Martha & the Muffins - Metro Music (1980)

If they are remembered at all, I suspect Martha & the Muffins have been reduced mainly to a question in a pub trivia quiz with vague suggestions of a time when new wave was angular, quirky, and wore a skinny tie; although to be fair, it was four fucking decades ago. Like everyone, I thought Echo Beach was great, but retained impressions beyond the token hit single thanks to my record collecting pal at school who obsessively snapped up subsequent singles by anyone whose debut smash had already found its way into his heart, particularly if coloured vinyl was involved. So I dutifully borrowed and taped the five or six which came after Echo Beach along with the b-sides because - who knows? - just in case, and life went on.

Recently going through old tapes - all of which still play just fine, thank you very much - listening to Saigon again, not having heard it in maybe thirty years or more, was like being punched in the face. The song chugs along on its tidy wee new wave beat, keyboard wistfully keening away in the background, and then we come to the end of the verse and that riff is like going over the humpback of a rollercoaster just as the amphetamine hits. I was aware of there having been an album or two and had vague memories of studying the sleeves in record stores, specifically HMV in Coventry. It seemed like further investigation was long overdue.

The production is slightly flat, underscoring the illusion of the tidy little college band in shiny shoes playing their songs for you, but this only means it takes longer for the magic to work its way through; and the more you listen, the more it seems like the Muffins were at least a Canadian equivalent of the Talking Heads, probably more jagged than they sound here but nevertheless something which conveniently coincided with the mainstream more than played up to it. We're not quite talking Devo, but we're definitely not talking Huey Lewis and the fucking News. Behind the radio friendly mix, the instrumentation is pretty wild, peppering all manner of structural somersaults with blasts of jazzy noise, and offsetting squeals of the unexpected against metronomic repetition of a kind which would doubtless have beardy old men wetting themselves had it been originated in Düsseldorf in the seventies. I suspect this band were not served well by their own billing which seemed to miss everything that made them worth hearing, and surely the Peter Saville sleeve should have been a clue.

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003)

Now that I'm more than one-hundred years old, the majority of the music I own will be, by definition, stuff which I haven't listened to in a while, because even listening to an average five or six albums a day, there will inevitably be records which have settled, so to speak. Usually this means I get to rediscover these misplaced waxings and enjoy them all over again, and sometimes I discover qualities I didn't even notice on previous occasions and enjoy them all the more, but every so often there's an exception. The last time I tried to listen to Curtis - 50 Cent's third album, of which I had no memory and had forgotten I owned - it was hard work getting through the thing, which at least explained why I'd barely played it, and left me with the impression that he probably wasn't worth bothering with beyond that classic debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin' - with no g at the end because that's how tough guys speak, see.

Time hasn't done this one any favours either. In Da Club and 21 Questions still sound okay, I guess, and I assume the rest was once provided by how new and different it seemed at the time - now devalued in currency thanks to everything since sounding more or less like this: rap for the airwaves or the shitty little speaker on your wanky phone with da club relegated to a subject, just a hook. 50 Cent half raps, half sings, as his critics have so often pointed out, but it's more that he speaks a tune while the beats just kind of shimmer and chug in the background. Strip the vocal from a few of these and it would be anyone's guess where or who they were pitched at.

Lyrically he places himself as the third of a holy trinity behind Nas and Jay-Z, just as certain presidents will tell you what a great job they're doing which, I feel, lacks objectivity and is therefore an unreliable quantifier of worth; and 50 Cent, or Fiddy as I've no doubt hyper-talented NME writers of the day knew him, isn't terrible, but beyond the vague novelty of his speaking tunes, I have a tough time thinking of anyone less lyrical until we get to early nineties garage MCs. This is one of those guys who isn't above repeating a word at the end of two consecutive lines and so rhyming it with itself; which would be okay, except an entire album of I've shot tons of blokes in the face and the cops didn't do nuffink because I am really, really hard and that and nothing else is kind of witless; and a token track for the ladies amounting to how pet, you can suck my dick if you like doesn't really bring thematic variety. I loves me some ign'ant as much as anyone, but even rap's most celebrated cavemen can usually work a moral into the body count, something from which we might learn, or something cinematic at least - an angle which distinguishes it from being the same fucking thing over and over in a monotone with notes. Fiddy's delivery is possibly calculated to suggest the detachment of a killer—excuse me, I mean a killa, but it makes him sound like he's zonked out on dope, which is perhaps why this one was a lot more fun for him than for me.

Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv (1984)

Comparing the respective careers of the four Throbbing Gristlers after they parted ways, I realise Gristle itself could be pretty much summarised as Chris & Cosey with Porridge providing a picture of a chair for the album cover, then telling you 'Hermann Göring sat on that chair,' with that lurid smile which lets you know you've been Porridged good and proper. It's strange how this only seems obvious - at least to me - with a couple of decades of hindsight. I'd guess the music of Chris & Cosey mostly sounded happy, doubtless as a result of having left a band which included Porridge, although it didn't seem so at the time. It seemed more like they'd divided into the polar opposites of weirdy stuff with pierced nobs on the one hand, and nursery rhyme proto-techno on the other; but having noticed that 2018's Tutti is almost pure Gristle with more polish, yet without sounding like a trip down memory lane, this is the rabbit hole I've chosen today.

I'm not sure if Techno Primitiv was exactly the last good thing for me, but as I still can't remember what Pagan Tango sounds like, it was the last to make an impression, following which my attention span wandered off somewhere else. The couple hit the ground running with 1981's Heartbeat, released the same year as the split and sounding like they were at least fucking trying. More records followed and a sound developed with some sense of direction, meaning we never quite bought the same album twice while allowing for occasional flashes of tangential brilliance - the Elemental 7 soundtrack or collaborations with Konstruktivists and the Eurhythmics for example. However, we shouldn't underestimate how different these records seemed to what had gone before. Without Porridge providing some vaguely sinister subtext - and I honestly don't know how much else - the music became its own subject in so much as that it lacked an overt message. These were studio experiments in building a groove and seeing where it led, with Cosey's vocalisations more about mood than anything. Technically, the electronics were always a couple of years ahead of everyone else, usually meaning there was enough going on to keep it from sounding like all those plug it in and press a button cybernauts who came later. So considering the improvisational nature of the composition, and that Chris & Cosey albums had a diary quality of what we've been working on since the last thing hereby presented for your consideration, there's no obvious singularity of vision or focus to sharpen a record into the sort of point you might get with other artists. Practically this meant what sounded to me like diminishing returns, more and more nursery rhymes, bass patterns which may as well have been the Birdie Song, Cosey sounding slightly bored, and albums suggesting the work of people titting about in the studio because they have nothing better to do.

Yet when they're good, they're great - moody and sensuous like a cyber-age Serge Gainsbourg, hypnotic with some mathematically ornate rhythm track taking centre stage within a vast sonic space windswept by half-heard melodies, noises, groans, sighs - all captured in digital hyperclarity so sharp that it's almost weird. Techno Primitiv has a few of those tracks which never quite worked, I felt, due to an incongruously chirpy quality - He's an Arabian for example, but then you hit the pseudo-tribal panorama of Do or Die and all is forgiven; and even the more uptempo tracks, the almost songs, have a certain frisson of the forbidden which elevates them above the frosty jangle of Christmas muzak. Above all, this one still sounds like an album regardless of whatever themes it may carry remaining ambiguous. It sounds like possibilities, like effort made beyond sticking a skull on the cover and giving the kids what they want. So credit where it's due, and all that.

Analog Brothers - Pimp to Eat (2000)

While this one looked a lot like Kool Keith and Ice-T ripping the piss out of the RZA's Bobby Digital, it's proven near impossible to find anything substantial in support of the proposition and even the line about how everyone knows digital blows sounds more like good old fashioned technological fundamentalism. Whoever the target may have been - and I suspect it's more likely suckers as a demographic rather than any specific member of the Wu-Tang Clan - it shares an attitude with much of Kool Keith's back catalogue, namely the suggestion of it being better than everyone else, and knowing itself to be better than everyone else. If this quality is hardly exclusive to Keith in rap terms, he goes one fuck of a lot further than most in proving his point, and so it is with Pimp to Eat.

The Analog Brothers are, or possibly were, mostly lesser known names within Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate, plus the man himself trading as Ice Oscillator, with er… Keith Korg as the only one who wasn't already in the gang; yet it feels like part of Keith's body of work more than anything, making use of that brooding Diesel Truckers sound - up front beatbox with growling bass and not too much else to clutter the sound; and the full complement of Analog Brothers working with the same lyrical firehose, an uncensored fountain of bewildering surrealism and profanity that's as much challenge as proclamation:

More flow than the average Joe, get off the stamina, Peein' off the top of the Empire State Building, urinate on pedestrians, Walkin' past West 4th Street lesbians, 28th Street flashin' drivin' Dodge dashin' free man, Sport Superman underoos with a six-pack of O'Douls, Move in spark-plugs, come aboard walkin' butt naked with gloves, Throwin feces at celebrities at the Billboard Awards, Make Jerry Springer jump on my balls...

