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

Return to Index

Dada X (1992) C90

I drew my first Dada X cartoon strip in 1988, inspired in equal parts by Alfred Jarry, Zippy the Pinhead, punk rock, and how I imagined the first Nurse With Wound album probably would have sounded had I bought it. Dada X - whose name should properly be rendered with the X as a mathematical exponent - was a nonsense character in a horned wooden mask which allowed me the liberty to produce strips without giving two shits about whether or not they made sense. Four years later, Carl Glover and myself, having been playing and recording as the Dovers for a while, took to a sudden and dramatic change of direction for reasons I can't quite remember, but possibly just for fun. We'd recorded a shitload of thrashy rock songs, that being our default setting, and now undertook an instrumental work of quite different complexion.

Dada X seemed an appropriate name. It would be a C90 with a single track taking up each side, a slowly evolving sound collage. We would refrain from using conventional or programmed instruments aside from, I suppose, the human voice, and all sounds would be derived from either non-musical sources, or compact discs, records, or tapes supplied by our friends, all of which would be heavily treated with effects. The end result features tape loops, samples, a food mixer, bath sponges as percussion instruments, and one hell of a lot of ourselves farting into the microphone over and over until someone had to open a window.

The idea was to regard this as composed by Carl and myself with everyone who had given us a tape of noise we could use listed as a member of the orchestra. Some tapes were supplied on request by those concerned, others we just had laying around and we used them anyway. Unfortunately neither of us bothered to write down just who was in the orchestra, so the following list is from memory, and what can still be recognised:

Source material provided by Glenn Wallis (Konstruktivists), Andrew Cox (Pump, MFH), Timothy Griffiths, John Powell, Shaun Robert (factor X), Paul Condon, Martin Woodall, Martin de Sey (Cravats), and there were probably others but it was a long time ago.

A particularly noisy passage occurring roughly twenty-five minutes into part one was given the title Chocolate Disco and appeared in isolation on the Power to Destroy compilation tape released by Trev Ward's Lebensborn back in 1993. There was a page of artwork supplied, although I don't think he ever used it, and so it is reproduced here for the sake of giving you something to look at, simply because this cassette never got so far as having a cover.

Quite chuffed with this one.

Download Dada X by clicking on this link.

Return to Index

The Dovers - The World of the Dovers (1991) C60

I probably already wrote as much as you really need to know about the Dovers here, but if you can't be arsed to read all that for whatever reason, the Dovers were myself and my good friend Carl Glover, although I actually still think of us as the Dovers even now for what it's worth. I played guitar, Carl programmed the drum machine and sang, and we played live quite a lot. Needless to say, we sounded kind of basic, although I personally prefer the term primal, but were fun to watch according to at least a few of the people who saw us and then bothered to turn up at a second gig. I sort of enjoyed the gigs, but I always worried that we might sound a bit like Carter the Unlistenable Sex Machine or one of those baseball-cap-festival-and-references-to-Blockbusters bands of whom there were far too many at the time. We started recording on portastudio around 1990 or so, and took the opportunity to produce something a bit more layered than what we had been doing live, something with room for nuance 'n' shit. We recorded a lot of material but somehow never quite got around to doing anything with the tapes. The World of the Dovers was vaguely intended to be our first album, at least by me, and would have been released through my Runciter Corporation tape label had I got around to it, but for some reason I never did.

I remember this stuff sounding decent, but I'm surprised at how good it sounds now, at least to me - thankfully more reminiscent of Wire or maybe bits of Mark Perry's Alternative TV with an Iggy influence than Carter or Pop Will Regard Itself With Studied Irony or any of that auld shite. I'm also surprised at how good that drum machine sounded, pissing over most of those tedious work / obey marching bands. Actually, listening to this stuff, I really don't understand how we failed to be fucking famous.

Oh well.

