‘After America’ reviews

Oh yes…and this from Brainwashed; “With very few exceptions, Simon excels at just about everything he tries..”

Bourbonese Qualk Press roundup – March 2015

Lots of new exposure for the Mannequin records CD+2 X LP ‘Bourbonese Qualk 1983-1987’ project and the ‘Lies’ 12″ – from a strange mix of DJ magazine and new ‘industrial’ press…

Resident Advisor

Sentirescoltare (Italian)

“Colonna sonora perfetta della decadenza urbana, tra incubi distopici e sogni libertari, oggi come allora, i Bourbonese Qualk ci mostrano, da un passato mai dimenticato, lo spirito e le forme possibili della resistenza del futuro.”

Igloo Magazine (English)

“Bourbonese Qualk were as difficult as their name suggests: abrasive, uncompromising, highly conceptual and devoted to specific ideals. As one of the early original industrial bands from the UK emerging in the tumultuous wasteland of Thatcher’s England, BQ would influence many other bands to follow”

DJ Broadcast (Dutch)

Hartzine (French)

“…Perfide Albion”

Juno (english)

““God With Us” which originates from their 1983 LP Laughing Afternoon and suggests fragments of their musical legacy has spread deep into the DNA of modern electronic music.”

That Muslimgauze book.

 

Ibrahim’s book on Muslimgauze ‘Chasing the Shadow of Bryn jones’ has been out for some time now but I thought I’d give it a little extra publicity boost. Not that anyone I know could afford to buy it – if you are really keen you can buy a whole box set of vinyl and book from VOD for 219,99 Euro. As I may have mentioned before, I don’t get this vinyl collecting thing (or collecting anything come to that) so such behaviour is beyond me.

I was asked to creatively direct the project after the project almost collapsed when the original designer suffered a near-fatal cycle accident and I suppose because I new Bryn well from the Recloose days – we released a number of his works and in effect launched his ‘career’; something for which he was eternally unthankful.

The book is a plush affair beautifully printed and laid out by designer Eric Kessel using original and rare material. ‘Chasing the SHadow’  goes into obsessive detail on the Muslimgauze subject – basically Bryn didn’t do anything but spend time in a local recording studio releasing record after record…which doesn’t make for exciting reading unless you are an MG devotee. I’m not totally convinced that his work deserves such lengthy scrutiny but it does hold together as a ‘total object’ and as such is a good testament to Bryn’s life and work.

http://chasingtheshadow.org/

http://www.vinyl-on-demand.com/

 

Memories of Lol

Lol Coxhill (19 September 1932 – 10 July 2012)

The Recedents Live at the Red Rose, London Feb 6th 2007

In 1984 I attempted to release the first album by Lol Coxhill’s trio ‘The Recedents’* on our Recloose Organisation label. Unfortunately all of the global distributors absolutely point-blank refused to take the LP claiming that even by Recloose standards this was strong meat i.e. no one but the terminally obscure or criminally insane would think of buying such a product. So, to my eternal regret I shelved the project.

Kif Higgins: August 23, 1957 – May 19, 2012

With empire came sugar and with sugar came slaves. Slaves that made the sugar (African) and slaves that brought it to England and processed it (English, Irish, Welsh and Scots). Those that exploited the labour made fortunes and built the city of Liverpool (the irony of Tate Liverpool).

Bourbonese Qualk Peel Session 1987

So after a lengthy campaign of pestering, John Peel finally allowed us to record a session for his show in late 1986 (for the unaware; John Peel’s nightly BBC Radio programme was hugely influential to new music in the UK throughout the seventies and eighties) with the caveat that we weren’t to set foot in the BBC studios. John Walters, Peel’s producer somewhat haughtily claimed that we had such a bad reputation for anarchic trouble making, nicking stuff and smashing things up that we had to use our own equipment…which was a bit rich considering the long list of ruffians who HAD been allowed in.

Auf einen Augen-Blick

‘Auf einen Augen-Blick’ is an animated video piece using sequences of hand corrupted jpg files. If I was a bit smarter i could probably have written a script that batch processed multiple files but I found that there is something important in the laborious process of doing each frame by hand – it introduces some organic element into what should be an efficient process…I like the contradiction of using digital media in such a manual way…especially when the content is all about degradation and corruption of the media itself.

