“’These Things’ was the last song written for Delights Of My Life. Often the last song is written with the aid of what has come before it, the other songs on the record. We have one song to write, or so we think, now then, what shall it be and why? I think that I asked this question. We will never know. And I also think that I thought that it might be novel to have a song with a very clear form (four times through a melodic verse, with a tag at the end that wraps it nicely). That, and that the record may very well appreciate a song with little to no improvisation. A straight curveball!
Eric Cazdyn, who made the ‘These Things’ video (and around 18 other videos for my music) may have heard the song similarly. He has certainly given me that impression. What I see in the video is a very simple movement or gesture, but with an immense amount of minimal detail. Well, that is how I often describe the dance of Angela Schubot, although she is just on the verge of dancing here in this video. She dances like vegetation. Or, she shows me again and again that vegetation is a dancing world.”
Ordinarily, interviews on Aural Aggravation are run with titles which serve to encapsulate the contents in half a dozen words. This is an interview where that simply isn’t possible.
Since Nocturnal Emissions came into being in the late 70s, emerging from the experimental / industrial scene which evolved after Throbbing Gristle broke ground first tested by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, they’ve existed in various forms, often as much known by reputation as by their actual work, which is nigh on impossible to pin down or pigeonhole. For most of their career, Nocturnal Emissions has been the solo vehicle of founder Nigel Ayers, who has come be a pivotal figure in the field of underground and experimental music – and beyond, working in a host of media including film and text, with a number of books since the turn of the millennium: The Bodmin Moor Zodiac (2007) is a characteristically quirky example of his wide-ranging interests which include psychogeography and occultism. Then again, any summary would be to omit so much as to misrepresent his divergent eclecticism. And then there are the countless collaborations… John Wisniewski was fortunate to pitch some questions to Nigel about his lengthy career, his influences, and current and future projects…
When did you start experimenting with sounds, Nigel?
I must have been aged 13 or so. Actually, I was experimenting with sounds in the form of soundtracks because had happened is my dad had this very old-fashioned format camera, it was called a Standard 8 camera, which was a kind of silent home movie film that preceded Super 8.
So, it was this kind of film that you could run twice through the camera, and it had large sprocket holes like 16mm, that was the difference between Standard 8 and Super 8 film. So, he’d bought this camera and he’d been using it to film his work in schools and as a youth club leader, but this camera was lying around. And when I was 13 or so, I was watching these experimental films on TV, and I’d been watching them in black and white, but there was things like the Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles and then there’d be segments like “I am the Walrus”. These very early rock videos, were extremely surreal. And then there was a TV programme for kids called Vision On, there was sort of experimental animation on there. And then also there was Monty Python, where there was Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animation going on. There wasn’t the easy access to visual culture you get these days, but I had been exposed to and absorbed this kind of aesthetic and I was just looking at these ways of manipulating film. And I realised this camera, you could do stop-frame animation, you could also run multi-layers of film together.
Now, these techniques of layering and stop-framing and getting into individual segments of imagery are really what I used later when working with sound, because I was aware of how the context and meanings of images and sounds change through overlay, almost randomised factors, which could lead to an exploration of something which was intrinsic to the medium. Or intrinsic to memory, a memory of imagery and how imagery is imagined and restructured within our minds and within our culture. So these ideas, I was exploring film at a very early age, I mean, I’m talking like age 13 to 16. Meanwhile I was having a very conventional school education, really. This was not the sort of thing I could do at school.
I also acquired this reel-to-reel tape recorder, which was like another sort of cast-off that had been bought for some purpose, and it was an old-fashioned technology by then. Of course, it was this very solid mechanical thing with a manual sort of gear, that you could change to make the tape go backwards or forwards or rewind.
I think it had different speeds on it, I used this later on the raw material that went into the first Nocturnal Emissions records.
So yeah, I was exploring these sort of overlays of memory, I suppose. And I wasn’t really able to articulate that in words. Now as an adult, as an elderly adult, I can articulate this in a way I couldn’t do as a teenager.
But then I got onto a foundation course in art school after being thrown out of school, really. Excluded from school, really, it wasn’t an environment I fit in with very well.
So I went to do a foundation course in art and design, and the thing that I really warmed to was, they had this studio set up to do “light and sound”.
And in there they’d got, oh, I don’t know if modern people will understand this technology, but they had slide projectors, which could be synchronised to a reel-to-reel tape. And this reel-to-reel tape was a four-track TEAC tape recorder, routed to four speakers in this darkened room for a quadraphonic surround sound experience.
And they had a Revox in there, which is a two-track tape recorder. That’s something which you can, when you know the technique, do tape echo on. Wonderful machines.
And also I think I had the loan of a cassette recorder, I was recording incidental sound from the TV. I was recording children playing. I was recording dogs barking, and constructing this into sound collage.
We were making handmade slides, it was a sort of technique that was probably used by the Victorians in magic lantern shows. These are very high contrast slides, that I made anyway, and hand-coloured them with overhead projector markers and with coloured acetate. And I sort of made this scenario of, a sort of an alien civilisation, but it was really close-ups of the insides of a vintage and broken radio, with these parts of toys inside it. It was Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. These heads from Revel plastic kits that my brother had made years ago and then lost interest in, these parts of plastic toys. And I was constructing this sort of miniature city and then sort of overlaid in that city.
I had made these sort of, these non-functioning machines, but like science fiction devices,
A projection from the wartime era, rather than steampunk. Yes, that’s what it was. From the era of electronics, not the era of steam.
And I made this elaborate sort of titillation machine, which a friend of mine, she posed on it and as if she was pleasuring herself on this very strange sort of dynamo construction with loops of wires and coils and high voltage fuse boxes and transformers. And this was superimposed against these miniature sets.
