AN AQUARIUS EXCLUSIVE!!!
Yeah, Bernard Sumner may have claimed the computer as the ultimate punk instrument; but not everybody in 1982 could afford a computer to program samples while sipping cocktails at the Hacienda. Tape - now THAT is a punk as fuck tool. It was everywhere; it was cheap (not so much anymore, mind you); and the tools to edit tape could be as simple as a razor blade and a tape recorder. Andre De Saint-Obin was of this DIY mindset, a musician making the most out of the least, utilizing that aforementioned punkest form of technology. This Dutch fellow was home-taping for only a few short years in the early '80s, releasing a couple of singles and a cassette... and then he just disappeared. An impressionable Frans De Waard (the man behind Korm Plastics, Plinkity Plonk, Vital Weekly, and too many bands to mention) was smitten by that De Saint-Obin cassette back in the day, and years later, he embarked on a quest to seek out De Saint-Obin in hopes of reissuing the album. We'll skip forward through the bits about interminable internet searches and dropped conversations due to artist idiosyncrasy and flighty weirdo behavior; for here we have the glorious fruits of De Waard's labor of love - a minor masterpiece of Dutch post-punk / minimal-wave eccentricity: Sound On Sound by Andre De Saint-Obin.
The title refers to means-of-production, De Saint-Obin didn't have a multitrack recorder, but rather he could overdub tracks onto a single piece of tape in the tradition of Les Paul and the earliest of sound engineers. Yup, in mono! Built up from the bottom up, starting with drum machine, then bass, the guitar, and finally voice, each of Andre De Saint-Obin's songs required considerable foresight and architectural planning. The process was a destructive one, so if he fucked up on one of the last layers, he would have to start all over again. The fact that these songs are so fractured, so lysergic, so dystopian speaks to the cracked vision of De Saint-Obin. The opening number (eponymously titled "Introduction") is an instrumental cut with swollen basslines plucked with the swaggering panache of a Peter Hook or a Simon Gallup, punched with spark-plug guitar jitteriness and mechanoid electronic rhythms. It's pretty damn close to being a perfect piece of gloom pop, but fixed to a woozy DIY axis instead of a baroque goth polish. The spasmodic anti-funk number "Dance Till I Die" sports jagged guitar fuzz and exasperated vocals above a backbeat of machined click and churlish basslines, lending to visions of Pere Ubu or James Chance in a fit of epileptic delirium. The manic-depressive bounciness of "Hey You" sways toward sexual frustration, and "I Got Plopmusic" veers towards the truly bizarre in the vein of Fad Gadget or any of those synth-punk ditties that Colin Potter put to tape around the same time.
The accompanying cd, in addition to the record proper, features 5 bonus tracks, including the predatorily creepy yet captivatingly catchy "Stay Tonight" and the much sought after "Everytime We Say Goodbye" originally released on one of Alain Neffe's Insane Music compilations. Sound On Sound finds company with a few contemporaries in the head-scratching Factory Records ensemble Crawling Chaos and Pete Shelley's aptly named Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners; but was very much a precursor to what the Blank Dogs and Ariel Pink attempted several decades later.
We should note that aQuarius is the ONLY shop in North America that you can get one of these, and get one you should!!! Fuck yeah!!!
