Active Denial (2018) C20

This was the other tape which came to me through some bloke taking a million years to post the record for which I had paid generous numismatic inducement - full story here if you can be bothered. When he suggested I pick a tape from the list he'd provided as compensation for his taking a million years to send me a Smell & Quim album, I went for this one by Active Denial, or possibly just called Active Denial, because I hadn't heard of any of them and the title sounded promising. 'A wise choice,' my contact remarked as though congratulating me on picking a particularly fine cigar from the available selection before again failing to get my fucking record in the mail for the millionth time.

Well, for what it's worth, it did indeed seem to be a wise choice. Excepting a few things by +DOG+ here and there, I don't really keep up with what's going on in power electronics and the like, so it's nice to hear something which, even if it does mostly what I expected it to do, still surprises me. This one is a single continuous assault comprising three tracks (my incrementation of which is mostly guesswork) with the sort of er... philosophical intensity I associate with the last years of Whitehouse; so I don't know what's going on here but it rewards repeat listening.

 

On the subject of things I don't know, we also have anything about the person or persons who recorded this - who were very cooperative and happy for me to share the tape, but asked that I refrain from linking their Bandcamp page, so I haven't; but Google is your friend, as smug internet pedants are wont to say, so I'm sure you can find out for yourself.

 

Download Active Denial by clicking on this link.

 

Tracks:

1 - Psalm
2 - Smoke
3 - Champagne

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The Gerogerigegege - Piano River (2016) C46

 

About this time last year I ordered a Smell & Quim album from someone I'm not going to incriminate by identifying (because describing what someone actually did apparently now counts as 'saying nasty things' about them in the noise twat microcosm), and who took a full eight months to send me the thing for reasons described in a series of increasingly lame excuses; but happily, he actually did eventually get off his fat ass and send me the record along with a bunch of freebie tapes. I hadn't asked for the tapes. He'd promised to chuck them in the package as compensation for the delay, even though it still took another six fucking months for said package to make it to the local post office. I didn't really want the tapes. I just wanted the record I'd paid for before I died of old age, but never mind.

Anyway, the Smell & Quim album was great - actually just about worth the wait. The tapes were of the usual kind which seem to do the rounds in noise circles - a crap plastic wallet containing a loose cassette and usually a photocopy of someone's knob, the equivalent of some postmodern wanker picking an empty crisp packet out of his bin, screwing it into a ball, and chucking it at you with the words, 'here - this is art. You can have it if you like.' Some might suggest such packaging strikes against the hegemony of boringly conventional cassette cases, but it always looks like they just couldn't be arsed to me - same as when I hear the words this is art in reference to anything which patently isn't. Make some fucking effort, dude.

To get to the point, now that I'm good and ready to do so, one of the tapes turned out to be this thing. I've never been particularly drawn to the whole Japanese noise thing, and the only legitimate reasons for anyone ever doing a poo on stage in front of the audience are 1) in the event of the venue lacking adequate restroom facilities, or 2) if you're playing support to the Electric Light Orchestra. Still, I'd at least heard of the Gerogerigegege so I gave it a listen, and as it turns out Piano River is not at all what I expected and is, in fact, pretty good. I couldn't really work out how he generated this noise, but presumably it's something involving turntables. Discogs breaks each side up into five pieces, which I've ignored because each sounds like a single work in five movements to me, just like you get with Beethoven and all of those guys. I assume this is the unofficial version issued by Michael Gillham, although given all the networking, I'd be surprised as to whether it was unofficial in the sense of Sting's I Hope the Russians Love Me Too triple vinyl bootleg (1986). Presumably being the unofficial version, I don't know if the sound quality has suffered. It seems a bit hissy, but then it still sounds pretty good to my ears.

 

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

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Radio Hajra (1989) C90

Here's another from the Chainsaw archive, digitised by Mr. Gallon, then incremented and shared here by me - meaning I've edited the two sound files (one for each side of the tape) into individual tracks for ease of listening, beyond which Richard has done a great job of sending me material which has thus far required little or no further attention regarding the EQ and so on - barring the first couple of minutes of this one lacking the full treble which is obviously a tape flaw and nothing either of us could do much about.

