Real Time 1 (1982) C90

Some Digital Dinosaurs yesterday.

I thought I'd run out of compilation tapes, having digitised all of those in my possession, then remembered that Robert Cox, the man behind Unlikely Records, had very kindly sent me digitised files of the volumes of his Real Time series which I hadn't already posted here. So these are tapes from the eighties which I've only heard this year for the first time, which is exciting. The two volumes I have in my physical possession were posted here and here,  and I'm sharing those links so as to avoid having to repeat myself as to what Real Time was all about.

I'm pretty much in the dark about most of these people. I recall the Digital Dinosaurs from back in the day, and it turns out they were from Coventry so I probably read about them in Martin Bowes' Alternative Sounds. There's a bit about them here, and I've just noticed that the excellent Mr. Zchivago has a shitload of material on his Die or DIY? blog. In Embrace were something to do with the guy from 3 Way Dance and Peter Becker of Eyeless in Gaza, amongst others, and I remember What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen fanzine of Leamington Spa going positively apeshit over their album, from which I assume these excerpts are taken. I also recall Jonathan Rush from somewhere or other, and the Ffuts used to be known as the Stuff. I'm sure you all know who was behind EG Oblique Graph, and the Same was Robert Cox himself, which is why it probably reminds you of Rimarimba. I don't know anything about the rest, but hopefully you'll agree this is a nice little collection, full of surprises. Quite keen on the Emergency Exit tracks myself.

I'll post volume two in another couple of weeks once I'm back from my holiday in Airstrip One.

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

Tracks:
1 - Syd Nairda - Nevada
2 - Lurch - High-Steppin' Mamma
3 - Digital Dinosaurs - Sideways Man
4 - Digital Dinosaurs - Red Fire Engine
5 - Jonathan Rush - Synthasalsa
6 - Jonathan Rush - New Dawn
7 - Y Celfi Cam - Mab y Gweinidog
8 - In Embrace - [excerpts]
9 - EG Oblique Graph - Scar
10 - The Ffuts - Luscious Love
11 - The Same - 453-549
12 - Tom Cramp & the Epileptic Ducks - Die for Doggy
13 - R.J. Curd - [excerpts]
14 - Emergency Exit - Falling for You
15 - Emergency Exit - Voices
16 - Part Form - [excerpts]
17 - Future Future - Operator
18 - The Toy Shop - [excerpts]
19 - Extension-Two - Gaps
20 - General Motors - Tubular Turd
21 - General Motors - Live Wasp Omelette, Lung
22 - Piers of the Realm - Manic
23 - Someone Else - Something Else
24 - The Same - Set Zero
25 - The Same - Hot & Cold
26 - The Same - Larruping Shuftly
27 - The Same - If You Want To, Do So!
28 - The Same - Du Ma Casa
 
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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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Impulse 6 (1996) C40

Still wading through the longest ever Apostles tape, I'm afraid, so here's another Impulse compilation in the meantime. This one features, amongst other things, a pretty great Muslimgauze track. The Fragment Collage is an assemblage of material from the label of the same name featuring Moisten Before Use, Erixma, and others - didn't seem to be much point in breaking it all up into individual snippets, so you'll just have to refer to the cover in order to work out what's what; or you could look at the mag, because one thing I finally found time to do was to scan all of my back issues of Impulse, and scans of Impulse 6 are included as a separate folder within this download. Keeping in mind that I'm inexplicably missing issue four, scans of the rest have now been added to the download folders of their respective tapes, which you can find in the index at the foot of this blog post. Impulse issue one, for which I never had the tape, has been added to the download for the Impulse 2 tape and I've even chucked in the issue with the Death in June stuff because if you really need to read Mr. Forbes amazing thoughts on pleasuring oneself over grainy photos of dead Nazi stormtroopers, then that's your tough titty.

