Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

More recently reissued on CD by Klang Galerie, Mysterious Kitchens was a Terse Tapes compilation cassette from way back in the depths of the Precambrian. Terse Tapes, as you will doubtless recall, was the Australian organ from which the mighty Severed Heads didst squirt forth. Featured artists include Pissy Relay Switches, the Nobodies, Wet Taxis, Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign, Lamington Lady, Holiday Funn, and Mindless Delta Children amongst others. As you may have guessed from the fameproofing of the names in combination with this being a cassette from 1980, what we have are weird noises recorded on cheap equipment by a subs bench of about ten persons working in various combinations under different names. Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign may be vaguely familiar as an early incarnation of the Severed Heads, which it is, although Tom Ellard and Garry Bradbury are each involved with half of the other named artists on Mysterious Kitchens so it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and Pissy Relay Switches actually sound closer to Clean or Ear Bitten. Standouts include the Nobodies, seemingly the only act failing to share its membership with anyone else from what I can tell, who fall marginally closer in sound to early Cabaret Voltaire or Devo, for want of a better comparison; also Garry Bradbury's Wet Taxis who notably managed something of a career beyond this compilation. Primitive rhythm boxes, cheap keyboards, tape loops, hiss, and one effects pedal between the lot of them accounts for the sound, generally speaking, although there's plenty of variation, with Tom Ellard's involvement betrayed by his luxurious Pre-Raphaelite melodies which sound gorgeous even when recorded on what may as well be one of those little plastic records you used to find in the back of your talking Action Man.

One for the kids there.

Mysterious Kitchens is rough as fuck but has a joyous peculiarity that elevates it way above the standard photocopied industrial collections of its day - closer in spirit to the Residents and their like than any of the Gristle bunch; and honestly it's a lot more fun and interesting than many of its more technologically adept successors.

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.

Nitzer Ebb - Showtime (1990)

 

The further we travel, the stranger they seem with the accumulation of hindsight; or if not strange - at least not how the Residents were strange - then not very much like what they seemed to be at the time. Beyond the sounds coming from boxes with plugs rather than boxes with strings, I suppose it comes down to mostly haircuts and graphics which kept Nitzer Ebb in the same corner of the record store as Borghesia and all those other marching up and down bands. Maybe there's a certain shared attitude expressed as a love of frowning, but such characteristics arguably extend the arbitrary field to everyone else from here to Led Zeppelin - although Showtime shares more common ground with Physical Graffiti than with whatever the hell Borghesia did, for what that may be worth.

They've freely admitted to starting out with sequencers because they couldn't be arsed learning guitar, and so inevitably first took to the stage as a sort of council estate version of DAF, more violent than hypnotic. As their sound developed, the mania remained the constant, and so the second album moved away from music sounding quite so obviously like the machinery from which it had been generated, bass deepening to a subsonic pseudo-organic rumble contrasting with the factory noise. Showtime went a step further, bringing in sounds and rhythms which seemed more in keeping with jazz and blues records, still stomping away but as a hybrid, like a sound trying to escape its own limitations. The reason none of this struck anyone as peculiar is, I presume, because the smoky menace and basement grind were there all along, but initially limited to Doug's harrowing vocal forever on the point of losing control.

Showtime seemed to slip past the post without much notice at the time, but you can tell it was the album before the one that sounded like Queen and the progression makes perfect sense. It lurches and growls with rockabilly intensity as the music fights itself, the swing and the drunken sway straining against electronics as precise and deadly as ECT; and the crazy thing is this wasn't even their best album, not by some way.

I actually wrote this about a month ago. The timing is just tragic coincidence.

Analog Brothers - Pimp to Eat (2000)

While this one looked a lot like Kool Keith and Ice-T ripping the piss out of the RZA's Bobby Digital, it's proven near impossible to find anything substantial in support of the proposition and even the line about how everyone knows digital blows sounds more like good old fashioned technological fundamentalism. Whoever the target may have been - and I suspect it's more likely suckers as a demographic rather than any specific member of the Wu-Tang Clan - it shares an attitude with much of Kool Keith's back catalogue, namely the suggestion of it being better than everyone else, and knowing itself to be better than everyone else. If this quality is hardly exclusive to Keith in rap terms, he goes one fuck of a lot further than most in proving his point, and so it is with Pimp to Eat.

The Analog Brothers are, or possibly were, mostly lesser known names within Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate, plus the man himself trading as Ice Oscillator, with er… Keith Korg as the only one who wasn't already in the gang; yet it feels like part of Keith's body of work more than anything, making use of that brooding Diesel Truckers sound - up front beatbox with growling bass and not too much else to clutter the sound; and the full complement of Analog Brothers working with the same lyrical firehose, an uncensored fountain of bewildering surrealism and profanity that's as much challenge as proclamation:

More flow than the average Joe, get off the stamina, Peein' off the top of the Empire State Building, urinate on pedestrians, Walkin' past West 4th Street lesbians, 28th Street flashin' drivin' Dodge dashin' free man, Sport Superman underoos with a six-pack of O'Douls, Move in spark-plugs, come aboard walkin' butt naked with gloves, Throwin feces at celebrities at the Billboard Awards, Make Jerry Springer jump on my balls...

