Name Me Someone Thats Not A Parasite

YUCK INTERVIEW FOR THE CREATORS PROJECT MAGAZINE

2011-09-13T07:37:00.001-07:00

Atthe beginning of 2010 Yuck seemingly came from nowhere to become the only indieband that anyone cares about in London within a few short months. That’sprobably because, hiding behind a bracing combination of hazy reverb, feedbackand lo-fidelity recording, lie the bones of perfectly executed songwriting, melodichooks and memorable choruses. It is no coincidence that despite their relativeyouth as a band both Dinosaur Jr and Teenage Fanclub have requested Yuck toopen shows for them.

DanielBlumberg and Max Bloom, the bands core songwriting duo, may be London nativesbut Yuck’s rhythm section of Mariko Doi and Jonny Rogoff made it all the wayfrom Hiroshima and New Jersey respectively to play with the band. If thereception the Yuck have been greeted with by both critics and audience alike isanything to go by then their journeys have been well worthwhile.

Ifyou’ve been hiding under a big boulder, in a very dark cave, somewhere on aplanet very far from Earth you may still be yet to hear Yuck but that’s OK. Youcan stay there because pretty soon everyone will be humming their songs all theway out there too.

The Creators Project: Howdid you guys meet? You are a pretty globally cosmopolitan band.
Daniel (voclas/guitars): Max and Ihave been friends since we were very young and we’ve played music together foryears. I’d known Mariko for ages and I met Jonny in the dessert in Israel.

How did you end up togetherin the Israeli dessert?
Daniel: I was on holiday there forfive days and I hitch hiked to this kibbutz out in the dessert as a few of myfriends were living and working there. Jonny was just there.
Jonny: I was living there and hisfriends had told me he was in band and I had been in a band back in the Statesso despite the fact that we only hung out for about four hours we decided weshould form a band together. I think we were both kind of joking but 6 monthslater I got this massive Facebook message from Daniel talking about all thismusic that we both liked and saying that we had to start the band.

So you cyber stalked himDaniel?
Daniel: Basically. I set up aFacebook account just to contact Jonny. Up until then it had just been myselfand Max playing in Max’s room and it had become obvious that we needed adrummer.

Max: We had been watching all theseYouTube videos of Jonny playing in his old band and it seemed like he was theright guy for the job. His old band was called Impossible Voyage and they wereprobably the best band in the world ever.
Jonny: I wouldn’t go that far. Weplayed this kind of a progressive-space-shoegaze-metal and I loved to play withthose guys but my taste was always a little less hardcore than theirs and whenDaniel sent me the songs he’d been working on I was blown away. I realised thatDaniel was offering me the choice to play in the kind of band I had alwayswanted to be in but had never had the opportunity to play in before.

So you just up and leftthe States?
Jonny:Pretty much. I left university after having only been there for 6 weeks. I’donly really studied my bed and the girl next door who I’d fallen in love with.

That is a big commitment.What kind of music had you had all bonded over?
Daniel: Titus Andronicus, The SilverJews, Pavement. That kind of stuff. We love the Silver Jews. I did a recordwith a guy in Nashville once who had worked on a bunch of Silver Jews andBonnie “Prince” Billy records and I basically spent three weeks asking him DaveBerman and Will Oldham stories and not getting much done.

You can certainly hearechoes of those artists in your songs.
Daniel:We just write songs and we write lots of them and what comes out comes out. Youtry and write the kind of music that you would want to listen to so I guess yourtastes do end up being reflected in the music that you make.

One of the elements thatmakes your recordings unique is their low-fidelity which gives them a prettydistinct sound was it a conscious decision to record in that style?
Daniel:In terms of the things we have released so far we just didn’t want to re-recordanything. We were happy with the general sound of the tracks we demoed in Max’sroom on his 8-track so we just released the ones that sounded most finished.
Max: We wouldn’t want the album orwhatever we put out next to be a big leap in terms of sound from the demos andearly releases so we will probably just continue recording in the same way,straight from a microphone in to an 8 track with maybe some drum tracksrecorded in a studio.

You guys have had a lotof attention for a band that has been around for such a sort space of time, howdo you feel about the Internet and web technology with regard to your music?
Daniel:In terms of the actual music it is just boring in a way and kind of irrelevant.I think a lot of people just read about things and have opinions about themwithout actually listening to them. But in terms of getting our music out thereand allowing people to listen to it and enjoy it it’s pretty amazing.
Max: Basically, all the attentionand stuff makes no difference to what we do as a band or would make us stopdoing what we do or change what we do in any way.
Daniel: Soon enough some new bandwill turn up and everyone will be talking about them instead. You just need tokeep things in perspective and not let things like that affect your mind.

Do you look forward to apoint when people don’t talk about you so much?
Daniel: If people are actuallylistening to the records and like them then that’s nice and it’s amazing thatwe can do this full time. That is probably the biggest benefit of the wholething.

How does the writingprocess work for Yuck?
Max:Daniel and I are just constantly writing songs and we’ll then take them toMariko and Jonny and together we’ll finish them off with drums and bass.
Daniel: I try not to think aboutlyrics too much and just try to just get them down. Vocal melodies just soundnice in the context of the song. Sometimes the lyrics end up meaning somethingover time but I’ve never really listened to lyrics much aside from Silver Jewsor Red House Painters songs.

You guys got to supportDinosaur Jr recently who sound like a big influence, how was that for you guys?
Jonny:That was a pretty amazing night.
Max: Not only did we get to supportDinosaur Jr but we also met Kevin Shields backstage and it was the day beforemy birthday. The reason that I started making music was basically because of JMascis and My Blood Valentine so it was ridiculous meeting them both in onenight. The guy who did My Bloody Valentine’s sound actually did our sound whenwe played with Teenage Fanclub in Edinburgh.
Daniel: That show was probably evenbetter than the Dinosaur Jr one. They were really cool as well.

So meeting your heroesdoesn’t suck after all?
Daniel: Not for us so far.

STARKEY LIVE REVIEW FOR NME

2011-09-13T07:36:00.001-07:00

Starkey
Corsica Studios
12/06/10

Entering notoriousSouth London rave enclave Corsica Studios to find the club resembling JimHenson’s Creature Workshop on DMT hardly seemed a fitting backdrop for Philadelphiastreet-bass pioneer Starkey to make the live debut of his peerless debut longplayer Eat Drums And Black Holes.

Thankfully the B-Movieanimatronics and visuals which had accompanied Brummie dubstepper Milanese’slive warm-up set were toned down to a minimum as Starkey took to the stage.

Mumbling that it wasthe first time he had played live in London for “a coupla years” and seekingrefuge crouched low behind the comforting glow of his Mac and a pair ofsequencers Starkey really need not have been so nervous.

From the first subbass stab and synth swoop of LP opener “OK Luv” Strakey had the capacity crowdin the palm of his hand. While many would argue that dubstep and the fragmentedaxis of sounds that coalesce around the genre is best conveyed via thetraditional DJ set Starkey makes a strong case to the contrary.

It doesn’t hurt thatthe material he is performing is so strong. EatDrums And Black Holes is filled with riches: unique drum programming thatswings and steps, Joker-esque saturated synths and of course deadly, deep subbass that rattles the rib cage more than adequately.

While album tracks“Necksnap” and “Alienstyles” may have been dancefloor standouts for the ravingcrew it was the glacially tender “Spacecraft” which saw Starkey picking up themic to recreate the track’s plaintive vocal refrain, truly melting hearts andtaking the set from the special to the sublime.

SHANE EMBURY INTERVIEW FOR VICELAND.COM

2011-09-13T07:35:00.003-07:00

Vice: Hello Shane. Napalm Death have been going forthree whole decades now. That is a pretty long time. What has allowed Napalm toendure where so many others have whimpered off into obscurity?

Shane Embury (bass): Wehave always been fans of music so that helps. There have been many times ofdoubt but we have hung in there somehow. We are pretty close as friends butwe’re also diverse as people and our influences reflect that. We also came fromthe old school way of doing things and although we keep an eye on what’shappening out there we just try and do our own thing. We’ve reached a point nowwhere we feel very confident in our style but we equally feel like we can’t reson what we’ve done in the past so we try to move forward while keeping respectfor what got us noticed in the first place.

Supersonic is a Birmingham metal festival. Do Napalmstill feel like a Birmingham metal band?

We area Birmingham band for sure even though we have two Americans in the band thesedays they’re probably more Brummie than we are. Birmingham is a strange city. Ithink it has a lot of layers that people overlook and a lot of great musicians asproved by the past and the present. Supersonic will feel like a homecoming I amsure.

What was in the water in Birmingham and the Midlands tocause so many bands like Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Doom, Heresy,Ripcord, Unseen Terror to pop up in the 80’s?

WellENT were from Ipswich and Ripcord were Bristol based but still smallish citiesnontheless, If you are into heavy music in Birmingham there has always been athriving scene of kids who are eager to break out of where they are. If you gointo Scruffy Murphys you will see punks and metal heads coming in afterwork and there still seems to be a fire in the eyes and a keenness to bond andreach out and create. I actually come from Shropshire near Ironbridge and movedto Birmingham many years ago. All I wanted to do was make music like my heroes:Black Sabbath. Judas Priest and Discharge and when I moved here I met peoplewho wanted to do the same thing. Life can be oppressive sometimes and musichelps you escape that plus Birmingham has a grey, dark side like most citiesbut look at it's track record. There have been so many great and musicallydifferent bands that have emerged over the years that there has to be somethingin the water. It all just depends on how you want to channel your energyreally.

Who else are you excited to see play Supersonicthis year?
Godflesh, Swans and no doubt some othe

PURO INSTINCT SXSW LIVE REVIEW FOR NME

2011-09-13T07:35:00.001-07:00

Pruoro Instinct
ND @ 501
16/03/11

The Kaplan sisters mayhave traded in their former Pearl Harbour moniker but they have lost none oftheir effortlessly melodic ability to put a tune together while picking up asix piece band along the way.

Lead vocalist Piperhad a conscientiously hip crowd eating out of the palm of her hand with asassily energetic and reverb drenched display of showomanship redolent of acoquettish, young Debbie Harry.

Anchored by afaultless rhythm section younger sister Skylar (who’s all of sixteen)effortlessly poured out myriad snaking guitar lines simultaneously calling tomind McGuinn and Marr while providing each number with a lilting, escalatingenergy which has a habit of spilling in to moments of sheer, ecstatic joy notseen since the wiry psychedelic freakouts of Brian Jonestown Massacre at theirbest.

Puro Instinct’s debutLP proclaims them to be Headbangers inEcstasy. As potential summer anthem “Stilyagi” rang out we couldn’t haveput it better if we tried.

VICE V9N4 REVIEWS

2011-09-13T07:34:00.001-07:00

Thurston Moore
Demolished Thoughts
Matador

6 A bizarre sequenceof total non-sequiturs which hang together only by dint of their shared oddnessof both words and recording quality. But come on: anything less from a Thurstonsolo record produced by Beck would have been a total disappointment. UncleThurston even manages to squeeze in an ode to the semi-obscure early 20^thcentury bohemian poet/actress/artist Mina Loy which, let’s face it, you aren’tgoing to get on the Brother record.

Ezra Found

Tennis
Cape Dory
Carmen San Diego Records

5 All these husband & wife and girlfriend & boyfriend duos are gettingpretty nauseating. Everyone thought it was gross when Mates Of State wereairing their fey, indie affection for each other in public five years ago sowhat’s changed? There are more girl/boy duos knocking about this year thanjangly indie bands with bad Paul Weller haircuts and this record is the finalstraw. I’m not taking it anymore. Who’s with me?

Jim Kinsella

Panda Bear
Tomboy
Paw Tracks

8 Sung Tongs seems a long time ago and I guess we just have to facethe fact that, for better or worse, the early naughts class of Animal Gang GangMarkers are now part of the furniture and safe bets for end of year “Best Of”lists on just about ever lazy music aggregating website out there. For all the grief this groundshift hasgarnered in some indier than thou quarters when records this good are beingkicked out who cares whether it was released in a sandpaper sleeve limited toeleven copies or not? Stepping away from the total aural saturation of Person Pitch and presenting a morefocussed sound mixed by ex-Spacemen 3 oddjob genius Sonic Boom has made for yetanother record that should rightfully make the top end of all those lists.Here’s hoping he doesn’t make us wait another four years for another one.

Peter Shilton

Cass McCombs
Wit’s End
Domino Records

9 The saddest thing abouta Cass McCombs record is not how beautifully bittersweet and perfectly executedhis songs are but how few people seem to recognise how far ahead of anyone elsehe is at pouring his heart out over wistfully melancholy arrangements. Yetanother heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Waylon Jammings

VICE V9N1 REVIEWS

2011-09-13T07:33:00.001-07:00

Mob Rules
The Donor
Zandor/Grot Records

10 Ear perforating,malevolent misanthropy from Leeds’, nay the UK’s finest hardcore band. The factthat this sounds very little like a conventional hardcore band and a lot like avery angry Rorschach crashing into a very loud Bl’ast is nothing but a goodthing. I’d like to see another UK ‘punk’ band come close to this long playerbut for me all bets are off, I’ll happily put my money on The Donor being my hardcore record of whatever we are calling thisdecade we are just about entering.

Clifford More-Dins

Sun Airway
Nocturne Of Exploded Crystal Chandelier
Dead Oceans

7 Ohkay so the saying the words “nocturne of exploded crystal chandelier” outloud in that particular order is only ever going to make you sound like a fifthrate Sal Paradise wannabe which is never desirable. That aside Philly duo SunAirway have crafted ten warm, wafting tracks here that prove their able remixwork for folks like Delorean and Here We Go Magic to be no fluke.

Seymour Butts

Ultraphallus
Sowberry Hagan
Riot Season

8 Riot Season have a fairly impeccable track record when it comes to puttingout cacophonous albums of the doom-y persuasion. However, this LP may well bethe first release on the label to contain both a soprano saxophone and a banjo withoutstraying too far from the imprint’s tried and tested formula. Only a bunch ofbatshit crazy Belgians named after a ginormous penis could pull off a move sobold.

Billy Bunter

The Death Set
Michael Poiccard
Counter Records

7 The Death Set have playeda few of our parties over the years and were never less than great live so itwas with sadness that we learned of founder member Beau Velasco’s death byaccidental overdose after many years fighting drug addiction. “MichaelPoiccard” is a sprawling seventeen track tribute to Beau and testament to theband he helped build’s ability to conjure up day-glo ADD punk at the drop of ahat.

Perry Nutkins

Disappears
Guider
Kranky

7 Woah, if you thought you were in for a standard Kranky ambient-a-thon think again.Disappears play balls to the wall rock & roll so brawny it probably hasmuscles on its muscles.. Apparently they recorded this LP direct to tape overthe recording of their first album Lux.You’d of thought Steve Shelley could afford some new tape with all of thoseSonic Youth cheques rolling in but maybe not.

Balla Chada

Æthenor
En Form For Blå
VHF

9 Taken from threelive performances in Norway in 2010 these seven tracks show that Æthenor’sunique, improvised and wholly engrossing meanderings suit a live setting justas well as they do the studio. The group’s core duo of Daniel O’Sullivan andStephen O’Malley are joined here by latest full-time recruit, Ulver’s KristoferRygg and regular Derek Bailey collaborator Stephen Noble. A singular auralexperience.

Peter Shilton

Jesu
Heart Ache & Dethroned
Hydra Head

8 Now that all the excitement of the Godflesh reunion is over new Jesu materialcomes as a welcome departure from all that fearsome noise featuring as it doesJustin K. Broadrick’s more ambient leanings. Don’t be fooled though, this isnot an entirely new release, the HeartAche part actually constitutes a re-release of Jesu’s first EP but staytuned as the Dethroned material isbrand new and as essential as ever.

Biff Tannen

Death
Spritual Mental Physical
Drag City

8 The unearthing of Detroit proto-punk’s Death’s admittedly totally incredible1974 LP …For The World To See wasgreeted like the second coming so I guess that makes these demo recordings fromthe mid-70s the third coming.

Bo Ridley

Geriatric Unit
Audit Of Enemies
Boss Tuneage

8 Weighing in at 23odd minutes Geriatric Unit’s fifth release is actually their longest. Short,sharp blasts of to the point, pissed off punk rock featuring ex-members ofHeresy, Hard To Swallow and Iron Monkey. If you’ve somehow managed to sleep ontheir previous releases this is not a bad place to wake up and get started.

Boss Keloid

Hype Williams
Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Reel
De Stjil

5 I may be missing something but didn’t DJ Screw do this about two decades ago?

Robert Davis

VICE V9N2 REVIEWS

2011-09-13T07:32:00.001-07:00

Gyratory System
New Harmoony
Angular Recordings

8 Another helping ofColtrane does Neubaten whilst wearing a creepy Aphex Twin mask from thisbonkers London based trio. Allegedly the band’s mainstay, producer andtrumpeter “Dr” Andrew Blick, is a constitutional historian who used to work atNo. 10 while he wasn’t cutting records with everyone from Damo Suzuki toGrooverider. If you’ve never heard Gyratory System before that should give yousome idea of what’s in store.

Brandenburg Kate

Crystal Stilts
In Love With Oblivion
Fortuna POP!

7 Crystal Stilts seemto be able to whack out shimmering, lo-fi post-punk gems on demand. That theymanage this while somehow effortlessly cramming whistle-along hooks into the mixmakes them the Stock, Aitken & Waterman of Brooklyn slacker pop for mymoney.

Jill Dando

Parts & Labour
Constant Future
Jagjaguwar

8 If I was in a bandthat every single journalist in the world felt compelled to describe as “difficult”or “challenging” I’d make a whole record that sounded like Will.i.AM autotuningCheryl Cole in a vocoder warehouse just to get a rise. This isn’t quite thatbut it’s about as compellingly accessible as Parts & Labour have soundedthus far.

Hadley Wood

FESTIVAL PREVIEWS FOR VICE 2011 FESTIVAL GUIDE

2011-09-13T07:31:00.001-07:00

Glastonbury

June 22-26, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Glastonbury

Getting in may not be quite the labyrinthinetask of near impossibleness it once was but Uncle Eavis’ annual shindig down onWorthy farm is sure to be full come opening day as 2012 sees the cows gettingthe run of the place while the partying takes a year off. Get past the shockand bore of U2 AND Coldplay both headlining and root around for the likes of techno’snew white hope Nicholas Jaar and the wonderful Omar Souleyman and come rain orshine it will be worth the trip. If there are any tickets left you can get holdof them and all other info at glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

Supersonic
October 21-23, The CustardFactory, Birmingham

Who said festivals had to be in the middle ofAugust? The UK’s best avant-metal festival gives the plethora of summerfestivals the bird and returns to the Custard Factory for another round of allthings heavier than everything else in fittingly grim October. Dorset doomlegends Electric Wizard head up the bill with the undercard proving typicallystrong and including a one off collaboration between David Tibet of Current93 andItalian trio Zu and the welcome return to these shores of Steve Moore’s Zombiproject. Tickets, lineup and the rest at capsule.org.uk

StopMaking Sense
August 12-14, The Garden, Petrcane,Croatia

OK, soyou could either go and drink warm Carling on a strip of mud just outsideReading one-way system and watch Muse and My Chemical Romance OR you couldspend a weekend on a wooded peninsula on the Adriatic coast in a country whereyou can live for a week on what it costs to go to the cinema in LeicesterSquare. The fact that a smorgasbord of all that is currently good and excitingin electronic music, from Martyn to Floating Points via Chad Valley, will beplaying is also not to be sniffed at. Tickets as well as travel andaccommodation advice can be found at sms-2010.com

HopFarm

July 1-2, Paddock Wood, Kent

Likesome benign festival dictator Vince “I made Reading what it is today” Powerinsists on sticking his name above what has actually been a consistently great festivalfor the last few years as long as you were born between 1935 and 1955. Lastyear it was Dylan this year it’s The Eagles, Bryan Ferry, The Human League andsome young whippersnapper called Brandon Flowers. Tickets are £130 for the weekend or £70 per day.Find out more at hopfarmfestival.com

Benicassim
July 14-17, Benicassim,Spain

Somehow Benicassim has sprawled into a being amarathon of a festival with four “official” days sandwiched between various preand after parties. If six days in the sweltering Spanish sol doesn’t seem toobig an ask then you get a valedictory performance from The Streets, a JamesMurphy solo show and Primal Scream doing Screamadelicawhile you’re at it. Tickets for the very long weekend are £177.50. Getthose and all other info at fiberfib.com

SouthwestFour Weekender
August 27-28, Clapham Common, London

Forone weekend only one of London’s prime cruising spots ends up being filled withmore dance music figureheads than the bar at the W hotel during the MiamiWinter Music Conference. Everyone from the old order (Underworld, Digweed, SvenVath, Richie Hawtin) to the young pretenders (Magnetic Man, Joker) will be downthere so if you are in to dancing to repetitive beats don’t sleep on it.Weekend tickets are £95, day tickets are £45 and you can get those and find outmore at southwestfour.com

GetLoaded In The Park

June 12, Clapham Common, London

There are now so many festivals that the factthat a band are only playing one of the damn things in London is now seen as amajor selling point. If you want to be sold Razorlight as that band then lookno further! Get Loaded In The Park is your one-day piss up sent from on high.British Sea Power and Babeshadow make things seem a little less bleak. Ticketsare £37.50. Get those and all information at getloadedinthepark.com

End OfThe Road

September2-4, Larmer Tree Gardens, North Dorset

Alongwith Green Man and Latitude, the End Of The Road festival completes the triumvirateofboutique-festivals-aimed-at-Uncut-and-Mojo-subscribers-and-their-kids-wot-done-good.While it may be a whole lot bigger than years gone by End Of The Road can’t befaulted on lineup. From former Lift To Experience fella turned lonesome croonerJosh T. Pearson to Joanna Newsom to Mogwai via Wooden Shjips and a soloappearance from Gruff Rhys it’s basically good things at every turn. Weekendtickets are £145 and you can get those and find out more at endoftheroadfestival.com

The SecretGarden Party
July 21-24, Near Huntington, Cambridgeshire

The not so Secret anymore Garden Party has cemented itselfas one of the most popular festivals of the entire season particularly amongstpeople who like dressing up as ladybirds and discussing recycling as opposed towatching live music. If you do find yourself there and are so inclined youcould do worse than watch Blondie or Martha Reeves & The Vandellas. Ticketsare £155 and available from secretgardenparty.com

Download

June 10-12, Donington Park, Midlands

Asidefrom Pendulum bizarrely being billed above Korn, this years Download is evenmore of a trip down metal-memory lane than usual. Def Leppard, System Of A Downand Linkin Park headline and elsewhere The Cult, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sisterand Cheap Trick pretend the last 20 years didn’t happen. Dig deeper though andthe bill yields a few gems: NOLA sludge supergroup Down make a rare UKappearance and rare doesn’t even cover a show by Danzig, which is probablyworthy of admission alone. Weekend tickets are £155 and day tickets are £82.50.Get those and anything else you need to know at downloadfestival.co.uk

HUDSON MOHAWKE INTERVIEW FOR THE CREATORS PROJECT MAGAZINE

2011-09-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

HudsonMohawke is an enigma. His music runs the gamut from hip-hop, to garage, tofunky, to house and back and again. A child of the 90’s he quietly absorbed themanifold dance influences of that decade and has consistently reconfigured,reworked and re-imagined them in new and wildly varied contexts.

