Neil, Richard, Simon, Stewart - Durian Durian (1992) C46

The cover, although informative, isn't visually arresting so the above is a picture of all four persons involved superimposed over one another, somehow amounting to Stewart Walden and a few blurry wisps, which represents the music only poorly but at least gives you something to look at.

The four persons were Neil Campbell, Richard Youngs, Simon Wickham-Smith, and Stewart Walden. Neil Campbell you may remember from ESP Kinetic, SWANC (with Stewart Walden), Vibracathedral Orchestra and others, the first two of which are represented by adjacent material right here, if you would be so good to have a look in the index as linked at the foot of this page. Richard Youngs was something to do with Omming for Woks, whom I remember from somewhere or other, and all of them have been in the A Band at one point or another.

Durian Durian seems to result from all four of them recording sounds entirely independent of each other, with the whole lot then mixed together - simultaneous playback, so I gather - resulting in this tape. Anything involving Neil Campbell is usually worth a listen, and this one is no exception.

Download the tapir by clicking on this link.

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SWANC - Mouldy Roll (1992) C90

Here's another one which fell off the back of the Pumf catalogue. Older boys and girls will recall Neil Campbell from ESP Kinetic and from er... being Neil Campbell, accounting for the NC of the acronym. The SW is Stewart Walden who was involved with Smell & Quim amongst other things. I looked him up on Discogs to see if he'd been a member of Bruce Hornsby & the Range or anyone else you will have heard of, and discovered that I actually know the guy on facebook under a different name and never realised; although to be fair this isn't even the first time this has happened. Come to think of it, the previous bloke turned out to have been in Smell & Quim too, which suggest there's a bit of a pattern there.

 

Anyway, apparently this was their third album. As you will hear, it belongs to the general pissing about with a tape recorder genre, in this case yielding a ton of short, occasionally tuneful blasts of absurdity, of which I feel Morons is, in particular, a masterpiece of its kind. As a whole, the thing reminds me of the Residents' Commercial Album, albeit vaguely. Mr. Walden has informed me that the live bonus tracks were actually Stan's idea - they appear in two selections at the end of each side on the cassette, but this sounded untidy to me so I've shuffled them all together to the end of the thing (tracks 40-52).

 

Enjoy.

Download all fifty-fucking-two tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - A Song for Stan
2 - (song)
3 - Good Old Casio
4 - The Park
5 - Mankin' Mr. Big Tits
6 - Fankle
7 - The Ballad of Sticky Foster
8 - Teenage Lobotomy
9 - Waiting for Little Red Riding Hood
10 - Middle Eight
11 - Git
12 - Something of Love
13 - Middle Eight
14 - Rub Down Transfer Song
15 - How to Tell Kids About Pee-Wee
16 - When I Fell in Love
17 - Ten Stewart Walden Lookalikes
18 - Windmill in Old Amsterdam
19 - Me 163 Komet
20 - Hit the People Who Can't Hit Back
21 - Skateboard Song
22 - Caspar the Friendly Ghost
23 - Mouldy Roll
24 - Morons
25 - Twenty-Twenty
26 - Prophet of the Age of Hourous
27 - Screaming Trouble
28 - Backpack
29 - Fit a Little Song
30 - Locked Groove
31 - I'm Glad
32 - Dr. Hungry Casio
33 - Woman in Love
34 - Working Men's Feet
35 - Hatstand Man
36 - Turnip Tulip
37 - Windowsill
38 - Ogle Drive
39 - Don't Pass Me By
40 - SWANC
41 - Feelin' Groovy
42 - Sound of Silence
43 - Morons
44 - Mmmorning
45 - Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue
46 - Lenty!
47 - Home on the Range
48 - Got It Together Again
49 - Caspar the Friendly Ghost
50 - Here's What to Do...
51 - Mom, I Gave the Cat Some Acid
52 - Motorbike Song

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ESP Kinetic - Dance as Hallucination (1985) C60

If you're not sure who Neil Campbell is, there's always Wikipedia. His name came up a lot when I was churning out gushing reviews of stuff no-one listened to for Sound Projector, and it was a truly weird moment when the penny dropped and I realised it was actually Neil C (as he signed his letters) from ESP Kinetic to whom I used to write back in the sixteenth century; so even though no-one knows much about his early work, lost as it is in the hallowed mists of time, as I keep trying to explain to any passing clowns who've taken it upon themselves to write the history of (cough cough) industrial music - that vital early chapter in the story of Ministry - some of us were actually there, fuckface.