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

Tracks:
1 - Chief
2 - The End
3 - Screaming the Blues
4 - So Many Fools
5 - West Midlands
6 - Sentimental Fool
7 - Wide Open to You
8 - When the Power Falls
9 - Call It What You Want
10 - Be My Valentine
11 - You Were Better When You Were Crap
12 - Jimmy Stewart
13 - Fly in the Ointment

Return to Index

Illyana Rasputin in Pittsburgh (1988) C60

This was myself and John Jasper, the man behind the Joneses, thirty minutes of which can theoretically be found by referring to the index. I had been recording my own stuff under the name Do Easy since about 1982 or thereabouts, the problem with which was - as I began to realise - lack of quality control and the absence of any clear idea of what I was doing. Pieces of music which were obviously rubbish were taped over at source, but unless it was completely shit, I usually stuck it on a cassette in the hope of someone buying it. Additionally there was the problem that my tapes would vary wildly in style and quality from one track to the next. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Leonard Cohen, so it probably all sounded wildly inconsistent. By the time 1988 wheeled around I fancied a fresh go at it with a new name and efforts made to ensure that successive tracks would at least sound like the work of the same person. Illyana Rasputin was a character whom I fancied from the X-Men comics, of which I was reading a ton at the time due to having very little in the way of a sex life. It sounded vaguely exotic and not even remotely industrial, so that was what I went with. This tape was recorded on and off throughout 1988 around at John's house. I and the Village, Pure Finger Point at Earth Scum, In the Ruins of Becelaere, Waterside at 12, Let the Bayonets Speak! and Groove 1889 all came from previous incarnations as Do Easy songs, or at least demos left at varying stages of completion, but half of these compositions are John's doing, and he's the reason I can still listen to any of it without wincing too hard.

The details at which I still wince are entirely mine, and time hasn't healed the wound. Because it was the eighties and I had everything Throbbing Gristle ever recorded (including the ludicrously rare private Death Factory tapes from '76, so nyer nyer nyer all you Johnny-come-lately part-timers) I spent at least some of the time exploring controversial ideas and imagery, just like every other sad fucker with a delay pedal and a copy of that Emlyn Williams book about the moors murderers. Accordingly one of these songs is named after a painting by Adolf Hitler, and another was one of Mussolini's catchphrases, to whom there are a number of additional lyrical references for the sake of flavouring one's Riesling with just a splash of urine for sake of texture. Personally I always saw the referencing of the transgressive as roughly in the tradition of the Surrealists and their like. It honestly never occurred to me that there might actually be genuine Hitler enthusiasts out there strumming acoustic guitars whilst singing about Himmler being a bit like some nice flowers, and getting away with it because industrial music fans are generally as thick as fucking pig shit. When not making daring references to bad 'uns, I was mostly singing about how I hadn't had it off in ages. Why this should have been so is obviously a mystery to me.

It actually took me a couple of years to get around to shoving this tape out under the banner of Runciter Corporation, a name stolen from a Philip K. Dick novel under which I also produced various comics and fanzines. I ran off about fifty or so copies, so far as I can tell, although I'm not sure how many of those I actually sold. The tape was also released by Carl Howard's Audiophile Tapes in the US. I'm not sure how many Carl sold, but from what I can tell by looking at his facebook page, he doesn't appear to own a yacht, so US sales may not even have hit single figures. I probably should have recorded a better tape, I suppose, although for all its innumerable flaws, I've heard worse - even if I do say so myself. I only wish the good bits had been my fault.

Whilst I'm here, I feel I should mention Space Patrol!, Carl Howard's net radio show for which there is a facebook page to be found here, and a dedicated group here. It seems like something worth supporting, so you know what to do.

Download the eleven songs and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Rorschach Love Song
2 - I and the Village
3 - Sad Fascination February 1988
4 - Pure Finger Point at Earth Scum
5 - In the Ruins of Becelaere
6 - Scavenger
7 - Waterside at 12
8 - Let the Bayonets Speak!
9 - Musik in My Gasmask
10 - Pittsburgh
11 - Groove 1889


Return to Index