AMK - Selected Montage Performances 1989 (1989) C60

 

Here's another one about which I don't know a whole lot, beyond it being the work of one Anthony Michael King, hence the name, formerly associated with Big City Orchestra and White Hand both of whom I remember from when I were a lad listening to Opera For Infantry on eight track whilst riding my chopper around the village green, much to the disapproval of John Craven. There seemed to be quite a bit of this sort of thing around at the time, as the eighties rolled over into the nineties, with the loops and the weird edits and the tape-fuckaboutery; but as you will hear from this set, AMK was one of the people who really nailed it (rather than just churning a million of these things out every month and expecting the rest of us to support it, not mentioning no names or nuffink), and this example is both weird and strangely beautiful.

I already tried to contact AMK to ask if it would be okay to share a different tape but heard nothing back. As it turns out, I wasn't actually able to open the files for that other tape, so never mind, but should he be reading and experiencing reservations about my giving this stuff away for free - please just let me know and I'll pull the plug, okay?

In the meantime, everybody else please feel free to support the artist directly by visiting his Bandcamp page here.

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

Tracks: 

1 - Montage Performances
2 - Touch
3 - Late
4 - Travels
5 - Hesitation
6 - Triana

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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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Due Process - RRRadio 12-15 (1988) C60

Here's another edition of the crazy hour of radio fun brought to you by Due Process back in 1988, similar sort of thing to the Radio 1 Roadshow but without bearded kiddy-fiddlers. If you were paying attention last week you'll already know what the deal is with the RRRadio tapes. This one utilises contributions from Asmus Tietchens, Brume, Psyclones and the mighty DDAA. I'm guessing the DDAA material is the twanging you can hear very near the beginning of the set, at least based on Ronsard and other classics with which I'm more familiar. For what it may be worth, in the event of this initially sounding like random shite, it's all built up to a serious head of steam once you get into the second side, so stick with it.

 

Download the tape and cover by licking on this clink.

 

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Due Process - RRRadio 41-55 (1991) 2C60

 

 

I know Due Process from A Person's Guide to Healthy Listening, but that's it. Discogs, which admittedly you could probably look up all by yourself, describes them as featuring Thomas Dimuzio, Ron Lessard (the man behind RRRecords) and John Wiggins, Due Process knows how to crank it out. While they can create a terrific din, the music actually leans a bit in the ambient direction, with lower dynamics and muffled timbres, albeit with a raucous pandemonium of noise just beneath the surface. This tape captures what was apparently their final RRRadio broadcast, RRRadio having been aired once a month through agency of WZBC Boston College Radio and comprising spontaneous live transmission of sound collages with improvisational musical accompaniment. This one additionally features a shitload of presumably prerecorded contributions from Dave Prescott, Floating Concrete Octopus, Franz De Waard, HNAS, Korm Assemblage, PGR, Psychic Rally, Schimpfluch, Black Museum, The Jamie Shalar Band, Uvegraf, Violence + The Sacred, and Etant Donnes; although as you will hear, there didn't seem to be whole lot of point in further dividing the whole up into anything smaller than four sides of tape, so it's more or less a continuous piece. I'm sure it would be massively lazy to compare it to Nurse With Wound, but it's closer to Nurse With Wound than it is to Menudo, and scores highly on the what the fuck will happen next? spectrum.

Noise, musique concrete, weird twanging sounds, speech, tapes - what's not to love?

 

Download the show, or the tapes of the show, I suppose, by clicking on this link.

 

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White Slug - Cage Paralysis (1992) C30

 

...and we're back at long last. My precious tape deck has been repaired to the highest possible standard for a very reasonable price by the wonderful guys and gals of the Sound Idea hi-fi repair shop of 2615 NW 36th St, San Antonio, TX 78228, although if you're not based in this corner of Texas I don't know how useful that address is likely to be. I guess you could give them a call on 210-433-0728 and ask. Also I've been very kindly supplied with a mammoth stack of sound files for all sorts of goodies from the private collection of Richard of Chainsaw Cassettes, many of which are new to me, so I'll be sharing those over the next few months, excepting one or two which I've noticed have since turned up on Bandcamp courtesy of the original artists; and there will probably be more from my own collection, most of which I've already shared here, but I have a few bits and pieces still to digitise.

Anyway, we kick off with White Slug, whom you may recall from the second Impulse cassette compilation. I just happened to notice this cassette for sale on Discogs so I bought it, and it was an obvious choice for testing out my tape deck when it came back from the repair shop. I still don't really know anything about this lot, aside from what I'm sure you're quite capable of finding out for yourself which is that they were Jason Whittaker and Richard Munn of which the latter seems to have been something to do with Bum Gravy, and Cage Paralysis was issued by the label which released Bum Gravy's Fat Digester 7", much to the endless amusement of whoever was writing the Melody Maker funny pages that year, presumably David Stubbs. Whilst Bum Gravy is indeed an hilarious name for a band, I'm still not sure how I feel about the ribbing dispensed in their general direction week after week, much of which seemed to amount to Ha! Ha! You'll never get anywhere.

