Howling Larsons & Nikolaos Lymperopoulos - Poemandres (2021)

Occasionally there will be a piece of music of such self-contained power as to inform the suspicion that any comment one might offer will be essentially dog shit; and that's what we have here. I've known Alan Trench for a long time, and on the last occasion of our being together in the same room, he'd remarried and bought a house on a Greek island with the intention of living there in response to some seemingly mysterious calling. I say house, but I had the impression that it was actually a pile of rubble and the newlyweds would need to undertake some renovation work - and by renovation, I mean things like electricity, running water, and basic plumbing. Anyway, they seemed to know what they were doing, and it sounded exciting in a massively reckless sort of way.

Another couple of years down the line and it seems to have worked out well for Alan and Rebecca, now recording as the Howling Larsons - amongst other wilfully tangential names - and they've produced this, a collaboration with one Nikolaos Lymperopoulos who I'm sure Alan described as their next door neighbour, a man who just happened to be fluent in ancient Greek. It sounds unlikely, but this sort of thing seems to become fairly commonplace once you achieve a certain remove from locales with shopping malls; and in any case, this album definitely derives from somewhere outside the familiar, mainstream reality. Poemandres is nearly an hour of Lymperopoulos reading, chanting, and intoning as follows.

The ancient Greek text, a revelation of the creation of the Universe and the fate and nature of Man, is presented here in the original, using the Byzantine intonation method. This has long been considered one of the most important, and certainly the most famous, documents of the Corpus Hermeticum. The music, performed as a ritual piece, draws the listener into one of the most important mind-states of the Ancient World.

...and that really is what it does, underscoring the spoken account with a powerful devotional drone of church organ and other elements hidden further down in the mix to produce something which actually achieves the promises made elsewhere on Current 93's proverbial tin without the emphasis on crap tattoos and pierced todgers. This is because the Howling Larsons took a different route to many of their showier, better publicised contemporaries in moving to Greece and just getting the fuck on with it. Remember all those [name diplomatically withheld because he's probably reading] albums wherein the lad pretends to be a thirteenth century monk by whacking the decay of his digital reverb up to five minutes? Well, this is the real thing.

LCD Soundsystem (2005)

I love this album but I've never been quite sure what to make of it. I appreciate that there are few artists whose work doesn't expose at least a little of their influences, but there's a point at which influence crosses over into homage, postmodernism, or just plain chicken-in-a-basket summer season impersonation. Stereolab, for obvious example, almost fall into this latter category as the Showaddywaddy of krautrock, and yet they just about get away with it by virtue of the Billy Childish defence, namely that if it still works then you can still use it.

LCD Soundsystem are, or at least were, the same sort of deal, but stealing down the midnight stairs for a secret swig of populist postpunk lemonade; and 1978 was, after all, a very good year. There's something almost willful about it, I suppose, but maybe it's no different to the fact of some people still playing the blues on a knackered guitar, and occasionally there will be one guy who does it really, really well. Here we have a dry, unfussy production seemingly inspired by late seventies disco, just before programmable beat boxes came in, electronic instruments played manually, a live sound, syndrums pew-pew-pewing all over the chorus, and long grooves based around riffs and catchphrases - mostly stuff which became subject to a degree of sneering during the rise of haircuts and sampling technology. LCD Soundsystem, however, showed that you could do something of worth with such neglected tools, and something which sounded fresh as fuck. The thing is, he - or possibly they - went even further, releasing a debut which could almost be a compilation. There are snatches of seventies metal, Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up which might be a lost Beatles demo, Disco Infiltrator which probably should have been on Remain in Light, Great Release which sounds like something from one of Eno's first couple of solo records, and then Mark E. Smith vocalising for disco-era Blondie on the rest. It's only because the music is so fucking good that you don't notice this weirdly eclectic skipping from one genre to another, and the music is so good because I guess LCD Soundsystem don't give a shit.

No-one remembers the cod reggae track on that Whitehouse album or Elvis Costello's brief excursion into techstep because they never happened, because most artists tend to stick to a furrow, or at least few artists commit the musical equivalent of a muscle spasm depositing three unexpected minutes of New Orleans bounce halfway through side two of a Ramones album.

