The MOJO CD - Neu Decade

This month the MOJO cover CD features sounds from across Western Europe that contributed to the musical zeitgeist that serenaded David Bowie during his brief stint in the German capital in the later years of the 1970s, to tie in with their feature article on Mr Jones' time in Berlin. Twelve of the fifteen tracks are German and the CD forms a loose collection of the less obvious Kosmische Musik of the times, less obvious because more than likely licensing issues prevented the use of the usual suspects. This makes it far more interesting than it might otherwise have been, and Neu Decade seems at times like a trawl through the lesser played slabs of vinyl in my small, yet perfectly formed Krautrock collection.

Developing free from the constraints of a deeply ingrained blues and latterly, rock'n'roll heritage, these bands and artists naturally ventured well beyond those base building blocks of all British and American alternative musical culture to forge something entirely new from the ruins of post war Germany, and beyond.  These musicians lived in a brave new world where electronics and keyboards often took precedence over the electric guitar, with a few very notable exceptions of course, and these pioneering sound technicians were boldly going where no ostensibly "rock" bands had gone before, and in that sense were making truly progressive music.

Michael Rother - Karussell
In keeping with the Bowie-in-Berlin theme it is fitting that the opening track comes from Deutschrock luminary Michael Rother, who was due to collaborate with Bowie in 1977, a pairing that unfortunately didn't come off. This track, from Rother's first solo album sounds like his former band Neu! with electronic motorik rhythms replacing Klaus Dinger's thunder.

Brainticket - To Another Universe
This multi-national band always gave the impression that they were powered by the choicest psychotropic drugz, as this dislocating voyage along misfiring synapses testifies. This track is lifted from the 1973 album Celestial Ocean, a fried trip recounting the "after-life experience of Egyptian kings traveling through space and time", and who am I to argue? Brainticket made much use of narration instead of singing, a gimmick that does wear a bit thin after a while. I can think of a modern band who should take note.

Amon Düül II - Fly United
One of the big names now... this track is lifted from Amon Düül II's 1973 Vive La Trance album. By then, the splinter group "II" from the original Amon Düül agitprop hippy commune had lost some of the more outlandish and experimental musical edge that gave birth to such masterpieces of unclassifiable lysergic wiggery as Phallus Dei and Yeti, but this song is still a fair representation of their loose acid rock vibe.

Can - Future Days (edit)
From the Cologne masters' new singles box set, Damo and the boys craft three minutes, twenty two seconds' worth of seemingly effortless sassy elegance. However, why bother with an edit when the full nine and a half minutes long version awaits you on the LP of the same name, I wonder?

Cluster - Dem Wanderer
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius were perhaps the most bookish pair in Deutschrock...well, they were on a par with Schneider and Hütter at least. This intriguing example of what I can only term intellectual ambience from their marvellously rarefied 1976 Sowieoso album goes "sproing" in a fetchingly chin-stroking fashion.

Deuter - Der Turm/Fluchtpunkt
Primitive and experimental, this is what Deutschrock is all about. Listen to this free form piece of music from multi instrumentalist Georg Deuter and you can hear elements common to the early explorations of all the more well known bands that fall into this singularly individualistic category.

His first album, from which this track is taken was released in 1971 and is simply entitled D. It is something of a below-the-surface classic of the time, since when Deuter has gone on to amass a huge discography of exploratory music.

Guru Guru - Electric Junk
Apart from the later Roedelius track and the album closer, this is as close as anything on this album to rock music. But this is free rock music or ur-rock musik, as Mr Cope would put it. There are no rules, and after charging out of the traps, the LSD takes hold of the elephant as it wastes all before it. About halfway in the whole band decide...heeeyyy...let's talk about this, as they loll about on a burst sofa discussing the next move before a rolling bass line takes the tune down the road in the company of some fine Hendrix inspired wigout. Bloody marvellous! This is from their 1971 second album Hinten, part of a run of unmissable early albums you need to hear if you like having your mind fried by off the wall guitar music with seemingly no precedents.