I quote that as a single block so it reads closer to the cumulative effect of listening to this stuff for an hour or so. It approaches information overload, mostly with fucking weird information, that which you may not even want to know - such as that O'Douls is alcohol-free lager, for one example. We're a long way from In da Club, as is probably clear from the cover showing the Brothers picking out their favourite brands of breakfast cereal. In case it isn't obvious from the above, this is pretty much a work of genius, existing at a tangent to the rest of the rap universe at roughly the same angle as the Residents and Flaming Carrot comics to their own respective mediaspheres. We should probably be glad this wasn't a direct potshot taken at anyone specific because I'm not sure many would survive such a blast of concentrated weirdness.

Blancmange - Irene & Mavis (1980)

By the time I was aware of this one having existed, I could no longer afford a copy so thankfully it's been reissued. I liked Blancmange a lot, although they seemed to work better as a singles band than at album length; and naturally I've always wondered about this formative obscurity reputedly recorded using pots and pans for percussion.

Typically for such a shining example of the is it supposed to sound like that? genre, it came in the mail just as the needle of my turntable picked up a lump of ominous gunk which somehow remained invisible to the naked eye, making the record sound as though my stylus might be fucked; and I played it at 45RPM, which is the wrong speed, although most of the vocals have been slowed down on the original portastudio recording, so everything except the voice had me wondering whether it was supposed to sound like that? Then, having cleaned the needle and bothered to look at the cover - which recommends 33RPM more or less as a serving suggestion - I got to hear the thing as intended, roughly speaking, and it seems it is supposed to sound like that.

It's an understatement to say Irene & Mavis is a far cry from the shiny synth pop to come being as it sounds like something from the median point between the Residents and Nurse with Wound. Those pots and pans were just for starters. Percussion could be anything from the aforementioned to someone thumping a wardrobe, the vocals are all recorded at double speed, and there's some apparent pleasure taken in tape distortion, wow and flutter and the like, which I'm fairly sure was deliberate. Even so, we nevertheless have plaintive tunes which quite clearly foreshadow Sad Day and I've Seen the Word drifting here and there, additionally evoking the melancholia of Eno's earlier ambient jobbies and inventing vapourwave on Holiday Camp even as those eventually sampled by Vektroid and her pals were still in short trousers.

I could stand to hear a lot more of this version of Blancmange.

Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler (2021)

Having just looked on Discogs I have learned that this album is apparently called GURKE, which I refuse to acknowledge on the grounds that 1) I've been thinking of it as Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler for the past few months, and 2) that I object to the misuse of upper case, and 3) after the bollocks I endured just trying to get myself a copy, I'll call it what I fucking well like.

'Do you want one of these?' the man asked. 'It's a fancy hand crafted edition and everything.'

'Cor! Yes please,' I spluttered and immediately sent him my money. Nothing happened for a couple of months, so I made the appropriate enquiries. It seems our guy had underestimated how much postage would be required to send the album to Texas which, as you will know, is actually on fucking Mars.

So I sent him a bit more to cover extra postage, rocket fuel, cost of atmospheric heat shielding and the like.

Nothing.

It turned out it still wasn't enough and he now felt embarrassed informing me of this. There followed another few months of my sending increasingly sarcastic messages, demands for my money back and so on in response to a series of promises that it would definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely be sent this week because his dole money had come through, and so on and so forth - somehow missing the point of my having already paid the fucking postage - and then suddenly, a mere eight months later, the record actually showed up on my doorstep.

Amazingly, it was worth the wait.

I have no real clue what's going on here beyond that Wolfgang Kindermann is an Austrian poet and Kommissar Hjuler is a German sound artist who was apparently a cop up until 2013. Musically, the record features one lengthy piece each side - electronic sound collages with loops, noise, the Teddy Bears' Picnic, and the usual underlying suggestion of something aromatically pornographic about to transpire. It's immediately recognisable as the work of Smell & Quim, which is an odd realisation given that Smell & Quim are nearly always immediately recognisable despite the dizzying sonic range they've covered over the years, alternately resembling bedfellows to the Grey Wolves, Gristle, Whitehouse, the Residents and Beefheart depending on which way the wind happens to have been blowing; and here's another one sounding as weirdly disgusting and screwy and yet as paradoxically fresh as their earliest material.

The fancy hand crafted edition I bought - when honestly the regular version would have been fine, except I'm not even sure there was a regular version - has someone's hard drive physically hot-glued to the cover, meaning it's likely to fuck up my copy of the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow should I attempt to file it away with my other albums, thus demanding I keep the bastard to one side as some sort of art object. So, factoring in the additional process of flying it through space in the first place, Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler probably counts as the most awkward record I've ever bought, besides which, even the Nocturnal Emissions one which came wrapped in a nappy may as well be Strollin' with Max Bygraves. It's therefore a fucking good job that it delivers.

Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.

Smell & Quim - Cuntybubbles (2020)

 
I recently discovered that Mr. Walklett attended the same fine art course as Marc Almond, back in the mists of time, and it sort of makes sense that the man who brought us Beaver Full of Spunk should once have patronised the same scholastic cafeteria as the one who brought us Sex Dwarf. Makes you wonder about Leeds a bit, or it makes me wonder at least. Maybe it's something in the water.

Anyway, just when you thought it was all done and dusted, the naughty fuckers are back, and my shelves suddenly groan beneath the weight of more Smell & Quim albums than I even knew existed this time last month, even a couple of newies. Cuntybubbles is brought to us by agency of the very wonderful and recently revived Cheeses International and illustrates, yet again, how Smell & Quim just seem to shit out one instant classic after another - arguably literally - like a musical version of the woman who keeps having babies in that Monty Python film, the one that wasn't very good; and yes, I do mean musical. Smell & Quim's strength has ever been that there was always a lot more to them than mere volume, and the romantically named Cuntybubbles is a rich sequential montage of loops, found sounds, squelches, musique concrete, alcohol abuse, scatological perversion, and Jimmy Savile. Of course, there's plenty of noise, and the sort which kills your lawn, but it's just one tool in the arsenal rather than the whole point, and this one sits as happily next to your Residents albums as that Whitehouse boxed set.

They've since released another new album even before I managed to get hold of this one, and that's great too. If you're not sure what Smell & Quim sound like or what they do, just imagine what your favourite noise group might be like if they managed to record something you were going to play more than once.

Order from Cheeses Int., a link for which can be found at the top left of the page under some stuff.

Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome (1999)

It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.

I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.

Available from this lot.

Neil Campbell - Roll the Vole to the Owl (2020)

Well, this is all very nice nice. I have a vague impression of Neil Campbell having more releases to his name than all other recording artists put together - ever, and here's another one which he's slipped out without an excess of ceremony and which doesn't sound like any of the others I've heard. Actually, of the others I've heard, a great number of them have been fairly noisy, which this isn't. The subheading on the Bandcamp page seems to be music for thumb piano, flute, and voice, which is what it is, although the flute sounds a lot like a recorder - as such arguably representing one of the few examples of a recorder sounding as good on the album as it probably did inside the artist's head - and there isn't much voice that you would notice, plus I'm fairly sure I could hear a Casio VL-1 in there somewhere. Roll the Vole to the Owl comprises seven vaguely folky instrumental pieces - at least atmospherically speaking - definitely free-range and home grown without chemical interference. It falls somewhere between a slightly friendlier relative of the Residents' Eskimo and Robert Cox's Rimarimba without all of the mathematics. Repeat listening gradually reveals electronic activity way down in the mix, at least as pertains to the recording process, but it's not obvious.  Roll the Vole to the Owl is so unassuming, so lacking an agenda, that it's hard to know what to say about it once we've established that it's a truly beautiful and perfectly formed piece of work, so I guess I'll leave it at that.

Residents - B*** S** (1971)

I still haven't quite got used to the idea that we now know the names written on at least two of the Residents' birth certificates, and somehow I prefer to continue to think of them as four anonymous beings who may or may not be of this planet. Similarly confusing has been my discovering the existence of this early, early album, apparently some Record Store Day thing which I presumably missed due to a general lack of enthusiasm for green vinyl reissues of Barry Manilow.

The original liner notes of Meet the Residents from 1974 muttered about the notoriety of earlier sound experiments, to which I never really gave much consideration until I noticed they had issued The Warner Brothers Album as a Record Store Day artifact, by which point I couldn't really afford the fucking thing. The Warner Brothers Album was approximately their first record, sent as a demo tape to the aforementioned label and accordingly rejected as too weird or something before being returned to the group - sent to the residents of the provided return address, which is how they came by their name; and this, discreetly abbreviated to BS for obvious reasons, was probably their second album, sort of, posthumously rescued from the can. It seems the bloke at Warner Brothers didn't think much of this one either.

The strange thing is that you really can tell it's the Residents, and yet it sort of isn't, not quite. The tendency to discordant nursery rhyming and pretending to be an alien was already very much a thing, but it sounds as though it was recorded on this planet by a bunch of hairies who may or may not have spent at least some time hanging out with Beefheart or even Zappa, guys who went about their daily business in regular clothes, and who probably had regular names written on birth certificates. The other strange thing is that BS is kind of groovy, jazzy and evocative in terms which had been thoroughly strained out of the musical gene pool by the time we got to actually meet the Residents, because they still sounded like a band of regular guys, at least around the edges of We Stole This Riff and Deepsea Diver Song. Peculiarly, after listening to this record, Meet the Residents still feels like their first album where this might be something popped through from an alternate universe or recorded during the negative time counting down to the birth of the band as we didn't actually come to know them, if you see what I mean. Typically, it seems not even the Residents themselves are unanimous in recognising BS as having been their own work. The more you know, the greater the mystery…

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968)

I'm out of my depth here, never really having had much to do with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or anything from the long-haired end of the sixties. It either hasn't grabbed me, or hasn't had the opportunity to grab me for one reason or another, which has never really felt like a problem given that I've always had plenty of other stuff to listen to, and I don't trust anyone who feels their record collection must include a representative selection of everything. It's not a fucking competition.

