Hero of a Hundred Fights (1999)

I'm backtracking from their EP, The Cold, the Remote, to this earlier recording, a full length album but this time lacking anything referencing the writings of Lawrence Miles. I was somehow under the illusion of the name having come from a role playing game, but it's actually a characteristically nebulous painting by J.M.W. Turner, and this information still doesn't provide much of a clue as to what the hell is going on here.

Hero of a Hundred Fights sound like free jazz melded in a transporter accident with Shellac, so obviously it makes perfect sense that the later work should be produced by Albini; but meanwhile in 1999, there was this album, just a beautiful recording so clear it feels as though we're there in the room, and not even any effects to speak of beyond natural valve amp distortion and the sound of a man screaming his throat out. The music, even at its most discordant, has the soft, injured beauty of a wound after it has healed and the pain has subsided to a dull warmth, all tied up in the staccato mathematical knots of a structure which seems to have involved one hell of a lot of algebra. There's not much to say about this one because the music has already said everything, even if it's in an unfamiliar language.

Who the hell were these people and what happened to them?

Cabaret Voltaire - Groovy, Laidback and Nasty (1991)

'Micro-phonies sounds about right,' quipped my one time friend Paul, 'because they're phonies!' The thrust of his satire - cleverly recycling the same actual joke made by the band in the title of what was then their latest album - was that Cabaret Voltaire had sold out in producing a queer gayboy disco record which may as well have had Boy George singing on it etc. etc.

Drum machines?

Bum machines, more like!

Hopefully he exploded when this one came out.

To be fair, the sight of Stephen Mallinder doing the butterfly in a hoodie with a big sporty stopwatch swinging from his neck in the video for Hypnotised is somehow massively comical, and very much suggestive of an album trying far too hard, which is why I've only just bought this. How bad could it be? I asked myself, repeating a question which seems to have informed quite a few of my musical purchases of late.

Obviously it doesn't really sound like a Cabaret Voltaire album, even though it is; but in their defence, the next logical question would be what does a Cabaret Voltaire album actually sound like? I suppose the answer depends on which one you're listening to, and it probably would have been just as weird had they dug out an old copy of Voice of America, analysed how it was recorded, and then impersonated their former selves like we apparently wanted them to. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty scores low for tapes of evangelical preachers, drums played through a flange pedal, or Mal doing that weird vocalising thing which never quite sounds like language so much as Sean Connery having a seizure.

Yushnar arwar sharwar nawurhar…

Groovy, Laidback and Nasty is house music, which doesn't have to be a problem, because 1) if anyone had earned the right to jump on the house music gravy train, it was Cabaret Voltaire, 2) I like house music, and 3) they do it very well.

This last point is what seals the deal, and which differentiates this from one of Porridge's hilarious attempts to get down with da mans dem, and specifically due to the involvement of persons such as Marshall Jefferson and Paris Brightledge; besides which Cabaret Voltaire always had some vague connection to northern soul and black music in general, particularly the sonic experimentation of dub producers. It's not like they ever had much of a through line from Led Zeppelin or Whitesnake; and when you stick the record on, it sounds fucking great - at least more convincing than all those fuckfaced baggy twats of the day, jangling away and insisting that there had always been a dance element to their dopey shuffling songs. Mal's vocal, if limited, is surprisingly conducive to what is basically soul, and the music very much inhabits its genre rather than standing outside waiting to be let in. You can already hear traces of Kirk's Sweet Exorcist beginning to emerge, so it's not even like Groovy fails to bring anything new to the table; and once again I wish somebody had told me all of this back in 1991.

Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar (2018)

I loved the previous album, White Men are Black Men Too, so much that I couldn't imagine how they were ever going to follow it up; and predictably the first time I heard this it seemed underwhelming, a variation on the same sonic theme without whatever it was which made White Men sound so astonishing. In fact it seemed like they'd made a rap record with significantly less emphasis on the soulful vocals, which was odd because it sounded totally different the second time I gave it a spin to the extent that I can no longer even work out what nudged me towards that initial impression. What's more, I've now played it enough for Cocoa Sugar to sound at least as good as its predecessor, and what I took from that first hearing seems crazy with hindsight.

My guess as to the nature of the disparity is that Cocoa Sugar is a very different record to White Men, but the Young Fathers' sound is so distinctive, so immediately recognisable and unlike anything else - at least so far as I'm aware - that it takes time to recognise the variation. The sound is, roughly speaking, a sort of African gospel embellished with music made up from sounds found laying around on a laptop, non-musical glitches edited into something with both the musicality and rawness of early Motown. The difference is that where White Men had an additional touch of something resembling the influence of maybe Suicide, this one has a subtly different dynamic with more of a soulful vibe; all of which is frankly a fucking crap comparison, and one which doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, but it's the best that I can do.

Cocoa Sugar is, after a couple of plays, at least as intense as the last one, and it's nice to have lived long enough to have heard this genuinely amazing group. Maybe that's all you really need to know.

DDAA - Ronsard (1988)

Here's another album I briefly owned, then flogged, then bought back during a moment amounting to either regret, guilt, or curiosity. I seem to recall first encountering the lurid red and green cover on a stall in Greenwich market and picked it up on the strength of King Deebo is Six Tracks for a Kit having been one of the best numbers on those first two volumes of Rising from the Red Sand. I don't really know what I expected Ronsard to do once I got it home, but it didn't seem to do it. At one point, whilst attempting conversation with a boring French goth schoolgirl who had insinuated her way into my home via my girlfriend of the time, I plucked Ronsard from the racks and said, 'look - here's a French band,' which was admittedly lame, but at least got her to shut up about fucking Nosferatu or whatever the hell they were called. Later it went to Vinyl Experience along with records by Z'ev, the Pressure Company and others on the grounds that weirdy music is always worth a bit of money if you wait long enough; plus I'm not even sure I'd even listened to the thing twice.

Once again I'm kicking myself, having tracked down another copy and recognised it as something I would have kept hold of had my brain been working properly back in 1994, or whenever it was.

DDAA have been described somewhere or other as a cross between the Residents and Throbbing Gristle, which probably isn't significantly worse than any other description to be had by throwing lawn darts at the internet whilst blindfold. The music is minimal, noises twanged or scraped or plucked from assorted conventional instruments with very little in the way of effects or production, so it has the feel of an improvised live performance, something you watch rather than which unfolds in a studio. This album comprises two long pieces, one to a side, both of which build into something fairly hypnotic without any overt concessions to tunes or even repetition. There's a slow, regular beat, but it somehow has the cadence of stonemasons tapping away on a building site, or even something tribal. It's a record built from elements which are noticed rather than which intrude, and it feels like poetry more than it feels like anything you could describe as a soundscape, at best a distant relative to Laurie Anderson.

Despite most of the lyrical content being in English - albeit with truly peculiar pronunciation - and despite the insert explaining what Ronsard is all about, I still don't have a fucking clue what Ronsard is all about; but maybe it doesn't matter because it seems to work on some very basic, almost physical level, working like a painting you just can't get out of your head. It worms its way into your consciousness.

Of all the things I've revisited or rediscovered, this has thus far probably been the most powerful by some distance.