Random Rough Mix

Been a while comrades: heres some audio and video of stuff from the studio floor that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day – edited together in a random fashion. Quite a large dose of Geoff Leigh in there from the work we did together and never quite finished…

 

Ghosts

Towards the end of this video I am being beaten with fish by a very tall Australian woman then lifted upside down by my feet and shaken so that all the coins in my pockets fall on the floor. The location is Clapham Junction railway station in London which at the time (1986?) was partly derelict – the occasion,  a shoot for the Factory Records stars Durutti Column directed by DV8 Physical Theatre Company. Miles makes a ghostly appearance with trademark slouch at  2.46 sadly a surreal dance sequence he did was cut from the final edit.

Orgonite melt

Geoff Leigh has uploaded some of his video experiments with ice formed under the influence of orgonite (with a soundtrack of some music work we did earlier this year). Orgonite, a dubious by-product of the Willhelm Reich school of pseudo-science, is an agglomerate of left handed metal swarf and acrylic resin said to have mysterious and mystical properties…

Links:

http://www.orgonite.info/

Geoff Leigh on myspace

what the song you play that?

leytonstone, london summer 2009.

As work on ‘The New Album’ comes to a close i’m faced with the inevitable quandary of not only what to call it, but what to call the ‘band’ and also decide the names of all (well, most) of  the songs. It’s not that the ‘songs’ aren’t about anything it’s just that describing them via titles would come across at best as either sterile – numbers, dates, sequences – or pretentious; trying to succinctly enunciate the meaning of the piece in short form. So, with this in mind i decided a good first approach would be to apply a logical process that will not only ensure commercial success but provide meaningful, memorable titles that will resonate with the intended demographic target…kind of:

Method:

1. Find a list of song titles from the last, say, fifty years that have had some kind of chart success…
2. Find the most repeated words within that list i.e. the most used song title words in the last fifty years…
3. Stick these words together randomly to create two or more word song titles

so, the top forty words from the top ten songs of the last fifty years are:

ain’t around away baby blue boy cry dance dream eyes girl give gonna happy heart heaven home kiss lady life live lonely love man mine moon music night oh rain rock rose song star sweet theme tonight wanna woman world

It almost writes itself…

Beyond the wall: new music from China

Yan Jun with Wu Na & David Coulter/ White/ FM3/ Xiao He

Barbican St Luke’s London. 26-04-2009

‘Beyond the wall’ is a rare chance to glimpse the musical innovation that is taking place in China right now. Modern Chinese music is usually ‘state approved’, uncontroversial and sanitised i.e. the ubiquitous Mando/Canto Pop which almost exclusively dominates the airwaves and record stores. Despite and maybe because of this commercialism an experimental counter-culture has developed over the last decade under the radar of official or unofficial state control. Characterised by a noisy and experimental approach and championed by a loose pan-Chinese coalition of oddballs, new middle class youth and eccentric musicians; this music is the direct polar opposite of the banalities of Chinese Pop:

Musical roads of the world.

Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus building the Asphaltophone

back in the seventies novelty cereal packet gifts reached a zenith of inventiveness and surreality.My particular favourite was a sound player ‘toy’ – basically a strip of red plastic, shaped like a cable tie, with audio samples encoded into grooves in the strip. The idea was to fit one end to a hole in the empty cereal packet and run your fingernail along the strip at a constant speed. the cereal box acted as an sound box, amplifying the vibrations delighting the astonished breakfast audience with audio clips from history, if my memory serves me correctly, Chamberlain’s “…and here is the paper” and Churchill’s ” some chicken, some neck” amongst others.

Top of the Nazi pops: towards a racially pure top ten

“We are on the verge of moving into the music business in a big way – something with enormous cultural, political and financial potential.”

BNP Chairman Mr. Nick Griffin 2005

What would British music sound like if it was free of racial ‘impurities’ and  foreign influence, what would the undefiled, ‘indigenous’ British top ten sound like? The obvious answer would be that it wouldn’t sound like anything because music has been for millenia a fertile mix of multiple cultural influences echoing the mixed racial and cultural profile of the people who make it. Despite this, white supremacists seem intent on defining ‘M.O.W.I.’ – Music of White Origin –  as the genre of choice of the true white indigenous British race.

“Muslimgauze: Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones”

Ibrahim’s encyclopedic book on the history and music of Muslingauze is finally finished “Muslimgauze: Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones” will soon be available from amazon:

“A decade after his untimely passing, Bryn Jones, better known as Muslimgauze, left behind a staggering catalogue of published and unreleased music that continues to be appreciated by dedicated fans as well as converts to industrial, techno, hip-hop, dancehall reggae and dubstep styles. Manchester-born Jones was both prolific and controversial. Working alone in his bedroom studio, Muslimgauze’s music highlighted the struggles of the Muslim world against the West, with the Palestine/Israel conflict as the focal point.”

