Hand To Mouth – The truth about being poor in a wealthy world – Linda Tirado

Hand To MouthWell it’s about fucking time! Well-off academics recalling ancient childhood experiences of poverty & deprivation or studying contemporary penury from the must of university libraries has got a bit out of control. Oh absolutely, the genuine outrage & in depth & accurate analysis of poverty & the shitter angles of “economically deprived” & destitute communities lives can be exposed & castigated by those that observe the affliction externally rather than suffer directly from it, but the absence of those really on the receiving end in literature putting it in their own words is totally unacceptable. Continue reading Hand To Mouth – The truth about being poor in a wealthy world – Linda Tirado

Vaudou Game – Apiafo 12” LP

Apiafo

Vaudou Game – Apiafo Bleg Excerpt

Here’s an interesting exercise in atavism. A contemporary shot at a distinctly ancient style using purely analog recording equipment to re-enact/enkindle the original sound & energy-currents. There are some really astonishing 60’s/70’s African reissue compilations (particularly the West African stuff) doing the rounds, most notably for me the superb Analog Africa series levelling some profound gyration & beautiful distorted obscurer from multiple decades back. Vaudou Game perform the raw Funk influenced sound from the Benin, Togo, Ghana districts commingled with Afro-Beat & some Rock styled residue. Continue reading Vaudou Game – Apiafo 12” LP

Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo 12”LP

Monkey-Pockie-Boo

Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo Bleg Excerpt

The seminal shockwave. Passion-sodden discordant ictus lurid contumacious mayhem with all the hinges gone & the screws ejected from their cavities. Sharrock & his mad-moll Linda took certain principles further than anyone & FIRST! it certainly did not always work but this classic LP is an excellent display of Sharrock’s churlish Avant-Garde aggression. Summoned to agitate the storm-currents are Sharrock on guitar & vocals, his partner Linda on vocalizations & two French session musicians that were synonymous with the BYG/Actuel collective & performances – Beb Guerin on Double Bass & the excellent Jacques Thollot on drums. there are three expeditions, one with a hugely destructive radius – “Soon”. Side-A’s solitary track is the unsettling & ectopic “27th Day, a sixteen minute plus metaplasia of cardinal Avant oddity. It’s a spectacular, bizarre & intensely estranging experience. Continue reading Sonny Sharrock – Monkey Pockie Boo 12”LP

Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman 12”LP

sonny_sharrock_black_woman

Sonny Sharrock – Peanut (Bleg Excerpt)

So this is actually the initial Sharrock as a leader effort, recorded in 1968 two years before the more widely vaunted Monkey-Pockie-Boo LP. Sonny scrambles Dave Burrell on piano, Milford Graves on drums, Norris Jones on bass & of course Linda on larynx-lallation. There are five tracks on the LP, all splaying to different dichotomies. Frankly, I think all but one are really quite terrible, albeit very interesting & adventurous conceptually. Some of Sharrock’s themes & the simplicity exacted (stripped back acoustic for example on Blind Willie), plus the nature of the totally admirable but (to my ears) lost & unfulfilling experimentalism fail to accomplish substantiation as a complete track. Continue reading Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman 12”LP

Sonny & Linda Sharrock – Teleport & Time-Warp

Sharrock

Sonny Sharrock was an American guitar-maverick/revolutionary who inspired by the turbulence & absonant progression/permutation of John Coltrane & Ornette Coleman (& others) transfused what is to me the earliest form of Noisecore through the prism of chronic Avant-Garde Free Jazz Expeirmentalism. Imbued by the saxophone as a leading solo instrument, Sharrock created his own approach to the electric guitar, adhering loosely to the same antiphonic expression & intense extemporization as colossus saxophonists in The New Music/Avant Garde. During the mid-sixties he performed in session with Marzette Watts, Herbie Mann, Pharaoh Sanders & incredibly even Wayne Shorter (on 1969’s excellent Super Nova LP) before finally recording his debut as a leader “Black Woman” on the Frisco label “4 Men With Beards” in 68. Sharrock’s indelible supra-progression was largely in his course, anti-phonic, aggressive & ludicrously advanced methodology of guitar playing. At his most abrasive & “out-there” sections of Sharrock’s mid-sixties cacophonic-clarion sound, very literally, like modern-day Noisecore, Extreme Music, Improvisational Noise, Harsh Experimental genres. I find it difficult to overstate his precocity, the guy was there in a developed stage decades before anyone else (certainly to my knowledge) was doing anything like it. again, even comparing these bouts & techniques to neoteric “Noise” assimilating rubrics, this guys ridiculously futuristic & astoundingly-atypical playing style & compositional approach is so far forward it’s hard to believe, & I see his unique innovation & musical hostility as the first incarnation of so much modern “Extreme” music from Metal to Noise & it’s sub-strata’s. Continue reading Sonny & Linda Sharrock – Teleport & Time-Warp

