Bladder Flask - One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (1981)

 

Reading Nick Soulsby's excellent Viva Negativa! The Noise of Art and Nothing covering the elusive, bewildering and intermittent existence of the New Blockaders, I'm reminded of the association with this album and additionally flabbergasted to discover I put a few of these people out on one of my own tapes back in the day during the two hours of their identifying as Citipati. I had no idea, which is doubtless a consequence of the strategic anonymity practiced by those involved.

I would have bought this at the time, and even had the Recloose Organisation flyer blutacked to my bedroom wall in preference to the usual posters of Bucks Fizz, Noel Edmonds, Kevin Keegan and so on, but pocket money was tight and the paper round wasn't paying a whole lot. I'm not really a fan of the sound made by the New Blockaders but I like the ideas, and in any case this predates the antimusic by probably a couple of months. Dada racket is as good a term as any, as snippets of cut-up and/or found sound spew arbitrarily forth from our speakers and the compositional technique of Un Chien Andalou is referenced in the sleeve notes. We're on the same side of town as Nurse With Wound, and the weird, perhaps fascinating thing, is that somehow it doesn't sound anything like Stapleton's doing. The focus is different, mood occasionally slips through in the juxtaposition of abused instruments and records spun backwards by hand; also the fact of the Rupenus brothers having no fear of the completely fucking ridiculous - so there's a slapstick undercurrent here, which is both funny and disconcerting depending on what other cacophony it happens to be competing with.

I've heard a million tapes composed by similar means with a similar aesthetic over the last few decades, and somehow Bladder Flask pisses over most of them, if you'll pardon the image and not-quite-a-pun. There's a unique wit here, and the production suggesting presentation in a music hall rather than some guy's bedroom brings a sense of weird gravity which makes whatever the hell is happening seem all the weirder. What with the Adventures of Twizzle, Citipati, Metgumbnerbone, Zoviet France, and the Hafler Trio, there was clearly something in the water of early-eighties Newcastle, and Bladder Flask were on their backs, right beneath the tap, mouths open wide; or maybe they were just whistling.

SPK - Auto-da-Fé (1983)

 

The late Simon Morris described them as industrial chancers which, if consistent with his habit of poo-pooing whatever you like on the grounds of your liking it, probably wasn't entirely without substance. As a close personal friend of the noise-stars, my favourite SPK story is of Graeme Revell signing a ten-album deal with Elektra, spunking the money away on a massive sampler, delivering Machine Age Voodoo, then recording the other nine albums in less than a week to such a standard that SPK were released from the contract. If true, I assume those nine missing albums sounded like their hopefully sarcastic But Can You Dance To It? except not as good. Still, when they got it right, they really fucking nailed it as demonstrated by the first side of this compilation.

The first side assembles tracks from the early singles and EPs recorded without much of a budget or significant interest from anyone who wasn't in the band; and they sound like nothing else released as SPK, not even Leichenschrei. If influenced by a good few of the usual suspects - Faust, Neu and so on - you still wouldn't mistake them for anyone before or since. We have harsh electronic squeaks and farts overloading the speakers while somehow sounding quite minimal, ninety-mile an hour pounding rhythms, lots of screaming and ranting, and the unexpected embellishment of angular new wave guitar. So it's a fucking racket, but it's a weirdly infectious fucking racket in places, like someone fed the Banshees into a blender; and crucially it sounds nothing like Gristle. I always had my doubts about Germanik, a title suggesting scary faces pulled while overly-earnest schoolboys scream Achtung and Die Englander Schweinhund because Hitler innit, but I assume one of them spoke German and the title is meant in the sense later employed by Laibach as a portmanteau of German and manic. Anyway, these six short blasts of punk noise will astonish you no matter how vast your rekord kollection may be, and no kobweb shalt remain inviolate.

By way of contrast, side two feels somewhat like here's the other stuff we've been mucking around with, opening with an earlier version of Metall Field, spelled with the Welsh ll for some reason, which is a'ight but not a patch on the version from the Peel session. Then we have Walking on Dead Steps which is one of those naughty bondage-synthesiser songs with Grez counting in German and from which Depeche Commode implausibly decanted an entire leather-underpants-clad career. Finally we come to A Heart That Breaks in No Time or Place which combines moody poetry with rude words and some nice trumpet work, but again feels like pissing around in a studio in hope of something happening. Nothing on the second side is actively bad, but it sounds weak after Retard, Slogun and the others, amounting to a full album which adheres to the long dead maxim about seven inch singles with lousy b-sides. The important thing to remember is that side one is akin to sticking your head into a cement mixer, then somehow fitting the cement mixer into a microwave oven and pressing go.

