SPK - Auto-da-Fé (1983)

 

The late Simon Morris described them as industrial chancers which, if consistent with his habit of poo-pooing whatever you like on the grounds of your liking it, probably wasn't entirely without substance. As a close personal friend of the noise-stars, my favourite SPK story is of Graeme Revell signing a ten-album deal with Elektra, spunking the money away on a massive sampler, delivering Machine Age Voodoo, then recording the other nine albums in less than a week to such a standard that SPK were released from the contract. If true, I assume those nine missing albums sounded like their hopefully sarcastic But Can You Dance To It? except not as good. Still, when they got it right, they really fucking nailed it as demonstrated by the first side of this compilation.

The first side assembles tracks from the early singles and EPs recorded without much of a budget or significant interest from anyone who wasn't in the band; and they sound like nothing else released as SPK, not even Leichenschrei. If influenced by a good few of the usual suspects - Faust, Neu and so on - you still wouldn't mistake them for anyone before or since. We have harsh electronic squeaks and farts overloading the speakers while somehow sounding quite minimal, ninety-mile an hour pounding rhythms, lots of screaming and ranting, and the unexpected embellishment of angular new wave guitar. So it's a fucking racket, but it's a weirdly infectious fucking racket in places, like someone fed the Banshees into a blender; and crucially it sounds nothing like Gristle. I always had my doubts about Germanik, a title suggesting scary faces pulled while overly-earnest schoolboys scream Achtung and Die Englander Schweinhund because Hitler innit, but I assume one of them spoke German and the title is meant in the sense later employed by Laibach as a portmanteau of German and manic. Anyway, these six short blasts of punk noise will astonish you no matter how vast your rekord kollection may be, and no kobweb shalt remain inviolate.

By way of contrast, side two feels somewhat like here's the other stuff we've been mucking around with, opening with an earlier version of Metall Field, spelled with the Welsh ll for some reason, which is a'ight but not a patch on the version from the Peel session. Then we have Walking on Dead Steps which is one of those naughty bondage-synthesiser songs with Grez counting in German and from which Depeche Commode implausibly decanted an entire leather-underpants-clad career. Finally we come to A Heart That Breaks in No Time or Place which combines moody poetry with rude words and some nice trumpet work, but again feels like pissing around in a studio in hope of something happening. Nothing on the second side is actively bad, but it sounds weak after Retard, Slogun and the others, amounting to a full album which adheres to the long dead maxim about seven inch singles with lousy b-sides. The important thing to remember is that side one is akin to sticking your head into a cement mixer, then somehow fitting the cement mixer into a microwave oven and pressing go.

Cloth Ear - 一 (yī) (2026)

 

I assume this to be the work of Peter Hope, it having been hustled forth by Wrong Revolution, but I'm otherwise mostly in the dark given the lack of information on either cover or Bandcamp page. It could be the first album from his milkman for all I know, but let's assume it's the man himself, being consistent with Hope's sonic aesthetic which allows for noise, distortion, and things occasionally sounding like they were captured on a mono-portable tape recorder in 1974 - allows for without it being the entire point such as you tend to find with young bearded men who curate things involving 'vinyls' in coffee bars. Instruments feature, or at least there's a guitar providing scraping noises, meandering bass notes on some kind of primitive synth, percussive sounds which are probably cardboard boxes and bits of wood, and everything dominated by a delay, possibly a WEM Copycat by the sound of it. It chugs, whines, hisses, screams, drifts from place to place, and what we lack in anything you'd call a tune or even a groove is compensated by the slow repeat and decay through a dirty echo box; so it becomes hypnotic and absorbing fairly soon. I don't detect any significant element of nostalgia, but the mains hum, technology, and general mood hark back to those brief seven or eight months before anyone described anything as industrial, and all we had were rehearsal tapes of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Deviation Social and hardly anyone else; and we didn't really know what the hell it was except that we liked it. The repetition of the delay is what makes sense of this material as something powerfully musical and after a few plays you begin to anticipate certain sounds and noises just as you'd anticipate the chorus of something more obviously structured.

It wasn't that I didn't have expectations of this album but I didn't have any idea what it was, relying on the House of Hope to come through with the goods as usual; as indeed it has, and this may even be my favourite Wrong Revolution release, or at least it's up there with the best.

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.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2t2 (2025)

 

Here's another Cosey solo, not radically different to Tutti but representing further goodness mined from the same seam; although it brings new realisations, namely that on reflection I think I prefer her solo work to anything recorded with him indoors, or even with that other group. I'm not even sure why this should be, for clearly it's a relative. Another realisation is that both 2t2 and its predecessor seem sonically closer to the very first Chris & Cosey outings than to the later, which may be to do with either a reinvestment in gritty analogue sounds or the renewed spirit of adventure which comes with endeavours beyond a familiar configuration of people. A lot of it chugs along at some halfway point between Gristle and Moroder, as much a bubbling bass as a rhythm. With Wrangler and countless others, the last decade or so has seen a revival in what I'd hesitate to call sounds of the seventies, harking back to those early experiments with plug-in synths grinding away, and so it is with Cosey's work. In most cases, and certainly this one, it doesn't strike me as an exercise in nostalgia so much as a reflection of changing music technology thankfully losing its fixation with the new, instead favouring variety and malleability in terms of sound design.

