Power to Destroy (1993) 2C60

Usual terms and conditions apply regarding imagery which is probably supposed to upset you, aside from which, Trev really surpassed himself with the packaging of this one and probably would have won a design award were it not for all the pictures of rotting corpses. The cover was photocopied onto card, with each one presumably individually assembled so as to resemble something like a cigar box, with the tapes kept in a slide out tray thing. The tape itself was likewise pretty decent, with a fair bit of sonic variety, and certainly more than you might have expected from the scarier end of the electronic landscape. A few of these are unlikely to require any introduction (and the Ramleh track is blistering, by the way), and I'm sure you're perfectly capable of Googling the others, because I've never heard of them either.

Four of these tracks actually came from me, these being the work of Konstruktivists (of which I was a member at the time), Family of Noise, and Dada X (both of which are represented elsewhere on this blog, so please feel free to have a poke around in the index linked at the foot of this entry) and, at the risk of offending purists, I've actually replaced the tracks as digitised from my copy of the compilation with copies digitised from the master tapes. So they're the exact same tracks, just better quality through not being fourth generation copies.

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

Tracks:
1 - Final Solution - Right to Hate
2 - M. Behrens / Junta - Soundtrack for Original Torture Performance
3 - Agony for Pleasure - Primal Scream
4 - Konstruktivists - Monsieur Y
5 - Sudden Infant - Destroy Your Manipulators
6 - MAUTHAUSEN - Kill the P.A.S.T. (1992)
7 - Con-Dom - Patriotism
8 - Ramleh - Melt the Cube (live)
9 - Family of Noise - Upwards and Outwards
10 - Genocide Organ - Kill Useless Nations
11 - Had.It - Interrogatorio a Pietro Maso
12 - Academy 23 / Grey Wolves - Terror Intensifies
13 - Exit
14 - Smell & Quim - Cunnilinguaphone
15 - Family of Noise - Sometimes I
16 - Taint - Orifice Training
17 - Dada X - Chocolate Disco
18 - M. Behrens - Splatterdance (II)
19 - Sudden Infant - Birth is the Beginning of Destruction
20 - Nailchrist - Nails and Blood
21 - Third Organ - Fuck Your Organs
 
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Opera for Infantry - Live 1984 (1984) C60

This was never released, and I don't think it was intended for release, but Trev sent me a copy so here it is. Opera for Infantry - whom younger readers may know better as the Grey Wolves - had taken to performing as a more traditional punk act with guitars and pogoing (presumably), as I already explained here. This was a recording of one of those gigs at Amesbury Sports Centre, May 1984. It's a bit of a racket and I was never entirely certain of what the individual songs were called and have therefore left it as a single piece of music, so you could probably still pretend it's Ramleh if you like.

The rest of the tape was filled with three tracks more recognisably by OFI. It Was Another was apparently a work in progress. The tape actually sounds like it contains five or six pieces of music, and my guess is that a couple of those pieces are actually a single track with a poor quality edit in the middle, so I've had to use my skill and judgement to decide what is what. This also means that Tears and Laughter for a Drowned Man may actually be the second half of Barking at Planes, and the thing I've given the title of Tears and Laughter for a Drowned Man may be just a field recording made on the cassette which Trev later taped over when making me a copy of their live gig - I don't know.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Amesbury Sports Centre 12/5/84
2 - It Was Another
3 - Barking at Planes
4 - Tears and Laughter for a Drowned Man

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Tomorrow We Live (1986) C60

Last week I posted Opera for Infantry material from a tape I'd made up myself, copied from things which Trev Ward had sent me over the years. The last track on the tape was a massive slab of noise identified only as being by Irritant, a name Trev briefly used for his solo recordings. I had a hunch I'd probably just copied it straight from Tomorrow We Live for the sake of filling up a tape, so I went to check, then decided I may as well just go ahead and digitise the thing seeing as I was planning to get around to it eventually; meaning that April is Grey Wolves Month here at Ferric Archaeology Towers.

In between the end of Opera for Infantry and the beginning of the Grey Wolves, Trev recorded solo as both Irritant and Nails ov Christ, although I can never remember which secret identity came first. Anyway, this one was a split tape with Ramleh. The Ramleh side seems to be from some live performance, although I have no clue as to where or when, and the booklet doesn't give anything away. It also seems to share a roughly similar track list to a few of their early Broken Flag tapes - from what I can see on Discogs - which I never actually heard, so I don't know how well it stands up in the wider context of their oeuvre. Ramleh's Blowhole is one of my favourite records, but is almost the work of a different band, and their tracks on Broken Flag's Statement album are pretty solid, but I guess you probably have to be a bigger fan of Ramleh than I ever was to get something from this live set. I mean, it's okay, just sounds like a lot of other things. Titles appear where it seemed like a new track had begun to my ears, because otherwise it's just twenty minutes of more or less continuous noise. I know I could have left it as a single track whilst editing the sound file and no-one would have given a shit, but it felt as though it would be wrong to just leave it, because I'm a pedant.

