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 - Meridians 1 (1983) C60

It was going to be Vittore Baroni's TRAX 0682 compilation this week, but at last minute I noticed someone had already stuck it on CD, so you should probably buy it if you want to hear it, mkay? Anyway, Larry Peterson sent me Meridians 1 as a swap for something I'd sent him which I remember thinking was quite a lot better, so I was briefly miffed, not least because it seemed obvious that someone had given him the tape as a freebie and he'd thought it was shit and so passed it on to me. So that wasn't a great start, and there was something I didn't like about the cover (and I'm usually a fan of Malcolm Garrett too), and the whole enterprise felt like the Hayward Gallery getting involved in the tape scene and showing us uncultured fucks how we should have done it instead of all those tacky pictures of Hitler adorning our shit Woolworths cassettes of short-wave radio noise. There was something a bit up itself about Touch, or so it seemed to me.

So imagine my surprise when I pluck this from the shelf as a last minute replacement for TRAX 0682, digitise the thing, and discover that it's actually pretty decent, as I would have realised had I listened to it more than once. The contributors were mostly established artists with record contracts, or close friends of established artists with record contracts, but the music is mostly decent, or the very least, interesting. Most of this lot shouldn't really require an introduction, although for what it's worth, NOTi is also Andrew McKenzie, and the Ludus track seems to feature SPK's Graeme Revell on saxomaphone and Dave Formula from Magazine tickling the ivories. You may notice that the track list given on the sleeve does that fucking annoying thing of featuring mysterious interludes identified in predictable lower case but with no artist, as though they was done by a fucking ghost or summink! This is a pain in the arse for a digitiser such as myself given that I have to divide everything into proper tracks, regardless of stray snatches of speech scattered hither and thither in the name of art. Anyway, I've followed the track list given on Discogs which blows the whistle on himself of the Hafler Trio as author of all the scrappy bits of art challenging the listener's preconceptions about something or other. I should probably also mention that I'm not entirely sure I've correctly labelled tracks 14 through to 17, or whether one of those is actually another one of Andrew McKenzie's medium questioning excerpts from an episode of Nationwide.

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

Tracks:
1 - Matador - Nowever, Ornever
2 - AC Marias - The Whispered Year
3 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil one
4 - Pascal Gabriel - Machu Pichu
5 - Matador - Mother Earth Film Music
6 - Touch 33° - Oral Tradition
7 - Graham Lewis - He Said "Argh..."
8 - John Foxx - The Quiet Man IV
9 - Simon F. Turner - Wash
10 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil two
11 - Current 93 - Salt
12 - Touch 33° - The Crucible
13 - Test Department - Efficiency
14 - S/Z - Text
15 - The Pathfinders - Long Shadows
16 - NOTi - Diagnosis
17 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil three
18 - Ludus - Corpse Candle

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