+DOG+ - Rural Highway [After Hopper] (2025)

 

Even given the apparent limitations of noise, they continue to surprise. Here we have four tracks, two recorded live and two which sound as though they've been recorded live - live here implying someone in the audience with a tape recorder, so it has the ambience of something released on Broken Flag back in the day with none of the usual high definition clarity of oscillators suffering in some digital hellscape. The sound, as ever, is difficult to identify beyond the roar, aside from the element of workshop percussion, drums and cymbals going way beyond free jazz into the territory of someone hammering nails or taking a chisel to something on a lathe. This kind of noise has accrued such associations that one might assume something fucking appalling happened on this rural highway, but that's never what +DOG+ have been about, and being committed to a sort of pastoralism I have to conclude that this is presented as a different form of beauty. Not everything in nature is pretty or lends itself to sentiment, which isn't to say it's necessarily ugly either, and I suspect that may be what +DOG+ strive for unless I'm simply overthinking this one.

To take a massively self-indulgent digression in furtherance of my point, some years ago I made a wood frame to cover our garden pond so as to protect the plants and fish from raccoons at night, because nothing fucks up your garden pond like a raccoon. I made the frame by bending wood into a kidney shape and covering it with wire mesh. The frame has done well over the years but is now in such a state as to oblige me to construct a replacement. One problem I didn't foresee is a wooden structure built at one end, a sort of open-ended box which rests in and covers the water where there's no protective mesh and so allows frogs and toads to come and go, built deep enough to prevent raccoons reaching in and yanking out the plants, as they tend to do. This box structure, being partially submerged some of the time, had rotted free of where it was attached to the frame.

Bear with me. I'm getting there.

I took the structure out, this assemblage of rusted screws, algae, and wood eaten away by fish, snails, and insects. It was junk, but I'd put a lot of work into screwing and gluing the thing together and I couldn't quite bring myself to chuck it out. On close inspection I found the decay fascinating, quite beautiful in its own way, and so decided it was art. It's not quite a Dadaist readymade because I made the thing, but it comes close in spirit. I've churned out a great many paintings over the course of my existence, and even a few sculptures back in my twenties - or assemblages which I called sculptures - and it occurred to me that this belonged with them more than it belonged in the garbage. It's 13" x 10" x 4", made of wood, screws, and organic matter, and vaguely resembles a model of some primitive neolithic dwelling. The form speaks to me, although I'm not sure that what it says is worth writing down, and any future archaeologist digging it out from wherever it ends up will have no fucking clue why I assembled the thing and may even conclude that it's art. I'm not planning on exhibiting it, selling it, or even telling anyone about it beyond this paragraph, but there it is. I put it together and natural processes did the rest.

Returning to the point, whatever it is I see in this piece - which is how I'd refer to it if I took myself even more seriously - seems akin to what I hear in +DOG+, and particularly in this album  referencing the art of Edward Hopper. It's neither a flower nor a beautiful sunset. It's noise and decay and relics which have lost natural purpose over time, or patterns in bark, or a storm, or things found under rocks before we've given them meaning and declared them beautiful or otherwise. The noise, the howl, and the sonic scream is a celebration, not a herald of destruction, and this is in the ear of the beholder, just as it has always been. As a celebration, there's something very liberating about this noise, almost refreshing, even if not everyone is going to hear it.

We now return you to your normal programme.

Buy from Love Earth Music.

Laibach (1985)

 

Laibach's first album has recently been reissued in a box with all sorts of fancy extra stuff. Typically I finally found a decent quality copy that I could afford, or almost afford, about a month before anyone said anything about a reissue, but never mind. The pleasure of bagging this one is undiminished. While I can appreciate their more recent work, engaging with capitalism and consumerism using the same methods with which they once dissected totalitarian ideology (amongst other things) I still feel it steers too close to the wacky cover versions of the later Residents, at least for my tastes; and although Milan Fras growling be yourself brings me great pleasure, I remain drawn to the mystery of the earlier material from before the wall came down. I remain drawn to it because it's incredibly fucking powerful and I'm still trying to figure it out and whether or not this says anything unfortunate about me.

Thankfully, my recent reading of Alexei Monroe's Interrogation Machine has answered pretty much any question I had, additionally confirming that my questions inevitably arose as a result of not having been born in Slovenia and being largely ignorant of its history. Laibach are surprisingly straightforward once it's explained, as is their preference for ambiguity even where the ambiguity leads to disturbing conclusions such as maybe they really mean it; but this isn't a discussion which is served by reduction to soundbites or disclaimers so you'll just have to read the book if you care that much.

