Antonym - Blood and Aphorisms (1991) C60

Here's the second tape by Antonym. The first can be found here if you missed it, in which case you will additionally find that the associated blog post tells you all you need to know about Antonym, or at least as much as I know myself. This one doesn't even seem to be on Discogs, which is odd. I don't know if it received a more limited distribution or something. Anyway, as you will hear, it's more good stuff in a similar vein, and a vein which reminds me a little of er... early Nocturnal Emissions combined with the more abrasive side of the Severed Heads, maybe with a faint je ne sais quoi of Esplendor Geométrico, P16D4 - something in that general ballpark. I think my only complaint is that these tracks could have been a lot longer, but I suppose if that bothers you, maybe you could just listen to them twice or something.

 

Someone do a vinyl retrospective of this guy please.

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

Tracks:
1 - Principle Rising
2 - Prime Mover
3 - Portrait of the Artist as Shark Chyme
4 - Metal Beast IV
5 - Noisework I
6 - Miasma
7 - Pushing Brick Walls
8 - Metal Beast I
9 - Polished Air
10 - Malachite
11 - Cages for the Spirit and Cemetries for the Soul
12 - Mumiai
13 - Erubescent Splash on Chrome
14 - Tear Gas
15 - Present Tense
16 - Feed the Flaming Hunger
17 - AWB
18 - A Short Study in Feedback
19 - A New Face in Heaven
20 - Metal Beast II
21 - Survivor Type
22 - Morass
23 - Metal Beast V
24 - Radiation Complication
25 - Divine Falling

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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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War Drum - Fatu Hiva (2000) C90

Fatu Hiva was the fourth tape I recorded as War Drum, the first I can still listen to without wincing, and possibly the best thing I've ever recorded - which I state as someone who generally regards most of his own back catalogue as disappointing at best. War Drum's mission statement (what I thought I was playing at) can be extrapolated by referring to previous entries, but could probably be summarised as Death In June with Precolombian Mexican lore in preference to the European stuff and associated Nazi tendencies. I was trying to do something folky without necessarily sounding folky - Looking for Aztlán notwithstanding. Most of this stuff makes sense if you'd boned up on Mexican history and Quetzalcoatl as much as I had, so please feel free to visit the anthropology or mythology sections of your local book store in order to learn more. That said, Caught in the Glare was inspired by my having read up on the planet Mercury, and is - I suppose - a sound painting, if you will, of radiation blasting back out into space from the planet's night-side surface as it slowly turns. The track Fatu Hiva was inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's account of his living on a remote island of the same name.

Musical points of potential interest might be the covers of tracks by Severed Heads and Tuxedo Moon, also that Andy Martin of the Apostles, Academy 23, and UNIT plays electric guitar and provides backing vocals on Looking for Aztlán; and The Cage and Night Song were recorded with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists on vocals when he came to visit one evening. If you want to dig really deep, part of New God was recorded on a digital studio thing owned by James and Jason of Orange Can, who were NME darlings for a couple of months but somehow failed to become the next Stone Roses.

As for the rest, my listening was pretty much exclusively rap, R&B and the like by this point, the influence of which you'll be able to hear in some of these tracks - particularly For Christopher Rios which was my tribute to the recently deceased Big Pun.

So there you go, on the strength of being arguably the least-shit thing I've ever done, please download and enjoy this one. Amazingly it sold about a hundred copies, or at least I had to do a second run of fifty copies at the place I used to use in Bromley, and by the time I got around to packing up all my shit to move to America, they were all gone; so even if I didn't sell every last one, Fatu Hiva was at least much easier to give away for free than all my other stuff.

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

Tracks:
1 - Caught In The Glare
2 - Chicoce Coatl
3 - Looking for Aztlán
4 - Fatu Hiva
5 - Kingdom Hall
6 - Southern Cross
7 - Maguey Hare
8 - Nation
9 - On Mission
10 - The Cage
11 - Jaguar Sun
12 - Caxtollice Toxcatl
13 - New God
14 - Night Song
15 - Celebración de la Noche Triste
16 - For Christopher Rios
17 - Tepetlaoztoc II
18 - Land Of Thorns

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