The band are led by a wonderfully barking and very powerful drummer by the name of Mani Neumeier, whose Bonzo-on-acid tub thumping wanders up the garden path to Earthly Delights hand in hand with Uli Trepte's thunderous bass. The spearpoint of this unfettered power trio was a guitarist whose untramelled riffing and spiked soloing made for a whole that is a parallel universe Cream, born in a world were the twelve-bar had never been played. Also, the plank spanker has possibly the best name for a guitarist one could possibly wish for - come on down Ax Genrich!

Popol Vuh - Steh Auf, Zieh, Mich Dir Nach
Popol Vuh were formed in 1969 by classically trained pianist Florian Fricke, who, thanks to his rich family was one of the very first owners of a Moog Synthesiser. Depending on which source you believe, it allegedly cost up to DM800,000, and was probably the size of a small shed. Who said prog wasn't a middle class sport? Wanting to take his already reverential music in yet more elegiac directions, Fricke later sold his synth to Klaus Schulze, making him doubly influential in the instrument's beginnings.

This track is from 1975's Das Hohelied Salomos, the Vuh's sixth album, by which time Fricke's use of the synth is eschewed for a more organic and ethnic approach, with guest musicians playing sitar and tabla.

Roedelius - Am Rockzipfel
A later entry into the fray, this is from Roedelius' first solo album in 1978, and presents us with a very untypical bluesy chug that keeps on breaking down like it realises it doesn't quite belong in this universe. Satisfyingly odd.

Conrad Schnitzler - Die Rebellen Haben Sich In Den Bergen Versteckt (Schaltkreis Edit)
An early member of Tangerine Dream, and Kluster, the pre-Cluster group with Roedelius and Moebius that reflected the harder inital consonant in its steely-edged industrial soundscaping, Conrad Schnitzler went on to have a long solo career. His career-long experimental inclinations are present and correct on this sparse electro march of the robots from 1974.

Tim Blake - Metro Logic
The only Brit on this compilation, Tim Blake was of course a member of Gong, before escaping the mothership in 1975 to make some langorous synth music of his own.

Pyrolator - Danger Crusing
The next three tracks take us into the post-punk era. Pyrolator was ex-DAF member Kurt Dahlke, who here makes some almost friendly, yet icily creepy noise.

Richard Pinhas - The Last Kings Of Thule (Part 1)
Mavellously left-field French guitarist Richard Pinhas of Heldon fame should need no introduction if you've been paying attention, and here we have a track of typical brooding strangitude from the 1979 album Iceland, one I admit I have not heard before and will now be searching out.

DAF - Bild 4
Another entry from the post-punk years, DAF were a full-on music-concrete-with-a-punk-sensibility experience. This is from the group's feral 1979 debut album Ein Produkt der Deutsch Amerikanischen-Freundschaft. Uneasy listening to rattle yer fillings.

Tangerine Dream - Ultima Thule Part 1
Pick a tune to represent one of Krautrock's top six bands, in this case West Berlin's Tangerine Dream, whose Edgar Froese first used the words "Kosmiche Music" to define his and his peers' common ground, and it wouldn't be this VERY sub-Floydian throwaway debut single from 1971, that sounds like it should have been recorded in 1967. Still, a strangely neat end to an interesting CD, nonetheless.
...

As ever with these magazine CDs, there are some obvious and some not so obvious omissions. It is a shame that there is no Ash Ra Tempel from their early "guitar" daze, a band so out on limb they made Guru Guru sound like a completely rational proposition, but for anyone unfamiliar with all but the most well-known German rock of the 1970s this is not a bad compilation at all.

When is a review not a review? When it goes Grrrrnnnnggghh, that's when...

This started out as a review of an album entitled Synchromysticism by a band of renegades calling themselves Yowie...

Apparently first used after an incident in Prague Castle in 1618 that initiated the Thirty Years War, “defenestration” is the act of throwing someone out of a window. This begs the question that, being Prague, it must have been spoken in Slavic tongue and therefore was not “defenestration” at all, but some semi-guttural utterance us pampered Anglos would have no hope of pronouncing. Anyway, nitpicking at the technical niceties of language while simultaneously having a dig at the limitations of Wikipedia aside, the drummist and de-facto leader of this band of American lunatics goes by the name of Defenestrator. If that isn’t a reason to review an album I don’t know what is, and boy, do I need a reason right now.