Aspart of the Glasgow based Luck Me collective, 24 year old Hudson Mohawke (RossBirchard to his mum) has been part of an emerging vanguard of young, talentedand musically aware pioneers who have dictated where UK bass music is headedfor the next decade.

Asa DMC finalist at the tender age of 15 and one of the youngest signings to theprestigious Wrap Records label in its history his future is brighter than most.While the immediate reaction of the uninitiated Hudson Mohawke listenercontinues to be “what the fuck is this?” the contented converts simply ask,“where the fuck will this go next?”

The Creators ProjectDespite: Despite Ding and performing all over the world you continue to keepyour roots in Glasgow.
Hudson Mohawke: Yeah, I’ve lived there my whole life. My Dad was actually from LAweirdly but for whatever reason that remains unclear he moved all the way fromLA to Glasgow.

Your music is near enoughimpossible to classify. What did you listen to as a kid?
The first thing I guess I really obsessed over was crappy chart pop music. Thiswas when I was about 6 or 7 and I would religiously collect compilations ofchart dance music.

When did you firstencounter underground dance music that wasn’t Top 40 bound?
I got in to hard UK rave music when I was maybe 11. Things like rave-y gabbaand hardcore by people like DJ Sy and Seduction and Scott Brown that you wouldlisten to on tapes that came in these huge tape packs. There was a rave seen inScotland at that point but I was so young that I had no knowledge of it evenexisting so I didn’t really have any context to place all this music in but Iwas just so in to the music and loved it so much that I didn’t really stop tothink about things like that.

When did you start DJing?
By thatpoint I’d got my first pair of crappy belt drive turntables and I was alsobuying 12” records so I started making mix tapes of all this rave music that Ihad been listening to and buying. I would then sell them at school.

Where did you buy recordsback then? Were there specialist rave music shops in Glasgow at that point?
Not that I knew of. I just used to buy records in the Glasgow HMV. It had thisamazing vinyl floor that was almost like a separate shop that had great stockand was basically as good as an independent record shop. It’s gone now. It was in that HMV actually where I sawmy first DMC video.

Was that what led youdown the turntablism road?
Totally. There had been some scratching in the rave music that I had beenlistening to but it was more for effect and really fast without much technique.Watching the guys who were battling in that DMC video was pretty amazing atthat age. I’d never seen anything like that before. The video also happened tobe of the year that A-Track won the DMC when he was only 15, which was the ageI ended up qualifying for the UK final. I saw that he was young and doing it sothat was motivating and I just got way into Turntabalism and hip hop fromstudying that tape over and over again.

How did you make the jump from Ding toproduction?
In about 1998 or 1999 I got a Playstation, which came with a program called Music, which was followed by Music2000. Using those programs was myfirst experience of experimenting with actually making music and production. Music2000 had this feature where youcould put audio CD’s in to the Playstation and sample bits of audio trackswhich was pretty amazing to me at the time. I’d be sampling little drum breaksand melody lines and making songs. I was still doing DJ battles at that point butthe production began to become the focus. When my family got their first PC, inabout 2001 it just used to be in the living room and I got a cracked version ofFruity Loops and that was that.

What do you use toproduce now?
I still use Fruity Loops! I have used Reason and Logic but I’ve never found aprogram as immediate and intuitive as Fruity Loops plus I’ve spent so manyhours in front of it that I just know it so well.

When did you startplaying your creations out?
Back when the PC was still just in my parents living room and I couldn’t use itall the time I’d go to this internet café about 15 minutes walk from my houseto use the internet there. It was this weird sort of hippy-ish community centreplace where people would hang out and they would stay open until 3am on aFriday night and there was a guy who would play records. I used to go downthere with my Dad and he asked if I could play a record or two and I ended upplaying out there regularly on a Friday night. That’s shut down now as wellwhich is a shame.

How did you play yourtunes out, were they cut to vinyl?
At that point I was getting a few DJ bookings but mainly off the back of theDMC stuff so I was kind of expected to play hip hop which restricted what Icould play plus the technology wasn’t really there at that stage to play mp3audio out. I used to record stuff from the PC to minidisc and then plug theminidisc straight into the mixer with an audio cable if I wanted to play any ofmy own stuff. In about 2004 thoughI started to really focus on production in the same way that I had focused on Dingand turntabalism up until that point. Production just became this all-consumingthing. I’d get home from school and just be doing it all night.

Was there a scene inGlasgow at that point?
When I started making stuff there was no real scene and I used to post stuffonline on forums and pretend not to be me and see what the reaction was. I’venever really felt that I make particularly far out music but a lot of thereactions that I got then and even now have tended to be a bit like “what thefuck is this?” There were a lot of good club nights in Glasgow but everythingwas quite segregated. And we could not have played the stuff we were making atthose kind of nights so a couple of guys called Dominic Flannigan and MartynFlynn as well as myself and a few others started a night called Lucky Me at atiny bar called Stereo that held about 60 people.

How did you come up withthe name Hudson Mohawke?
When I started posting tracks up online I knew that I would really have to comeup with a name so myself and a friend had a competition to try and send eachother the most ridiculous name possible via text message and Hudson Mohawke wasthe stand out.

How did the Warp dealcome about?
A few people in Glasgow had a few of my tunes early on and they’d been playingthem at after parties and stuff and one of the guys that works at Warp is aGlaswegian. He’d heard the tunes and really liked them so took them into SteveBeckett at Warp and just hassled him about it and it went from there. It was alabel I had a huge amount of respect for but it seemed like this huge beast ofa pinnacle so far above anything that I could achieve that I had never evenreally considered being involved with it.

Is it weird being on alabel with such a sense of dance music history?
I’m a huge Boards Of Canada fan so it was crazy being on the same label asthem. I was initially totally overthe moon but after it settled the reality of the situation was filled with farmore pressure and weight of expectation than the dream. I wasn’t sure that Icould put myself up there next to all of those artists without doing somethingnew and exciting and different but after all the panic I had a realisation thatthey had approached me because they wanted me to do what I wanted to do. If youlook at any of the great albums in the Warp catalogue I am pretty sure thatAphex or Autechre didn’t sit there thinking “I’m going to make a classic album”,it’s just how it happens. You can’t over think things; it’s best to just dowhat you do.

GODFLESH INTERVIEW FOR VICELAND.COM

2011-09-13T07:27:00.001-07:00

Hello Justin, whatprompted the decision to re-convene Godflesh after all these years?

Hellfest were the catalyst for this reformation;they tried desperately for a number of years to get Godflesh to reform for thatfestival. It took some time for me to even consider it and go as far as askingBen Green to do it. He responded so positively that it was inspiring and thisprompted me to consider it too, and leave all the baggage behind.

What was it that madeyou specifically choose Hellfest and Supersonic as the scenes of Godflesh’sreturn?

They are two very exciting festivals, and Godfleshdid not in its career, do that many festivals so they make for an interestingenvironment for Godflesh to play in. My only concern is volume levels thesedays are so controlled and minimal that it is impossible for GF to achieve theheights that it once did via suffocating volume, which could be possible allthose years back.

Was the decision to playSupersionic a nod to your Birmingham heritage?

In some ways, yes. The organization begind thefestival believe in Godflesh but the band only really played Birmingham frequentlywhen it first formed. We barely played there after 1991!

Who else comprises thelive lineup or is it just yourself and GC Green?

It is exactly as Godflesh was originally intendedto be, and was for most of its existence: GC (Ben) Green, myself and machines.

How does it feel playingGodlesh material to audiences after almost a decade?

In some ways it has been bizarre. Largely we'replaying to audiences who never saw Godflesh in the first place. That makes itall the more exciting though. It's hard now to say what Godflesh was after sucha long break of almost 10 years. That is a longer period than Ben and I playedtogether as Godflesh in the first place.

Is there any intentionto record new Godlesh material?

There is some intention, but in practice it is abig question. I don't like expectation, since generally the larger theexpectation the bigger the disappointment. I have new Godflesh riffs and ideas,but I have had for some time, even before the reformation. I am just unsure asto whether it should be considered seriously or not.

Will this reunion have anyaffect on the operations of jesu and your other ongoing projects?

No, not really. It's timely, due to the fact thatI took some time off from releasing a lot with jesu at the rate I had been.There was a glut of jesu releases and eased back. For the last year or so I'vebeen slowly writing the new jesu album, which is finally being recordedthroughout this winter, aiming for a May 2011 release. So in some ways I havebeen able to let jesu take a back seat for now.

Has working on projectslike Jesu and Final in the interim period affected how you approach theGodflesh material after all these years?

In some ways, yes. I haven't spent the last 8years plus performing very aggressive or brutal material. Going back to theGodflesh sound required reaching back to those emotions, which was not in theslightest bit hard, it was just a case having to get to grips with performingin that context again. It took me some time to adjust to the way jesu wouldperform relative to Godflesh performances.

What can people expectfrom Godflesh’s show at Supersonic?

The Godflesh show that we always hoped to performmore often when we last existed; projections and minimal/maximal brutality. Itshould be every bit as claustrophobic as Godflesh was intended to be in a liveenvironment.

FLATS RADAR FEATURE FOR NME

2011-09-13T07:26:00.001-07:00

“People need to stoplistening to Gang Of fucking Four” intones Dan Devine, rail-thin, tousled hairstreet urchin ring leader of the most excitingly raw and visceral mess of aband currently plying their trade in London. “Half a decade of raping the samerecord? Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand came out five years ago and people stillthink it’s acceptable to trot out an angular guitar riff and a dance-y bassline with a disco beat. It makes me fucking sick..”

Dan may be more than alittle opinionated but fortunately Flats deliver the goods to back up thebluster and they formed a few short months ago intent on remedying the musicalills of the last 5 years. “We couldn’t see a single band out there thatrepresented the things we wanted from a band so we came up with a sort ofmanifesto that we haven’t deviated from. The songs have to be fast, short andheavy and the vocals have to involve me screaming as loud as I can.”

Do Flats consider whatthe manifesto has produced punk rock in essence? “Someone asked me if what weplay is three chord punk and I said: “nah mate, it’s six chord punk”. I wastaking the piss but it’s not a bad description of what we do: punk withsomething extra” says guitarist Luke Tristram. “Basically” continues Dan, whenme and Luke lived together we bonded over Swans and Arab On Radar and thesegirls we lived with were always throwing parties and all these emaciated malemodel freaks would turn up. We’d stick on some Arab On Radar and they’d allleave. I want Flats to be the musical of equivalent of sticking Arab On Radaron the hifi and clearing the room of all the cunts so only the people who getit are left. That actually happened the other day when we supported MarkRonson.”

Sending Mark Ronsonfans running from the hills aside Flats aren’t lacking in ambition: “By thetime we release an LP I want us to have 40 original tracks. I hate bands that re-release the same track 20 timesthen release it again on their album. Fuck that, just get it out. For all weknow this could all be over this time next year but if I’ve put out six recordsby that point I’ll be happy”. Considering the calibre of what they have alreadyproduced so should you.

FORD & LOPATIN NEWS PIECE FOR NME

2011-09-13T07:25:00.001-07:00

When cosmic drone-synthexplorer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and ex-Tigercity bassistJoel Ford fulfilled a childhood dream late last year of forming a synth-pop duothe last thing they imagined would hamper the project would be a face-tattedex-affiliate of 50 Cent.

However, the pair havehad to loose the Games moniker that served them so well on last yearsexceptionally excellent That We PlayEP on advice from their label.

Mexican Summer, whichis home to the pairs’ newly minted Software imprint, advised Ford and Lopatinthat the Games alias could possibly kick up a stink with Interscope-signed thugrap aficionado The Game who has recently switched to being known as just plainold Game.

“We were told Game wasa little too close for comfort,” bemoans Lopatin over the phone from his newstudio HQ in the bowels of the Mexican Summer complex in Brooklyn, NewYork. “It was kind of apre-emptive strike to avoid the legal muscle of Interscope as opposed to ushaving the guy beat down our door yelling at us to cease and desist thank God.That would not have been good”.

With the Games aliascruelly swiped from their paws Ford and Lopatin have decided to become knownas, well, Ford & Lopatin.

“We actually wanted tocome up with another band name but nothing felt as comfortable as Games for meso we figured we might as well just be ourselves. We’re definitely more Kruder& Dorfmeister than Hall & Oates though”.

Channel Pressure, the highly anticipated Ford & Lopatinlong player is due on the seventh of June and Daniel couldn’t be happier to bereleasing it via the duo’s own imprint: “We see Software more as a productionimprint than a label per se. Mexican Summer have some amazing studio facilitiesin Brooklyn that they have been kind enough to give us the run of to work onboth our own material and with other bands. After the F&L LP and the nextOPN LP we’ll initially be focusing on smaller 12” and EP releases for folkslike Sleepover and Laurel Halo but if the right artists come along we’ll belooking to release LP’s as well in the future.”

Here’s hoping thatrelease schedule is not cut short by enraged gangster rappers or major labellawsuits.

COMPUTER MAGIC SXSW LIVE REVIEW FOR NME

2011-09-13T07:24:00.001-07:00

Computer Magic
Malverde
14:00
18/03/11

Danielle Johnson maybe a New York native but as Computer Magic her wistful and adorably endearingsynth-pop may as well have been made for a woozy Austin afternoon a-top abreezy balcony to accompany slowly slipped margaritas in the sun.

Playing the White IrisRecords party in support of her debut EP on the label Danielle took a raptcrowd through six mini-electro operas all of which could potentially be 2012’ssynth anthems of love and loss.

While the ComputerMagic material that has thus far been made freely available via Danz’s websitehas possessed a wonderful fragility at times bordering on glacial the songstook on a new life fleshed out live by a skilled band including dexterous drum accompanimentfrom Adam Green/Lightspeed Champion sticksman Chris Egan.

All eyes however couldnot help but be drawn to Danielle’s central performance, calmly eeking outmelodic synth-lines from behind a petite organic while delivering powerfullyunderstated vocals redolent of Kimya Dawson, another great observer of life’slittle intricacies.

Beware Danielle’sdeceptively coy and cute appearance, a monstrous talent lurks therein.

Yemen Feature For Vice V8N5

2010-05-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

This is a piece that I wrote the intro for. My colleague Bruno Bayley conducted the interview which I re-produce here just because it's really interesting.

HELL ON EARTH

Yemen has never been the most peaceful corner of the Arab world. Situated in the southernmost tip of the Middle East, just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, it is the region’s poorest country. It is also one of the more heavily armed Arab nations: it is estimated that there are more than 60 million guns in a country with a population of 25 million. That’s two and a bit guns per person in case you can’t do the math.

The country’s only constant is civil war. Despite supposed unification in 1990, Yemen remains divided between the traditionalist north and the separatist south. But even by its own warring standards, things have been going a little bananas since 2004.

Yemen’s local squabbles, both separatist and sectarian, have, in fact, got so bad that they are threatening to destabalise the entire region. Everyone from Saudi Arabia to Iran, Egypt and Jordan have got involved and started lining up to back sides.

An ongoing conflict in the north of the country between Sunni Yemeni forces and Shiite Houthi insurgents has been bolstered by an independence movement in the south, led by rebel Yemen army militias disillusioned by the northern-based government. Among the leaders of the southern separatists is one Tarik al-Fadhli.

A veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, al-Fadhli and his supporters have been accused of wanting to establish a separatist, extremist Islamic state in southern Yemen. Since allied clampdowns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it has long been suspected that southern Yemen is a key training centre for Islamic militants.

That belief was confirmed on Christmas Day last year when it was revealed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 over Detroit, received both his weapon and training from al-Qaeda cells operating in Yemen.

Publicly claiming responsibility for the attack, AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) asserted that it had been prompted by US air attacks on supposed militant targets in the region. This led to an escalation of western-masterminded attacks and AQAP retaliation recently culminating in the recent suicide attack on the British ambassador to Yemen in late April.

While the world’s media continues to train its sights on Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has silently opened up a third theatre in a war on terror that looks about as likely to end as their old favourite, the war on drugs. We decided to speak to Brian O’Neill to find out what’s up in a country with lots of guns, no natural resources and escalating wars both civil and international. Brian used to write and take pictures for the Yemen Observer so it’s safe to say that he knows more about the place than you.

VICE: How did you become so interested in Yemen? It’s not exactly a country that regularly features on A Place In The Sun.
Brian O’Neill: I have always been interested in the Middle East, I studied in Cairo and even in the Arab world and the world of Arab scholars, Yemen was always this exotic backwater. A strange land. As a younger person that appealed to my sense of exotic adventurism. As I studied it more and looked at its political, demographic and economic trends and its history I began to realize that this country was going to become really important really soon. Its systems were falling apart, its institutions didn’t really hold and there was a growing threat of Al Qaeda. It seemed clear that this country was not going to stay anonymous for long.

The coverage of Yemen in mainstream media seems quick to condemn the place as going to hell in a handcart. Can it really be that bad?
In some ways, and this might be because I am a contrary bastard, I tend to think people are underplaying the story. Almost every economic, climatic and demographic problem that a country can face, Yemen is facing. 50% of the population are under the age of 15 so there will be a generation of young men growing up without jobs or opportunities. I think the story that is most important however, and one that the media is not concentrating on the way it should, is the impending water shortages. By 2020 the capital could well be out of water and within the next decade we could have millions of people without water.

How did this water crisis come about? We’re guessing it wasn’t a case of too many people leaving the sprinkler on.
There are a lot of natural factors, but the main cause is that in the 60s and 70s the UN got involved in the way that Yemen collected its water. Those methods mainly consisted of collecting rainwater and storing it. The UN said, “don’t do that, its not going to work” – even though it had worked for thousands of years – and instead encouraged themto tap into the underground water tables. This quickly became a matter of whoever was richest digging the deepest and draining water for their own use. The inherent corruption in Yemen combined with the good, but ultimately misplaced, intentions of improving water collection by the UN has drained the water tables much faster than anyone could have imagined.

Aside from a potential complete lack of H2O what are the other major issues being overlooked by the media?
The rebellion in the south for a start. Obviously the Christmas bomber got everyone focused on AL Qaeda, and they are extremely important globally, but they are not massively important in terms ofYemen itself. There are two domestic rebellions going on, one in the North and one in the South. The one in the North got more attention initially because when the world started looking at Yemen in the wake of the bombing attempt there was still open fighting going on, which is exciting for the media. In that war the President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, dubbed his last battle ‘Operation Scorched Earth’ which was exactly what it sounded like. There was carpet bombing, villages being razed and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

That doesn’t sound so good. How about in the South?
The Southern issue was more political than anything. Yemen used to be two separate countries until 1990: North Yemen and South Yemen. The North had been a democratic state and south a Marxist state. The two unified in 1990 because they were both broke. There was a lot of tension, and a civil war between the North and South in 1994 which the South lost. President Saleh used a lot of Jihadis in that war who had just returned from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and after they won he let the Jihadis sort of take over and rule the South.

So it became a little Jihadi colony?
Well, the people of the South were very much colonized and oppressed by their own countrymen. In 2007 there was a movement for more rights, but since then Saleh has cracked down again and it’s an open call for secession. It looks like they are lurching back towards civil war and that is the issue more than Al Qaeda. By focusing on Al Qaeda we are ignore the broader and more dangerous issues in Yemen. Our overriding interest has to be to keep Yemen from falling apart. By focusing on Al Qaeda we could actually accelerate Yemen’s breaking up and if the country breaks up it will become an incredible safe haven for Al Qaeda.

How deep has Al Qaeda sunk its tentacles into Yemen?
They are very involved in everyday Yemeni life but certainly not in the central government and mainstream of Yemeni politics. In fact they have pretty much declared open war on the central government. They have focused their efforts on infiltrating the tribal system on a local level by marrying into tribes and gaining local bases of support. Their numbers belie their strength. There are only 2-300 AL Qaeda in Yemen, but they are smart and patient and have been getting stronger over the past few years. It is interesting to contrast Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, al-Zarqawi’s group. Their goal was carnage, so it was inevitable that people in Iraq would turn against them, but Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula has not really made any attacks in Yemen or on the Yemeni people. So, though people might not actively support them, or agree with everything they say, at least they aren’t killing anyone. Unlike the government, who are.