I suppose it was like probably a DIY version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but with this sort of different surreal sexual-mechanical angle that I gave it. So that was actually a quadraphonic sound installation that I did when I was 16, 17. So I sort of continued experimentally making films.
And so the sound that I worked on were to do with film installations and to do with, I suppose, visual art more than anything else. But all the time, I was DJing as well though, as at school, you know, I ran the school record club and I was at art school, I was DJing at events for the student union. I had very strong likes and dislikes in the way of music.
And also I knew some songs, which are dance songs, which would work. And I think very early on, I developed a very deep affection for reggae music. And that was going back to late sixties, early seventies anyway.
So yeah, so I was experimenting with sound ages 17 in art school anyway. So, but I didn’t have any equipment of my own, so to speak.
And so when I graduated and was out of that context, I started acquiring instruments. d I think the first thing I got was a cast off electric guitar and, a Watkins copycat echo, which I messed around with.
I found I used to cover up the erase head so you could get these endless loops building up on it and just gradually kept acquiring sort of sound manipulating equipment. And I bought a synthesizer in 1978. I bought the Korg MS-10 in Sheffield, you know, from the same shop that the Human League probably shopped in and ABC and Cabaret Voltaire shopped in.
And quite soon after buying this synthesizer, I was talking to Mal out of Cabaret Voltaire. I think it was at a Pop Group gig in Sheffield. And he invited me to use his studio, which was very good because I didn’t have access to that sort of thing, but I had some ideas that I was working on and not quite sure where to take them.
But then I got invited to London to stay with Caroline K. She was finishing a degree course and I’d met up with her and she’d seen that I got this synthesiser. And she wanted to install this sine wave, this sort of constant hum to be playing in this exhibition she’d done with some very austere black and white photographs of this house she was living in.
And the photographs all had different captions on which made you think different things about this location, was making it into the site of murders and various other fictional things for this exhibition. And with the sound, I think she was trying to give it a disturbing edge to it.
The place that she had photographed was actually quite a disturbing place and quite disturbing events happened there, but this was unrelated. This was probably what was at the back of her mind when she was thinking about this installation.
What did you hope to accomplish through your work with Nocturnal Emissions?
Well, what I wanted to accomplish was to get my inner visions out into the world somehow.
And at the time, it seemed the easiest way to do this was through the format of an experimental music group. Because I couldn’t see the experimental films I was doing being screened at any cinema, because they were too abstract, to fit in that context. And what was trying to do was like a live improvisation between multiple layers of projection, and multiple layers of sound.
That’s what Caroline and myself were aiming for, really. Caroline was always focused on soundtracks, and that’s reflected in her solo album, Now Wait for Last Year”, the track titles are named after Tarkovsky films, and it’s got a very strong John Carpenter influence going on there, as well as an Ennio Morricone influence, and as well as the radiophonic workshop influences that were going on.
What I want to accomplish through my work, though, was to get these inner visions, these inner sounds and visions out in the world, and to share them with the world, really. I just want to sort of bring things out, because I thought what was happening in the world of music in the early 80s didn’t exactly reflect my preoccupations.
I did want to get a political idea over, and a sort of an altered reality over, as well, because I think by deconstructing and restructuring reality, we get a better perspective of what’s going on, and we can see that other worlds are possible, and it’s possible to make the world into a kinder place, and a more compassionate place, and a friendlier place, and a more beautiful place than it is at the moment> That’s really what I wanted to get over in the music. I know the very early music was quite harsh. It continues to be quite harsh and abrasive occasionally, but I think that’s a way forming focus and dramatic tension within the work.
Tell us about forming the label “Sterile Records”. Who are some of the artists that you collaborated with?
I get the impression that when [people] form record labels, they have some sort of financial backing and they might also have some kind of business sense. That certainly wasn’t the case with me.
When we put our first Nocturnal Emissions records out, I was living rent-free because we were squatting. I had to do a lot of house maintenance to keep the place a bit habitable, but the housing and space costs were near zero, and I was in the middle of London, and so it was quite good for venues and things like that. I didn’t have transport.
I was working as a cleaner. Caroline was working as a library assistant, and we scraped together… What was it? Maybe it cost £1,000 to put out 500 records back then.
Whatever it was, we scraped it together, and I think we went into an overdraft to put together this first record. We didn’t have the equipment to do it on, really… We went to evening classes and used their equipment and borrowed instruments from friends and neighbours.
Vicki Aspinall out of the Raincoats was a neighbour, and I borrowed her electric violin. I don’t play it. I created sounds with it, on Tissue of Lies.
We hired a four-track and a two-track reel-to-reel to mix down onto for one weekend, we initially intended to make a single, but it worked out we could do an LP and give better value, and probably get more money back from doing an LP than we would do from doing a single. So that’s why our first record was an LP, Tissue of Lies.
Within months from doing Tissue of Lies, we’d actually made some money on it, and so we thought we’d do another record. The plan was just to carry on with what we were doing… after we’d done Tissue of Lies, our technical skills had improved, and we were able to do more, and we were getting. it to sound more like we wanted things to sound Our craft skills improved, so we wanted to do another record.
And then Maurizio Bianchi (M.B.) got in touch with me from Italy, and he wanted to pay me to put out a record on my label, but I didn’t have a label. I had just done one record, and I’d done a compilation cassette, which Maurizio had been on, about a year previously. I’d been in contact with Maurizio when we put out cassettes before Nocturnal Emissions, before we did any vinyl.
Maurizio wanted to put out 100 records, I was going to the pressing plant anyway, and it looked like I got enough money to add to make an edition of 250.