Anyway, while solo Cosey makes great use of rhythm, it's a different emphasis to that favoured by hubby and is more exploratory, hence the continued delight in things which make a noise for their own sake - the cornet and even a harmonica on this album. I gather these pieces were composed for some kind of installation, which I can see given that they have the quality of soundtrack, a certain cinematic scale wherein even the atonal elements gain musicality by contrast with adjacent sounds. It suggests improvisation and random juxtaposition but for the fact that everything works and complements the whole, so maybe there's an element of selection. Whatever the case may be, it's at least as powerful as weather in its emotional impact - an album in which to lose yourself.

Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv (1984)

Comparing the respective careers of the four Throbbing Gristlers after they parted ways, I realise Gristle itself could be pretty much summarised as Chris & Cosey with Porridge providing a picture of a chair for the album cover, then telling you 'Hermann Göring sat on that chair,' with that lurid smile which lets you know you've been Porridged good and proper. It's strange how this only seems obvious - at least to me - with a couple of decades of hindsight. I'd guess the music of Chris & Cosey mostly sounded happy, doubtless as a result of having left a band which included Porridge, although it didn't seem so at the time. It seemed more like they'd divided into the polar opposites of weirdy stuff with pierced nobs on the one hand, and nursery rhyme proto-techno on the other; but having noticed that 2018's Tutti is almost pure Gristle with more polish, yet without sounding like a trip down memory lane, this is the rabbit hole I've chosen today.

I'm not sure if Techno Primitiv was exactly the last good thing for me, but as I still can't remember what Pagan Tango sounds like, it was the last to make an impression, following which my attention span wandered off somewhere else. The couple hit the ground running with 1981's Heartbeat, released the same year as the split and sounding like they were at least fucking trying. More records followed and a sound developed with some sense of direction, meaning we never quite bought the same album twice while allowing for occasional flashes of tangential brilliance - the Elemental 7 soundtrack or collaborations with Konstruktivists and the Eurhythmics for example. However, we shouldn't underestimate how different these records seemed to what had gone before. Without Porridge providing some vaguely sinister subtext - and I honestly don't know how much else - the music became its own subject in so much as that it lacked an overt message. These were studio experiments in building a groove and seeing where it led, with Cosey's vocalisations more about mood than anything. Technically, the electronics were always a couple of years ahead of everyone else, usually meaning there was enough going on to keep it from sounding like all those plug it in and press a button cybernauts who came later. So considering the improvisational nature of the composition, and that Chris & Cosey albums had a diary quality of what we've been working on since the last thing hereby presented for your consideration, there's no obvious singularity of vision or focus to sharpen a record into the sort of point you might get with other artists. Practically this meant what sounded to me like diminishing returns, more and more nursery rhymes, bass patterns which may as well have been the Birdie Song, Cosey sounding slightly bored, and albums suggesting the work of people titting about in the studio because they have nothing better to do.

Yet when they're good, they're great - moody and sensuous like a cyber-age Serge Gainsbourg, hypnotic with some mathematically ornate rhythm track taking centre stage within a vast sonic space windswept by half-heard melodies, noises, groans, sighs - all captured in digital hyperclarity so sharp that it's almost weird. Techno Primitiv has a few of those tracks which never quite worked, I felt, due to an incongruously chirpy quality - He's an Arabian for example, but then you hit the pseudo-tribal panorama of Do or Die and all is forgiven; and even the more uptempo tracks, the almost songs, have a certain frisson of the forbidden which elevates them above the frosty jangle of Christmas muzak. Above all, this one still sounds like an album regardless of whatever themes it may carry remaining ambiguous. It sounds like possibilities, like effort made beyond sticking a skull on the cover and giving the kids what they want. So credit where it's due, and all that.

Whitehouse - Erector (1981)

 

It's hard to know where to start with Whitehouse because they pretty much defy analysis, so what follows will probably be just as useless as the rest. They promised the most violently repulsive records ever made, and that's what they delivered. Left with nowhere else to go, their harshest critics - of which there have been many - usually argue that actually, they really mean it and are therefore Nazis, and it's all just cheap shock tactics, despite that it logically can't be both of those. Brexit may have happened because William Bennett couldn't settle down to playing jagged guitar for Essential Logic, but I'm not convinced that it's an argument worth having, at least not when our collective cup already runneth over with social evils without calling noise weirdos up before the House Committee to explain what the fuck they were thinking.

Whatever may have been said about transgressive art - if we really must use that term - in the years since this appeared, I feel it may be more useful to consider when it came out, which I'll attempt by describing what it meant to me. I would have been sixteen or seventeen and I was already listening to Throbbing Gristle and a few others of their association. I read about Whitehouse in issue four of Flowmotion fanzine and was immediately fascinated because I'd never heard of them and yet they seemed to be a big deal. I'd never heard of them because the records were difficult to get hold of, being stocked by very few physical stores, and the music papers wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. This was mostly, so I gather, about the imagery - death, murder, sadism, sexual perversion, Nazism, serial killers, war criminals, extremes; but where Gristle presented some of these as documentation of civilisation falling apart at the seams, Whitehouse sounded like a celebration in wilfully eschewing the excuses, explanations, or get out of jail free cards helpfully provided by those who quite liked reading about themselves in the NME.

