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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v/a - A Sudden Surge of Power (1983) C90

You may have noticed how I'm in the habit of apologising for the stuff I post here, occasionally even writing something amounting to I wouldn't bother if I were you; well, not today. A Sudden Surge of Power gets my vote for the greatest compilation tape of all time, and it's probably no exaggeration to say this thing changed my life when I first heard it. This collection tipped me off to a lot of stuff without which my life would have been significantly poorer, and of the eighteen individual contributing artists, there remain just eight whose work I never subsequently hunted down on vinyl or on other tapes. Fuck - I even ended up knowing a few of these people as friends. Third Mind's Red Sand is the one which always seems to get the publicity, and which is fondly remembered by industrial music historians who weren't actually fucking there; and Red Sand is great, and yes, I would never have bothered checking out DDAA were it not for that tape, but Sudden Surge was the one you actually listened to for pleasure because it was such a fantastic and varied assemblage of the weird and wonderful with a good few of those Wild Planet big names we were all gagging to hear.

Some trivia:

• Laugh by Mandible Rumpus may actually be the greatest song ever to appear on a compilation tape. Their 7" single wasn't as good though. Shame.
• These two Mex tracks come from the lad's Happy Life 7" which, at the risk of hyperbole, is probably one of the greatest 7" singles of all time, alongside Gambit of Shame's wonderful 18 out of 20, in which Mex also had a hand. Complete your Mex collection here.
• Cult of the Supreme Being were Mex and the late and greatly missed Robert Dellar, in case anyone was wondering.
• These are still my two all-time favourite Attrition tracks. I've heard a million versions of Monkey in a Bin but this one remains the most powerful for me.
• John Balance had something to do with Cultural Amnesia, but I'm not sure what - unless he just supplied the artwork for them or summink.
• Behold - even Chris & Cosey's track sounds great!
• Dave Henderson's favourite track was apparently Strangeways (because that's what he told me, so it isn't really apparently at all), and wouldn't it have been fucking wonderful if 400 Blows had lived up to their initial promise at least long enough to make a decent album?

The tape came with a highly informative 24-page A5 booklet with contributions from everyone involved, which I've scanned and included in the download along with cover, flyer, and a CFC tapes catalogue of the time.

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

Tracks:
1 - Mandible Rumpus - On the Floor
2 - Mandible Rumpus - Laugh
3 - Mex - Happy Life
4 - Mex - Veins
5 - Gambit of Shame - Gambit of Shame
6 - Section 10 - Mr. Parker
7 - Cult of the Supreme Being - Chlorine Fills My Lungs
8 - Cult of the Supreme Being - God is Thicker than Water
9 - Attrition - Hang Me
10 - Attrition - Monkey in a Bin
11 - Test Dept - Shockwerk
12 - The Cause for Concern - Disturbing Visions
13 - Martin Howard Naylor - Modulation 4/5
14 - Cultural Amnesia - Colourblind
15 - Cultural Amnesia - The Pigs Are Coming
16 - Paul Kelday - Angel Hair
17 - New 7th Music - Apocalypse
18 - Chris & Cosey - Light Fantastic
19 - We Be Echo - Survivalist I
20 - We Be Echo - Sex Slave
21 - Ramshackle Ammunition Band - Space Song
22 - 400 Blows - Strangeways
23 - Twelve Cubic Feet - Fred's Song
24 - Red Herring - UAB Advert
25 - Red Herring- Crispy Wrap

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