We could call this the start of a record label, I suppose, that with Fruiting Body, the second Nocturnal Emissions record. That’s how Sterile Records actually happened, really, what sort of started me made me open to the idea of it being a label.
But I mean, as a label, you know, people assume you’ve got money behind your venture, and you’ve got an office. But we didn’t even have any transport. A few hundred records would arrive at our house from a van.
But then getting them to the numerous record shops that we sold through in London, … I had this sort of shopping cart like old ladies have, you know, with wheels on it. And I’d go on the tube or on a bus and deliver boxes of records that way…. it was the most basic, crudest, cheapest DIY-est way you could operate a record label.
It was operating an absolute shoestring budget. but, you know, we sold a few thousand records this way, and it created quite a lot of interest and influence, I suppose, within that sort of very small, tight, obsessive community, which was the early industrial music world.
So we were gigging around London, and I think our first gig we actually played with anybody who was doing anything in a similar vein was with SPK. SPK asked us to play with them, and Brian Williams came along to it. He was a big fan of SPK’s and later joined SPK.
He was making his own experimental noises up in Wales, quite different to what he’s doing nowadays (nowadays he’s a Hollywood sound designer). His very early music sounded like train sound effects records, really, with this sort of ring-modulated vocal shouting over the top of them. But he sent me this demo cassette, so I said, ‘oh, let’s put this out’.
Let’s do a Lustmord cassette. And that did okay, I suppose. So then we did a Lustmord vinyl album, and I actually hired a studio for him to come down and record that.
And he invited… his friend from Wales who was called Nigel Dunster, and he also invited this other guy who was like a mutual friend correspondent, who was Geoff Rushton, who later changed his name to John Balance of Coil. He was involved in this first Lustmord album that we made, around the time he was involved in the preparations for Psychic TV.
And, yeah, I suppose…
Yeah, who’d we collaborate with? Well, quite a lot of people… you have to go and look at Discogs, and you’ll see who we put out on Sterile Records.
Yeah, we’re trying to develop something. I was going to do one of the first Portion Control records I was going to put out, but then they got a better deal with somebody else, and they got to do a tour with Depeche Mode.
So I didn’t do that one. And a band of Holy Joy was going to do a record with. I had that on a compilation.
Who else? Lustmord. Control Bleeding. And Nurse With Wound, but I rejected what they gave me. We were friendly with Bourbonese Qualk and collaborated with them on a few things. And helped one another out…… these were our friends who we hung out with, these old-school industrial people.
Who are the composers and recording artists who have influenced your work?
The big one would be, way, way back, the big one would be Captain Beefheart, and especially Trout Mask Replica.
That sort of field recording like a reconstruction of music. By this possibly crazy outsider artist, an incredible piece of post-blues music/ come field recording and it just conjured up a different, expressionistic, freeform natural world.
That was a big influence. Another big influence was the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I’m talking Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram.
There were quite a lot of women involved in this early electronic scene, and it seems they weren’t really credited at the time. They were quite important. The way they talked about putting sound together.
From loops and from music concrete. That’s the way it went in radio plays. Which they were doing soundtracks for.
And for TV work with things like Doctor Who. Some very strange children’s TV that was being made in the early 70s.
Ennio Morricone.
Just the beauty of those westerns. Those really operatic works. The good, the bad and the ugly. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
I’ve got to say that almost all the music I’ve been exposed to has influenced the work. But I have to say very early on I was very black and white in my likes and dislikes. It was intense love or hatred, not by genre, but by individual pieces, I think that might have got in the way of some enjoyment sometimes.
Tell me about your work with digital sound assemblage.
I was talking about the way I constructed the films. In terms of overlay which changes the context of what lies beneath. The altering of speed and pitch and timbre. And time and space manipulation. Looping. And getting into the basic building blocks of sound. And. messing with it, Improvising with it. And editing it in such a way that it becomes something new that feels beneficial and healing.
And interesting and stimulating. That’s what I’ve done over the years. And nowadays I’m working digitally – largely. I’m out doing field recordings all the time. I use real instruments some of the time… I think with Digital sound you can do so much. And so.
I just like the way it’s gone actually. Because the way it’s been.
The access to. I’m not precious about technology, I’ve grown up. In an analogue world.
Of analogue tape. And analogue film. And analogue loops.
And I continue. To use some of that technology. Certainly the things you can do with analogue film which are impossible to do digitally.
Do you listen to genres such as rock or jazz music?
I don’t really listen to radio or streaming services, I tend to go to live music events as much as I can, and play CDs I’ve bought, rather than other people’s selections.
So these are some titles in a rack on my wall…
Bo Diddley. Donovan. Captain Beefheart.
Gavin Bryars. James Brown. David Bowie.
The Blind Boys of Alabama. Black Grape. Count Basie.
Asian Dub Foundation.
Johnny Cash.
The Bollywood Brass Band.
Sinead O’Connor.
Brian Eno Michael Nyman. Moondog. Thelonious Monk.
Andrew Lyles. Lead Belly. La Düsseldorf. The Unthanks
The Kinks. Daniel Johnston. The Human League.
Gil Scott Heron. Richie Havens. The Beatles.
The Fall. The Velvet Underground. Penguin Café Orchestra.
Nico. Lou Reed. Lou Reed’s solo work.
Lou Reed’s ambient work. Miles Davis. Bob Dylan.
Everything by Dylan. Wreckless Eric.
High Voltage. Flashpoint. 20th Century Experimental Electronic Sound.
The Bundu Boys. Gregorian Chants.
George Formby. The British Sixties. These kind of things.
Any future plans and projects, Nigel?
