The Cure - Faith (1981)

Here's another one I bought when it came out, albeit as a cassette because it had a film soundtrack for something called Carnage Visors on the other side, which seemed like a good deal. My dad bought a new family music centre that Christmas, and somehow I managed to persuade the folks to let me play Carnage Visors on it as we ate Christmas dinner, myself, my parents, and my granny. I still have the tape, although it's in a cardboard box full of other tapes presently on a different continent, but the memory was of sufficient strength as to cause me to shell out for this vinyl reissue when I saw it in Hogwild, my local independent record store.

It feels weird buying a Cure record in 2016, not least because I've hated everything they did since this one, pretty much. Love Cats was shit. That mega-twee Caterpillar song was wank served with a soupçon of shit, toss, and arse. Lewis Carroll through a flange pedal worked fine for Siouxsie & the Banshees who at least had the sense to move on once the affectation had done it's job. Since Faith the Cure have been a fat clown crying into his guitar, as Henry Rollins memorably, entertainingly, and accurately put it. I've heard Pornography but I can't remember a thing about it beyond that it failed to change my mind. Faith was the last good thing where the Cure are concerned. This was where it came to an end, but Jesus - what a record to go out on. Seriously, you should hear this thing.

This was the Cure as a Joy Division tribute act, so ran the generalisation, although listening to it now the differences seem too pronounced to take seriously. At most they were Joy Division without the Black Sabbath, and it's not exactly like the Divs were the only band placing this sort of stark emphasis on their rhythm section that year. Not even the mood is particularly similar. Without bothering to check, I vaguely recall reading that Robert Smith was massively depressed around the time of recording Seventeen Seconds and this one, and it shows; but it goes beyond boo hoo into near existential nausea, the numb, almost comforting feeling of understanding that there's no point to anything. The mood is as much to do with a distracted guitar jangling away and bearing no resemblance to anything on Unknown Pleasures, as Smith's disconsolate wail - a voice that became an unlistenable whine on later records but here works beautifully; and beyond the voice and the guitar there's all that space betwixt the twinned basses and percussion so dry it sounds vacuum sealed, and it seems like there's something haunting all that space between but you really have to listen closely to pick it up.

There's not a poor song on here, and at a perfect eight tracks it's too short to outstay its welcome, and - fucking hell - All Cats Are Grey is one of the greatest things ever recorded, working that sombre mood like not even Elgar managed. Lordy, the Cure were really something back then. It's a shame they couldn't have just called it a day after this masterpiece.

Irsol - First Contact / Half life (2015)

Irsol's debut was possibly one of the first independent tapes I bought way back when I were a lad, and certainly one of the first which wasn't a compilation of various artists; or it could have been We Be Echo's Ceza Evi - I could look it up in my diary of the time, I suppose. Anyway, the detail that matters is that I had a flyer for First Contact, having written to Alan Rider who was then running the Adventures in Reality zine and label. I hadn't heard anything by Irsol, so I had no idea what I would get for my ₤1.50, and that was the appeal.

First Contact, when it dropped through the letterbox, sounded amazing to me - clearly a self-produced effort, cover seeming a bit like it might have been done on an etch-a-sketch or whatever primitive 5KB computers were available at the time, and yet the music sounded beautifully expensive compared to what I had come to expect from cassette artistes, beautifully expensive and not really quite like anything else I'd heard up to that point. Irsol cited Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire amongst their influences, as well as Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and other electronic acts of which I was then only dimly aware, and whilst I could hear some of these influences, none seemed to dominate or dilute. First Contact sounded like something really special, as did Half Life which appeared about a year later.

Now here they are again, the same tracks three decades later, lovingly pressed onto vinyl and still sounding as rich and - if you'll pardon me - darkly mellifluous as ever. Referring to the sleeve notes, I see we have an MS20, Roland TR606, the mighty Wasp, and a couple of Acorn computers, whatever the hell those were, so it's all pretty basic by contemporary standards; but the strength of Irsol lay in what they did with the tools at their disposal, how they managed to get the best out of each piece of equipment, forging wonderful, truly immersive soundtracks to imaginary films, half-remembered dreams, even the occasional Open University module. As with what little I've heard of Tangerine Dream, the magic is in the contrast of ornate melody with texture and use of effects, giving even the most innocuous ping of a 606 the rich faux-acoustic resonance of a live instrument. It may just have been three blokes with a load of wires and boxes, but to this day I'm yet to hear anything which does what the music on this album does quite so well.