Anyway, I feel I was somewhat primed for this material through familiarity with Dadaism and a few of the Surrealist painters - Hans Bellmer being the obvious one; and then Erector came in the mail. As with Second Annual Report, my first reaction was genuine revulsion to the point of experiencing an actual cold sweat as I listened. I spent a day thinking I needed to send the thing back, but was paralysed by the terrible realisation that Whitehouse now had my home address. I don't know what I thought they were likely to do. Another day passed and I decided that I would do better to just not think about it for a while, which turned out to be the best option.

Erector is a long fucking way from the seductively weird science-fiction sounds of Throbbing Gristle sticking their bagpipes through a flange pedal just like Pink Floyd would have done. Everything you hear seems designed for maximum physiological discomfort - think the sine wave whine of a dentist's drill rather than SPK's abstract expressionist wall of distortion; so we have VCOs tuned down to unsettling ticks or impersonating medical technology, blocks of white noise, traces of musique concrete resembling the sounds half-heard from a hospital bed, bubbling feedback low in the mix, and William Bennett screaming his lungs out with such fury that it's impossible to pick out words beyond a few phrases and the repetition of horrible titles; and it's all dry as fuck, no reverb, no echo, no concession to mood or soundtrack. The vocal isn't even consistent with the heavy metal tendencies of singers who growl to let you know they be baaad. Screams alternate with incongruously pathetic non-vocal noises, or the intonation of certain words veer off into the utterances of dunces, all punctuated by feedback from some weedy metallic noise which sounds like Mr. Bennett tapping the mic stand with a spoon. Everything grates, or is unpleasant in some way. It doesn't brood and isn't cool. It has no stance. It doesn't make sense. As promised, it's violently repulsive even before we get to the track titles and wonder whether we really want to grab that dictionary to look up the two we've never even heard of.

So, no. Erector by Whitehouse is not for everyone.

These days I don't listen to this album much because, joking aside, I prefer music; and yet the more I notice it either ignored or otherwise dismissed for the usual reasons, the more I'm glad that it exists, and the more I feel inclined to stand by this fucking repulsive racket because it's honest by some definition, and it will never be bought or conscripted to a putrid cause, and even after all these years, Erector still sounds like nothing else.

Cover art censored so as to prevent spread of devil worship, Communism and extra-marital relations.

We Be Echo - The Guestlist (2024)

 

Somehow this one wasn't quite clicking for me, which was puzzling given that it sounded like it should be doing something, at which point I realised I nearly always listen to We Be Echo on headphones - as we used to say in the olden days - where I'd been playing The Guestlist over speakers, almost as background. I don't know why this should make a difference but it does, and listening by my traditional means was a very different kettle of fish, specifically involving those terrifying things found at the bottom of the sea.

The Guestlist forms a wall of rhythmic sound, much like previous albums, but there's so much going on here that you really need to immerse yourself to get the full benefit. It does too much to be limited to the term industrial, although that's as good a reference point as any and is earned in this case. Where the last few albums focussed on stretching a particular formula limited mostly to bass, percussion and vocals, The Guestlist sees an expansion of the familiar palette bringing in a wider range of electronic and treated sounds, notably in the rhythm section, building up the sort of pensive moodscape in which Gristle excelled back in the day, and which is sonically descended from Kevin Thorne's work with Third Door from the Left; so, as with Third Door, if it goes places you may recognise from Throbbing Gristle (particularly the live material) it nevertheless manages to sound very much its own thing. The major progression from previous albums, given that the general mood remains more or less the same, is in the vocals, with some tracks allowed to stand as instrumental, others with vocals treated or the voice howling away beneath a fog of reverb. Somehow this gives the impression of a more rounded whole, something with a beginning and an end rather than just the latest selection of songs.

Where Do Not Switch On seemed to be the best of the reformed We Be Echo* so far, The Guestlist has gone one better, which is as it should be.

*: I realise the idea that a musical act comprised of a single individual can reform is basically fucking ridiculous, but it was the easiest way to write the sentence.

Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)

This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.

We Be Echo - Ceza Evi (1983)

I now have three versions of this, and I've a feeling I've reviewed it as many times over the years, with excerpts of my previous reviews having been reprinted on the cover of previous reissues, albeit reissues of related We Be Echo material rather than this specific collection. I'm quoted on the cover of this one too, which is massively gratifying, although it presents the weird possibility that you may even be reading this on the cover of some future reissue. Anyway, before I disappear up my own arse…

Ceza Evi was recorded by Kevin Thorne, formerly of Third Door from the Left and fairly close associate of Throbbing Gristle. It was one of the first independent cassettes I bought, and as such set an unusually high bar for the form. It had quite an impact on me. The music - and it is music rather than some dreary bloke scratching his nuts next to a tape recorder and declaring it sound art - utilises drum machine, synth, bass guitar, electronics, and a lot of tapes to communicate a powerfully brooding atmosphere approximately parallel to the sort of thing Gristle always did so well, something bordering on the edge of the profane or unthinkable - beat driven music which really grinds its way into your subconscious. The incredible thing is that this material didn't even have the benefit of a four track portastudio. It was captured by bouncing tracks from tape to tape on a domestic double tape deck. Naturally, no-one's going to mistake Ceza Evi for a Trevor Horn production, but nor does it quite sound like anything produced by a bloke sat cross-legged on the rug in his front room. Kevin got the absolute best out of the extraordinary limited equipment available at the time, even without the significant occurrence of tape hiss, and it succeeds because the simple power of these tracks sweeps you up and carries you away to some very dark places before it even occurs that maybe it wasn't knocked out at Abbey Road.

