a manner that suggested they had never really learned any 'proper' technique and it was all the more mind-bendingly good for it. We later read a review, in fact, that put it thus:
"So what exactly is the difference between an xNoBBQx recording and a couple of 14 year olds bashing instruments in the garage with record pressed down on one of their mum’s old tape recorders? Probably not a whole lot, actually, but I get the feeling that’s precisely the point." (Cyclic Defrost)
Well, it's a helluva point. The duo, in spite of or, perhaps, due to their unabashed simplicity, manage to create sounds that are warm as an old-fashioned blanket, each piece having the ability to induce a state of complete, dribbling mental stasis. It's disjointed, scratchy and 'difficult', yes. But it also manages to be completely absorbing. If you like your rock deconstructed to the nth degree, we highly recommend you dig this.
xNoBBQx will be touring the UK from 10th May 2009. We'll be putting them on in Manchester on 12th May at the Klondyke Club (see above), so come along and enjoy the full xNoBBQx experience.
For now, you can pre-order your copy of this stellar new 23 minute masterpiece right here.
Janina Angel Bath's unabashed approach to cranking out sun-drenched, ecstatic drones overlaid by seedy saxophone and deep, almost Nico-esque vocals has us melting into our sofas. We came upon Sequin Trails through this here myspace, which is normally a bit too postmodern for us. But the fact that there was dayglo, facepaint and tonal honking involved really won us over. The recording is blown-out and buzzy and all the better for it. And it traverses muddily pulsating rhythms through to pure note elongation that zaps the senses and focuses the mind's eye, like listening to one's own tinnitus. This is so deep, it may be bottomless.
Peeesseye I Woke Up and Drank a Bottle of Cheap Kojak CD-R (ROWF8)
Peeesseye made the scene at Dylan Nyoukis's Colour Out of Space festival last summer and hopped over to Manchester to play a show at the Town Hall Tavern, the recording of which forms the content of this incredible slab of dense droning harmonium, scraping, buzzing, subtly soloing guitar and pulse-free, scatter-drumming. We can't recommend this enough. Ltd to 80 copies, sleeves printed on recycled card w/soya based ink, no less
Greg Kelley & Alex Neilson Passport to Satori LP (ROWF6)
Limited to 500 copies.
This beautiful super-heavyweight LP, which comes packaged in a sweet full-colour sleeve reunites the UK's premier free drummer Alex Neilson, who's played, amongst others, with Motor Ghost, Directing Hand, Trembling Bells, Tight Meat Duo, Josephine Foster, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Jandek, MV&EE, Richard Youngs, Baby Dee and Alastair Galbraith, with Nmperign member Greg Kelley, whose reinvention of the trumpet is as crucial now as Anthony Braxton's reinvention of the sax was 30 years ago. A screeching, soaring, scattergun array of noises come maniacally out of Greg's horn, unlike anything we've ever heard and he successfully straddles no wave, concrete and free jazz in a way that makes those genres seem like trite pigeonholes.
We've had this recording for almost a year now and we can't tell you how excited we are to finally have it out.
Now available to pre-order.
UK £10 ppd
Europe £12.50 ppd
USA/Europe/Rest of World £14.00 ppd
What Norman Records say:
Passport to Satori is a collaborative effort from U.K. freeform super dude Alex Neilson (tight meat duo, Directing Hand, MV&EE, Will Oldham and many more as I'm sure you'll know) and Nmperign trumpeter Greg Kelley released on the consistently excellent GoldenLab records. This is a full on manic attack of freeform drums and mind-boggling trumpet abuse. Never have I heard such wild trumpet playing and for this Greg Kelley should be applauded (applause!!). I assume that there's some stealth use of effects pedals to enhance what is already an inventive use of the brass but its almost impossible to believe the array of sounds he manages to conjure from the humble trumpet. Crazy crazy crazy......Alex provides a perfectly infinite landscape of bells, broken cymbals, woodblocks and toms that make Greg's job ultimately easier and more enjoyable whilst contributing greatly to the overall feel. Again, its not easy to put this record into words that could do it justice so you'll have to make the time to check it out for yourself. I guess this record covers everything from free jazz and concrete to no wave whilst giving the middle finger to the whole notion of improv sub-genres. An awesome collaboration and an excellent release from Golden Lab. Also worth mentioning that they look like street tough muthafuckers on the cover. Badass!!!
We're tripping to announce that the first issue of BREAD is now OUT. Sleeve art by that dude of can-do, Dave Bailey. Oof!