 

Well, back to White Slug, it probably won't come as a massive surprise that this dates from 1992 given what else was around. It does that sensory overload thing you get from Godflesh, Swans and others and is accordingly heavy as fuck, yet with a touch of beatbox driven aural assault thrown in resulting in something like a massively more pissed off version of Hula. Side one of my copy came with one channel significantly louder than the other to the point of rendering it unlistenable on headphones, so I've tried to sort that out, although there was a limit to what I could do. It still sounds louder in one ear, but is better than it was, and yet actually sounded worse with the quieter channel brought up to the same volume as the other. Oh well. You shouldn't notice over speakers, and it sounds crushing regardless. Also, there seemed to be one less track on the tape than is listed on the cover, so I've had to take a guess as to what is what, and making an assumption of the first seguing into the second seemed to make the most sense at the time given that the second track is obviously Slavetrade. I don't know.

 

Download the nine or possibly ten tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

1 - Sidewinder / Silver or Lead
2 - Slavetrade
3 - SS Musick
4 - Nazilover
5 - Inferno
6 - Puppyfat
7 - Caterwaul
8 - Black Eucharist
9 - Don't Laugh

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Death Magazine 52 - Mermaid 1983

 

I found this picture of the venue on Google, apparently taken the day after the gig. Whitehouse weren't fucking about that night, let me tell you. I'm presently sorting out all the digitised music files on my PC so as to free up space for more material which will eventually be shared here (in case anyone was wondering). In the meantime, I found this. It was originally part of a catch up blog post (scans of fanzines, FLAC files etc.) because it's only about five minutes long, which I'd reverted to draft for the sake of keeping everything tidy. Here's what I wrote back in 2017:

 

This left me with nothing much to post, so as it's been a Death Magazine 52 kind of month - what with the Family Patrol Group material I posted a few weeks ago, and Mike Grant of the same commenting, and my getting hold of a copy of their excellent retrospective double album released by Harbinger a couple of years ago - I figured I may as well digitise my tape of the Death Magazine 52 performance from when they appeared on the same bill as Whitehouse and Family Patrol Group at the Mermaid in Birmingham back in 1983. I don't recall D.Mag 52 / SHC being particularly amazing that night, certainly not compared to Family Patrol Group, but it seemed like the tape should be of interest to someone. So I digitised it and immediately realised why they had seemed so underwhelming: they played for about six minutes and knocked it on the head, so it's really just a track rather than a live gig. The evening is described in more detail in the Family Patrol Group post, and I therefore gather that whichever two - or maybe it was three - of the Death Magazine 52 collective had turned up to play that night must have felt as though it had been a mistake and pulled their own plug or something. It's a shame really. There's a tantalising burst of rhythm about half way through the track (which I don't remember at all from the event itself), hinting at the kind of material I've heard more recently on the Harbinger album, but I guess it just wasn't happening for them. Anyway, if you're interested, this was Death Magazine 52 briefly live at the Mermaid, Birmingham on the 27th of August, 1983.

 

While we're here, you might want to take a look at this.

That's all for the moment, I'm afraid. I'll be back when I've sorted more of my shit out.

Download D. Mag 52 at the Mermaid by clicking on this link.

   

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Six by the Sputniks (1986) 10"

I intended to share this one a while ago seeing as I'd digitised it and even edited out all of the pops and clicks, but Tim of the Sputniks never replied to my request asking whether it would be okay to give away his work for free. I actually don't think he would have had a problem but suspect he never saw the message, being an oldie like myself, but one less able to navigate all the convolutions of this new-fangled facebook shite - and I didn't want to ask again in case he had seen the message but had been too angry to formulate a response.

Who the hell am I talking about, you may ask. Well, he was my pal and he recently bought the farm, which is upsetting, and I already wrote about him at length here.

For someone who was so busy, musically speaking, it still seems weird that Tim should have left such a scant recorded presence - this 10", a few tracks on the Hangman compilations, and I expect there are still tapes of Johnny Gash and others in a box in someone's attic which will probably remain there, which is a real shame; so that's why I'm sharing this now that it's gone posthumous, in memorial to a guy who deserves to be remembered better than he probably will be. If you want a physical copy, there's still a couple on Discogs last time I looked.

 

Thanks a fucking bunch, 2020, you utter fucking cunt.

 

Rest in peace, Tim, old buddy.

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

Tracks:
1 - Rawhide
2 - Let's Talk About Living
3 - Besame Mucho
4 - Bumble Beat
5 - Danny
6 - A Swingin' Safari

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