There were two versions of Ceza Evi. The special edition came out a year or so after the first, replacing more than half of the tracks with newer, more technically sophisticated material. This double disc from Cold Spring polishes up and remasters the special edition on the first disc - or rather Martin of Attrition polishes up and remasters, and a great job he's done too. The second disc collects the tracks which were lost in the update. They're perhaps more primitive than others on the special edition, harder or even more brutal, but - fuck - I'm glad they haven't been left completely by the wayside, and it's particularly great to hear I'm A Gambler, Micro Penis, and Knechtschaft again after all this time. Listening to this lot again, it's also interesting to hear formative clues as to the current We Be Echo sound, which has evolved greatly from these beginnings, but still carries some of the same mood.

I've lived with these tracks for what is now a bewildering two thirds of my existence on this planet, and can't imagine what life would have been like without this stuff somewhere in the background.

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.

Stylic - Preacher EP (2022)

 

I don't know why I took a chance on this one over other doubtless wonderful sets squirted forth from New York Haunted's virtual spigot on a seemingly weekly basis - because they're always great - and I suppose it was just the cover image which caught my attention by putting me in mind of Craggy Island's finest.

That's how superficial I am.

Well, superficial or not, other factors must account for why I've ended up playing the thing so much, namely that it bangs and is proper peng and fire and that, as we teenagers say. Preacher is techno or dance or summink, but with what I presume to be that distinctive New York Haunted sensibility in that it sits at a bit of a distance from everything else I've heard and is at least as much concerned with sonic power as getting your back up off the wall. Stylic's brand of techno has an undercurrent of the sort of EDM I recall from the nineties, particularly Nitzer Ebb before they turned into Led Zeppelin, without really sounding like anything from a previous decade. I assume this to be the samples, that specific snare and so on, rather than what it does on the floor; although the mood may also be a factor - a sort of euphoric stomp with added 303 squelch stood at the bar waiting for its turn. The second track, Led, is in particular a work of crazy genius, welding Robert Plant's orgasm noises from the aforementioned Zeppelin's Lemon Song* to Front 242 driving disco trucks across an international checkpoint. Why no-one has syncopated Plant's cum-face before is revealed as a complete fucking mystery as the track sweeps you off your feet, or your chair in my case.

Everything else holds up too, for what it may be worth - three tracks plus three remixes, although not of Led probably because it simply couldn't be made any more amazing than it already is; and we even get one of those remixes in which the label seems to specialise which veers towards Throbbing Gristle effects overload. Someone needs to vinylise this monster ASAP.

 

*: I'm pretty sure it's the Lemon Song but I can't be arsed to check right now. It's the one where it sounds like he's shooting his muck anyway.

Jolthrower - The Last Sip (2021)

 

The relationship between light beverages and electronic, industrial, or otherwise futuristic forms of music is not well documented, possibly due to the slightly more pervasive influence of meth, cocaine, and space fags; but it's definitely a thing. Few will have forgotten Watford's Soft Drinks, who might be likened to a more violent version of Nitzer Ebb but for the songs being about Pepsi Cola, orange squash and the like. Now we have Jolthrower, a fount of hard electronic noise dedicated to Jolt Cola; or at least we had Jolthrower, the existence of which has been dependent on the availability of the recklessly refreshing non-alcoholic beverage which provides both its inspiration and reason for being.

Please don't tell me you've never heard of it.

I didn't believe it either, until I found a bottle for myself. It was five in the morning and I was on the way to work and there it was in amongst the inferior drinks at 7-Eleven. The label and logo - that distinctive red and yellow flash of lightning - was printed directly onto the glass of the bottle so it seemed like something special; and the joke my friends had made about all the sugar and twice the caffeine turned out not to be a joke after all, but a promise, a vow even, and there it was in those exact same words on the glass; and I'm here to tell you, should it need saying, that it didn't disappoint.

Unfortunately, the company has somehow had a sporadic relationship with its supply chain, going out of business from time to time, shutting down, then back up and running again; and so Jolthrower's Last Sip serves as a sort of requiem to the drink's most recent period of availability as well as a celebration.

Sonically we have only titles such as The Powerful Cola Compels Me or the pensive Trying Coke Zero to establish an obvious association between the drink and the noise, but it all makes sense, the more you listen; and yes, it's noise, seeing as I apparently didn't already mention that. Specifically, The Last Sip is a barrage of electronics recorded in a live setting, screaming feedback, distortion, sine wave chaos, loops, glitches and the like, and of all things it reminds me most of Throbbing Gristle's live recordings from back before Porridge grew himself a pair of baps - that peculiar combination of terror and excitement in this instance specifically evoking the caffeine rush of the world's most powerful cola. There's a dynamic here and the sound constantly changes and evolves, taking the listener on a journey, even if it's just to the local Dollar Store. If ever proof were needed as to how noise has evolved as an art form, how far it has come, then it's right here.

Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance (1981)

PIL were an early discovery for me, a band which loomed large in my teenage world for what seemed like an age - the era prior to my discovery of Throbbing Gristle and all the really weird, scary stuff - but which may actually have been a matter of months. I was hypnotised by that first single before I even realised there was any kind of Pistols association; I was chilled yet thrilled by what Annie Nightingale played of Metal Box before it hit the shops; and I was so primed and ready for Flowers that it may even have been the first album I bought on the day it came out.

I never really tired of this stuff but I came to play it less and less as it was eclipsed by other things, and it didn't help that my copies of the first two albums took to skipping all over the fucking shop whenever I tried to listen to them. I assumed it was something to do with those bass frequencies collapsing the walls between the grooves during mastering; then recently I bought a new needle and found First Issue was just fine when I happened to play it, as was Second Edition. It seems that I've spent three decades listening to music with needles which weren't actually quite so good as I had believed, given that I never experienced the skipping problem with anything else. So, after all this time the early, spikier incarnation of Public Image Ltd. were suddenly back on the menu.

It's therefore been one fuck of a long time since I gave this a spin, and Christ almighty - it still sounds incredible. The loss of Wobble really seemed like a disaster at the time and I couldn't see how they would come back from it, at least not without taking on another bassist; but Levene, Lydon, and Martin Atkins squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons, producing something which, although rhythmic, is otherwise almost completely unmusical by any conventional terms but succeeds by the sheer force of its overpowering atmosphere; and it probably doesn't hurt that Lydon's vocalisations had grown particularly haunting and lyrical by this point. I'm still not sure quite where any of it came from, besides being vaguely aware of Lydon and Levene's eclectic influences, but it seems to foreshadow Einstürzende Neubauten of all things, at least in terms of crushing atmospherics derived from flawlessly recorded and immediately recognisable sound sources captured with pseudo-classical clarity.

I vaguely recall some radio interview from the time during which the lads expressed dismay at Adam & the Ants having produced such a relatively weedy sound despite having two drummers, and in light of this monster, they had a point. I'm trying to think of something so heavily reliant upon just percussion as was The Flowers of Romance which came anywhere close to sounding so powerful, but I'm drawing mostly blanks.

Come - Rampton (1979)

I suspect the increasing ubiquity and multiplication of noise artists may have somewhat reduced the impact of the form in certain respects. My first encounter with Whitehouse, for example, was in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine contemporary with the release of Psychopathia Sexualis - so about 1982, I guess. The first thing which struck me as weird was that I'd never heard of this band and yet they seemed to have quite a following. They sounded absolutely terrifying, the music papers refused to write about them, and Rough Trade wouldn't stock their records, and so it was inevitable that I should at least wonder. Forty years later and I'm still not sure what I think about Whitehouse - or even that what I think about Whitehouse really matters - but Come seemed initially promising.

Come was William Bennett's first attempt to scare the living shit out of the public following his exit from Essential Logic, and might therefore be regarded as a formative version of Whitehouse. I thought Come Sunday 2 on the Für Ilse Koch compilation album was terrific, a vertiginously flanged swirl of understated menace reminding me very much of Gristle's live material, so I bought the 7" - effectively the first version of Come Sunday - and discovered the compilation track to be the single fed through a powerful effects pedal. Without the benefit of the aforementioned powerful effects pedal, it was kind of clean, very minimal, and just sounded a bit odd. I still probably would have given Rampton a shot, but Come Organisation vinyl was selling out within weeks of release by that point; and I didn't have much faith in the cassette versions, having originally purchased the tape of Für Ilse Koch and listened to William Bennett pissing about in one channel for the duration, presumably running off the copies on his home stereo little realising he still had one microphone plugged in - watching a bit of telly, making a cup of tea, playing guitar and so on. It was amusing but I traded it in for the vinyl.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's Rampton once again, nicely remastered and pressed, the cover printed rather than photocopied, and me not having to pay four hundred dollars for a copy. I wasn't massively impressed with the Come Sunday 7" but was assured of it being the weakest track on what is an otherwise decent record, and so curiosity caught up with me; and the whole is actually stranger than I expected, possibly not so much for what it does, as for what I expected it to do, which it doesn't. Lest we should have forgotten, William Bennett is a pretty decent guitarist, and Rampton is mostly angular guitar riffage with Daniel Miller playing a bass synth and someone pounding out a pseudo-tribal rhythm on a couple of floor toms. Vocals are way down in the mix and tend to be vocalisations rather than singing. The whole is surprisingly minimal and lacking in effects, excepting a light slapback echo on the vocal, and somehow - and I'm assuming here that it's on purpose - this is its power. This unsettling quality is the fledgling form of all that feedback and implied violence because, no matter how many thousands of industrial music rarities you may have accumulated over the past few centuries, the initial most logical reaction to this record is holy shit, what the fuck am I listening to?