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel I've been missing out where Frank Zappa is concerned. I always liked the idea of the man, but never knowingly heard any of his work until the late, great Andrew Cox gave me this for Christmas. Given that Andrew passed away back in 2009, it's probably fair to say that it's taken me a while to click with the record, although in my defence there have been a few years spent in transit and without a turntable between then and now.

It seems Zappa viewed the long-haired end of the sixties with suspicion equivalent to my own. Scratch anyone who feels the need to tell you just how laid back and far out they are and you'll invariably find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Obviously this one was taking the piss out of Sgt. Pepper, or what Sgt. Pepper seemed to represent, but ran much deeper than mere sarcasm, revealing a healthy distrust of utopian sentiment as being no more revolutionary than the hula hoop or the beehive hairdo; and if it fails to offer an alternative to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, that's because it doesn't fucking have to because it's not chess. If you don't want to know that you're being used, then that's your tough shit.

Musically, Money goes along with certain conventions of its era, subverting ragtime, doowop and others to the cause of its opprobrium, then glueing all the bits together with an avant-garde sensibility hinting at musique concrete and the weirder end of jazz, but with a precision and targetting which can be mistaken for neither. There's none of that saggy far out shit here, no aimless giggling at its own reflection, but neither is the record in any sense mean spirited. Frank doesn't want to piss you off so much as he wants you to wake the fuck up - which is probably why you'll laugh your ass off with this record, at least if there's any hope for you.

I guess this is approximately where Devo got started, and certainly the Residents, or at least that's how it sounds to me. I'd say that I wish someone had told me, but they sort of did.

Infinite Livez vs. Stade - Art Brut fe de Yoot (2007)

Infinite Livez is arguably the closest rap has come to producing an analogy of the Residents. His Bush Meat was amazing and a definite contender for some all time best list or other, so I bought this and probably listened to it once. Being the work of Infinite Livez, I knew it would be screwy, but I suppose I wasn't prepared for just how screwy it turned out to be - almost like one of those things which isn't actually rap but, on close inspection, turns out to be some pal of Damien Hirst recontextualising an intrigueing blend of improvised jazz, situation comedy, world music, soul, French cuisine, Nordic cinema, a different type of improvised jazz to the first batch, Andy Warhol, and rap. It was what I imagined cLOUDEAD probably sounded like, although as it happens, cLOUDEAD are pretty much a vapourwave version of De La Soul, or summink.

Several million years later, second and third spins suggest I simply wasn't listening hard enough back in 2007. Art Brut is fucking strange for sure, but nothing like so abstract as I remember. Stade - pronounced starred, as in John Le Mesurier starred in Dad's Army - seem to be one of those laptop glitch outfits, although not bearing quite such a sonic resemblance to Farmer's Manual as I recall. The noises, clangs and beeps cohere into solid beats on a couple of tracks, whilst Infinite Livez' random vocal outbursts and apologies for being disgusting likewise assume rhythm and soul at certain intervals, leaving us with an album which allows some insight into what might have happened had Marvin Gaye been a member of Nurse With Wound; and I'm not shitting you here. I had no idea Livez was in possession of such a soulful singing voice as he demonstrates on tracks like webcamwoman.co.uk, even though the contrast of vocal style and subject is truly disorientating. Imagine if R. Kelly had possessed actual talent and had been a bit more up front about what he used to get up to in his spare time. Actually, while we're here, Infinite Livez pisses all over D'Angelo as well, although thankfully not in any literal sense.

It seems that everybody else had the same reaction to this when it came out. We listened to it once and decided it wasn't proper rap, an argument which I now understand to be bollocks, and an argument which doesn't matter because Art Brut fe de Yoot sounds like nothing else I've heard - pants-pissingly stupid yet with bathfuls of heart and soul. The one after this was called Morgan Freeman's Psychedelic Semen, and needless to say has just been added to the list.

