Do Easy - The Twelfth Metal Tape (1983) C60

Another one which wasn't much good I'm afraid; and with hindsight I continue to notice themes which weren't so obvious at the time. If The Sixth Metal Tape was my media album - as proposed in a previous blog entry - and The Ninth Metal Tape was a concept album about sexuality and fear of molestation, if you squint a bit, then this was the theatrical album. I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education retaking the 'O' levels I'd been too thick to obtain at school, plus some new subjects such as drama. My drama class split into two groups towards the end of the academic year, and each one wrote and produced its own play as part of our course work. The other group came up with a play called Everybody is Someone - or something of the sort titled so as to more or less give away both the entire story and the conclusion towards which it frogmarched its audience at gunpoint before anyone had even sat down; and my bunch came up with the similarly understated Victory For Who?, because if you really want to understand the horror of war, who better to ask than a self-involved teenager?

Anyway, we wrote this thing and put it on for an audience and I did the sound, which allowed me access to the college sound room and a lovely TEAC reel-to-reel on which I could make echo effects. With the exception of Song this tape comprises an audio recording of our performance, sound effects material I cobbled together for the same, and stuff derived from my pissing about with the TEAC. One of them is named after a painting by Adolf Hitler, which is really playful and subversive blah blah blah...

Victory For Who? was produced and performed by Helen Barnard, Addi Harris, Mark Langston, Stella Gill, Richard Jones, and myself, and the download includes a transcription of the script as a PDF - which you should be able to read on a Kindle if you feel so inclined - mainly because the audio recording is impossible to follow. I'm no longer in touch with any of the other five and I have no idea what happened to any of them, but I figured that if any of them should Google either the play or any of the names involved, being able to read the thing should at least compensate for the sound quality, possibly. Keep in mind however that we were all about seventeen, so if you're reading this as some massive theatre producer on the look out for the next Waiting For Godot, don't get your hopes up.

Download the tape, inlay card and eBook by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - South African Power Corporation
2 - Song
3 - Don't Trust Anyone
4 - In the Ruins of Becelaere
5 - Warfare
6 - Your Wife...
7 - Victory For Who? (live audio recording 17/5/83)
8 - Tortion

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621 Monosodium 621 - We, Torn from the Earth by Wonders of Gold (1992) C15+

Back in 1992, both Paul Condon - editor of Gneurosis - and myself had been subject to visitation by a fanzine editor to whom I shall cryptically refer as Jeremy Beadle because he was a fan of the same. Jeremy Beadle came to stay with me and slept on my sofa for a couple of nights but soon began to get on my tits, at which point I fobbed him off on Paul Condon and his sofa, like a true pal. Amazingly Paul was still speaking to me afterwards, so I suppose he understood, and on the positive side we subsequently had a whale of a time comparing notes and discussing how annoying we found Jeremy Beadle over beers and ciggies. Then one Saturday afternoon we went to some kind of free festival in New Cross, the one held annually in that park behind the Venue at the end of Clifton Ride - as it is misnamed in S. Alexander Reed's shit book about industrial music. There were crusty bands and there was beer and it was a nice day, and the conversation soon turned to Jeremy Beadle and his annoyingness. The thing that had really got to me about his visit, as I explained, was his diet. He wouldn't eat anything. Every night I'd cook something - spaghetti bolognese or curry or whatever, and I'm really not a bad cook.

'How much of this do you want, Jeremy Beadle?' I would ask.

'Oh I'm fine,' he would say, smiling as he pulled a family size bag of fucking Monster Munch and a litre bottle of Pepsi from his back pack.

Paul and I realised that neither of us had ever seen him eat anything other than crisps or related potato-based snacks generally marketed at school children, and this made us howl with laughter for most of the rest of the afternoon, culminating in Paul proposing we get t-shirts made - a picture of a packet of crisps with the legend Crisps - My Favourite! I'm not even really sure why it made us laugh so much, but it did.