A few years back, there was a comprehensive reissue campaign for moody atmospheric pastoral eighties jangle poppers Felt, a group we had convinced ourselves we wouldn't like, until we finally heard them, and not only liked 'em but became a bit obsessed. And while most folks are probably familiar with Felt mainman Lawrence (nee Lawrence Hayward) who was the face of Felt and who would go on to front Denim, and less successfully Go Kart Mozart (ugh), it's the lesser known Maurice Deebank who helped create Felt's signature sound, which is evidenced on here, a reissue of Deebank's 1984 instrumental solo debut, which finds Deebank creating lush landscapes of shimmer and jangle, swirling minor key chords, looped, cyclical melodies, and warm whirling layered ambience, introspective and heartfelt, the music here shadowy and dreamlike, lovely and lyrical, reminding us at times of Roy Montgomery, and at others Vini Reilly, but really sounding like our favorite moments on those early Felt records. Deebank would leave Felt in 1986, as Lawrence moved more toward the bubblegum pop that would begin to seep into the later Felt outings blossoming into the pure pop of Denim, while Deebank continued to look inward, creating gorgeous soundscapes of soft psychedelia and glistening guitar shimmer. "Dance Of Deliverance" might be our favorite track here, ominous low end, soft swells of shimmering synths, all swirled into a sort of shadowy new age drift, or it might have sounded new age if it wasn't so dark, a brooding mini masterpiece that is the perfect balance to the rest of the record's more sun dappled crystalline dreaminess. So great!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
Monkey Banana Kitchen was the band's first full album (following a string of singles including several head-scratching / loving homages to Debbie Harry's rumored hermaphrodism - yeah, how about that for a topic of a poptune?!). The album's jittery punk-dub songwriting has its roots in the British classics of Public Image Limited and the Clash, although the anthemic pop-hook has been tossed out the window in favor of a glossalaic patter of semi-coherent lyrics. The triumphantly kaleidoscopic "Savoir Faire" operates in the same art-pop lineage of Stereolab, with Family Fodder being freakishly unfettered in their exuberance where Stereolab would play it ultra cool behind their Moogs and Gauloise cigarettes. Then, there are the deep-dub tracks of "Organ Grinder" and "Bass Adds Bass" which could have easily get confused for anything by The Slits or New Age Steppers. Sprinkled throughout the album are a series of short slapstick pieces of spring-loaded vaudevillian tunes and elliptical dada / slapstick lyrics: "Darling, reason's in the monkeyhouse with a banana in the kitchen."
Fantastic stuff!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
Monkey Banana Kitchen was the band's first full album (following a string of singles including several head-scratching / loving homages about Debbie Harry's rumored hermaphrodism - yeah, how about that for a topic of a poptune?!). The album's jittery punk-dub songwriting has its roots in the British classics of Public Image Limited and the Clash, although the anthemic pop-hook has been tossed out the window in favor of a glossalaic patter of semi-coherent lyrics. The triumphantly kaleidoscopic "Savoir Faire" operates in the same art-pop lineage of Stereolab, with Family Fodder being freakishly unfettered in their exuberance where Stereolab would play it ultra cool behind their Moogs and Gauloise cigarettes. Then, there are the deep-dub tracks of "Organ Grinder" and "Bass Adds Bass" which could have easily get confused for anything by The Slits or New Age Steppers. Sprinkled throughout the album are a series of short slapstick pieces of spring-loaded vaudevillian tunes and elliptical dada / slapstick lyrics: "Darling, reason's in the monkeyhouse with a banana in the kitchen." The compact disc is fleshed out with the tracks from the Schizophrenia Party EP plus a couple of singles (sadly none about Debbie Harry). The highlight of these tracks (for some of us) is the ridiculously over-the-top "Dinosaur Sex" - a totally stupid / brilliant rock-opera / punk-dub number that parodies Broadway musicals in an engorged number about, ah, fucking like a dinosaur!!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
This lp contains all the tracks from the Schizophrenia Party EP plus a couple of singles (sadly none about Debbie Harry). The highlight to these tracks (for some of us) is the ridiculously over-the-top "Dinosaur Sex" - a totally stupid / brilliant rock-opera / punk-dub number that parodies Broadway musicals in an engorged number about, ah, fucking like a dinosaur!!