You see over the past couple of months I have lost my writing mojo, and no doubt that provokes a sigh of relief from you, dear long-suffering reader. In fact if you’re still reading this, you are one of only thirteen people worldwide who do not merely skim-read these missives, and for that I commend you. If I were giving out prizes you would get an overripe banana sent by elf piloted moose to any destination you choose. I'm not so you'll have to make do with feeling superior...it works for me!

Actually I haven’t so much lost my mojo – as this stream of liquid brown stuff proves – as I am increasingly despairing at the incessant tsunami of musical flotsam, jetsam, sewage, and worse, that rises in never-ending huge waves and breaks over the collective hard drives at Astounded by Sound Towers, falling away to leave behind piles of indistinguishable fare that 40 years ago would not have got much further than the limited imaginations of its creators. I include much-lauded name acts in this invective as I do the most unknown of amateur bedroom musicians.

The rock era is dead, there are no stars any more. Cynical exploitation knows no bounds and now includes tours of holograms of dead rock stars fronting bands of bewildered musos who must be wondering what the very fuck they’re doing there...oh yeah, it’s a wage, ain’t it? The latest of these farces, following on from the pioneering “Ronnie James Dio”, is the Zappa estate’s latest bid to kill off the career of the only true representative of the great man’s music, his son Dweezil, by way of a hologram of the icon fronting gawd knows who as a backing band. Whoever they are should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Next up, watch as the tour industry for actual living bands and musos dies on its feet as this new Frankenstein’s monster in the nostalgia industry eats up all before it in an orgy of race-to-the-bottom capitalismos, co-sponsored by the shiniest of regulation sidestepping teflon-coated taxi apps. Get driven to the gig, and possibly home if you’re lucky, but via the woods, by an un-vetted leering psychopath who puts up with being paid £2.31 an hour by his “employer”, because it gives him the chance to indulge his dark obsessions. Imagine said swivel-eyed dribbler delivering you to your favourite bar to watch “Frank Sinatra” fronting “The Sex Pistols” while you enjoy a hummus burger with mogo chips served on an upturned toilet seat. Actually, don’t imagine that at all, it’s not good for the soul. At the going down of the sun and between the jumpers for goalposts, it’s all our fault ultimately as “we” will head off in droves to watch these atrocity shows while real culture dies starving.

Oh...hang on...Synchromysticism by Yowie....it’s certainly different, to a point. They obviously love Ruins. I'll review it properly, later...maybe. To be fair to them, you can hear it all HERE.

That is all, now go and away and do something useful like hacking into the mainframe of a hologram projection company and turning all their holograms into Hitler...or summat.

Yours explosively, Roger McNasty

V Ä L V Ē - #1 [the theosophical society]

With every other member of Knifeworld being involved in at least three other bands as well as having parallel solo careers, as musicians, DJs, and sword swallowers, it would be remiss of the Knives' resident bassoonist Chloe Herington to sit at home putting up shelves, don't you think? She did too, so with the help of "a spectacular array of rather fetching collaborators" adding saxophones, found sounds, and fragile electronica, this somewhat beguiling EP was produced.

It sounds like anything that required electricity to power it was plugged into a single socket in next door's garage while they weren't looking via stacked three-plug adapters, such is the tottering fragility of the music herein. Some say that avant garde music is often unnecessarily indulgent, and wilful for the sake of it, but this is another creature entirely, blown on the winds of a febrile imagination.

If I am forced to describe this music in two words, that epithet is "dangerously cute", or maybe "cutely dangerous". #1 [the theosophical society] is a taster for a forthcoming album rather discomfitingly entitled Silent Reflux, which despite the name I look forward to with heightened curiosity, pricked further awake by the appearance of a fully formed song in the last track here, lights. #1 [the theosophical society] has inculcated itself with that song, and I require more.

Tracklist:
1. atmos #1 (6:18)
2. {da} FEM (3:14)
3. futures (4:27)
4. lights (4:24)

Total running time - 18:23

Line up:
Chloe Herington - voice, shelf, bass, melodica, percussion
Elen Evans - harp, voice
Emma Sullivan - microkorg, voice

Links:
Bandcamp
Facebook

Colouratura - Colouratura

"Colouratura - n. elaborate ornamentation of a vocal melody, especially in operatic singing."