The Best of Schoolly D (1990)

 

I assume we all remember Schoolly D as the guy generally credited with inventing gangsta rap, and while there's a thin line to be drawn because nobody could possibly mistake The Message - to name but one - for Oops Upside Your Head, it's doubtful that NWA, Compton's Most Wanted, Ice-T and others would have sounded quite as they did without the influence of this guy, both in subject matter and its delivery; but as with almost everything, history gets in the way meaning gangsta rap has become a misleading description at best. Even if he's pulling a face, these records are mainly about good times with a liberal seasoning of reality, simply meaning that gangs, shags, and getting off one's tits on illegal substances are an inevitable part of the equation - which is refreshing in the wake of all those rap records about how you could go to college, or at least help an old lady across the road and refrain from being such a Negative Neddy*. Positivity doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing, but we're drowning in it right now and it doesn't seem to be helping.

In addition to being a whole shitload more fun than you may have been led to believe through overexposure to the 50 Cent back catalogue, these singles (plus a couple of early album tracks) may not sound quite as expected. Hip-hop moves on like no other genre, sonically speaking, filling as it goes an ever expanding circus tent with the latest incarnations of old school, as though all that went before is known, done, all over, and at best just a helpful footnote to where we are now. The twelve tracks included here are mostly just a guy rapping over a drum machine with scratching - grooves not tunes, and not even much in the way of sampling. It's minimal when you look at the credits, but it sure doesn't sound that way. I still vividly remember getting to piss about with my first proper eighties drum machine - a Yamaha RX15 owned by Steve McGarrigle, and one of the first to use samples. It seemed amazing what you could do with the thing, and even more amazing what came out of the speakers despite such memories having since been tarnished by all the shitty futuristic haircut acts of the decade hammering that thing into the ground. The difference is that whatever they're using on this stuff - and it's something very similar - still sounds as powerful and fresh and exciting as I remember, like the world's funkiest bailiff kicking in your front door - somehow in a good way. I suspect this may be thanks to DJ Code Money who additionally fills the remaining space with a tapestry of the finest scratching you'll hear, riffs, parps, squeaks, burps and scribbles forming a powerfully atmospheric embellishment to the microphone without ever quite committing to a tune. It's rare to hear music which seems to do so little and yet sounds so fucking massive that it would kill you in an instant if it fell on you.

Time for a giant fuck-off sized bronze statue of the man in one of those parks, I'd say, should anyone from Philadelphia city council happen to be reading.

*: Turn that Frown Upside Down, You Miserable Fucker by Afrika Bambaataa & Positive Life Tabernacle being one example of the subgenre that I've just made up.

Konstruktivists - Dark Odyssey (2004)

 

This is one of those Konstruktivists albums that sort of fell through the cracks, at least relative to those you will have heard of, or stand a chance of having heard of. Konstruktivists were between labels at the time but persisted regardless with CDRs here and there as the internet slowly began to happen, meaning you can now bag this one from Bandcamp should you so desire, but that the total bandwidth is shared by fifty million useless wankers all screaming for your attention without any good reason to be doing so and the only way you're going to seek this out is if you already know about it. Anyway, I was never keen on CDRs and didn't really know what to make of this one in 2004. It sounded, as I recall, overly digital, very much something which happened on a screen. To be clear, it didn't sound bad but, as I say, something wasn't working for me*.

Anyway, twenty-two years later, not only am I delighted to discover a CDR that hasn't degraded into the usual beer coaster, but that whatever I didn't get about Dark Odyssey no longer seems to apply so probably I just didn't have the right ears; or else it was simply a grower. Generally speaking, it sounds closer to the krautrock than previous efforts, in so much as that there are mesmeric grooves aplenty rather than songs or any of that angry stuff with all the funny noises and shouting. The layered instrumentation which I apparently didn't appreciate last time is beautifully balanced with all manner of lavish melodies contributing to the whole rather than dominating centre stage. It has some of the high definition of Glennascaul but isn't quite so in your face. Given the Neu-adjacent rhythms, Dark Odyssey feels like a travelogue, music in constant motion, probably at night and maybe a little too relaxed to be at the wheel but thankfully there's no-one else on the road. It takes you somewhere, hence the title, I guess, and I'm glad to have got there in the end.

Isn't it about time one of you fuckers pressed this onto vinyl?

*: I was additionally a little phased to see that the cover art was a pen and ink drawing I'd done in 1991, over a decade earlier when I was a briefly a member of Konstruktivists. I didn't mind, and it was nice to see my art used for something, but the drawing simply wasn't anything special to my way of thinking.