I’m preparing to do more live performances because involving more of a physical presence and more spoken word. I don’t want it to be an anonymous figure hiding behind a table while a film goes on in the background. It’s to do with spoken word and it’s to do with interaction and it’s quite pleasurable, dance orientated and dare we say quite funny what I do, I suppose.
And also, I’m trying to bring a bit of joy into this world. A joyful foundational industrial practice. And I’m also producing paintings.
I’m painting a lot on canvas and I’m writing and I’m keeping very creatively busy in these elder years. I hope to be performing all over the place, really. I’m putting out the vibe that I’m available for gigs anyway.
I’m available for live performances and I’m saying yes to a lot of things I probably wouldn’t do before. I’ve been performing in the UK which is very different to me because I very rarely played in the UK. So, yeah, I’m just making myself available and I’m saying yes to things, I’m writing, I’m doing spoken word performances and things like that if anybody’s interested in booking me for spoken word performances.
Ah, that difficult second album. Kee Avil set the bar high for herself with her debut, Crease, two years ago.Crease was a highly experimental, boundary-pushing collection of compositions, which was as challenging as it was entertaining. But the trouble with setting out one’s stall in such a fashion is that you can’t retread the same ground, you can’t do the same thing twice, you can’t repeat the same experiments and expect different results. Not to suggest that Crease was in any way a ‘novelty’ record, but experimentation and avant-gardism has to be ever new, fresh, and novel. Pushing the boundaries requires an artist to continue to push them further, to expand the parameters, or otherwise risk being confined withing the limits set initially, at which point, it becomes prescriptive, a template. Small wonder, then, that Avil found the process for Spine to be quite different from Crease. But, unlike many artists who struggle to regain the creative spark in the wake of their debut, whereby some languish for years in a creative trough only to return with some second-rate slop (there are many articles devoted to examples of the ‘sophomore slump’, and I feel neither need nor inclination to recap on them here), Kee Avil seemingly found herself fizzing with ideas, as her bio details:
‘Spine was written in Kee Avil’s home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months—a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: “This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch.” In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts.’
Touring does seem to have a habit of affecting the creative flow. It seems almost as if the industry model with its cycle of release – tour – write – repeat – serves to doom artists to dealing with unnecessary pressure to deliver, and it’s entirely self-defeating since inspiration simply cannot be forced – it’s something that happens. And it happened for Kee Avil, for sure.
Spine is brimming with discord and dissonance, angularity and oddness. ‘Felt’ fucks things up from the very off with warped, wrangling, jangling guitar that twists and mangles across flickering, stammering beats and extraneous noise that gets in your ears like a hatched moth fluttering against your eardrum. It’s a cringy, unsettling sensation, and it’s not really all that pleasant, and Avil breathes and croaks her way over it.
‘the iris is dry’ is magnificently weird, a close, breathy semi-spoken word muttering about lamps and eyes and angels, and it’s tense and claustrophobic and claws its way into your cranium. ‘It makes no sense,’ she croaks by way of a closing refrain, and it’s hard not to agree.
‘remember me’ continues the form of minimally-arranged alternative / eerie indie with a dark folk vibe crossed with a vocal style that sits in the realm of spoken word with a performance art delivery: Avil doesn’t sing, but whispers and breaths the words in a fashion that creates a palpable tension.
The only real difficulty in Kee Avil’s second album is for the listener: with its shuddering percussion and harsh frequencies, as well as the up-front vocals, this is a challenging work. And this is a good thing: art should be challenging, and the quality is outstanding.
Another day, another artist I’m discovering and wondering if I’m increasingly poor at keeping up or of there really is just more music in the world than I could ever keep abreast of even if I devoted every waking minute to trawling every corner of the Internet for news and playlists. Maybe it’s a bit of both. There is, perhaps, something of an expectation that someone who writes about music should have a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the subject. The trouble is, the more music you’re exposed to, the more avenues it opens up, and suddenly there’s this and this and this… and how is there time for all of it?
If you’re obsessive about a given genre, you may be an expert in your field, but you’re missing out on all of the other fields. Explore the other fields far and wide, and you’re missing something elsewhere. I see people on social media who seem to spend their entire days playing – usually streaming – new albums, and they’ve heard pretty much everything on release, five, six, seven albums a day. I’m rarely able to listen to music while working my dayjob, and when reviewing, I can’t really manage more than an album a night to hear, digest, process, formulate an opinion and sentences to articulate it.
In daily life, I rarely suffer from FOMO, but when it comes to music, I feel – increasingly -that I’m unable to keep up. I’ve not listened to the latest Taylor Swift album, for example. Or any of her albums for that matter. Am I missing out? My daughter would insist that I am. But as much as I listen to music for pleasure – at least when I can – I also listen with a view to providing coverage to artists who aren’t Taylor Swift, who you won’t find covered in every other publication. And so we come to Yosa Peit, who I clearly can’t claim to have discovered at the dawn of her career, but who, while having gained a following and a contract with Fire records, clearly isn’t a household name either.
The pitch for ‘The free-ranging sound of Yosa Peit’ is that her work ‘recalls the intense arrangements of a cyber-era Prince with the surrealist tones of Arthur Russell and the vulnerability of Arca circa 2017.’
I’m a little uncomfortable with Prince. By that I mean, likely somewhat controversially, I think he’s massively overrated, and moreover, I’m not really a fan of anything funk.
