A Year of Music

Some things happened, and then they stopped happening, and here I am, back again, with a huge pile of new music to hear and perhaps the cleverest recording I’ve heard in a long time currently on the stereo. I’ll get to talking about the huge pile in a little bit, but I wanted to urge anyone who likes their out-rockin’ both clever and loud to go check out this awesome Nurse With Wound / Spasm split 12” at The Thing on the Doorstep (yet another way-too-awesome MP3 blog I’ve discovered).

Its ability to be musical and strange in equal measure frankly confuses me. One side features Steven Stapleton’s / Nurse With Wound’s usual high surrealism (although more linear and rhythmically coherent than usual), and the other is a slab of slowly building, hard-rockin’ tribal psychedelia that reminds me of the Krautrocked heaviness Julian Cope tries so hard to harness, or maybe Electric Wizard in a particularly blown state of mind. It gets genuinely heavy, and Stapleton’s predictably unpredictable interventions just ratchet up the intensity by throwing things in new directions every few phrases. It remains curiously unadorned and unsentimental for all that, and so it stands pleasantly outside of time, sounding like it could have come out at any time in the last 40 years. Nurse With Wound makes this kind of mercurial mutability seem so easy, but I know it’s anything but.

I’m going to have a terrible time trying to find a copy of this for myself (United Dairies vinyl is deeply collectible and hence tough to find), but I’d really like one.

Writing this blog is leading me into interesting terrain, as this recent batch of additions to my library shows:

• The second half of Mordant Music's The Tower has been banging its way into my head far enough to make me take a leap of faith and buy the rest of their diverse and aggressively eccentric catalog.
• I realized that I was entitled to download a bunch of Severed Heads' Op series outtakes due to having bought Op 2 a while ago, so I grabbed those.
• Talking about Surgeon's awesome DJ sets reminded me to check his site to see if he had a more recent set than the ones I have, and indeed he did.
• Finally, I've been accumulating a pile of crud from Mutant Sounds, so I added all that to my iPod so I could get to know it better. There is some amazing music that's been dug out of obscurity by that blog:
  • Tappi Tíkarrass, Björk's first foray into the post-punk sound that she refined in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, before she decided to become the most avant garde pop star ever;
  • a bunch of long out of print Hirsche Nacht aufs Sofas (HNAS) records from a parallel universe where Nurse With Wound were actually German, instead of merely being obsessive fans of Krautrock;
  • a whole pile of European art-damaged gothic post punk (Claustrofobia, Dark White, Epitaphe, Tango Luger);
  • some early records by the fucking tremendous Wall of Voodoo, whose Call of the West combines the miserably American, empathy-drenched humanity of Raymond Carver or Robert Stone with Ennio Morricone's expansive sound and Kraftwerk's electronic pulse – anyone who thinks the Wall of Voodoo story starts and ends with "Mexican Radio" is very much missing out;
  • a couple completely sui generis Japanese electronic / prog / jazz / avant garde records from the 70s, one of which was a collaboration between most of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the one Japanese Pop artist whose work I know well (Tadonori Yokoo – there was a semi-exhaustive survey of his work up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when I was there);
  • and a pile of random singles from the Mutant Sounds archives, including an awesomely out of character John Duncan track and a deeply weird couple of tracks by Duppi, a Japanese band I'd never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Mutant Sounds is so awesome that there's no way it's going to last.

Here's the full list. I've appended links to sources for most everything. Downloading the albums posted by Mutant Sounds requires you to deal with quasi-filesharing services like Rapidshare, Zshare, Bodongo and Megaupload; these services' wack-assed stabs at business models make getting at the archives a pain, but I assure you that if you like boundary-pushing music, it's worth jumping through the requisite hoops. A lot of this stuff is begging to be put back into print, if only by somebody like Hyped2Death.

• Claustrofobia: Arrebato (Fobia) [ms]
• Dark White: The Grey Area (private) [ms]
• Epitaphe: Syndrome (private) [ms]
• HNAS: Melchior (United Dairies / DOM) [ms]
• HNAS: Music für Schuhgeschafte (Dragnet) [ms]
• HNAS: Willkür Nach Noten (Dragnet) [ms]
• Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo: Cochin Moon (King) [se]
• Mordant Music: Baud With You / Shot Away (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Carrion Squared (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Fallen Faces / Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Filthy Danceheng (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Petri-Dish (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: The Tower: Parts I-XVII (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Travelogues: A Beautiful Vesta (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Severed Heads: Op 1 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.3 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.9 (sevcom)
• Surgeon: Neck Face (www.dj-surgeon.com)
• Tango Luger: s/t (Invisible) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Bítið Fast í Vítið (Spor) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Miranda (Gramm) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Ring of Fire / The Morricone Themes (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Tsutsui Yasutaka & Yamashita Yosuke: IE (Fiasco) [ms]
• whacked-out singles from the Mutant Sounds archives:
  • Drinking Electricity: Shaking All Over / China (pop:aural)
  • Duppi: Velvet Night / はつねつのみやこ (Night Gallery)
  • Électric Max Band: Mick and Max / Knives, Feathers and Fire (Reprise)
  • Electro Static Cat: Lethologica (Freedom in a Vacuum)
  • Eskaton: Musique Post-Atomique (Eskaton)
  • John Duncan / Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann: The Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem / Old Hive (Die Stadt)
  • Kevin Dunn: Nadine / Oktyabriana (dB Records)
  • v/a: Earcom 3 (Fast Product)