Bennett has cited Yoko Ono's Don't Worry, Kyoko as a significant influence on Rampton, which I can definitely see although this is, frankly, a much better record. The vocals, perhaps not on purpose, are vaguely ridiculous upon close inspection, mostly the sort of lines we used to come out with in the playground when impersonating the mentally ill, and yet somehow this makes the record additionally disturbing when combined with those jagged shards of guitar - regarding which, it's easy to hear why he was asked to join Siouxsie & the Banshees as replacement for John McKay.

Rampton doesn't quite stick its fingers down your throat as did Whitehouse, but there's a powerful sense of something wrong on this record, so much so as to overcome what initially seem like limitations, and even Come Sunday sounds better in the context of the whole. The only wobble, at least for me, comes with the use of tracks from side two of the BBC's Sound Effects volume thirteen - Death & Horror, an assortment of screams seguing into heavy breathing, then more screams as Rampton comes to a close. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone I knew in the DIY tape scene of the time had at least one track featuring those same screams, and naturally I'd done it myself, so hearing that the Master of the Overviolence also went there, admittedly a year or so before the rest of us arseholes, is akin to discovering that Lemmy briefly presented Blue Peter back in the sixties.

Never mind. I'm very glad to have heard this regardless, and should Susan Lawly see fit to stick out either In Country or I'm Jack, I'm certainly curious.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (1968)

I'm not entirely sure how I'd heard of Stockhausen back in May 1982, but I assume his name may have come up in something written about Throbbing Gristle. I had a couple of their albums but had only just begun to dip toes in such waters and was still to hear what Cabaret Voltaire sounded like - for example. Anyway, I found this at my local record library and vaguely recall being disappointed that it didn't sound anything like as electronic as I'd hoped although there was nevertheless something fascinating about it. Then a couple of years later, having left school and signed up for beer studies at Maidstone College of Art, I was lucky enough to see Stimmung performed at the Barbican as part of their Stockhausen week. That was January, 1985.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, I've discovered another used record store in San Antonio, one called Crazy Rhythm which I'd passed many times, but never as it was open. When a random break in my usual routine deposited me outside Crazy Rhythm during its opening hours, I went in and immediately noticed that one of the racks was marked avant-garde classical, and I noticed this because I always look for that section in whichever used record store I happen to enter but never find it. I always look for that section because it's not quite familiar territory for me and is therefore likely to yield surprises; and accordingly the first record I encountered as I began to browse was Stimmung - same Deutsche Grammophon edition, even the same cover as the one I'd borrowed from the library in Stratford-upon-Avon nearly forty years ago. It was ten dollars and is in wonderful condition, so I also picked up Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré while I was there. It was all I could do to keep from giving the cashier a big old Frenchie. Stimmung isn't quite where it all started for me, but it's pretty close.

It's a lengthy piece, over seventy minutes and sounding clear as a bell on this single album - somewhat calling into question recent boutique vinyl reissues expanding supposed classics to six fucking sides of a triple album in ten minute helpings. It's also entirely choral, having been scored for six vocalists, hence my being disappointed that it didn't sound more like Second Annual Report back in 1982; and at least one of those vocalists - specifically Wolfgang Fromme - is one of the people I saw on stage back in '85. Stimmung is mostly vocalisation with words, phrases and names - mostly of mythological figures - here and there for the sake of punctuation. It's scored but with some leeway for the performers to react and improvise within the whole. Perhaps what takes the most getting used to, is how much Stimmung relies on vocalisations amounting to the sort of weird noises we probably all made as children when left to our own devices, weewah and oyoyoy and that sort of thing, which aren't the sort of sounds one expects to hear on a record, being mostly too peculiar to work as anything cool or emotive in the conventional sense; so I suppose one might term it sound poetry, or at least acknowledge that Stimmung is a relative of the same. However, the harmony of Stimmung is strong, generating a semi-hypnotic drone within which the more unorthodox vocalisations become texture, weaving together so well as to distract from this even being a vocal performance; and over seventy minutes, the cumulative effect is emotionally very powerful.

Most surprising of all is how well Stimmung has lasted. If it has a strong sense of the sort of post-Dada theatrical experimentation one associates with the sixties, it nevertheless sounds fresh, like something new and unfamiliar experienced for the first time.

Stockhausen remains an approximately controversial figure. Referring to the events of September the eleventh, 2001 as the biggest work of art there has ever been probably wasn't the greatest career move, and Cornelius Cardew famously denounced him as a tool of capitalism - which might have carried more weight had the same not taken to wearing a flat cap and affecting a Lancashire accent so as to be down with the mans dem - but fuck it, on the strength of his work, Karlheinz really was a visionary and probably a genius, if that term actually means anything.

Cabaret Voltaire - Chance Versus Causality (1979)

The unfortunate passing of Richard H. Kirk has, somewhat predictably, resulted in my listening to quite a lot of Cabaret Voltaire of late; and this one has stood out partially because it didn't make much of an impression at first, sounding as it does somewhat basic in contrast to The Voice of America to which it was approximately contemporary, but also because it doesn't really sound like anything else from their back catalogue - although I should probably add that I haven't heard that boxed set comprising a million CDs worth of out-takes and the like.