Why not, we might ask? Truthfully, while it's nice to know what you're getting, and there's a certain virtue to variations on an established theme because no-one likes inconsistency, isn't it all just a little bit affected? Isn't it all just a little like those who refuse to allow themselves to enjoy anything outside whatever mileau they have established as the sum of their personalities, whether it be Psychic TV, rockabilly, or whatever? Isn't all this denial a little bit Oliver Cromwell, a bit like being at fucking school? Anyone remember that Lustmord album with the riotous pub rock knees up* as the first track on side two? Me fucking neither.

Anyway, I wonder if this album is therefore a deliberate flouting of some unspoken cooler than thou etiquette - flinging it all around with mad abandon simply because you can and it's fun. I also wonder if I've been thinking about this one too much, because it actually doesn't entirely sound like a compilation, despite the absurd range, with all tracks achieving a sort of unity through shared production, instrumentation, general spirit and so on. It's not karaoke, just great disco as you've either never heard it, or hadn't heard it for a while; or it was as of fifteen years ago.

It's not - ugh - "retro cool" either.

Piss off.

*: Conversely I draw the reader's attention to Wreckless Eric's weird electronic album, Bungalow Hi, which exists because Wreckless Eric was, is, and will forever remain artistically superior to the majority of his contemporaries.

Amoeba - Watchful (1997)

I reviewed this one back when I was writing stuff for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector about a million years ago. I encountered my review once again just a couple of weeks back and, aside from wondering why Ed even printed some of the garbage I submitted, it occurred to me that I'd done this album something of a disservice, so here we are again. I'm just trying to be a better person.

To be fair, I suspect Ed sent this one my way having formed the initial impression of a tasteful new age soundtrack for coffee bars, or at least this was how it looked to me. It's certainly constitutes a type of which there were a shitload back in the nineties - young poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos presenting musical analogies to the cover of a Sandman comic painted by Dave McKean; and yet for all that Watchful ticks boxes which shouldn't ordinarily be ticked, two decades later it still blows you right off the sofa, out the window, and into the yard.

Musically we're not talking anything too unexpected - double bass, brush drums, pseudo-Spanish guitar and whispy vocals preventing the subtle loops and digital wash of sound fully descending into ambient territory. It's probably not a surprise that half of Amoeba were probably better known for hanging around with Lustmord, although frankly this is better, and sufficiently so as to give me cause to wonder whether better than Lustmord might not be considered an actual genre in its own right, although of course there would be one fuck of a lot of acts under that particular umbrella, possibly as many as all acts.

Watchful haunts the listener, or it has haunted me, creating vast spaces within which one cannot help but pick out fascinating details, then suddenly you're listening to an actual song, something which tugs at the heart like the dream you wish you could remember upon waking; and the bass and the melody sound like the saddest thing in the world. I suppose there were a lot of similar acts in the nineties. I used to hang around the World Serpent office nosing around their stock to see what had come in, and aside from the obvious names, there were always a couple of goth-neofolk-darkwave hopefuls I'd never heard of - yet more poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos, some mediaeval woodcut on the cover and a band name which was clearly trying way, way, way too hard. The Soil Bleeds Black was probably the funniest of those I'm able to recall; and Loretta's Doll*, of course…

Anyway, to get to the point, this is what I suspect all of those bands wanted to sound like; and in 2019 it reminds me of nothing so much as the more wistful bits of Kate Bush's back catalogue. That's a recommendation, obviously.

*: I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that she probably wasn't from the Barbie & Friends Malibu Beach Gift Set.

Salford Electronics - Communique No. 2 (2017)

Salford Electronics is one of the Grey Wolves, whom I gather have now ceased trading as a collective concern. I have to admit that I'm only loosely familiar with what the lads have been up to during the past couple of decades. I'm assuming they didn't have a Bavarian oompah phase or spend a couple of years as a sixteen piece ska band, but my estimation of where this disc stands in relation to the last few Grey Wolves releases, sonically speaking, will probably be somewhat off target, so you may have to bear with me.