I quote that as a single block so it reads closer to the cumulative effect of listening to this stuff for an hour or so. It approaches information overload, mostly with fucking weird information, that which you may not even want to know - such as that O'Douls is alcohol-free lager, for one example. We're a long way from In da Club, as is probably clear from the cover showing the Brothers picking out their favourite brands of breakfast cereal. In case it isn't obvious from the above, this is pretty much a work of genius, existing at a tangent to the rest of the rap universe at roughly the same angle as the Residents and Flaming Carrot comics to their own respective mediaspheres. We should probably be glad this wasn't a direct potshot taken at anyone specific because I'm not sure many would survive such a blast of concentrated weirdness.

Whitehouse - Erector (1981)

 

It's hard to know where to start with Whitehouse because they pretty much defy analysis, so what follows will probably be just as useless as the rest. They promised the most violently repulsive records ever made, and that's what they delivered. Left with nowhere else to go, their harshest critics - of which there have been many - usually argue that actually, they really mean it and are therefore Nazis, and it's all just cheap shock tactics, despite that it logically can't be both of those. Brexit may have happened because William Bennett couldn't settle down to playing jagged guitar for Essential Logic, but I'm not convinced that it's an argument worth having, at least not when our collective cup already runneth over with social evils without calling noise weirdos up before the House Committee to explain what the fuck they were thinking.

Whatever may have been said about transgressive art - if we really must use that term - in the years since this appeared, I feel it may be more useful to consider when it came out, which I'll attempt by describing what it meant to me. I would have been sixteen or seventeen and I was already listening to Throbbing Gristle and a few others of their association. I read about Whitehouse in issue four of Flowmotion fanzine and was immediately fascinated because I'd never heard of them and yet they seemed to be a big deal. I'd never heard of them because the records were difficult to get hold of, being stocked by very few physical stores, and the music papers wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. This was mostly, so I gather, about the imagery - death, murder, sadism, sexual perversion, Nazism, serial killers, war criminals, extremes; but where Gristle presented some of these as documentation of civilisation falling apart at the seams, Whitehouse sounded like a celebration in wilfully eschewing the excuses, explanations, or get out of jail free cards helpfully provided by those who quite liked reading about themselves in the NME.

Anyway, I feel I was somewhat primed for this material through familiarity with Dadaism and a few of the Surrealist painters - Hans Bellmer being the obvious one; and then Erector came in the mail. As with Second Annual Report, my first reaction was genuine revulsion to the point of experiencing an actual cold sweat as I listened. I spent a day thinking I needed to send the thing back, but was paralysed by the terrible realisation that Whitehouse now had my home address. I don't know what I thought they were likely to do. Another day passed and I decided that I would do better to just not think about it for a while, which turned out to be the best option.

Erector is a long fucking way from the seductively weird science-fiction sounds of Throbbing Gristle sticking their bagpipes through a flange pedal just like Pink Floyd would have done. Everything you hear seems designed for maximum physiological discomfort - think the sine wave whine of a dentist's drill rather than SPK's abstract expressionist wall of distortion; so we have VCOs tuned down to unsettling ticks or impersonating medical technology, blocks of white noise, traces of musique concrete resembling the sounds half-heard from a hospital bed, bubbling feedback low in the mix, and William Bennett screaming his lungs out with such fury that it's impossible to pick out words beyond a few phrases and the repetition of horrible titles; and it's all dry as fuck, no reverb, no echo, no concession to mood or soundtrack. The vocal isn't even consistent with the heavy metal tendencies of singers who growl to let you know they be baaad. Screams alternate with incongruously pathetic non-vocal noises, or the intonation of certain words veer off into the utterances of dunces, all punctuated by feedback from some weedy metallic noise which sounds like Mr. Bennett tapping the mic stand with a spoon. Everything grates, or is unpleasant in some way. It doesn't brood and isn't cool. It has no stance. It doesn't make sense. As promised, it's violently repulsive even before we get to the track titles and wonder whether we really want to grab that dictionary to look up the two we've never even heard of.

So, no. Erector by Whitehouse is not for everyone.

These days I don't listen to this album much because, joking aside, I prefer music; and yet the more I notice it either ignored or otherwise dismissed for the usual reasons, the more I'm glad that it exists, and the more I feel inclined to stand by this fucking repulsive racket because it's honest by some definition, and it will never be bought or conscripted to a putrid cause, and even after all these years, Erector still sounds like nothing else.

Cover art censored so as to prevent spread of devil worship, Communism and extra-marital relations.

Das Synthetische Mischgewebe - Neunundvierzig Entgleisungen (2008)

Back when I was still at school and trying to get my weirdy music tape label off the ground without the help of funding, interest, or even Letraset, I was briefly in correspondence with Guido Hübner of Das Synthetische Mischgewebe. His letter opens, rather endearingly, with you must excuse me in advance that I doesn't can write you so many like you, doubtless referring to my tendency to address seven or eight  handwritten pages of complete bollocks to justifiably bewildered strangers. This implies that I wrote to him first, although I have no recollection of this. I gather, from what he wrote, that I'd proposed an exchange of art - something visual for his magazine or possibly something musical for one of my tapes. It never happened, which almost certainly means I sent him one of my collages and he decided it was shite, which was probably fair.

