Wilding and Unwilding - Hard Noise to Scumrise (2020)

I've a feeling that almost every single review of this man's work will almost certainly have opened with a paragraph similar to what follows, but you'll just have to bear with me. Back in 1980 I was an only infrequent listener to John Peel due to having to get up for school the next day, but two or three of those infrequent hearings were distinguished by himself playing There Goes Concorde Again by ...And the Native Hipsters, a genuinely odd six minutes of Dada minimalism which didn't really sound like anything else I'd heard at the time. It made a big impression and reached number five in the independent charts. Weirdly, it also made an impression on a few of my wee pals, some of whom I hadn't even recognised for the sort of kids who would listen to Peel, most peculiar being Paul Boulton who resembled the singer from the UK Subs, regarded Sid's version of My Way as a protest song, and who was trying to form a punk band called the Suburbans - he thought Concorde was a bit weird but really good. So my equivalent of being able to remember where you were when Kennedy was shot is probably my recollection of that strange couple of days when everyone I knew seemed to be into There Goes Concorde Again. A few years later I ended up at Maidstone College of Art and discovered that one of my tutors, Bob Cubitt, had been loosely involved with ...And the Native Hipsters, which naturally impressed the shit out of me; and now, a million years in the future, Wikipedia informs me that Tony Visconti had aspirations to re-record There Goes Concorde Again, and that William Wilding - the man at the heart of all of this - has also performed as Woody Bop Muddy, a name I remember mainly because my friend Eddy used to go to see him perform quite a lot.

Anyway, my point is that this is what he is - or possibly they are - up to now, and that There Goes Concorde Again is probably a lot to live up to, but Hard Noise to Scumrise is fucking excellent and therefore does. Some of what we have here is noise, and noise in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, so we have slabs of untreated musique concréte delivered to our ears in sequences which, while appearing arbitrary, hint at a fairly refined sense of composition. Band-saws, drilling equipment, bits of factory, and whatever the hell else is making those noises doesn't usually sound quite so musical, at least not without going down the obvious route of sampling everything for novelty covers of Tutti Frutti; but this is familiar urban noise with unfamiliar punctuation and therefore works a little like Einstürzende Neubauten without the haircuts or self-conscious emphasis on cheekbones.

Additionally we have musical elements which introduce themselves, notably a powerful horn section, which further removes Hard Noise to Scumrise from the sort of thing everyone else would probably do given similar ingredients. Order seems to form from apparent chaos as the album progresses, allowing a Beefheartian element to surface - bluesy growling and absurdist lyrics, or absurdist with a point. It's unexpected but we adjust, much as we adjust to gentle acoustic guitar and pulsing synth, following the album where actually very few have gone before, generally speaking. The final track, and probably the hit single is Scum Always Rises, a genuine soul-drenched howler scored for jackhammer, chainsaw, and cocktail piano which somehow summarises everything that's been wrong with the world at least since we abandoned hunting and gathering, and does it with only a few words and a handful of pertinent location recordings. Hard Noise to Scumrise really is a masterpiece, very satisfying if occasionally disorientating listening from end to end.

Bag it hither.

The Shamen - In Gorbachev We Trust (1989)

A faintly punky upbringing left me generally suspicious of psychedelia, at least as I understood it at the time. Fags and lager were my drug of choice, I couldn't stand even the smell of dope, and psychedelia seemed like sappy nostalgia for something which rarely sounded so amazing as had been promised. Wobbly drawings of gnomes engaged in lazily surrealist situations, smoking joints or whatever, were habitually greeted by a few of my peers with the usual chorus of wow, then pronounced amaaaaaaazing spelled with seven As in the middle; and if The Prisoner had been an entertaining, inventive TV show, it hardly seemed like anything containing the meaning of life. Psychedelia struck me as a safe, cultish understanding, the redundancy of which seemed confirmed by some book I checked out of the library, possibly something to do with Encyclopedia Psychedelica, and which listed the Psychedelic Furs as contemporary exponents of the form, presumably because of the fucking name. Of course, I had a few records which might be deemed psychedelic to greater or lesser degrees, but I never really thought of them as such because they usually did something else besides jangling or saying things like oh wow, I just tried to Hoover the carpet but I ended up carpeting the Hoover! The Shamen evaded my otherwise rigorous screening process when I heard Christopher Mayhew Says on John Peel, whenever that was, and found myself seduced by the startling combination of spaced out backwards mind-felch with hard, pounding electro not a million miles from what you might have heard on one of those Street Sounds compilations.

