Headyello - Road to Elsewhere (2019)

Being somewhat out of the loop, I have no idea whether this is what people are presently referring to as noise, or whether this sort of thing is fairly commonplace for those with digits on cultural pulses, so bollocks to thee and thine should I give cause for sneering at my Grandpa-esque observations.

I generally don't do downloads, and yet here we are once again and not regretting the experience. Road to Elsewhere was approximately recommended to me as the work of a fellow Texan, and although Fort Worth is at such a distance that I've only been over that way twice this decade, it turns out to have been a good recommendation. As stated, I don't really know if this counts as noise, although if it does, symphonic noise seems as reliable a term as any. My initial impression was of random electronic farts, squirts, and bursts of tape hiss in the vein of factor X or maybe the nineties version of Nocturnal Emissions, and if there's a harsh element, it's to be found in the composition rather than the actual sonics. The album, which we may as well refer to as an album, comprises two lengthy pieces of respectively twenty minutes and half an hour duration. It's mostly found, treated sound from what I can tell, snatches of radio, telephone maybe, the buzz of a starter motor interfering with a tape recording, quiet sound sources peaking and distorting as the needle swings into the red, mains hum, things which sound like memories of the engine rumble on a childhood car journey. Excepting bursts of pop hits overheard, there's nothing musical, and yet the arrangement lends this whole thing a sort of tonal progression which becomes apparent with repeat listening. Loops cease to sound any more like loops than would be refrains repeated for the sake of a chorus in a more regular piece of music, and the rumble comes to complement the squeak and the squeal in much the same way as a cello might underpin the higher strings in an orchestra; and all the while Road to Elsewhere retains its sense of chaos, certainly nothing so twee as noise regimented as music. It's emotionally quite powerful is what I'm trying to say here.

If none of that makes any sense whatsoever, then I suppose you could say it's Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain as distinct from Jackson Pollock splashing it all about like Henry Cooper; and if that doesn't make any sense, maybe just take the plunge and listen to the thing.

Stop it and buy one here.

Dr. Dooom - First Come, First Served (1999)

It took me a while to come round to Kool Keith, and what eventually swung it was a stack of his albums for a couple of quid each in a second-hand place in Camberwell. Without actually having heard the man's work, I'd received the impression of his being another one of those rappers for people who don't actually like rap. This came from recommendations by, amongst others, Shaun Robert, formerly author of weirdy sound art cassettes under the name factor X, who, having inspected my shelves of rap CDs, opined something like, I'm a bit surprised that you don't have any Kool Keith, which sounded faintly like sneering at the time. We'd probably just had a disagreement over the merits of Björk, my position being that there aren't any, so Kool Keith became rap for people who like Björk and who probably read The Wire, to my way of thinking; and of course I was wrong.

I warmed to the idea of the man when he released an album on Esham's label, Gotham Overcore - which is probably ass-backwards, but never mind; and then when he sang the praises of low-brow rap, as the journalist termed it, in the pages of Vibe or The Source or one of those, specifically No Limit and other labels keeping Pen & Pixel in business. I could have just listened to his records, of course, but that would have been too easy.

First Come, First Served, defiantly released with another eye-watering Pen & Pixel cover, was recorded by one of Keith's numerous personalities, specifically the one which really seems to focus what I like about the guy, although appreciate may be a better word than like. He raps like a nutter, lines spat out with just a hint of anger, like you've spilled his pint but the situation hasn't quite made it out into the pub car park; and he's about four-thousand times more eloquent than most rappers. It all spills out, even sluices out in a barrage of faintly queasy and upsetting images, and it's like that moment where you take out the trash and lift the lid of the wheelie bin and get just a whiff before you remember to hold your breath. Keith seems fixated on detritus and snack food and rubbish, anything with a bit of a pong, as a sort of combined inversion and refutation of just about everything else which has ever happened in rap. If he wasn't so fucking good at it, you could be forgiven for thinking he hates the genre. There's not a lot of gold, and nor are the fizzy millionaire drinks aflowing - just about every other liquid you might care to mention but probably wouldn't, but definitely not a lot of Alizé. In fact, the imagery of dollar store diapers, cereal, and egg shells is of such concentration that if you wrote everything he said down, I'm pretty sure it would read like a less alcoholic Bukowski.