So says the dictionary, and thankfully we can ignore what follows the comma, but the rest applies.

An album made in small hours in their spare time by Nathan James, who wrote the music, and Ian Beabout who twiddled knobs in his fast becoming inimitable fashion, this unusual trip throws the genre book out the window. Over the course of its 50 minutes, a seamless journey split into definable songs or tracks for convenience, but playing as one piece, Colouratura in its first three tracks covers spectral if unsettling ambience, plaintive ballad and Faustian space rock, which gives an idea of the "scattergun set to stun" nature of this record.

The height of the realised songwriting on the album arrives on Sea Shanty, which sways along in proto-Procol Harum fashion before a middle eight that rides the swell in triple time. Nathan James is a fine singer with a good range and emotive scope, so much so that pernickety bugger that I am, I can even forgive him very occasionally going slightly wayward with the pitch (no doubt something to do with the yaw) on Sea Shanty as he gives his soul to "For what is a man, if he's not really free? And what is human without dreams and destiny?" What, indeed?

The title track is a love song accompanied by lone piano, and the obviously needed bridge of The Other Side takes us straight into the baroque-prog territory of Jekyll.Hyde, which puts me in mind of The Stranglers from their Meninblack phase. Enlivened by Dave Newhouse's sax, an air of menace permeates proceedings as Nathan's treated voice sings his fatalistic lyric to us. A degree of continuity brings us the suitably creepy Old Nightmares, introduced by a piano in a Gothic setting, and like a Hammer movie, the horror is with an element of cheese. "There are voices in my head, and I can't get them out, but I can't let them in...I think I'm losing my mind" our narrator tells us along with mentions of "the witching hour", "evil" and Vincent Price cackling. Mmmwwwhahahahaha...

In fact, from Jekyll.Hyde onwards Colouratura becomes more cohesive, as if the spirits have aligned in a world of Gothic pop, confronting death, war, and the big Questions, the latter ending the album in a punky charge as the sun comes up over the mixing desk.

All bases are, if not covered, at least fleetingly visited on this never-a-dull-moment album of after hours winding down (and up), and it has developed a life of its own along the way. "A labour of love, and it shows" says Ian Beabout, but warts and all this is a fun ride through two mates letting off steam at the end of stressful days out there in the increasingly insane "real" world. The Matrix is broken, and this is part of the soundtrack.

Tracklist:
1. Cacophony (4:24)
2. Questions? (3:15)
3. Space Western (4:07)
4. Sea Shanty (6:55)
5. Colouratura (4:00)
6. The Other Side (1:22)
7. Jekyll.Hyde (7:57)
8. Old Nightmares (6:08)
9. Until You Slip Away (5:49)
10. Hymn (2:47)
11. Questions (3:14)

Total running time - 49:58

Line up:
Nathan James - voice, piano, bass, guitar, keyboard, percussion, ARP 2600
Ian Beabout - flute, treatments, narration, dragon breaths

With:

Ryan Smurthwaite - guitar
Brandon Collins - drums, cajon, guitar, whistle
Dave Newhouse - woodwinds
Connor Reilly - drums
Evyenia Karapolous - voice
Damon Waitkus - guitar, slide guitar

Links:
Bandcamp

The Fall - New Facts Emerge

New Facts Emerge is the 32nd album from that strange mental institution burning that goes by the name of The Fall. Led by Mark E. Smith, it is entirely probable that you or I is at least distantly related to someone who has been in The Fall, or at the very least is only three steps removed from a plucky musician with a career death wish to back Smith's by now embarrassingly random splutterings. They seem to be drawn to Smith like moths to a flame, and he has got through approximately 70 of the poor fuckers since crawling out of Prestwich with the first line up back in 1976.

Over the years this band has belted out some stonkingly classic records, and even now and well beyond their prime have until fairly recently managed to pepper their albums with blasts of righteous indignation that make the former fan such as I still occasionally part with readies for a shiny disc. Yes, we still buy CDs, for like Mr Smith we are now quite old. The last time I did this was back in 2008 for Imperial Wax Solvent purely on the strength of that marvellous old bloke empowerment anthem, 50 Year Old Man. That they actually played that song the last time I saw them live in 2011 was a minor miracle in itself as Smith's dictum has always been "Never look back", for which he can only be applauded.

