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.

Download the eighteen tracks, cover, and hilarious lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

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

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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?

Download this fucking crap by clicking on this link.

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

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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.

 

Download ten of these super hot disco extended twelves by clicking on this link, baby.

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)

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Total Big - Rehearsals 3 & 4 (1985) C90

Total Big should require no introduction providing you've read (or even downloaded and listened to) this, or even this. If on the other hand it seems like maybe they (or I suppose we) do need an introduction, then click on either or both of those words highlighted in orange in the previous sentence.

You're very welcome. 

Here's another ninety minutes as compiled by Chris, our drummer. Both rehearsals were in the kitchen of Hollytree House in Otham, Kent. The first thirteen songs (comprising side one of the cassette) date to Saturday the 7th of December, 1985, and the rest are from the following weekend, the 14th of December. This was the first stuff recorded since our debut gig on Wednesday the 27th of November at the art college as part of an all-night work-in held in protest of education cuts. The gig was short and noisy but fun seeing as we only had two and a half numbers worked out (Rock Sandwich, He Writes the Songs, and Ouch!!!), and it is acknowledged in my diary as follows:

It was the work-in today. Carl and Chris turned up in the evening, and Jude Hibbert back-combed my hair for me. The Submarines played, followed by He's Dead, Jim who were Pete Avery, Jel, Rob Coolen, and some guy from the painting department. Total Big played to a half empty canteen. We showed some TBM videos to a bunch of hyper-enthusiastic art foundation course guys and gals. I watched Saturday Night & Sunday Morning in the lecture theatre.

Crazy times, man. Crazy times.

I've a feeling one or more of the new songs on this tape may have been developed from stuff improvised at the gig, probably Are You My Mother? and Call It What You Want, although I could be mistaken. This tape also includes Carl pissing around on Chris's synthesiser and use of some sort of echo effect meaning the whole bears a much stronger resemblance to the work of Emerson, Lake & Palmer than the previous tape. Whilst obviously I'm biased, I find this one quite listenable in places, particularly Armchair Maniac and the formative thrashy version of Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'.

The cover is just yer bog standard inlay card which I couldnae be arsed to scan, and the poster above refers to a later gig at someone's house in 1986.

Download the twenty six songs by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
2 - Rock Sandwich
3 - Are You My Mother?
4 - He Writes the Songs
5 - Call It What You Want
6 - Armchair Maniac
7 - Ghost In My Trousers
8 - The Best Thing I Could Do
9 - Are You My Mother?
10 - Rock Sandwich
11 - He Writes the Songs
12 - He Believes
13 - Hippy Smashing Machine
14 - Are You My Mother?
15 - Ouch!!!
16 - Rock Sandwich
17 - He Writes the Songs
18 - It's No Fun
19 - On the Beach
20 - Big Buzz
21 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
22 - She Takes Me By the Hand
23 - Baby Bankrupt
24 - Are You My Mother?
25 - Call It What You Want
26 - Trust in Dust

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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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Envy (1986/7) C46

I wrote a bit about Envy here, and if you've been following this blog you may be familiar with Apricot Brigade, their earlier and probably slightly better incarnation. I wasn't actually aware of being in possession of any recordings of Envy until I was looking through a couple of compilation tapes of all sorts of shit and noticed I had this, which was nice as I thought nothing had endured from my brief couple of months of pressing buttons in this band. It isn't actually a C46 so much as one side of a C90 also featuring some crap I recorded in Wales on an art college field trip and er... FLM by Mel & Kim taped off the wireless (and which is surprisingly better than I remembered it being) - but a fair few of the tapes I've slapped on this blog are listed as C46, C90 or whatever mainly so as to indicate duration rather than to attribute origin. Sometimes the material doesn't even all come from the same tape, but listing them as a C60 or similar just seems tidier (and besides, who cares?)