Residents - Mark of the Mole (1981)

My first proper gig - large venue, no-one from school in the band - was the Residents' Mole Show at Birmingham Town Hall, so it's probably peculiar that it should have taken me nearly forty years to get this given how much I enjoyed the aforementioned Mole Show. Partially it was just how it worked out, Mark of the Mole hardly being the sort of record I could find at my local WHSmith, and when I stumbled across a copy at some better stocked place it was usually just after I'd spunked away all my pocket money on yet another live Throbbing Gristle album. Intermission somehow made it to our local record shop during the six months of the place managing to stay open, so I bought that, and it was great, and then the next thing I actually found was George and James, which wasn't very good at all and which pretty much killed my curiosity regarding new Residents material. I liked the old stuff, the weirdly discordant tunes plucked out on bits of wire stretched across the back of a chair, the music which didn't really fit anywhere, which sounded like it was recorded on another planet. It seemed as though they had lost something since they bought their Emulators, and the charm of endless wacky cover versions had begun to wear thin. Oh yes - it's Shakin' All Over sung by Herman Munster with the guitar riff on something which sounds like a cow playing the tuba - ha ha…

Better late than never, I guess. It took me a couple of plays to hear past my expectation of the formulaic weirdness of the Residents as wacky covers band, but I got there, and I realise Mole was probably the best Residents album since maybe Fingerprince. It sounds played rather than programmed, and played by Residents rather than wacky entertainers giggling inside their giant eyeballs. The music develops organically, without too much suggestion of anything happening just for the sake of being fucking weird. It's that same alien folk music which first caught my attention and it tells a story, and the tragedy of the Moles driven from their homes survives the surrealism of its telling. I liked both Eskimo and The Commercial Album, but I never really played either that much. For all of their qualities, I always felt they were laying it on just a little thicker than I liked, whatever it was; but Mark of the Mole is perfect.

Mark of the Mole was the first part of a trilogy which was never completed, and online sources seem to suggest that this was due to disillusionment with the expense of the Mole Show and how the undertaking didn't really turn out as the lads had hoped. I always understood that the Moles were actually the Residents struggling to get by in our society, but I didn't realise that part of this reflected on the apparently poor critical reception which greeted the previous two records; and I guess this was, if anything, what went wrong with the Residents. They wanted a hit single, or wider acclaim, or the stuff you're probably not going to get much of a sniff at when your album sounds like it was recorded on Mars. I guess maybe that's why there was a time during which they seemed to be turning into a surrealist comedy turn, something to match the sales of Weird Al Yankovic; and I guess that's why I've heard more recent stuff, and it's all right but I still feel the spark has gone. I still feel like they stopped exploring and became a tribute act recreating material in the style of their former selves, but maybe - and hopefully - I'm wrong. I guess I'll just have to track down The Tunes of Two Cities and see how it all panned out.

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.

Looney Tunes (1976)

I discovered punk rock at the age of fourteen, roughly speaking. Prior to that, I had my four Beatles albums - which had been my record collection since the age of eleven or so - and I thought Abba were quite good, but most of all I liked novelty records because I was a kid - my friend Sean's Wombles album, the Goodies, and this compilation, borrowed from Paul Moorman who lived on the farm next to ours and who was in my class at school. K-Tel's Looney Tunes is significant in being the first album I ever taped, having been given a mono portable tape recorder for Christmas, or possibly my birthday. I hadn't really thought about the thing until I chanced across a copy in Half-Price Books and realised what it was. I hadn't really thought about it because Looney Tunes dropped off my radar pretty fucking quickly once I discovered punk rock, which I regarded as proper grown up music, although it's probably ironic that the thing which first drew me to punk rock was that they said rude words on the telly, which was funny. Not for nothing does Stewart Home characterise the most successful punk bands as novelty acts in Cranked Up Really High, but anyway...

Thirty five years later, these twenty-four tracks, all crammed into tiny grooves so as to achieve maximum value for money, sound astonishingly good, perhaps even better than they did to my fourteen-year old ears, not least because this is mostly stuff you won't read about in the usual rock histories, the usual grown-up rock histories…

Interestingly, it's not even a couple of dozen actual looney tunes. Naturally, we have out and out comedy records such as Shaving Cream and The Streak, but there's plenty which simply chugs along on some kind of vague novelty value - The Bird's the Word or Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, which surely only count as comedy on the grounds of having presented a more authentic doo-wop experience than Perry Como; and then we have Tiny Tim's song about tulips, whatever the hell you'd call that. The thing which stands out for me - excepting the two proper children's numbers, Rubber Duckie and that fucking awful Chipmunk shite - is how most of those gathered here are just great songs, regardless of comic thrust. Susan Christie's I Love Onions still reminds me of the Residents; and Jumpin' Gene Simons' Haunted House is a gorgeous slice of hillbilly inflected country evocative as a childhood sunset; and Lonnie Donegan's surprisingly enduring My Old Man's a Dustman establishes a clear link to the Sex Pistols and all that, even though I probably wouldn't have quite been able to say why back when I first heard it.

