Regular - Music 1980-1988 (1988) C90

Long term inmates will already have been exposed to the work and existence of John Jasper here, here, here and possibly also here - paragraph nine onwards if you want to cut to the chase. This was one of a number of tapes John ran off for me when I first met him, something to give me an idea of where he was coming from; and, as you will hear, he was coming from somewhere roughly equidistant between PIL's Metal Box and Adrian Sherwood's On-U label, but with enough of his own thing to oblige the rest of us to at least have to work at spotting the influences. John had a weird habit of occasionally mixing his own stuff up with that which had patently been recorded by other people - notably one thing he claimed some friend had sent to him which I almost immediately recognised as Keith LeBlanc's Major Malfunction album. The last time I saw him - late nineties, I think - he passed me a tape of his work with a few tracks sounding suspiciously like something off the Leftfield album. Anyway, I'm reasonably certain this one was all John, excepting that I played the bass on February '88 (the first thing we collaborated on), and the first two tracks of side two were from a Jah Wobble record, which I haven't included here for obvious reasons; and as for recorded live at the Hope & Anchor, sure, John, whatever you say...

Frankly, this guy was funny as fuck and an artistic leviathan where his music was concerned. Had he been able to resist weaving all those weird self-defeating webs of mystery and half truth around his efforts, we might now be buying the 180gsm vinyl reissues of a massive back catalogue rather than hearing it for the first time as a download of a tape that's been sat at the bottom of a cardboard box for the last couple of decades, but never mind. If it weren't for all the bewildering subterfuge, he probably wouldn't have been John.

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

Tracks:
1 - A Joke from the Neck
2 - Scratch
3 - Version Yellow I
4 - Version Yellow II
5 - Metal West
6 - Disco (Jerk Off)
7 - Three Cat Juggle
8 - Ground Under Sound
9 - Metro (with Colour)
10 - Shortwave Globetrot
11 - (no title)
12 - February '88
13 - Absence
14 - Into Thin Air
15 - Dry
16 - Collage
17 - Mind Sweeps Back
18 - Rubberneck
19 - A Joke from the Neck II
 
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Antonym - Statues in Ice (1992) C50

Can't even find this one on Discogs, so 1992 is a guess. I expect I still have the letter from Mr. Burnham reading Dear Loz, here is my tape of rare stuff but I can't be arsed to look to check the date. Also, he probably wouldn't have described it as rare stuff, because that's more like the sort of dumb shit I used to do: well, I've sold five copies of that last tape so now its time to issue a cassette of my rare recordings... Anthony had more sense than that, so this is a tape of leftovers, or something in that general direction, which admittedly may not sound too promising, but there's some nice stuff here. It may, if you're about the same age as I am, initially remind you of the straight and curly animation sequences they used to have on Rainbow - Bungle not Blackmore - but stick with it as it gets its hooks into you.

 

It was a bit difficult to tell quite where a couple of these tracks ended and others began, particularly with Warp I and Woven Glass, but hopefully I got it right.

Download the fourteen tracks plus cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Warp I
2 - Woven Glass
3 - The Bonnicon
4 - Inherit the Earth?
5 - Pikadon
6 - Persistence
7 - Warp II
8 - Weft
9 - Kinetic Workhorse I
10 - Kinetic Workhorse II
11 - Primordial Cry
12 - Black Velvet Void
13 - Scarsnarl
14 - Fracturhythm
 

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Impulse 8 (1996) C30

Here's my final Impulse compilation. For some reason I don't have the magazine that came with this one, yet I have issue seven but no tape, so issue seven is included with the download for the sake of tying up a loose end. You should know most of these names, but for the record: Splintered were something to do with Richo Johnson of Grim Humour and Adverse Effect zines, and as such probably qualify as the best band ever to involve a bloke who writes a fanzine, possibly excepting Alternative TV. Discogs seems to think the Richard Johnson of Aphasia is a different person, but personally I'm sceptical. Even my wife's 93-year old Texan grandmother has a couple of tapes by Illusion of Safety, so there's no excuse for ignorance regarding the same. Cathedra was Mark who wrote Impulse (and as such is exempt from any statements about bands formed by blokes who write fanzines), later of Konstruktivists, and whose Codex Empire have just put out a double vinyl album about which I've heard only good things. Day of the Moon was in Evil Twin with Karl Blake, and Band of Pain was something to do with Steve Pittis of Dirter Promotions.

 

Had to apply an unusual amount of noise reduction to this one - the silences were filled with this sort of low-level digital susurrus suggesting a virtual rather than physical master copy, but I think it's come out sounding okay.

Download the tape and mag by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Splintered - Smokescreen (Impulse mix)
2 - Illusion of Safety - Altered Locations
3 - Aphasia - Based on a Disturbed Glance (edit)
4 - Cathedra - Relegatio
5 - Day of the Moon - Night of Knives
6 - Band of Pain - Fake Shit (Drone Mood)
7 - Konstruktivists - Midnight Mass (short mix)

 
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Mlehst - Occasional Stimulation / She Made Me a Sadist (1995) C60

Only now has it occurred to me that the name seems to be a phonetic spelling of the word molest. Anyway, I don't know a massive amount about this guy, although I met him once and found him very personable - according to my diary. I'm told he made a point of destroying his master tapes so as to preserve the preciousness of the artifacts, or something, so hopefully I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by sharing this. No track list with this one as it comprises one long piece of reassuringly expensive sounding noise per side, and was actually a reissue of a couple of C30s previously issued by labels other than Bandaged Hand. Needless to say I can't find mention of any of them on Discogs so I assume he was simply more prolific than anyone could keep track of.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