Laibach's initial musical campaign reveals common ground with Test Dept, 23 Skidoo and the like, founded in intense rhythms and the sort of manipulation of sound heard before anyone could afford a sampler. Rekapitulacija 1980-84, issued the same year, better represents their first formative steps, with this debut as an arguably transitional album - still with someone playing a bass guitar amid various electroacoustic sounds, but they're moving towards neoclassical bombast of the kind which inspired a thousand other marching up and down bands, few of whom managed anything more than a dubious karaoke turn. Laibach here recapitulate the sound and imagery of totalitarian power according to its own strengths, its ability to reach down to our most primal selves and grab them by the metaphorical bollocks, because this approach is arguably more effective - and less insulting to its audience - than mere parody, or Billy Bragg bravely punching a Nazi with one fist while giving us a comradely thumbs up with the other. Crucial to this is what is said, and whether this repetition of noise and light actively says anything at all, because much of the totalitarian rhetoric is stripped of its meaning, leaving no identification of scapegoats (a popular theme with ideological types), nor even anything more coherent than a nebulous hymn to some kind of progress couched in retrograde terms combining early modernism with the folk art so beloved of authoritarian regimes. Should anyone still be bothered by how any of this fits together, or unduly bothered, I'll close with an excerpt from Françoise Thom's Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism as quoted in the aforementioned Interrogation Machine.

Confronted by the terror of nothingness which ideology brings, man instinctively seeks refuge under the wing of some tyrant, unaware that in so doing he is handing himself over to the very thing he fears. Compared with sheer nothingness, tyranny always looks like the lesser evil.

Just keep thinking about it, if you're still not sure. I'd argue that Laibach create true art of tremendous intellectual and emotional force in summary of both the essence and the sheer scale of the problems of civilisation, and if you still get them confused with Skrewdriver or Ayn Rand or any other ideology driven shitbag, then you're almost certainly contributing to that problem. I'm not saying that this record will scare some sense into you, but it's probably a good place to start.

Sleaford Mods - The Mekon (2008)

 

I make vague efforts towards not writing the same thing week after week, and I know I covered their first one not so long ago, but Jesus this, their second album, has really got its hooks in. Everything that sounded like it was going somewhere and had probably arrived on the debut outing here comes into focus so sharp it'll have your eye out. My expectations may have been reduced by it being named after Dan Dare's cartoon enemy, but as I approach the Ozempic years, I realise I'd forgotten how the Mekon once served as the go to synonym for the absolute worst fucker you could have the misfortune to encounter. At least this was so in the West Midlands of the seventies, and I assume elsewhere. The Mekon was anyone awful beyond description - your boss, someone's shitty kid, a hated relative - and I don't remember any stronger condemnation; and this came back to me as I listened to the title track at the end of side one, a shrapnel blast of wrath over the stuff described as Liveable Shit in more recent times, weighted down with a loop of Pretty Vacant, which remains terrifying all these years later and somehow sounds even angrier here than it did back then.

We're off to a flawless start with a Rotten sample and Jason bellowing toilet over and over as we build up to Armitage Shanks, which lyrically feels like early Viz comic pushed to a harrowing extreme. Another day in the gutter, darling. Forget about it...

As with the first one, we're mostly dealing with looped samples, although there's layering, some structural work here and there - so a belated hats off to Simon Claridge, whoever he may be. Thought has gone into this so it's never just a record of loops, and the aforementioned Armitage Shanks may even have borrowed a full instrumental for all I can tell. The Sex Pistols, Nas and the Who notwithstanding, I don't immediately recognise too many of the sources and nothing gets in the way of The Mekon feeling very much in the vein of a sixties beat album in its entirety, with jazzy undertones which might be smoky were they not so fucking angry. The first version of Jobseeker builds on the Yardbirds' For Your Love to great effect and I think I prefer this version, at least once I've got past reminders of all the fun I had at Tile Hill job centre. There are plenty of memories here, mostly the kind ground into the brain like the vintage gunge around a neglected overflow - pubs with red flock wallpaper and the stench of Rothmans or JPS hitting you in the face upon entrance, synthetic carpet tiles underfoot before staggering out into halogen daylight with the manic urgency of excessive booze, a violently embittered version of the swagger promised by Oasis but nowhere near so dumb or blunted. The worst of times were the best we could manage or expect.

Then we come to Trixie with another loop which somehow improves on its source, and some of the grimmest, most depressing shit ever committed to wax; and it suddenly makes sense that the Sleaford Mods have always enjoyed a certain popularity in noise circles. It's not just the element of two blokes stood on a stage with a laptop. Trixie could be Consumer Electronics but for the repeated riff from Submission. The Mekon also makes some sense of Sleaford Mods as the English Mobb Deep - grimy as fuck, cold and relentless as daily existence, and very much rooted in its own soil.