Featuring:
Poetry by Byron Coley, Christina Carter, and Oliver Neilson
Stories by R.L. Perry, Nick Mitchell, Fliss Horrocks, Tim Horrocks and Nicholas Ainsworth
Drawings by Dave Bailey, Nick Mitchell, Fliss Horrocks, Pascal Nichols, Lucy Jones and Rollin Hunt.
The CD includes music by:
MV&EE, Directing Hand, Puff, Beach Fuzz, Astral Social Club, The Hunter Gracchus, Harappian Night Recordings, Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides and more.
Limited to 300 copies.
Pre-order yours now
United Kingdom (£5)
Europe (£6)
USA/Canada/RoW (£7)
BREAD is also (or will soon be) available from the following places: Time Lag Records (Portland, Maine), Blackest Rainbow (Sheffield, UK), City Lights Books (San Fransisco, CA), Magma (Manchester, UK), Piccadilly Records (Manchester, UK), The Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK), Norman Records (Leeds, UK) and more, eventually. Also look out for it on the Beach Fuzz/Spectre Folk tour between August 16th and August 23rd.
MV&EE WITH THE GOLDEN ROAD Moment Spacing/Bong Judge 7" Ltd to 500 copies (ROWF5)
This summer loving bliss festival of a record is everything we hoped it could be and more. Side A, "Moment Spacing" is a two-and-a-half-minute blast of "ooh-la-la-la-la-la" joy that wraps a posi+ aura around the world. B-side, 'Bong Judge' is the stoned, slowed down, phaser-drenched, stretched-out basement tapes version of (almost unrecognisably) the same song running at six+ minutes. The most beautiful record we think we'll hear all year. (And we sold half of the 500 copies in the first week, so be quick if you want one). Featuring:
"Moment Spacing" mv * guitars/vox, ee * vox, willie lane * guitar, sparrow wildchild * vox, janane tripp * vox, chris livingood * vox; "Bong Judge" mv * guitars/vox
ee * lap steel, willie lane * guitar, samara lubelski * bass, john moloney * drums
Sleeve art by the unmeritricious Rollin Hunt, out now on Golden Lab. Limited to 100 copies and it's 21 minutes of sunshine drone that goes something like this:
Electric Free Time Machine celebrate the launch of their debut album: ’mystery with hermit foil’ with a gig at the Yorkshire house in Lancaster.
ELECTRIC FREE TIME MACHINE - Lancaster
recent sound carriers for Damo Suzuki:From fast and bulbous blues stomps and vast experimental krautrock ambient strangeness, to abrasive shambolic metal, strange time shifts and delicate acoustic folk. www.myspace.com/eftm
albums at a special launch price of £4...so thats £5 for an amazing night of music and a brand spanking new bespoke embossed digipack album...have mercy
I am now recording for a new set of releases called the "Persona Series". These cassettes will be commissioned works (not by content, but by payment) for individuals. If John Smith in London, England wants his own Zebulon Kosted album, I will make a 45 minute album (one side of a 90 minute tape), 2 hand drawn mini posters, I will name the album after him (Zebulon Kosted - John Smith), and the fan will retain all rights to the recording (for use of any future release, sampling, or broadcasting rights). One copy of the album will remain in my personal collection, and one will be sent to the customer, so that the only copy that will be in circulation will be John Smiths copy! Each album is available for the ridiculously low price of $10 (not including shipping), and will be shipped in its completed form no later than 6 weeks from the date of purchase!!!
Svarte Greiner (Deaf Center/Miasmah/Type) explores deep into a dark, mysterious and disturbing universe. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Earth, Volcano the Bear, David Darling & Deathprod, the music is draped in Lynchian mysticism and horror film cinematics. "The music of Svarte Greiner is practically perfect. It's like that sound in our heads we've been imagining for ages but had never actually heard." - Type Records.
The Sight Below (Rafael Anton Irisarri/Miasmah/Immune) draws as much on modern genre progenitors like Brian Eno, Robin Guthrie and My Bloody Valentine as it does from the more historic traditions in neo-classicism from Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen. His album Glider has appeared on Thom Yorke's radar in making the Radiohead's lynchpin's top ten playlist.
His debut album Navigare soon to feature on the Miasmah label, Simon Scott (former Slowdive) is set to be a household name in conceptual music. Simon is the former Slowdive drummer, co-producer of Televise, producer of Seavault, and owner of KESH Recordings label.
