Allegory (1992) C40

Allegory was a compilation put together by Mark of Impulse, the only one which wasn't associated with an issue of the mag, and, so far as I recall, dating to the time he was making a go of running his thing as a label - see also Konstruktivists AGM tape and the Muslimgauze 7" he released. I'm sure you're both all familiar with most of the contributors here - Pure Motorised Instinct was Stephen Jarvis from Nagamatzu, Tautologize represents Mark's brief tenure as part of the factor X pyramid scheme, and so on and so forth.

To briefly adopt my Negative Neddy persona, I have to say, thirty years later and I'm still fucking mystified by the brief descent into industrial rock karaoke with underwhelming cover versions of chart smashers by Front 242 and the Throbbing Gristles, not least because I seem to recall Another Headache being somewhat better than this one might suggest; but never mind. Maybe it's just me. Once over those particular humps, the tape settles into a very pleasing rhythm of not-quite-ambient sound concluding with Dark Star's stunning P2C2E.

There was also a tiny wee booklet of artwork with this one, some related, some not at all related and therefore maybe pertaining to persons who failed to stump up their tracks in time (guessing here), so I've scanned that and it's included in the download.

Download the nine tracks, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Pure Motorised Instinct - Shaking Death's Hand
2 - Voltoid - Tragedy for You
3 - Another Headache - Hamburger Lady
4 - Antonym - Cinnamon Air
5 - The Impulse fX - Tautologize
6 - Attrition - The Third House
7 - Brume - Suck Your Bones
8 - Konstruktivists - Untitled II
9 - Dark Star - P2C2E
 
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Antonym - Statues in Ice (1992) C50

Can't even find this one on Discogs, so 1992 is a guess. I expect I still have the letter from Mr. Burnham reading Dear Loz, here is my tape of rare stuff but I can't be arsed to look to check the date. Also, he probably wouldn't have described it as rare stuff, because that's more like the sort of dumb shit I used to do: well, I've sold five copies of that last tape so now its time to issue a cassette of my rare recordings... Anthony had more sense than that, so this is a tape of leftovers, or something in that general direction, which admittedly may not sound too promising, but there's some nice stuff here. It may, if you're about the same age as I am, initially remind you of the straight and curly animation sequences they used to have on Rainbow - Bungle not Blackmore - but stick with it as it gets its hooks into you.

 

It was a bit difficult to tell quite where a couple of these tracks ended and others began, particularly with Warp I and Woven Glass, but hopefully I got it right.

Download the fourteen tracks plus cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Warp I
2 - Woven Glass
3 - The Bonnicon
4 - Inherit the Earth?
5 - Pikadon
6 - Persistence
7 - Warp II
8 - Weft
9 - Kinetic Workhorse I
10 - Kinetic Workhorse II
11 - Primordial Cry
12 - Black Velvet Void
13 - Scarsnarl
14 - Fracturhythm
 

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Impulse 4 (1992) C40

There would have been another Apostles tape this week, but the one I digitised was - so it turns out - copied onto a C180, amounting to three fucking hours on a single cassette, and most of that being extras that Andy stuck on there which aren't officially on the cassette, and hence aren't listed on the track list - so it's going to take me some time working out what the fuck is what with that one. I didn't even realise there had ever been such a thing as a C180 until this week.

While we're waiting, here's Impulse 4, which I apparently misfiled between Impulse 5 and Impulse 6 rather than Impulse 3 and Impulse 5 like some crazy ketamine fuelled anarchist mental case, hence my not having posted it before. As you will be aware, this was a cassette given away with Impulse mag, although I don't have the magazine, for some reason. Seems a bit weird my having mislaid this one seeing as I'm actually on it, but never mind.

Attrition you will surely know by reputation, and same with most of the others if you've regularly been following this blog. Michael Mantra, one of the two names with which I was not familiar, is some big cheese in American improv circles, or possibly was; and as for Sexus - even at the time their contributing seemed like a bit of a scoop being as they were famous and had been lumped in with that whole Romo thing which Melody Maker was desperately trying to get happening, and ended up releasing a single on ZTT. Shame it never really took off. Even if the hype was pure wank, the music pissed over all that other Thousand Shed Present toss which everyone except me and a select band of my fellow cool kids* were listening to.

*: This term is utilised with a certain quota of irony in mockery of anyone attempting to use it as a serious criticism, as has happened on occasion, because yes, we were soooo fucking cool hunched over a pile of envelopes and a stack of photocopies in our freezing bedsits in nowheresville - which is nice because being perceived as cool was obviously a big deal for us.