One of the earliest releases from the nascent 4AD label, issued in late 1980, 3R4 marked one of many facets to the structuralist experiments of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis. Those two had parted ways with the other half of Wire in 1979, bringing forth a deluge of exemplary projects of adventurous post-punk including Dome, Duet Emmo, and Cupol, with this album being one of the few things ascribed to their birth names. It follows relatively closely - or rather as closely as one could - to the deconstructionist approach to the song espoused by Dome, with angular mechanical noises, tape loop miasma, psychological-drone slumber, and flanged noise engineering. The pastoral swell that grounds the first half of "3.4" could very easily have been the inspiration for William Basinski's baroque anthology of crumbling tape loops, through a languid melodic fragment whose origins could hail from a similarly decontextualized Muzak via slow-motion pitchshifting. It's quite a stately progression that takes a rather lumbering turn upon the introduction of a series of tape loops of orchestral flourishes, wooden rhythms, and a hypnotic lurch that tumbles out from Lewis' bass. The flipside "R" builds on a rhythmic interplay between two chiming sets of guitars glides from urban gamelan grittiness to flanged tape loop exploration with a drone-on dubbiness that easily parallels the anti-rock stupor of This Heat's posthumous album Repeat. Another necessary reissue from Superior Viaduct!
- MPEG stream: 3.4
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Krautrock fans are familiar with these guys: Dieter Moebius, who is one one-half of Cluster, and Conny Plank, the producer/engineer responsible for recording sooooo many amazing albums in the '70s and '80s. Both were also members of Liliental. In the early-mid '80s they teamed up for a series of albums together, of which 1980's Rastakraut Pasta was the first.
Various instruments (and non-instruments too?) were played by the duo, then manipulated via Plank's mixing desk, with Moebius providing additional electronics. Can's Holger Czukay also dropped in to lay down bass on a few of the tracks. The results are all quite pleasant and playful, goofy even, tinged with a sunny Jamaican dub reggae influence (hence the Rastakraut title), most notable in the quirky percolating grooves of "Missi Cacadou". And it's quite obvious that this album has something to do with Cluster, nobody else really ever made music like this. Experimental and accessible, weird and wonderful, sorta surreal and not so serious, yet still quite affecting - and full of effects! From the chugging motorik distortion of "Feedback 66" to the looping lovely melodies of "Two Oldtimers" to the more abstract ambience of "Solar Plexus", Rastakraut Pasta is an airy delight. It's mostly instrumental, but when there are vocals, they are heavily treated and fragmentary, and with or without 'em you'll be humming and nodding along.
This new Water label reissue includes new liner notes, providing quotes from Moebius or Plank about each track. Recommended, and we're looking forward to what we'll assume are upcoming Water reissues of the other M&P records, especially the darker, more rhythmically driven Zero Set from '82.
What's The Hubub Bub is a twistedly brilliant DIY post punk holy grail from a group known simply as Tronics, not so much a group as the work of one man, Ziro Baby, and his peculiar brand of post-punk / folk-punk /art-rock / protest music sounds relevatory even today. Originally released at the beginning of the eighties, this record must have really blown minds back then. Equal parts singer/songwriter punk folk songsmithery, minimalist punk primitivism, and ahead of its time tape experiments and sound collage, What's The Hubub Bub has been floating around the underground for 30 years now, with just a track or two popping up on obscure comps, which is hard to believe considering how fucking great this whole record is.
