Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

+DOG+ - Ad Infinitum (2021)

 

Once again, I'm overwhelmed by the artistic vision of this bunch whilst being left bewildered as to how the hell I could even begin to describe it in anything other than purely subjective terms. This time it's a lavishly forged double disc set which divides into thirty tracks including Record Collector Scum, Scumbag Pile of Shit, Impact Geology, Broken Astral Projector, Jazz Snobs, and The Greatest Gift of All is Love. However, I've been listening to the thing as a single piece, by which terms it seems to work particularly well, so individual titles may be not much more than a distraction.

Ad Infinitum seems recognisably the work of +DOG+ as characterised by focus on the sounds which traditional musicians try to keep at bay - mains hum, rattle, circuit buzz, hiss, distortion, speaker deterioration driven to ear-splitting volume or, at other times, settling to a more ambient level; alternating with the occasional incongruous intrusion of a piano or even xylophone played for tonal effect rather than notes; and the whole - all two hours or however long it is - feels almost as though it's telling a story, albeit the sort of thing which doesn't translate into words or even images. It's trippy and sort of immersive, even kind of meditative yet without a single element that you could possibly describe as relaxing.

Available from Love Earth Music, link top left of webpage.

Bigg Jus - Poor People's Day (2005)

As regular viewers will probably have worked out, most of what you read here turns up because I feel like writing about it rather than through a desire to keep anyone's finger on a pulse of any description. The only reason it's taken me this long to get around to Poor People's Day is because I had assumed I'd already written something about it, but apparently not. The reason I had assumed that I'd already written something about it is because it's an honestly fucking amazing album.

You may recall Bigg Jus as having been one third of Company Flow, which will at least give you some idea of where Poor People's Day is coming from. Musically, it's not entirely unlike what El-P has been doing since Company Flow imploded - that same kind of post-industrial extrapolation of hip-hop fundamentals first drawn up on a couple of decks plugged into a light pole in the park. There's a science-fiction element, maybe a psychedelic tinge to the treatment of some of the samples and a bit more of a melody, but it's that same angry insurrectionary lurch albeit with a reduced sense of claustrophobia.

Lyrically, it further underscores that Company Flow were never just El-P with two other guys, and even titles such as Energy Harvester hint at similar dystopian obsessions; as does the subject matter. Bigg Jus is one of those guys who simply can't be pigeon holed and probably shouldn't be, given how fucking angry he is regarding the state of the world, society, and the machine which has made its business to shit directly upon us to an hourly schedule; and his politics are delivered without any of the conspiracy bullshit which blunts the testimony of many of his contemporaries. Poor People's Day is what we used to refer to as righteous truths, although it eludes even the conscious rap tag through having better things to do than waste half its playing time whining about other rappers letting the side down, which makes for a nice change.

Poor People's Day is one of those rare efforts that transcends its genre through not quite sounding like anyone else out there. It's truth is raw and of such emotional power as to reduce the best of us to tears simply through telling it like it is, for which soul music is as good a term as any. This one is right up there with Funcrusher Plus and I'll Sleep When You're Dead.

Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

 

I've tried with this one, but I've tried by means of a Discman while out riding the range on my horse. Now listening to the thing at home, I realise it benefits somewhat from being played over speakers like background music. This is annoying because I'd already built up a significant head of ambivalence and had worked out what I wanted to write; but fuck it, I'll just say what I was going to say and you can assume that it's probably better.

I first heard of this lot back when Morrissey recorded that album of Skrewdriver covers or whatever it was that he did, and Cornershop wrote him a letter to explain how disappointed they were - much to the delight of the music press. It was something along those lines anyway. If the sentiment was worthy, I remained unimpressed on the grounds that Morrissey had spent his entire career eulogising the good old sixties, Granny Grove on black and white telly, penny chews, and how everything used to be much better than it was in the nineties. He'd never struck me as an ambassador for multicultural Britain, and it seemed bizarre that anyone should be surprised after Bengali in Platforms.

Anyway, I saw Cornershop live at least once, possibly twice, but don't remember much about the experience. I had, and still have, a few of their first records. I dig Hold On It Hurts out roughly every five or six years to give it another chance, but beyond that Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal is fairly amusing, it still sounds like a fucking racket, and not even an interesting racket; then I encountered this for a single dollar in the usual place.

