+DOG+ - Die Robot (2019)

I've never really been in a position to find review copies dripping from my letterbox with any regularity, but it happens from time to time which, if nice in theory, is not without its problems. Of course, the obvious one is when someone you like sends you their work and it's fucking terrible, obliging you to either find something pleasant you can say about it or else stoop to well, I didn't really think I could do it justice so… The other one is when the legitimate freebie masterpiece is garnished with something by the guy who runs the label, which is why I now own one more CD by Der Blutharsch than I ever expected to own. On the other hand, there's this, which fell from the same envelope as Jenny Lives with Smell & Quim and Harsh Noise Movement, and which revealed itself to be frankly fucking amazing after just a couple of plays, which I really didn't expect. It may even be one of the best noise things I've ever heard.

Anyway, I did a bit of homework and discovered that one of this bunch, and actually the one with whom I'd been communicating on facebook, used to be in Expandobrain, one of those great lost bands who should have been enormous over whom I'd been quietly obsessing since taping Thyroid off Peel back in 1987 - not obsessing all of the time admittedly, but their legend had attained sufficient stature in my own personal mythology to at least have me yelling holy fucking shit at the screen before running into the front room to tell my wife knowing full well she wouldn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about.

Anyway, to reset to this morning, back before I realised there was a connection to anything I'd heard of, here's what's so great about this CD. As previously stated, I'm vaguely aware of the noise thing but I don't listen to a lot of it, which is probably why it's taken me so long to acclimate to the possibility of noise as anything other than just kicking your audience's head in for thirty minutes. I grew up with noise as transgressive confrontation, and only now am I beginning to appreciate that a distorted electronic racket can be at least as varied and expressive as any conventional instrument in terms of what it does - at least up to a point. I suspect we're still some way off the first noise power ballad, but, you know, it's not all an exercise in enforced bowel evacuation is what I'm trying to say here.

Die Robot seems to be, if anything, an ecologically themed concept album; or at least that's how it sounds to me. Excepting a folky acoustic guitar interlude and a location recording made in Istanbul, Die Robot mostly resembles what happens when you rummage around inside an old transistor radio with a screwdriver, sounds resembling nothing found in nature, buzz, hum, interference, distortion, grind, chug, tinnitus whistle and so on, and it's all amplified to a point bordering on, but not quite crossing over into discomfort. So it's mostly sounds your brain would filter out should they be heard in any other context, but here you're obliged to listen, and so you begin to notice effects and textures which are actually kind of absorbing, and which feel kind of good in much the same way as it does when you scratch an insect bite. Titles and half heard vocalisations hint at something, the interpretation of which may be in the ear of the beholder. Taking the term robot back to its original connotation of a creature which mindlessly repeats a task, even a stupid one, and not necessarily with mechanical overtones, Die Robot sounds like a broadside launched at human stupidity and the impulses which are presently destroying the planet; but like the very best surrealist masterpieces, this may well be nothing more than a pattern I happened to notice. The thing you should probably take from this is that for something which sounds like a power station having a fight with itself, there's a wide range of form and shade here, and a lot to be heard, even if you can't always tell what you're listening to.

Get it here.

LCD Soundsystem (2005)

I love this album but I've never been quite sure what to make of it. I appreciate that there are few artists whose work doesn't expose at least a little of their influences, but there's a point at which influence crosses over into homage, postmodernism, or just plain chicken-in-a-basket summer season impersonation. Stereolab, for obvious example, almost fall into this latter category as the Showaddywaddy of krautrock, and yet they just about get away with it by virtue of the Billy Childish defence, namely that if it still works then you can still use it.

LCD Soundsystem are, or at least were, the same sort of deal, but stealing down the midnight stairs for a secret swig of populist postpunk lemonade; and 1978 was, after all, a very good year. There's something almost willful about it, I suppose, but maybe it's no different to the fact of some people still playing the blues on a knackered guitar, and occasionally there will be one guy who does it really, really well. Here we have a dry, unfussy production seemingly inspired by late seventies disco, just before programmable beat boxes came in, electronic instruments played manually, a live sound, syndrums pew-pew-pewing all over the chorus, and long grooves based around riffs and catchphrases - mostly stuff which became subject to a degree of sneering during the rise of haircuts and sampling technology. LCD Soundsystem, however, showed that you could do something of worth with such neglected tools, and something which sounded fresh as fuck. The thing is, he - or possibly they - went even further, releasing a debut which could almost be a compilation. There are snatches of seventies metal, Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up which might be a lost Beatles demo, Disco Infiltrator which probably should have been on Remain in Light, Great Release which sounds like something from one of Eno's first couple of solo records, and then Mark E. Smith vocalising for disco-era Blondie on the rest. It's only because the music is so fucking good that you don't notice this weirdly eclectic skipping from one genre to another, and the music is so good because I guess LCD Soundsystem don't give a shit.

No-one remembers the cod reggae track on that Whitehouse album or Elvis Costello's brief excursion into techstep because they never happened, because most artists tend to stick to a furrow, or at least few artists commit the musical equivalent of a muscle spasm depositing three unexpected minutes of New Orleans bounce halfway through side two of a Ramones album.

Why not, we might ask? Truthfully, while it's nice to know what you're getting, and there's a certain virtue to variations on an established theme because no-one likes inconsistency, isn't it all just a little bit affected? Isn't it all just a little like those who refuse to allow themselves to enjoy anything outside whatever mileau they have established as the sum of their personalities, whether it be Psychic TV, rockabilly, or whatever? Isn't all this denial a little bit Oliver Cromwell, a bit like being at fucking school? Anyone remember that Lustmord album with the riotous pub rock knees up* as the first track on side two? Me fucking neither.

Anyway, I wonder if this album is therefore a deliberate flouting of some unspoken cooler than thou etiquette - flinging it all around with mad abandon simply because you can and it's fun. I also wonder if I've been thinking about this one too much, because it actually doesn't entirely sound like a compilation, despite the absurd range, with all tracks achieving a sort of unity through shared production, instrumentation, general spirit and so on. It's not karaoke, just great disco as you've either never heard it, or hadn't heard it for a while; or it was as of fifteen years ago.

It's not - ugh - "retro cool" either.

Piss off.

*: Conversely I draw the reader's attention to Wreckless Eric's weird electronic album, Bungalow Hi, which exists because Wreckless Eric was, is, and will forever remain artistically superior to the majority of his contemporaries.

Zones of Industrial Wasteland - Sectors (2019)

Having taken delivery of another care package from the very wonderful AUT label, I find amongst the latest selection of Sweden's finest, this full cassette album from Zones of Industrial Wasteland whom I recall from the label's Att Förstå Ensamhet compilation a while back, so that was the first one out of the box and into the tape deck - and yes, tapes in 2020 still strikes me as all sorts of weird, but I'm sure there will be those who say the same of any physical media, so there doesn't seem much point in getting too hung up on any of it.

Zones of Industrial Wasteland is one Janolof Enberg, author of a virtual album called One Mountain back in 2015 and which was a  more overtly dance orientated thing from what I can tell. Sectors is techno in so much as that pretty much everything you hear seems to have been generated within a metal box of some description, or at least processed therein; and while it mostly adheres to one time signature or another, as marked by certain muted percussive sounds, it's more in the way of soundtrack music than anything to which you might necessarily bust a move. For sake of lazy reference, think some of the less thumping moments in the career of Front 242, but geared towards the sort of movies where darkly militaristic craft cruise through smoke-choked apocalyptic skies; so there's a touch of maybe Vangelis, or whoever it was who scored Blade Runner. This sort of thing seems to be fairly easy to do, but is hard to do well, and Enberg does it very, very well - dark, moody and deliciously expansive without ever quite tipping over into pulling scary faces or pretending to be a robot. There's a strong suggestion of craft, sounds which have been worked at, nothing you'd spot as an obvious preset, and with plenty of interesting stuff kept bubbling along in the mix beneath the main theme, suggesting something along the lines of Chris & Cosey scoring the sort of moody techno thrillers already invoked.

Also, Maintenance Drone - which I recall from Att Förstå Ensamhet - opens with a sample which I'd swear was taken from some early Devo home movie, so obviously that gets extra points from me.

Virtual version here.

Peter Hope & David Harrow - Sufferhead 85/13 (2020)

Here's a couple of EPs originally released by Hope and Harrow in 1985 and 2013, now reissued as a single album; which works surprisingly well despite the three decade gap between the original sessions, with five tracks per side adding up to a nice and tidy album length. The 1985 material sounds very much of its time and geography - which isn't a criticism - very much birthed from the same milieu as Hula and digital-era Cabaret Voltaire with hard gated beatbox rhythms pulled out of shape by horns, tapes, even some metal bashing, then formed into something fierce and bluesy by Hope's powerful voice, yielding, I suppose, sound pieces as much as songs, like short, moody films lacking only their visual component. It's quite harsh, almost not quite musical, and yet there's a kind of funky tension keeping everything tight, keeping it all from springing out of shape. Think Tackhead pushed further, twitchy and sleep deprived.

I tend to listen to a lot of music first thing in the morning while doing things around the house, washing dishes, wrestling cats, cleaning up shite and so on; which has begun to feel a little awkward since my wife's company decided, in their finite wisdom, that they could make a great saving by having her work from home while hiring out the office space to someone else. She isn't too happy about the arrangement, which means I'm additionally a little self-conscious about my morning soundtrack, given her arguably more traditional musical tastes. As she has made clear, I'm quite welcome to listen to what she refers to as that pipe banging music, but I nevertheless feel a bit uncomfortable about blasting her with DDAA or Headyello first thing.

Getting back around to the point, I sensed funny looks coming in my direction when I played the aforementioned 1985 material, although Mrs. Bricklaying seemed to acclimate to it after the first couple of days. More surprising, at least to me, was how much she seemed to enjoy the second side of the record, the material from 2013, even asking who was responsible and what the tracks were called. Side two maintains the mood but otherwise slows everything to the pace of a comedown with intricately woven sequencers dominating, and less of a temper. We're still on the short, moody films, but now they feel like film noir, mysteries half seen from a rain soaked doorway.

Internet research reveals David Harrow as having worked with Jah Wobble, Adrian Sherwood, and others already resident on my shelves, which makes a lot of sense given the sonic territory he inhabits; and his soundtracks provide a perfect complement to Hope's image-heavy narrative. I realise I seem to have gotten into the knee-jerk habit of unquestioningly buying everything issued by these two on the strength of name alone - limited run vinyl, CDRs, lathe cut things and what have you - but they deliver every time so it seems justified, and I'm already looking forward to the Revbjelde album.