The more you listen, the more obvious it becomes how some of these songs are genuinely odd, even avant-garde but for the lack of a beret. Buzz Clifford's Baby Sittin' Boogie flavours its breaks with the perfectly syncopated gurgling of an infant to genuinely peculiar effect, which can surely only have been achieved through mucking about with tapes; and there's the similarly bizarre vocal acrobatics of Joe Perkins' Little Eeefin' Annie knocking Can and all those other supposedly groundbreaking acts no-one actually listens to into a cocked hat. Rarely ranging much beyond doo-wop, rockabilly, country, and maybe a touch of traditional music hall, Looney Tunes is mainstream as hell, and yet manages to be seriously fucking weird for most of the playing time - arguably excepting the aforementioned children's numbers and Charlie Drake as ever trying far too hard on My Boomerang Won't Come Back. Transfusion by Nervous Norvus will save you the bother of ever having to read J.G. Ballard, and there's the distinctly rapey Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs to keep power electronics enthusiasts happy; and, in essence, what I mean to tell you is that this album has fucking everything you could ever need from a record. As some dude identifying as DaKreepa on YouTube states, the Looney Tunes album was the best fuckin' thing man has ever made, meaning that we can stop looking, having finally found the eye of the YouTube comments storm where truth finally happened.

Enhet För Fri Musik - Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig (2017)

There's A Heart That Leads You by the Free Music Unit, in case you were wondering, and I'll assume the freeness refers to improvisation rather any suggestion that they might just send you this record for nothing if you ask nicely. They're from Sweden, and I heard of this one through agency of Simon Morgan who insisted that it was great and that I should therefore get hold of a copy, which I did and it was.

Online research throws up references to both folk and improvised jazz in relation to Enhet För Fri Musik, so thankfully I began with what I could find on YouTube, because whilst both terms may indeed be extraordinarily broad in scope, I've been burned in the past. Observant readers will notice that the cover of Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig superimposes a skull over a national flag, and I accordingly had some fears grounded in it all being Swedish and thus beyond my obvious comprehension; but thankfully nothing here translates into anything suggestive of stiff right arms, and it's probably worth remembering that national flags tend to carry less contentious associations in countries which haven't spent the last century bombing the shit out of everyone else; which happily leaves us with just the music.

Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig features some improvised material in so much as that none of it is orchestrated into oblivion, and its folkiness is found in its simplicity - guitar, voice, sometimes a saxophone or a church organ - recorded without embellishment on what may as well have been a portable tape recorder; so there's rumble, tape noise, hiss and so on, all of which impose a powerful, possibly unintentional, sense of nostalgia over the music. They're not afraid of the occasional bum note or missed cue, and it sounds very much like the work of people who genuinely love what they're doing, and hope you will too, and who probably aren't going to beat you over the head with it or give you a lecture. You could probably call it lo-fi, if you really must. It reminds me a little of Ivor Cutler's musical forays, maybe with a faint trace of something from the first Residents album - mainly thinking of how Variationer Av En Längtan Till Gud, which is apparently Variations of a Longing for God, sort of reminds me of Skratz - but more than anything, it invokes that happiness which can only be experienced with a little bit of sadness, a kind of nostalgia without being an arsehole about it. There's something very warming about this record, which may not be a coincidence given its country of origin. Like a rich soup, Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig is good for you. It may not be obvious what they're saying, but somehow you can feel it regardless of the language barrier.

Wreckless Eric - amERICa (2015)

Wreckless Eric made a huge impression on me at an early age, and at least a couple of years before I actually knowingly heard any of his records. Most of my taste in music is fairly firmly rooted in me and Grez raiding his older brother's bedroom when we were teenagers. Grez's older brother - or Martin to his friends, that being a category which didn't include us - had all these amazing albums by people we'd never heard of, Alternative TV, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Faust, the Residents, Skrewdriver…

Well, it was All Skrewed Up which I believe predates the racist phase, but let's not get off the subject. Amongst Martin's records were several by Wreckless Eric, notably that legendary 10" album on brown vinyl; you know the one. If you don't, might I suggest euthanasia followed by reincarnation and then trying your hardest to get it fucking right next time around? How many 10" brown vinyl albums have there ever been?

Assuming we all know what I'm talking about, I maintain that the aforementioned 10" is blessed with one of the greatest covers ever. Eric looks like he's drunk, about to fall over, but really doesn't give a shit because he's having an amazing time regardless; and then there's that jacket, some funky print of eagles soaring across what probably isn't silk - all very New Faces or Opportunity Knocks and yet somehow so punk rock as to make most of those King's Road clowns look like ELO. Whether you ever regarded Wreckless Eric as punk rock probably depends on where you were stood at the time, but I guess it's okay if we keep in mind that the point of punk rock, at least according to some Sex Pistol or other, was not to destroy rock 'n' roll so much as to take it back to its roots, to take it back from all the bouffant hairdo fuckers who'd lost sight of what it was supposed to do in the first place, Geoff Lynne.

So, in accordance with my vaguely punky roots, I still find myself getting ready to sneer at the slightest suggestion of artists working past their sell-by date, but it's just a knee jerk thing, and it really doesn't apply to Wreckless Eric; because this isn't a comeback album, nor recapturing the glory days, nor sensitive sound recordings of all his new forest pals in Papua New Guinea, nor a true return to form as the perpetually misleading promise always has it, nor our man dabbling with ambient sludgestep; because amERICa is simply a new Wreckless Eric album and that's all you should need to know.

May as well cover the full distance and take the remaining few steps up my own arse, seeing as we've come all this way.