The Grey Wolves I remember were nothing if not confrontational, where Salford Electronics seems to be a less demonstrative concern. Somebody somewhere will already have described Communique No. 2 as dark ambient, which I'm not going to do because I'm trying to discourage the use of such silly terms, and because the music of Lustmord is always described as a dark ambient, and this is much better than Lustmord—pardon me, I meant Lustmørd. The plain black cover seems as initially inscrutable as the ten electroacoustic soundscapes on the disc, but as with patterns seen once you've gazed into the shadows for sufficient length of time, some sort of narrative emerges after a few plays; or rather a non-narrative because Communique No. 2 feels like what we're left with once all the words have been used up, nothing left to say, which it could be argued constitutes a statement in its own right. There are no songs, tunes, melodies, nor even rhythm - well, not exactly - just a pseudo-organic noise resembling that which endures when there's no-one left behind to operate the machinery. It's the sound of concrete, underground car parks, waste disposal machines going through the motions in a world denuded of humanity - what happens to the cities after we've gone, like an urban cousin to Nocturnal Emissions' invocations of the natural world. It ceases to be ambient once you turn it up to the sort of volume at which it deserves to be heard.

Very impressive.

Skinny Puppy - Cleanse Fold and Manipulate (1987)

Should there not be a comma in there somewhere? Anyway, none of it will really matter once I get my bill through congress, specifically my bill to have almost all industrial music officially reclassified as Belgian New Beat. If it wasn't actually recorded by a member of Throbbing Gristle or SPK in 1978 - excluding those who bravely vocalised their hatred of gypsies or else went on to bash the skins for Skrewdriver whilst insisting that music and politics should never mix - then it ain't fucking industrial and is therefore Belgian New Beat so far as I'm concerned. Once applied, the bill will float works by Whitehouse, Ministry, Cassandra Complex and the Neon Judgement on the open market where they will be obliged to compete with the musically superior work of TNT Clan, Lords of Acid, and the Confetti's. Record stores and mail order operations will be required to reorganise their stock and the categories through which it is sold; and Oxford University Press will be obliged to recall, revise and reprint all copies of S. Alexander Reed's Assimilate: A Critical History of Belgian New Beat - as will be its new title; on which subject, here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

It was April 5, 1991, and Gary Levermore was worried. He'd spent thousands flying the band Front Line Assembly from Vancouver to London for a concert he was promoting that night at the Venue, a seventy-year-old stone building in New Cross. 'It wasn't in the centre of town where you'd think it would be easy for people to get to. Instead it was a few miles further south; not on an underground line,' he remembers. The first time Front Line Assembly had played London, in July 1989, the turnout was disastrously low...

When Levermore arrived at the old theatre, though, it was clear there would be no repeat of 1989's miserable show. Wrapped in a long queue down Clifton Ride were some three hundred industrial fans, dressed in black...

I suspect he's referring to Clifton Rise, there being no such place as Clifton Ride. Additionally, the Venue is about three minutes walk in a straight line along a main road from New Cross station, which is on the East London Line in terms of the underground network; and I myself was present at that gig, and the place was conspicuously less than half full; and all of this on the very first page, which is one of several reasons why I've yet to avail myself of a copy of Reed's Critical History of Belgian New Beat. I'm also a little put off by the title coming from a Skinny Puppy track because - all joking aside - they really sort of are Belgian New Beat, apart from being Canadian.

I never really got Skinny Puppy, and this album, picked up for mere dollars with the idea that I may have been wrong all these years, goes some way to illustrating why this should be. I'm sure I've seen it turning up in a few of those dreary ten industrial albums you must hear kind of lists, invariably alongside Coil's CD of the humming noise made by their fridge and Sol Invictus gathering together a few entirely harmless songs about how the world would be a better place without certain kinds of people if you know what I mean, not mentioning no names or nuffink.

I'm actually not averse to a spot of Belgian New Beat. Front 242 have barely ever set an electronic foot wrong to my ears, and whilst Front Line Assembly are really just Napalm Death with a synthesiser, they've usually sounded decent to me; and then there's Nitzer Ebb, and the Severed Heads were pretty much one of the greatest bands of all time, but then I hear this...

The first thing you do when you buy a digital effects box is you select reverb, you whack the decay up to about two minutes - or as far as it will go - and then you tap your finger gently against the microphone and summon forth the screaming cacophony of the void as the black stars of the netherverse devour the fabric of reality. After another ten minutes you either get bored of this or else try to make a career out of it like that Lustmord chap. Whilst Cleanse Fold and Manipulate also has sequencers and drum machines to impersonate medieval armies smashing up your castle thanks to the magic of the two minute reverb, it kind of comes from the same place; and the singer appears to be auditioning for the role of wicked goblin number two in Lord of the Rings, and it really sounds to me like he's singing with an affected English accent because the English are always the bad guys in the movies; and there's a bloke called Nivek Ogre on this record, and Nivek is Kevin spelled backwards; and the whole thing sounds so cock-obviously digital it borders on being a Duran Duran extended club mix from when they were famous, without irony, right down to stabs of orchestral sound.