Scientist - Scientist Meets the Space Invaders (1981)

To lay my cards on the table, I never fully understood reggae when I was growing up. Some of it sounded okay, but I never really got the appeal of - for one example - Bob Marley, whom I have since come to regard as the black Paul McCartney, give or take some small change. Also, hailing from a rural area, the people I knew who listened to reggae were all white, and there's something horribly self-important about those white reggae dudes, or at least there has been about the ones I've met. On the other hand, ska seemed to make a lot of sense, and there was a quality I enjoyed about those seemingly hour long dub tracks Peel would play from time to time. I think what held me back was a combination of funding - there only being so many records on which I could spunk away my pocket money every week, and not knowing where to start with this stuff, and fear of seeming like one of those self-important tea-cosy-wearing tossers forever referring to himself as I and I whilst banging on about de weed and mi woman and things being claat despite his being even whiter than me in all other respects.

I discovered this album because every single person I knew owned a copy at one stage, so it seemed, even white guys who weren't pretending to be Rastafarians and who just liked music. I couldn't escape from the thing and it wormed its way into my consciousness pretty quickly, slipping past all the weird conditioning and hang-ups detailed above - particularly De Materialise which arguably features the greatest bass-line ever committed to tape; and yet I never bought a copy because I didn't want to be the guy with just one reggae album; and it didn't even seem like I needed my own copy given that I could just go around someone's house and hear it; and I'd get around to buying it one day. Then suddenly it was no longer in every single record shop, and then there ceased to even be record shops, and old copies of Scientist Meets the Space Invaders cost a fortune on eBay, until just now...

It's been reissued. I saw it in the store and I bought it.

You all know what reggae sounds like. Here it's stripped down to just percussion and a deep, deep bass with a few other sounds drifting in and out of a mix - snatches of vocals bouncing off those twangy old springline reverb units, delay echoing against itself, forming new cross-rhythms from the decaying signal, sounds crunched through filters... Space Invaders is like a few moments of three in the morning drawn out into a blissful codeine haze of eternity. Possibly you may even know what this record sounds like - the purest form of a thousand other things you've heard which weren't as good - but whilst you're listening to it, whilst you're caught in the moment...

It's like a musical evocation of a single meandering train of thought and is as such absolutely hypnotic and enveloping, peculiarly duplicating the effect of listening whilst smoking one of those space fags even for those who aren't. Whilst this record is playing, you're in another place and you really have to wonder why anyone has bothered recording anything since. It's that powerful, and now that I'm older, fatter, and better financed, I really need to get me some more of this stuff.

Peter Hope & Charlie Collins - Destroy Before Leaving (2016)

This is another one of those download things which exists only as electric magic. I downloaded a couple by Blank Banshee last week and told myself I wasn't going to make a habit of owning stuff with no physical dimensions, but fuck it - it's Peter Hope and it was a quid - actually it was free but it seemed polite to make some sort of donation. Anyway...

Peter Hope and Charlie Collins will of course be remembered as vocals and saxomophone of the Box, who were in turn Clock DVA minus Adi Newton and somehow wound much tighter. You can still feel some of that legacy in these six tracks - dark, dirty, and kind of jazzy without any of the usual unfortunate connotations which have adhered to jazz since it was assimilated by the man. That said, it doesn't exactly sound like jazz beyond the noodling presence of whatever Collins is playing - some sax, some clarinet I think - and a few details of mood. On the other hand, what it very much does sound like is twenty-first century blues, meaning the genuine Robert Johnson deal updated as is appropriate to time and culture, as distinct from some Mark Knopfler heritage project; also as distinct from certain Foetus efforts inhabiting similar territory but sounding a great deal more mannered and studied than this raw outburst of noise, gravel and loathing. Were time travel a thing, you could take this back to the Mississippi Delta in the thirties and I'm pretty sure those guys would recognise it immediately. Of course, beyond Hope's characteristic growl and Collins' riffing, what you have might almost be Einstürzende Neubauten in sonic terms, but it should probably be remembered that whilst the original bluesmen had guitars and harmonicas, they really weren't in the business of making pretty music. So to dispense with most of this paragraph, Destroy Before Leaving is a blues album, and a powerful one, and that's everything you need to know.