What he's actually saying is similarly pungent, and with not very much that would have seemed out of place in one of the earlier, more harrowing John Waters films. This is because he's keeping it real, as we say, but really real, the sort of real which is customarily subject to a restraining order. His message to fellow artistes is You Live at Home with Your Mom, and once you compare this album with whatever else has been doing the rounds, you realise that they do.

Musically, it's a little basic, just hard atmospheric beats keeping a rhythm to the justifiably arrogant dispensation of bile, which is how it should be. Anything stronger would mask the odour and would miss the point, so instead we get hints of turd-strewn sidewalks, film soundtracks, and Peter Lorre on full ooze sliming his way around a backing vocal, knocking on your door at midnight to apologise for the smell from the apartment across the hall, and hey, you got any toilet paper?

First Come, First Served is a classic, no argument, and I think I need a shower.

Sylvie & Babs - The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985)

Yes, I'm well aware of it being Nurse With Wound, thank you very much, but I'm pretty sure it was listed as above when released, the reason being that Steve Stapleton regarded the Hi-Fi Companion as something quite separate and distinct from the Nurse With Wound canon, which it sort of is, or at least was. So I'm sticking with the original version of the story, plus I seem to recall the United Dairies mail order list had this down as something other than Nurse With Wound, and listed under comedy for what it may be worth - along with Hastings of Malawi, whatever the hell that was.

Of course, it's now difficult to get through a whole day without having to hear some cunt's aspirationally humorous plunderphonic deconstruction of existing bits of music, but back in 1985, 'twas not yet so overegged a pudding as it has become, and possibly because no-one had a sampler so it was harder. Sylvie & Babs were principally Stapleton and the gang making music with bits of other people's records, and - so I gather - making it the extraordinarily complicated way by splicing together inch thick strips of studio tape and so on in the spirit of Pierre Schaeffer and those guys as opposed to just sitting next to the radio with one finger on the pause button and then selling the end result to people with a photocopy of your knob on the cover like Hamilton Bohannon* would have done.

To start again at the beginning, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as industrial, then you're a fucking clown; you wear big red shoes; you have a bowler hat on your head with a giant flower coming out of it; and when you drive your car, you honk the horn twice every few yards and the doors have usually fallen off by the time you reach your destination, which will almost certainly be a clown shop which you're visiting in order to make purchase of clown supplies. This description also applies, albeit to a lesser extent, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as a noise group or - ugh - sound artists; although Nurse With Wound are very much about sound and the psychological and physiological effects it can have on the listener: so it's definitely music, but works more like a sonic analogy of the art of Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaist types than does music with tunes, verses, a chorus, or which is made using musical instruments. The next sound you hear on a Nurse With Wound record may often be the last sound you would expect to hear depending on whatever has gone before, which distinguishes them from those acts more obviously reliant on repetition. It can be hard work listening to Nurse With Wound, but also very rewarding because it's never quite like anything you will have heard before, possibly including previous Nurse With Wound albums. They're not something you can listen to all the time, but every so often, you'll find there's nothing better if the time is right.

Well, that's the theory anyway, and I haven't actually heard the last five-hundred or so records so for all I know he may be cranking out handbag house with Nick Griffin these days, but for the sake of argument, let's just pretend it's still 1985 and that I'm right. I failed to buy this at the time because there was other stuff I wanted, and Nurse With Wound were an acquired taste even by my standards; also, it wasn't that easy to get hold of their stuff. I had Insect & Individual Silenced, which was fucking great, but apparently not so great as to keep me from flogging it when I decided I really needed those first two albums by You've Got Foetus On Your Breath. Millions of years later, I find this on CD and notice that I actually know three of the people who appeared on here amongst the lengthy list of collaborators, which is weird. In fact, I've been in bands with two of them; and one of them was Andrew Cox who was my bestest buddy for a while, and who is no longer with us, and who I still miss like crazy; so I couldn't really not buy it.

I suspect all those bargain basement cassette versions of Nurse With Wound have spoiled the real thing for me over the years, because in 2017 Sylvie & Babs sound drearily familiar rather than weird and surprising, at least on first listen. The key seems to be getting past the point of trainspotting where it all came from - snatches of My Boomerang Won't Come Back and the like, which seem intrusive whilst they remain familiar, although maybe that was the point. After a few spins, it picks up - which again is the opposite of what I expect to get from a Nurse With Wound record given how they seem so often reliant on shock and surprise; but this eventually settles into a sort of musicality suggestive of narrative which is almost certainly in the ear of the beholder. I suppose this could be what differentiates Sylvie & Babs from Nurse With Wound - unless it's just my lugholes - namely that increasing familiarity with the material brings some sort of pleasure, just like you get from Sting and Coldplay, beyond which, one is drawn to focus on the bizarre acoustics at play. That made sense in my head when I thought it.