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Impulse 6 (1996) C40

Still wading through the longest ever Apostles tape, I'm afraid, so here's another Impulse compilation in the meantime. This one features, amongst other things, a pretty great Muslimgauze track. The Fragment Collage is an assemblage of material from the label of the same name featuring Moisten Before Use, Erixma, and others - didn't seem to be much point in breaking it all up into individual snippets, so you'll just have to refer to the cover in order to work out what's what; or you could look at the mag, because one thing I finally found time to do was to scan all of my back issues of Impulse, and scans of Impulse 6 are included as a separate folder within this download. Keeping in mind that I'm inexplicably missing issue four, scans of the rest have now been added to the download folders of their respective tapes, which you can find in the index at the foot of this blog post. Impulse issue one, for which I never had the tape, has been added to the download for the Impulse 2 tape and I've even chucked in the issue with the Death in June stuff because if you really need to read Mr. Forbes amazing thoughts on pleasuring oneself over grainy photos of dead Nazi stormtroopers, then that's your tough titty.

Download the tape, cover and mag by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The Fragment Collage
2 - Thieves of Impressions - Savennenland
3 - Hex Minora - Embrace of Evil
4 - Muslimgauze - Thief Severed Hand
5 - M. Nomized - Untitled
 
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Impulse 4 (1992) C40

There would have been another Apostles tape this week, but the one I digitised was - so it turns out - copied onto a C180, amounting to three fucking hours on a single cassette, and most of that being extras that Andy stuck on there which aren't officially on the cassette, and hence aren't listed on the track list - so it's going to take me some time working out what the fuck is what with that one. I didn't even realise there had ever been such a thing as a C180 until this week.

While we're waiting, here's Impulse 4, which I apparently misfiled between Impulse 5 and Impulse 6 rather than Impulse 3 and Impulse 5 like some crazy ketamine fuelled anarchist mental case, hence my not having posted it before. As you will be aware, this was a cassette given away with Impulse mag, although I don't have the magazine, for some reason. Seems a bit weird my having mislaid this one seeing as I'm actually on it, but never mind.

Attrition you will surely know by reputation, and same with most of the others if you've regularly been following this blog. Michael Mantra, one of the two names with which I was not familiar, is some big cheese in American improv circles, or possibly was; and as for Sexus - even at the time their contributing seemed like a bit of a scoop being as they were famous and had been lumped in with that whole Romo thing which Melody Maker was desperately trying to get happening, and ended up releasing a single on ZTT. Shame it never really took off. Even if the hype was pure wank, the music pissed over all that other Thousand Shed Present toss which everyone except me and a select band of my fellow cool kids* were listening to.

*: This term is utilised with a certain quota of irony in mockery of anyone attempting to use it as a serious criticism, as has happened on occasion, because yes, we were soooo fucking cool hunched over a pile of envelopes and a stack of photocopies in our freezing bedsits in nowheresville - which is nice because being perceived as cool was obviously a big deal for us.

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

Tracks:
1 - Attrition - The Next Day (Revisited)
2 - Another Headache - Go Slow
3 - Antonym - Xchne Arcae
4 - Ozone Bandits - Empty Lizard (Slight Return)
5 - Sexus - How Can You Live Without Me?
6 - Michael Mantra - Glistening Air
7 - Family of Noise - Don't Look Back
8 - Aerschot - Chuckle
 
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Cassette Music 5 (1994) C60

Here's the last of my compilations from Dave Hopwood's excellent Personal Soundtracks label - not sure if it's the best of the bunch but it's probably a contender. As for the individual tracks - was never entirely convinced by Brume, although I can no longer even remember why, but this one is excellent and seems to foreshadow a lot of that glitchy laptop stuff by a good couple of years; and talking of foreshadowing, Cacophony '33' were apparently recording vapourwave roughly two decades before anyone else - vapourwave here distinguished as the sort of repurposing done so well by Blank Banshee and others, as distinct from, you know, Africa by Toto and other stuff from which it borrows. I never got around to nabbing any Cacophony '33' material at the time, and I should have done because they had some great stuff on a couple of other compilations too; Ice Pedestal is presumably factor X again, collaborating with - at a guess - maybe Tom Cox, but I could be wrong; Westland seems to be Parisian noise dude Franck Canorel; Konstruktivists are Konstruktivists, obviously; and Cathedra was Mark who published Impulse and ended up in Konstruktivists, possibly as the longest serving member aside from Glenn himself; Ozone Bandits was Dave Hopwood, and I'm not sure about the rest - apart from factor X, whom I'm sure you will have heard about, and M. Nomized whom you will definitely have heard about unless you've only recently emerged from thirty or forty years spent living in the Amazon basin. Chris Brett's track is also particularly fine and worth singling out as such while I'm here.

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

Tracks:
1 - Brume - Le Chemin Duciel
2 - Cacophony '33' - Chill Up A Rising
3 - TAK/fX - Ice Pedestal
4 - The Rorschach Garden - Night Journey
5 - Westland - Hidden in Argentina
6 - Konstruktivists - Alien Blues
7 - Cathedra - Prima Luce
8 - Ozone Bandits - 12/3/94
9 - Chris Brett - Napalm Gtr 2
10 - M. Nomized - Russolo Music
11 - MMATT - Song X
12 - factor X - She's Mine
13 - Ars Moriend - Lack of Light
14 - Manatisa - No Title

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