Download the tape, cover and mag by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The Fragment Collage
2 - Thieves of Impressions - Savennenland
3 - Hex Minora - Embrace of Evil
4 - Muslimgauze - Thief Severed Hand
5 - M. Nomized - Untitled
 
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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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The Last Supper (1984) C70

The Last Supper was probably the better known of the compilations released by Adventures in Reality, released roughly around the time of Third Mind's Red Sand - probably eclipsed by Red Sand to some extent, which is a shame as I'd say it's a tighter compilation with a slightly higher quota of surprises. I think it originally came with issue L of Adventures in Reality, but mine is a presumably later edition, so I didn't get the mag, so if you want scans I'm afraid you'll just have to keep looking. I'm sure they're out there. I've already seen other virtual versions of The Last Supper out there, although the one I downloaded was in mono with each side of the tape digitised as a single track, so this is digitised from my own copy of the tape, with which I've made a bit of fucking effort, know what I mean?

No-one contributing to this tape should really require much introduction, possibly excepting Gorilla Aktiv (of whom I'd never heard at the time but are wonderful and sounded a lot like DAF) and Tex Mirror H (who eventually gave birth to In the Nursery). Otherwise, Alan probably already said it all here. Apparently there's a chance The Last Supper may be getting a CD reissue, at which point this post will disappear for obvious reasons, so enjoy it while you can.

Finally, there's a split second of the Test Department track cutting out on my copy, which sounds like a fault with the copying, maybe a loose connection or something. I've cut and pasted in an effort to repair it, which probably isn't perfect; so if you're tapping your toe to Forward and suddenly feel like you missed a beat, that would be my doing, but I still say it sounds better than a crackle and a moment of silence.

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

Tracks:
1 - SPK - Ich Klage An
2 - SPK - Satori
3 - Gorilla Aktiv - Spiegelbild
4 - Gorilla Aktiv - Ottos Pornos
5 - Autentisk Film - Polaroid
6 - Smersh - X, X, X, Going on L
7 - Bourbonese Qualk - In the Flesh
8 - Test Department - Forward
9 - Audio Leter - A 'Lot' of Time
10 - Muslimgauze - Metropolis
11 - Muslimgauze - Trans/Time
12 - Tex Mirror H - Sister
13 - Attrition - Mr. Toma

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v/a - A Person's Healthy Guide to Listening (1991) C70

This was a cassette release by Regelwidrig Recordings, the work of one Simon Kelly whom I vaguely recall as a wonderful guy with whom Glenn Wallis, myself, and Paul Condon shared pints at Bradley's Spanish Bar in Hanway Street. Annoyingly, it was one of those cassette releases which came clad in fancy, fiddly packaging which meant you couldn't just slot it in with the others on the shelf. I appreciate the effort to keep things interesting and special, but there were a few people guilty of this sort of thing and it was always kind of annoying, and the end result nearly always seemed kind of half-arsed and never as good as the artist presumably hoped it would look. This one came in a large card box with a photograph slapped on the cover at an angle and an apostrophe missing from the title; and anyway, should it not be A Person's Guide to Healthy Listening? Wouldn't that make more sense? Anyway, opening the box - which is no longer necessary since it all fell apart with age and now looks even crappier - caused bits of paper to spill forth across one's listening space - track lists, information, and bits of artwork which I presume to have been supplied by the individual artists because they're all different shapes and sizes and only five of the contributors are represented in this way.

Which is probably why I never listened to the fucking thing more than once, which is a shame because Simon clearly put a lot of effort into it and spent some money on getting it properly mastered and so on, as you will hear. In fact, this tape makes for pretty convincing listening once you've sat down, having swept up a million bewildering pictures of Islamic shoes supplied by Bryn Jones, the man who invented the racist instrumental, it could be argued.

You should probably know of at least a few of these artists, and of the ones I hadn't heard of either, there's not much I can tell you. I always assumed Shock City was something to do with Stefan Jaworzyn of Whitehouse who briefly ran a similarly named label and publishing imprint, but apparently not.

Anyway, enjoy!

Download the thirteen tracks and various related scans by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Nocturnal Emissions - Raised Beach
2 - Shock City - One World Before the World's Ways Waste the World Away
3 - Das Kunst - Probe
4 - Bourbonese Qualk - O Sonambulo
5 - Konstruktivists - Desire (part one)
6 - Konstruktivists - Desire (part two)
7 - Asmus Tietchens - Lemminge
8 - Jouissance - Delirium Dosage
9 - Illusion of Safety - Musikfuck
10 - Shock City - Alienateaghurkin
11 - Due Process - RRRadio WCVW Extract
12 - Contact with a Curve - Balloon
13 - Muslimgauze - United States of Islam


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