Right...that's the good news. The bad news is that for a while now Smith seems to be doing little more than taking the piss, or letting it leak out, come to think of it. Coincidentally, the track I have playing right now is tellingly entitled O! Zztrrk Man, a title almost as unintelligible as the deliberately distorted and garbled (yarbled?) declaiming by the cult leader as he slumps in the darkest corner of the most downmarket cheap shit room imaginable, a two-thirds drunk pint of cheap lager next to his slumped head as it burbles incoherently into a pool of beer, drool, and fag ash. That about sums it up - Smith could make a recording of his bathroom noises and set it to the competent but uninspiring backing of his latest bunch of poor drone-slaves, and the regulation 19706 units would be shifted to the supplicants who will then declare it nectar from the gods to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately for them, some of us old fuckers still have our discernment faculties intact, fangyewverymuch.

OK, maybe it's not THAT bad - Gibbus Gibson is actually sung, after a fashion, and though I have no idea what he was singing about, it sounds vaguely melancholic, and possibly even self-reflective. Or is that hoping for too much? You see the problem is, much like the worst excesses of the obese and flatulent arse of prog rock, aka ELP, Mark E. Smith appears to have little or no self awareness, and seems to treat his audience with a similar lofty disdain to the 70s dinosaurs. Ironic that, doncha think?

By the time this grating record gets round to the last track, the almost prog-length nine minute Nine Out Of Ten, I just want it to stop, much like The Fall themselves. To think this sad spectacle once used to be genuinely cutting edge and singularly magnificent. Unfortunately, this album is nowhere near nine out of ten, and no new facts have emerged, it simply confirms my worst suspicions.
Bloody sad, really.

Jumble Hole Clough - Go and play quietly by yourself

Foreclose on the definite, obliterate all expectations. From the building blocks start anew. Reconnect the heart to the mind via the spidery funk line. Dangle a proposition and attach it to the running board of a runaway bus, for this is the start of a new adventure. The unknown is not un-named, it is Go and play quietly by yourself, the 758th album this epoch from Jumble Hole Clough, a possibly imaginary concept that exists both before and after Schrodinger opens his box in the troubled hamlet of Hebden Bridge yesterday. The tree fell in the forest, no-one observed it apart from Colin Robinson who wrote a tune about something else entirely called Skin & Hide that combined pop and the fractured dissonance of our troubled souls. "Goat and gland, Autonomy in hand, Don’t fill your ear full of sand".

Colin's work will engage your noggin as well as make you smile, possibly at one and the same time. This is the kind of multi-tasking I can cope with. Colin's hovercraft is always full of eels, which is probably why he gets few paying customers. Slippery blighters, eels, and some of these sprout wings and fly off dripping and shimmering before being sucked into the turbines of passing budget airliners, flying low to see if they can ascertain where all this goddam interference is coming from.

Can you send me one of Santa's Swearing Elves for Xmas?

You can get this sequence of noises HERE, and Colin invites you to Name Your Price. It would be good if you bought it for cash money, he needs a new shovel to bury all those dismembered eels that fell from the sky and landed in his front garden t'other day...

Schnauser - Irritant

Madness, they call it madness...

In my fevered imaginings I would like to think that the annoyingly over-capable DIY Sturmführer Dick Strawbridge, he of the unfeasibly humungous moustache and loveable teddy bear persona was playing the Midi-kazoo for Schnauser, the wonderfully strange yet cuddly combo from Bristol, as they cavort around the stage playing Have You Got PPI?, a particularly loose-limbed number from their fabulously tumescent new album Irritant. In my peculiar fantasy, Dick looks proudly over to his son, guitarist and singist Alan as he belts out the wonky wonderfulness that comprises Schnauser’s weird yet perfectly self-contained universe, as strange tiny creatures synchronously writhe about in Dad's bristling upper lip hair monster.