Anyway, tracks one through to sixteen comprise a rehearsal conducted around Andy's house at some point during the summer of 1986, most likely August; and the title My Sorrow is just a guess as I have no memory of the song or what it was called. I could have edited out all of the pissing about and false starts, but I didn't want to so if you want just the songs themselves shorn of mysterious silences and Rajun noodling about on his guitar, just delete anything which isn't actually a song once you've downloaded it. Unfortunately the tape upon which I recorded this stuff was kind of fucked and a bit stretchy in places. I've done what I could to clean it up, and I think it's listenable, but it should probably be noted that any tremelo effects you can hear weren't our doing.

After I was chucked out of Envy, Andy was replaced by Rajun's brother, Prez, and this line up recorded a fantastic five track demo tape in 1987, produced by Tim Beeby and Dave of DTS Studios (it says here on the cover). I was going to supplement the rehearsal tracks with the five later studio recordings but by ridiculous coincidence, that tape is also fucked. I managed to digitise A Suicide but the other four sounded like they'd been drinking cough syrup; which is a pisser, but I suppose at least I rescued A Suicide, which is nice because I honestly think it's a work of art, easily the best thing this band ever wrote.

Download the eight songs and related fucking about by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
2 - Twenty One Years
4 - Pale Orchid
6 - We Will Fall
8 - Cut So Deep
12 - Cut So Deep II
14 - Cut So Deep III
16 - My Sorrow
17 - A Suicide

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The Dovers - Adam Ant is now Basil Brush's Straight Man (1991) C90

Just to get it out of the way, the title was an observation made by my friend Paul Woods and as such has no direct association with the tape or its contents beyond that it made me laugh, so that's what I wrote on the inlay card because it sounded more exciting than Rehearsals 1991 or whatever. I'm not even sure Carl was aware of ever having recorded a tape called Adam Ant is now Basil Brush's Straight Man, although I suppose he is now.

The fancy portastudio tracks on this collection were recorded at Carl's flat in Bermondsey back in 1991, with the final three being specifically attributed to Sunday the 27th of October, 1991. Furry Animals is actually a demo by Alan Mason who was our other, slightly more accomplished guitarist for a while. I think he recorded it so I could work out something to play along with it, or something of the sort, and it ended up on this tape for the sake of having everything in the same place. The other tracks, I Still Wet My Bed through to La La La La La, were recorded on John Jasper's karaoke machine in my shitty one-room bedsit in Chatham in either 1988 or '89 and appear out of sequence here (in terms of the recorded oeuvre of the Dovers) presumably having been originally recorded on a tape which we lost and then found again immediately following the recording of Drink It Down.

A lot of this stuff was made up more or less as it was recorded, sometimes recycling riffs or lines from earlier material, sometimes to later be given a more thorough treatment, although Call It What You Want and Louie Louie had been live standards for both the Dovers and Total Big, and Furry Animals got played a fair bit whilst Alan was a member. The quality is variable with some loss of one channel during a few of the songs recorded in Chatham. Additionally, the portastudio tracks sounded improbably treble-heavy so I've made some attempt to sort out the EQ on these sound files.

Adam Ant is now Basil Brush's Straight Man comprises twenty-three songs and is available to download for free. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band comprises a mere nine songs and will probably cost you a couple of quid. You do the math.

Download the twenty-three songs 'n' shit by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - When I Fall In Love
2 - The Great Masturbator
3 - When the Power Falls
4 - Precious Time
5 - Total Noise
6 - Words Are Useless
7 - Call It What You Want
8 - The Meaning Reveals Itself
9 - There Are Holes
10 - Drink It Down
11 - I Still Wet My Bed
12 - 1000 Hours in a Pit of Snakes
13 - The Group Collector
14 - Every Cliché in the Book
15 - A Vision of This World
16 - Chogi! Scrotina!
17 - Heartless Town
18 - I Wanna Hold Yr Hand
19 - La La La La La
20 - Furry Animals (instrumental)
21 - Back Home
22 - Partial Bastard
23 - Louie Louie

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