What sort of poverty levels are we talking about in Yemen?
It’s Sub-Saharan-esque. In almost every poverty and developmental standard it is usually in the bottom five or ten countries in the world. There are not a lot of jobs, the economy is mostly based on oil, and that is running out.

Everywhere seems to be running out of oil. Is Yemen’s case more pressing?
It’s more dire than most. They never had that much oil to begin with as they are stuck at the shit end of the peninsula. Most of the oil is concentrated in the South, so the political situation there makes it much harder for the central government to get any money from the oil. In Yemen, every issue ties into at least two or three other problems that make it harder to solve.

There are also problems with piracy right?
Yes, and it’s getting worse. For a while it was concentrated off Yemen’s Western coast, close to Somalia, but now we are seeing a lot more piracy around the South, near The Port of Aden. I think what is interesting is that Yemen is so much closer to Somalia than it is to the Arab heartland. We tend to see things too simply. We connect Yemen with the Middle East, but culturally it is far closer to Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia. When you see similar paterns of piracy in Somalia and Yemen, it makes sense, crime often follows the same links as culture.

What form of piracy is this? Is it the kidnapping and ransom type you hear a lot about in Somalia?
It’s mostly for ransom. But then you have a lot of smuggling routes that follow the same lines as the piracy routes. I think the smuggling of arms and drugs is more of a threat than actual ransom piracy. Yemen is a hub for international crime. It is geographically ideally suited to smuggling arms into war zones in the horn of Africa, drugs up through Saudi Arabia and it’s a major route for arms supply to terrorist groups.

Is there any meaningful effort being made by the West or international organisations to try and avert any of these impending disasters.
There have been a lot of conferences and there is the Facebook group sounding ‘Friends of Yemen’ who have meetings and talk about helping. We will see if that actually comes to anything but historically these talks don’t.

If things were to continues as they currently are how long do you give Yemen before it becomes a totally failed state?
I would say it could very easily happen within a year.
Would a total collapse make the country and even better base for Al Qaeda operations?
The huge fear is that the autonomous tribes now have connections with Al Qaeda, and they can use their safe-havens, without any government interference, to strike abroad. Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula needs space, but also some structure, and Yemmen’s tribal havens can provide both. They have already shown themselves able to strike at the heart of Saudi Arabia, and the fear is that a Yemen that can no longer harass them would be a country where the Saudis, or even worse, the West, feels they need to intervene militarily. That would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.

Vice V8N5 Record Reviews

2010-05-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

Integrity
The Blackest Curse
Deathwish

10 Half a decade in the making, Dwid Van Hellion emerges from behind the shrouded myths to lay down a whole album’s worth of pure Holy Terror. If last year’s Walpurgisnacht EP got you excited then the first chords of opener “Process Of Illumination” will have you hooked. From there on in it’s a sheer masterclass from an unparalleled outfit that defy just about anything you’ve got. Rumour has it they may or may not be playing a certain pub at some point in the very near future so watch out for that.

Jimson Isolation

Black Helicopter
Don’t Fuck With The Apocalypse
Ecstatic Peace

8 We were bananas for this one before we even got past the Pettibon illustrated sleeve but once we actually got this thing in the CD player all manner of spiralling riffs spilled out and then we were even happier than when we saw the cover. Definitely a better signing than the guy who pretended to be Kurt Cobain in that Gus Van Sant movie Thurston.

Cosmopolitan Girl

Lair Of The Minotaur
Evil Power
The Grind House/Southern Lord

8 This is a record called ‘Evil Power’. It’s by a band called Lair Of The Minotaur. It features guest vocals by a guy called ‘General Diabolical Slaughter’ as well as tracks with titles like “Let’s Kill These Motherfuckers” and “Riders Of Skullhammer”. In other words it wouldn’t be all that hard to laugh at this album if it wasn’t so uncompromisingly raw and utterly great.

Bloody Pussy

Sloath
Sloath
Riot Season

8 How has no doom band ever in the whole history of playing Sabbath riffs slower than Sabbath thought to call themselves Sloath before? I mean Sloth was good but Sloath? It’s perfect! I even doubled checked on metal-archives.com and these chaps from the South Coast really are the only ones. Congratulations on the name there guys. These three 10-20 minute dirges on the CD you sent me aren’t too bad either.

Beezer Guttler

Rangda
False Flag
Drag City

9 The concept of Ben Chasny, Sir Richard Bishop and the drummer-that-makes-all-other-drummers-look-plain-lazy aka Chris Corsano embarking on a project together was always going to be one that built expectation. False Flag however, easily vaults any expectation and thumbs its avant-free-form-indescribable-jazz nose at us for ever doubting it for a second.

Charlie Harper

Born Ruffians
Say It
Warp

5 The band who everyone found lots of nice things to say about first time around and whose song was in all those Orange ads are back and guess what? They are still about as interesting as having a conversation with a fermenting pot of crème fraiche. There’s absolutely nothing wrong here and that’s probably the problem.

Buster Bloodvessel

Holy Fuck
Latin
Young Turks

8 Wait a second. Did you hear that? A guitar! Yes, everyone’s favourite capering Canadian purveyors or euphoric, ramshackle dance music are back and they have added a Strat they probably found backstage at one of the 475 shows they play a year to the mix. Despite departures on the instrument front it’s business as usual in the main as looped, chirping keyboards build walls of melody and textured sound to the point you think your head might implode. More please.

Freeda Khalo

Melvins
The Bride Screamed Bloody Muder
Ipecac

8 The whole having two drummers gag got a old a while back but luckily King Buzzo seems to have decided to go all weird again. If you like your Melvins closer to Bullhead than Nude With Boots then this is worth picking up. There is even a totally unhinged cover of The Who’s “My Generation” that goes on for about 8 minutes and is worth the price of admission alone.

Hung Bunny

Dead Meadow
The Three Kings
Xemu

6 This release is the soundtrack part of a DVD for a film that looks like it was definitely conceived under the influence of too much marijuana and YouTube searching Jodorwsky clips. Trying to explain what goes on in said film is pretty pointless as we genuinely have no idea but if you like Dead Meadow, smoking marijuana or the films Jodorwsky of you will probably be in to these songs.

Perry Nutkins

Thee Oh Sees
Warm Slime
In The Red

8 Yet another near-perfect, frazzled, frayed, battered and blown out nugget of psyche-garage brilliance from one man garage rock jukebox John Dwyer. The title track goes on for a mind-warping 14 odd minutes but elsewhere it’s rip-snortin’, boot-stampin’ business as usual.

Alexis Petri-Dish

Male Bonding
Nothing Hurts
Sub Pop

8 After what seems like approximately 211 7” and 12” EP’s and splits Male Bonding finally release their debut long player on Sub Pop. Yep, you read that right, Sub Pop. If you aren’t familiar with the London three-piece’s kinetic Wipers-played-at-45-instead-of-33rpm punk then you’ve probably been sleeping under a boulder since 2008. Here’s a handy single disc to get you familiar.

Tommy Slammer

Perfume Genius
Learning
Turnstile

7 It’s amazing that anyone can hear this guys frail but wholly engrossing vocal and piano-led laments of pain and suffering above the furious tapping of fingers hitting keyboards to blog about the tough years which bore these ten sparing tracks but really, who gives a crap about another teen-years sob story when the tunes are this good? Just saying.

Peter Shilton

Festival Previews 2010

2010-05-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Written for the Vice Festival Guide.

STOP MAKING SENSE
September 3-5, The Garden, Petrčane, Croatia
Why Croatia remains unexplored by the marauding English holidaying hordes is beyond us. It’s cheap as chips, the food’s good, the weather is amazing and both the urban architecture and the countryside are mind blowingly stunning. As it is we’re pretty happy to keep Croatia to ourselves and share it with the slowly increasing number of Stag Do’s that seem to represent the only other form of English tourism in the area. Stop Making Sense may be the undoing of keeping Croatia a guarded secret though offering as it does a great lineup if you are into dancing lots (Carl Craig, Theo Parrish, Matias Aguayo and Nathan Fake) and a great backdrop (it’s by the seaside). Get there before everyone else does by heading over to sms-2010.com and getting yourself a ticket for just £80 for the whole weekend.

LATITUDE
July 15-18, Henham Park, Suffolk
The festival that was born to be mild goes from strength to strength. Constantly pigeon-holed as a fun for the whole family affair if you have a hunt around behind the poetry tents and stand up shows Latitude has some teeth. The xx, The Horrors, The Big Pink and hot tips Egyptian Hip hop and Active Child are all worth a look with Belle & Sebastian, Vampire Weekend and Florence & The Machine proving to be the big draws. Latitude has in fact proved such a hit with all-comers that there is not a single ticket to be had via legitimate means so you won’t get any of them at latitudefestival.co.uk but you will be able to find out anything else Latitude-related.

BESTIVAL
September 9-12, Robin Hill County Park, Isle of Wight
Crazy costume ahoy! It’s only Rob Da Bank’s insanely popular late season Isle of Wight shindig. If the summer months have passed you by without of a weekend spent in tents with no running water then Bestival is a good bet. The line-up is as diverse as ever: LCD Soundsytem, Roxy Music, Richie Hawtin, The Wailers, Vitalic, Joy Orbison and Todd Edwards all feature and if you plan on dressing up the theme is “Fantasy” so you can basically go wild. There are a handful of tickets left at £160 each for the weekend and you get them and find out everything else you need to know at bestival.net

DOT TO DOT
May 29-31, Various venues, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester
What started as Camden Crawl-style affair across a handful of venues in Nottingham a few years ago now engulfs a phalanx of bars, clubs and pubs in probably the three best cities for live music in the country that aren’t London. Dot To Dot tends to plump for the exciting and new and there’s now deviation from that manifesto with this years line-up seeing turns from Chapel Club, Yuck, Washed Out and Jamie Woon with Beach House, Wild Beasts and The Mystery Jets in the headline slots. Tickets are a snip at £30 and you can get those and more information over at dottodotfestival.co.uk

LOVEBOX
July 16-18, Victoria Park, London
Lovebox now sprawls over a whole mid-July weekend of dance-orientated shenanigans handily located in popular London summer spot Victoria Park. Dizee Rascal, Chase & Status, Roxy Music, Grace Jones and Hot Chip hog the limelight with plenty of things to keep you dancing from Chromeo to Booka Shade and Joy Orbison and MJ Cole representing the improbably healthy state of UK garage music in 2010. All of that and you can probably pop home for tea if it all gets a bit much. Tickets for one day are £45, two days is £80 and it’s £99 for all three. You can get a hold of those and find out more at lovebox.net

SONAR
June 17-19, Various Locations, Barcelona
The gilded swan of electronic music gatherings, Sonar has amassed an almost statesman like reputation that can easily mislead. Take away the more refined than thou aesthetic and it is basically a load of the best DJ’s and produces on the planet all shoved into one of the best cities to throw a party in the world. Sounds like a good combo? That’s because it is. It is basically not humanly possible not to have fun at Sonar. There things that are worth seeing are too numerous to mention here but if we were you we’d be excited about Zomby, Roska, Jackmaster, Wooky and perhaps worthy of the flight alone: a rare appearance by Detroit City’s finest: Kenny Dixon Jr aka Moodymann. Tickets are 155 euros and you can get those and all other info at sonar.es

CREAMFILEDS
August 28-29, Daresbury, Cheshire
Probably the closest you’ll get to a spirit of ’88 M25 outdoor rave with overtones of being trapped in the Cirque de Soleil on acid anywhere in the festival season. One for the committed hedonist, Creamfields doesn’t let up on the bpm’s so if high-octane dance floats your raving boat then this one is for you. Several dance music titans will be making the trip to a field near Runcorn for your dancing pleasure this year including Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, David Guetta and Sven Vath. Joker, High Contrast and Erol Alkan are of interest elsewhere. A weekend ticket including camping comes in at £100 and ‘hospitality camping’ tickets (whatever that means) are £185. Those and whatever else you need to know at creamfields.com

OYA
August 10-14, Gamlebyen, Oslo, Norway
If you are considering getting out of the UK in order to get your festival fill Oya offers some pretty stunning Norwegian countryside and a line-up that puts most of the UK’s grandstanding events to shame. Pavement, M.I.A., The Stooges, a solo turn from Outkast guy Big Boi, LCD Soundystem, The Specials and Fucked Up will all be there. Book your flights early enough and getting out there will be cheap enough to make all the terrifyingly expensive booze you’ll drink worthwhile. Tickets cost a scary sounding 1940 NOK and you can get those and further information at oyafestivalen.com

EXIT
July 8-11, Petrovaradin Fortress, Novi Sad, Serbia
Exit takes place in a 13th century medieval Hungarian fortress overlooking the river Danube in Serbia. Which sure beats Clapham Common or that park somewhere outside Leeds that Google Map can never find in terms of a location. Throw in appearances from acts as varied as hardcore survivors Bad Brains, disco-punk pioneers LCD Soundsytem and Chilean techno magi Ricardo Villalobos and a four day ticket for just £85 if you book before June and you have a very attractive excuse to explore Serbia for the first time. Find out all things Exit-related at exitfest.org

OFFSET
September 4-5, Hainault Forest, Essex
Every year more festivals shift their dates further into what can realistically be described as ‘autumn’ to avoid doing battle with sixty million competing events in the busy June-August period. If you are attending a September festival though it’s nice to have the option of sodding the tent off and hopping on the Central Line back home to your own bed if the rain comes. Offset offers just that option. A discerning lineup that takes in punk-funk vets Liquid Liquid, krautrock royalty Cluster and a heap of bands that blogs have told you to like so may times that they already seem like part of the furniture (Telepathe, These New Puritans, Male Bonding) make Offset a safe bet if you live within the M25. Tickets are £65 for the weekend including camping, £55 if you plan on going home to sleep and £29 per day. Get them and all other info at offsetfestival.co.uk

FIELD DAY
July 31, Victoria Park, London
Let’s face it, if you live in London, the sun is shining and you can’t face being rammed like a KFC battery hen into London Fields you’ll probably be in Victoria Park anyway. As well as all of the Park’s usual, slightly grubby charm, for one Saturday a year only you also get one of the most well thought out one day festivals in the country. The line up is, as ever, great with appearances from established older guys like The Fall and Andrew Weatherall as well as young whippersnappers that everyone is getting excited about such as Yuck and James Blake plus it’s all happening, quite literally, in most of your back gardens. Tickets are £39.83 after all the booking fee nonsense and you can get those and find out more at fielddayfestivals.com

BENICASSIM
July 25-18, Benicassim, Spain
Sweaty, lobster-coloured English people ahoy! It’s only Benicassim time again! So many English people make the trip to the East Coast of Spain for this European heavyweight every year that if you Google the thing the English fans guide to the festival beats the official festival site. Fact. Still, if you like following the herd and you want to roll a sunny week away into seeing a bunch of bands then you could do worse. Ian Brown and Kasabian should keep the Stella and sunburn brigade happy but dig a little deeper and you’ll come across jj, Lindstrom, Dirty Projectors and a rare appearance by the reformed Public Image Limited. If you are seriously considering going take our advice and get an air-conditioned apartment. You’ll thank us later. Tickets are £172.50 including camping and you can get those and further info over at fiberfib.com

SUMMER SUNDAE
August 13-15, DeMontfort Hall, Leicester
Flying the flag for Midlands festivals this one seems to grow exponentially at a pretty alarming rate every year. Maybe one day in the future it will bulge to so many stages that you’ll be able to walk from Reading up to Leeds via Summer Sundae. While the main stage seems pre-occupied with folk this year, featuring turns from Seasick Steve and Mumford & Sons, have a look further down the bill and you get Caribou’s glitchtronica, grime from Skepta and interesting pop from The Invisible. Basically all things to all men. In a good way. For a reasonable £105 you get entry and camping and you can make that happen and find out more at summersundae.com

PRIMAVERA
May 27-29, Parc Del Forum, Barcelona
Imagine an ATP but instead of staying in a Butlins you are staying in a nice apartment of the Ramblas in one of the hands-down best cities in Europe. Yep, Primavera is pretty good. So good in fact that ATP nullified our analogy back there by actually setting up shop with their own stage so you don’t even have to imagine that you are at an ATP, you will be at an ATP. Kind of. Oh, and it gets our seal of approval as they gave us a stage too. The list of bands that you will actually want to see as opposed to miss accidentally-on-purpose goes on forever but highlights include: Atlas Sound, The Black Lips, Sian Alice Group, The Clean, Shellac, Mission Of Burma and some guys called Pavement. Tickets are 180 euros but go get them quick at primaverasound.com as this one actually sells out.

THE READING & LEEDS FESTIVAL
August 27-29, Richfield Avenue, Reading and Bramham Park, Leeds
If you want to see the re-formed Libertines, Klaxons’ return to festival duty or whatever the fuck Axl Rose is now calling Guns N’ Roses this summer then you’ll have to bite the bullet and make it to Reading or Leeds. Sadly the days of Leeds descending into a good bit of arson, rioting and looting by the Sunday seem to have come to an end so it’s more a case of whichever is closer and whether you got a ticket in time or not. Beware if you think you already have one of the now sold out weekend tickets as the festival has been targeted heavily by ticket scammers this year. To find out if your ticket is real or not or get a day pass for £75 head over to readingfestival.com or leedsfestival.com

T IN THE PARK AND OXYGEN FESTIVAL
July 9-11, Balado, Kinross-shire, Scotland and Punchestown Racecourse, County Kildare, Ireland
The Celtic answer to Reading and Leeds offers similarly safe line-up options but with the added bonus of lashings more booze and bad behaviour as standard. The Scots and Irish simply know how to have more fun than the English. Sorry, it’s a fact. I am English so I’m allowed to speak these words of truth and you’ll just have to deal with it. Have a root around below the Eminem/Muse/Kasabian sized headliners and Yeasayer, Black Mountain and a resurgent The Coral as well a solid dance lineup including Erol Alkan, Sven Vath and Richie Hawtin doing his Plastikman thing all make a trip north worth your while. Oxygen tickets are 224 euros including camping but you’ll have to resort to ingenuity to get yourself into T at this stage as it is completely sold out. All information can be found at tinthepark.com and oxegen.ie

SUPERSONIC
October 22-24, The Custard Factory, Birmingham
Shockingly, Supersonic is already in its eighth year. It seems like just the other day the girls behind astute Birmingham bookers Capsule came up with the idea of shunting a bunch of their excellent shows together into a single weekend. If you have a beard, subscribe to The Wire and/or Terrorizer, haunt the Southern Lord blog or simply possess good taste in music then Supersonic is well worth your attention. The reformed Swans are the only act yet to be announced but what more do you need? Weekend tickets will set you back £75 and you can get those and more line-up information as it surfaces at capsule.org.uk/supersonic

GLASTONBURY
June 23-27, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Glastonbury
The labrynthine ticketing application/initial sale/refund/resale nightmare that seems to get more confusing with every year that passes. However, we can now safely say that unless you have a ticket already or are willing to risk almost certainly getting ripped off by eBay scammers then the golden passes to Michael Eavis’ annual mudbath are now officially all gone. If you do have a way of getting in then you will be able to bear witness to lots and lots of solo artists playing the main stage. Seriously go look at the lineup: Snoop, Shakira, Ray Davies, Stevie Wonder, Slash, Willie Nelson, Femi Kuti, Norah Jones, Paloma Faith. The list goes on… What happened? Are they allergic to bands all of a sudden? You know what to expect elsewhere and you’d probably just as well stay at home and watch it on TV as the BBC seems to mistake this yearly pop music event in a field for some form of world shattering current affairs dropping literally everything else in their schedules to bring you 24 hour coverage in multiple angles and possibly 3D across every channel they possess. No tickets but lots of information at glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

DOWNLOAD
June 11-13, Donnington Park, Midlands
The Ronseal of rock festivals lumbers ever onwards. Not straying too far from the tried and tested riffs and leather formula this years edition of what was once known as The Monsters Of Rock sees a host of veterans return to Castle Donnington. Aerosmith, Motorhead, AC/DC, Saxon, Megadeath and even Billy Idol all make appearances on the main stage while Napalm Death, Suicidal Tendencies and Dillinger Escape Plan crop up elsewhere. Weekend tickets including five nights worth of camping will set you back £180. We’re not sure why you would need to stay for five nights but a trip to downloadfestival.co.uk might explain that and anything else you wanted to know about the festival.

SOUTH WEST FOUR
August 28-29, Clapham Common, London
For the final bank holiday weekend of the year South West London cottaging hotspot Clapham Common transforms into a ginormous dance arena. Formerly known as Get Loaded In The Park the event now stretches over two days as opposed to one and sees headline sets from household name DJ’s John Digweed, Judge Jules, Paul Oakenfold, Carl Cox and Zoe Ball’s husband. Elsewhere more interesting propositions such as bass envelope pushers Skream & Benga and SBTRKT and French disco don Vitalic make the whole thing worthy of your attention. Weekend tickets are £85 and you can get those and find out more at southwestfour.com

SECRET GARDEN PARTY
July 22-25, Huntingdon Mill Field, Peterborough
If the characters in an Enid Blyton novel ever found themselves in the here and now and had to go to a festival it would probably be the Secret Garden Party. All leafy, whimsical, anti-branding and well manicured the Peterborough three dayer continues to draw a loyal following all of whom extol its virtues like it’s the second coming in festival form. Highlights include a live Gorillaz performance, a rare UK appearance by Mercury Rev and up and coming blue-eyed soul guy Othello Woolf. Head over to secretgardenparty.com to get hold of weekend tickets for £149.50 including camping.

