Sunken Chambers (1995) C90

I recently came across an Anschluss track on YouTube, which was interesting because that was me for about five minutes. It was a track taken from this compilation, and yet when I played the clip it turned out to be one of the other tracks from the tape. Now, having edited this thing, I can see how the confusion arose regarding where one track ends and another begins.

I know. Cool story, yeah? Feel free to retell it at dinner parties and claim it as your own.

Anyway, clearly this has already been digitised by someone else, but nevertheless here it is again with the correct titles, unless I too have fucked up, which is admittedly a possibility.

Anschluss was supposed to be a postal collaboration with the bloke who did Hoax! magazine, partially so as to focus all of his attempts to involve himself in everything I did in one place in the hope he'd leave everything else alone. The idea was that I'd build it all up from samples of his demos, but he started to send stuff which sounded like Nik Kershaw and lo, my enthusiasm didst wane; so that was the end of that, apart from the tracks on Sunken Chambers plus an unreleased tape elsewhere on this blog if you can be arsed to look for it. Apparently I was going to send it to Mindscan to see if he wanted to put it out, but I guess I never got around to it.

Sunken Chambers was the work of the excellent Kyran Lynn, CEO of Racing Room Tapes, whom I vaguely recall as having sent me a few good ones when I was reviewing stuff for Sound Projector magazine. Curiously, I also vaguely recall having been sent a Dachise CD for review in the same, although I can't remember what I made of it. Ed Pinsent was of course the editor of the Sound Projector - and still is come to think of it. Himself and Harley Richardson were in Pestrepeller with jovial, light-hearted raconteur Edwin Pouncey. I used to know Harley but fell out with him after he started posting links to climate change denial articles on my facebook page and chanting the people have spoken whenever anyone mentioned Brexit. Sigh. Another one bites the dust.

I don't know anything about the rest, except everyone has heard of Expose Your Eyes, obviously; and Ozone Bandits was Dave Hopwood. Sunken Chambers is mostly weirdy noise music, but is very good of its type and really takes hold of you after a couple of plays.

Download the thirty-one tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Educational Resources - Start in Her Hands to Grovel at Her Feet
2 - Expose Your Eyes - Bastard
3 - Tim Baker - Blame the Kingdom of God
4 - Messy - Fall Out
5 - WYRM - Three Minutes I
6 - Carsick - Social Club Revert
7 - Sean Reynard - Tijuana Bastard
8 - Anschluss - Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Shit to Live
9 - WYRM - Three Minutes II
10 - Tim Baker - Do You Want to be Killed or Murdered?
11 - Expose Your Eyes - Solan
12 - Educational Resources - Smirk at the Sitting in the Temple
13 - Dachise - Futile Rebellious Teen Shite
14 - Paddy Collins - Tech'no'ise
15 - WYRM - Three Minutes III
16 - Amy Love - Fisherman's Thread
17 - The PamelA Mind B.and - 11-TV
18 - Amy Love - Sonic Attack
19 - Ed Pinsent & Harley Richardson - The Volcano
20 - Carsick - Morning Shift
21 - Messy - All These Colours
22 - Ozone Bandits - Ozone Ballad
23 - Forecastle - Norwaves
24 - Anschluss - Reward
25 - Mark Hadley - Evil 95 Version
26 - Ozone Bandits - Mo'Pro re-hash : i
27 - Messy - To-she
28 - Expose Your Eyes - Small Masks Made Out of Spit and Paper
29 - The PamelA Mind B.and - Okwinox
30 - Educational Resources - Proper Grade Prolix
31 - Noise Gate - Musique Cemente

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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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