Meanwhile I was toying with the idea of recording sarcastic power electronics, an idea which found itself split into two, one branch leading here, and the other to 621 Monosodium 621, but with those three little magickal dots around the numbers like you have on Current 93 records. Paul had an expensive sampler and was an accomplished violinist, and the idea was to record something with all of the usual fixations of the industrial or whatever the fuck you want to call it genre - Manson, Crowley, Hitler, and potato-derived snack foods. We both also found neofolk unintentionally amusing, so 621 Monosodium 621 - named after everyone's favourite flavour enhancer - was firing off in a number of directions all at once whilst going out of its way to take itself extremely seriously.

We convened one Saturday afternoon around my place in Lewisham, beginning with a trip to Sainsburys from which we returned with two carrier bags each full of snack foods, fizzy pop and so on. We sampled ourselves eating crisps over and over, and different kinds of crisps, cheese footballs and so on in pursuit of variant sounds. We recorded Wheaties - a tubular snack - played as atonal instruments by blowing across one end as though they were pan pipes. We sampled and looped cans of cola popped open for rhythm. We mixed all of this together with guitar and effects and Adolf Hitler and the humble potato as a mystic avatar of revelation 'n' shit, and we ended up with the material comprising this download. I drew a picture of Roman soldiers eating crisps before an inverted Christ on the cross; and I seem to recall Paul writing a brilliantly impenetrable essay about the role of potatoes in human magickal history, although I'm no longer sure whether this happened or was simply an idea; and I intended to put it out as a C15, but somehow lost the impetus. So eventually I just made a couple of copies for Paul and myself.

We might have ended up on Top of the Pops, or at least on the flip side of a Current 93 album, but never mind. Possibly the only thing we achieved was a cure for the desire to eat crisps ever again for at least the next few months.

Anyway, here are all four tracks, plus a couple of variant mixes I found I had laying around and which I think I prefer. Enjoy and take very, very seriously, preferably whilst scowling and marching up and down in front of a Bavarian castle whilst munching away on a bag of Wotsits.

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

Tracks:
1 - 621 Monosodium 621
2 - NaCl/HNO3
3 - Monosodium 666
4 - Boiled Alive in Oil of Sunflower
5 - 621 Monosodium 621 (early version)
6 - Boiled Alive (early mix)

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Dovers - Rehearsals 2.2, 3 & 4.1 (1987) C90

Here's another one of negligible interest to everybody except those who were actually in the band at the time, namely me and Carl, and it's not even like either of us will be playing this shit on a daily basis; but nevertheless, here it is, should you require it.

The first five tracks are obviously just me pissing about with my Casio SK1 whilst watching Eastenders - note backing vocals by Nick Cotton. The rest is Carl and myself rehearsing, jamming, or whatever the hell you want to call it at Hollytree House in Otham, then at the place I moved to in Glencoe Road in Chatham, and finally at Carl's place in Bermondsey at various times during 1987. I can't be arsed to work out what belongs to which rehearsal and where, or how the previous tape segues into this one, but it probably doesn't matter and an inlay card's worth of notes are included in the download if you care enough to work it out.

For what it may be worth, the arbitrarily named Ghost in My Kilt - end of side one, beginning of side two on the cassette - is here welded into a single track because it seemed to make marginally more sense that way. Also, if you're downloading this out of curiosity due to the presence of two apparent covers of a Slade song, personally I wouldn't bother. That said, most of side two sounds decent to me, thanks in part to Carl having picked up a drum machine which sounds pretty decent recorded through a speaker and over a crappy condenser microphone, and in part to the songs beginning to emerge as songs rather than vaguely repetitive interludes during longer periods of wibbling and general fucking about. Well, that said, it all sounds fine to me, but then it would, wouldn't it?

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

Tracks:
1 - East End Gristle
2 - Dangerous Farmers
3 - Clocks Ain't Goth
4 - Violent Violin
5 - Beastie Burton
6 - Mucking About
7 - Piece of Meat
8 - Batman's Personal Friend
9 - Robin Hood
10 - Catch the Pigeon
11 - Cum On Feel the Noize I
12 - Cum On Feel the Noize II
13 - Fever
14 - Space Travel
15 - Ghost in My Kilt
16 - Public Image
17 - Beat Me Black & Blue
18 - B.L.A.C.Clowns
19 - A.I.D.X.
20 - Misery List
21 - Fatback
22 - Misery List
23 - B.L.A.C.Clowns
24 - Beat Me Black & Blue