GREEN MAN
August 20-22, Glanusk Park, Brecon Beacons, Wales
The festival that banks on rustic charm and a cultivated sense of pastoral rootsiness, Green Man continues to gently woo the mature end of the festival-going spectrum with grandstanding sets from Doves, Billy Bragg, Tindersticks, The Flaming Lips and Joanna Newosm. Meanwhile, our favourite tear-jerking troubador Cass McCombs, Welsh hardcore hopefuls Islet and the much talked about Egyptian Hip Hop keep things interesting on the smaller stages. Tickets are £120 including camping and they are available from greenman.net

UNDERAGE
August 1, Victoria Park, London
The Field Day for little people is so much fun that lots of big people try to get in every year masquerading as parents. True story. With a lineup as here and now as it is borderline pathologically diverse ranging from Lightspeed Champion to Donae’o to Is Tropical it’s easy to see why. If you are younger than 18 and live in London you probably already have a ticket but just in case you don’t they are only £29.50 and can be got at underagefestivals.com

TRUCK
July 23-25, Hill Farm, Steventon, Oxford
What began as DIY anti-festival with secret line-ups 13 years ago now takes in an Oxford version of SXSW called OX4, Wood, a folk-y sister festival and, as of this year, a Truck America in upstate New York. Not bad going for a couple of brothers who insist on minimal corporate presence and giving most of what they make to charity. Now that they tell people who’s playing in advance we can reveal that there will be sets from Fucked Up, Teenage Fanclub and Mercury Rev with dancing duties handled by DJ Zinc. Tickets are only £80 and you can get those and find out more at thisistruck.com

ISLE OF WIGHT
June 11-13, Seaclose Park, Newport, Isle Of Wight
Back when Dylan made an appearance at the Isle Of Wight in 1969 in the middle of his reclusive Woodstock period the festival was one of the first of its kind. It’s probably a safe bet that if you’d asked Bob whether he thought a Beatle would be headlining the same festival 41 years later he would probably mumble something cryptic and incomprehensible but underneath all that we’re betting he’d be surprised. Paul McCartney takes on the Sunday with Jay-Z and The Strokes headlining the Friday and the Saturday respectively. The rest of the bill is equally heavy on big names with Blondie, Spandau Ballet and even Pink all making the trip to Newport. Tickets for a weekend on the Isle Of Wight will set you back £150. Find those and further information at isleofwightfestival.com

1234
July 24, Shoreditch Park, London
Sean Mclusky’s 1234 one-dayer swaggers into its third year. Within spitting distance of the bars that many of the people reading this will be drinking in anyway.1234 takes place on a patch of green next to City Road that optimistically calls itself Shoreditch Park. You could probably guess the lineup with your eyes closed but that is no bad thing. These New Puritans, Veronica Falls, Dum Dum Girls and up and coming anarcho-punks Flats are all playing and the after party options will be numerous. Tickets are only £15 if you get them now from the1234shoreditch.com

END OF THE ROAD
September 10-12, Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset
This one could be the festival manifestation of Captain America’s much missed Virgin radio Americana shows. They seem to somehow get Wilco to headline every year and it’s beards and acoustic guitars aplenty elsewhere too with appearances from Iron & Wine, The Mountain Goats and The Felice Brothers all turning up to strum and holler. There is also a cinema stage curated by Little White Lies in case you get bored of the bands. Tickets are £130 for the weekend including camping. You can purchase those and find out what else is happening at endoftheroadfestival.com

Vice V8n3 Interview

2010-04-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

An interview from the Vice annual Fashion issue.

We Want War

Mathew Stone & These New Puritans Talk About Fashion Music And Art

Mathew Stone is an artist who founded the !WOWOW! collective and has exhibited his work internationally. He is much loved by a fashion world which he has always shied away from preferring his work to stand alone and speak for itself.

These New Puritan’s are so loved by planet fashion that Hedi Slimane got them to soundtrack his 2007 Dior Homme Show and in the band’s drummer, George Barnett, found a young muse. George himself has gone on to model and design himself but the band have continued to shy away from a fashion world so in thrall to them preferring to let their music stand alone and speak for itself.

Are you beginning to see what we’ve done here? Mathew shot Jack and George Barnett, the band’s creative nucleus, exclusively for this issue.

Vice: So did you guys know each other before this photo was taken?
Mathew Stone: We’d never met but I’d been into them since the first time I saw them play at DURR.. It was obvious that they had very strong ideas which many band’s don’t. Concepts like mixing archaism and futurism by playing weird old woodwind instruments on the same track they had synths all over the place immediately positioned them almost beyond time rather than being led by it.
George Barnett: Taking this photo was the first time that we had met Mathew and whatever pre-conceived notions of him being a hyper-pretentious art guy that some people might have they should forget about. He was just really nice and very creative. He actually seemed quite nervous when we turned up at his studio. The shoot was great though. We enjoyed working with Mathew so much and he had so many ideas that it looks like we’ll be making our next video with him.

Would you say that there is anything that your work has in common?
George Barnett: Probably strong ideas immediately executed. When we turned up for the shoot he just had this red background ready and we got on with it. As a band we have ides that we go into the studio with and just record. We never jam. Jamming probably encapsulates everything I hate about music.
Mathew Stone: Yeah, the pursuit of strong, interesting ideas in their music was a definite motivation for me wanting to work with the band. Most bands are chickenshit, the first second someone tells them that if they do something in a certain way they will get more money they jump at it. I don’t think These New Puritans have ever done that. They have fought to be in place where they can do whatever they want and that in itself is admirable. I appreciate people who are committed to making things in that way.

You are both linked to fashion but don’t seem to let it lead the stuff you do.
George Barnett: For me they are just fairly separate things.
Mathew Stone: The band have made music for Hedi Slimane’s catwalk shows and George fronts campaigns for people like Lanvin as a model so they are always going to be linked to fashion but they do seem to see the two things as very separate pursuits. Similarly, while I am interested in clothes and think that fashion is just as vital a creative pursuit as any other form I have never shot fashion photography as I have never been interested in selling clothes or being a part of the industry itself. I think that the people that are able to successfully operate within the confines of the fashion world without being creatively compromised are the people to be celebrated though and the band certainly fulfil that criteria.

Vice V8n4 Record Reviews

2010-04-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

The Black Keys
Brothers
V2

5 This is one of those records that is being touted as “the album they always wanted make”. What does that even mean? That you never wanted to make the other five? Those just happened to slip out by mistake there? Hollow pre-release rhetoric plus the presence of Danger Mouse equals mid-career crisis.

Perry Nutkins

The Bastard Noise/The Endless Blockade
The Red List
20 Buck Spin

9 Where would you guys be without us telling you to go buy a Bastard Noise-related record every thirty days or so huh? There are, in fact, lots of reasons to purchase this latest missive from Eric Wood’s ongoing adventure in sonic destruction. First up the Bastard Noise side features Danny Walker on live drums. Yep, that’s Danny Walker who used to play in Phobia, so you should already know how brutal it’s going to sound. On top of that you get Toronto’s Endless Blockade weighing in with three tracks, two of which are up at the 15 minute mark each so don’t go mentioning powerviolence around those guys. Yet, another essential skull release.

Bustah Nut

Broken Social Scene
Forgiveness Rock Record
V2

5 If someone had left the gas on while cooking a vegan bean-curd soup during the recording of this record and simultaneously lit up a limp, hemp paper rollie they would have literally wiped out a whole musical genre. This album features guys and gals from Metric, The Sea & Cake, Feist, Stars, The Weakerthans and even one of the dudes from Death From Above 1979. Yep, just think: one little spark and kaboom! No more whinging aboot feelings over too many instruments than is strictly required to play pop music ever again. In fact scratch that disaster fantasy. The tribute album is too much to even bear thinking aboot.

Barry Shandling

Harlem
Hippies
Matador

5 These guys got the whole nowhere-one-day-huger-than-a-really-huge-thing-the-next treatment courtesy of the golden handshake of hype: a fawning Pitchfork write up. However, the name of the guy who catapulted Harlem and their so-so lo-fi pop from obscurity to ubiquity is probably of greater note than the band’s music: Roque Strew. What kind of a name is that? He must be a robot. This adds further evidence to my theory that Pitchfork is not a website created by humans but a piece of software that causes indie-record buying impulses in weak-willed, hormonal teenagers transmitted orally via lightbeams.

Professor Y

Elephant 9
Walk The Nile
Rune Gammofon

8 Woah. This is like some mythical long-lost bootleg tape of an improvised session that Klaus Dinger and Rick Wakeman never had. Equal parts motorik stoicism and unhinged keyboard pomp that sails mighty close to being awful but somehow never deviates from being wholly engrossing.

Mont Cowbell

Trash Kit
Trash Kit
Upset The Rhythm

7 I still haven’t actually seen these guys play yet which, seeing as I live in London where they seem to play daily and twice a day at weekends, is quite an achievement. Listening to this stark debut though they can at least feel confident that they have blown any lo-fi competition they have clean out of the water by sounding so stripped back that sounds like Trash Kit’s instruments consist of a dustbin and some shoestrings stretched over an old box. Some lovely harmonies bring the whole mess together rescuing it all from the scrap heap in a touchingly DIY manner.

Billy Bunter

Chris Leo’s Vague Angels
The Sunny Day I Caught Tintarella Di Luna For A Picnic At The Cemetary
Expect Candy Records

8 OK, lets get clear up the three elephants currently stampeding around the room. 1) Yes, this is Ted Leo’s brother, 2) yes, that album title is pretty nauseatingly convoluted and 3) yes, that sleeve is equally sickeningly twee. Despite all of these facts being true I unequivocally love this record to bits simply for existing. Native Nod, The Van Pelt and The Lapse make up a body of work so perfect in my book that they allow the person who made them license to do whatever he damn likes. Chris Leo could drive a tricycle naked up and down outside my grandparent’s retirement home every day from here ‘till eternity and I’d still buy his records and love every second of them.

Sultan Of Sentiment

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
The Brutalist Bricks
Matador

7 Not often you get two separate albums by a pair of brothers reviewed in the same column. Well this is your lucky month. Here is Chris Leo’s slightly better known and equally nasally imposing brother Ted’s latest offering with his backing outfit The Pharmacists. It ploughs similar thoughtful, indie-rock-with-big-words territory as Chris’s Vague Angels record and even though he was in Citizen’s Arrest I was never a huge Chisel fan so this get’s a point less. Sorry Ted.

Puzzle Head

Roky Erikson & Okkervil River
True Love Casts Out All Evil
Chemikal Underground Records

8 Call me a cynic but I can’t help thinking that, excited-as-a-seven-year-old-on-his-birthday that this even came out at all as I am, this would have been better if po-faced Americana types Okkervil River weren’t involved. I mean, Roky has trunk-loads of heartbreak, loss, pain, hard times and a whole heap of crazy of his own to draw on, what does he need these young whippersnappers around for?

Dr Doom

Walls
Walls
Kompakt

8 Walls may just, unwittingly, represent the future. Guy from Allez-Allez enjoys remixing guy from Banjo Or Freakout’s track so much that they temporarily ditch their respective previous bands to make a blissed out synth-pop mini-masterpiece on Kompakt. Remixing whole bands to create new bands might be the way to go if the results are always this good. Feel free to give up the day jobs guys.

Wolf Gang

The Radio Dept.
Clinging To A Scheme
Labrador

8 Somewhere, most probably hidden away at the bottom of a cupboard, is the only cardigan I still own. I haven’t worn it in a very long time but it is a comfortable, familiar piece of clothing upon which is pinned a small, red Radio Dept. badge. I haven’t worn a badge in a long time either. Listening to this considered, gentle tear-jerker of an album made me want to go dig out that cardigan, dust it off and wear it, and the little red badge, with pride.

Roger Haley

Ganglians
Monster Head Room
Souterrain Transmissions

8 Thirteen cuts of woozy slacker-pop with just the right amount of psyche and good-times surf harmonies to make Monster Head Room a sure-fire, slow-burner hit for the summer. Trust us, come August you’ll love this as much as we do already.

Like Move

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday
Sub Pop

7 I set out to hate this. Honestly. I mean, look at the band name, the eponymous album title and the beyond irritating artwork. All of these things screamed bad right at me. Then I got sent an actual physical copy of the album in the post and flipped over the puke-inducing front sleeve to discover a bunch of fun sketches and doodles on the back. This swayed me in to actually putting the thing on and whaddayaknow? Perfectly formed nuggets of Raspberries style power-pop! Let that be a lesson to you PR’s: send out real records and not MP3 download links before your stupid bands sell themselves short with their stupid artwork before their (occasionally great) music even gets a listen.

Jerry Lonely

Cocorosie
Grey Oceans
PIAS

6 Crikey. The Casady sisters always looked a little fruity but on the cover of this one they’ve gone hog-wild with the kooky. They could be one of those Terrorizer bands that look like they are made up of guys who wouldn’t even get cast as extras for the last Mortiis video. And the music isn’t a whole heap better. Remember girls: there used to be a “folk” at the end of the “freak” back in 2006.
Alex Petri-Dish

Damian Jurado
Saint Bartlett
Secretly Canadian

8 Where once Jurado’s songs were stark, painful snapshots of love and loss set to bare acoustic guitar accompanied by a plaintive, haunting voice you now get stark, painful snapshots of love and loss set to a full band and accompanied by a plaintive, haunting voice. As chillingly brilliant and worthy of compare to Molina and Oldham as he ever was.

Saint Huck

Televison Personalities
A Memory Is Better Than Nothing
Rocket Girl

8 Is Dan Treacy the original Pete Doherty? Or does that honour belong to Peter Perret? Who gives a crap. The TVPs always have, and on the strength of this latest set, always will have the knack of turning whatever drama Dan has boiling on the backburner into pure pop joy. So forget all the noise and go buy this record to help pay your dues to a minor modern British institution.

Dorian Gay

Vice Singles 01.02.84

2010-03-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Perfume Genius
Mr Petersen
Transparent

8 More fragile sounding than the bones of that creepy comic book collector guy that Samuel L. Jackson plays in Unbreakable. If they were music. Bad analogy right there but you get the idea. Mike Hadreas makes songs so taught and emotionally charged that as you listen to them you actually get scared that they are about to shatter into little shards of sadness and fade out into the wash of fuzz he swaddles his tracks in.

Butch Bunter

So So Modern
Dendrons
Transgressive

7 Wow. Just listening to this on totally knackered me out. Having as many things going on in a single song as these guys manage to cram in could very easily end up sounding like a total disasterous mess. Thankfully these guys successfully channel the spirit of vintage Q & Not U with added wobbly synths. Which is a good thing in case you’re lost.

Cap’n Krunch

'Zine Scene

2010-03-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

This is something that I did for the Red Bull Music Academy's daily newspaper The Daily Note. You can find it online here.

‘Zine Scene

The internet is, in many ways, a perfect digital manifestation of many of the core characteristics that defined the DIY punk scene that spawned ‘zine culture in the late 1970’s.

The copy and paste, staple and glue approach to producing ‘zines which gave them such a coherent aesthetic is wholly and immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. The ability to say virtually anything without being censored and the sheer amount of information that is freely available online coupled with the ability to copy chunks of text and paste them elsewhere or screengrab an image from one website and place it on another has allowed blogs to become the online equivalent of ‘zines.

Special interest blogs have become small, cottage industries populated by passionate individuals discovering and passing on information very much in the tradition of pioneering ‘zines such as Sniffin’ Glue or Maximum Rock & Roll.
While online blogs and websites allow immediate and inexpensive exchange of musical knowledge at hitherto unimaginable speed they are yet to render the humble ‘zine redundant. Scratch below the digital surface and you’ll soon find a vibrant world of small-run, print ‘zines catering for people who still like to be able to hold, touch and smell an actual physical artifact and for whom reading about new and interesting music on a screen will never be wholly satisfying. After all, when was the last time you read Pitchfork while taking a crap?

Punk was the movement which birthed the ‘zine and a massive percentage of contemporary ‘zines continue to be concerned with punk music and culture. However, great though those ‘zines are, they are merely the tip of a massively varied iceberg. The focus of this paper has dictated that we look mainly at music related ‘zines but go to just about any ‘zine fair or symposium (http://www.londonzinesymposium.org.uk/ is a great place to start investigating where they happen) and you will encounter ‘zines that deal with art, comics, literature, poetry, oversized vegetables and shoelaces. I am not making the last two up. I own ‘zines on both topics. Here are a few of the best ‘zines dealing with music currently in print.

DISTORT

Australia might not be the first place that springs to mind when you think of hardcore and punk rock but Distort is easily one of the best ‘zines currently chronicling the genre. It is an A4 sized, black and white stapled affair crammed with carefully selected fliers, photographs, reviews and columns that run the gamut from classic punk and first wave hardcore right through to what is happening right now. Issue 24 covered everyone from Rocky Erikson & The Aliens to Cold Sweat. With a wonderfully anachronistic adherance to the physical distribution of music most issues come with a cover mounted 7”. Watch out for the next issue which will come complete with a 7” by excellent Aussie powerviolence types Extortion. All information can be found at distortcult.blogspot.com

FERAL DEBRIS

Once the novelty of getting hold of a ‘zine which isn’t pre-occupied with punk or hardcore has worn off allow Feral Debris to quietly inform you about band after band you have never even heard of. If you try and claim to be a huge Simply Saucer fan you’ll have to forgive me for not believing you for a second. The ‘zine also has a regular poetry section and comes with a free CDR consisting of tracks by artists featured in that issue so if you are after a free compilation of acts like Moss, Jandek and Wooden Sjips: look no further! For musings on strange sounds check out myspace.com/feraldebris

YETI

OK, so Yeti might not technically be a ‘zine due to it’s sheer size and glossy cover but take a peak inside and sure enough Mike McGonal’s sporadically released labour of love is indeed mainly black and white. So I am including it as a ‘zine. If you are interested in everything from indie-rock to avant-garde power-electronics to strange sounds from sub-Saharan Africa then Yeti is for you. Past issues have included conversations with folks like Will Oldham and Pat Gubler from PG Six, illustrations by German surrealist artist Unica Zurn, drawings from Kyle Field from Little Wings, a comprehensive feature on Blind Willie Johnson and a Western Saharan travelogue by Hisham Mayet from the excellent Sublime Frequencies label. You should by now be wanting to purchase a copy at yetipublishing.com

WOOFAH

Again straying away from the default ‘zine fodder of punk-rock, Woofah concerns itself with all things bass related from a uniquely UK perspective. Whether it’s charting the latest offshoots of the constantly morphing UK Garage/dubstep/whatever-you-call-it continuum via interviews with folks like Untold or the Hessle Audio gang, continuing to champion grime that isn’t made by Calvin Harris with features on the Newham Generals or re-examining UK bass music’s roots with features on dancehall mainstay Tippa Irie, hardcore and jungle dons Shut Up & Dance or legendary Leeds soundsystem Irration Steppas, Woofah has consistently proved that informed, considered and informative journalism continues to exist outside of the internet and mainstream monthly music titles. Head on over to woofahmag.com for more information.

THE HIDDEN HAND

Run by a Northen misanthrope whose MySpace name happens to be ‘Nathan Awesome Rape’ this handsome ‘zine is consitently stunningly presented with screened woodcuts on heavy-duty card and text on recycled stock. Throw in interviews and features on The Shitty Limits, Eyehategod, Pagan Altar and Pulling Teeth and even rarities such as an unpublished interview with J.P. Morrow from 1997 conducted by a young John Gilbert from Red County War Ensemble and you have one of the most thoughtful and engrossing ‘zines covering heavy and warped metal out there. More can be discovered on The Hidden Hand at myspace.com/unholyhandfanzine

FODIDO E XEROCADO NO.7

“Fododio e xerocado’ translates as ‘fucked up and photocopied” which is a very accurate portrayl of what you will find between the covers of this ‘zine: a heaving motherload of images of kids going wild at shows as well as shots of the bands who are whipping them into such a state. While the guys behind the publication may be based in Brazil this doesn’t seem to act as a barrier to making their coverage truly global with photographs of shows by bands you’ve never heard of in Brazil and Portugal to spot-you-and-your-mates shots of Fucked Up at The Barfly in London. Find out more at myspace.com/fodidoexerocado

NICHE HOMO 1

A ‘zine that comes out of Leeds and is unafraid to mix articles on ‘The Women Of Hollyoaks’ with pieces on great current bands such as Leeds residents Mob Rules or an extended discussion with Oxbow frontman, MMA champion and general hellraiser-for-hire Eugene Robinson. One of the most fun and varied ‘zines to come out of the UK in a good while. Buy actual real life issues of the ‘zine and find out more at myspace.com/lonklonklonk

MODERN HATE VIBE

When not fronting excellent garage punks The Sceptres or putting on some of the most consistently great DIY shows in London with her Big Takeover nights Bryony Beynon somehow finds time to put out an informative, coruscating and bilious A5 black and white ‘zine called Modern Hate Vibe. On top of bits on bands you should like such as Ironclad and Cold Ones you also get convincing columns on why you should listen to Poison Idea and what you could be learning from the Wu Tang manual right now instead of reading this. Fun for all the family at modernhatevibe.wordpress.com/

Vice Singles Reviews 15.02.10

2010-02-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

3 Titans
College
Daptone Records/Dunham Records

0 Wow, these three minutes actually manages to be less fun than sitting in bumper to bumper to traffic with nothing to but the Shipping News or back to back repeats of Sue Perkins doing Just A Minute to listen to for 8 straight hours. Think three 7 year olds rhyming about how they won’t ever drop out of school and will get straight A’s forever on an episode of Sesame Street from the late 70’s and you’re not a million miles off.

