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.