It's not terrible, and you could get a fairly respectable 10" out of this bunch by excising all the pissing about, the tracks which don't really count as songs. Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha are both reasonably wonderful as vaguely summery John Denver impersonations with maybe a bit of Velvet Underground chucked in, and there are perhaps four or five others; beyond which we have a lot of that stuff which always washed ashore every time one of the music papers published yet another krautrock retrospective - three minutes of drumming, someone pissing about with a digital delay, strum strum strum about halfway through then someone pushing an easy listening record around by hand and pretending that it's scratching. It's all very well, and God knows that could serve to describe half of the bands with which I've ever been involved; but it was long in the tooth even before I got hold of it, never mind this bunch. The best you can say of these examples is that they probably worked well as linking music for that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sitcom, the one without any actual jokes. To me, tracks of this general type make it sound like you don't actually know what you're doing but - hey - look, we're nearly up to an hour now, the album is finished! Just because you were there doesn't mean it's interesting, and no, calling it improvisation really doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

That being said, When I Was Born for the 7th Time sounds much better on speakers, blending into the background as something not unlike elevator music; which was maybe the whole point.

If you read through the above a couple of times, I'm sure you'll eventually find something useful.

Mystikal - Unpredictable (1997)

While I always enjoyed Mystikal turning up on other people's tracks, I never took the plunge with a whole album. The sheer intensity of his delivery seemed like something which would make for tough listening over an hour or more; but I found this in the racks like someone half remembered from school and it seemed like it would be stupid to just pass it by - rude even - and so once again here I am learning the error of my ways, nearly a quarter of a century behind the curve as per fucking usual.

Taxonomically speaking, Mystikal is to be found occupying roughly the same branch of the rap family tree as Fiend, Full Blooded, Ludachris, and possibly Busta Rhymes - gruffly voiced dudes who sound like they're about to explode most of the time. If the mighty Fiend can be considered the alpha male bullfrog of rap, then Mystikal is probably the Tasmanian devil - both the critter and the guy from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. My guess would be that the influence of James Brown looms large, although possibly not so large as the hellfire Baptists Mystikal almost certainly encountered growing up in New Orleans. His delivery is pretty shocking first time you hear it, the sort of thing that has you holding the speaker upside down to see whether it's broken. He yells, he whoops, he growls, he howls like his eyes are about to pop right out of his head with the sheer force of testimony, and he changes gear from rumbling tornado warning to five-hundred miles an hour with unpredictable ferocity - hence the title, I guess. All that booty-bounce My Little Pony rap which the yoots dem are so keen on these days began with either Mystikal or members of his platoon; so it's perhaps his fault, although to be fair, he did it a million times better and it's not like he's been sending out invitations to rip him off. The difference, I suppose, is that Mystikal's delivery remains clear no matter how close he gets to the point of lyrical meltdown, and he delivers shit that's worth hearing, which makes for incredible listening.

So, an entire album of this bloke pebbledashing one's lugholes actually works and isn't at all like listening to extreme metal, as I assumed it would be - although it could be argued that the growled chorus of Oh Shit! Motherfucker! Goddamit! on U Can't Handle This works a lot like some metal riff. It probably helps that Beats by the Pound, the No Limit label's in house production team really gave this album its own sound, one which could mostly be transposed to a live band as distinct from some of the weirder techno stutter with which they graced sets by C-Murder and the rest. So it's almost jazzy, or at least has jazzy overtones, bolted to hard as fuck beats blended in with chiming guitar funk, piano and so on; all of which keeps Unpredictable nicely grounded as our boy raps his face off - literally by the sound of it. It also helps that Unpredictable is good to the last drop with not a single skip button special in evidence. He keeps it moving and he keeps it startling, and I need to track down those other albums while I can still afford the fuckers. Unpredictable was one of No Limit's best beyond any shadow of doubt.

Meteor F. Atomic - This is How I Dance (2021)

I gather this is Danny Ayers, brother of Nigel and formerly of both the Pump and the first line-up of Nocturnal Emissions, which should be enough to at least dispel expectations of This is How I Dance sounding like the Detroit Spinners. I'm not sure whether this ever had any sort of official release back in 1981 when it was recorded, but suspect it was probably a few copies handed out to friends, at best. Anyway, here it is again, possibly for the first time, thanks to the revived Sterile Records, and I'm surprised it's taken this long in some respects. I'm not saying This is How I Dance is life-changing, but it's surprisingly listenable for something with such basic ingredients.

What little background detail we have reports that This is How I Dance was recorded directly onto cassette, which is entirely believable; and it might be viewed as a single lengthy work in four movements, if you really want to. Most of it seems to be mains hum, rummaging around inside a transistor radio with a screwdriver, things recorded off the telly on shitty condenser mics, hiss, and the sort of feedback we used to summon by holding our massive Tony Blackburn style headphones up to the microphone. There's a degree of repetition but I'm not even sure our man was using anything so fancy as a tape loop, and it may just be actions repeated over and over live into the cassette deck. The second movement, if that's what it is, utilises a Boss DR55 drum machine, albeit more as a noise source than for the sake of rhythm, phase pedals, and what sounds like a Casio VL-Tone; so suffice to say, the whole enterprise resembles things I've heard before, albeit a long time ago, and yet remains fresh thanks to the Meteor's sense of invention and the sheer impossibility of working out what the hell's coming next, plus the textures, rough as fuck though they often are, are gorgeous. Imagine Tissue of Lies without the sensory overload, and oddly hypnotic. This is How I Dance proves that the size of either the budget or the studio never mattered.