Perhaps it’s my relatively superficial knowledge of Prince that’s the reason that Prince is by no means my first point of reference on hearing Gut Buster, an album which is positively brimming exploding with ideas. There are elements of crisp pop and some bust-up, fucked about bluesiness to be found in the mix in this extravaganza of inventiveness, which also sculpts dark electropop shapes with some heavy bass and ethereal synths. At times, skitters and ripples rush by faster than the mind can compute, and there are some pretty slick grooves, even hints of what one might broadly refer to as ‘urban’ shades – as exemplified on ‘Tower Shower’, which also brings some dubby bass and blasting beats.
Gut Buster has soul – bit tosses it in a liquidizer and pulses it to a pulp with skittery bits and pieces of synth and hyper-processed vocals, 80s AOR melted into soporific trip-hop and hyperactive techno tropes. The chipmunk vocals area bit irksome at times, but there’s so much else that’s good that you can forgive it. The minimal gloop of ‘Call Me’ is a slow bump and scrape, and showcases the way in which Peit’s compositions are riven with intricate and fascinating detail.
Gut Buster is odd, quirky, in places dark and in others, less so. Unashamedly other and oddball, there is much to unravel here.
Plan Pony – the solo project of Jase Jester, one half of Ombibael / Ombibadger – has been simmering for a while, and we’ve been following his output since the release of the ‘Martyr’ single back in 2020. So I was naturally excited to hear his latest offering.
I felt suddenly uncomfortable, concerned, even, on seeing the accompanying blurbage, which leads with ‘RIYL: Animal Collective, Madlib, Nurse With Wound, Hype Williams, Black Dice’. I mean, I do like a bit of NWW, and don’t mind some Black Dice, but I absolutely abhor Animal Collective. So, so much. Something about Animal Collective radiates muso smugness – something it would be hard to accuse Jase of.
Electric Swampland Home is the first Plan Ponyalbum, and as with previous outings, finds Kester grappling with vintage gear to conjure authentic vintage noise inspired by those early adopters. He’s right when he tells me that emulators simply aren’t the same, and that when technologies were emerging, the sound of the resulting recordings was born of necessity – like when you bounce tracks on a cassette four-track and lose some quality and definition in the process, and the presence of amp hum and tape hiss because amps hum and tape hisses. Adding tape hiss or vinyl crackle digitally is an affectation, and while some may be sold on this kind of nostalgic artifice, it lacks that certain something.
While questions of authenticity provoke heated debate in circles around some genres – punk, obviously, grunge, perhaps to a lesser extent, and right now, indie and alternative as new acts track stellar trajectories seemingly from nowhere while claiming modest grass-roots credentials while obfuscating middle class and public school backgrounds and major label backing, Electric Swampland Home is a truly authentic work. Kester hasn’t amassed a pile of highly-sought-after vintage kit in the way people with hods of cash buy up 808s and Moogs to try to be cool. Electric Swampland Home is the sound of a Boss sampler and an old Tascam digital studio he’s had for yonks, and which by today’s standards are pretty primitive.
From the very start, Electric Swampland Home creates discord and chaos with the woozy, bent, and frankly fucked-up ‘Travelling There’, a loop of atonality that gives way to a rolling rhythm and feedback-squalling bass crunch… and from thereon in, everything goes.
‘The Village’ tosses a salad of tribal beats, twisted Kyoto and a dash of Joujouka. While I’ve never been comfortable with the kind of cultural appropriation that the likes of Paul Simon’s takes on ‘world music’ present, this is something entirely different – a full global exploration which occurs simultaneously. This owes more to the tape experiments of Burroughs and Gysin, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire than anything else, conveying a sense of the way in which everything happens all at once, and linearity is a construct.
Across the album’s eight tracks, Plan Pony meshes some dense sonic textures and layers of difficult dissonance. Notes and tones bend and warp, things twist and melt and bleed into one another: edges blur and fade. The way the juxtaposing and often incongruous elements are brought together isn’t explicitly jarring, it’s not a bewildering collision of noise, but something rather more subtle – although no less impactful and no less disorienting. As with Burroughs’ cut-ups, Electric Swampland Home captures – recreates, distils – the overwhelming experience of modern life, the blizzard of information, the endless intertext, the diminished attention span, the globalisation and the egalitarianism of everything. That isn’t to say we live in an egalitarian world – but that everything equally demands our attention from every corner of everything, to the point that it’s impossible to prioritise or even reasonably assess what’s of more importance than anything else. And so we quiver, frozen in stasis, poised between myriad options and so often spend hours selecting none of them.
This is nowhere more clearly conveyed on the warped, glitchy layerings of ‘Same Cloud’, which brings everything all at once. On the one hand, it’s the most overtly ‘song’ like piece on the album. On the other, it’s like listening to the radio from the next room while reading a book with the TV on in the background, and your phone’s ringing and next door are doing DIY and your mind’s wondering about what’s for dinner – and this continues into the sample-soaked looping stuttering jangle of ‘Amphibian’.
‘8pm Local Time’ combined field recordings, a low-level quivering bass and squelchy laser-blasting electronics together, and not necessarily in the most comfortable of fashions.
Electric Swampland Home revels in incongruity, in awkwardness, in otherness, and in many ways, it’s a magnificent representation of life in all its colours and chaos, its business and unpredictability. It’s not an easy or immediate album, and it’s not for a second intended to be. It is an unashamedly experimental work, and one which succeeds in its explorations.
Letters and things lost have an almost mythical status in the field of literature. So many volumes are dedicated to the reproduction of exchanges between authors of revered status, and are poured over, clawed over, by both fans and academics. Many writers of great novels were also great letter-writers, and the letters often serve to build not only biographical depth and detail but also shed light on the development of the novels, that mystical ‘creative process’. Much of history exists in letters – the rich primary source material from which we piece together the picture and assemble a coherent narrative. It may be a construct, but it’s a necessary one when it comes to understanding the world and how we collectively came to arrive at the present.