Same with the Irritant side of the tape - the noise changes about eighteen minutes in so I've assumed that's where Assault System starts. I have to say, this Irritant material is probably one of the most powerful slabs of noise I think I've heard, and I vaguely recall thinking it was about the best thing Trev had ever done at the time.

I wasn't going to bother scanning the booklet because I'm sure you've all seen pictures of bad guys before, but what the fuck - here it is scanned and included with the download for the sake of being thorough. Enjoy.

I seem to recall the tape came loose in a sort of envelope made of an A4 photocopy folded over and stapled closed, which annoyed me because I LIKE EVERYTHING TO BE NICE, so I made my own cover (using photocopies of the envelope version) for the sake of sticking it in a case and neatly filing it away with my other tapes, like nature intended; so I've scanned my version of the cover. I don't have the envelope version. It's probably worth about a million quid now too.

Finally, in case it still requires an explanation, you will notice that the artwork of this tape features a heapin' helpin' of Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, whom older readers of the Daily Mail may remember with some affection. My feeling, based on years of personal correspondence with Trev and the fact that I'm an adult, is that the presentation of Tomorrow We Live was intended to provoke an extreme and unpleasant reaction, rather than being as it is because, as some have suggested, Trev thought Oswald Mosley was probably a right nice bloke. The intention of most of Trev's work, as it seems to me, has been to provoke horror of such strength as to inspire change within society, so it's simply not the case that he's ever presented a vision of society he would like you to support. He's trying to scare you into pushing back. I personally think he may have misjudged the effect of what he was doing on a couple of occasions, but the Grey Wolves were never the musical wing of the far right, regardless of how it may have seemed from a cursory glance. Were it otherwise, I wouldn't be sharing this thing, mkay?

Smiley face. Smiley face.

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

Tracks:
1 - Irritant - British Blood
2 - Irritant - Assault System
3 - Ramleh - Throatsuck
4 - Ramleh - A Return to Slavery
5 - Ramleh - Nordhausen
6 - Ramleh - New Force
7 - Ramleh - Phenol
8 - Ramleh - Koprolagnia

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War Drum - Complex Adaptive System (1998) 12"

This would have been a five track 12" EP except I never managed to get the money together to have the thing pressed, and the longer I waited, the more I realised no-one would buy it or even want to distribute it, and eventually I stopped caring. I seem to recall that Mark of Impulse fanzine (and Konstruktivists) ran me off twenty-five CDR copies, but my disillusionment with CDRs had set in by the time they came in the mail and I never did anything with them. It was recorded at JTI Studios in Brixton with Ian McKay engineering - same place as various Alternative TV and Skullflower records, and (as I've only realised just now) Ramleh's fucking fantastic Blowhole album. It would be nice to think some of the magic rubbed off, but it probably didn't. Anyway, I was at JTI recording a load of stuff with UNIT, probably material for the album which never happened and (frankly) would have been about a million times better than the one which did, and I've a feeling there were a couple of days we had booked upon which it turned out that Dave or Pete or someone wasn't going to be able to make it. Andy was going to ask Ian, who ran the place, if he could just have his money back for those days and let someone else make use of the studio, but I said I'd pay for those days and use them to record some of my own stuff. So that's what I did. This was January and February, 1998.

 

As you can probably hear, I was suffering from neofolk poisoning at the time, but never mind. Penitent wasn't really supposed to be on the non-existent 12" EP, but I recorded it seeing as I had some time left after we'd finished the first five. Lonesome Town is a Ricky Nelson cover, for some reason which made sense in 1998, and the other tracks, excepting Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G, are fancier versions of things I'd already recorded on various War Drum tapes, as can be found elsewhere on this blog. Most of this was just me, although Andy Martin sang backing, played drums, and delivered the spoken vocal on Shoemaker. Ed Pinsent, whom you may recall from either Pestrepeller, Mystery Dick, Sound Projector magazine or his Resonance FM show, played guitar on Shoemaker.

I don't know. It all seemed to make sense at the time.

Download these six tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - A Marriage
2 - Toltec Inheritance
3 - Hummingbird
4 - Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G
5 - Lonesome Town
6 - Penitent
 
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