Anyway, if nothing else, this meant the name stayed with me, and over the years I noticed that he seemed to be doing better with his thing than I'd done with mine, and yet only now have I finally heard his work. Even given that I had no expectation of what it would sound like, it's come as a surprise and one hell of a puzzle.

This is a double ten inch disc of - I don't know what, perhaps the sound of an installation, music in its own right, or something else entirely. Sonically, it seems to be related to that laptop glitch stuff which may or may not still be doing the rounds, although it's less predictable, less easily quantified than most of what I've heard in that genre. Blips, clicks, squeals, and other fragments of sound emerge from mostly silent grooves in such a fashion as to suggest the arbitrary pops and surface noise of the vinyl should be considered as integral. Some of the sound appears treated, although the occasionally metallic quality may simply be part of the initial digitisation process, where other sounds may be more or less natural, notably instances of what sound like a condensing microphone rubbed across fabric; and there's very little repetition, or indeed anything which might lend familiarity to whatever the hell it is that we're hearing. In other words, Neunundvierzig Entgleisungen is probably about as obtuse as you can get without turning into the New Blockaders, and that's its charm - at least for me - namely that it obliges the listener to put in work.

After listening to this thing for more than a week, it has come to remind me of the music of Pierre Schaeffer in the absence of almost any other comparison, although the sounds are so abstracted from their respective sources as to suggest where Schaeffer was heading more than what he did, and it isn't musique concrète. Nor does it seem to be anti-art in the sense of the aforementioned New Blockaders, but rather attempts to [pauses to push spectacles further up bridge of nose] forge a new sonic language from the ground up. It seems to have things in common with certain abstract expressionist artists - although probably not Pollock - or even with Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró. Rooting around online I learn that Hübner applies a certain visual sensibility to his work, so that's what I'm going with; and if I'm way off target, it's nevertheless been a pleasurable aural and psychological workout.

Paris - Pistol Politics (2015)

Having spent the last six months backtracking through the work of Paris one disc at a time, I've noticed both the complete absence of duds, and the fact that he's grown angrier and somehow more formidable with age. Pistol Politics is the one before the most recent album, 2020's blistering Safe Space Invader, and if it represents the lad stepping down to the release of a new one every five years - the first since 2008's Acid Reflex - it's the only aspect that's been stepped down; and this is a fucking double CD, would you believe? Never mind just rap music, you can count the number of double CDs that haven't been a complete waste of time on the testicles of one scrotal sack, and yet Pistol Politics remains fully caffeinated right to end of track twenty-seven on the second disc with not a moment wasted.

As you may be aware, Paris is a black man with things to say, and things you should probably hear regardless. You may recall certain rappers banging on about their music being edumacational back in the day, usually meaning endless bland repetition of the knowledge-wisdom-understanding mantra without truly saying anything, but Paris delivers on that ideal. You learn stuff from listening to his work. Facts I've picked up from this one, for example, being that America leads the world in just three respects - incarceration of its own people, defence spending, and grown folks who believe angels are real. There's a lot of truth that hurts here, but there's something liberating about even the shittiest news imparted in such terms.

I vaguely recall Paris once casually dismissed as also ran by one of those hairdresser magazines - Vibe, or whichever one it was - presumably meaning he'd failed to go platinum through a major label, with some half-assed analysis suggesting listeners were unable to square the hardline Black Panther politics with fat-ass street level g-funk. Of course, it depends what you call success, and never mind that he seems to have done just fine releasing artistically uncompromised material through his own label, the message delivered as funky as fuck populism being exactly why it works. It's street level communication rather than an academic treatise delivered as slogans. It's so street level that E40, the Eastsidaz and Westside Connection's WC guest on a couple of numbers proving that the common ground is a lot more expansive than purists may have realised; and sonically it spans pretty much the gamut of black music, additionally serving as a reminder of who came up with most of it - rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, soul, p-funk, weirdy electronics, boom bap, often all jammed together on the same track, and even with a few cuts which wouldn't seem out of place on a Bill Withers album. Imagine a Public Enemy record you could slap on at a party without everyone pulling faces, or Tupac actually having done the stuff for which he's routinely credited.

As I write this, it's MLK Day here in Americaland, and somehow also the day of the presidential inauguration of the selfless multimillionaire who wants only to make America great again, even though he apparently couldn't fucking manage it first time; but listening to Paris helps, because truth is always louder and more enduring than bullshit.