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

Tracks:
1 - Attrition - The Next Day (Revisited)
2 - Another Headache - Go Slow
3 - Antonym - Xchne Arcae
4 - Ozone Bandits - Empty Lizard (Slight Return)
5 - Sexus - How Can You Live Without Me?
6 - Michael Mantra - Glistening Air
7 - Family of Noise - Don't Look Back
8 - Aerschot - Chuckle
 
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Antonym - Blood and Aphorisms (1991) C60

Here's the second tape by Antonym. The first can be found here if you missed it, in which case you will additionally find that the associated blog post tells you all you need to know about Antonym, or at least as much as I know myself. This one doesn't even seem to be on Discogs, which is odd. I don't know if it received a more limited distribution or something. Anyway, as you will hear, it's more good stuff in a similar vein, and a vein which reminds me a little of er... early Nocturnal Emissions combined with the more abrasive side of the Severed Heads, maybe with a faint je ne sais quoi of Esplendor Geométrico, P16D4 - something in that general ballpark. I think my only complaint is that these tracks could have been a lot longer, but I suppose if that bothers you, maybe you could just listen to them twice or something.

 

Someone do a vinyl retrospective of this guy please.

Download the twenty-five tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Principle Rising
2 - Prime Mover
3 - Portrait of the Artist as Shark Chyme
4 - Metal Beast IV
5 - Noisework I
6 - Miasma
7 - Pushing Brick Walls
8 - Metal Beast I
9 - Polished Air
10 - Malachite
11 - Cages for the Spirit and Cemetries for the Soul
12 - Mumiai
13 - Erubescent Splash on Chrome
14 - Tear Gas
15 - Present Tense
16 - Feed the Flaming Hunger
17 - AWB
18 - A Short Study in Feedback
19 - A New Face in Heaven
20 - Metal Beast II
21 - Survivor Type
22 - Morass
23 - Metal Beast V
24 - Radiation Complication
25 - Divine Falling

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Impulse 2 (1992) C40

Impulse was an A5 mag produced by Mark of Konstruktivists, Binary, Codex Empire, and others I probably never heard of. Each issue came with a compilation cassette of (what I'm pretty sure was) all new material by many of your weirdy faves, which is why it's here. I missed the first issue, in case anyone was wondering, but here's the second with forty minutes of very listenable stuff.

 

You should have heard of Nagamatzu, I would think, so I doubt they require introduction, although for what it's worth this is one of my favourite tracks by them*. Antonym have already turned up on this blog. Nova State Conspiracy were something to do with Alex Novak of Venus Fly Trap, Attrition, and others. I don't know much about any of the others, and I wish I knew more about Whiteslug as their track is fucking great. The collection has a bit of a whiff of combat boots about it, but mostly it's done well, and certainly better than a lot of those village hall scout hut versions of Front 242 which were around at the time.

 

I've scanned the mag (plus a copy of the first issue which someone kindly sent me), so those are also included in the download as a series of jpegs in separate folders. Where tapes came with booklets, I usually include them as scans, and this is sort of the same deal, I guess. You can see who features in the mag by looking at the picture above. I haven't had time to re-read the thing so take no responsibility for any claims of simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery made therein, but it is, if nothing else, a labour of love and really well put together.

More of these to come when I get around to it.

*: Postscript 2022 - I can't fucking listen to them any more. One of them kicked off when I first shared this, demanding to know 'what have you done to our track?' in more or less those words, apparently having mistaken me for his employee and being unable to believe that the digitisation of a track from a fucking thirty year old cassette tape wouldn't sound like you were right there with the band in Abbey Road during recording. Oh - I'm so sorry, did I just spend all fucking day cleaning up a sound file as best as I could manage thereby drumming up free publicity for your back catalogue meaning you might actually flog an extra CD next time you're out on the industrial music chicken in a basket circuit with A Tribute to Controlled Bleeding and Sounds Like Muslimgauze? Well, excuuuuuuuse me.

Download the ten tracks, cover and magazine by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Nagamatzu - Firewalker [remix]
2 - IAV - You Make the Groove
3 - Nova State Conspiracy - Definitive Item
4 - Antonym - Prime Mover
5 - Red Sekta - Torture
6 - German Shepherds - I Adore You
7 - Whiteslug - Motherfucker
8 - Trance - By the Pound
9 - Shinkansen - Ishikari
10 - Momento Mori - Excerpt

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Antonym - Native Dystopean (1990) C46

Antonym was the work of Anthony G. Burnham, the living dynamo behind Soft Watch, which was, roughly speaking, the Yellow Pages of weirdy tapes, zines and noisy buggers from all over the world. The comparison to Yellow Pages isn't arbitrary because the thing was A4 and about an inch thick, maybe thicker - alphabetically arranged entries on fucking everybody and all written by the man himself, then later supplemented with shorter updates every few months. I drew the cover for the main edition so vaguely knew the guy and spoke to him on the phone on one occasion. I seem to recall that he said he worked a night shift in some hospital and actually spent some of that time sneakily printing off and collating Soft Watch. I was impressed, and yeah - I know there was CLEM and a few other things, but this one was made in Nuneaton, which is quite near where I'm from, and I'm not talking about a tape recorded by the dude who wrote frigging CLEM, mkay?