Busta Nut

Los Campesinos
Romance Is Boring
Witchita

2 Despite now being friends with avant-indie types like James Stewart out of Xiu Xiu and whatsisname from Paranthetical Girls these guys are still basically still the same shoutalong indie band now with added weird guitar pedals and less jangle. Strip the effects away and the chorus could be by just about any band played before 11pm and the inevitable endless Smiths and Libertines records start rolling out at your local indie disco. Plus the girl sounds exactly like the guy from Placebo.

Perry Nutkins

Creed
Rain
EMI

1 I almost feel sorry for Creed that Nickleback took their AOR rock and sub-Pearl Jam stadium rock template and ended up selling a bazillion more records than the original purveyors of the totally banal rock-ballad. Can you even remember what that big Creed single was? No, me either.

Brian Blessed

Vice Singles Reviews 08.02.10

2010-02-15T05:57:00.000-08:00

Bison
Way To LA
Claremont 56

8 Something of a supergroup featuring as it does Holger Czukay, Ursa Major, Paul 'Mudd' Murphy and Benjamin Smith this rumbles along like krautrock via a night-class at Blaxplotation bassline school. The way to LA must be a long road as both sides of this 10” feature the theme of getting to the City Of Angeles. The A side is making it there in the Day and the B side features trying to get there at night.

Barry Bawler

The Macabees (feat. Roots Manuva)
Empty Vessels
Polyodor

6 By some miracle this is nowhere near the dogs dinner the lineup threatens. If anything it’s closer to those spaced out jams that Rodney used to spit over back in the days when his tracks only turned up on things like Kitz’s seminal Countryman LP.

Basher Bishop

You Know I’m No Good/Shakin All Over
Wanda Jackson
Third Man

8 This was kind of a no brainer. Jack White producing a raockabilly legend for his boutique vinyl label. How was it ever not going to be great.

Billy Bunter

NME Radar Piece: Trash Talk

2010-02-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

A beer crate comes sailing from the cramped Camden Barfly stage hitting a crowd member squarely in the head. Neither the band on stage nor the seething, surging crowd that are bordering on all-out riot miss a beat. Flying beer crates, and an ability to whip audiences into scenes of cultish adoration and violent chaos within the space of a few chords have become second nature to Californian hardcore malcontents Trash Talk.

While all of the bands’ members have served in hardcore outfits across the Bay Area neither Trash Talk’s hometown nor influences are cut and dried. “We come from all over California and despite none of us living in Sacramento it is still home for the band” says guitarist Garrett Stevenson, “and although we’ve all played in punk acts before if you took a ride with us in the van you’d realise we aren’t a bunch of hardcore purists. Lee (Spielman, vocals) might be playing some nasty hardcore one minute and Sam (Bossan, drums) will play some Lady GaGa the next, then Spencer (Pollard, drums) will play some avant-garde stuff and I’ll probably be dropping some soul or hip-hop”.

Tales of multiple shows at both CMJ and SXSW last year are already legend and the band will happily play anywhere with whoever they can. “Getting to play one show is awesome but to be able to play five or six shows in a day and have people turn up and go nuts is mind-blowing”.

As to the band getting crowds a little too excited Garrett isn’t convinced it’s a bad thing, “people are just having a good time and letting off steam at our shows. Sound & Fury last year might have got a bit much though. We drove there in a U-Haul, parked up and played out of the back of it. There were people kicking all of our stuff over and stage diving in to guitar amps. But it was still really fun.”

The bands’ third album, Eyes & Nines, due this autumn, was recorded with Joby J. Ford of The Bronx. “This time around we sat down and really thought about the songs. Some of them are over two minutes long!” enthuses Garrett and for a band whose catalogue includes titles such as “Just Die” you can expect another dollop of misanthropy. “I think we have the same issues that most people have in the world today. We just choose to vocalise them and people identify with that”.

A band that spends “eleven months a year” on the road inevitably have their share of Black Flag-esque road tales. “The time we were driving out of Cali to go record our second record with Steve Albini sticks out. We got pulled over and locked up for having some stuff in the van we shouldn’t have. We were sitting there thinking, “shit, we’re gonna miss recording with Steve Albini because we’re in jail”.

Jail terms notwithstanding, you’d be a fool to miss Trash Talk’s live onslaught when they return to Britain later this year. Just mind the flying beer crates.

Vice Singles Reviews 02.11.09

2010-02-02T09:18:00.002-08:00

A-HA
Shadowside
Universal

7 While hardly scaling the heights of Hunting High & Low or Soundrel Days A-HA’s epitaph of a final album, Foot Of The Mountain, contains enough grand synth-pop to be worth checking out. Plus a band deciding that they are going to split and then sticking to their guns is pretty rare and in these less than dignified times.

Perry Nutkins

Wet Dog
Lower Leg
Angular

9 If I could still afford to by lots of records purely on the strength of sleeve quality alone this would be on the top of my stack. Or high up in my Boomkat basket or wherever it is that you buy records online these days. The fact that the tune is a nice, shouty bass lead piece of post-punk perfection doesn’t hurt either.

Strap’em Jones

Paulo Nutini
Pencil Full Of Lead
Atlantic

0 Every morning I wake up to Magic FM. My girlfriend loves the station’s ability to play the same 12 songs incessantly all of which are so inoffensive that they might as well be the aural equivalent of a nice neutral wallpaper: there but hardly noticeable. Nutini has recently made it on to the playlist though and ruins the whole effect by nestling like a poisoned morning-after vomit stain amongst the so-boring it’s OK Tracy Chapman and Wings beige music. Thanks for single-handedly spoiling my morning Nutini.

Billy Bunter

Vice Singles Reviews 09.11.09

2010-02-02T09:18:00.001-08:00

Vitalic
Poison Lips
PIAS/Different

10 Second 12’”from Pascal Arbez-Nicola’s future-disco classic of an LP Flashmob. Ticks all the bleeding edge synth and crushingly well produced beat boxes that you’d expect with added pre-orgasmic breathy female vocal for good measure. The man can do no wrong.

Ellis D

Boy Of Girl
Hot Chocolate Boy
Off The Unceratin

7 Sadly not a gender inverted 2 step garage response to Shanks & Bigfoot’s “Sweet Like Chocolate” but a whole different kettle of enjoyable nonetheless. Fragile, female voxed synth pop by what I am pretty sure used to be a band called Moon Unit. Luckily this duo’s tunes are better than their choice of band names.

Norris Da Boss

Pearl Jam
Got Some/Just Breathe
Universal/Island

2 As a kid of about 12 or 13 I had a tape with VS on one side and Vitalogy on the other. Walking back and forth to school was made approximately one million times more enjoyable by that single tape so I have always felt a huge sense of obligation to Vedder, Stone Gossard and the other three. Obligation or not though bad is just bad plain and simple.

Mother Love Phone

Vice Singles Reviews 16.11.09

2010-02-02T09:17:00.002-08:00

Ali Love
Diminishing Returns
Back Yard

0 This guy is still alive?

Billy Bunter

Frightened Rabbit
Swim Until You Can't See Land
Fat Cat

2 Could there possibly be a more irritating name for a limp, insipid, jangly indie band that make music that probably came out of a machine set to “incidental music for Zooey Deschanel movie in which mis-matched girl and boy fall in love despite inherent differences”?The only thing that sucks worse than the name is the tunes so it’s loose loose.

Justin Fashanu

Mariachi El Bronx
Litigation
Witchita

7 I never really got the big deal with The Bronx. They just sound like beefy, polished hardcore for people whose only exposure to punk was via Grand Theft Auto games to me. That said their new Mariachi incarnation slayed our Vice Presents party last month so what do I know?

Perry Nutkins

Vice Singles Reviews 20.11.09

2010-02-02T09:17:00.001-08:00

The Bitters
East General
Woodsist

10 A new 7” from the unstoppable Ben Cook aka Young Governor aka one of the hardest working men in the business of making punk rock songs that are good for your ears. After serving time with No Warning, Violent Minds and Criminally Insane Ben sold his soul to Mike Haliechuck and now plays guitar in Fucked Up. Seeing as Mike and Josh ‘Concenration Camp’ Zucker were already playing guitars in that band Ben must be real good for them to be bothered with a third six string guy. On top of playing sixty bajillion shows that last for twenty hours at a time a year with Fucked Up Ben also finds time to record solo as Young Governer, with the Marvelous Darlings, in a band called the Roomates that I’ve not even heard and with The Bitters who may just be the pick of the bunch. Slacker, sun-kissed, lo-fi, pop-punk anthems all lovingly churned out by Ben and Aerin Fogel. Perfect.

Jelly Bi-Afro

Invasion VS Shackleton
Wizards In Dub
This Is Music

9 If a Shackleton is good enough to warrant a remix by elusive minimal godhead Ricardo Villalobos the a Shackleton remix must be a bit like being refixed by Jesus. Except Invasion would probably be more into crucifying Jesus upside down in a cave on Mars. Either way Shackleton takes apart the bits that make Invasion’s unlikely soul/doom formula great and makes it even better.

Will Bevan

Mayfair Set
Young One
Captured Tracks/Woodsist

8 You know the bit in record reviews where it goes “this sounds like Dum Dum Girls meets Blank Dogs” that you skip to to actually find out what the thing sounds like? Well this actually is the Dum Dum Girls meeting Blank Dogs. There you go.

Anna Bananna

Vice Singles Reviews 26.10.09

2010-02-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Enter Shikari
Wall
Atlantic

(1)0 While not quite as far it into the sonic insaniverese as that bastion of total absurdity that was “Zzzonked” (their last nail in the coffin of ‘post-hardcore’ in case you missed it pop pickers) which sounded like Limp Bizkit covering The Vengaboys this one definitely sees the band reach their lyrical zenith. To wit, the first two verses:

I'm gonna paste you up, cover you in wallpaper
Screw shelves into you and call you a wall
Thats all you are to me trying to keep people inside, inside your sordid little house. This is not white abode.

You can have skirtingboard shoes and plug sockets on your knees
I'll hang a painting on your lip
And put tinsel 'round it at Christmas

Billy Bunter

MSTRKRFT
Bounce
Dim Mak

0 Listening to farty electro-house synths spluttering up and down goves me 2004 flashbacks that make me so glad that sanity won the battle and no one actually listens to this tripe anymore other than people in luminous New Era caps that still thing that Egg is the jump off on a Friday night. Not even Nore can save this abomination.

Teddy Sheringham

Scooter
J’adore Hardcore
Universal

10 This post-modern masterpiece of rabble rousing hedonism is everything that Enter Shikari should dream of being but will never manage. It somehow rips off “Dup Dup” by Mickie Krause, Planet Funk's "Chase the Sun" AND The Pitcher's "I Just Can't Stop” and transform them into a stone cold euro-rave classic. I’m shit you not. Scooter are the sound of genius.

Hans-Peter Goodies

Vice v8n1 Band Piece: Shrinebuilder

2010-02-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

Sonic Titans From Beyond

Shrinebuilder Think Supergroup Is A Dirty Word

Supergroup. The word alone is enough to make you shudder. I got a little pukey just typing it out right there. Bouncy castle size egos, nonsensical concepts and consistently awful records are all that has ever come from the meeting of supposedly great musical minds. Velvet Revolver, Audioslave, Zwan, A Perfect Circle, Fantomas. Do we need to hammer this point home any further? Ok, The Travelling Wilburys.

One look at the Shrinebulder lineup though and the rule didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. Between them the four members of this band have served in Sleep, OM, Neurosis, The Melvins, The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan and The Hidden Hand. Oh, and Saint Vitus. In case you are not familiar with these names then you are reading the wrong magazine. Yep, between them Scott “Wino” Weinrich, Al Cisneros, Scott Kelly and Dale Crover have had a hand in a bunch of records that make up a large portion of what most people who like slow, heavy music have listened to over the last quarter of a century.

It was obvious from the outset that this wasn’t exactly going to be Humble Pie but the five tracks that make up Shrinebuilder’s self-titled debut album are so untouchably brilliant that they blew even the expectations of those with sky high hopes to eensy weensy teeny weeny smithereens. It’s basically a masterpiece. Put this magazine down and go and buy it now.

Seeing as all four of the guys in Shrinebuilder play in lots of other bands and live in different cities it was always going to be a chore getting them all together for an interview but we were lucky enough to get Scott Kelly on a the phone for a few minutes so we were happier than pigs in shit anyway. Turns out Scott is a man of few words but they are all good ones so heed them.

Vice: Hello Scott, so how did what basically amounts to every teenage stoner rock fans wank fantasy doom band come together?
Scott Kelly (guitars): Well, originally it was something that Al and Wino had talked about. I think they had actually been talking about it for a long time and I’ve known Al for years so he just asked me if I wanted to play guitar on the record. It wasn’t like I was going to say no to being in a band with Wino.

What’s it like waking up and thinking: “Holy crap, I’m in a band with Wino!” ?
Well, we’d kind of moved in similar circles for a long time but we’d never actually met so it was strange to finally meet him but it was great making the record if that is what you mean. We did it very fast in very few takes and there was a real energy in the room that you can hear on the record. It was something I’ve never quite experienced before and I’ve made quite a few records.

How do you feel about people describing Shrinebuilder as a supergroup?
We don’t use that word.

Circle Jams

Shinebuilder’s self-titled debut album is available on Neurot Recordings right now.

www.myspace.com/shrinebuildergroup

Vice v8n1 Record Reviews

2010-02-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

Olafur Arnalds
Dyad 1909
Erased Tapes

9 Olafur Arnalds is in fact an Icelandic composer prone to an output that borders on the R. Stevie Moore side of prolific. If Arnalds’ stuff wasn’t so bonkers-ly eclectic and consistently brilliant the rate at which it turns up would be plain annoying but this Sergei Diaghilev-inspired seven song score for award wining British choreographer Wayne McGregor is as good as anything else I’ve heard this month. Or this year for that matter.

Perry Nutkins

The Bastard Noise
Atmoskull
Thumbprint Press

9 Eric Wood’s dogged sonic crusade continues. This CD documents a Bastard Noise live excursion recorded at Atmosphere in Osaka during their Japanese tour, which saw dates with fellow angrier-than-thou noisemongers Corrupted and Unholy Grave. The show consists of a single unrelenting and profoundly disturbing wave of wailing, clunking and screeching that lasts for almost 40 minutes. It is guaranteed to have your girlfriend questioning how anyone could ever call this stuff music and it is titled “Overtures For A Planet Destroyed”.

Pissed Happy Child

Liars
Sisterworld
Mute

8 Have you noticed how Liars records always need a hook? There was the first one where everyone was like “hey look! Karen O’s boyfriend made a record! Even the guys she fucks are creative!”. Then there was the witches one and the last one was self-titled so that had the automatic “this record is just us trying to be us” thing going on. Apparently Sisterworld has something to do with the band moving to LA and becoming obsessed with how people define themselves as individuals in such a morosely homogenised city. Maybe everyone should just forget about punchy one-line summaries and focus on the fact that everything these guys touch turns to gold.

Whippy Milk-Shake

Saxon Shore
It Doesn’t Matter
Broken Factory

8 In a just world Saxon Shore would be as big as former drummer J. Tillman’s other band. That’s Fleet Foxes btw. Or at least as popular as Explosions In The Sky who they make look rank amateurs at the whole really-quiet-then-really-loud game. Maybe they should send their albums to Sir David. Twining epic post-rock with polar bears lounging on melting icebergs worked for Sigur Ros right?

Raymond White

Mordant Music
SyMptoMs
Mordant Music

8 While the broadsheets, monthly glossies and guitar-centric blogs continue to salivate over post-dubstep (what does that even mean?) it might be a good time to point out that that whole sound has already been handily pre-packaged and co-opted into a new line of Fabric mix CD’s for easy mass consumption. If you want something genuinely strange and exciting that retains the ghost of a two-step beat then you could do worse than throw your lot in with Baron Mordant and his truly of-kilter productions.

Marcus Thatcher

Bass Clef
May The Bridges I Burn Light The Way
Blank Tapes

8 After a barren period for bass music long players (the Silkie and 2562 albums aside) we get sent two odd-ball gems in one month. Along with the Mordant mini masterpiece reviewed elsewhere you might as well pick this one up as well to help restore your faith in UK bass and beats. You’re hardly likely to get Theremin’s, cowbells or the Hackney Memorial Free Jazz Marching Band playing brass on the latest Rusko 12” are you?

Custard Cream Chucker

Megasus
Megasus
20-Buck Spin
9 This is technically a reissue but unless you were one of the 200 people who managed to get a copy of the Wild Power vinyl pressing this CD will be your first chance to get a hold of these seven tracks of Pentagram and St Vitus worship so we’ll treat it as a new release. Hope that’s OK? Instead of getting all hot and flustered about Bass Brian from Lightning Bolt playing drums on this album just try putting the record on, staring at whatever that winged and horned thing is on the sleeve and enjoy some true metal.

Ball Scraper

Pyramids With Nadja
Pyramids With Nadja
Hydra Head Records

5 What do you do once you’ve shoegazed yourself into a corner and your post-metal is making even yourself yawn? Buddy up with another band that are having the same problem and hope for the best! The results sadly do not demonstrate this course of action as wholly sound.

James Plot-King

Jesu
Opiate Sun
Caldo Verde

8 Jesu consistently continues to be the best thing that Broadrick’s touched. Warped, shimmering patina’s of crackling noise and lurching stabs of volume that catch you off guard all topped with a vocal that sounds like it’s being phoned in by Orpheus as he descends.

God’s Flesh

Spin Spin The Dogs
Leave Me In Leicester
Gringo Records

8 British guitar music’s best kept worst secret. A bit like witnessing human birth, a Spin Spin The Dogs live performance is simultaneously disturbing and engrossing. The band somehow manages to make a virtue of sounding like four people playing four very different songs. No mean feat. With the arrival of mythic London avant-garde musician Luke Younger on guitar to complement Dean Hinks’ Seinfeld inspired bass lines, John Wilson’s staccato drums and unhinged front man Vincent Larkin’s bizarre ramblings only a fool would bet against their imminent world domination.

Gypsy Billy

The Soft Pack
The Soft Pack
Heavenly

8 We interviewed these guys in the magazine way back when they used to be called The Muslims. That name proved a little bit of a hot topic so now they’re named after a brand of dildo instead. I scratched my noggin for a good few minutes trying to rustle up a funny dildo analogy or metaphor but came up blank. Sorry about that. Who needs dildo gags when your record sounds like the prefect puzzle of Jonathan Richman fronting the Velvets with nagging Replacements hooks smattered all over the place for good measure though huh?

Sterling Moss

Tunng
…And Then We Saw Land
Full Time Hobby

4 There’s something far too optimistic and smug about folktronica. Maybe it’s something to do with fusing bucolic and traditional music with forward thinking electronic instrumentation but it’s always seemed like the aural equivalent of owning a Prius to me.

Jam 69

Frightened Rabbit
The Winter Of Mixed Drinks
Fat Cat

3 Someone is forever playing this band on the office stereo then not owning up to it. I guess that says it all. Indulgent, schmaltz stuffed indie that you should be ashamed to own up to liking in public.

Kelis Alimony

Built To Spill
There Is No Enemy
ATP Records

8 If you can’t figure out what the hell Dan Bejar is singing about on the last Destroyer record, you find the guy from Modest Mouse’s vocal like nails down a chalk board and you want to sock the guy from the Mountain Goats for making ever album he puts out like a Catholic act of confession then don’t worry: you are not alone. Just listen to Built To Spill. The faultless indie-rock band that make a Pavement reunion seem utterly pointless.

Peter Shilton

Vice v8n1 Literary Reviews

2010-02-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: A NEW YORK ART
Edired bu Johan Kugelberg
Rizolli

Sure there have probably been lots of books published about The Velvet Underground. Possibly hundreds. Maybe even thousands. Wait a second, let me look on Amazon. There you go, 2,869 results. That’s a lot of books about one band from New York right there but if there was ever an act worthy of getting eulogized betwixt a pair of heavy duty covers on glossy paper to highlight just how mind-boggalingly good they were then the Velvets get our vote. And, if you are going to buy just one book about the band it might as well be a huge, chunky one with an exhaustive amount of unpublished interviews, images and ephemera that you can leave in your loo and then time how long people spend in there oohing and ahing over it.