As you possibly know, Chance Versus Causality is the soundtrack to an experimental film by Babeth Mondini, improvised live by the lads without actually seeing the film. It's very much the opposite of multilayered, often with just a single weird atonal noise occupying the stereo field for some time and very little that's conspicuously musical - snatches of heavily treated guitar being employed for effect rather than in pursuit of anything melodic which therefore may as well be a hoover or something. Edits are often abrupt and incongruous, as is the dry insertion of taped dialogue played both forwards and backwards, amounting to something which suggests the early days of experimental film without the benefit of a visual dimension - unless you're sat looking at the cover. It works through application of the unexpected, through contrast, and through what may well have been a concerted effort to avoid the conventionally musical, arguably placing it more in the realm of Pierre Schaeffer and, I suppose, maybe Stan Brakhage, than even Gristle's After Cease to Exist soundtrack which sounds positively Ennio Morricone by comparison. It's crude, effective, and still sounds surprising after all this time and the more technically sophisticated efforts we've heard since; and, despite the minimalism, it's immediately identifiable as the work of Cabaret Voltaire.

I've seen them written off as overrated in recent years, and I disagree. As a group who worked with semi-improvised grooves rather than anything more obviously structured it's inevitable that some albums were more convincing than others, and the live albums tend to fall under the category of things which probably sounded better if you were there; but even their most chugging pieces never sounded like anyone else, retaining so strong an identity as to render most tribute acts sounding so derivative as to be pointless - although both Portion Control and Bourbonese Qualk admittedly found their own respective voices by the time it came to sticking a record out; and when they got it right, which was a lot of the time, they were genuinely astonishing, and I'd argue moreso than, in particular, even Gristle, through a reluctance to rely on shock effect for its own sake. I'm still not convinced that Chance Versus Causality is the lost classic described by most of the reviews I've seen, but it's a good indication of what made them so special and why we're still listening to this stuff four decades later.

Soft Cell - Cruelty Without Beauty (2002)

I was avoiding this, having only recently discovered its existence. Soft Cell were approximately my most important band in the world for the year or so spanning Non Stop Erotic Cabaret to, I suppose, The Soul Inside. They were Throbbing Gristle as pop songs, which I found incredibly exciting. I wasn't convinced by This Last Night in Sodom when it came out and although it eventually grew on me, it seemed like the split had probably been timely. Dave Ball's subsequent endeavours were sort of interesting, if hardly essential, and outside of The Boy Who Came Back, I never really warmed to Marc Almond's solo career. It seemed to try too hard, and to fixate on all that Jacques Brel stuff at the expense of fun, plus the singing lessons had apparently smoothed out all the previously wobbly charm of his voice. I probably didn't need a Grid album with Marc warbling all over it, and no-one seemed to have much of a good word to say about Cruelty Without Beauty.

Time hath yet pissed harsh upon my regard of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, I cried unto the wind whilst wearing a toga and clutching some stone tablets, so let us remember Soft Cell as they were.

Then, because they've just reformed to record a fifth album, somebody issued this one on vinyl and a combination of curiosity and completism got the better of me.

Initial impressions were of hi-energy techno, which at least worked better than Marc warbling all over a Grid record, but the more I listened, the more I noticed the subtleties, and the more it grew on me. Cruelty Without Beauty as an eighties revival album was never going to work, but happily they've likewise avoided the trap of sounding self-consciously contemporary - at least as of two decades ago. Musically, the album mostly keeps its feet planted in parping northern soul, as with the first three, or maybe two and a half, simply sounding like a slightly snappier, more sophisticated - or even older and wiser, if you prefer - version of the Soft Cell we knew and loved. In fact it's weird how neatly it sits behind Sodom - bringing up the rear, if you will - as the next, most logical thing, reducing the twenty year hiatus to a brief cessation of activities; and yet without simply repeating the winning formula.

Soft Cell were one of the few groups of such importance that they sort of cancelled themselves out for me, and I somehow forgot they had existed or that they were ever such a thing. Those records said far more to me about my life - and still do, weirdly - than fucking Morrissey ever did, and I played them so much that it became unnecessary with the music embedded so firmly in my head. Against odds and expectation, Cruelty Without Beauty lives up to the standard, and Dancing Alone, Perversity, All Out of Love, Caligula Syndrome and others are as wonderful as anything they ever recorded back in the eighties. Definitely looking forward to the new one now.

The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie (1992)

I first achieved an admittedly dim awareness of En Halvkokt i Folie back in 1984 or thereabouts as one name amongst many to feature in the catalogue of the Swedish Selbstmord label. Years passed without my actually managing to hear anything by them, at least not directly, although Lars Larsson seemed to turn up as a performer on other things I found myself enjoying with some regularity; and by 2020 I'd become sufficiently familiar with underground music from Sweden to wonder if there might not be something in the water, because most of what I've heard had been exceptional. Significantly, the name of En Halvkokt i Folie has been a constant presence lurking in the background as either an influence or even as a source of members in the stories of most of the Swedes whose work I've enjoyed, presenting me with the impression of their having been the Swedish equivalent of Throbbing Gristle, culturally speaking. Anyway, having finally made the effort to track something down, I realise that none of the comparisons quite fit and possibly the closest we'll get is that they are, or possibly were, the Swedish En Halvkokt i Folie.