The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion is decent, and it's nice to hear Andrew's voice again - repeating the phrase it ain't necessarily so, in case anyone was wondering - but it isn't startling, and more than anything it makes me wish I'd found some other means of financing my purchase of those early Foetus discs. Time to get looking for another copy of Insect & Individual Silenced, I suppose.

*: Name changed so as to protect the annoying.

Muslimgauze - The Rape of Palestine (1988)

Recording as Muslimgauze, Bryn Jones released about a million albums, and at least seventy-five thousand of those were posthumous efforts, turded out in the studio faster than whoever was paying to have the things pressed and distributed could handle, at least up until Jones' unfortunate demise from a rare blood disease in 1999. About three or four hundred of those albums passed through my hands, having been sent to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review way back whenever, and they sounded all right, but they mostly sounded like variations on a theme and I ended up passing them on to my friend Carl who seemed to enjoy them more than I did.

As has been noted on a number of occasions, Muslimgauze might be considered a somewhat contentious operation, what with his openly supporting Jihadist suicide bombings and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The music of Muslimgauze has been for the most part instrumental, with the supposedly political aspect represented by titles and packaging. I say supposedly because personally I've never been entirely convinced about where Jones' apparent fervour was coming from, and I wonder if he really knew himself.

The work of Muslimgauze fixates on Islam and the cultures of the Middle-East. Musically speaking this amounts to lengthy rhythmic pieces either utilising traditional Middle-Eastern instrumentation or else invoking a general effect amounting to the same just as a film soundtrack might evoke a certain culture without quite stooping to imitation. Given how greatly Muslimgauze fixates on Islam and the cultures of the Middle-East, it seems clear that this was a more than passing interest for Jones, and more than a mere aesthetic. Nevertheless, he wasn't a Muslim and he never actually visited an Islamic country, which always struck me as weird given how even I managed Morocco without really trying; and his interviews seem to vary from Muslimgauze as the musical branch of Hamas to no dude, it's just about the tunes so as not to scare those nice Wire readers. There's an argument for Muslimgauze as carrier of a certain anti-Semitic subtext given the Jihadist fixation, but I suspect the truth is more that Bryn Jones was probably just a sad man, living on his own and eating cheese footballs while watching Countdown followed by Richard and Judy, promoting what is actually some pretty decent music with a sabre-rattling helping of shock effects. He certainly hasn't done much to promote a positive image of Islam. The records are aesthetically fascinating, but it's hard to find amongst all that back catalogue a single version of Islam which isn't pointing a gun at you or threatening to chop off your hands for stealing a Hovis. To further reduce it to the essentials, it's a musical experiment utilising the exotic and alien as both structure and as a big scary monster, just like on a death metal record. Were I of Islamic persuasion, I don't think I'd be too happy to have this guy claiming to be on my side.

So before this all starts to sound a bit witch-hunty, I personally doubt that Bryn Jones was ever an anti-Semite, but - and may Allah forgive me for speaking ill of those who have passed on - I suspect he was probably a colossal knob in certain respects, not least that he presented an image of Islam which is more or less indistinguishable from the one I see on Fox News every night; and the last thing this world needs at this end of the twentieth century is more demons.

This album is one of three Muslimgauze records given to me by a fucking cheeky noise music cunt of my former acquaintance who once stayed at my house, ate my food, knackered my tape deck, and then left me a stack of industrial vinyl records as either apology or payment. I was pissed off, but I suppose I shouldn't complain seeing as said records have all turned out to be worth a fucking fortune in recent years, and this is one of them, and for all it being the work of a colossal knob, it is a pretty great record, a fruit of the days when Muslimgauze albums sounded different to each other. This one drones and thumps and pounds, invoking all the stuff you will probably expect if you've read reviews of other Muslimgauze records; and it's hypnotic, and surprisingly beautiful in places. I suppose if nothing else, Jones' silly affectations have at least prevented his work ending up in either the new age or world music ghetto, but it still seems a shame that he had to be such a twat.