Radio Hajra is a new one on me, compiled by Paul Nonnen (Swing Jugend, Smell & Quim, Foldhead and others) and his pal Mark Martin with the intention of providing a slightly broader range of weird noises than had become the norm for 1989, hence the presence of screwy Beefheart-style blues growling in amongst the tape loops, musique concrete, improvisation and Rabelaisian noise. You'll probably recognise a couple of names - Ethnic Acid, Human Flesh, Bene Gesserit, and Mystery Hearsay amongst at least a few members of the extended Smell & Quim family; but the standard is high and the variety is such that there's nothing you have to sit through to get to the next decent track. One of the stand-outs is, I would say, the Abstract Skulls thing, and I've no fucking clue who they were.

If you're bored listening to this one, you probably need to seek medical advice.

 

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

Tracks: 

1 - Human Flesh - L'Accident
2 - LOW - Guides on Guard  
3 - Swing / Hajra - TV / Machine Noise   
4 - Milovan Srdenovic Singers featuring Diz Willis - Fitz McGurdy's Tail
5 - Ix Ex Splue - Mania
6 - Caruso - Untitled
7 - Mystery Hearsay - Random Riff Raff
8 - Andy Astle - Be Careful Jane
9 - Abstract Skulls - Just a Matter of Sliding It In
10 - Andy Astle - Slow Motion Woman
11 - Miss D - Untitled
12 - Ms. & Mr. D - Safe In Our Hands
13 - Ethnic Acid - Enhanta Dollar
14 - John Boardman - Orgasmic Circle
15 - Swing Jugend - Hothaus Farts
16 - Cajun Crocs - Get Out Your Brodelics
17 - Blind Boy Grunt - Bondage Song
18 - Ustad - A Daddy Like Charlie
19 - Bene Gesserit - Que Lit Lily?
20 - Mystery Hearsay - Petit Problem
21 - Diz Willis - Teenage Buggery
22 - GTOG - Don't Play With Your Penis Little Girl
23 - Swing Jugend - Albert's Fish
24 - Smell & Quim - Carmina Barnsley
25 - Milovan Srdenovic Singers - The Haunting of Monica Clay
26 - Ix Ex Splue / LOW - Powerful Minority (version)
27 - Tom Ato - A Well Oiled Fist
28 - John Boardman - The Orgasmic Circle of 330,216,446

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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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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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Onomatopoeia - Anal Almond (1996) C30

It's difficult to shake off the notion that power electronics must by definition be about the joys of a violent and unpleasant sexual deed or how Adolf Hitler was probably amazing in real life, but of course there's no real reason why it shouldn't explore controversial ideas and imagery associated with less obviously contentious subjects, a food allergy for example. This is where Onomatopoeia went with Anal Almond, limited to an edition of one-hundred, issued by a Japanese label in a fancy box physically including an actual almond as part of the artwork. The idea struck me as initially peculiar, but in Onomatopoeia's defence, what you hear on this cassette is probably of an intensity equivalent to what goes through my wife's head when she comes into contact with almonds. She's allergic too and has very strong feelings on the subject.

Anyway, regardless of anything else, this is a very substantial and satisfying slab of noise. I don't know much about Onomatopoeia beyond that it was the organ of Steve Fricker who ran Cheeses International - both a label and distribution - and occasionally worked with the mighty Smell & Quim. So there you go.

Download the tape and scans of the box it came in by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Pink Sugared Almonds
2 - Marzipan
3 - An Acrid Amygdalaceous Aroma

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Smell & Quim - The English Method (1988) C60

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the English Method changed my life, but it was definitely a revelation inspiring the question of why no-one had done it before. My own small corner of noisy DIY electronic shite had become unusually po-faced by about 1987, which is why I lost interest and took to reading X-Men comics. Popping my head back in to see if anyone was still around circa. 1991 or thereabouts, I realised that if I'd just hung on for another six months...

