Posts Tagged ‘Wevie Stonder’

(kröter) – *d, *e

Posted: 17 May 2021 in Albums
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11th May 2021

(kröter) don’t do things by halves. Back in 2018, the landed not just one album, but three, all culled from the same sessions, with two of those albums arriving simultaneously. Fifteen minutes of (kröter) can be quite the headfuck, but three hours? (kröter) are a melting-pot of madness, and how much of their derangement does anyone need?

Well, from seemingly out of nowhere, they’ve dropped a further two albums, *d and *e, again drawn from the epic sessions in 2017-18.

‘avantgarde’, the first piece on *d is typically whacky, and knows it. A picked guitar, hesitant, and sounding more like tuning up than an actual composition, is immediately obliterated with a squelchy squirt of digital diarrhoea. ‘How much water does an avocado need to grow?’ they ponder by way of an introduction to some abstract lyrical ponderances. ‘This is avantgarde’. And yes, it is: and this is also an exercise in avantgarde self-reflexivity, art reflecting on art reflecting on art.

‘soul monkey’ does have that cack pop vibe of associated act Wevie Stonder and Mr Vast’s solo works, white soul played limp and strange, before a really dingy bassline grinds in like a bulldozer and distorted vocals rant and yelp half-submerged in the mix. The ten-minute ‘flattening shades’ marks a distinct shift of style and pace, manifesting as a slow, ponderous, piece with chorus-heavy guitar and a sparse, strolling that combine to create some palpable atmosphere. Despite some odd vocal segments, there are some moments of both menace and beauty, which show that beneath all the zany shit, these guys have some real talent and ability.

Not that you’d know it from the discordant chaos of ‘lambs brain’, which is twelve minutes of demented racket and shouting, and a bunch of twanging and sampling and whatever else happens to be at hand that ended up bring tossed into the blender. Then there’s ‘tomatos’ and ‘omatose’, companion pieces that are daft, quirky interludes. Because.

The album really only has one song that’s recognisable as such, and that’s ‘up to chance’ which incorporates elements of country and prog and autotuned Radio 1 chart pop, and of course, it gets pretty weird pretty quickly.

*e, described as ‘another bucket full of toad spawn fished out of the kröters sessions’ is more of the same, only more, containing four longform tracks that showcase leanings towards more spacey-electro and jazz. Tinkling synths and a wandering horn amble all over an insistent beat that in combination provide the disjointed backdrop to monotone chanting vocals on borehole (prelude), which provides an extended introduction to another aspect of their oddball stylings. It paves the way for the twenty-minute ‘borehole (suite)’, which is both more and the same, an extended drone of froth and foam and bubbling electronics, propelled by a swampy, looping, pulsating bass. It’s certainly darker in hue, and the expansive forms only add to the bewilderment.

The hypnotic weirdness continues through the snickeringly-titled ‘glandfather’, culminating in the eighteen-minute ‘coloumns’, another off-kilter spoken word piece accompanied by minimalist instrumentation that scratches and scrapes

If some of this feels like the whacky weirdness is something they’ve worked on, it’s equally something that they feel comfortable with, as if they derive pleasure from making you feel uncomfortable. As such, while there’s a certain self-awareness about all of this, it doesn’t feel particularly contrived or forced, and we leave this duo of albums with the conclusion that this isn’t a gimmick and that these guys are genuinely fucking barmy. And we should embrace that: while people all around us are losing the plot, (kröter) celebrate the idea that plot is overrated and they never had any grasp on it to lose in the first place. At their best, (kröter) evoke some of Bauhaus’ more experimental moments,, but mostly, (kröter) just sound like (kröter), and utterly deranged. Which is all the reason to like them, even if their music isn’t for everyone.

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Watch: ‘caspar hauser in the mirror’ by kröter

Posted: 11 January 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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We love a bit of kröter here at Aural Aggro.

We even love a lot of kröter, like three whole CDs worth at once.

So it shouldn’t be a shock that we love this: the music is a recording of a session on the 12.09.2019 by kröter, and it’s accompanied by a film collage by Chr Chr, using material from a forest zoo close to Berlin, taifun nr.19 coming onto Yokohama and selfies made by the musicians.

Check it here (click the image to link to the player):

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Wevie Stonder – Hyperboredom (Vol 1)

Posted: 14 December 2020 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

2020 has been cack. That’s pretty much a fact. And here we are in December after nine months in varying degrees of lockdown around the globe, and many of us are really starting to feel it now. So what do we need to top off this annum of cack? More cack, of course, courtesy of the prime purveyors – and possibly the sole exponents – of cack-pop, Wevie Stonder.

Founded by Al Boorman in Brighton in 1993, along with Chris Umney, Richard Sothcott, Henry Sargeant, Wevie Stonder’s bio is a combination of tall tales and out-and-out oddness, which pretty much summarises everything they’ve done. Sargeant turned solo and split for Germany, where he’s now massive – or at least Vast – while Boorman operates a ‘music and sound design’ studio called Wevie as his mainline, with a catalogue of adverts and TV credits, spanning Comedy Central, Adidas, Netflix, and even Disney. Hunter S. Thompson said that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and these guys demonstrate that it’s actually possible to go pro without ditching the weird. And make no mistake, they’re way weirder than most.

So this landed with me, and I don’t even know what the fuck it is. It’s a digital file. Is it an album? A podcast? Kinda. A FaceBook post on the Wevie Stonder page announced that ‘While some have been working on a vaccine, Al’s been working on an antidote to 2020 as a whole. To hear the results so far, tune in to the Skam Records live stream’. And so here we have an hour of wild experimentalism – with the emphasis firmly on the mental.