It took me a couple of years, but I chanced across the brown vinyl 10" in a second hand place in Norwich, and I bought it because Grez and myself had never got around to actually playing his brother's copy, for some reason. I bought it because I recognised the cover and I knew it would be good, as indeed it was. In fact it was more than just good. It was one of those greatest album ever recorded deals, or that's how it seems when you're in the middle of listening to the thing, playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror and miming along to Reconnez Cherie. It's difficult to pin down what made Eric seem so unique, and why I can't help bristling a little whenever I hear that pub rock song by Denim. He has an ear for a tune, and a weird little voice which sounds more like one of your mates than anyone you'd expect to hear on a record, and somehow it all comes together with such raw honesty that it would hurt if it didn't also have a decent sense of humour - it's something along these lines. Stand Wreckless Eric next to almost anyone you care to mention and the other person will look like a fake, a part-timer, an idiot with no idea what he or she is doing; and the crucial detail is that unlike so many rock 'n' roll hall of fame bores, Eric just gets on with it. He really is all about the craft unhindered by bullshit of any stripe. I had an argument with my mother about Shakespeare, her position being that the works of Shakespeare are the greatest things written in the English language because, whatever it is you wish to express, there will always be one particular way to say it which works better than all the others, and which is the most fluent; and so everything Shakespeare has said has been the best way to say that thing. I'm still not that bothered about Shakespeare, but I take the point and I'd say it applies just as well to the songs of Wreckless Eric. In terms of the heart, it doesn't get better than this. It speaks to me about my life, I suppose you'd say.

amERICa is Wreckless Eric's response to his having moved to the United states, which speaks to me about my life with particular resonance because that's what I've done too, and I know exactly what he's talking about. There's a faint country twang, but it still rocks like that bloke in the print jacket, and the honesty is both funny, painful, and even a little sad, just like on the best soul or blues records; and Transitory Thing nearly tears my fucking heart out each time I play it. Bloody hell. At the risk of hyperbole, amERICa might even be the greatest album ever recorded.

Devo - Something For Everybody (2010)

I've always found the idea that anybody could have a single all-time favourite music artist a little weird, but if pressed I'd have to say mine were Devo in so much as that whilst there have been months, perhaps even years, without them being much of a presence in my headphones, there has never been a time when I've stuck on a Devo record and found I wasn't really in the mood for it. Setting aside a pre-pubescent fixation with the Beatles, Devo were probably the first group I really got into as a teenager, and got into with sufficient fervour as to get me buying the records. They scared the living shit out of me when I first heard that debut album, a red vinyl copy lent to me by my best friend Graham, but once I got past my suspicion of this music as something weird, unwholesome and mutated - which of course it was - I was hooked, and apparently for life.

A couple of years later I was hanging out with a former Cravat and we were talking about Crass, of whom we were both fans. Ideally, we concluded, Crass should make records which sounded like the Human League or Roxy Music by which to smuggle their message into the hit parade and reach people who might genuinely benefit from their perspective on society; at which point of the conversation I realised it had already happened, and that's what Devo were. Of course, whilst Devo may not actually have much to say about anarcho-syndicalism, like Crass, they've never been shy in pointing out everything which is wrong with our society and our forever needing daddy to tell us what to do. The main difference is that you can dance to the Devo version because it's fundamentally stupid and fun, and even though it was born from Gerald Casale's outrage at witnessing cops shooting kids at Kent State, musically it's the Monster Mash as envisioned for a future designed by John Waters and Hugo Gernsback; and it's like this because it's a satire on culture, not something removed from it and living by its own laws in Epping Forest - which isn't a criticism of Crass, by the way, simply an acknowledgement of different strategies.

Something For Everybody will probably remain the final new Devo album given the passing of a Bob, and a couple of those left behind supposedly no longer on the greatest of terms. Continuing Devo's taking the piss out of society, the music industry, and themselves, the album was supposedly written by focus group in response to questionnaires asking what consumers would like to hear from Devo. I remember filling in one online, and that's supposedly why we have the blue energy dome on the cover, as opposed to any other hue of headgear. We also got to pick which tracks made it onto this album which, tellingly, makes for much better listening than the collection of rejects and leftovers which was later issued as Something Else For Everybody. I say much better listening, but what I actually probably mean to say is that this is an unequivocally perfect album, illustrating as it does why there can never be a musical institution greater than Devo.

Yes, I know, and I don't care. There are people who don't get Devo. I've met them on internet forums sniggering about how Devo is like totally gay LOL before returning to the thread discussing which Judas Priest albums rocked the hardest, which sort of proves that Devo were right about a few things.

