bondi blitzkreig

Bondi postcard from the Museum of Sydney thoughtfully included in compilation package - Jaws has apparently eaten at least one of the legs of the two guys at the front - didn't they used to be in Neighbours? Or was that Summer Bay? etc. Anyway, it's all a bit physically ept and naturey if you ask me. Shouldn't they be at home reading all those famous Aussie philosophers...or something?

Infinite Thought (i.e. me) reviews an aussie-core compilation from someone kind enough (D84) to answer my plaintive call, after having missed out in the first round (all those wasted days of puppy-like anticipation!). In a moment of madness and desperation I previously claimed: 'At this point if someone sent me a tape of themselves weeing with Westlife playing distantly over the plaintive sounds of their under-attended children crying in the background....it would get a good review'. But they didn't (curse you lazy parents!). Instead I got something far better (although quite possibly less poignant and not as likely to involve Social Services, or whatever the Australian equivalent is).

Clever selection of song titles for starters - something of a political theme: 'The Lighter Side of Global Terrorism' (Jello Biafra & The Melvins), 'Revolution' (Butthole Surfers), 'Plastic Bomb' (Poison Idea). Lots of men shout at me on Side One: 'Your blood on my hands!' ('Slateman' by Godflesh). Then it goes a bit swimmy and prog towards the end of side one with some band I've never heard of called 'Old' and 'Who Are You?' (I, er, simply don't know!)

Side two goes all hip London winebar for a minute with Carl Craig's '4 My Peepz', making me wonder whether I should be kicking some high heels against chrome plating in a club whilst eyeing up some American Psycho-esque chap. At this point I get a text from my Ma telling me my uncle and his boyfriend are getting married this summer. Excellent! Should be drinking cocktails or champagne, though have drunk last bottle of latter (oh I didn't buy it, like I've got any money - I get paid in champagne for various writing jobs - I think it's a kind of tax scam). Down some slightly corked wine instead (can wine be only slightly corked? Quite possibly not). Blurgh. Anyway, bits of chocolate bunny in the sensorial admixture make me forget whether the Carl Craig track has blended into the Lassigue Benthaus track or not ('Overflow'). I listen out for some lyrics. There aren't any. Erm...have a picture:



'North Bondi womens march past team, 1947', apparently (no apostrophes required, it seems!). From the back of the postcard. Their faces seem to have been made a bit elongated due to my leaning on the scanner whilst eating a mix of fried mushrooms, potatoes, spring onions and tomato ketchup (before I got round to smashing the head of my chocolate easter bunny on the back of a chair, heh). I think it looks quite neat like this tho, a bit Aphex Twin/Chris Cunningham-ish, even. Can't work out what those semi-circular motifs are on the skirt-bits are though. Laurel wreaths? Good-luck horseshoes? Necessarily inadequate semiotic manifestations of the impossibility of female desire? Who knows!

Turns out the Carl Craig track is, like, bare long! The Lassigue Benthaus track reminds instead just slightly too much of days spent at Trowbridge Pump Fayre listening to Ozric Tentacles with my dear Pa, West Country rave casualities and druids getting organically trashed on cider whilst doing deeply unattractive things with glo-sticks (on reflection, 'organic' a term possibly invented by Sainsbury's in 2002). Ah, Glastonbury 1995, the folk stage! Ah, the Amulet at Shepton Mallett's listening to Wolfstone whilst trying to persuade Pa to buy me their t-shirt (featuring a giant red wolf paw-print)! It's all coming back... the swimming/trace theme gets going: James Plotkin's '(Swimming Against) Clinton Street' (also possibly a bit political, yep yep), and Sandoz's 'Ocean Reflection'. Is now the time to take the ketamine? Only joking, of course (though great line in Basic Instinct II when k-holed Stan Collymore, being driven by Stone around Canary Wharf says 'I can't move' and she replies 'you don't need to. You're in a car.' Fantastic!)

