Robert Rental & Glenn Wallis (2017)

Having misspent at least some of my youth knocking around with Glenn Wallis, I vaguely recall having heard this as one of a million tapes plucked from the drawer of a million cassettes with nothing written on them at two in the morning. We'd usually been in the pub for the best part of the evening and I'd most likely be gearing up to my third or fourth report of being completely fucked and wanting to go to bed and we can listen to it in the morning, can't we? If that sounds like a complaint, it isn't, and should be taken as namedropping combined with an indicator of Glenn's absurdly prolific work rate. We once lived on the same continental land mass, even in the same town for a while, and he was always recording, tape after tape of experiments, fucking about and what have you; and the tapes all got slung in a drawer, and that drawer was pretty fucking full. As you probably know, some of that material was polished up or re-recorded and released on Konstruktivists records and tapes, but I always had an impression of the material which reached a slightly wider audience being the tip of the iceberg. He played me a lot of tapes of things I never heard again over the years, and of the stuff he played me, it was mostly pretty great.

Here's a good example, lovingly restored and pressed onto vinyl by Dark Entries - Glenn improvising with Robert Rental, whom you may remember had an album with Thomas Leer on Industrial Records: two men improvising, guitar, effects, Wasp synth, tape recorder and almost certainly a couple of those special jazz cigarettes. It's simple, powerful, almost certainly improvised live onto tape, and quite clearly descended from Cluster and the like. It's proof, if it were ever needed, that you don't need either an ostentatious display of technology or conventional musicianship to make a statement. It makes me very happy to hear this music again, and by means of a more durable format. There have been a ton of artists associated with the unfortunately misleading industrial label who released far too much over the years, spoiling a once deserved reputation with noodling excesses which should have stayed in the can. Glenn Wallis, on the other hand, is someone whose unreleased back catalogue could stand a little more mining. This is a great release, so let's hope it's part of a general trend.