Yosuke Yamashita Trio-Chiasma, Clay, Up-To Date & Frozen Days LP

Yosuke Yamashita Trio 2Here’s one of the most staggering, energetically-strenuous, bedlam-hoisting dynasties in explosive bisecting Free Jazz intensity. As independent musician’s these laureates each excel in their own immense pedigree, but as a trio entity they fused & co-founded a hulking opalescent deluge of atom splintering, non-negotiable, prolonged-pandemonium-pummel-prism & volleyed forth a massive concatenation of consistently eviscerating recordings with a reliability & emblem of quality for the most excruciatingly effusive of outbursts. Lead & founded by pianist Yosuke Yamashita, most references encountered refer to him as “The Japanese Cecil Taylor”! Continue reading Yosuke Yamashita Trio-Chiasma, Clay, Up-To Date & Frozen Days LP

Asscavern & Jet Jaguar KR3 Kill Spree

The Cavern_EdOk, so there’s two groups that you have probably never heard of, unless you are one of the most tenacious, autocephalic, crypt-raiding, independently-sourcing & intransigently-intrepid LURPS-like deep-density-explorers running off the kind of pure renegade fervency that so’ so rarely finds a host in today’s barren paste-land of tube-fed monopolized-media miseducated morons & couch-negatos.

There’s always someone that transcends logical progression & will jump a whole series of evolutionary frames & drastically escalate or indeed, upend entirely, the genre or rubric they are operating in. These two incomparably mutated outfits redefined the whole sonic-scape & took the whole professional-demolition & “Anti-Listener” decimation proficiency to a barely fathomable vertex with tons of idiosyncrasy & lashings of perfectionist experimental birth defects & phonic deformity.

Asscavern- King Of All Kongs (Bleg Excerpt)

Continue reading Asscavern & Jet Jaguar KR3 Kill Spree

Tunnel Canary – Jihad CDR

Tunnel Canary-Jihad

Right so, it’s 1980! & some goons from Vancouver are about to vault a decade or so ahead in some kind of precocious portendral catapulting. Tunnel Canary! Who were active between 1978-1983 & transfigured tremendous histrionic, chaotic wild & fervent horrisonant scream-stippled psychedelic sundry, or using neophyte terminology – “Noise”. The sodality consists of three antagonists – Aleh Kaheen (Nathan Holiday) on electric guitar, synthesizer & “processed effects”, Ebra Ziron on vocals & David Sheftel shifting bass & electronic effects. A massive menu of manoeuvres & modalities are mustered, but heaps of cacophonic, harsh, high-pitched, distraint & turbulent turmoil, string straining fret-foible & guitar grating, searing & psychedelic synths, harsh/super distorted Noise, Feedback, Power Electronics & stentorian frequencies. Continue reading Tunnel Canary – Jihad CDR

Industrial Noise Revival – Eine Stunde Merzbauten CD

Industrial Noise Rivival

A humungous harsh plenoast through the soviet junk-yard & hypogeal caverns & cave-complexes. Industrial Noise Revival is actually veteran Stentorian Radek Kopel & his recently deceased accomplice Martin Beraxa, therefore “Napalmed”, the long running Czech Industrial-Harsh-Experimental-Noise goliath. There are three colossal tracks condensed into a single eighty minute convulsion. So a band called Industrial Noise Revival delivering three tracks actually is Napalmed providing one sustained voltage & venting. The two musicians tear through troves of equipment & sound-substances, but remain firmly in intense free-fall throughout. It’s basically a blank frame with multifarious noise wandering through it. In that respect, it can become fairly laborious. It seems much more like a demonstration of very cool sounds, phonics & ideas.

Continue reading Industrial Noise Revival – Eine Stunde Merzbauten CD

My Life as a Foreign Country – Brian Turner – Autobiography/Memoir

My Life As A Foreign Country282
Brian Turner is a poet/writer & ex US Army veteran who served for seven years with stations in both Bosnia-Herzegovnia & Iraq. This excellent book extends many ruminations & accounts during, after & prior to his deployment, defined by Turner’s starkly descriptive & stylized writing characteristic. His style is blunt & terse but also verbose, ornate & often abstruse & cryptic with many peregrine qualities. It’s evocative & can be considerably ambiguous, sometimes to extremes, I would not even be uncomfortable with christening it avant-garde on occasion, whereas at others it’s profoundly direct with a literary brutality. Some of the passages are very abstract & have a dream-like/oneiric angle. The book can easily be read for these qualities alone, irrespective of any absence of interest in modern war & conflict. but should a desire for knowledge in the inner-realities of recent conflicts be present, Turner’s accounts contain reams of salient information from his very direct experience of military conduct in Iraq & the muted phenomenon of post conflict home-coming/reintegration into the civilian sphere & demilitarization. Continue reading My Life as a Foreign Country – Brian Turner – Autobiography/Memoir