The fact no-one writes letters anymore is a great loss. The same thought and effort simply doesn’t go into emails, and they tend to be considerably shorter, too, especially in the last decade or so. In fact, the quality of communication has slumped through the floor in recent years. Emails volumes – at least, ones that aren’t transactional in some way, have plummeted in favour of WhatsApps and messenger missives via FaceBook, Twitter, etc. It’s hard to really articulate just what’s been lost over the last few years, besides simply the art of in-depth, detailed longform communications, but with anything more than five lines long likely to be dismissed as TL;DR, it’s significant. I digress… because there are rare avenues open to expand on these matters.
Benjamin Heal, one of those multi-faceted, polyartistic individuals who is hard to pin down due to the sheer range of his output, has, through the years, pursued an academic career with a focus on William S. Burroughs – a prodigious writer of letters – and performed experimental noisy indie under the guise of Cowman, sharing stages with the likes of Trumans Water and Gum Takes Tooth, as well as his more electro-centric vehicle Coaxial.
Now resident in Taiwan, his latest project seems to bring together these elements of a diverse life. The material on this, the debut release from The Lost Letters – which finds Heal working with Fulia, is a calm and calming collection of delicate songs. The duo offer a quite gentle and melodic set of tunes in which is mostly centres around mellow acoustic-led indie, and slow, sparsely-arranged, soporific shoegaze and it’s not merely projection on my part in detecting a wistful, vaguely nostalgic air permeating the songs. The songs effortlessly drift and weave, Fulya’s vocals adding a layer of sound rather than easily audible lyrics.
The seven-minute ‘Cecille’ has, by its trilling gentility, nothing to do with The Walking Dead: it’s a graceful exploratory work which is mellow, melodic, and carries heavy hints of The Cure circa Disintegration thanks in no small part to its fulsome, airy bass sound and crystalline guitars, and it’s fair to reference Cocteau Twins at this juncture, too.
Things take a turn for the darker and more discordant on the lugubrious, plodding ‘Cut’, which scrapes and scratches for another seven minutes. With its muttered, monotone vocals and insistent sparsity, it offers hints of Shellac and latter day Band of Susans, in contrast to the soft acoustic instrumental work of ‘Route Rute’. These songs are on the longer side by necessity: repetition has greater impact over duration, and if the literary allusions and lifts by means of the deployment of the cut-up technique devised by Burroughs and Gysin are largely lost in the mix, the overall effect of discomfort and disjointedness remains strong throughout the set. ‘Crystal Skies’ is murky, with a drifting ambience spun through with a softly picked guitar, before ‘Sails and Sou’wester’ brings the album full circle to its nautically-themed beginning. While inviting comparisons to Slowdive and Cranes, it cascades dreamily into a mesmerising sea of sound, so richly evocative that you ache as it drifts on toward the horizon, leaving you reaching for something intangible.
Critics often write of craft, but the most moving music often comes from intuition and feeling, and this is moving in the subtlest of ways. Quite simply, The Lost Letters is a beautiful album.
Stars of the Lid are one of those acts who seem to have spent a – now lengthy – career on the fringe, an ultimate cult act who’ve built a substantial following without ever being well-known. Here in the UK, at least, they’re strictly a 6 Music act. With Brian McBride’s passing last year, their future remains unclear, but in the meantime, Adam Wiltzie, who had already been active for some time as a solo artist, offers up a new set of drifting, dreamy, discombobulating amorphous ambient works in the form of Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal.
Sodium Pentothal is (to quote, unfortunately, Wikipedia), ‘an ultra-short-acting barbiturate and has been used commonly in the induction phase of general anesthesia’ and is also perhaps better known as a ‘truth serum’.
We recently aired the opening track, ‘Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left Of Walter Matthau’ here at Aural Aggravation, and it’s inevitably tempting to infer connotations from this title in context of events – something the album’s title wouldn’t seem to necessarily counter. But Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal seems to be preoccupied with memory and place in a broader sense.
We’re infirmed that the album ‘took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved.”
Dreams have a way of staying with you, and of twisting your psyche in some unsettling way, the more vivid ones lingering and replaying for hours, even days on end, the vaguer ones leaving you feeling somehow disjointed and in a slip from being in step with the world, partially detached, partially disconnected, as if looking at your own life through a window. Recurring dreams can prove particularly unsettling, and have a way of encroaching on your waking hours, assuming a reality of sorts.
The track titles, in the main, tell us very little, presenting mere abstractions, although one suspect they carry significantly greater weight of meaning for the composer. Bereavement and loss has a way of bringing layers of meaning to the slightest things, often unsuspectingly – a sight, a sound, something not even remotely directly related, has the capacity to trigger a memory, which in turn has the capacity to elicit an emotion or some not-quite-definable internal response. It’s often fleeting, or otherwise vague and indefinable, something impalpable and beyond reach, leaving a certain pang of bereftness – in much the same way as if waking from a dream.
Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal is not a dark or heavy album, but one which is dense in its atmosphere and carries a certain air of melancholic reflection in its drifting waves. This melancholy may well be as much a reflection of the way places – even unfamiliar locations – have the capacity to stir memories but indirect association – again, a sound, a smell, a certain shade of lighting, the angle of a tree, a riverbank – prods a deep corner of the memory most unexpectedly, causing memories we didn’t even know we had, or still had, to trickle forth, vaguely, out of focus, out of context, and sometimes you wonder if is really is a memory or a fragment of a dream.
