Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance (1981)

PIL were an early discovery for me, a band which loomed large in my teenage world for what seemed like an age - the era prior to my discovery of Throbbing Gristle and all the really weird, scary stuff - but which may actually have been a matter of months. I was hypnotised by that first single before I even realised there was any kind of Pistols association; I was chilled yet thrilled by what Annie Nightingale played of Metal Box before it hit the shops; and I was so primed and ready for Flowers that it may even have been the first album I bought on the day it came out.

I never really tired of this stuff but I came to play it less and less as it was eclipsed by other things, and it didn't help that my copies of the first two albums took to skipping all over the fucking shop whenever I tried to listen to them. I assumed it was something to do with those bass frequencies collapsing the walls between the grooves during mastering; then recently I bought a new needle and found First Issue was just fine when I happened to play it, as was Second Edition. It seems that I've spent three decades listening to music with needles which weren't actually quite so good as I had believed, given that I never experienced the skipping problem with anything else. So, after all this time the early, spikier incarnation of Public Image Ltd. were suddenly back on the menu.

It's therefore been one fuck of a long time since I gave this a spin, and Christ almighty - it still sounds incredible. The loss of Wobble really seemed like a disaster at the time and I couldn't see how they would come back from it, at least not without taking on another bassist; but Levene, Lydon, and Martin Atkins squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons, producing something which, although rhythmic, is otherwise almost completely unmusical by any conventional terms but succeeds by the sheer force of its overpowering atmosphere; and it probably doesn't hurt that Lydon's vocalisations had grown particularly haunting and lyrical by this point. I'm still not sure quite where any of it came from, besides being vaguely aware of Lydon and Levene's eclectic influences, but it seems to foreshadow Einstürzende Neubauten of all things, at least in terms of crushing atmospherics derived from flawlessly recorded and immediately recognisable sound sources captured with pseudo-classical clarity.

I vaguely recall some radio interview from the time during which the lads expressed dismay at Adam & the Ants having produced such a relatively weedy sound despite having two drummers, and in light of this monster, they had a point. I'm trying to think of something so heavily reliant upon just percussion as was The Flowers of Romance which came anywhere close to sounding so powerful, but I'm drawing mostly blanks.

Speed Garage Anthems volume two (1988)

I realise it's ancient history, and that when it was brand spanking new it was almost certainly as seen on TV, but I couldnae gi' twa shites. Keeping in mind that music appreciation is entirely subjective, this double disc was nevertheless as good as dance music ever got so far as I'm concerned. I'm not saying it was all downhill from hereon, but this compilation represents the point at which my dance boner achieved its greatest density. Conversely, I recall a degree of sneering dispensed in the general direction of speed garage, or 2-step, or just garage or whatever you want to call it. Chavs, welfare recipients, trainee mechanics and people who worked in high street supermarkets listened to garage and danced around their working class handbags to it at the weekend, with nary a media studies degree student to be seen unless engaged in some sort of anthropological survey. They probably didn't even read Mixmag, for fuck's sake.

From my perspective, by the mid nineties, popular music had mostly degraded into an undifferentiated chantalong mass of turdy indie shite performed by young men with ironic seventies haircuts, and yet I still required something by which to occupy my ears at work and keep me sane during those long, long hours of trudging around in the pissing wind and rain. Radio 1 was unlistenable, as were most of the music stations. Danny Baker hadn't yet taken over the breakfast slot at GLR, and Radio 4 got on my tits, leaving just Kiss 100 FM on the grounds that I could pick it up on my Walkman radio and Steve Jackson hadn't yet been replaced by a complete fucking tool; and this was the sort of thing Jackson played, regardless of whether or not you had a clue what you were listening to, and regardless of it being eight in the morning; and being London based, it really felt like our thing.

Without my bothering to look anything up on Wikipedia, speed garage seemed to be eighties deep house sped up a couple of notches with a few other elements chucked in - R&B, breakbeat, even a touch of jungle, whatever got the job done. It worked like acid by virtue of intense repetition, but with sounds combining the rich vocalisations of soul with the blunted sine waves and filtered sound of 8-bit games, forming a composite which would eventually mutate into grime, dubstep and others. Above all, what distinguished this music was the skipping rhythm straying from the solid 4/4 of pretty much everything else spawned of house music. I've digitally slowed it down in hope of working out what the fuck it's actually doing, but that beat differs from one track to the next, sometimes working with an offbeat, sometimes with hi-hats in a triple time signature, sometimes resembling a traditional reggae rhythm once reduced to a less manic pace. If the squelch of the TB-303 formed the core of acid - the element which draws you in, even transports you - with 2-step, it's that weird sped up clatter of hi-hat.