THE JOYS OF WORK
Jake Saltiel
Self Published

Jake Saltiel lived for much of the 80’s in squats around Ladbroke Grove with various anarchists, criminals and drug addicts before winding up in Hong Kong and India where he found many other individuals of a similar bent. The body of the book is made up of a mix of snatches of prose and dialogue plonked next to italicized musings. It’s a bit like that guy in the wheelchair in Oz who breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience occasionally with lyrical bits of philosophy that offer a bit a meta-narrative. Don’t worry though, there’s still plenty of talk of Molotov cocktails and railing against the system, Old Bill and whatever else is at hand at any given time to make it worth a read.

lulu.com

PRISON PIT BOOK ONE
Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics

Johnny Ryan is our favourite person who makes comics in the whole wide world. That should be abundantly obvious purely by dint of the fact that we get him to draw a page at the back of the magazine each and every month. I am not going to lie, when we are putting the mag together every month it is Johnny’s page that I take a look at before anything else just so that I can giggle uncontrollably like a three year old for five minutes straight. Our blind faith in everything he touches turning to gold aside you really should go and pick up Prison Pit. You may remember Nick Gazin talking to Johnny about the book in the Moments Like This Never Last issue a couple of months back and Nick knows more about funny books than most people so heed him when he tells you that it’s the best thing Johnny has ever put his name to. It’s a violent, brutal and often truly disgusting black and white romp around what looks like the face of a moon inhabited by barbarian, wrestling aliens with regenerating heads and worms with cunts for faces. Sold? You should be.

fantagraphics.com

DISTORT #24
Self-published

Distort is a punk and hardcore ‘zine that comes out of Australia. We actually got sent issues 22 and 23 as well AS ISSUE 24 in a bundle and they were all totally great but #24 is basically a scrap book issue with a tonne of great cuttings from punk pillar to post. It is all photocopied and stuck on the page just like ‘zines are actually meant to be and ends up being like a proper paper version of that Fucked Up & Photocopied book that everyone went bananas for last year. You get fliers, interviews, reviews, photos and letters from the early 80’s through to right now, from Rocky Erikson & The Aliens to Cold Sweat. Distort is one of, if not the, best paper punk ‘zines that has come through our letter box in an age and issue 25 comes with an Extortion 7” in case you needed any more of an incentive to subscribe.

distortcult.blogspot.com

PORTABLE GRINDHOUSE: THE LOST ART OF THE VHS BOX
Edited by Jacques Boyreau
Fantagraphics

While coffee table books eulogizing the lost art of the 12” sleeve as a palette for creativity and oddity are a dime a dozen this may be the first book to pull together sleeves from the arguably odder world of home videos. Fantagraphics have really gone to town ferreting out films you are almost guaranteed never to have seen or heard of including Tentacle (a pre-cursor to Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus), The Toolbox Murders (“bit by bit he carved a nightmare!”) and Stunt Rock (concerning a stunt man who plays guitar in a rock band). As well as scanning in the back of the sleeves as well as the front so you get the blurbs which are often stranger than the covers (“Home safety can be fun with Gary Coleman!”) the whole thing is packaged in a slip-case VHS sized sleeve. It’s a shame Christmas has already been and gone as this would make a bullet-proof gift for anyone with taste.

fantagraphics.com

Vice v7n12 Interview: Iain Banks

2010-02-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

Another interview with a big hero of mine for the Vice annual Fiction Issue. Again a longer edit than the version that saw print.

WRITING WHILE HIGH, STONED OR DRUNK DOESN’T WORK

But Iain Banks Still Likes a Drink a Can’t Stand Wars

Even if you’ve never read an Iain Banks novel and think you’ve never heard of the guy, you are familiar with him. You just don’t know that you are. He’s part of the fabric, part of the framework, part of the furniture. Although the belligerent Scot would never like to be considered in that ballpark, his place in the late 20th century order of things was established by his early work, such as The Wasp Factory and Consider Phlebas, his novel’s iconic design and the rate at which they appeared.

His ability to simultaneously forge a career as a successful and roundly applauded writer of both science fiction and books that didn’t have robots and spaceships in them remains unique amongst modern bookmen. His latest novel, Transition, is the first to marry his two disciplines between a single pair of covers and if you haven’t read Raw Spirit, his wild eulogy to his native Scotland’s whiskey industry, then you should stop reading this and go read that instead.

Vice: Let’s start with your latest novel. Transition has no “M” on its cover and despite a distinct lack of Culture, it contains elements that pitch it in “M” territory. Is the “M” gone forever to make way for a synergy of your science fiction and straight fiction work?
Iain Banks: Nope, the “M” will be back next year, plastered firmly onto the cover of the new Culture novel. Probably. That is, it will be unless I, or my publishers, suddenly decide it really needs to be dropped. Having, with Transition, published what could certainly be seen as a science fiction novel with no “M”, it'd be even easier now to make that leap. I'm pretty sanguine about it; wouldn't bother me either way. As to Transition representing the future, again, no. As I say, it's back to the Culture, improbably spacious spaceships, sarcastic drones and exotic weaponry for the next project. I start writing the blighter in January. No title yet, but the plot is coming along very promisingly. Should be a cracker.

Much like the Culture of your "M" novels, Transition offers the reader a society that seems fairly utopian in the form of the Concern. What is it with the C's and seemingly idyllic societies with complex and often malevolent controlling elements?
No idea. Certainly, the thing with the C's is just coincidence. Anyway, I think there are more differences than similarities between the Culture and the Concern. The Culture is what you might call self-consciously utopian. Utopia is what it's aiming for—what it's continually attempting to exemplify within itself and to promote beyond its borders. It's profoundly and continually democratic and transparent, plus it's run, day-to-day, by the Minds, by ultra high-level AIs with very definite opinions about how a post-scarcity society ought to be run, basically so that those doing the running at all times smell impeccably of roses. The Concern is basically just another managerialist, semi-imperialist, top-down power system run by humans with all the usual human motivations and failings. It espouses liberal, progressive policies, but the reality is more about those in power using that power to keep that power. It just happens to have unparalleled access to other realities, and it has a secret agenda regarding alien intervention, or even contact.

Transition could be read as an attack on US foreign policy. It inverts our reality pitching the Christians as terrorists in an Asian-controlled world. It also dwells on torture, which could easily reflect Guantanamo.
Well, it wasn't meant to be, but I keep getting asked that question so maybe I'm going to have to start saying yes, it was. Let's just say I wasn't especially thinking of US foreign policy when I wrote it. The torture aspect is something I've been thinking about for a long time and finally decided I've got right, so for what it's worth, here's what I think: torture is always wrong, should always be banned and should never, ever be practised or tolerated—even at second hand, as it were by the state. If there is ever genuinely a situation where torturing somebody will directly save lives, and that happens extremely rarely, then the person who might be contemplating doing the torturing should know that they will subsequently be prosecuted and punished for it, even if they get a medal as well. That should concentrate the fuckers' minds. What it boils down to is that a society that condones torture to protect itself doesn't deserve to be protected in the first place.

You have dealt with the concepts of war and its religious justification in Look To Windward, which you also dedicated to Gulf War veterans. Complicity offered shadows of the Gulf conflict. 9/11 is dealt with in Dead Air and The Steep Approach To Garbadale could be read as commenting on the war on terror. Would it be safe to say that you feel pretty strongly about war on terror and the West's attitudes and approach towards it?
Yes, war exerts a certain grisly glamour, and the ways that societies justify wars to themselves fascinates me. Basically, though, I'm against them. If you're a person, don't start fights. If you're a state or a society, don't start wars. You have a right to defend yourself, but that's all. Probably most people would agree with both these statements, but then, in the real world, it gets more complicated. Anyway, for what it's worth I think that the war on terror is about as sensible—and about as winnable—as the war on drugs. Again, I wouldn't want to pile too much this-is-what-I-think responsibility onto Transition's shoulders, but I guess taken with the rest of the books you mention, plus the Culture novels in general, it marks out the fuzzy, arguably woolly, boundaries of my thoughts on the subject.

Within the sci-fi novels, the sceptre of war and the role of the state in leading society to war looms equally large. Despite being set in the utopian-ish world of the Culture, Consider Phlebas takes place in a time of war between the Culture and the Idrian Empire, and the inhabitants of the Culture are often controlled and manipulated. I’m thinking here of Guregh in The Player of Games or Zakalwe manipulating others in Use of Weapons. Special Circumstances have a creepy CIA air to them.
I think you'll find Special Circumstances would find it hard to suppress a snort of derision were the CIA and its activities to be dragged to their attention, but I know what you mean. I think it's made opaquely clear in Phlebas that the Culture agonises for decades over what to do about the Idirans and their programme of conquerance and occupation before finally going to war to stop them and even then, of course, the Peace Faction—forming a significant minority of the Culture—splits off, and nearly a millennium later still thinks of itself as the real Culture, as opposed to these tooled-up interferers everybody else in the galaxy calls the Culture. As for Gurgeh, well he does kind of put himself in harm's way when he messes with Contact and Special Circumstances and when he cheats during the course of a game. The thing is, he's in an extremely unusual situation, and I'd disagree with the notion that Culture citizens are often controlled and manipulated by the Minds. In fact, they almost never are except in the sort of vanishingly rare circumstances that attend Gurgeh and his predicament. Frankly, the average Mind would consider trying to manipulate an individual—Culture citizen or not—way beneath it, and I mean several very deep layers beneath it, deeply dishonourable! Seriously, it would be seen as potentially shamefully demeaning and utterly catastrophic for the only thing a Mind really values, which is its own good name and reputation. If, perish the thought, the individual involved ever found out, or—much, much worse—if any other Minds found out... one shivers to think. So, no, the Culture isn't meant to say too much about our own affairs except, perhaps, to point out how a genuinely benign power would conduct itself. In my opinion, anyway. Your mileage may differ...

You have a reputation for structural complexity, whether it is the unreliable narrators or multiple narrators of The Bridge or Walking On Glass, the parallel worlds that Transitionaries can move between in Transition or the alternate, simultaneously ascending and descending chapters in Use of Weapons. When you come to approach a new novel, is formal innovation and complexity a concern or does the narrative naturally dictate such courses of action?
It has to come from the narrative. Actually, in the case of Use of Weapons, it came from Ken MacLeod; he suggested the ascending/descending chapters idea and in doing so effectively rescued a manuscript I was going to treat as a lost cause and just forget about. Doing that sort of stuff for its own sake means you're just being self-indulgent, or trying to show off. It might look cool to some people but you'll lose more readers than you'll impress.

Alcohol and drugs recur frequently in your novels, from the Culture's drug glands to the lifestyle of Prentice McHoan in The Crow Road and Cameron Colley in Complicity. Transition’s Tarnsitionaries move between alternate dimensions via the injection of Septus and you detailed the world of whiskey in Raw Spirit. As an admitted indulger, did their presence in your work reflect their presence in your life? And now that you don’t indulge, will they disappear?
No, I still drink; I have a reputation as a champagne socialist to maintain, after all. Drugs seem to have lost their appeal. Could be just an age thing, though I still believe our drug laws are stupid, wrong-headed, irrational and almost certainly create net harm. I have tried writing while high, stoned, drunk, whatever, but it doesn't work. You might think it has worked at the time, but when you re-read sober, it's generally just embarrassing drivel. I suspect I'd still do coke now and again but a) my girlfriend is very anti-drugs and b) it's hard to justify, given the amount of violence associated with the manufacture and distribution of the stuff. By indulging you're sending money to some deeply unpleasant people. I miss it a little, but only a little. I guess having taken a few drugs over the years has had the effect of making me confident about writing about them, but I wouldn't want to overstate their importance in either my life or my work.

Your work rate is very high. In these uncertain financial times, do you think that more writers will have to take a more workmanlike approach to the craft of writing novels? You are releasing an abridged audio-book version of Transition on iTunes. Do you think that similar methods will become standard operating procedure?
Hmm. That might be an effect. Equally possibly, people—writers and readers—might turn to wild fantasy to escape the grimness of reality. I wouldn't claim to be an authority on the state of the novel, but it still looks pretty healthy to me and I think the idea it will somehow cease to be is just silly. Theatre didn't disappear when cinema came along and paintings didn't stop being painted because somebody invented the camera. The iTunes version of Transition is an interesting experiment, but not really that different from a standard CD audio book. I guess if it's judged to make money—either directly or by selling more copies of the CD audio or paper versions—then it will become standard procedure. The Sony eReader and the Kindle represent a more radical change; how those affect book buying will likely be profound.

What were the kind of things that set you on your way to creating the Sacrifice Poles in the early-80s?
Lots of influences—many of them literary, including a lot of science fiction novels and short stories, many not—Marx Brothers movies, The Goon Show, Monty Python and various films and TV, as you'd expect. My parents were always very loving and supportive and my extended family—especially on my dad's side—meant a lot. Plus I was lucky to have some very good English teachers—they made a difference too. The Sacrifice Poles? Frankly, I can't remember where they came from.

Vice v7n12 Interview: Alan Moore

2010-02-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

An interview with one of my heroes for the annual Vice Fiction Issue. This is a longer edit than the one that made the magazine.

DISTORTED DREAM GLASSES AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

Alan Moore’s Fictions Show Us What Could Have Been (And Still Might Be)

Alan Moore should need no introduction. But on the miniscule off chance that you don’t know who he is, it is fairly simple. Moore is the one guy that just about anyone who has ever read a comic agrees to be the best writer in the fictional form’s entire history. Period. He was the person who near enough single-handedly made it OK for grown-ups to admit that they liked funny books and legitimised the concept of comics being works of fiction that should be taken just as seriously as books that didn’t have pictures in them to go with all the words.

A proud son of Northampton who still lives near the area he grew up, Moore cut his teeth in the early 1980s at 2000AD, the leading British comic factory of science fiction and fantasy. His Judge Dredd strips re-imagined the character with hitherto unexplored complexities. His own creation, Halo Jones, was the first title in the medium not to portray a female character as a big-boobed super lady or a victim. They remain peerless within 2000AD’s output and British comics in general.

By the mid-1980s, he had revolutionised American comics first by jump-starting stagnant DC title Swamp Thing and turning it in to a book of existential examination with ecological concerns and then by creating something called Watchmen. Let’s assume you know all about that.

Several legal tussles over ownership and rights to his creations later, and Moore’s comic output narrowed to work on his own line, only half-jokingly entitled America’s Best Comics. Of the glut of genius that sprang from ABC, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman seems to have captured Moore’s imagination and it has become a mammoth, sprawling beast of a book that happily mixes fictional and imagined history with versions of our own reality.

On top of all that, Moore has managed to find time to produce a formally complex novel, Voice of Fire (1996) and a long form poem that deals with girls who like girls and guys who like guys called The Mirror of Love (2003). He also published 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, which examined pretty much what the title suggests, and Lost Girls (2006), which he created with Melinda Gebbie and involves Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice In Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz having lots of fairly explicit adventures. It’s a real hoot.

Moore is currently working on Dodgem Logic, an underground magazine, his second novel, Jerusalem, and a guide to magic. Because he is a practising magician. Who also worships a Roman snake deity called Glycon. We called him at his home in Northampton and, after assuring us that he had a cup of tea and “as many more cups on the way as it takes”, it soon became apparent that as well as being a genius of the written word, Mr Moore is also really in to talking. A lot.

Vice: Hello Alan, so Dodgem Logic is your new thing. Why don’t you tell us about that.
Alan Moore: Dodgem Logic is an aggressively random collision of all sorts of things from absurdist pieces of fiction by Steve Aylett to new bits of work by Savage Pencil and Kevin O’Neill. Aesthetically and in terms of form it came from a fascination with the underground press, which is a culture that dates back to before the printed press itself but came to popular fruition in the 1960s and 1970s when it was a vital part of the counterculture. In the UK, the main papers were The International Times and Oz – which started out as a satire magazine in Australia and then moved here, where it became a much more controversial and psychedelic affair. Those were intoxicating times and it was the underground press which acted as the glue keeping that whole element of society together and in touch with each other. Without that glue you would have just had a few people who wore similar clothes, liked similar music and took similar drugs. You would have had no coherent political or cultural discourse. We decided to make Dodgem Logic a very brightly coloured, 48-page magazine that is trying to reinvent the notion of underground publishing for the 21st century. We were constantly trying to leave it with some rough edges, we didn’t want it to be slick because there can be something intimidating about slick. It can put up a barrier between the magazine and its audience so we’ve gone for a deliberately rough look.

It is fairly cut and paste in places, which makes it seem like a hybrid between an underground paper and a zine.
I take that as a compliment. Fanzines used to be such a vital part of the culture that I grew up in from the poetry fanzines of the 1960s to the comic book, science fiction and fantasy fanzines in the 1970s that produced so much of the talent that now dominates the comic and science fiction genres. They were incredibly productive little publications and they contained such a lot of energy. Perhaps that came from how easy they were to produce. They were nowhere as easy as they would be to make these days, but now that all of the technology is there to make something far more ambitious than we ever dreamed possible the impetus is no longer there. Perhaps the degree of passion that was put in to something like Sniffin’ Glue or any of those zines associated with the punk movement does in fact exist now, but online. I don’t know. I may sound old-fashioned, but I still believe that there will always be a difference between something that you can look at on a screen and something that you can hold in your hand. There is more of a sense of an artefact that is part of a community and part of a culture.

A general dissatisfaction with government and the inexorable decline of civilization, as well as a concern with the erosion of local community and culture, is a recurring theme in your work, from Swamp Thing to Watchmen. Dodgem Logic seems a more direct means of addressing those issues, as opposed to the more oblique method of tackling them via comics.
To tell the truth, I am pretty much out of comics. I am pressing on with The League and I am drawing some strips for Dodgem Logic, but I am detached from the comics industry and I no longer consider myself a part of it. These issues could be addressed in comic form. However, while doing that might delight my comic book audience, it wouldn’t be addressing the wider world, which is where these issues need to be. I should initially point out that Dodgem Logic isn’t a magazine specifically about Northampton. That just happens to be where myself and some of the contributors are from. However, we look at it from the point of view that Northampton is in the exact centre of the country geographically, economically and politically. It is a fairly good model representation of an every-town. The high streets are being boarded up, the people are being abused by the council and there is garbage everywhere.

What prompted you to address these issue so directly now?
There were the social concerns of the general decline of society, but those issues constantly loom large. It was really more specific events that prompted us to start the magazine. A couple of years ago I was contacted by a group of ex-young offenders who hade been working on their music down in the Burrows area of Northampton. That is where I was born, where I grew up and where most of my forthcoming novel is set. They had decided that they wanted to do a film about this deprived and neglected area where they were living. Since they knew that I came from the area, they asked me if maybe I’d like to be interviewed for the film. They were working with the Central Museum in Northampton who got in touch with me and I went down there, met them and we got on very well. I wanted to stay in touch with them beyond the duration of that initial project, so I went down every week to the offices of a local community support organisation called CASPA that was doing brilliant work in the area. I met up with the boys and their wrangler, who was a wonderful young woman called Lucy, and I’d inevitably tell them about the local scene and the underground culture and arts clubs that were around when I was growing up and had done so much to shape me in to the person that I am today. I would also tell them about how we’d produce magazines and fanzines and hold poetry readings and things like that and I’m sure it was very boring for them hearing all these stories, but the ideas seemed to stick. They decided to produce a magazine of their own, which I contributed to. Both myself and the boys wanted to talk about some of the genuine problems that afflicted that area and how it was a shame that we probably couldn’t talk about them in the magazine because it was council-funded. We discussed the possibility of doing an independent magazine and decided to give it a go. The issues seemed so important to the people of that area that we couldn’t keep them from the local community. I wrote an article that was called The Destructors. It was about an old incinerator that was in the Burrows area. It was where, in days gone by, the entire city would bring its rubbish and crap to be disposed of. Now that gave a pretty clear message as to what the council thought of people who lived in that area, and while the incinerator was torn down in the 1930s, that message remains applicable to the area. It is where the council sends things that it doesn’t want to have deal with: immigrant groups, ex-convicts and people who have been in care homes. All the problematic people are shoved down into this neighbourhood, often in accommodation that has been condemned by the fire services and where horrific things happen every day. We were unsurprisingly told that we could not publish the article as it was critical of the council, so Lucy and I worked it out that she could drop down to three days a week at CASPA and spend the other two days working on an independent magazine with me. The council swiftly told her that if she was going to spend two days a week working on an independent magazine then she wouldn’t have her job at the council on the other three days, at which point I decided that I’d had enough and I invited Lucy to work on the magazine full-time. The issues we are talking about are important and the magazine offers a place where these things can be discussed. We’re not bound by any constraint and we can say whatever we want. However, we don’t just want to depress the hell out of people, so we have tried to get as much stuff in there as we can that is genuinely entertaining as well as the social and political. These are both strategies of getting people through difficult times – give them the information that they need, but also give them something to cheer them up. I hadn’t done much more than pass through that area for many years. Meeting the good people that lived there in this rotten situation actually made me decide that I wanted to do something focused on that area and areas that are like it all over the country. The Burrows is in the top two percent of depravation in the United Kingdom and there are areas like it all over the country but they are swept under the carpet. I also felt an emotional attachment to the area, which I’ve always had, and I saw an opportunity to produce something beautiful and useful out of that environment while at the same time creating a model for other areas like it.

You have advocated anarchy both in your work and personally in the past. Would that be your answer to the social problems discussed in Dodgem Logic?
Well, in the second issue I will actually be writing an article introducing anarchy and explaining how it could practically be applied to our current situation. So yes. One of the things that I will be looking at is the principle of the Athenian lottery and the concept of sortition. Sortition basically dictates that on any issue that needs to be settled on a national or administrative level you appoint a jury by lottery. They can come from anywhere within the culture and they are appointed purely at random. The pros and cons of the case are then presented to the jury, which they then listen to, debate, then vote on. After the decision, they are no longer part of the jury, they melt back into society and for the next issue another jury is appointed. That system seems to me like it might be approaching something like democracy, which is something that we do not have at the moment. The word democracy comes from “demos”, the people, and “cratos”, to rule – “the people rule”. It doesn’t say anything about the elected representatives of the people ruling, which is the system that we have at the moment. By moving to something closer to sortition, we would create a system safe from many of the abuses of our current model of government. It is quite difficult to buy people’s favour if you don’t know who the people you need to be buttering up are going to be. It would also be difficult for the temporary ruling body to act in their own interest, as it would make more sense for them to act in the interest of the society that they would be returning to. It would also square the circle between the ideas of anarchy and government. My definition of anarchy is the Greek one: no leaders. It is difficult to think of an ordered society that conforms to that ideal and yet with the Athenian lottery you wouldn’t have leaders, you would have individual people making balanced decisions. It would take an enormous amount of constitutional change, but I like putting the idea out there so that it is a possibility and something to be discussed. Our current form of government clearly isn’t working and we can’t just keep trying to make quick fixes on a model that is inherently flawed. It might be the time for a new model rather than putting continual patches on the radiator of the old Model T Ford that has come to the end of its natural lifetime.