There are some deep, rich, grainy textures to be found here, and ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Boogerville’ brings some dark, heavy strings and sonorous scrapes to close the album – which, incidentally, contains only nine tracks. Loop’s Robert Hampson was an inspired choice for the album’s mixing, bringing the layers of organic-sounding drones to the fore.
Returning to the press notes, ‘Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.”’ With Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal, he has created that perfect escape. This is an album that lends itself well to listening – or half-listening – by candlelight with a slow-sipping drink, and to simply drift and nod to.
It’s been almost four years since I encountered Alaxander Stordiau, when I covered the single release by The Original Magnetic Light Parade, a collaboration between Stordiau and Edinburgh man, Harold Nono, on perennially oddball label Bearsuit Records.
With minimal info about that release – and not much more about this one, I’m mostly left to grapple with the music as it presents itself, with minimal content. This is good: and so is this EP.
A brief Internet delve uncovers that the material on this this EP was initially released a year ago, as part of an album-length work bearing the same title, slipped out on Soundcloud. Now, there are plenty of albums I think would have made decent EPs – or 7” singles – but there’s no reason to believe Stordiau has whittled this set down due to any issues with quality, and it does seem that it’s often easier to pitch an EP than an LP in our attention-deprived times. If I were to go all-out on a personal obsession, I’d make a greater deal of the fact that this four-track cut has aa running time of twenty-three minutes. There’s nothing to suggest Stordiau is a fan of William S. Burroughs or otherwise beholden to the ‘23 Mythos’, but the fact it does have a playing time of twenty-three minutes was of note to me, simply because. The twenty-threes just keep on coming.
And so to the music itself. ‘Fear Merges Easily’ is something of a teaser, an introduction, an atmosphere-builder, with wavering synth undulations creating a nice, even flow over a shuffling beat that sits off in the background. It’s got groove, but it’s subtle, and overall, it’s pretty mellow. It doesn’t ‘do’ much: one gets the impression it’s not supposed to, and nor is it necessary for it to do more. It’s vaguely background, it has some classic eighties electro and krautrock elements to it, and enough texture to keep it engaging.
‘Hearing the House Breathing’, stretching out to almost eleven minutes is the centrepiece and defining track here, and what’s interesting is how it’s centred around a core motif and built upon a solid spine of subdued beats, pulsating bass, and nagging synth shapes, but shifts and moves through a succession of segments. It’s dancey, but at the same time, it isn’t. and there are gasping, whispering vocals wheezing beneath the waves of undulating analogue ripples. Around the mid-point, it breaks into a more energetic mood, the bubbling synths bouncing over a lively robotic electro beat dominated by the whip-cracking snap of a vintage drum machine snare sound. Everything gets quite busy, and a shade hazy around this point, there’s a lot going on, and not all of it synchronous. I can’t be alone in finding this kind of busyness induces not a trance-like state, but one of feeling dizzy and vaguely overwhelmed, an experience not dissimilar to sitting in a busy pub or coffee shop and being unable to focus on reading or the conversation in front of my face for the distraction of all the babbling noise filling the air all around.
Things take a turn for the eerie, the proggy, the spacey, on the trilling title track, where a creeping dark chord sequence sits beneath altogether more vibrant tones, before giving way to a sloshing ebb and flow overlayed with some barbed organ, and there are moments here that remind me of Gift by The Sisterhood, Andrew Eldritch’s project between phases of The Sisters of Mercy: specifically, the notation the chilly closer ‘Rain From Heaven’. Closing off, ‘The Sting of the Lie’ is a relentless, cyclical composition over which blasts of wavering, quavering keyboards wander and spin.
Skin Of Salt brings together a range of elements, and not always comfortably. But why should music be comfortable, why should it always be easy, accessible? What’s wrong with discord and dissonance, lumpiness, discomfort? Why, nothing, is the answer. Life is brimming with discord and dissonance, lumpiness, discomfort. And without these elements, this would just be a bland hybrid of dance and ambient. Thankfully, it is so much more. Skin Of Salt isn’t mere mental chewing gum, but something which requires some proper chewing and a slow digestion.
I don’t really know too much about this release. It came my way via one inbox or another, with a download, but no cover art, no press release. And for some reason, I had expected it to be longer. But it’s a Skoghall release, and features Dave Procter (Legion of Swine, Dale prudent, Wharf Street Galaxy Band, etc ad infinitum) and some mates.
We’re looking at a couple of tracks, both short of five minutes. Nothing wrong with that – there’s a lot to be said for keeping things simple, and keeping things concise. Do I need the backstory, an essay on the contributors and their backgrounds? No, no I don’t. No-one does, really.
I do feel we’ve become altogether excessively invested in the wrong details in recent years. Time was when an act could release a record, it would be reviewed on its merits, or it’d slip under the radar and all we’d have would be the music. There would often be no mention of who did what on the record., and there would of course be no website, no source by which to obtain details of personnel or a bio. Nowadays, journos – people like me, although I don’t consider myself a music journalist by any means – get picked up on the slightest inaccuracy, we get asked to change spellings and correct who played bass, amend the cover art and the release date… This is not right. The press’ purpose is to independently proffer opinion, to critique, and where facts are missing, perhaps plug the gaps with assumptions, why not? While reviews are a part of the promotional cycle, it’s important – at least for me – to be apart from it all. In short, press is not PR, and should on no way feel obliged to give frothingly enthusiastic reviews simply because they’ve received an advance copy.
I digress, and admit that I tend to provide positive coverage of the releases which come my way which I like, rather than slapping down the releases I’m less keen on. When you get fifty or more submissions a day, you can afford to be selective, and besides, life is short and I’m not going to spend mine squandering energy on stuff I have no interest in.
I have a strong interest in this, though.