That said, we're not talking music with no resemblance to anything else you've ever heard, but there's nevertheless something absolutely weird and unique about The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie, which feels like a compilation but may not be. Musical styles are stolen and interfered with depending upon the demands of the track, although the production values are very much expensive samplers of 1992, at least as a starting point. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is how much of this disc resembles house music, and house music as in the pastel coloured stuff with a shitload of piano and vocal samples, although there's also a bit of rapping, and the general vibe is maybe if Front 242 had appeared on an episode of Father Ted and spent most of the time trying to get those samplers to impersonate a Bontempi organ; so it's kind of a great big stupid riot, but with a poker face of such intestinal fortitude that Laibach would have told it to maybe lighten up a little. Sebastian Jensen Grundberg of the AUT label, who acts as my Swedish music advisor, suggested that much of this may get lost in translation given that my understanding of Swedish doesn't extend much further than one song by the Stranglers, but it feels as though whatever the hell they were trying to do is communicated reasonably well even to me, and of course it helps to have a couple of titles in English, notably Housecleaning with Narcotics and Germans Reminded of Their Nazi Past (by Foreigners). Also of note is the creation of an entire new musical genre on this disc, specifically Mongo House, which is actually a lot like regular house music but with greater emphasis on the planet Mongo from the old Flash Gordon serials.

Having a root around on the internet, I find a number of live clips showing a band vaguely closer to my original idea of their having occupied the same cultural bandwidth as Throbbing Gristle except in Sweden, and admittedly with an element of the Bonzos thrown in there somewhere; so I guess the Father Ted version of Front 242 was probably just how they were feeling at the time of recording. This also means that there must have been a whole shitload of variant incarnations of En Halvkokt i Folie which we've been cruelly denied these last three decades. Someone really needs to get onto that because this is magnificent.

The New Harnessians - Tabla Rasa (2020)

I'm not exactly sure who's behind this one but suspect it's something to do with +DOG+, being on the same label, inhabiting adjacent sonic territory, and the vocal on Blank Slate sounds kind of familiar. Where +DOG+ have brought us harsh noise composed and contrasted with an almost musical quality, the New Harnessians take it a step further. There's noise and distortion aplenty, but it's mostly textural compared to the ear splitting cacophony heard on Die Robot and others; and while there's nothing melodic, not much you'd recognise as a conventional instrument - excepting percussive effects and an occasional guitar, the howling and grinding is not without tone, meaning all these massive slabs of concrete and metal work against one other to create a mood - a powerfully pensive sense of melancholy. Not for the first time, I'm reminded of My Bloody Valentine's first album, particularly the more ruined tracks where something of obvious beauty is still just about audible within its own distorted and destroyed remains; or, if you prefer - the big revelation for me regarding Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report when I first heard it at the age of sixteen or whatever, was how all those echoing noises, all the humming and buzzing formed itself into something quite haunting after two or three plays, despite the seemingly random nature of its composition. Tabla Rasa works in the same sort of way without sounding particularly like either Gristle or even My Bloody Valentine; so it's probably fair to say that, +DOG+ excepted, it's not quite like anything I've heard before - which is probably one hell of a claim to make in the year 2020, but there it is.

We Be Echo - Beat of the Drum (2020)

 

We Be Echo were one of a handful of groups who emerged at the beginning of the eighties in the wake of Throbbing Gristle removing themselves from the picture, specifically a handful of groups enjoying varying degrees of association with the same, even if just through members having met at some Gristle performance. Dave Henderson wrote about them in Sounds, and there's a reasonable possibility that you will have heard of at least Konstruktivists, Test Dept, Nocturnal Emissions, and Attrition. We Be Echo unfortunately never achieved quite the same level of relative infamy, releases being mostly limited to cassettes sold through the mail. By rights, some record company really should have been chucking money at Kevin Thorne, but it apparently wasn't to be.

Now - in anticipation of Darkness is Home, We Be Echo's first new album in a while - here's a reminder of what we missed, material dating from just after the Ceza Evi cassette which never really got a fair crack first time round. I've heard most, if not all, of these tracks on tapes which briefly did the rounds among friends of friends, and I've a feeling a couple of them may have been issued by the Mystery Hearsay label at some point; but Lordy, it's nice to have them cut into a big fat slab of vinyl at long last. A few of these feature a female vocalist rather than the taped voices which distinguished Ceza Evi, and so might be deemed, for want of a better description, what we all assumed Chris & Cosey would probably sound like before we actually heard Heartbeat. There's a dark edge, but nothing you could really call gothic, and the synths pump and pulse away in contrast to the moodier sort of ambient noise you may have associated with Gristle. Of all the Wild Planet bands, We Be Echo actually seemed to be the one you could just about play to friends who might otherwise shit themselves in the absence of anything recognisable as a tune. They might have seemed a fairly logical foreshadowing of Nine Inch Nails and the like, had anyone been listening; but were ultimately doomed to have become a sort of English counterpart to San Francisco's Deviation Social, among other names which should be better remembered.

Still, as Lenny Kravitz is my witness, it ain't over 'til it's over, and the new album is stunning. So here's a chance to get yourself up to speed - a pleasure which shouldn't be taken for granted given that for at least a decade it very much looked as though We Be Echo had fallen off the edge of the map.