luka

Well-known member
wally baderou is one of those ones where sometimes i'll be listening thinking yeah baby do your thing keep groovin' and other times the same song will make me think what is this shit its totally unacceptable
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Spring 1988. An all enveloping sound presences itself in the musical terrain.



I can't be the only person who had layers of pop shit hurled at them during the 80's. Hideous. Stupefying. Trite. Cunts like Paul Young and the Kemp gimps. Fans of the Breakfast Club and The Lost Boys with mullets and perms. Crimes against jackets at cliched meat markets. Always a threat of it kicking off, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. Sounds of breaking glass and glass under foot generally. Dissonance, amplified by the north of Ireland, meant 1988 was a mountain of an abyss. New lows and not from depression, you're too busy trying to get a ride. A sense that everything, everything, just out of the peripheral range of your hearing was turned up to 11. Volumes unheard red-lining, feeling the rip tides and ripples in your psyche like air and sound.

It isn't an lp i play often these days, but for a decade or so it was an obsession that spawned a tangent universe. Read a review and at some point a tape copy got passed and finally seeing the artefact itself in Eastern Bloc. Running a nail along the thin cellophane sleeve cover at home, pulling the inner sleeve out staring into the pressing's patterns, catching a sheen of surreal Braille. There's a smell to that rite too. Finally easing a needle down on to fresh static, baffled at the sleeve's symbolism.

Spiral Insana was the first Nurse With Wound work to register and get in there, that place where you and music are paradoxically one and yet you retain subjective joy, awe and wonder. That and Soliloquy For Lilith were gateway drugs. They pulled my mind into a new mode of listening. Maybe it's timing and age with certain records. Not all the components work on SFL and there are plenty of Stapleton detractors. On the one hand, I love the man, but it's like a high maintenance relationship panning for gold.

His influences are clear and i'm holding back on Andrew Liles and other works. A Missing Sense is Robert Ashley, someone else who it's easy to go off the deep end with too (Ash link time stamped, by all means rewind for visitor, visitor, visitor)



Back to SFL, if Stapleton genuinely stumbled on its cited methodology and had the ears and daring to listen for possibilities (pushing further with the technique), that's the same muse as capturing lines in poetry and prose out of the ether, a moment in photography, compositional layering in a frame and/or film sequence, or any other route, experience and vista that opens up the transcendent. It can be both immediate and delayed, but i'd go with Colin Wilson's interpretation of peak experience. Roll out the red carpet for Cooloorta. Some of the best ears in electronic music.
 

woops

is not like other people
I can't be the only person who had layers of pop shit hurled at them during the 80's. Hideous. Stupefying. Trite. Cunts like Paul Young and the Kemp gimps. Fans of the Breakfast Club and The Lost Boys with mullets and perms. Crimes against jackets at cliched meat markets. Always a threat of it kicking off, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. Sounds of breaking glass and glass under foot generally. Dissonance, amplified by the north of Ireland, meant 1988 was a mountain of an abyss. New lows and not from depression, you're too busy trying to get a ride. A sense that everything, everything, just out of the peripheral range of your hearing was turned up to 11. Volumes unheard red-lining, feeling the rip tides and ripples in your psyche like air and sound.
nice post good writing
 

version

Well-known member
version's best thread by a country mile
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catalog

Well-known member
I've dipped into NWW before and kinda enjoyed it but looking forward to going through that last batch with wash's write up as a guide, good stuff.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The counterpoint of existentialist dread to so much free information today and burrito apps, is that you can access most of the Nurse With Wound discography as and when it suits. Not much can be missed. The constructive criticism of ltd runs with novelty art pieces included, driving up price and possibly pretentious, has merit but Stapleton’s heights are numerous.

SFL was caught at that age where you’re permastoned, but drugs had nothing to do with its overall impact then (or now). Referencing their role in somehow making the music ‘better’ isn’t the point - the music‘s potential to transport you the way certain compounds can is though. Stapleton taps into both the hypnotic and the uncanny. Those are his long term strengths. Andrew Liles compliments the Nurse spectrum perfectly too. Prefer to wait and add a few more later than ramble on.

Big regret was a missed sleep concert. Wanted to stay awake and listen to the bag of sound tricks pulled out, set and setting, but planets didn’t align.

Next, a mission further north to Newcastle, home of Eric Burdon, Jimmy Nail, Alan Shearer and Zoviet France.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I'd like to visit Stapletons pad in Ireland, that looks like it could be a good place to hang out

saw a video of him once recording in a shed in his backyard, funny to thing that's where the magik happens.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Time for an lp. A whole one. A creation with a sleeve and content apt for the times and forthcoming election


Attitude, Banned in DC and Big Take Over might be the heaviest personal hitters, but what a blast overall. An lp that came with a huge reputational history. "They play dub AND the rest". The vision of Washington getting a direct lightening strike hit. Uncompromising to the max. They mixed the tempos up really well, a few juicy power chords, speedy chaos-laden madness, broken up by high-calibre musicianship that served as a souterrain underpinning the cacophony. My own copy is a shredded wreck these days, but every so often (like tonight) it gets an airing. Hallelujah.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Love bad brains, i bought the black dots live cd when i was in america and played it to death. Such a good band.
 