“Live Series 2” & the London Ambulance Station

Live series 2 cassette package

 

To Londoners, The old Kent rd  has been for many years a byword for poverty; the cheapest, dismal brown coloured property on the monopoly board and in reality a grimy thoroughfare providing the boundary of two of the most neglected regions of London, Peckham and Bermondsey. Once the heartland of a solid white working class population the area was bombed close to complete destruction during the war and then rapidly rebuilt with monolithic high-rise housing estates which by the 1980s had begun to be abandoned and crumble.

In the cold winter of 1984 we – bourbonese qualk and crew – occupied the Ambulance station, an empty five story castle-like building on the Old Kent Road. Our ambition was to create a radical ‘cultural-political centre’ (though we would never have used that term) and a general base for our activities – performance space, recording studio and office for the Recloose organisation label –  in the middle of this piece of un-picturesque South East London. After lengthy renovation (removing 1 meter deep layers of dead pigeons, replacing piping, windows and tiles on the vertiginous roof) The top two stories were converted into artists studios, the middle storey our living quarters. The first floor was taken up as meeting space for anarchist groups, a free cafe and offices for the local squatters organisation, ‘S.N.O.W’ (who housed more people in 1985 than the local council). The ground floor was changed into a large performance space and bar as well as a recording studio, sculpture studios and print workshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The grand erector

Bit late now because it’s sold out – but, Andy Wilson’s (Sunseastar etc) latest audio product is ‘The Grand Erector’ a fancy limited  edition (100), 12″ vinyl, ten page booklet type thing which also includes six audio tracks of mixes, distortions and mangling of sounds contributed by members of the  Faust mailing list. Can’t vouch for the music as i haven’t heard any of it and don’t have vinyl reading technology – but it probably sounds a bit like this:

The Grand Erector – “Brasov Monkeys”

This and many other ‘fascinating’ releases are available on the Beta Lactam Rrring website  – soon with free MP3 downloads!

‘foreign sounding’: asian racial stereotypes in popular music

“Plinky plunk, A Chinese Elopmement” sheet music from 1930s USA

The “Oriental Theme”

Sun Ra the black liberationist, spaceman and jazz musician in “Overtones Of China”(1957)  unconsciously perhaps, repeats the old tradition of exotic stereotyping in defining musical Chineseness as wood blocks, gongs and pentatonic piano stabs. In essence the piece is an evolved jazz version of the ‘Oriental Theme’ that serves to evoke Orientalism in the western imagination. The tune, a nine note phrase, is found throughout modern popular music most famously in the introduction to Carl Douglas’s ‘Kung fu fighting‘ , The Vapour’s ‘Turning Japanese’, and David Bowie’s “China Girl”:

Oriental Theme MIDI File

What does death sound like?

“A truck rear ended my car and I died instantly. All the traffic was at a stand still and a truck not paying attention to traffic, blasted into the rear end of my car. Not wearing a safety belt, I was thrown against the windshield and all of a sudden I was in this white silver light. A man’s voice, whom I couldn’t see, said to me “You can either come with us now, or you can go back.” The next thing I knew, I was back in my injured body. the music started pouring through me like Niagara Falls…”

In the film  ‘Touching the Void’ as Joe Simpson descends the mountain close to death and in the grip of delirium, he realises he is about to die because he is plagued  with the sound of  “Brown Girl in th Rain” going round and round in his head; “I was so pissed off… because i realised I was going to die to Boney M”. This post explores the audio experience before and during death – an event of importance perhaps, but little researched. Descriptions seem to have some commonality across cultures but of course come from either survivors of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and therefore compromised by memory and suggestion or from religious/cultural texts  – compromised by cultural values but perhaps a store of a cultural memory of death…

Earworms, Surgery and Musical hallucinations

“I hear singing and there’s no one there,

I smell blossoms and the trees are bare. . . .”

From ‘Call Me Madam’ Irving Berlin 1953

Earworms:The Cognitive Itch Theory

97% of us have the capacity to trigger simple audio hallucinations; For instance the sentence “brown girl in the rain” will for most of you cause an involuntarily re-occurring audio hallucination which can only be stopped by the words “Do you know the way to San Jose”. Commonly called  ‘Earworms’, this disorder is thought to be the result of specific musical properties of a song that trigger the brain to uncontrollably repeat the song in an attempt to resolve some logical musical anomaly. The most successful Earworm songs have a repetitive rhythm, bright catchy melody but importantly some unusual, unexpected musical aspect. For instance the BaHaMen’s “who let the dogs out” has an offbeat repetitive  “Who,Who” chorus making it ripe for repetitive neural analysis and keeping it high in the Earworm top ten: