Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome (1999)

It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.

I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.

Available from this lot.

Neil Campbell - Roll the Vole to the Owl (2020)

Well, this is all very nice nice. I have a vague impression of Neil Campbell having more releases to his name than all other recording artists put together - ever, and here's another one which he's slipped out without an excess of ceremony and which doesn't sound like any of the others I've heard. Actually, of the others I've heard, a great number of them have been fairly noisy, which this isn't. The subheading on the Bandcamp page seems to be music for thumb piano, flute, and voice, which is what it is, although the flute sounds a lot like a recorder - as such arguably representing one of the few examples of a recorder sounding as good on the album as it probably did inside the artist's head - and there isn't much voice that you would notice, plus I'm fairly sure I could hear a Casio VL-1 in there somewhere. Roll the Vole to the Owl comprises seven vaguely folky instrumental pieces - at least atmospherically speaking - definitely free-range and home grown without chemical interference. It falls somewhere between a slightly friendlier relative of the Residents' Eskimo and Robert Cox's Rimarimba without all of the mathematics. Repeat listening gradually reveals electronic activity way down in the mix, at least as pertains to the recording process, but it's not obvious.  Roll the Vole to the Owl is so unassuming, so lacking an agenda, that it's hard to know what to say about it once we've established that it's a truly beautiful and perfectly formed piece of work, so I guess I'll leave it at that.

The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie (1992)

I first achieved an admittedly dim awareness of En Halvkokt i Folie back in 1984 or thereabouts as one name amongst many to feature in the catalogue of the Swedish Selbstmord label. Years passed without my actually managing to hear anything by them, at least not directly, although Lars Larsson seemed to turn up as a performer on other things I found myself enjoying with some regularity; and by 2020 I'd become sufficiently familiar with underground music from Sweden to wonder if there might not be something in the water, because most of what I've heard had been exceptional. Significantly, the name of En Halvkokt i Folie has been a constant presence lurking in the background as either an influence or even as a source of members in the stories of most of the Swedes whose work I've enjoyed, presenting me with the impression of their having been the Swedish equivalent of Throbbing Gristle, culturally speaking. Anyway, having finally made the effort to track something down, I realise that none of the comparisons quite fit and possibly the closest we'll get is that they are, or possibly were, the Swedish En Halvkokt i Folie.

That said, we're not talking music with no resemblance to anything else you've ever heard, but there's nevertheless something absolutely weird and unique about The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie, which feels like a compilation but may not be. Musical styles are stolen and interfered with depending upon the demands of the track, although the production values are very much expensive samplers of 1992, at least as a starting point. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is how much of this disc resembles house music, and house music as in the pastel coloured stuff with a shitload of piano and vocal samples, although there's also a bit of rapping, and the general vibe is maybe if Front 242 had appeared on an episode of Father Ted and spent most of the time trying to get those samplers to impersonate a Bontempi organ; so it's kind of a great big stupid riot, but with a poker face of such intestinal fortitude that Laibach would have told it to maybe lighten up a little. Sebastian Jensen Grundberg of the AUT label, who acts as my Swedish music advisor, suggested that much of this may get lost in translation given that my understanding of Swedish doesn't extend much further than one song by the Stranglers, but it feels as though whatever the hell they were trying to do is communicated reasonably well even to me, and of course it helps to have a couple of titles in English, notably Housecleaning with Narcotics and Germans Reminded of Their Nazi Past (by Foreigners). Also of note is the creation of an entire new musical genre on this disc, specifically Mongo House, which is actually a lot like regular house music but with greater emphasis on the planet Mongo from the old Flash Gordon serials.

Having a root around on the internet, I find a number of live clips showing a band vaguely closer to my original idea of their having occupied the same cultural bandwidth as Throbbing Gristle except in Sweden, and admittedly with an element of the Bonzos thrown in there somewhere; so I guess the Father Ted version of Front 242 was probably just how they were feeling at the time of recording. This also means that there must have been a whole shitload of variant incarnations of En Halvkokt i Folie which we've been cruelly denied these last three decades. Someone really needs to get onto that because this is magnificent.

The New Harnessians - Tabla Rasa (2020)

I'm not exactly sure who's behind this one but suspect it's something to do with +DOG+, being on the same label, inhabiting adjacent sonic territory, and the vocal on Blank Slate sounds kind of familiar. Where +DOG+ have brought us harsh noise composed and contrasted with an almost musical quality, the New Harnessians take it a step further. There's noise and distortion aplenty, but it's mostly textural compared to the ear splitting cacophony heard on Die Robot and others; and while there's nothing melodic, not much you'd recognise as a conventional instrument - excepting percussive effects and an occasional guitar, the howling and grinding is not without tone, meaning all these massive slabs of concrete and metal work against one other to create a mood - a powerfully pensive sense of melancholy. Not for the first time, I'm reminded of My Bloody Valentine's first album, particularly the more ruined tracks where something of obvious beauty is still just about audible within its own distorted and destroyed remains; or, if you prefer - the big revelation for me regarding Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report when I first heard it at the age of sixteen or whatever, was how all those echoing noises, all the humming and buzzing formed itself into something quite haunting after two or three plays, despite the seemingly random nature of its composition. Tabla Rasa works in the same sort of way without sounding particularly like either Gristle or even My Bloody Valentine; so it's probably fair to say that, +DOG+ excepted, it's not quite like anything I've heard before - which is probably one hell of a claim to make in the year 2020, but there it is.

We Be Echo - Darkness is Home (2020)

You wait ages then a couple of them come along at the same time. This is my second new album from We Be Echo - who had remained pretty much silent for at least a couple of decades there - in a month. However, where Beat of the Drum excavates old material, Darkness is Home is the legitimate new new album recorded using different equipment and on a different continental landmass with a lot of water having passed under the bridge since Ceza Evi. I have to admit, I wasn't too sure what I thought about the prospect of new material from We Be Echo. There were a couple of later works on the Decades compilation, and they were decent but that was still a while back. Kevin Thorne shared a few things he'd been doing on the internet - seemingly from an album called Mood Swings which I gather either failed to achieve escape velocity or else turned into this - and they sounded all right, but they didn't sound like We Be Echo to me; or maybe I couldn't square the improved quality with those gritty but nevertheless startling tape experiments of yesteryear.

I wonder if that was just something to do with my expectations, or if it really was enough of a thing to have bothered Kevin himself, because whatever the case, Darkness is Home sounds very different to Ceza Evi and yet somehow it's immediately recognisable as a continuation of the same current. A lot has changed, notably Kevin is now vocalising rather than using cut-up tapes, and while he's hardly David Coverdale his voice works really well - a little muted and fairly low in the mix, but doing just enough to give the tracks some sense of personality. The technology is additionally an improvement on the Sharp music centre or whatever it was - proper studio quality with live sounding drums and bass pounding out driving rhythms of a kind which very much invoke Ceza Evi, but also Neu and Hawkwind - which is an aspect I've only just noticed. Oddly, more than anything, Darkness is Home makes me think of Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor had grown up listening to Wire rather than Kiss, particularly in some of the guitar work and the general aesthetic with all sorts of mysterious half-heard noises and scrapes shifting and settling in the digital background; and despite any of the above namechecks, it doesn't really sound like anyone else. Darkness is Home may even be the best album I've heard this year.

Purchase yonder!