Get it here.

Blank Banshee - Blank Banshee 0 (2012)

A couple of months ago, someone mentioned vapourwave to me, specifically wondering aloud whether it should be considered post-music in the sense of Lady Gaga and other ringtone artistes. Because I'm fat and fifty, and because I couldn't give a shit about computer games, incomprehensible Japanese cartoons, Instagram, most social media, or young people in general, I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of him, or it, or whatever gramophone records they may have recently sent scurrying to the top of the hit parade, there to dislodge Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. I was embarrassed because it turns out the thing had been around for at least five years without my having been aware of it even as a name.

Okay, so vapourwave was not only old news but also massive in context of its own self-contained microcosm of 4Chan types and people who post video clips of themselves talking about computer games on YouTube; so there's no reason why I should have heard of it, I suppose. Anyway, Wikipedia has this to say:

Vapourwave is a music genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s and spread over the next half of the decade among various internet communities. It is characterised by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural aesthetics (typically that of the late eighties and early nineties), entertainment technology, consumer culture and advertising, and styles of corporate and popular music such as lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music. Sampling is prevalent within the genre, with samples often pitched, layered or altered, sometimes in a classic chopped and screwed style. Central to the style is often a satirical but not necessarily critical preoccupation with consumer capitalism, popular culture, and new-age tropes.

I've also seen it claimed that vapourwave is over, and Blank Banshee is actually seapunk, but I don't care. I'm fifty. Fuck off.

Anyway, it's a file sharing, downloady thing, and I'm yet to sign up with the whole download culture because I much prefer physical objects and I've never owned an iPod - or equivalent device - that worked for longer than three months at a time; and like I say, I'm fat and fifty.

I had a root around on YouTube, it being a source of numerous vapourwave albums uploaded in their entirety. Most of what I heard sounded sort of interesting, if not startlingly unlike anything else I've ever encountered. As a genre it seemed to be making a virtue out of samples of unusually bland material - ringtones, game noises, television station idents, the little tune your computer plays when you boot it up. Some of it was kind of irritating, but some of it seemed to have something, and of all the stuff I browsed, Blank Banshee seemed to have enough of something to warrant a violation of my own personal code; so I threw dollars at the bandcamp page and bagged me some downloads, then immediately burned them to CDR so I could give them a proper listen.

Blank Banshee is supposedly a Canadian by name of Patrick Driscoll, beyond which I know nothing but for the music itself, which I guess is deliberate. It sounds very much like music composed entirely on audio editing software using samples of the general type described, so for the most part there's a weirdly smooth quality which actually makes me think of the blandly utopian seaside resort described by J.G. Ballard in Vermilion Sands. Some of it has the monged-out ambience of new-age motivational tapes, and is almost certainly sampled from something in that direction. Yet, as promised by the hype, there's something weirdly fascinating by this overpowering wash of airbrushed perfection, as though it's laid on so thick it becomes something new.

On the other hand, the music might not work so well were it purely as I've described, that also being more or less how Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus sounds to me, and which is why I didn't bother downloading it despite it apparently being the Never Mind the Bollocks of vapourwave. Blank Banshee works by taking the form somewhere else, bringing in material lifted from the crunkier end of southern rap - notably those crunchy handclaps and finger clicks - and this influence seems also to mold the music into something significantly funkier than whoever it was nicked from - possibly excepting Flash's The Message which is the only sample I've been able to identify. Regardless of sources, Blank Banshee 0 ends up as something new in its own right - nothing longer than your average television commercial and adding up to just over half an hour of what feels like a continuous piece, and one which definitely exerts a strange influence on the place you're in, cerebrally speaking. It invokes in passing certain quieter moments of Nine Inch Nails, Anne Dudley's Art of Noise, and Three-6-Mafia, but also a fairly substantial dose of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I'm still not a fan of downloads, but this cost me a dollar and is pretty darned wonderful; and more than anything it's really nice to know that in terms of new things, music isn't quite over. This kind of thing may even be the first wave of whatever happens next.

Blank Banshee 1 from 2014 is also fucking great by the way, and apparently he has a new one out even as I write this.