The Night Factory (1997) C90

Here's my final DJ set by my friend Paul Condon, whom some of you may recall as the editor of Gneurosis mag. I'm not honestly convinced this one dates from 1997, but am taking a rough guess (and to be honest I could have sworn Fiery Bliss was '95 at the latest because I recall lending it to an ex-girlfriend with whom I think I had fallen out by '96, but Paul insists that's the right date)...

Anyway, he was playing as DJ Novafrost (or possibly just Novafrost) by this point, and this is a bit of a darker set as you will hear. I think the opening material is actually Nurse With Wound. The rest I don't really have much idea about, I'm afraid. I had to be in bed by ten for most of the nineties so this is all a foreign land to me.

End of side one glued on to beginning of side two so as to hopefully present a seamless sound experience. Usual terms and conditions apply.

Download the tape by licking on this clink.

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Mixed Results (1996) C90

Here's another DJ set put together by my friend Paul, then working as Blackcurrant 93 and raising the roof on a regular basis from what I recall. As with Fiery Bliss, it's something in the general direction of trance techno with a certain je ne sais quoi of acid, and I have no idea which records or even how many went into this particular blend - except The Odyssey by Odyssey 2000 (Exist Dance label, 1992) which is such a fucking cracker that I went out and bought one (or more likely Paul had a spare). It kicks in at around 12.50 and will be recognisable by samples of Cylons from Battlestar Galactica saying by your command; and it's a serious fuckin' tune, mate.

Also, the track which ends this set appears about halfway through Fiery Bliss, but other than that - no idea. As before I've taken the liberty of sewing the end of side one onto the beginning of side two using special computer magic, so hopefully the join is of sufficient seamlessness as to allow the listener to keep his or her buzz going if using this tape as an accompaniment to smoking ecstacy cigarettes and having it large.

Sorry about the Jive Bunny cover. I'm a child, I know.

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

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Fiery Bliss (1996) C60

Something of a change of pace this week, namely a mix crafted by my friend Paul back when he was a DJ, a master of the two record players if you will, and I suppose there's a slim chance you may remember him from this thing. He put a lot of time into perfecting his mixing and got pretty good at it, and this was the first sample tape he put together, or at least the first one to come my way. He was DJing as Blackcurrant 93 at the time, and I seem to recall that he played at quite a few parties and clubs around London and built up a bit of a following, but never quite seemed to get either the success or billing for which he strove and probably deserved, possibly due to the London club scene being as much about who you know as whether or not you can move a crowd. My guess was that this set dated from around the tail end of 1995, for various not particularly interesting reasons, to which Paul says I finished it around March '96, I think, but it took nine months to put it together and there may well have been an earlier version knocking about at some point.

As to what it actually is, and what you'll hear if you download the thing - house or possibly techno music, bit faster than you probably remember it being, and I'd call it trance except I've a feeling trance was mostly a bit more airy-fairy and synonymous with long-haired persons playing digeridoos on Mediterranean beaches; whereas this is quite hard-edged and a bit sweaty, or summink. I asked Paul about the genre, and he said I don't know either. I used to take some pride in finding not-that-well-known tunes that were hard to pin down genre-wise...

So there you have it - no individual titles because it's a mix of about a million records seamlessly blended into one. I've taken the liberty of welding the end of side one to the beginning of side two, thus eliminating the stop and start of the tape changing sides.

Download Fiery Bliss by clicking on this link.

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621 Monosodium 621 - We, Torn from the Earth by Wonders of Gold (1992) C15+

Back in 1992, both Paul Condon - editor of Gneurosis - and myself had been subject to visitation by a fanzine editor to whom I shall cryptically refer as Jeremy Beadle because he was a fan of the same. Jeremy Beadle came to stay with me and slept on my sofa for a couple of nights but soon began to get on my tits, at which point I fobbed him off on Paul Condon and his sofa, like a true pal. Amazingly Paul was still speaking to me afterwards, so I suppose he understood, and on the positive side we subsequently had a whale of a time comparing notes and discussing how annoying we found Jeremy Beadle over beers and ciggies. Then one Saturday afternoon we went to some kind of free festival in New Cross, the one held annually in that park behind the Venue at the end of Clifton Ride - as it is misnamed in S. Alexander Reed's shit book about industrial music. There were crusty bands and there was beer and it was a nice day, and the conversation soon turned to Jeremy Beadle and his annoyingness. The thing that had really got to me about his visit, as I explained, was his diet. He wouldn't eat anything. Every night I'd cook something - spaghetti bolognese or curry or whatever, and I'm really not a bad cook.

'How much of this do you want, Jeremy Beadle?' I would ask.

'Oh I'm fine,' he would say, smiling as he pulled a family size bag of fucking Monster Munch and a litre bottle of Pepsi from his back pack.