I appreciate that a lot of Nurse With Wound is essentially Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, but the jokes worked better if you'd been to art college, where Smell & Quim were a bit more Max Miller. Andy Martin described them as the Chas & Dave of power electronics, and I'm not sure that's entirely fair, but as descriptions go I suppose it does a job. I don't personally regard them as a novelty act or a comedy troupe, because it seems retarded to make such a distinction purely on the grounds of something having a sense of humour, rather than being stood in a corner sucking its cheeks in and thinking about Baudelaire.

Just listen to the fucker, okay?

Also, remember to wash your hands afterwards.

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

Tracks:
1 - Smelly Quim
2 - Nipples on Buttocks
3 - Shaft of a Goad
4 - Lurve
5 - The Gospel Accordion To James Anderton
6 - Man with Spirit
7 - Woman with Spunk
8 - Spirit Log Supplemental
9 - Encased In Rubber
10 - Fucker (live in Barnsley)
11 - Two Way Passages
12 - Paranoid
13 - Nag's Head
14 - Reprise
15 - Bunghole
16 - The English Method
17 - Yah Fucking Bastard

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Lead Shoes - Lead Up the Garden Path (1985) C46

Unlikely Records - whom I suppose might be best remembered for an early release of those Milovan Srdenovic numbers which were eventually reissued as Songs from West of the Pelvic Girdle - sent out a request for material. Put your best stuff on a C50, suggested Robert Cox, and if I like it we'll release it on Unlikely Records. I put together a Do Easy tape, which was rejected for obvious reasons, but I also mentioned the proposal to Steve Coots, with whom I shared a house. Like myself, Steve was on the Time Based Media course at Maidstone College of Art. To be honest, he could be fucking hard work at times, but he was often funny and I really liked the music which he recorded in the college sound studio under the name Lead Shoes.

 

Unfortunately, Unlikely Records didn't seem to like Lead Shoes any more than they had liked Do Easy, so I offered to put the thing out on my own label. Lead Up the Garden Path, was Steve's best of tape. There's a potted history of the band on the cover, included with the download, which I can't be arsed to type out here, but for what it's worth I recall Eat Your Peas as being fucking great, and I really wish I'd kept a copy, or that Steve had included it here, but never mind. Steve was into a lot of music which I couldn't stand and still can't - Pink Floyd and Genesis, but also Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and those guys, the influences of which you can probably hear on this collection. Neither the Cockney Rejects nor Sham 69 had established much of a presence in his record collection. I'm not even sure he owned a copy of Machine Gun Etiquette. Mental.

 

Lead Shoes were named after a pseudo-surrealist film by Sidney Peterson which Steve loved, although I wasn't that impressed when I saw it as part of our film course. Steve later ended up in a somewhat laboured wacky folk band with Charles Thompson called Heads on Springs. They were a sort of trying too hard hey kids, poetry isn't just for squares type operation which I prefer not to remember in detail, just as I prefer not to remember sharing a house with Steve in detail, but even with such unpleasantries in mind, it has to be said that the guy recorded some fucking great music. It also has to be said that Steve McGarrigle's wonderful trumpet playing on a few of these tracks didn't hurt.

 

This tape makes use of Brian Eno's old EMS synthesiser and the poorly quantified involvement of someone from ...and the Native Hipsters. There were two covers because the first one didn't photocopy very well, featuring a photograph of the head of a tailor's dummy called Norman. Steve had Norman placed at an upper floor window of an earlier house in which he'd lived so as to cause innocent passers by to shit themselves when they caught sight of him.

Download the twelve tracks and two covers by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Sniffing Glue
2 - My Street
3 - Baseball on Sunday
4 - Beautiful Dreamer
5 - Drowning in a Coffee Pot
6 - Submerged
7 - Blink
8 - Night Soiler
9 - Holding My Nose
10 - Four Legged Friend
11 - Waltz
12 - Happy Feet


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