'Planet Earth is blue' a voice informs me on, er, one of the tracks or other. Is it though? my stratified and rather ungenerous mind wonders. The Thames, for example, looks pretty mucky to me, and I've seen at least three shopping trolleys in there round my way, the metal leaching off of which would at least taint the original blue (if indeed this is EVEN TRUE) of the water. Pah! I mean, if you live somewhere where nature genuinely does you some visual favours (I dunno, baby turtles being born at midnight on a sandy beach, sun, ha, places you could run wild without getting shot by an irate farmer, etc.) you might believe this kind of natur-propaganda. But I don't. Not living here anyway...grr, visions of bronzed, healthy beach-types enjoying themsleves by moonlight on endless sand-stretches...pasty englishness feeling slighted...

Er, haven't really mentioned much about the actual music...suffice it to say that the first side goes 'WRRRRRAAAAAAGH!' and the second 'whooooooooosh, bleep, whooooooooosh'. It's very nicely done. Thanks D84!

Nang/Bang

Nang [A] Side:
45 minutes of random freestyle grime MCing from pirate radio station LUSH 107.6.

London pirate radio feels like the bleeding edge of modern music from the left side of the Atlantic and I was so eager to hear some honest-to-god grime freestyle that my evening commute felt like it was stretching into eternity. It was a heady moment when I was finally able to bask in the analogue glory of looped beats, slang rhymes and occasional static. After about the first half-hour, though, the new sheen had worn away somewhat and I was left with a disparate number of stale loops, intelligible vernacular, and mumbled phrases. After repeated listens, the highlights became the vocals of an unnamed female MC, who spontaneously broke into gospel-type house-diva vocals at the end of random phrases, and the screw-ups and miss-cues of the remaining non-descript male majority. Not only did both add a bit of spice, but also contrasted the varying levels of talent I imagine are endemic to pirate radio; soulful, poignant vocals versus “Oh gosh!”, “Listen!”, and station identification MCs seem to use when they fuck up.

Bang [B] Side
High Tide – James’ Last (Time To Swing)
Beckett & Taylor – More Lies
Dadableep – Ill Spec
Inaqui Marin – Ultrabitch
Funk D’Void & Phil Kieran – Black Worm
Dave McCullen – B*tch
Audion – Just Fucking
The Chemical Brothers – Get Yourself High (Switch’s Rely On Rub)
Switch – Bounce To This
Depeche Mode – Precious (Misc Mix).”

Nicely rounded trip through experimental electronics, techno, electro-house, and back again. A garden of distorted beats, the mix is almost totally devoid of any unprocessed timbres. Everything sounds harsh, angular, and overdriven, just the way an modern techno mix should. High points are Dave McCullen’s electro-house groover B*tch and the progressive Depeche Mode remix that wraps it all up. The rest of the tracks have been artfully chosen to bridge the gaps between the experimental opener, B*tch, and Precious. The whole thing hangs together very nicely, despite some rough mixing through the middle. All in all, the kind of solid underground selection I would expect from a London-based Dissensian.

Review- Hauntology 1, a k-punk compilation

There’s a fairly obvious clue as to who made this one in the title- made for me by one of only two people in the cassette swap that I actually know outside of Dissensus, so I imagine he had to pull his finger out somewhat…Though I haven’t specifically written about it before, this mixtape partly inspired the starting of this thread and the writing of this post , so that should give some indication of the general Zone in which it exists- tracks seem to have been chosen specifically for their ghostly effects, and mount up like a pile of detritus, with little markers of possible futures and failed pasts- and surprisingly enough, it includes some things by John Foxx.

‘I turn towards Big Ben. But there is no time. The face across the street is blank.’

