Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

+DOG+ - Ad Infinitum (2021)

 

Once again, I'm overwhelmed by the artistic vision of this bunch whilst being left bewildered as to how the hell I could even begin to describe it in anything other than purely subjective terms. This time it's a lavishly forged double disc set which divides into thirty tracks including Record Collector Scum, Scumbag Pile of Shit, Impact Geology, Broken Astral Projector, Jazz Snobs, and The Greatest Gift of All is Love. However, I've been listening to the thing as a single piece, by which terms it seems to work particularly well, so individual titles may be not much more than a distraction.

Ad Infinitum seems recognisably the work of +DOG+ as characterised by focus on the sounds which traditional musicians try to keep at bay - mains hum, rattle, circuit buzz, hiss, distortion, speaker deterioration driven to ear-splitting volume or, at other times, settling to a more ambient level; alternating with the occasional incongruous intrusion of a piano or even xylophone played for tonal effect rather than notes; and the whole - all two hours or however long it is - feels almost as though it's telling a story, albeit the sort of thing which doesn't translate into words or even images. It's trippy and sort of immersive, even kind of meditative yet without a single element that you could possibly describe as relaxing.

Available from Love Earth Music, link top left of webpage.

Bigg Jus - Poor People's Day (2005)

As regular viewers will probably have worked out, most of what you read here turns up because I feel like writing about it rather than through a desire to keep anyone's finger on a pulse of any description. The only reason it's taken me this long to get around to Poor People's Day is because I had assumed I'd already written something about it, but apparently not. The reason I had assumed that I'd already written something about it is because it's an honestly fucking amazing album.

You may recall Bigg Jus as having been one third of Company Flow, which will at least give you some idea of where Poor People's Day is coming from. Musically, it's not entirely unlike what El-P has been doing since Company Flow imploded - that same kind of post-industrial extrapolation of hip-hop fundamentals first drawn up on a couple of decks plugged into a light pole in the park. There's a science-fiction element, maybe a psychedelic tinge to the treatment of some of the samples and a bit more of a melody, but it's that same angry insurrectionary lurch albeit with a reduced sense of claustrophobia.

Lyrically, it further underscores that Company Flow were never just El-P with two other guys, and even titles such as Energy Harvester hint at similar dystopian obsessions; as does the subject matter. Bigg Jus is one of those guys who simply can't be pigeon holed and probably shouldn't be, given how fucking angry he is regarding the state of the world, society, and the machine which has made its business to shit directly upon us to an hourly schedule; and his politics are delivered without any of the conspiracy bullshit which blunts the testimony of many of his contemporaries. Poor People's Day is what we used to refer to as righteous truths, although it eludes even the conscious rap tag through having better things to do than waste half its playing time whining about other rappers letting the side down, which makes for a nice change.

Poor People's Day is one of those rare efforts that transcends its genre through not quite sounding like anyone else out there. It's truth is raw and of such emotional power as to reduce the best of us to tears simply through telling it like it is, for which soul music is as good a term as any. This one is right up there with Funcrusher Plus and I'll Sleep When You're Dead.

Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

 

I've tried with this one, but I've tried by means of a Discman while out riding the range on my horse. Now listening to the thing at home, I realise it benefits somewhat from being played over speakers like background music. This is annoying because I'd already built up a significant head of ambivalence and had worked out what I wanted to write; but fuck it, I'll just say what I was going to say and you can assume that it's probably better.

I first heard of this lot back when Morrissey recorded that album of Skrewdriver covers or whatever it was that he did, and Cornershop wrote him a letter to explain how disappointed they were - much to the delight of the music press. It was something along those lines anyway. If the sentiment was worthy, I remained unimpressed on the grounds that Morrissey had spent his entire career eulogising the good old sixties, Granny Grove on black and white telly, penny chews, and how everything used to be much better than it was in the nineties. He'd never struck me as an ambassador for multicultural Britain, and it seemed bizarre that anyone should be surprised after Bengali in Platforms.

Anyway, I saw Cornershop live at least once, possibly twice, but don't remember much about the experience. I had, and still have, a few of their first records. I dig Hold On It Hurts out roughly every five or six years to give it another chance, but beyond that Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal is fairly amusing, it still sounds like a fucking racket, and not even an interesting racket; then I encountered this for a single dollar in the usual place.

It's not terrible, and you could get a fairly respectable 10" out of this bunch by excising all the pissing about, the tracks which don't really count as songs. Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha are both reasonably wonderful as vaguely summery John Denver impersonations with maybe a bit of Velvet Underground chucked in, and there are perhaps four or five others; beyond which we have a lot of that stuff which always washed ashore every time one of the music papers published yet another krautrock retrospective - three minutes of drumming, someone pissing about with a digital delay, strum strum strum about halfway through then someone pushing an easy listening record around by hand and pretending that it's scratching. It's all very well, and God knows that could serve to describe half of the bands with which I've ever been involved; but it was long in the tooth even before I got hold of it, never mind this bunch. The best you can say of these examples is that they probably worked well as linking music for that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sitcom, the one without any actual jokes. To me, tracks of this general type make it sound like you don't actually know what you're doing but - hey - look, we're nearly up to an hour now, the album is finished! Just because you were there doesn't mean it's interesting, and no, calling it improvisation really doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

That being said, When I Was Born for the 7th Time sounds much better on speakers, blending into the background as something not unlike elevator music; which was maybe the whole point.

If you read through the above a couple of times, I'm sure you'll eventually find something useful.