Monday 29 February 2016

War Drum - War Drum No. 1 (1997) C90


I wasn't going to bother with this one, but I had a listen and it's not quite so bad as I remember, so what the fuck.

By 1996 I was thoroughly sick of being me and had decided to be someone else for a while. I think I was probably going round the twist somewhat. One element of this awakening - what I have come to view without irony as a Shamanic process, roughly speaking - demanded a whole shitloads of breaks from the past and from previous ways of doing things in so much as this was even practical. I was tired of the sort of material I wrote or drew or painted or recorded and had decided to start again from scratch. Another element of this awakening was a growing obsession with Mexico, specifically late Postclassic central Mexican culture - the people generally but incorrectly remembered as Aztecs. By obsession I'm not referring to just a T-shirt and a couple of library books, but something which pretty much consumed me and changed the course of my existence, and about which you can read more here if you're that interested.

War Drum was a fresh start because I felt like making music once again, and given my interests of the time it came out as something akin to Muslimgauze but with an entirely different focus, which was intentional. One problem I had experienced, and the one which meant I hadn't actually recorded much of my own music for at least a couple of years, was a lack of equipment. Specifically I had a few bits and pieces but nothing on which to record anything, so I just went ahead and shoved everything into a little four channel mixer and recorded it more or less live onto my home stereo, but for occasionally bouncing tracks by plugging a second tape recorder into the mixer. The quality wasn't great, but then I reasoned it would be no worse than any of those Do Easy tapes recorded by more or less the same method; also that I should be able to produce something listenable if I made some effort to work around the limitations of this set-up, and to keep things simple.

The reason I wasn't going to bother is nothing to do with the quality of the music, such as it is, but that War Drum No. 1 dates from a time when I was still dishing out the benefit of the doubt to certain neofolk types, as indicated by two covers of Sol Invictus songs and at least a couple of lyrical flourishes betraying just how entertaining I once found that Boyd Rice album. I've never had any racial agenda - excepting perhaps a touch of Aztec Fundamentalism coming from a philosophical or aesthetic angle more than anything else - and nor anything along Social Darwinist lines; but I was keen on forging something slightly fierce and scary from my interest in both Mesoamerican history and all of the science I was reading at the time - Dawkins and others, hence the somewhat regrettable monologue of Timebomb which, I feel I should stress, condemns a cultural bias towards quantity over quality of life rather than being the Douglas P style horseshit about bad stock to which it bears unfortunate comparison because I wanted to sound like a hardcase. I'd apologise for the Sol Invictus covers but won't because I still like the songs, despite what I have since accepted to be the unpleasant truth of the source; and even if my versions are a bit John Shuttleworth, I still say my voice is superior to that bellowing noise we once heard coming from the blowhole of the original artist.

The rockabilly numbers may seem a bit mystifying in context - I was going for a sort of back to basics vibe, something as far away as possible from the sort of Wire-reading art gallery shite the rest of this music probably resembles. War Drum was supposed to be folk music, or imaginary folk music, or Muslimgauze eating a taco whilst frowning - something along those lines. Most of the references will make more sense if you have some working knowledge of Nahua culture, (and yes, that would be me trying to sing in Nahuatl on Xochitlacuicatl) although it probably isn't essential. Just pretend it's fake Swans without a drum kit or summink.

Anyway, once I had recorded this masterpiece I got fifty copies professionally duplicated on chrome cassettes by a bloke in Bromley and had a cover printed. I sold a few, gave some away, and eventually got rid of them all. This was in aid of an ideal of producing a cassette tape which didn't look like some half-assed piece of shit, and generally speaking I'm still fairly pleased with this one despite its obvious shortcomings. My biggest mistake was, I suppose, releasing a cassette at a point at which people had more or less stopped bothering with the same, having mostly switched to the greatly inferior medium of CDR.



Tracks:

1 - Yei Tepeilhuitl
2 - In Xochitl, In Cuicatl
3 - Penitent
4 - Rex Talionis
5 - Burning Water
6 - I Can't Believe in Forgiveness or Absolution
7 - Communication
8 - See the Dove Fall
9 - Autosacrifice
10 - Timebomb
11 - Azcapotzalco
12 - Xochitlacuicatl
13 - Fire of Love
14 - A New World
15 - Chicome Cipactli
16 - Dry Valley, Antarctica
17 - Blood Consciousness
18 - Lonesome Town

Return to Index

Monday 8 February 2016

Do Easy - The Ninth Metal Tape (1983) C60


I knew this one was going to be tough going, but I didn't realise it would be quite as bad as it is. I'm probably not even going to bother leaving the usual links on Twatter and Arsebook. Download at your peril.
 