Sadly, as we all saw, they somehow became the Adam & the Ants of the nineties, someone of whom it would forever be said that you had liked their early stuff; but then even Ant's cheesiest guest spots on the Basil Brush show usually had something going for them, whereas the ravey Shamen were just plain fucking crap, at least to my ears - the sound of people who should have stuck to their Pink Floyd impersonations failing to understand acid house - which wasn't actually that fucking hard to understand; one shit hit single after another, the ingenious wordplay of Ebeneezer Goode, then LSI which stood for love, sex, intelligence and I felt insulted the latter through lacking either the subtlety or sincerity of Mel & Kim's similarly acronymous FLM, which was at least, as one of the initials promised, fun by some definition. Anyway…

Before it all went tits up, we had this record, tripping its knackers off while jamming acid house and psychedelic guitars together on the same tracks, and working because it never sounded like an impersonation, just a peculiar juxtaposition of unrelated elements. Gorbachev sounds as though it was informed by the spirit of seeing what would happen, with none of the later populist box-ticking. Half of it is way too hard and crunchy to work in a rave setting, and there's even a few of those tracks which jangle and say wow when you show them a picture of a rainbow pixie with a bong, but fed through weirdy filters sufficient to distance them from anyone still wearing velvet loon pants. Of course, sampling evangelical preachers praising God so as to highlight what evil fuckers those guys can be was so dated by this point that even Phil Collins had done it, but the Shamen got around the in-your-face obviousness of the affectation by really shoving it in-your-face with bells on to the point of it seeming so joyful as to render its raw cynicism positively poisonous. They were trolling, and they were trolling hard - not least with the album title - because the evil bastards in their sights needed to be trolled.

It was all downhill from here, albeit not in the commercial sense, but even silly Ebeneezer can be forgiven then dutifully ignored in light of this record. It did everything it needed to do at the time and was endlessly inventive, from the Star Trek samples on Synergy to an entire song about a lady's fanny euphemised as Rasberry Infundibulum. Had other psychedelic revivalists been so riotously progressive as this, I would have had much less cause for grumbling.

Da GobliNN - God Reactor (2020)

Here's another you've never heard of, although to be fair, me neither, so we're both in more or less the same boat even if I'm sat slightly nearer to where the sandwiches are stowed away by virtue of my having been spinning this banger for a good couple of weeks now; or specifically I've been spinning a CDR burned from the download. I would have had it pressed onto a series of wax cylinders, obviously, but I ran out of the blanks.

As a rule I tend to steer clear of arbitrary typographic eccentricity, but God Reactor caught me on a good day and it was on the New York Haunted label, so that seemed like a recommendation. It's your basic dirty old school acid, but as with a lot of stuff on this label, it never quite does what you might expect it to do and ends up going all sorts of unfamiliar places, sonically speaking, nevertheless riding on the familiar squelch and crunch-clap of the form, and with the music swelling in waves, coming and going, up, down, back up again, then right up - both mesmerising and euphoric without looking like a wanker.

In theory we have four tracks, then six remixes of God Reactor, but so remixed as to be entirely different tracks. At least I've been listening to this for a couple of weeks and I still haven't spotted the connection; so ten tracks, for the sake of argument: some familiar acid without, as I say, quite doing anything you might expect, plenty of harmonics and loops and snippets of filtered noise, although not quite anything the milkman could ever whistle; and then the L/F/D/M remix which makes me think of bass music, as in the Miami thing; the May McLaren remix which - for fuck's sake - is the most eighties thing you've ever heard and could almost be Trevor Horn's version of Front 242, yet somehow very much belongs to the God Reactor whole despite itself; and I'm not going to describe every last track, but there's a lot of stuff going on here, and for something to which repetition is so obviously fundamental, no-one seems to be reheating any existing recipes.

God Reactor is why you really, really need to open yourself up to new shit every once in a while. I know that now.

Wrangler - A Situation (2020)

It's unfortunately difficult to discuss Wrangler without at least thinking about Cabaret Voltaire, which seems potentially insulting to the two of them who aren't Stephen Mallinder; although for what it's worth, Mallinder's vocals and what he does with them are pretty distinctive, pretty difficult to mistake for those of anyone else, which is impressive given that his lyrics are more like serving suggestions, loaded images delivered in the same couple of bluesy notes which have seen him so well through these past four or five decades. He doesn't do a whole lot in terms of vocal acrobatics, but he's never needed to.

Musically, Wrangler feel like an outgrowth of Cabaret Voltaire, specifically from the shock of the clean sound where sequencers and electric pings replaced fuzzed guitar and flanged clarinet; and, of course, it's also a factor that what we have here are extended grooves rather than songs in the traditional sense.

Nevertheless, three albums in and Wrangler is beginning to feel very much its own entity regardless of historical detail. I'm told they use only analogue equipment, or at least analogue synths. I don't know whether this is true, or to what extent, and there are at least a couple of vocal burps which sounded somewhat sampled to me, but it feels organic, a jazzy groove which just happens to come out in bleeps, bloops and acid squelch. In fact, A Situation is funky in terms which Cabaret Voltaire never quite managed, despite the house phase, like an Asimov rewrite of the Gap Band and the like. The odd thing, at least at first, is how this one seems so much less immediate than the previous two, which is down, I suppose, to its ten tracks taking the form of tight rhythmic jams more than anything too reliant on hooks or a chorus; but three or four plays and it's tugging at your sleeve, pulling you out onto the dance floor, and no-one is going home just yet. I know it's not all Mallinder, but nevertheless it's hard not to marvel at the man and his career, that he should be involved in something of such magnificence some forty years since Voice of America and Mix-Up. I'm beginning to think we should consider an annual National Stephen Mallinder Day.