With Devo, each song is a puzzle in so much as that there is either a directly progressive message, or one otherwise implicit in the form, and it's usually communicated in terms which combine the novelty of the Archies with the mind-expanding strangeness of the Residents; and unscrambling that puzzle, you arrive at a place wherein it becomes impossible to sustain ridiculous devolved ideas, or so my theory goes. What this means, or what I think it means, is that if you get Devo, then you're probably doing something right; and you've probably never stood outside Planned Parenthood wearing an NRA t-shirt and holding up a crucifix; and you almost certainly didn't vote for the Annoying Orange. The music of Devo improves our world by making us better people, and if you need proof - next time you get your heart broken, eschew the usual soundtrack of miserable fuckers in favour of almost anything by Devo. I promise, you'll notice the difference in a very short time.

So yes, this will most likely be the final Devo album, which is a shame but - Lord - what a finale! Musically it's almost a summary of their entire career - the sharp, irresistible pop of Freedom of Choice, the synthetic grandeur of Shout, and the faintly disturbing mutant novelty of their weird primal phase - Fountain of Filth, Buttered Beauties and the rest, not even omitting the occasional Popeye-style ethnic caricature switched on its head as happens with Cameo. Something For Everybody rocks hard and dresses like the Jetsons whilst still managing to squeeze out a tear of more genuine feeling than anything Sting ever did in a rain forest.

In the bigger scheme of things
We haven't been around here more than a moment.
And yet too many, it seems,
Believe we are creating a brand new world around us.
We are creating a brand new world without us.
Maybe it really is okay.
Although we're digging our own graves,
At this moment.

I could write about how no-one really took them seriously because they were scared of the truth about de-evolution, namely that it was never a marketing gimmick like Adam Ant pretending to be a pirate or whatever; but some of us did take them seriously, and I guess we've been proven right because we're now living in the world described in Don't Shoot (I'm a Man).

This might be our very last chance. Let's not fuck it up.

MERZfunder (2016)

Kurt Schwitters was an artist associated with Dada and Surrealist art movements, but mainly Dada. His best known work mostly comprised collages of found objects - bus timetables, scraps of newspaper and so on - and of all the Dadaists, he seems a strong candidate for the one who best tapped into the appeal of random images and juxtapositions, the way our eyes might fixate on a particularly interesting pattern caused by damp on the ceiling. Certainly he seems to be the one whose work has remained an enduring influence on everyone from Billy Childish to Nurse With Wound; and it turns out that he lived in England for a while, which I didn't even realise. He lived in Cumbria, specifically the town of Ambleside, and whilst there he turned a local barn into art. This barn is now known as the Merz Barn and, as the name probably implies, MERZfunder is a compilation aimed at raising money so as to ensure that the thing is preserved for the benefit of future generations. I guess England probably doesn't really have money to spare right now, especially not for art, the province of the liberal media elite, homosexuals, and people who don't like football.

This seems worth supporting, I said to myself, even though I don't ordinarily do downloads. The Shend from the Cravats is on there, and it features 114 songs by all sorts, so I envisioned something in the vein of the Residents' Commercial Album or Morgan Fisher's Miniatures compilation. I realised I was mistaken in at least one respect when the thing took over an hour to download. As stated MERZfunder features 114 individual pieces of music, but of course being associated with no physical format, it's under no obligation to keep it snappy. There are a couple of tracks of at least twenty minutes duration, and plenty of around ten - all adding up to nearly eleven hours of music.

Jesus.

Needless to say, reviewing this as I might review the latest collection of Miley Cyrus hits could take years being as I've thus far only listened to the thing all the way through once - albeit over successive weeks, so I'll stick to just the facts embellished with comments where I feel qualified to offer them. Contributors I've heard of include the Astronauts, M.Nomized, Band of Holy Joy, the aforementioned Shend, Security, Hagar the Womb, Neil Campbell, Rapoon, and Nik Turner whom older boys and girls may remember as having had something to do with Hawkwind. I've actually only heard of Security because I used to be in a band with one of them, although I've also had intercourse with both the Shend and Neil Campbell - not sexual intercourse, obviously; so this is one of those reviews of something featuring blokes I know, but given that the contributor credits for this thing probably account for a decent percentage of the current human population, you probably know someone with a track on this collection too, dear reader, statistically speaking; and accordingly MERZfunder features every single style of music ever, more or less.

As you might expect, there's Dadaism aplenty in myriad forms - everything from the sound of marbles chucked at a dustbin into which someone is doing a poo, to peculiar songs written by aspiring Martians. There's punk, free jazz, reggae, trad jazz, easy listening, ambient, just plain strange, and everything in between. Numbers which have impressed me enough to mention them here include Woefully Tired by Pampered Fists, the Shend's Pixie Denial, In the Here and Now by Deviant Amps, and the Staggs track which forges techno with a sample of Jon Inman saying I'm free! I feel fairly confident that the other hundred tracks are probably also decent on the grounds that I don't recall skipping any during my first marathon month's worth of listening. Another year might pass before I've heard MERZfunder all the way through more than twice, but in the meantime the sheer scale and range of the thing becomes a quality in its own right, almost amounting to pins stuck in random lists of names by virtue of how long it will take for this thing to achieve familiarity. I'm sure Schwitters would have approved.

Get thineself one at yonder link.