Ordinarily I might have raised eyebrows and muttered something about people who can't get anyone to listen to their stupid tapes and so start doing fanzines by which they can mention them in passing like it ain't no thing, and mainly because it's exactly the sort of thing I did and continue to do (buy my book, by the way) and it always felt a bit devious; but, Anthony gets special dispensation on the grounds that Soft Watch was such a mammoth and impressive undertaking, and that actually his music is pretty decent, as you will hear.

This was his first tape, I think. I'm not sure what he recorded it on, but the quality suggests a reasonably fancy four track, with influences maybe somewhere between (hazarding a guess) Muslimgauze, early SPK, possibly Severed Heads before they went all Howard Jones; and it's good stuff too.

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

Tracks:
1 - The Human, Conditioned
2 - Man Infesto
3 - fragment °1
4 - A Debt to Asclepius
5 - fragment °2
6 - Pangloss in Reflection
7 - fragment °3
8 - A Gift for Ix Tab
9 - fragment °4
10 - Malengine Abstract
11 - Party in Dystopia
12 - Saint of Sorrow
13 - fragment °5
14 - Western Culture (petri)
15 - Fragment °6
16 - Grand Guignol
17 - fragment °7
18 - A Human, Deconditioned


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Cassette Music 1 (1993) C60

My perception of the tape scene as was is that it pretty much went tits up in the mid-nineties. A few people struggled on, but we all knew it was over, supplanted by stuff recorded direct onto hard drives and distributed on CDR - a medium conducive to superior quality but which was never anything like so durable and had none of the charm. Of course more recently we have certain berks going back to tapes as some kind of artisanal statement for the same reason you'll occasionally get steampunk wankers issuing their most indubitably delightful examples of musical charivari on wax fucking cylinder, but let's be honest - it's over, upsetting though that certainly is, and you can never go home.

Dave Hopwood's Personal Soundtracks label has therefore come to represent - at least in my mind - one of the last great flourishes of the cassette, someone finally getting it right just before the lights went out, so to speak. There may have been others more deserving of such accolades, but I never heard them, so that's why I'm writing about this tape rather than them. Personal Soundtracks released five of these Cassette Music compilations (at least I'm not aware of there having been a volume six), and the music was always good, or worth hearing at the very least; the covers, as designed by Shaun of factor X, were decent; and it really felt as though some care and attention to detail went into these things - an entertaining sixty minutes worth as Scott McCrae wrote in his review in Music from the Empty Quarter #9. There was a similarly positive write up in Impulse #5, and I was going to reproduce both reviews here, but I've just had a quick look and aside from the thumbs up, they just tell you what's on the tape, so I can't be arsed.

If you've been following this blog, you should be familiar with a few of these names - Operation Mind Control, factor X, Chemical Plant, and Symboliks at least; Patternclear was Phil from Stress, the Stick Insects and others; Antonym was Mr. Burnham who edited Soft Watch - and I have a couple of his tapes to digitise at some point; Venus Fly Trap were, so I believe, Alex Novak, later of Attrition, and others - a familiar name, usually as the token rock band on tapes full of people reading poems over the sound of refrigerator hum, but it was always a pleasure to see their name on whatever had just fallen through the letter box; I believe Mr. Hopwood himself played the skins for Pranksters at some stage, and I'm not sure about any of the others - except the Chemical Plant track makes me wish I'd picked up more of their werks at the time.

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

Tracks:
1 - Patternclear - Dreamscape
2 - Operation Mind Control - Spark Intro
3 - Westland - Pterodaktyl
4 - Symboliks - Andeluvia
5 - Pranksters - Brut Force
6 - factor X - determinants
7 - Antonym - Tranquil Skies
8 - Chemical Plant - Dark Water (second mix)
9 - Ozone Bandits - Black Rain Edit
10 - Ozone Bandits - Slank
11 - Er - Who
12 - Symboliks - Getting Back
13 - Architects Office - A0809.7
14 - Pranksters - Govt. Agents
15 - Antonym - Song for Karen
16 - Venus Fly Trap - 19th Incident
17 - Patternclear - Flamenco
 
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