godspunk volume twenty-two (2021)

I should possibly open by declaring certain details which may suggest a lack of objectivity on my part. I've known Stan Batcow, the man behind both this compilation and the Pumf label which spawned it for a plurality of decades. He's appeared on things I've recorded, and I've appeared on stage with him back when he was blowing a jug for the Ceramic Hobs. I contributed to the first three volumes of godspunk, and have been a member of one of the bands who contribute to this collection. Anyway, Stan has been sending me the latest volume of this thing since way back whenever, usually with some disclaimer along the lines of I know you probably think this is a pile of shite, but it's free, so bollocks - you'll have it and like it, or words to that effect; and I always feel as though I should make the effort to review the thing, or at least spread the word in some way, but I never do.

It isn't that I think the godspunk compilations are a pile of shite, but I've often found them a bit of a mixed bag. There's been some great stuff on godspunk over the years - not least being the Las Vegas Mermaids and one of the Shend's rare solo outings - but there's usually a couple of tracks I'm not so keen on, and I always feel awkward about it. Actually there have been at least a couple I've actively hated.

The deal with godspunk is that the artist contributes to the cost of producing a fancy compact disc, essentially paying for time on the disc and a page in the accompanying booklet. So if you have sixty quid, or however much it costs, you can probably get yourself on one of these. Although this has meant the inclusion of an occasional splash of uninspiring or otherwise workmanlike pub rock over the years, that sort of thing has generally been in the minority, and the eclecticism of these compilations tend to reflect the mix of weirdos with whom Stan Batcow breaks virtual bread rather than who just happened to have sixty quid to spare. The godspunk discs therefore tend to present a bewildering selection of pop, punk, DIY, techno, house, country, noise, avant-garde, prog, metal, rockabilly, free jazz, and trad garage just for starters; which can be a bit overwhelming if you're not prepared for it, which is usually why I'm left speechless.

I tend to listen to this sort of thing on a Discman while I'm out on my bike, and I took a slightly different approach with this one because it's the first volume issued on two discs. Fearing sensory overload, I took the case with me so as to refer to the track list as I listened, and somehow it made a big difference, providing some kind of context to the anticipated barrage of random swerves. It still didn't mean I loved everything here, but it rendered the experience a little less like arbitrary twists of a radio dial and therefore a lot more interesting.

My favourite tracks came from the ever formidable Harsh Noise Movement - who directly big me up in the booklet for some reason; and Jeanie & the Kaprikorns who seem to be a country and western outfit, which may mean I've been in Texas too long, or not long enough depending on how you look at it. Also great are the Large Veiny Members, Taurus Board, and Nil by Nose - all godspunk regulars who can usually be relied upon to come up with something worth hearing; and Stan's own Howl in the Typewriter should probably have been mentioned in that sentence. There's also UNIT, of which I was a member back in the eighteenth century and concerning which my commentary might therefore constitute a conflict of interests, although I will say that it's probably the best stuff I've heard from UNIT in a long time, at least in so much as that a couple of their tracks feature none of the usual easy listening glockenspiel overload and are therefore almost listenable, if a little more clean cut than I like; having said which, I could have lived without the Apostles classic Anarchy, Peace & Freedom rewritten as a self-improvement anthem. Infected Youth banging on about H.P. Lovecraft didn't really do it for me either, but never mind - a couple of duds amongst what amounts to nearly fifty tracks isn't a bad average.

I suspect the mistake I've been making with these godspunk collections, aside from taking them along as I go out and about but leaving the track list at home, is listening to them as I might listen to, off the top of my head, Rising from the Red Sand or some compilation demonstrating a fairly specific focus; because godspunk is essentially a spigot. You turn the tap and weird shit gushes out in seemingly random sequence. The key to appreciation is therefore in riding the gusher, going with the flow, and expecting to be surprised - which you absolutely will be. With editorial policy being whoever happens to have sixty quid and something they want to share, one might be forgiven for certain assumptions regarding godspunk; but it's worth remembering that it's 2021 and the majority of talent free shitehawks will most likely be clogging up Bandcamp or similar download sites because they're free and easy, or at least easier than physical media has become. So rather than godspunk assembling an array of ageing pub rockers who just happen to have cheque books at the ready, it's probably closer in spirit to the tapes once issued by Music for Midgets and the like, by virtue of contributors having eschewed the path of least resistance, musically speaking; so check the fucker out, is what I'm saying here.

Pumf Records link up there on the left hand side of your screen.