Peter North - Singing Fish (1984) C30

Here's another tape that wasn't actually a tape (but which I've labelled C30 because that's probably what it would have been were it a tape). These were five tracks Larry Peterson sent to me in case I wanted to stick them on a Do Easy compilation, presumably because Peter North had sent them to him and he was winding down his tape label by then. I was also winding down my own tape label at the time so nothing came of it. Peter North sent me a few tapes and I seem to recall one of them being three C60s with hand-tailored artwork (possibly Laminated Studies), and there was another tape when he morphed into Nort BC, which was the name he used for the two of the cassettes which appear on the Discogs page. They featured hand tailored covers - photocopies with rubber stamps and felt-tip colour, - but all I can recall of them was that they mostly sounded like Fish at Liberty, which you have here - someone dropping marbles onto a glockenspiel through an echo box for a long time. So, although they sound kind of interesting in small doses, a little went a long way, which is probably why I no longer have the tapes he sent me although I sort of wish I did.

 

I know. I'll bet you can't wait to hear it.

 

I still don't really know what to make of this stuff and I have to admit it didn't get a lot of rewinds from me back in the day, but listening to this now in 2024 I'd say the man was ahead of the curve with the weirdy tape manipulation stuff. With hindsight, I'd guess three hours of this was just a bit too much to work as my introduction, but I'd still buy a vinyl reissue if there was one out there.

Word of warning - there's also, as I have just discovered, a significantly better known Peter North who worked in the adult entertainment industry, so Google may let you down in this respect if you wish to know more; and if you came here looking for more of the star of the North Pole series, I'm afraid you're very much in the wrong place. This Peter North lived in Clapton in east London and wrote nice letters.

 

Download the halibut, perch, tench and Nemo by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

1 - The Singing Fish
2 - Fish at Liberty
3 - Walking with Mr. and Mrs. Fish
4 - He Fish Here in Gaps
5 - She Fish Here in Gaps

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Man's Hate - President Botha Kills Children (1986) C30

 

I'm going to assume you're already familiar with Man's Hate, having downloaded this one, stuck it on a tape, then flogged it on eBay for a monkey after describing it as a rarity from my collection, you tosspot. I'm sort of cheating here because this was never an actual tape so much as five tracks on a cassette which Andi sent to me for my third Do Easy label compilation, the one which never happened because I'd run out of steam by that point - which was a shame because these Man's Hate tracks were, as you will hear, fucking gorgeous. Much as I often felt a great deal of sympathy with the anarchopunk cause, listening to those records often felt like being back at fucking school, so thankfully some people made the effort and gave you a reason to listen to their stuff, sweetening the message and thus - in my opinion - communicating it with more force than the increasingly traditional monochrome rants about Thatcher; and Andi Xport sweetened the message with killer tunes and a soulful voice. So enjoy.

More punky scrapings from somewhere beneath the barrel next week, readers! 

Download the righteous fury by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

1 - Men and Women on Horses with Dogs
2 - President Botha Kills Children I
2 - Dewhurst the Master Bastard
2 - A Dog's Tale
2 - President Botha Kills Children II

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Deadly Fish - First 1 (1985) C30

 

From the age of about fifteen to some point in my mid-twenties I made up a series of compilations which I anarchistically named The Illegal Tapes, and for which I drew covers and everything. It was shite I'd taped off the radio or borrowed from friends - anything which wouldn't fill a whole C60 because I didn't like loose ends. The series ran to 122 volumes before I could no longer be bothered, all of which I still have, you probably won't be surprised to learn. Anyway, having recently discovered that most of them still sound fine despite being forty years old - with the exception of anything recorded on a Sony CHF - I've been working my way through and digitising anything which seems like it should be preserved, notably demos or similar recordings sent to me while I was running my tape label, Do Easy - if someone sent me three tracks on a C90, well obviously I was going to fill it up and include it in the series. So that's what will be happening here for the next month of so...

I have no idea who the Deadly Fish were. I recall it as being one tape of many given to me when my friend Carl cleared out the office of Maidstone College of Art student union, notably including all the demo tapes he'd been sent by people who were after a gig. I assumed that Deadly Fish must have been one of them, except the cover mentions Yelverton, a village in Devon which is one hell of a distance from Maidstone meaning this tape probably came from somewhere else unless the Deadly Fish moved to Maidstone in search of fame and fortune - which seems a bit unlikely. Anyway, I taped over the worst of these demos, but not the Deadly Fish. They sounded sort of shambolic, and hardly the sort of thing which would have done well on an art college stage in 1984 given that we'd all just discovered James Brown and were pretending we'd always liked him, but - I don't know - once you get past the slightly self-conscious cover of Strychnine, I personally find it hard not to be swept along by the general enthusiasm and driving bass of their pissing around in a village hall. Maybe you will too.

 

Download all nine tracks plus artwork by clicking on this link.

1 - Strychnine
2 - Disillusion
3 - Wild Thang
4 - Live in the Living Room
5 - Thrones
6 - Dead Fish are Smelly
7 - (Wilder Than) Wild Thingy
8 - Untitled
9 - Week-End

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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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Forced Cohesion (1990) C46

I've never been entirely keen on the idea of split tapes, but I suppose it depends on who is involved, and Forced Cohesion has some justification for billing itself as neither entirely the work of Illusion of Safety nor Runzelstirn and However You Spell It. Dan Burke and Rudolf Eb.er are amongst those involved and it does its job very well, but you're probably best figuring out where one artist ends and the other begins for yourself.

