Peter Hope & David Harrow - Sufferhead 85/13 (2020)

Here's a couple of EPs originally released by Hope and Harrow in 1985 and 2013, now reissued as a single album; which works surprisingly well despite the three decade gap between the original sessions, with five tracks per side adding up to a nice and tidy album length. The 1985 material sounds very much of its time and geography - which isn't a criticism - very much birthed from the same milieu as Hula and digital-era Cabaret Voltaire with hard gated beatbox rhythms pulled out of shape by horns, tapes, even some metal bashing, then formed into something fierce and bluesy by Hope's powerful voice, yielding, I suppose, sound pieces as much as songs, like short, moody films lacking only their visual component. It's quite harsh, almost not quite musical, and yet there's a kind of funky tension keeping everything tight, keeping it all from springing out of shape. Think Tackhead pushed further, twitchy and sleep deprived.

I tend to listen to a lot of music first thing in the morning while doing things around the house, washing dishes, wrestling cats, cleaning up shite and so on; which has begun to feel a little awkward since my wife's company decided, in their finite wisdom, that they could make a great saving by having her work from home while hiring out the office space to someone else. She isn't too happy about the arrangement, which means I'm additionally a little self-conscious about my morning soundtrack, given her arguably more traditional musical tastes. As she has made clear, I'm quite welcome to listen to what she refers to as that pipe banging music, but I nevertheless feel a bit uncomfortable about blasting her with DDAA or Headyello first thing.

Getting back around to the point, I sensed funny looks coming in my direction when I played the aforementioned 1985 material, although Mrs. Bricklaying seemed to acclimate to it after the first couple of days. More surprising, at least to me, was how much she seemed to enjoy the second side of the record, the material from 2013, even asking who was responsible and what the tracks were called. Side two maintains the mood but otherwise slows everything to the pace of a comedown with intricately woven sequencers dominating, and less of a temper. We're still on the short, moody films, but now they feel like film noir, mysteries half seen from a rain soaked doorway.

Internet research reveals David Harrow as having worked with Jah Wobble, Adrian Sherwood, and others already resident on my shelves, which makes a lot of sense given the sonic territory he inhabits; and his soundtracks provide a perfect complement to Hope's image-heavy narrative. I realise I seem to have gotten into the knee-jerk habit of unquestioningly buying everything issued by these two on the strength of name alone - limited run vinyl, CDRs, lathe cut things and what have you - but they deliver every time so it seems justified, and I'm already looking forward to the Revbjelde album.

DDAA - Ronsard (1988)

Here's another album I briefly owned, then flogged, then bought back during a moment amounting to either regret, guilt, or curiosity. I seem to recall first encountering the lurid red and green cover on a stall in Greenwich market and picked it up on the strength of King Deebo is Six Tracks for a Kit having been one of the best numbers on those first two volumes of Rising from the Red Sand. I don't really know what I expected Ronsard to do once I got it home, but it didn't seem to do it. At one point, whilst attempting conversation with a boring French goth schoolgirl who had insinuated her way into my home via my girlfriend of the time, I plucked Ronsard from the racks and said, 'look - here's a French band,' which was admittedly lame, but at least got her to shut up about fucking Nosferatu or whatever the hell they were called. Later it went to Vinyl Experience along with records by Z'ev, the Pressure Company and others on the grounds that weirdy music is always worth a bit of money if you wait long enough; plus I'm not even sure I'd even listened to the thing twice.

Once again I'm kicking myself, having tracked down another copy and recognised it as something I would have kept hold of had my brain been working properly back in 1994, or whenever it was.

DDAA have been described somewhere or other as a cross between the Residents and Throbbing Gristle, which probably isn't significantly worse than any other description to be had by throwing lawn darts at the internet whilst blindfold. The music is minimal, noises twanged or scraped or plucked from assorted conventional instruments with very little in the way of effects or production, so it has the feel of an improvised live performance, something you watch rather than which unfolds in a studio. This album comprises two long pieces, one to a side, both of which build into something fairly hypnotic without any overt concessions to tunes or even repetition. There's a slow, regular beat, but it somehow has the cadence of stonemasons tapping away on a building site, or even something tribal. It's a record built from elements which are noticed rather than which intrude, and it feels like poetry more than it feels like anything you could describe as a soundscape, at best a distant relative to Laurie Anderson.

Despite most of the lyrical content being in English - albeit with truly peculiar pronunciation - and despite the insert explaining what Ronsard is all about, I still don't have a fucking clue what Ronsard is all about; but maybe it doesn't matter because it seems to work on some very basic, almost physical level, working like a painting you just can't get out of your head. It worms its way into your consciousness.

Of all the things I've revisited or rediscovered, this has thus far probably been the most powerful by some distance.

Kevin Harrison - Tape Recordings 1975-1985 (2016)

I always get the impression that Kevin Harrison should probably be a little more famous than he is - fame here translating to people hearing about your music, saying nice things, then buying it so that you can keep on making it and don't end up having to get a job in Tesco. That said, I've never been quite sure as to the precise extent of his fame. I first read about him in Martin Bowes' Alternative Sounds zine back in 1981, so he's always seemed sort of famous to me. I don't remember if he ever got name-checked in Dave Henderson's Wild Planet columns in Sounds, but given the wackily eclectic mix of that which Henderson covered and the sort of records Kevin has put out, he really should have been. I suppose, if nothing else, at least no-one is calling him an industrial legend or asking what he thinks about Charles Manson.

According to his website, Kevin Harrison's earliest sonic experiments were performed at the age of twelve, dropping nuts and bolts into a bucket of water then manipulating the sounds produced on the family tape recorder, and all whilst the Beatles were still in lovable moptop mode; leading to art school, and then to a bizarrely varied if somewhat underpublicised musical career which never quite seemed to square with any established or conventionally marketable pattern. These recordings might be seen as roughly kin to that whole krautrock thing, but there's always been more to the man - soul-driven dance pop with the band Urge, collaborations with various Specials and other Coventry luminaries, hanging out with members of DDAA, This Heat, and Tuxedo Moon: the guy is interesting before you've even heard a note.

Tape Recordings 1975-1985 is, as you might surmise, mostly instrumental, but never quite ambient. The fifteen tracks cover a broad range of moods - and very little which sounds like bedroom recordings, if that bothers anyone - but more than anything seem to suggest a film soundtrack, specifically the kind of effects heavy 16mm freak out genre which prevailed at the hairier end of the seventies. Guitars chime and echo off into analogue eternity as a church organ lights the darkness, and other sounds creep in, mutated beyond recognition or just hanging in the sky like giant Zardoz heads.

This is a wonderful record, and if you're new to this guy's work, it should really be considered just the beginning...