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Soul Providers - Cipactli Nahuatlamatl (1998) C90

I first met Ed Pinsent through comic books and his involvement with Fast Fiction, then later came to know him a little better when I realised that we lived in roughly the same part of London and shared an interest in weirdy music, as expressed by Ed starting his own magazine and asking if I would like to contribute. The magazine was called The Sound Projector and still exists today in concert with an associated radio programme broadcast on Resonance FM, all of which should be investigated by following this link. Anyway, back in 1997, both Ed and myself were furrowing along related musical parallels. My crap is sporadically documented right here on this blog, whilst Ed recorded and performed with Attack Wave Pestrepeller (famously including Savage Pencil) and Mystery Dick - improvised and occasionally noisy outfits whose works on vinyl and compact disc are well worth the effort of hunting down should you feel so inclined. I vaguely recall Ed and myself recording together mainly because it seemed crazy not to, given certain shared musical interests, although it may also have been significant that Alan Mason's girlfriend had given me an electric piano and Ed was quite keen to have a go on it. The electric piano was free on the grounds of it being the size of a small car and that Alan's girlfriend had grown tired of carting it around with her each time she moved. The contacts could have done with a clean, and the thing was so huge that I ended up giving it away for the exact same reasons that the thing had come into my possession; but it had a good sound, so it was nice that Ed made such great use of the thing whilst it was around, not least because his tickling of ivories had a little more going for it than my characteristic one fingered Gary Numan tributes.

Anyway, the story behind these tracks beyond that which is already described above is that we set up every instrument or sound producing object we had at our disposal in my living room and just improvised, although the first three significantly shorter tracks were recorded by making stuff up along to an already improvised backing track bounced onto my tape deck. I was probably worrying about them sounding too sparse or something.

The titles and artwork were more or less arbitrary choices derived from my Mesoamerican fixation of the time, as was the name of our "group" - the Soul Providers, which I liked because it sounded more like some RnB thing than a bunch of noise merchants, and I was mostly listening to RnB at the time. I'm not sure what Ed ever thought of the names or my turning this stuff into tapes, although Soul Providers didn't make him frown quite so hard as had my first suggestion - Shinjuku District, which came from a Godzilla film and I now realise would have been a dreadful choice. I had the impression he was really mainly just interested in the music, the improvisation and so on; which is fair enough. Listening to this stuff nearly two decades later I realise I still enjoy it. It still sounds good to me - at least once you get over the terrible hiss generated by the recording process of the first three tracks. In fact, I'm actually sort of proud of this tape, which isn't something I can say about many of them.

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

Tracks:
1 - Tepetlaoztoc
2 - Eight Deer Jaguar Claw
3 - Amplifier
4 - First Migration
5 - Chiconahui Cuetzpallin

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Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies II (1987) C60

I've already told the full boring story in as much detail as anyone could possibly need, so I refer you to this previous blog entry in order to avoid repeating myself. This second tape featured our second and third rehearsals, such as they were, with a line up of Carl and myself augmented - if that's quite the right word - by Garreth Roberts, usually playing second guitar, and Mark Smith on sax depending who had bothered to turn up on time. Both sessions occurred at Hollytree House, Otham, Kent during the Spring of 1987, and actually most of this is the second rehearsal but for tracks ten to twelve as listed below, which comprise the third.

Preamble was recorded some time later by myself with a guitar and a Casio keyboard sat in front of a tape recorder, hence the distinct difference in quality. It's actually one of four tracks on the original cassette which I presume I recorded alone for the sake of filling up the tape, and one of these tracks mentions the Dovers - the group we became in the wake of Spinning Pygmies - so it must have been a bit later. I haven't included the rest of these solo tracks in the download because the other three are all just me impersonating Carl and singing about being gay and how I regularly entertain sailors in my flat and so on - this being an example of my retarded sense of humour. I would argue that the censored tracks are too inept and stupid to be mistaken for genuine homophobia, but listening back to them now makes me nevertheless uncomfortable mainly because they're shite even by my unambitious standards, and just not very funny.