Dodgem Logic deals with the your local environment very directly. Your forthcoming novel is also set in the area, as was your first. Will you be tackling these themes through your long form fiction?
To a certain degree; both methods complement each other. Dodgem Logic and Jerusalem essentially deal with the same neighbourhood and territory, albeit in wildly different ways. Reading an issue of Dodgem Logic will be a very different experience to reading a chapter or two of Jerusalem. Dodgem Logic is me trying to do something intelligent yet accessible. Jerusalem – I don’t care if anyone likes it or not. I am just trying to do the best possible piece of writing that I can. Jerusalem is between myself and the world. If nobody reads it that is a problem for me, whereas Dodgem Logic is important in a different way. It is important in terms of the issue that it raises about the area and those are issues I want people to hear about. They are both attempts to reinvigorate and reinvent that neighbourhood in different contexts. Dodgem Logic is attempting to literally and practically re-invigorate the area and give something back to its people. Jerusalem is more akin to what Iain Sinclair achieved with his wonderful book Hackney, That Rose- Red Empire. He captured the rich snow globe of Hackney that was vanishing under his feet. He managed to get all of the broad characters and lost eras captured in that book before they are flattened and steam-rolled over to make way for the Olympic Village. With fiction, you have a means – and perhaps the only true means – to either resurrect or preserve the places that are going to disappear if not today then tomorrow.

The concept of preserving the past through fiction is one that you embrace in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman to a pretty huge degree. Every cell is crammed with tonnes of cultural references.
With The League…, which I can tell you that I have just finished writing book three of today, we are attempting to create, through fiction, a cultural Noah’s Ark, within which all of the great writers and the great fictions that Kevin and myself feel are worthy of preserving can be kept alive through The League… for a little bit longer before they sink in the depths of ignorance.

The League… also exists in a strange space between fiction and reality and carves a very convincing fictional reality. Was that intentional from the outset?
Absolutely. We have a very well-defined reality and it is something that gets stronger as the story goes on. It has probably got to be, by definition, the single biggest continuity in literature of all time because it has all of the characters individual continuities subsumed within it. That world is interesting in the way that we are trying to fit in all of the fictional inspirations from certain eras into our final continuity so you have a world where the Nazis did invade and Fu Manchu was real, but at the same time it mirrors our own world and our own world’s development. It may be a distorted glass but it helps order our perception of our own world. It is like a dream glass. Our reality wasn’t like that of The League’s, but it might have been what we were dreaming of in our fictions and in ourselves. It allows us to see what might have been and what we might have aspired to. It is the other half of the story. There is actual history, as in what actually happened, but that in itself is a kind of fiction. Then there is the kind of history presented in our art, books and literature. Which, in a peculiar and psychological sense, is truer and more dependable than supposedly factual, conventional history, which might not in fact be true in any sense at all. Throughout The League… we have established a sense that fiction is in fact the bedrock that mankind is standing upon and that our real world is ultimately based upon fiction.

How do you continue to shove so many literary and cultural references into The League…?
They are my interests, Kevin’s interests and a result of the research that we did when we hit upon the concept. Then we started to think seriously about what would happen if this was a story in which everything in the fictional world could be included. This meant that it would need its own geography, which we dealt with in the appendix to the second volume. It would also need its own history, which was dealt with in The Black Dossier. For example, we didn’t have an Adolf Hitler in our fictional reality, we had an Adenoid Hynkel from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. It’s nice to be able to tie up a few of these things and have them based upon self-contained real events. In our reality, the M figure, who is the leader of MI5, turns out to be Harry Lime from The Third Man, which was written by Graham Greene, who based that character upon his life-long friend and a real spy who defected to the Soviets Union called Kim Philby. The Harry Lime character we decided to in fact just make a pseudonym for Robert Sherry, who was one of the characters who attended Greyfriars school in the Billy Bunter books. We then decided to make George Orwell’s big brother into Harry Wharton, who was the leader of the gang at Greyfriars. We also turned Greyfriars into a British public school that was recruiting for the spy service, which in turn fades nicely into real history. What clinched it was discovering that there had been a brief spat between Frank Richards, who had written the Billy Bunter stories, and George Orwell, who had written an essay about how the Bunter books represented everything that was bad about the British Empire. Frank Richards disastrously attempted to write a riposte to Orwell, where he replied to the accusations that he portrayed foreigners as being in some way comical simply by saying: “They are.” That link between reality, fiction and the fiction being discussed in reality makes the uses all the more piquant. There are many links like that within The League… that Jess Nevins, The League’s annotator, will unravel. The subtexts are just interesting little avenues the reader might want to investigate and help enrich the world that The League… takes place in.

The League… and V For Vendetta both portray fascist dystopias. In light of the rise of the BNP and the English Defence League, as well as Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, do you fear that the fictional futures you have created may come to pass in your lifetime?
No. I could of course be completely wrong and I do think that fascism is still set to cause us a lot of trouble, but I genuinely think that it comes from a place of such ignorance that it cannot adequately cope with the realities of the 21st century. It is too simple a concept and lacks the complexity necessary to deal with the fairly chaotic daily realities of our current situation. It is only really effective on a thuggish street level, which can cause trouble for marginalised minority groups. That is a terrible reality for a lot of people but as a political force they cannot be taken seriously. I agree with Reginald D. Hunter who says, “You have to let the fascists talk.” Allowing them to speak in public will do them no good at all, as their voice is so shrill, unpleasant and off-putting that I don’t think it will in any way aid their electoral prospects. If you attempt to silence them you allow them to claim oppression by the liberal elite. Have you seen what Nick Griffin looks like? Now, I know that our politicians are no oil paintings, but even in that environment the BNP are particularly repulsive. Most parties put at least some thought into their presentation and allow some consideration of who will be their focal point. The BNP clearly do not have that luxury; they have to take whatever they can get. As to Griffin being on Question Time, I have never watched it so it will hardly bother me. Aside from that time that Brian Eno was on. That was rather good

What can we expect from Jerusalem? Will it pick up the themes dealt with in Voice of Fire?
Jerusalem will certainly have elements in common with Voice of Fire and there will still be elements of formal experimentation, but it will not be quite the same structurally. Jerusalem will be divided into three books. It will hopefully come in one volume with three parts. The first part will be reminiscent of Voices of Fire in that it will jump about from character to character in different times in the third-person past tense. There will not be an individual from each age in order, it will be jumping about from differing perspectives and from time to time. The second book involves a continuous linear narrative from chapter to chapter, but does peculiar things with language and perspective and it’s certainly where some of the more fantastic elements of the novel take place. It is rather akin to a mad children’s story due to the majority of the protagonists either being children or the ghosts of dead children. The third part, which I’m currently trying to finish and is about nine chapters from completion, is the most experimental and demented piece of writing I have ever done. Thus far it is all in the present tense and each chapter is written in a wildly different style. The chapter that I have just finished is entitled “Round the Bend” and it deals with the St. Andrews hospital, which is a marvellous place where my wife and I had our wedding. Its patients include Spike Milligan, Dusty Springfield, Patrick Stewart, Sir Malcolm Arnold the composer, JK. Stephen, the ripper suspect, and Lucia Joyce, who spent 35 years there as a mental patient. The chapter I have just finished involves Lucia Joyce wandering around the grounds of the hospital while she is also wandering in her mind where she is meeting other patients from other times who she could not possibly physically meet. It is a hallucinatory tour around the hospital grounds and around Lucia’s mind and it is all written in what I am sure is a lousy attempt at her father’s language, which takes you through this hallucinatory angelic state that Lucia is in. William Blake is another figure that is of course hanging over Jerusalem, even though he doesn’t directly appear in it, as well as John Bunyan, who does. They both helped inspire the visionary aspects of the novel. Part two involves a working-class paradise with working-class angels who play billiards with human souls, which is an idea I am keen on, but the chapter with Lucia Joyce took me forever to write, which is why I needed a break after chapter 26.

Is your book of Magic still in the works?
It certainly is. Once I’ve finished the final book of The League… and Jerusalem it will be time to tackle that.

What is it about magic that you find so interesting?
Magic to me is a new perspective with which to look at the world, your life and reality, as well as a new approach to your relationship with your own consciousness. It is a much more interactive approach to consciousness that offers far greater possibilities. I was initially very sceptical about magic due to the enormous number of idiots associated with it. However when I came across people like Dr. John Dee I realised that I was dismissing people who were clearly, or at least apparently, far more intelligent than myself. I didn’t come up with the theories of navigation or mathematics or astronomy or the concept of the British Empire and apply it to the whole world. You can’t really dismiss people who have achieved things like that so I started to study magic and I discovered that it was the most effective way of examining your consciousness. Science is a very powerful tool for examining reality, but there is a whole section of the mind that it cannot examine or explain. I think it is a fairly safe assumption to make that my consciousness is real and that I am currently talking to you on this telephone as opposed to a talking hologram that my consciousness is projecting. However, science cannot explain or rationalise the concept of consciousness because it cannot replicate it in a laboratory. That leaves the single biggest area of our experience of the world unexplained. We experience reality through our consciousness, so if we don’t accept that it exists what do we have? Science does a wonderful job of explaining many facets of reality but it is not its place to make pronouncements regarding consciousness because it cannot do the job of explaining it. Attempting to say that it doesn’t exist is an admission of failure. With magic, all sorts of possibilities are offered as to what consciousness might be, what areas of consciousness might have strange qualities and what may be practical applications for those qualities. Magic is entirely to do with the world of the mind and I happen to believe that things within your mind are real. They are just not real in the same way that things in the physical, material world are real. It is not a difficult distinction to make – we are talking about two different categories of reality here. We exist in the material world in the same way that a rock in the garden exists in the material world, but we also exist in this other world that seems to be purely cerebral. Magic is simply a way of exploring that world. It involves following concepts that certain individuals have been exploring since humanities inception. Some of them were charlatans, some of them were deluded maniacs or attention-seekers, but some of them are the pillars upon which our entire reality is based. Paracelsus basically put forward the concepts of modern medicine, as well as being the first person to explore the concept of the unconscious centuries before Freud or Jung. He was also a magician. He wouldn’t have used that term himself and probably would have thought of himself as a natural philosopher. Many of the cornerstones of our culture have roots in the occult. The earliest writers and artists came from the shamanic culture and science comes from alchemy. Isaac Newton was an alchemist. When he said, “We are standing on the shoulders of giants,” the shoulders he was talking about were those of John Dee. Einstein apparently died with a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine on the corner of his desk and there are certainly similarities between The Secret Doctrine and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, magic tends to be viewed as the deranged relative of the family that we don’t want to bring up this far in to the advancement of our culture. The idea for the book came about when I decided, along with my magical partner Steve Moore, it was time to lay our cards on the table and explain what magic was, how to do it and why you probably shouldn’t do it in a book that wasn’t hiding behind pseudo-creepy imagery or incomprehensible occult jargon. So watch out for it.

Vice v7n11 Band Piece: Joy Orbison

2010-02-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

NOTHING TO DO WITH ROY ORBISON

Joy Orbison Made The Tune Of The Year Without Even Trying

Back when we featured Skream in the Horror Issue of Vice way back in 2005 no one gave a crap about dubstep. You could go to FWD at Plastic People on a Thursday and there would be twenty people nodding their heads in the dingy basement.
Nowadays what came bubbling out of Croydon in the early 2000’s is the nations default main room club music. Skream’s remix of La Roux’s “In For The Kill” basically launched pointy hair smurf’s whole career and FWD got so popular that it had to move to Fridays before moving to Sundays in an attempt to shake off the coked up, white-shirts-and-shiny-shoes, weekend warrior brigade.

With the need to move huge rooms filled with gurning , sweaty masses of people much of what made the sound good in the first place has been lost along the way. Loefah’s stripped back masterclasses in minimal halfstep, the swinging 2-step of Horsepower Productions and the weird synth explorations that typified Kode9 have all been thrown overboard in favour of huge, derivative, squelching mid-range wobblers. Walk into a rave these days and it’s like being in the middle of a who-can-build-the-biggest-sonic-bouncy castle competition. Last time I checked Caspa and Rusko were way out in front.

Praise Todd Edwards above and Ghost Records almighty then for a bunch of young kids like Ben UFO, Untold and Ramadanman who are as much in thrall to Omar S and Basic Channel as they are understanding that the roots of the music they make lies in J Da Flex and El-B as opposed to Bad Company and Twisted Individual. Pick up a release on Hessle or 2nd Drop and you’ll soon get the idea.

“Hyph Mngo” came out of nowhere to close Ben UFO’s Fabric Live mix and suddenly this wave of producers had their anthem and the rest of us had a hands down track of the year. It was made by a guy called Joy Orbison who it turns out is actually called Pete and he has a record label called Doldrums that you should all start getting exited about.

Vice: Hi there. I feel a bit silly addressing you as Joy. Can I call you Roy?
Joy Orbison: It’s OK you can call me Pete. I just chose the name because I liked the sound of it. It wasn’t really anything to do with Roy Orbison.

Ok, how did a skinny white kid called Pete wind up making bass music?
I got in to drum&bass when I was like 10 or 11 mainly because my uncle made it, he’s called Ray Keith.

Ray Keith is your uncle?
Yeah. I thought everyone knew that already. He probably only actually listened to my stuff about a month ago though. For years I was into punk and collecting 7”s and I’ve always liked bands. It is difficult explaining that you like Josef K to people who just assume you are a garage kid. I started producing mainly because I was DJing and no one was putting out the kind of stuff that I wanted to play.

The day you made “Hyph Mngo” did you feel all inspired like Keats and know that you were about to make this big piece of work?
Not really it was one of the first things I made actually on my really basic set up. No one that comes round can believe how crap my speakers are. They are just kind of PC Workshop ones. It’s really cack-handed. I keep getting offered all these huge amounts to do remixes for people like VV Brown and I don’t think people realise how basic the approach is.

So you made everyone’s favourite tune of the year by mistake on some PC Workshop speakers?
Sort of, yes.

BUCKEN JERRY

http://www.myspace.com/joyorbison

“Hyph Mngo/Wet Look” is available now on Hot Flush Records. “BRKLN CALLN/J DOE” is forthcoming on Doldrums.

Vice v7n11 Record Reviews

2010-02-02T08:55:00.000-08:00

Life On Earth (Music From The 1979 BBC TV Series)
Edward Williams
Trunk

9 These days Sir Lord Attenborough may have the co-operation of the US Air Force and sixty bajillion dollars worth of camera equipment trained at a snow drift in Antarctica right now on the off chance that a silver eyebrowed Arctic marsupial might yawn. What he doesn’t have is Edward Williams unique music to soundtrack it. Williams fed his orchestral movements through early synthesisers to create unique and haunting pieces with names like “The Sex Life Of The Fern”. They are available here for the first time thanks to everyone’s favourite curate of lost classics Jonny Trunk. In a just world Jonny would be a “sir” too.

Alan Titmarsh

Hush Arbors
Yankee Reality
Ecstatic Peace!

7 Anyone would have thought that hanging out with David Tibet as a fully paid up member of Current 93 would leave you moping around weeping blackened tears under a cold, full moon. Not Keith Wood though. His second album for EcstatiscPeace! as Hush Arbors finds him hooking up with J Mascis and rolling through a hazy, warm and decidedly mellow approximation of somewhere between Laurel Canyon and that bayou that Creedence were always banging on about.

Judas Moth

Todd
Big Ripper
Riot Season

2 Todd make chunky, riffy metal for people who say they like the Melvins but don’t know who Joe Preston is. Which is a bit like buying a Misfits shirt in Urban Outfitters. There is nothing awful about this. There’s just nothing good about it either.

Andy Peters

Shrinebuilder
Shrinebuilder
Neurot

9 Saint Vitus, The Obsessed, Om, Sleep, Neurosis, The Melvins. Collectively the four people in this band have played in all of those things. Yep, you get the picture: it’s the stoner rock Travelling Willburys! Except that instead of being an excuse to get away from the missus and have a bifta or two under the pretence of ‘writing some songs in George Harrison’s garage’ this is has turned out to be just about as good as anything that Dale Crover, Wino, Al Cisneros or Scott Kelly have played on so far. Seriously.

Evil Gypsy

Molina & Johnson
Molina & Johnson
Secretly Canadian

7 Hardly the Morecombe & Wise of alt-folk, this not-so-merry merger of the guy with the voice like a lifetime’s worth of broken hearts from Magnolia Electric Co. and the fella who sounds like he’s about to do an Eliot Smith from South San Gabriel was never going to be a barrel of laughs. But, when you’re singing songs called things like “All Gone, All Gone” Jason and Willy are basically the A-Team.

Jennie Blackbird

Foot Village
Anti Magic
Upset The Rhythm

8 It’s a shame that there are no high street record shops left because this has a picture of a guy with his dick out stabbing someone in a hajib with a missile on the cover. Fifteen years ago that combination would have got you banned from Our Price at the very least which might just have generated enough press for a few people to actually hear this wholly unhinged and chaotically great album.

Glen Picton

Saviours
Accelerated Living
Kemado

7 Ignore this album’s title. It conjures sub-Progidy early 90s big-beat rave music you’d hear on a free covermount Max Power CD. Fortunately Saviours pedal thick-necked, doom metal that they are probably listening to in the Cro-Bar right now.

Circle Jams

Lightning Bolt
Earthly Delights
Load

5 Fives are a pretty unacceptable score. They are a cop out. A five means that the guy reviewing the record has no real opinion on the thing he’s supposed to be writing about and is just going to sit right there on that fence. Well, for once I’m slapping down a five where a five is due. Like a noise-rock Marmite, if you love Lightning Bolt and think that they redefined the boundaries of rock music then you will of course think this is the best thing since bread full stop and give it ten out of ten and a gold star before whacking it at the top of every year end list you get within 100 paces of. If however you think they are a pair of art-school drop outs who randomly smash their drums and play annoying high pitched bass figures on repeat forever then you’ll think it’s as two dimensional as ever.

Brian Brianson

Hello=Fire
Hello=Fire
Schnitzel Records

8 Howdy! Here’s twelve cuts of rock & roll like they used to make it back when people made things and didn’t get them from China or the internet. Dead Weather and Queens Of The Stone Age guy Dean Fertita has even managed to rope fellow Detroit maven Brendan Benson as well half of the Queens lineup and Michael Horrigan from the Afghan Whigs in for the ride to boot.

Jack Blight

Felix
You Are The One I Pick
Kranky

8 You know those adverts for Centre Parcs that make it seem like there will be Nordic hot springs in the middle of the middle of a verdant, green forest in a place of total calm and isolation when you get there? Well, I’ve been to Centre Parcs and it’s nothing like that but if I’d had this album during the three hellish days I spent there I could have at least closed my eyes and pretended I was in that place for a few brief moments.

Alexis Petri-Dish

King Khan & BBQ Show
Invisible Girl
In The Red

8 The hardest working kook in garage rock hooks back up with Mark Sultan for another round of fuzz, soul and endless innuendo. It is probably not possible for music to be any more fun than this without spontaneously combusting like when you put a Capri-Sun in the microwave.

Klaus Thinger

Viceland Rhys Chatham Interview

2010-02-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

An interview I did with Rhys Chatham for Viceland.

From this Saturday the ICA will be overrun for a whole nine days by people making weird noises. Calling Out Of Context is a haven of workshops, talks, shows and recording sessions for people who take things like modulating the sound of a nail scraping down a black board very seriously indeed. If that's your bag then you probably got your tickets months ago. However, if you're yet to book and want in on the action then fear not as we have a pair of tickets for the Lucky Dragons performance tomorrow which kicks the whole thing off. First person to email in and tell us which fancy pants art festival Lucky Dragons played last year gets those. If you miss out on the freebies though don't cry, you should go check out the festival anyway as a lot of the day time lecture-y type stuff is free and in the evenings there are a bunch of performances by guys like Aaron Dilloway, The Red Krayola, Chocolate Monk and Gravetemple aka Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi and Atilla from Mayhem. It's basically a Wire readers wank fantasy come to life. Oh, Rhys Chatham is playing too so we had a chat with him earlier in the week about what to expect from his show. Click on for that and all the details and stuff are here.

For those of you who don't know who Rhys Chatham is: you should be ashamed of yourselves. Feeling shamed? Good. OK, in a nutshell Chatham is conservetory trained classical musician who studied under Lamonte Young, Morton Subotnick, Glen Gould and Tony Conrad. If you still don't have a clue what we're talking about, that basically means that he was taught by the gods of modern avant-garde classical, electronic and minimal music. Jeez, get a clue already.

In 1977 Rhys saw The Ramones play, had his minimalist world spun on its axis and picked up an electric guitar. Along with kindred spirit Glen Branca he started performing a piece of music with three electric guitar parts which he imaginatively named Guitar Trio which set a fire up the ass of the Lower East Side that would eventually consume lots of people that you like a lot. You know that thing called No Wave that seems to provide endless fodder for coffee table books with introductions by Thurston Moore and crops up more than it should in the 'influences' bit of MySpace band pages? That's what we're talking about here. No Rhys means no No Wave. Since his late 1970's experiments Rhys has continued to chip away at the boundaries of the outer regions of what sounds it's possible to make with an electric guitar. Increasingly this has involved ginormous ensembles of 200 and occasionally 400 people all plugged in and playing at once. Which makes quite a racket. We caught up with Rhys from Paris which he has called home for many years.

Vice: Hey Rhys. So what can we expect from your show on Sunday at the ICA?