It starts off comparatively sedately with some wibbly synths and some narrative delivered in a prim English accent reminiscent of British 1950s children’s TV shows, but rapidly explodes into a brain-melting collage of all kinds of chaos. Despite the fact I’m personally more than well accustomed to all kinds of

A mere two minutes in, notes are sliding, gliding melting, a sonic equivalent of Dali’s brie-like clocks, before scratches and scrapes collide with mainstream trance and snippets of 80s disco chart hits are cut and spliced with vintage averts and clattering industrial beats. Carpet tile infomercials and grinding techno are glued at completely wrong angles. It’s disorientating, and the juxtaposition of the mundane and the strange creates an experience which is perfectly unheimlich, straddling as it does the familiar and the not-quite familiar just a step or two out of step with one another. It’s this proximity that creates such discomforting dissonance. You almost know where you are with it… but then there are elements which are just so wholly inexplicable.

You begin to feel woozy. You know, you get, that there is no lens into the mind of another person, especially not someone who thinks differently… but what the fuck is this? Suddenly Trout Mask Replica sounds coherent and linear. The thing about Hyperboredom (Vol 1) is just how quickly the scenes cut. It’s dizzying, and often, those cuts aren’t remotely subtle, but as clumsy as they come, calling to mind the primitive collaging of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu on 1987 and Shag Times.

Daytime YV snippets and wonky jazz collide in a messy mashup. ‘If you get bored of your own boredom, you experience what we call hyperboredom’ a soporific voice explains with almost a yawn. I’m thinking I’m more likely to throw up than suffer from any shade of boredom listening to this.

Whether knowingly or not, Hyperboredom belongs to the cut-up lineage that can be traced back to William Burroughs’ tape experiments of the late 50s and early 60s, and while the anarchic yet quintessentially English leanings may owe more to the Bonzo Dog band, the overall formulation is explicitly around methods of collaging, and the way different source materials play off one another. And in listening to this hour-long cut ‘n’ splice oddity, it’s impossible not to pick out or otherwise listen out for familiar voices and clips, and these in turn trigger recollections and avenues of reminiscence and contemplation, or otherwise the satisfaction of saying to yourself ‘ah, yes, I remember that’ – or frustratingly – aagh, that sounds so familiar, but what is it?’

And ultimately, what is it? It’s everything all at once, and one to explore, however much it might make you dizzy. The forthcoming album looks likely to be a cracker.

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Mr Vast – Touch & Go

Posted: 24 November 2018 in Albums
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Cack Records – 7th December 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

I rarely review the same album twice. I mean, really, what’s the point? Admittedly there are occasions when I’ll revise my opinion of a record or a band – I absolutely hated The Fall the first time I heard them on Hip Priest and Kamerads, but came around a couple or three years later. And yes, it’s inevitable that people go off bands or records after a period of time: some of the stuff you listened to in your youth is just embarrassing 15, 20 years later.

But the arrival of a picture-disc vinyl pressing of Touch & Go, the last album by Mr Vast does inevitably demand a revisitation of sorts. Unlike many albums I bang reviews out for, I have actually listened to Touch & Go since, because for all its zaniness, the endless procession of quirky oddball moments, and oddly 80s electrofunk vibe, it has some undeniably great songs on it, which are more than pure novelty.

Mr Vast released Touch & Go almost exactly three years ago, to an off-tune synth-disco fanfare of parping trumpets and the pitch that ‘he’s lost the fucking plot’. And so it was that Vast’s second compendium of cack pop crash landed on the planet. And I dug it. Writing for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’ I draw comparisons to Har Mar Superstar and made some reference to 80s electroclash in an attempt to grapple with the whappy, tone-bending synths and bouncing basslines which are a dominant feature of a dizzyingly eclectic album, commenting that ‘if you think theatrical oompah and a self-help relaxation track with a twist shouldn’t feature on the same album, the perhaps this isn’t the album for you. But if you thrive on incongruity that goes far beyond postmodern hybridity, then Mr Vast is your man…Half smart-arse, half plain weird, wholly unpredictable, Touch & Go is as whappy as hell, for sure, but the execution is far from cack-handed’.

And I stand by that, although I’d certainly throw in certain similarities to the Bonzo Dog Band when considering Vast’s quirky, irreverent and exceedingly British eccentricity. Split into two halves across the ‘brekkie’ and ‘supper’ sides, the sequencing of the tracks is perhaps more noticeable in rendering an album of two distinct halves, with the second (‘supper’) side being more trippy folksy and less frenetic than the first (brekkie).

But what the vinyl release brings to the party is… groove. Naturally – it’s vinyl after all. Chances are, those who buy it will have already heard at least some of the music on-line, which again limits the need for further critical analysis of the music contained here. But as an artefact, as an experience… This brings new dimensions. Visually, it’s striking, to say the least, taking the concept of the original cover art to a new level. The rendering of something being something that it is not places it in the domain of the vaguely surreal, while the vibrancy of the shades is eye-popping. It’s a nice, thick chunk of wax and nicely mastered. And it comes with a doyley slipmat. It’s the first record I’ve ever seen with a doyley – and this one is gold and shiny! Of course, the track-listing has to go somewhere. Flippancy aside, in a world oversaturated with product and pointless tat, and a world of conformity and uniformity, Mr Vast is a glowing beacon of individuality and a maverick icon representing art, delivered with a demeanour of not giving a toss abut criticism or commerciality. This in itself makes Vast a hero; the fact the album’s a left-field corker only adds to his heroism.

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And there’s more here…

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Mr Vast Vinyl