Mind you, I'm not saying the rest of this is particularly amazing, but there are probably bits you could play to Wire reading arseholes as obscure Faust outtakes or something, especially the stuff with Mark playing sax.

Download the twelve tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Money Can't Buy
2 - Appreciate You Being Round
3 - Noise
4 - No Cigars
5 - Makes No Sense
6 - Preamble
7 - Black and Blue
8 - Deliverance
9 - Duelling Kazoos
10 - CNAM
11 - Here's Fatty I
12 - Here's Fatty II

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Fysisk Fostran - Vi Behöver Ett Odöpt Barn (1983) C60

I have no idea about this one beyond that it was sent to me by Lennart Eilersen of Selbstmord in Sweden, the man who helped birth this masterpiece. I've barely listened to the thing over the years, but mainly because the actual cassette tape looked like one of those five for a quid crappo specials you would buy either from car boot sales or Sid's electronics shop in Church Street in Shipston, and I suspected it was only a matter of time before my player chewed the thing up. This is a shame because listening to it now I realise I like it a lot, and that it at least lives up to the promise of obscure Swedish avant-noise. The more I listen to this stuff, the more I wish someone had dragged these guys into a fancy studio and given this material the blistering production it deserves.

Nosing around on the internet I'm pleased to find there are actually a couple of Krabbkropp tracks on YouTube, apparently posted by one of the group, who gives this account:

Krabbkropp were a duo consisting of Robert Lagerström and Patrik Lager who were active in Stenungsund, Sweden around 1980-81. The band expanded in 1982 to incorporate additional "musicians" and were called Brosk for a period, releasing a few cassettes under that name before becoming Fysisk Fostran later that year. As Fysisk Fostran they released a number of additional cassettes and a 7" EP called Day of Reckoning.

It took me years to work out quite what the hell this was, who it was actually by, and whether it was some sort of split tape or not, but I guess what we have is basically a compilation of what was more or less the same group of people at different stages. Krabbkropp became Fysisk Fostran - meaning something like either Physical Education or Physical Upbringing - and I guess the Dance of the Washer-Woman material was recorded by one of the same people.

Whilst researching this oddity I couldn't help but notice that someone else has already posted a freebie download of the same, but I've gone right ahead and posted mine regardless seeing as I'd already spent half a day editing the thing. It can't hurt and maybe one of our respective digitisations is better than the other, hence greater choice for the consumer. Plus the site seems worth a look. God bless capitalism etc.

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

Fysisk Fostran - Vi Behöver ett Odöpt Barn We Need an Unbaptised Child

1 - Intro / Vill Era Gäster Ha Fiber? (live) Do Your Guests Want to Have Fiber?
2 - Det Blodrika Djuret The Blood-Rich Animal
3 - Döda Lollos Mamma (KK) Mother of Dead Lollo
4 - Vi Var Gudar (Vi Tog Betalt För Oss) We Were Gods (We Got Paid)
5 - Jag Har Ett Möte Med Jim H. Gud I Have a Meeting with Jim H. God
6 - Det Mystiska Talet 'E' The Mysterious Number 'E'
7 - Vill Era Gäster Ha Fiber? Do Your Guests Want to Have Fiber?
8 - Den Förtroliga Kammaren The Confidential Chamber
9 - Vi Kan Allt Få Dig Att Springa! We Can Really Make You Jump!
10 - När Arkeologerna Grävde Upp Min Hustrus Kropp When Archaeologists Dug Up My Wife's Body
11 - Jag Har Tältata Med Döden I Have Camped with Death

Krabbkropp

12 - Krabbkropp Crab Body
13 - Ett Krabbigt Förslag A "Crabby" Proposal
14 - Krabbornas Bröllop Crab Wedding
15 - Krabbans Klagan Crab's Lament
16 - Krabbkaka Crab Cake
17 - Krabbkroppar Crab Bodies

Dance of the Washer-Woman - Som Bombsplitter I Själen As Bomb Shrapnel in the Soul

18 - part one
19 - part two

Many thanks to Nils Inge Graven for the translations.

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War Drum - War Drum No. 1 (1997) C90

I wasn't going to bother with this one, but I had a listen and it's not quite so bad as I remember, so what the fuck.