I picked this one up because it seemed to include most of the greats - Double 99, Ruff Driverz, Dreem Team, Industry Standard, 187 Lockdown, Roy Davies Jnr. and Armand van Helden's version of Spin Spin Sugar which must surely count as one of the greatest remixes of all time. It's over two and a half hours with one track morphing seamlessly and euphorically into the next, and with only a couple of lulls on the second disc where someone threw in a more radio friendly sub-techno hit presumably for the sake of the sales pitch - Bobby Brown and the endlessly overrated Faithless being the worst offenders; but the whole is so fucking powerful that a couple of dips below the average don't seem to make any difference. More than twenty years later, I stick this on and I'm back in south-east London in the pissing rain eating fried chicken - but in a good way - and it still sounds as fresh as the day it was spawned. So much for dance music as an ephemeral form.

Howling Larsons & Nikolaos Lymperopoulos - Poemandres (2021)

Occasionally there will be a piece of music of such self-contained power as to inform the suspicion that any comment one might offer will be essentially dog shit; and that's what we have here. I've known Alan Trench for a long time, and on the last occasion of our being together in the same room, he'd remarried and bought a house on a Greek island with the intention of living there in response to some seemingly mysterious calling. I say house, but I had the impression that it was actually a pile of rubble and the newlyweds would need to undertake some renovation work - and by renovation, I mean things like electricity, running water, and basic plumbing. Anyway, they seemed to know what they were doing, and it sounded exciting in a massively reckless sort of way.

Another couple of years down the line and it seems to have worked out well for Alan and Rebecca, now recording as the Howling Larsons - amongst other wilfully tangential names - and they've produced this, a collaboration with one Nikolaos Lymperopoulos who I'm sure Alan described as their next door neighbour, a man who just happened to be fluent in ancient Greek. It sounds unlikely, but this sort of thing seems to become fairly commonplace once you achieve a certain remove from locales with shopping malls; and in any case, this album definitely derives from somewhere outside the familiar, mainstream reality. Poemandres is nearly an hour of Lymperopoulos reading, chanting, and intoning as follows.

The ancient Greek text, a revelation of the creation of the Universe and the fate and nature of Man, is presented here in the original, using the Byzantine intonation method. This has long been considered one of the most important, and certainly the most famous, documents of the Corpus Hermeticum. The music, performed as a ritual piece, draws the listener into one of the most important mind-states of the Ancient World.

...and that really is what it does, underscoring the spoken account with a powerful devotional drone of church organ and other elements hidden further down in the mix to produce something which actually achieves the promises made elsewhere on Current 93's proverbial tin without the emphasis on crap tattoos and pierced todgers. This is because the Howling Larsons took a different route to many of their showier, better publicised contemporaries in moving to Greece and just getting the fuck on with it. Remember all those [name diplomatically withheld because he's probably reading] albums wherein the lad pretends to be a thirteenth century monk by whacking the decay of his digital reverb up to five minutes? Well, this is the real thing.

Coldsore - En Dolor y Rebelión (2021)

The recent rebirth of Sterile Records brings a welcome return to Nigel Ayers' stewardship of a label which releases work of persons other than members of Nocturnal Emissions; which may seem a strange point to make and I'm certainly not disparaging Earthly Delights as anything other than the home of the hits, but Sterile issued some weird and wonderful stuff back in the early days - Controlled Bleeding, Maurizio Bianchi, and others - and it's always nice to have someone else coming through.

Naturally I'd never heard of Coldsore, but a minute or so of the first track on the Bandcamp page was enough for me to be sure, and now I've been listening to this thing for the best part of a week. They're from Finland, they make a noise, and they're politically progressive - which makes for a nice change. This one is inspired by and dedicated to the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico - which gets a thumbs up from me, obviously. Coldsore's tumblr page seems to make reference to something called doomdrone, which I'll ignore because labelling gets on my tits, although there are probably worse descriptions. What we have are two lengthy pieces of approximately thirty minutes each, utilising electronic and possibly environmental sounds - nothing resembling an instrument, or even suggesting that you could plug a keyboard into it. It's the ambient howl of factories and processing plants abstracted to the point of resembling music, so even if it's not exactly tuneful, there are notes which do what notes customarily do and the effect is powerfully haunting, even moving in an emotional sense without coming too close to anything you might call noise. For the sake of making the usual lazy comparisons, En Dolor y Rebelión isn't a million miles from Nocturnal Emissions more droning efforts - at least in terms of mood - although there's an element which reminds me of Einstürzende Neubauten for reasons I can't quite pin down, a sense of space perhaps. It doesn't feel like something generated from within a metal box. I seem to have ended up listening to quite a lot of atonal things this year, and this is undoubtedly one of the best.