Leo

Well-known member
saw them at CBGB, the place exploded when they hit the first chord of the opening song ("big takeover", maybe?) and HR immediate stage dove into the crowd. I spilled my entire beer in the moshing, IIRC.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
First rule of Zoviet France club is don't ask why they used a Z. 2nd rule is same as always. Find a seam and tap into reference points. Compelling soundscapes, rich range and an addiction ever since, a giant of the north.

Mohnomishe, inspiration for a thousand impersonators plus Gris and a shit copy of Garista, were the first rides into a cinema collage of sound but the addiction came from this track



Searing. Life. An absolute flow state. If you think Nurse With Wound or the Hafler Trio are pretentious, ZF cut through so much of that. I'm not a salesman or a vested interest group's rep - peak sonic experience with your head between a pair of speakers or headphones doesn't lie. Do it. If you don't have speakers, post-lockdown ask a friend who does and self-invite yourself over for a sonic mission deep into the north east finest vintages. Together, otherwise that would just be rude, lying on their floor, eyes closed while everyone else is trying to eat dinner. Small sacrifices. Everyone wins


 
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WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Can’t believe you cunts don’t dig Zoviet France. A sublime act to return to, I know where you all live too btw.

Thinking back. Some of what follows owes its provenance to the 20th anniversary of Paris and Prague being recalled in the news and media in ‘88, just before the Berlin Wall came down. A stack of late 60’s music got an airing by J Peel et al, which fed into this. Nostalgia finding fresh ears. Others were right place right time synchronicities. I love those chance encounters of discovering new worlds of music that stay with you for life from pure luck. A benevolent universe, contradictory considering all the sin.

Records and tapes came from multiple influences in a short blast. My Dad had a good few, but I never really got artists like Dr John initially. Too young? Immaturity? You turn away never to return in the teenage universe, but you haven’t really listened. One afternoon mutching off school at home with my mate *Trigger (*long story involving inebriation and getting people’s names wrong), he navigated through these sounds and it ‘clicked‘ into focus. “Your Dad’s got a bunch of Dr John here, duck, give em some volume” (or words to that effect).

Dr John, the original swamp thing. First impressions - what’s going on with the album art, Dr John? You look like Sun Ra meets a public safety campaign gone wrong. Masses of rhythm like a junkie wants to score more. Slick female vocal accompaniments that never over power in the mix, perfect soul counterpoints to all the strangeness. Of which there is plenty. A stack to distill and with inevitable memory fails in mind, highlights include

I Walk on Guilded Splinters


Danse Fambeux


Loop Garoo


Black John the Conqueror


Babylon


Like bayou swamp vapours bubbling out of your speakers. One bonus to temporal distance is you hear things out of their original cultural context. 2 stoned lads in the late 80’s aren’t going to adjust to the more precise nuances of American regions and their distinct flavours or revolutionary politics from the late 60’s, but they can still get on the bus. With the internet, nearly every listener can curate playlists today. The satanic lilies of ungodly YT recommendations aside, chance has a higher order of magnitude when you can hunt for music via your isp/dongle/wifi bill (or piggybacking on someone else’s). People can listen at work - if you‘d polled that question in 1988 as a future possibility, your answers would’ve been near zero, add digital downloads. But chance has a multitude of platforms.

The 2nd was Trigger looking at an albino keyboardist and asking “who’s this white cunt?”. One was an audio tape and another an early VHS from the Montreux Festival with the suspicion it may have contained a porno (highest shelf, hard to reach). That’s when I discovered the magic of Hermeto Pascoal. Think want you want about the Fender Rhodes as played out, exhausted, contrived, HP is a ride and a half



Lastly. Scoring draw. If there’s a worse routine of awfulness etiquette, it can be found within. The bloke who served up locally was a registered league football ref, 80’s centre-parting layered over his ears, had a few records but a fucking yeti too. Every inch of his home’s ground floor, including the bog, was dedicated to Nottingham Forest. His poor wife. Photo in their front room of him and his wife in mock western period cowboy gear and poses from a Skegness seaside visit. Best draw anywhere. Sandy kief press to sticky textured north African hash, to leb, temple ball, charas, Thai-stick and the radiantly stamped slabs of Afghan. The type of draw dealer who got washed away by pressed flower coming from the Netherlands and then extinction by hydroponics. In among the madness of the obligatory ten pipes, this psycho turned me onto Moondog



Saying ta on his doorstep with this in your head

 
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version

Well-known member
The last Zoviet France thing I listened to was that remix of Pan Sonic on the 12" with the Muslimgauze remixes.

 
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