By 1996 I was thoroughly sick of being me and had decided to be someone else for a while. I think I was probably going round the twist somewhat. One element of this awakening - what I have come to view without irony as a Shamanic process, roughly speaking - demanded a whole shitloads of breaks from the past and from previous ways of doing things in so much as this was even practical. I was tired of the sort of material I wrote or drew or painted or recorded and had decided to start again from scratch. Another element of this awakening was a growing obsession with Mexico, specifically late Postclassic central Mexican culture - the people generally but incorrectly remembered as Aztecs. By obsession I'm not referring to just a T-shirt and a couple of library books, but something which pretty much consumed me and changed the course of my existence, and about which you can read more here if you're that interested.

War Drum was a fresh start because I felt like making music once again, and given my interests of the time it came out as something akin to Muslimgauze but with an entirely different focus, which was intentional. One problem I had experienced, and the one which meant I hadn't actually recorded much of my own music for at least a couple of years, was a lack of equipment. Specifically I had a few bits and pieces but nothing on which to record anything, so I just went ahead and shoved everything into a little four channel mixer and recorded it more or less live onto my home stereo, but for occasionally bouncing tracks by plugging a second tape recorder into the mixer. The quality wasn't great, but then I reasoned it would be no worse than any of those Do Easy tapes recorded by more or less the same method; also that I should be able to produce something listenable if I made some effort to work around the limitations of this set-up, and to keep things simple.

The reason I wasn't going to bother is nothing to do with the quality of the music, such as it is, but that War Drum No. 1 dates from a time when I was still dishing out the benefit of the doubt to certain neofolk types, as indicated by two covers of Sol Invictus songs and at least a couple of lyrical flourishes betraying just how entertaining I once found that Boyd Rice album. I've never had any racial agenda - excepting perhaps a touch of Aztec Fundamentalism coming from a philosophical or aesthetic angle more than anything else - and nor anything along Social Darwinist lines; but I was keen on forging something slightly fierce and scary from my interest in both Mesoamerican history and all of the science I was reading at the time - Dawkins and others, hence the somewhat regrettable monologue of Timebomb which, I feel I should stress, condemns a cultural bias towards quantity over quality of life rather than being the Douglas P style horseshit about bad stock to which it bears unfortunate comparison because I wanted to sound like a hardcase. I'd apologise for the Sol Invictus covers but won't because I still like the songs, despite what I have since accepted to be the unpleasant truth of the source; and even if my versions are a bit John Shuttleworth, I still say my voice is superior to that bellowing noise we once heard coming from the blowhole of the original artist.

The rockabilly numbers may seem a bit mystifying in context - I was going for a sort of back to basics vibe, something as far away as possible from the sort of Wire-reading art gallery shite the rest of this music probably resembles. War Drum was supposed to be folk music, or imaginary folk music, or Muslimgauze eating a taco whilst frowning - something along those lines. Most of the references will make more sense if you have some working knowledge of Nahua culture, (and yes, that would be me trying to sing in Nahuatl on Xochitlacuicatl) although it probably isn't essential. Just pretend it's fake Swans without a drum kit or summink.

Anyway, once I had recorded this masterpiece I got fifty copies professionally duplicated on chrome cassettes by a bloke in Bromley and had a cover printed. I sold a few, gave some away, and eventually got rid of them all. This was in aid of an ideal of producing a cassette tape which didn't look like some half-assed piece of shit, and generally speaking I'm still fairly pleased with this one despite its obvious shortcomings. My biggest mistake was, I suppose, releasing a cassette at a point at which people had more or less stopped bothering with the same, having mostly switched to the greatly inferior medium of CDR.

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

Tracks:
1 - Yei Tepeilhuitl
2 - In Xochitl, In Cuicatl
3 - Penitent
4 - Rex Talionis
5 - Burning Water
6 - I Can't Believe in Forgiveness or Absolution
7 - Communication
8 - See the Dove Fall
9 - Autosacrifice
10 - Timebomb
11 - Azcapotzalco
12 - Xochitlacuicatl
13 - Fire of Love
14 - A New World
15 - Chicome Cipactli
16 - Dry Valley, Antarctica
17 - Blood Consciousness
18 - Lonesome Town

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