 

Unfortunately this will be the last of the material kindly shared with me by Richard of Chainsaw Cassettes (there were a few other things but mostly already out there and I didn't want to go stepping on any toes), so I'm not sure what you'll find here this time next week, if anything. I have a few things I intend to digitise, seeing as I've had my tape deck repaired, so there will be more at some point.

Click on this link to download.

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TAC - "if it fits....." (1998) C46

 

It's Sunday morning and I was going to write out the sales pitch and post the links for the Forced Cohesion cassette, having not found time to do so on Friday afternoon as has been my habit; but as I'm multitasking, combining the composition of this blog post with listening to next week's tape in the name of quality control, I find I can't remember much about the Forced Cohesion tape thus leaving me with little to say on the subject, and I can't help but notice that next week's TAC recording rocks like a bitch. So fuck it - here's next week's tape one week early in the name of mixing it up, wacky spontaneity, not having a clue what we'll do next because that's how crazy we are etc. etc.

As previously stated, I'm barely familiar with the work of Mr. Cox, who trades as TAC, but this one is fucking great - powerfully moody and atmospheric without committing anything too obvious to the general composition. Pierre Schaeffer probably wouldn't have been proud because he was apparently a miserable bugger who regarded his own work as basic experiments rather than ends in themselves, but he fucking should have been, the grumpy old bugger. I've probably said this before, but over the years I've heard so many pitiful efforts akin to some twat rattling a screwdriver around in a kettle for ninety minutes and calling it - ugh - sound art that I sometimes find it kind of difficult to get excited about yet another lengthy recording of someone I probably wouldn't want to meet chucking pebbles at a bike; but TAC is definitely one of the people who not only keeps this sort of abstraction interesting, but genuinely makes a number of the others redundant. In my opinion.

By the way, I haven't bothered splitting it into side one and side two because it didn't seem to need it.

 

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

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60 Minutes of Noise (1996) C60

I really have no fucking idea. I can't even find this one on the internet, and I've never heard of any of them aside from Macronympha and TAC. The title is reasonably descriptive, meaning that most of the contributions are about a minute long, some a little more, some a little less, so the whole is fairly disorientating, although on the positive side, the sheer numbers mean you will almost certainly find something which tickles your ear in an interesting way.

As usual, I did my best to divide everything up into individual tracks, although I suspect you're supposed to listen to the tape as a single bewildering piece. Due to the nature of certain offerings, this involved a certain degree of guesswork so I may have wrongly attributed a few of them towards the end of the second side, but who knows.

Download the fifty fucking million tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

 Tracks:

1 - Colin Pascal - Indecision
2 - Rectal Surgery - Blutsturz
3 - Greg Hagen - Recursive Transition Network
4 - Christus Apollo - Vieja Borracha Asfixiado
5 - Not Breathing - Black Overcast
6 - Macronympha - Isolation 313
7 - Audio Braille - Pink
8 - Brian Kaczynski - Imaginary Itinerary through the Particular Universal
9 - Endless Recursion - Fibonacci Government
10 - Tolc - Horn
11 - Barge - Fourn
12 - Twisted Helices - Fur Elise
13 - 000 - Vaul II
14 - AA.23 - Nothing is True
15 - John Sharp - Electro Acoustic
16 - Stellaluna - Holg Neubauten
17 - Cicatrix - Chaetotaxy
18 - Altruistic Suicide - Damage III
19 - Michael Azevedo - Q-IT
20 - Glass Crash - Ragnasik
21 - College of Excellence - This
22 - Black Sky Danse - Circlesaw
23 - Shunt - Where My Mandibula Was
24 - Cazzo Dio - Life Lost, Spare Organs
25 - Kaahnike Texnh - Neww
26 - Theodore Alexander Goodman - $$2
27 - Nevermore - Farsn
28 - Hal Pehlich - Untitled
29 - T.R. Elliot - April Music
30 - Music for Isolation Tanks - Freeform Flex
31 - Felix der Vortrefflichkeit - Der Schlave Fuchs
32 - The Nymphomaniacal Sociopaths - Chainsaw Cauldron
33 - Crackstop - Crackstop Vamp Rap Attack
34 - Shockra - It's Terribly Quiet at Sir Edmund Whitey's Table
35 - B-KO's New Outfit - Role Reversal
36 - Crucifixtion Machine - Nuclear
37 - One Lessone - Hermeneutics
38 - Pathogen - Televised Nonexistence
39 - Tropism - Dinner at the Country Club
40 - TAC - Method of Function 3
41 - Nosebleed Satori - Live at WRUB
42 - The Delinquent Gymnasts - Farmerette
43 - Nuturdless Bin Should Dry - Crunching Tubers
44 - Testicle Bomb - Hell
45 - Norwegian Power Ballads - Vicious Tape Friction
46 - Decibel Orgy - FM in My Extruder
47 - Dyslexis Coup - Dien Bien Phu
48 - Jeff Mielke & Zach Courser - Segayu 52-5/4 II
49 - Malta - The Collard Greens
50 - Scissor - Knotted Cables
51 - Crackstop - The Touch of Ball Lightening
52 - One Lessone - Ripieno Repressa
53 - Caffeine Charlie's Wake Up Service - Sarcophagus
54 - Pain in the Ass - Noise Pollution
55 - Stellaluna - Shortwave Alarm Clock
56 - Shunt - Pox Populi
57 - Bob Marinelli - LI#
58 - G42 - Entropy Free
59 - Circle - Marketing
60 - Montag - Face

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