What’s on offer are two slices of minimalist electropop with a keen late seventies / early eighties feel. A single droning note hangs throughout the first track and a drum machine clips and clops away recreating the sound of early Young Marble Giants – only here, Procter drones and stutters a blank, low vocal delivery, half-robotic, half crooning, and drifting astray in a swamp of reverb.
The (virtual) flipside is dronier, noisier, a serrated-edged grating drone providing the backdrop to a challenging piece where a clanking percussion saws away and Procter rants -away in the background, again, immersed in reverb and low in the mix – about control and its uses and abuses. Now you’ve got control… what are you going to do with it? He asks, antagonistically.
The answer, well, it depends on who you’re asking. Power is a difficult thing, and – so hark back to an early SWANS track, what we see is power for power’s sake – use and abuse, but more of the latter. Show me – when was power last used for benevolence? I don’t want to be dragged down in this now, and there is plenty of mainstream outrage in circulation, so let’s get back to the release.
It’s succinct, it’s tense, it’s uncomfortable. Bring on ‘Two’.
I’m out on my second consecutive night of gigging and it feels like it used to in 2019, when I used to do this sort of thing all the time. Other things about this remind e of times past, too. It’s a fairly last-minute show, booked after a couple of dates in Scotland fell through, leaving Thank and tour buddies Fashion Tips with gaps in their schedule. Consequently, promotion has been a bit sparse and ticket sales have only been ‘ok’, attracting the kind of turnout that would look good in a 100-200 capacity venue, but perhaps not so good in a 350-capacity space.
Moving the bands to the floor instead of the stage really changed the dynamic, though, and it worked so, so well. Having a 100% solid lineup was what really made all the difference, though, with local guitar and drums duo Junk It being first up.
Having caught them supporting Part Chimp in the same venue back in November 2022 (how was it that long ago?), I’d dug their sound and seen potential. They’re now absolutely delivering on that early promise, and tonight they’re absolutely outstanding. The set beings with a squall of feedback (as does every song, and as often occupies the space between songs) and a mega thick grunge riff. The guitarist sports a beard, long hair, chunky boots and long flowing skirt, and carries it off well, flailing said hair wildly while blasting out hefty power chords.
Junk It
The drummer and guitarist share vocal duties on the wild ‘Strut My Stuff’, and the former struggles to stay on his stool during the set, leaping and half standing as he thrashes the fuck out of his kit, the nut flying off the cymbal near the end of the set. The chat between songs is awkward, but amusing, and the songs are pure power. They’re a pleasant, affable pair playing hairy, sweaty grunge, the songs often becoming two players screaming ‘aaaghahah’ over hefty guitar and pummelling drums, before bringing unexpected harmonies in the last couple of songs.
Fashion Tips, whose EP I covered a bit back, and was keen to witness live, emerge a lot less poppy and a lot harsher and noisier than anticipated on the basis of the recorded evidence, and the four-piece bring a spiky riot grrrl punk racket played hard and cranked up loud. With heavy synth grind and pumping drum machine and layers of feedback plus extraneous noise, their sound is in the region of Big Black meets Dr Mix meets Bis meets Selfish Cunt.
Fashion Tips
Singer / synth masher Esme verbalises my thoughts perfectly when she comments on how tonight’s show is reminiscent of The Brudenell circa 2006 – it’s that low-key, lo-fi, direct engagement, band on-the-floor-and in-yer-face making unfashionable noise simply because vibe that does it, and seeing the likes of That Fucking Tank and Gum Takes Tooth playing to small but enthusiastic audiences of oddballs stands as something of a golden age in my mind. You can never recreate the past, at least not purposefully, and to pine in nostalgia is to grasp at emptiness – but sometimes, thing just happen, and this so proved to be one of those things, by accident and by circumstance rather than by design. Fashion Tips were nothing short of blistering with their abrasive antagonism. Fucking hell indeed.
Between Fashion Tips and Thank, Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want was blasting over the PA, reminding me of one of the most incredible and intense live shows I’ve ever born witness to.
Steve Myles always looks like he wants to murder the drum kit and he looks seriously fucking menacing as he starts tonight’s set, face low and focused as he thumps hard. To return to the topic of vintage Leeds, my introduction to Thank was in December 2016, supporting Oozing Wound at – where else? – the Brudenell. It got me out of a works Christmas do, and stands out as a belter in the games room, which stood as the second stage then, and Thank, decked in neon running gear stood out as being demented, but also quintessential Leeds alternative. They’re still blazing that trail and have gone from strength to strength, supporting the likes of Big ¦ Brave and maintaining a steady flow of releases – and of course, hardly play any of the songs from those releases tonight, because, well, that’s how they roll. When they erupt it’s a fierce racket. The bassist wrestles noise from a bass with a very long neck. It’s jolting, and it’s hard.
Thank
The set is strung together by some mental banter, a rambling narrative that expands on a fictitious account of a dialogue between the band and the show’s promoter, Joe Coates, spanning several months. It’s amusing, and grows more surreal and more stupid as the set progresses – which is Thank all over. Amidst the endless slew of new material, there’s a song called ‘Woke Frasier’, the premise of which is…. if Frasier was woke. Of course. ‘Commemorative Coin’, old yet still unreleased, is a big tempo-changing beast of a tune, and encapsulates Thank perfectly – crazed, irreverent, and daft in the way only a northern act can be. Freddie is the perfect frontperson, balancing charisma with clumsiness in a way that’s charming and entertaining, but hits the mark when they go loud, too.
With three bands out of three delivering outstanding, and utterly full-on sets, you couldn’t ask for more on a Friday night – and pints for £3.50 is just a bonus. If you missed it, you missed out.
Aural Aggravation 