Nevertheless, after three or four plays I begin to hear past the above, and see at least some of the appeal which lays in Skinny Puppy having been - probably unintentionally - a sort of Belgian New Beat Virgin Prunes. There's nothing much you would call a tune, just grooves, a lot of scraping and scowling, and a texture emerging from the relative chaos which works by similar means as did those very early Throbbing Gristle tapes - unfamiliar noises and effects rendered familiar through repetition. Much to my surprise, I ended up  enjoying this in spite of it all having been a bit studied and obvious even back in 1987, and in spite of there being a million other things which do the same job better. It's still not feckin' industrial though.

Frontline Assembly - Hard Wired (1995)

I shouldn't really like Frontline Assembly, and yet I find them difficult to resist. They seem at times like just one of a million bands who watched Blade Runner and then tried to pass themselves off as a strategic futuristic entertainment delivery unit, as opposed to a bunch of blokes stood around frowning at a drum machine. I first heard them when Gary Levermore of Third Mind Records bunged me some freebies because I'd painted some of his record covers and he's a generous sort of bloke. Amongst said freebies was Disorder which was nice enough, but did sound a lot like an angrier version of mid-eighties Cabaret Voltaire - a ton of sequencers with added mysterious whispering. A few years later, Gary blessed me with copies of Caustic Grip and the Virus twelve-inch single, which were at least good enough to compensate for the unfortunate fact of my somehow having managed to quack my pants on the bus as I went over to visit him in Hackney - must have had a bad pint. Anyway, here I am with Hard Wired, the next album on from the stuff with which I am familiar and now, weirdly, of nearly two decades vintage.

One of the many things that irritates me about that which willingly terms itself industrial is the unspoken suggestion of boldly exploring new musical territory in contrast with how balls-achingly generic much of it turns out to be. In a past life I somehow ended up in a pub in Deptford with one of the less interesting members of Konstruktivists and that bloke from Lustmord. I sat listening as they discussed footage of tanks and missiles recently taped off the box for future use as visual material, comparing notes like a couple of stamp collectors. It was kind of depressing to experience such confirmation that all the industrial blathering on about mind control and conditioning was essentially just window dressing and of no greater import than goths pinning plastic bats to their clothes.

Frontline Assembly might appear to epitomise this tendency - all self-consciously darkly sciency song titles like Neologic Spasm, Barcode, or Transparent Species, and even the cover of this one is by comic artist Dave McKean, the absolute master of style over substance. The music itself is unusually formulaic even by the standards of the genre, almost every track being four or five minutes of the same pounding beat, overly busy sequencers, and some guy growling in the background, two out of every three songs punctuated with roughly the same three note minor chord chorus and a few distorted words.

Dying sensation.

Fascination.

Expectation.

Re-creation.

You see what the artist is trying to say here? Me neither, but it probably doesn't matter. The message is perhaps intentionally impressionistic, the invocation of a dark atmosphere, something that sounds good if you're standing in a club sweating your knackers off in leather trousers and sucking your cheeks in.

And yet...

For all the ham involved, Frontline Assembly somehow manage to pull it off through holding back in just the right places. They suggest rather than shove it down your throat like all those shitty trying too hard bands that mostly turned out to be Alain Jourgensen under one of his many wearying aliases; and the music grows on you because there's a lot going on beneath all the grunting and groaning, tricky little sequences which get right under your skin which you may not even have noticed first time around. Oddly Frontline Assembly put me in mind of those 1978 garage punk bands formed when someone borrowed their big brother's guitar and taught themselves a few Sham 69 numbers. They have that same relentless quality, fevered grunty songs chugging along on a bare minimum of chords reborn fifteen years later as a sort of cyberpunk Ramones, or summink. It's too loud and you probably won't be able to hear the words, but it does what it has set out to do nonetheless, and is as such very toe-tappy.