With hindsight, the problem was my delusional graduation from noisy sound pieces such as Le Cœur à Gaz - which was named after a Tristan Tzara play and is probably the best thing here - to things I considered songs because they had tunes and deep, meaningful lyrics. It didn't really occur to me that my voice was whiny and unpleasant, and my lyrics weren't anywhere near as weird or interesting as I imagined them to be. Neither did it occur to me to re-record things so as to make them less shit than they turned out on first attempt. Oh well.

If The Sixth Metal Tape was my media album - which it wasn't - then this was probably my sexuality and fear of molestation concept album, or something. I vaguely recall finding the bloke in our local chip shop a bit creepy and deduced in my teenage wisdom that he was probably a kiddy fiddler, which he almost certainly wasn't, and so some of these songs were about that. At the same time I was developing a weirdly puritanical attitude in response to kids at school going on about Mad Max and how it's great when the bloke rapes all those women - or something along similar lines; and then there was Second Brain Product which I have a sneaky feeling may have been about having a wank, and distancing oneself from the act so as to appear less like a pervert to the girls who would then be more likely to let me have sexual intercourse with them. Ironic really, when you consider the old bloke in the chip shop was effectively giving it away and probably wouldn't have required the preliminary box of chocolates. There are also a number of references to Mussolini because why the fuck not?

What the hell was I thinking?


Tracks:
1 - Youth of Today
2 - I and the Village
3 - My Remaining Eye
4 - Le Cœur à Gaz
5 - Essential Supplies
6 - Eleven-Year Old Scenery
7 - Strong Stuff
8 - Obscene
9 - Pause Button Experiment
10 - Wasted Cells
11 - The Laugh!
12 - Twelfth Night
13 - Second Brain Product
14 - Just This Screaming
15 - Don't Look Back

Return to Index

Monday 1 February 2016

Konstruktivists - Tic Tac Toe Remixes (1991) C60


Konstruktivists had recorded an album for World Serpent and somebody or other suggested the possibility of there being a single from the album, which was all very exciting. I hit the photocopier and put together the artwork for what would definitely be our first twelve inch single whilst Joe hit the studio and remixed the shit out of Tic Tac Toe, the track which everybody seemed to regard as representing our best chance at knocking Cher's Shoop Shoop Song and Colour Me Badd off the top of the hit parade. Then suddenly everyone realised that vinyl was rubbish, and that no-one would ever buy a vinyl record ever again, and the thing was downsized to a CD single which I would have to take around to somebody's house to listen to for at least the next five years. Oh well. It was still better than a kick up the arse I suppose.

Weirdly, I find that twenty-five years later, persons on facebook are still listening to Tic Tac Toe, which is nice; and so I am prompted to dig out this cassette of ten mixes crafted by the technologically adept hand of Joseph Ahmed. Some of these turned up on the CD single. I can't be arsed to work out which, but unless you were in Konstruktivists in 1991, you probably won't have heard at least five of these. I wasn't sure what to make of these mixes at the time, but with hindsight Joe did a great job, and I only regret that one of the trancier versions didn't end up as a slab of vinyl being played into a flexidisc and getting rewinds and all that in the super hot Tropicana acid disco house clubs of the day. Seriously, I think this lot would make for a very listenable double vinyl set if anyone feels inclined to think about that one for a while.

No cover as it was just a boring inlay card, I'm afraid. The Alex pic comes from a promotional postcard we did around the same time.

 



Tracks:

1 - Tic Tac Toe (instrumental mix)
2 - Tic Tac Toe (guitar mix)
3 - Tic Tac Toe (vocal mix)
4 - Tic Tac Toe (album remix)
5 - Tic Tac Toe (trance I)
6 - Tic Tac Toe (trance II)
7 - Tic Tac Toe (trance III)
8 - Tic Tac Toe (dub I)
9 - Tic Tac Toe (dub II)
10 - Tic Tac Toe (reverse dub)

Return to Index