The first half tends more toward proper songs, although the record begins with the sounds of sirens, before in swoop brittle and angular guitars, languid and psychedelic, simply strummed and darkly jangly, accompanied by simple hand percussion, opener "How Do You Do Again" is crazy catchy, repetitive and mantra like, stream of consciousness lyrics, sort of sung/spoken, it's easy to hear the sort of influence this band has had on contemporary groups like Sic Alps (SA's Mike Donovan is a HUGE fan!), and that song sets the template, mostly one or two parts, looped and repeated, minimal lyrics, also repeated over and over, some songs have a distinctly fifties / sixties style pop sound, "Helsinki" is like some classic Beatles or Kinks song arranged for tinny guitar and hand drums. But it's right around "Space Message" that things start to get really weird, a brief blast of static, and garbled FX, with Tronics mainman (only man?) Ziro transmitting from the ether, his voice becoming equally garbled, very Conet Project sounding, and really, that signals a sort of seismic sonic shift, cuz the rest of the record, while rife with more punk-folk ditties, is also peppered with strange sonic experiments and collaged tape loops. There's the old timey rock and roll of "The Other Man" and then the murky droned out balladry of "Alone", that sounds like the saddest, warbliest Joe Meek outtake ever, but if any record was back loaded it's this one. Cuz then there's "Intro", which is in fact a sprawling bit of early sampledelia, bird song, weird voices, tape hiss, and strange effects, echo drenched samples of a sobbing woman, maudlin piano, snippets taped off the radio, bursts of jagged distorto guitar, little bits of orchestra, and symphonies, and what sounds like TV theme songs, all layered into a fantastic bit of psychedelic avant sound collage, and that leads right into what might be the greatest Tronics song EVER, "Shark Fucks", catchy, and anthemic, ridiculous lyrics, a main hook that KILLS, a wicked chorus, still just guitar and distorted drum (just one drum), with laid back, drawled vox, it will instantly get lodged in your brain, and you'll want to play it over and over and over, we have been, probably driving people insane, but we LOVE it! We're actually kind of amazed this song hasn't been covered a million times, it's SOOOOO good. Totally worth the price of admission, especially when he slips into some weird garbled underwater vocals, presumably just made with his mouth and not any actual FX.
Once you make it past "Shark Fucks", if you ever do, there's the primitive minimal fuzz-guitar punk of "I'm A Diver", also crazy catchy, and then things finish off with another sound experiment, the two part "Piece For A Galaxy Bar Jukebox", the first part, all pulsing sci-fi electronics, a dark shadowy kosmische, that gets people coming up to see what we're playing, every time it comes on in the store, moody and minimal and haunting, it's only three minutes, but it's the kind of thing we could listen to forEVER. The second part is still more sci-fi electro weirdness, this one less shimmery and droney, and more percussive and rhythmic, percolating bloops, that explode into jagged shards of distorted synth, and again, we would have loved if it stretched out for 10 or 15 minutes instead of just two...
So completely bafflingly brilliant, and utterly essential. A new unanimous favorite for sure. We also got another Tronics reissue, Say! What Is This?, which we'll review next time, but if you want that one too, just ask!
Somewhere in France, sometime in the '80s: a radical independent underground micro-scene peopled by creative teenagers who grew up listening to Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, A Certain Ratio, Metal Urbain, and Cabaret Voltaire, making their own synth- and sample-based music, with heavy beats and noisy dubbed out FX, that's like a post-punk/industrial hybrid of old school hiphop, Detroit electro, and tape-splicing musique concrete experimentation, releasing it themselves on artfully packaged cassette tapes and occasional pieces of vinyl, in limited editions heard only by the most dedicated international networkers in that pre-internet age. Sound good? It is! That's what this release documents, remarkable DIY music that's been aptly described as "like Wild Style on dust". Or imagine some other underground '80s industrial experimentalists from France, like Le Syndicat, toning down the noise (a little) and trying to make tracks like Afrika Bambaataa.
And please don't get confused, either, 'cause noted turntablist, producer and crate digger Cut Chemist's name is on the cover. This isn't a DJ mix, or remix, or collaboration, or anything like that. Cut Chemist doesn't himself have anything to do with the music of the two closely related bands on here, Vox Populi! and Pacific 231, other than having discovered 'em on one of his record-buying excursions (specifically via finding Vox Populi!'s track "Megamix" on a rare compilation LP called Alternative Funk, released by VP!'s own Vox Man label), and then making it his mission to find out more about them and get their stuff reissued - which he did, after many years of research, and friendships forged with both Vox Populi's leader Axel Kyrou and his colleague Pierre Jolivet, whose own project Pacific 231 ran parallel to Vox Populi!, and was also an important part of the collective described above.