In other news it turns out that "We are the brainworm" as the Nutty Boys play klezmer, and enquiries are made by chanting girl choruses asking "Have You Got PPI?" while a craftily purloined cheesy synth line from Bowie's Sound And Vision burbles away. Above all this lunacy, the melody is king and queen, and on the lilting but portentous Fail Better, the lyric implores the listener to get off their collective ass and try again. Failure may be the only option, but goddamn, do it better! A curiously fatalistic take on the Protestant work ethic that no doubt has crossed all our horizons at some point. On the other hand "Get yourself a life boy, get yourself a life girl" as the broiling sounds of wildly careening guitar, saxes and and noises off permeate the stately pace of the melody. Groovy feckers, this Schnauser band, who have caused my newsfeed to be inundated with adverts for the International Schnauzer Society, Alsatians For Jesus, and Poodles On Stumps, the bastards...the band, not the doggies, c'mon.

The club band at the local Latino Disco strike up here and there with a carefree joyfulness that flies in the face of the heavy manners of these perma-weird times. Hypertension is only displayed in the tune's title as this infectious instrumental does odd things with your pelvis. The album title is another misnomer, for this fab record is about as annoying as being given a full body massage by...insert your fantasy rubdown applier here. She or he is however suffering from a caffeine overdose, won't stop talking while chewing his or her bottom lip. It's a small price to pay.

A New Atmosphere is a snake-hipped bossa nova for dancers with at least two left feet. This thing schwings, baby, in a louche Hatfields kinda fashion, before briefly meeting 10:15 as it furtively leaves the bedroom, then subsequently descending to the bottom of the well, where workers go blind making mustard gas shells. There be an underlying seriousness at work, doncha know? They even get in a good old rant against the Bullingdon Bullies and turkeys voting for Xmas on The Monday Club, another musically satisfying trip through a series of vaguely familiar motifs, that as a whole make for the knee-flexing Schnauser Sound, ending like early Roxy swirling away down the plug hole.

It is over two and a half years since Schnauser's last album, the defiantly odd Protein For Everyone, and the Bristolians have refined their once fierce quirkiness into a gloriously fun experience. Irritant is just right for these surreal summer months as collective madness descends upon this benighted nation. The ongoing Schadenfreude Party is going to be a long one, methinks. All hail Supreme Leader Boris as we barf into our soup.

Sorry, got sidetracked there...Gleaning the influences that inspire this record is like lowering a net into an over-populated fish tank and coming up with a bewildering variety of writhing aquatic wildlife. This smorgasbord of delights is the combination of everything you can think of, from Cardiacs, through Madness, to Ivor Cutler via The Beatles and very early Daevid Allen/Kevin Ayers' Soft Machine, and on to Syd's Floyd, Berlin Bowie and XTC. As a result it cannot be pigeonholed for convenience.

Just give it a listen over on Bandcamp, for it bears bounteous gifts. Hopefully, this drooling missive might make you curious enough to buy it. Right. I'm off to join The Chocolate Labrador Motorcyle Club...

Tracklist:

1. Spiele Mit Katzen (4:21)
2. Chinese Brainworm (Taenia Solium) (4:48)
3. Re-Mortgaging The Nest Of Hair (4:12)
4. Sorry, You Were Out... (1:24)
5. Have You Got PPI? (4:44)
6. How About A Kiss? (4:06)
7. Fail Better (6:35)
8. Hypertension (4:15)
9. A New Atmosphere (8:22)
10. The Monday Club (7:43)
11. Speile-Jangle (Reprise) (2:17)

Total running time - ...about as long as a couple of very leisurely pints, or the time it takes Kat to saunter up the garden at 2:30am, catch, bring home and devour a luckless rodent, at the foot of our bed.

Line up:

Alan Strawbridge – guitars, vocals
Dino Christodoulou – tenor and soprano saxophones, vocals
Duncan Gammon – keyboards, vocals
Holly Mcintosh – bass guitar, vocals
Jasper Williams – drums, vocals

Links:

Bandcamp 

Facebook  - Schnauser 
Facebook - Bad Elephant Music

Footnote: No YouTube video available for this album, though if you type "Schnauser Irritant" into YT's search engine the first vid is the instructional "How to keep your mini-schnauzer's beard unstained", which you might find useful. Glad to be of help.