Nigel Ayers - The Vault (2026)

 

I've a feeling I should probably credit this as the work of Sara Lamb and Nigel Ayers. It's Nigel's sonic counterpart to the paintings of Sara Lamb, recently partnered as something along the lines of an installation in the wilds of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. I'm not sure whether the sound is a response to the paintings, or whether it's the other way around, or perhaps six of one and a half dozen of the other. YouTube footage shows the paintings on display along with a stack of sketchbooks in a caravan of the type once drawn by horses, with this music supplementing the ambience. I'm not certain whether the caravan is the only place the gestalt has been presented, but if so it's something I can appreciate given that neither artist seems entirely aligned with anything you might term the usual channels.

I've had occasion to frown upon persons who make a funny noise, stick it through a reverb unit with the decay set to twenty-five years, then call it dark ambient. The sonic component of The Vault is deceptively minimal with sounds resembling bells repeated as an intermittent organic rhythm against a distant wall of its own delay set to at least a century, the effect of which is neither dark nor entirely ambient. If anything it has the celestial sound of something vast and radiantly bright which is cumulatively overpowering despite the sense of space - akin to watching sunrise in a locale where you can no longer hear traffic. It does the same thing for an hour, or presumably for as long as you want if you visited the installation - which isn't quite the right word but I'm sure you know what I mean. Yet it feels as though it's constantly changing, or maybe evolving, yet might also be deemed timeless. It isn't noise, and it's thematically the opposite of industrial, for those of you who need to know such details.

As I expect I've said before, much of Nigel's work - at least this century - sounds like the result of an almost geological compositional process closer to the spread of lichen across granite than plugging it in to see what sort of scary sounds we can come up with; and Sara Lamb's painting appears to share some of this quality - a channelling which occurs regardless of the broader spectrum of western art, almost regardless of the person holding the brush or twiddling the oscillator—not so much outsider art as true art, something many of us no longer recognise through having become so accustomed to that which is served up by the factories.

In the event of none of the above making sense, it's jolly good.

Summon from yonder portal. 

Dick Hyman - The Age of Electronicus (1969)

 

This turned up in a batch of donations from a very, very old person who, having been left technologically beached by the endless march of progress - or at least the endless march of built-in obsolescence - was no longer able to appreciate all those Mantovani discs. To be fair, of the hundred or so vinyl records, it was a fairly interesting selection with some decent stuff, the strangest of all probably being this. I gather back during the dawn of the synthesiser, specifically the Moog synthesiser, there was a lot of this around - selections of pop hits magically transformed into futuristic cybermusic to be enjoyed by Martini-chugging sophisticates at dinner parties and which now sounds like the music enjoyed by the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers. Typically, we get a couple of Beatles numbers performed by electronic bees but never mind.

It takes a little getting used to given the difficulty of listening without the mind's eye becoming flooded with images of ironic teenagers, but not so much as you might expect. Dick Hyman was - and incredibly still is at the time of writing - a respected jazz pianist with a great ear for sound dynamics if this album is an indication, and the jazz drums complement the electronics beautifully. The possibly inevitable Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da is about as good as you'd expect and is dispensed with at the beginning of side one, in the wake of which the choices are interesting enough to allow for some sense of individual expression beyond populist novelty robotics. So we get a cover of James Brown, two from Booker T & the MGs and a Joni Mitchell number (which greatly improves on the original) amongst others. The magnetic poles of the record might be Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da at one extreme and Kolombo, Hyman's own composition, at the other. Kolombo with its moody rhythm and pseudo-Arabic melody could easily have come from one of those Cluster albums we all love so much; and with even the familiar titles sharing more in common with Kolombo than with the Beatles' worst song, this is a pretty great record which, for what it may be worth, pisses all over Switched On flippin' Bach.

Gary Numan - Strange Charm (1986)

 

Rather than merely slipping through the cracks, as tended to happen with Numan's later albums of the decade, I'm not sure this one ever quite made it up through the cracks in the first place. The man himself describes its recording as something of a nightmare amounting to an expensive sounding album reduced to rummaging down the back of the cushions for change. It failed to make much of a dent in either the charts or the lives of anyone who wasn't already tuned in, and so tends to have been generally forgotten even in the recent revival of Numan's fortunes.

Nevertheless it caught me at exactly the right time and place. I was near terminally jobless and accordingly skint, living in a dusty bedsit on a diet of tinned peas, beer, fags, and comic books. I bought records here and there, mostly from the bargain bin if they had anything - which they usually didn't - and this was a quid with only the inner sleeve. I listened to it on a crappy radiogram the bloke from the corner shop had been chucking out, and for better or worse it said a lot more to me about my life than did Morrissey calling for the hanging of a demographic so far beyond my own existence as to be irrelevant. In Praying to the Aliens, Numan reported:

It was a hard album to finish. The career problems created a dreadful atmosphere to write in because it felt like everything I was doing was for nothing... I knew I wanted a dark and dreamy sound for Strange Charm. However, I didn't quite know in which direction I wanted to take my songwriting. I was also running out of things to write about. There were quite a few arguments and the studio atmosphere was unusually tense and bad-tempered.

You can sort of tell, and the record sounds like the work of a man who had painted himself into a corner, which worked for me because this was also what I seemed to have done by that point.

Musically speaking, Numan has never concealed his influences and so we had the Japan album, the Trevor Horn album, the Robert Palmer album to make but three admittedly lazy comparisons. I never quite worked out where Strange Charm might fit in this respect unless it was the Attrition album, sharing a certain mood and sounds with Smiling, At the Hypogonder Club; but it works because said mood - numb desperation concealing emotional turmoil, panic, and general confusion - raises it far above any of the stuff that bothers me about being able to recognise a specific drum machine or anything someone else already did for a wider audience. It's the lyrics and the voice, if you want to call them lyrics, plaintive expressions of longing and regret stripped down to a chilling economy delivered with that voice which, regardless of routine criticisms that tend to miss the point, carries the intent with a sincerity that hurts

This is love.

This is pain disguised as a dream.

It's simple, nothing necessarily profound, and unlikely to convert anyone with tastes aligned to specific haircuts, but this helped me feel a little less like topping myself at the time, as do the other tracks on the record with the possible exception of The Need which seems incongruously jaunty alongside My Breathing, The Sleeproom, and the rest. Should Garrington himself be reading this, which I appreciate is extremely unlikely - dude, it was a long time ago, and you should feel good about this record.

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.