The tape is bookended by two Foxx/Harold Budd pieces, ‘Momentary Architecture’ and ‘Missing Person’, suggesting as much with their titles as by their limpid piano chords the shadows and displacements that echo throughout. The tape then moves through the icy tundra and mammalian murmurings of The Residents and into some reconstructed gamelan by 23 Skidoo, before making a detour into the grand guignol in Penderecki’s fairly horrifying ‘The Dream of Jacob’, as (if I’m not wrong) previously used to soundtrack Jack Nicholson’s ferocious mugging in The Shining. A This Heat track then continues the tape’s more quietly unnerving bent, which is then mechanised by the inhuman whispers of Tuxedomoon’s ‘A Mystic Death’ and Plastikman’s ‘Car Ten’. The first time I think I came across the Derridean neologism ‘Hauntology’ was in an Ian Penman review of Rhythm & Sound, so fittingly there’s some Berlin Dub here in the form of Pole’s ‘Huckenpack’, evoking in its cracks and folds that most palimpsetic of cities, as does the disconcolate clanging of Einsturzende Neubauten’s ‘U-Haft Muzak’. Its insistent metallic klang then carries on into (a surprisingly Ure-era) Ultravox’s ‘Your Name (Has Slipped My Mind Again)’, an elegaic piece of blank-eyed post-punk psychedelia. End of Side 1.

‘I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise what are the characters going to fall off on?’

Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Fuse Mountain’ implies in its vaguely bucolic refrain played on (what sounds distinctly like) a recorder a kind of depressive version of the music to Kes, the archetypal primary school instrument sounding eerie rather than cute. Well, still a little cute. The subsequent Coil instrumental features gongs and what sounds a little like someone submerging themselves in water until at the point of drowning and then gasping before plunging down again, as well as some remarkably bleak strafes of darkcore synth. Near the end of this is a spoken female sample of unknown provenance (I’m guessing Sapphire & Steel), the patrician tones of which continue into The Advisory Circle, where they are echoed and filtered as if to make uncertain their comforting effect. The cuckoos are then continued by the title track from Laurie Anderson’s ‘Big Science’, which gives an itemised list of outer-suburban non-places: car parks, malls and so forth, with a refrain of ‘every man for himself’ suggesting an unexpected depiction of consumerist anomie. Another short Tuxedomoon piece and then Belbury Poly’s quite lovely ‘The Willows’, which takes the industrial moorlands of the Cabaret Voltaire track and moves them to a sun-smeared South Downs. Then the chattering voices and tannoys end this excursion as the listener is confronted with the none-more urban tones of Phil Oakey, here with (proto-Human League) The Future. There’s a minatory BBC Radiophonic Workshop track, here sounding a great deal like the minature council estate electronica of the Human League’s Dignity of Labour EP- while curiously the CV piece it mixes into sounds exactly like the Radiophonic Workshop (supporting the idea that in Sheffield Delia Derbyshire was always more important than The Beatles)- the concrete walkways are than traversed by Robert Rental and Thomas Leer, until interrupted by an atypically optimistic Ariel Pink track, its indistinct, smudged surfaces strikingly unlike the grey geometries that precede it. It suggests Joe Meek in 1962, or Bowie in 1976, or some unnamed AM soft rock masterpiece, while not exactly evoking any of them, talking of incessant waitings and longings with no interest in release. And then there’s another Foxx/Budd piece, and a minute or two of hiss.

Tracklisting

Side 1
John Foxx & Harold Budd- Momentary Architecture
The Residents- The Walrus Hunt
23 Skidoo- G-2 Contemplation
Penderecki- The Dream of Jacob
This Heat- Diet of Worms
Tuxedomoon- A Mystic Death
Plastikman- Car Ten
Pole- Huckenpack
Einsturzende Neubauten- U-Haft Muzak
Ultravox- Your Name (Has Slipped my Mind Again)

Side 2
Cabaret Voltaire- Fuse Mountain
Coil- Enochian Calling
The Advisory Circle- And The Cuckoo Comes
Laurie Anderson- Big Science
Tuxedomoon- A Drowning
Belbury Poly- The Willows
The Future- Blank Clocks
BBC Radiophonic Workshop- The Master
Cabaret Voltaire- Sad Synth
Robert Rental & Thomas Leer- Day Breaks, Night Heals
Ariel Pink- For Kate I Wait
John Foxx & Harold Budd- Missing Person