 

ESP Kinetic were the first band I heard who inspired the thought, this is what Psychic TV should have sounded like - at least based on their apparent interests, penchant for weird noise, and not being scared of the occasional tune; and those of you who have been paying attention will recall they also turned up on Fear Eats the Soul, they being Neil and Andrew Watson, although ESP Kinetic seemed to occasionally bring in others depending on the demands of the music. When I emailed Neil to ask if it would be okay to give away his ancient history for free, his response was:

Digitise those old tapes? Ha! You are insane for keeping them, but by all means do it. There was a CDR I did and the LP on Harbinger that dredges the "good" bits of those tapes, plus other bits, so not sure who'd bother to wade through the rest.

So, there's a Harbinger album I'll be tracking down, but in the mean time here's the first ESP Kinetic tape, so far as I'm aware. It probably won't change your life, but it still sounds good to me. The Message is No Message and Mission will follow when I get around to digitising those. 

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

Tracks:
1 - ESPK
2 - Wall of Words
3 - Waltzing on Air
4 - Passive Partner
5 - Dance as Hallucination
6 - Slumber-Shake
7 - Jump Deeper
8 - Cannibal Chant
9 - Kissing
10 - Ambition
 

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Death Pact International - Fear Eats the Soul (1986) 2C60

All this Grey Wolves has set me to thinking about how I'd once collaborated with them as part of something called Death Pact International, and yet never heard the finished result. In fact I think I only realised that it had ever existed when Stream Angel, another contributor, had mentioned it on facebook. The deal had been that various persons with whom Trev of Opera for Infantry (or probably Irritant by that point) regularly corresponded should send in a tape of sound, noise, music, or whatever, and that it would all be processed, mixed together, and used as part of Death Pact International; so I suppose you could say it was a weirdy music supergroup on some level. Anyway, I sent him something called Rubbish Like You* - a title I'd pinched from Pok-a-Tok fanzine as produced by Lennart Eilersen of Enhoenta Bödlar - and that was the last I heard, although to be fair I was moving around a lot at the time so it's likely Trev either lost my address or that a copy never got forwarded to me from somewhere I'd been living. Anyway, duly reminded of this tape I had a look around for an MP3 version on the internet, but was only able to find one on a site which, for whatever reason, wouldn't let me download stuff. However, Nils Inge Graven was able to download the thing and thus kindly furnished me with a copy of the files, which was nice. So here, by way of a slight swerve, is something I haven't actually digitised from my own collection, but am sharing because I'm on the fucker.

The files I received took the form of four sides of the double tape each digitised as a single continuous track, which offended my sensibilities so I've put it all through Audacity and re-edited the thing, cleaned it up and so on, although as with Tomorrow We Live, the distinctions I've made as to where one track ends and another begins are guesswork on my part. I've also cleaned up the scans of the accompanying artwork and booklet. You're welcome.

Fear Eats the Soul is collectively the work of members of Opera for Infantry, Con-Dom, Kapotte Muziek, ESP Kinetic, Sperm Culture, Do Easy, Face in the Crowd, and a few others I haven't heard of. My recommendation is that you listen to it as though it were a single two-hour piece.

It's great to hear this thing at last, and I feel sort of proud to have been involved. 

*: The original track as it was when I sent it off to Trev can be heard on Gravesend.

Download the twenty-three tracks and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Bass / Roots Intro
2 - Madrid de Dia
3 - Sucked In
4 - Crawl
5 - Rubbish Like You
6 - Dumb Dogs
7 - Trigger Mechanism
8 - Mutation Nation
9 - Raw Aktion
10 - Piano //?
11 - Daddy, Fuck My Head
12 - Affirmation
13 - Rage Beater
14 - Clear Blue Sky
15 - Burning Down the Walls of Fire
16 - FDN
17 - What Are You Doing Tomorrow?
18 - Tentaciones
19 - Troops Rape Grenada
20 - Red Peace
21 - Ever Forward
22 - Kill at Will
23 - Banned Exit
 
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