So, thanks to Cut Chemist, whose imprimatur will hopefully help get this music some additional well deserved attention, we've now got this fantastic anthology of twenty VP! and P231 tracks rescued & remastered from rare cassette and vinyl comps, eps, etc., with plenty of previously unreleased material too. It's a real treasure trove of headnodding, mindblowing, utterly rad stuff, what could be indeed called, "alternative funk". Make that, alternative WTF? funk. These wide-ranging tracks contain, in varying combinations and degrees, all manner of frizzled blip bloop electronics, propulsive drum machine rhythms, subversive cut-ups, spanking funk bass, gothic cold wave vocals, ambient synth trances, crazed echoing dub effects, and reel-to-reel tape manipulation (the DJ "scratching" sounds you'll hear). All we can say is, upon hearing this, we immediately understood Cut Chemist's obsession!
Musically, the French always seem to have their own unique, unusual take on things, whether it's disco or prog or black metal, and the hard-to-define genre this represents is no exception.
The thick cd booklet (or big lp insert) is full of detailed liner notes, graphics and photos, which should give one a good sense of the exciting artistic/cultural/musical milieu these folks inhabited. Highly, highly recommended. (Note, the double vinyl version comes with a bonus 7" of extra tracks, which are also included on the cd.)
Some of these tracks have been floating around on blogs for ages, it was only a matter of time before someone would gather them all up and release a killer compilation, shouldn't be too surprised it ended up being Omni! This Australian synth pioneer is probably best known for the bubbly synth pop classic "Love By Numbers", with its near literal lyrics, the verses simply AW reciting numbers from 1 to 100 (and then some, but it fades out around there), in a thick weirdly Teutonic accent, his count interrupted here and there by a dreamy girl pop chorus of "It Must Be Love", before it's right back to the counting, all over some terrific minimal wave electro pop. Originally released with the awesomely titled B-side "Boring Instrumental", which is a glorious little chunk of stripped down lilting electronic pop, not boring in the least. And then it gets really weird. Check out "Sex II", which lays down a groovy squelchy minor key electro groove, over which AW, and his female counterpart, recite what sounds like a strange not especially sexy, grocery list, from avocado, to rare beef finely sliced, aspirin, a kumquat, three floral toilet rolls, a pork sausage, a cantaloupe, a jar of Vaseline, chicken giblets, crumpets, mayonnaise (this one delivered in a near orgasmic croon, as is chopped liver, rump steak and Listerine!), the whole thing laced with little electronic squiggles, the boy / girl vocals delivering their various items extremely passionately/seriously, more so as the list continues, the track occasionally also augmented by breathless panting, all over a sort of chorus of thick soaring majestic synth swirl and some crunchy fuzz guitar. Might be the most replayed track here. But that's only the beginning, there's a twisted cover of the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" which is nearly unrecognizable, made all woozy and fuzzy and soft focus, there's the VERY Elvis-y electro-rockabilly of "Boom Boom Baby", which also predicts the sound of eighties big haired synth weirdos Sigue Sigue Sputnik, there's the woozily psychedelic "The Galvanized Garden Of Inner Peace", that also has a little rockabilly swagger to it, there's another version of "Sex II", instrumental this time, the music even more playfully exaggerated and the sounds super dubbed out, there's the dark bloopy, distorted guitar driven, electro slither of "Do-Do" replete with some weird deep vocals intoning "GET OFF THE FLOOR!!", everything reverbed and drenched in echo, there's "The Ballad Of A Metronome", which is classic eighties pop, but with some truly strange sung/spoken vocals, there's also the warped piano ballad "Radiation Injection", which is more goofy and playfully silly than the title might suggest, but with some snarly almost Suicide like vox tethered to the bleepy bloopy music. Pretty much every track here is a twisted gem, covering all of AW's outfits, from his solo single, to his stints fronting the Metronomes, Thealonian Music and Modern Jazz. He would later go on to record with Nina Hagen, he's actually STILL a live member of Einsturzende Neubauten, the liner notes, as with all Omni releases, are extensive, and detail AW's musical life, and of course there are lots of rare photos and reproductions of original record sleeves. But give a listen to the sound samples, we're guessing you'll be immediately hooked!