Paul and I realised that neither of us had ever seen him eat anything other than crisps or related potato-based snacks generally marketed at school children, and this made us howl with laughter for most of the rest of the afternoon, culminating in Paul proposing we get t-shirts made - a picture of a packet of crisps with the legend Crisps - My Favourite! I'm not even really sure why it made us laugh so much, but it did.

Meanwhile I was toying with the idea of recording sarcastic power electronics, an idea which found itself split into two, one branch leading here, and the other to 621 Monosodium 621, but with those three little magickal dots around the numbers like you have on Current 93 records. Paul had an expensive sampler and was an accomplished violinist, and the idea was to record something with all of the usual fixations of the industrial or whatever the fuck you want to call it genre - Manson, Crowley, Hitler, and potato-derived snack foods. We both also found neofolk unintentionally amusing, so 621 Monosodium 621 - named after everyone's favourite flavour enhancer - was firing off in a number of directions all at once whilst going out of its way to take itself extremely seriously.

We convened one Saturday afternoon around my place in Lewisham, beginning with a trip to Sainsburys from which we returned with two carrier bags each full of snack foods, fizzy pop and so on. We sampled ourselves eating crisps over and over, and different kinds of crisps, cheese footballs and so on in pursuit of variant sounds. We recorded Wheaties - a tubular snack - played as atonal instruments by blowing across one end as though they were pan pipes. We sampled and looped cans of cola popped open for rhythm. We mixed all of this together with guitar and effects and Adolf Hitler and the humble potato as a mystic avatar of revelation 'n' shit, and we ended up with the material comprising this download. I drew a picture of Roman soldiers eating crisps before an inverted Christ on the cross; and I seem to recall Paul writing a brilliantly impenetrable essay about the role of potatoes in human magickal history, although I'm no longer sure whether this happened or was simply an idea; and I intended to put it out as a C15, but somehow lost the impetus. So eventually I just made a couple of copies for Paul and myself.

We might have ended up on Top of the Pops, or at least on the flip side of a Current 93 album, but never mind. Possibly the only thing we achieved was a cure for the desire to eat crisps ever again for at least the next few months.

Anyway, here are all four tracks, plus a couple of variant mixes I found I had laying around and which I think I prefer. Enjoy and take very, very seriously, preferably whilst scowling and marching up and down in front of a Bavarian castle whilst munching away on a bag of Wotsits.

Download the six tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - 621 Monosodium 621
2 - NaCl/HNO3
3 - Monosodium 666
4 - Boiled Alive in Oil of Sunflower
5 - 621 Monosodium 621 (early version)
6 - Boiled Alive (early mix)

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Anschluss - Fall Apart (1992) C60

At some point during 1992 I had a conversation with Paul Condon which yielded the sort of relentless belly laughter which begins to hurt after a couple of hours, and the resolution to record a tape of deliberately bad power electronics complete with Hitler's speeches and amusingly portentous titles, mainly because that stuff is piss easy. I started on some tracks, but found that I liked them too much to take them further into the realms of sarcasm; and Paul and I eventually recorded a C15 as 621 Monosodium 621 along related lines - roughly speaking our version of what Current 93 would have been had they been influenced less by Mr. Crowley and more by a love of potato crisps. One track features Hitler's speeches and amplified recordings of us eating Wotsits, Wheaties, and other snack foods whilst trying hard not to laugh, which sort of got it out of our system.

Meanwhile I still had this material, which became something else entirely. I chose the name Anschluss because it sounded austere and slightly menacing. It means union in German, or something along those lines. I later realised it historically refers to some political event relating to the Nazi occupation of Austria. I didn't know this at the time, but had I done, I doubtless would have been quite pleased, being a bit of a knob and all - simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery blah blah blah... The significance of the term union was a vague nod to this music being a sort of collaboration between myself and John Powell of Hoax! fanzine. Every few months he sent me tapes of music he had done, and I could never quite work out what I was expected to do with them, so I ended up sampling a lot of it and using those samples to create about half of the sounds you hear on this tape; so it was a union of sorts, albeit a bit of an unequal one, mainly because I liked the thought of having recorded a tape which wasn't just all me for a change. In addition to this, I was probably clinically depressed, or at least a significantly unhappy bunny, and I was listening to quite a lot of Swans and Death In June - although the influence of the latter thankfully shows only in the borrowed title and, I suppose, the guitar on Deny Everything.

It all sounds a bit absurd to me now, although I still think it's a decent tape for what it is, and it seems an accurate encapsulation of my state of mind at the time. Shortly after I recorded it, I got a girlfriend and managed to cheer the fuck up a little bit, so I never got around to actually selling copies of the thing.

Enjoy, but be warned, it's a bit droney.

Download the twelve slices of unremitting misery by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Feel Nothing
2 - Higher
3 - Stay
4 - Not Like This
5 - Deny Everything
6 - No Love
7 - Who You Are
8 - Break My Back
9 - Carrion
10 - Fall Apart
11 - Celebrate
12 - Mirror

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