Rhys Chatham: It will be a performance of Guitar Trio which was initially something that I performed in the 70's as a live piece to the setting of slides in places like Max's Kansas City in New York. A few years ago though I decided to revive the original version of Guitar Trio using musicians from whichever city we happen to be playing in. So, for example: if we are in New York all my friends from Sonic Youth will play with us and when we went to Chicago we played with Tortoise. I was actually nervous when we played with them because they are such fantastic musicians. In London we will be playing with members of Blue Sabbath Black Fiji.

It sounds like there are more than three guitars involved this new version of the trio?

Usually there are more like a minimum of six electric guitars. The first part of the piece is twenty minutes long and the drummer plays only the high hat. Then we take a quick break and tune and play the whole piece again but with a full kit. With the full kit the energy is completely different. In my formative career I was very much influenced by people like Lamonte and Terry and not to forget John Cale who was wailing away throughout the late 1960's but when the punk thing came along I decided to pick up an electric guitar. Now, when people first hear the piece they may notice that it is just one note but what the different musicians are working with are differing harmonics and the effect can be very powerful. Despite my classical background I wrote Guitar Trio with the intention of it being played by rock musicians. I was at a point where I wanted to throw that background to one side. The Ramones were playing three chords and I was just playing one. When we play Guitar Trio the musicians that I play with find counterpoints when they play the piece that allow for subtle fluctuations which can alter the harmonics. For example, when we are playing with six guitars we will listen to each other very carefully and with our picking techniques we can alter the whole tone of the piece.

Having performed your pieces for 100, 200, and even 400 guitar players what made you come back to doing Guitar Trio?

Well, a very practical reason is that those larger performances take about a year to set up and execute and involve a lot of logistical planning plus a lot of venues cannot afford it. The first time I reprised Guitar Trio though was at a festival in Atlanta for my record label, Table Of Elements, the guy who runs it asked if I'd do the original version and we did it and it sounded great. I also love the intimacy of playing rock clubs and in somewhere like the ICA you are going to have trouble fitting 100 guitar players on the stage.

Do you have any plans to top the 400 guitars that you did in Paris in 2005?

It's not really a question of beating. The idea with the larger pieces is to surround the audience with a wall of guitars so the number depends on the venue. It's determined by the location. It's basically a site specific work.

How did you wind up in Paris anyway?

I originally came here for a woman who I met in New York. She was French dancer and she wanted to move back home. I thought it would be an adventure to move to Paris and it was. I have lived here for 21 years now. I'm no longer together with the person but we're still friends and we have a kid together so my life is here.

Has living in Paris had any effect on your work?

Most of the guitar work I have done was defined in New York. My trumpet playing was completely defined here. I could probably do what I do in any major city though. I love Paris, New York, London and Berlin.

After all these years of making huge rackets with hundreds of guitarists how do you have any hearing left?

I play with ear plugs in practice but during the show I can't as you can't really hear anything properly. I have tinnitus, it was pretty scary when I realised and the bad news it that it doesn't go away.

Viceland Gallows Interview

2010-02-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

An interview with Lags from Gallows for Viceland.

As we've already mentioned Vice Presents is happening on the 18th of December. Tickets are disappearing quicker than Jordan leaving a jungle so best to get yours here before they're gone for good. We decided to have a chat to Lags from Gallows about how he feels about the lifetime highlight we've offered his band by allowing them to headline our event. Click on for that and a few videos of the last couple of times Gallows laid waste to The Old Blue Last.

Vice: Hey Lags. I just spoke to a press person who then connected me to you and said “you have Lags on the line”. It was like when Jack Bauer calls the President in 24.
Lags (guitar): I don’t know if I am as cool as the President but I’ll do my best.

So what have you been up to Lags?
I just got back from the US, we were doing a load of dates with AFI.

How was that? Were the shows filled with mopey emo-goths crying into the photographers pit on the front row?
It was pretty crazy, the whole front row at every single show we played would be packed with these really young identical looking girls. They sleep out at the venue from the night before just so that they can be in the front row. That’s dedication right?

It is indeed. How did your feisty brand of Watford Hardcore go down with the tweemo brigade?
You’d be surprised, as long as there are like, five hardcore kids in there some kind of pit gets going. Also, in the UK we tend to be headlining a lot these days so you end up playing to your own crowd a bit. It’s a nice to change to be playing to someone else’s crowd and trying to get a reaction.

So what can we expect from your show at Vice Presents?
We’re just psyched to be playing a Vice show, the last time I did anything with you guys was when I DJ’d at a Fucked Up show and that was pretty crazy. We played with Fucked Up at the Old Blue as well and that was nuts too. Andy (Capper, Vice Editor) has been a big supporter of ours from day one so we are just happy to be playing a show with you lot. I can’t wait.

It’s in a warehouse too which should be a different kettle of monkeys from the enormo-domes you played with AFI.
Yeah, I am excited about that too. Smaller club shows and house shows or warehouse shows like this are always more fun to play. They just feel a lot less rock&roll and have more of a straight up punk-rock vibe which I like. I’m also excited to see Lovvers and Male Bonding, it’s a good bill.

Have you got anything special planned? How about actually coming out with all of you hanging from a huge gallows? See what I did there? Have you ever done that before?
No. We did get all these neon crosses made up once though which we were gonna have upside down on stage.

Like the anti-Justice?
Yeah! We went and got them all made up off our own batt but we never ended up using them.

How come, did Warners tell you no in case you incited religious hatred and it had a detrimental affect on sales?
Nah, they just looked stupid so we canned the idea.

What about the gallows then? You can have that idea, I won’t even charge a consultancy fee.
We actually got the name from gallows humour as opposed to the actual gallows.

Oh, I guess that is a little harder to manifest in physical form. How about Frank getting a tattoo on stage or has that one run its course?
He’s running out of space mate. He’s getting this huge tiger grappling with a snake all over his back. It's basically from his neck to his arse so there’s not much room on him left.

OK, last questions Lags, when can we expect a My Dad Joe reunion?
If you can fly Andreas back from Brooklyn it’s on!

Alphabet Mix Part B

2010-02-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

Here is Part B in a series of mixes chronicling the letters of the alphabet that I did for my friend Ali's website.

OK, OK, I know I said I’d do one of these a month and I have been super slack even getting to part two of what now seems a hugely ambitious 26 part series but I will try and be more prompt in the future. Promise. Anyway, I am currently laid up in bed with gastroentiritis which I can guarantee you is not much fun but it has left me with not much to do other than puke and crap every 15 minutes which gave me the perfect excuse to sit on the toilet and compile this. I have made it a bumper selection to make up for the tardiness of its arrival so without further a do here is entry “B” of my ongoing alphabet mixtape series. The tracklisting and download links are below and there is a commentary on the tracks below.

1. “Pay To Cum” – Bad Brains
2. “Whispering Pines” - The Band
3. “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box” – The Bangers
4. “Black Heart Man” – Barrington Levy
5. “Q-Loop” – Basic Channel
6. “Defective Chain” – Bastard
7. “Hydraulic Beehive” – Bastard Noise
8. “In Conspiracy With Satan” – Bathory
9. “In Between” – Beat Happening
10. “Child Of Darkness” – Bedemon
11. “Voices Green & Purple” – The Bees
12. “We Love You Michael Gira” – Ben Frost
13. “Down On Penny’s Farm” – The Bently Boys
14. “Blues Run The Game” – Bert Jansch
15. “The Model” – Big Black
16. “Thirteen” – Big Star
17. “Omega Day” – Bill Fay
18. “The Actor And Audience” – The Black Dog
19. “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” – Black Flag
20. “Supernaut” – Black Sabbath
21. “Ritual” – Blasphemy
22. “Summertime Blues” – Blue Cheer
23. “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” – Bob Dylan
24. “She Sings But Once” – Bob Tilton
25. “Stone Mountain” – Bong
26. “You Want That Picture” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
27. “Star” – The Boredoms
28. “Mount The Pavement” – Born Against
29. “Shivers” - The Boys Next Door
30. “Ass Fucking Murder” – Brainbombs
31. “Dunkelheit” – Burzum

1. “Pay To Cum” – Bad Brains
What could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said? One of the most perfect examples of hardcore punk and the first side of the first Bad Brains 7” which was released all the way back in 1980. Proof that even when white people develop the whitest form of music of all time black dudes will be still be able to play it better than them. Oh, I thought of something I can say that might not have already been said or at least widely mentioned: “Pay To Cum” briefly makes and appearance in Scorcese’s slightly odd 1985 film After Hours.

2. “Whispering Pines” - The Band
As a pre-teen Bob Dylan acolyte I devoured everything the bard of Minnesota even vaguely had a hand in. As his backing band, co-conspirotors, friends and fellow Woodstock refugees the band once known as The Hawks who went on to become The Band loomed large over a lot of my early listening. The early rock & roll grounding they had accumulated as backing band to the legendry Screamin’ Ronnie Hawkins was combined with an interest in the gnarled roots of American music which Dylan galvanised during endless sessions in the basement of a house in Woodstock they lived and practised in called The Big Pink (recordings of which which would become the oft-bootlegged and poorly commercially released Basement Tapes). These sessions gave rise to two hugely influential and indisputably classic records which still resonate today in everything from Bon Iver to the Fleet Foxes to the late, great Jack Rose who sadly left us not so long ago. Part of what made The Band so uniquely special was that every member was adept at playing anything and had a voice to match anyone at any point in the contemporary canon. For my money though it was Richard Manuel with his ethereal and plaintive vocal who always stole the show. It was a huge shame that he didn’t vocal more cuts during The Bands prime and an even greater shame that he was never able to conquer a life-long addiction to booze and drugs that saw him take his own life alone in a room at a Quality Inn motel in Orlando, Florida in 1986. Pick up Music From Big Pink, The Band or Scorcese’s great documentary The Last Waltz and remember Manuel in his prime.

3. “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box” – The Bangers
Like a whole heap of great garage, doo-wop, rockabilly, rock & roll and R&B I discovered this track via the Lux & Ivy’s Favourites compilation series. The series is put together by a person or persons unknown and is composed of songs that The Cramps would play before they came onstage, as they left stage or mentioned in interviews that they were fans of. There are 12 volumes that I am aware of and every track is a gem so get a hold of them. Research on this track reveals that is was something of an r&b standard originally cut by The Toppers way back in 1954 and covered by everyone from Billy Ward & The Dominoes to Daddy Cool Ross Wilson and Doug Clark & The Hot Nuts (allegedly the group the Animal House band were based on). This version was released in 1965 on the R&B label and is a prime example of innuendo laced rhythm & blues. I’ve struggled to come up with any more on The Bangers so if you know anything about them leave a comment.

4. “Black Heart Man” – Barrington Levy
A track from Levy’s third LP Englishman which was released in 1979 by Greensleaves. Levy’s career has been long and varied but I always liked the roots sound on this album that has hints of lovers rock and strange dubby wobbles here & there.

5. “Q-Loop” – Basic Channel
At this stage only sheer ignorance could possibly fail to recognise the importance of Mark Ernestus and Moritz Van Oswald within the realms of electronic music and beyond over the last twenty years. While their myriad aliases, projects and labels (Chain Reaction, Rhythm & Sound, Maurizio, Replay, Burial Mix etc) have always had some footing, however tenuous, in the twin camps of dub and techno it would be short sighted to limit the pairs work by simple genre pigeon-holing. It was by establishing themselves sonically with perhaps their most abstract and innovative work in the form of their initial Basic Channel project that has allowed them to operate outside of any such confines ever since and long may they continue to do so. Rhythm & Sound live at Fabric a few years back remains one of the most enjoyable nights of my life.

6. “Defective Chain” – Bastard
Bastard were a Japanese punk band who operated in the late 1980s early 1990s and had it all. They played fast, were a little d-Beat, had a Cro-Mags swagger (and those little Age Of Quarrel-esque guitar solos), great gang vocals and a bit of blown at crusty distortion. They released a 7” in 1989 entitled Controlled In The Frame and an LP entitled Wind Of Pain a year later that are pretty hard to get hold of but you can pick up a discography CD that the band themselves put out called No Hope In Here easily enough. I was shocked to see that the band have reformed for a one-off show at Chaos In Tejas. Looks like I’ll finally have to go to Austin.

7. “Hydraulic Beehive” – Bastard Noise
I was going to leave all Man Is The Bastard related stuff until we hit “M” but then I figured fuck it, I love every stage of what Eric Wood has done so much and they all sound different enough to warrant covering every incarnation of one of the greatest sonic legacies of this or any other era. Plus how could I pass up putting a song entitled “Hydraulic Beehive” in the mix? In case you are unfamiliar with Man Is The Bastard they are the band that inspired the name, ethos and attitude of the early 90s ‘powerviolence’ movement, a genre which has been horribly misunderstood and, ahem, bastardised by ignoramuses ever since. At its best though it could be argued that powerviolence is one of the purist forms of musical expression as, rather like grindcore, it takes every element of punk and drives it to (and occasionally beyond) its logical endpoint. Listen to anything by Infest, No Comment or Crossed Out and you will soon understand. While they were very much part of the movement Man Is The Bastard always stood apart. Not only due to their defined, monochromatic skulls and slogans aesthetic but also their unique instrumentation which consisted of drums, dual bass guitars and home made electronics units and speakers made by Henry Barnes (now of Amps For Christ fame) which made them sound like nothing else imaginable. The Bastrad Noise initially began life to explore the electronic side of Man Is The Bastard’s sonic assault and while the lines between Bastard related projects constantly blur and realign it remained a mainly electronic entity until recently when the whole shebang came full circle and The Bastard Noise now resembles Man Is The Bastard all over again. Confused? Don’t be. Just embrace THE SKULL.

8. “In Conspiracy With Satan” – Bathory
While Venom might have coined the term ‘Black Metal’, Quorthon (and his enigmatic producer known only as ‘The Boss’ who may or may not be his dad) gave the genre just about everything else from the production sound to riffs, fonts, artwork and a preoccupation with Satan. This track is from the band’s self-titled 1984 debut LP which featured the infamous drawing of The Beast by Joseph A. Smith that you will probably be able to see on a t-shirt any given Thursday night at Jaguar Shoes worn by a kid who’s never listened to a Bathory record in his life.

9. “In Between” – Beat Happening
What with the ginormous resurgence in ‘lo-fi’ poppy garage music that we’ve seen in the last few years I expected this band to be on everyones lips, have the whole reunion, ATP Don’t Look Back special and everything. The whole works. But, nope, no sign so far. They’ve remained as strangely overlooked as ever. Good news for me though as I can put one of my favourite songs of all time on this mix and not look like a band-wagon jumping whorebag.

10. “Child Of Darkness” – Bedemon
Bedemon found themselves in the odd position of being regarded as a pioneering doom-metal band purely by being the offshoot band of another pioneering doom-metal. Randy Palmer, Bobby Liebling and Geof O’Keefe were all members of Pentagram (who formed in 1971 and were thus one of the first US doom bands to form in the wake of Sabbath) when they decided to start recording a few songs as Bedemon in 1973. Despite bootlegs of their early demos rattling around for years it wasn’t until 2006 that Bedemon material finally made it out into the public realm officially. Here’s one of their finest odes to the darkness.

11. “Voices Green & Purple” – The Bees
Not to be confused with either the tepid soft-rocking Bees from the Isle Of Wight who play at festivals like The Secret Garden Party or the San Francisco garage band of the same name these Bees are a far more unhinged proposition. From La Varene, California this band cut only one 45 to my knowledge but it is this psych-rock classic that found its way on to the Nuggets compilation and chronicles an LSD trip that’s not going all that great.

12. “We Love You Michael Gira” – Ben Frost
I once wrote a review of the excellent Australian born electronic musician Ben Frost’s fourth album, Theory Of Machines, that is somehow utilised on Wikipedia to describe the guys sound. I’m not sure how I can trump that so I’ll just repeat it here:

"...The compositional complexity of Arvo Pärt and the sonic nothingness of Wolf Eyes...Yes, it is that good."

The Wire also compared him to Arvo Pärt after my review had gone to print so someone over there must be a big fan of my comparisons I’ve always liked to think.

13. “Down On Penny’s Farm” – The Bently Boys
As mentioned above I’m a pretty big Bob Dylan nut and this song is interesting in Dylan terms beacuse Bob ripped it off wholesale (as he did so often in his early folk career) for his own composition “Hard Times In New York” (which you can pick up on The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1-3). It is likely that he heard it on one of his major sources of inspiration/goldmines for plagiarism: Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music. The version here was recorded in 1929 by The Bently Boys. Again I can tell you little about them other than they hailed from North Carolina and cut this side on a 45 for Columbia Records with a track called “Henhouse Blues” on the flip. The song itself is likely a traditional called “Hard Times” that the Boys adapted. Some commentators have observed that this track may in turn have influenced Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” although of this I remain dubious.

14. “Blues Run The Game” – Bert Jansch
Another fella who, like Bob, I have long been obsessed with. Along with fellow travellers such as John Renbourne, Davy Graham, Wizz Jones and later his own group Pentangle, Jansch was instrumental in the British folk revival and in particular a huge influence on generations of acoustic guitar players to come. There is Neil Young quote that goes along the lines of: “what Hendrix did for the electric guitar Jansch did for the acoustic”. Bombastic comparisons aside Bert continues to perform and record great albums, I have seen him several times over the last few years and he is never less than spell-binding. This track is from the long out of print (though recently re-issued) Santa Barbara Honeymoon LP from 1975 and it is a cover of a song by the American singer songwriter Jackson C. Frank, a friend of Jansch’s and another prominent figure on the London folk revival scene who suffered from tragic mental health issues and sadly remained relatively unknown in his own lifetime.

15. “The Model” – Big Black
While neither as visceral as Rapeman or as polished as Shellac Big Black always were my favourite Albini related project. This cheeky Kraftwerk cover has a guitar tone that sounds like sheets of metal reverberating inside an oil drum.

16. “Thirteen” – Big Star
Big Star are probably best known to a whole generation born post 1982 as the band who wrote the theme tune to That 70s Show, which has always seemed an unfitting epitaph for one of the greatest groups to ever craft bittersweet pop-drenched rock & roll. A bit like The Byrds playing with The Allman Brothers, Big Star, the brainchild of former Box Tops frontman Alex Chilton, released a trio of well received records, #1 Record, Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers, during a short period between 1971 and 1974 before disintegrating. They reformed in the mid-90’s and continue to play but the magic lies on those three records. This track recalls the day Chilton saw The Beatles play at the age of thirteen on their first US tour in 1964. It was also covered, to devastating effect, by Elliot Smith.

17. “Omega Day” – Bill Fay
Another sublime track by a somewhat forgotten genius (are you sensing a pattern here?). Bill Fay was an English singer-songwriter who cut two LP’s for the Deram label in the 1970’s, a self-titled effort and a sophmore album entitled Time Of The Last Persecution from which this track is taken. Both are masterpieces but sadly they failed to sell and Fay went largely AWOL for several decades until his third album saw the light day in 2005 on David Tibet of Current 93’s Durtro Jnana label. Eagle eared Wilco fans may have realized that the track Tweedy, Stiratt and Glen Kotchke sing backstage together in the film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is “Be Not So Fearful” by Fay. I felt immeasurably blessed to witness Fay actually get onstage and duet on a rendition of that song with Tweedy when he played a solo acoustic show at the Shepherds Bush Empire in 2007.

18. “The Actor And Audience” – The Black Dog
The Black Dog was an acid techno project formed in 1989 by Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner. While Downie continues to DJ, perform and produce records under the Black Dog moniker both Handley and Turner went on to form Warp Records mainstays Plaid. This track is taken from the outfits’ superlative and incredibly titled second LP Temple Of Transparent Balls which was originally released in 1993.

19. “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” – Black Flag
Again, there is little I can say about these guys that you haven’t already heard. I have the bars on my skin forever so it’s safe to say they mean a little to me. I will say that while Rollins was a great frontman I’d take Chavo, Keith Morris and Dez Cadena over him in that order. In line with that sentiment here’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” as it should be: with Chavo on vocals. If you want to hear what Black Flag is all about go listen to The First Four Years and Everything Went Black. If you want to know what Black Flag with Henry Rollins is all about then My War and Slip It In is you. Damaged, as fantastic as it is, sits somewhere in between these two periods a little uncomfortably to me.

20. “Supernaut” – Black Sabbath
Choosing a single Sabbath song was hard but I went with this one as it has one of the most immediate and brilliant riffs of all time and I play it almost every time I play records out and am still not bored of it. It could have been any one of about 30 masterpieces that they wrote though.

21. “Ritual” – Blasphemy
Fenriz knows about Black Metal. Being a founding member of Darkthrone means that that’s just a fact. It also makes it safe to say that the track he chose to open his Best Of Old School Black Metal compilation would be none to shabby. Going with “Winds Of The Black Gods” by Blasphemy may have seemed a bit of a curve ball to some, placed as it was next to established hordes such as Celtic Frost, Mayhem and Sarcofago but as we’ve already established: Fenriz knows what’s up. Blasphemy were formed in Barnaby British Columbia and have been spewing forth ugly, putrid, grim, war metal since 1984. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. Members have also played in such great black/death/thrash acts as Revenge, Conqueror and Domini Inferi and the band occasionally still play live. In fact they played two shows in 2009. This track is taken from their classic 1989 demo Blood Upon The Altar.

22. “Summertime Blues” – Blue Cheer
This Eddie Cochran cover was track one, side one of Blue Cheer’s debut LP, 1968’s Vincebus Eruptum. Sitting as it does at track one, side one of the bands debut LP it is also considered by many to be the first heavy metal song of all time. It beats the first Zeppelin LP by almost a year, the Sabbath LP by two years and even pipped Steppenwolf’s debut LP by a month which was the first record to mention the words “heavy metal” in the lyrics of “Born To Be Wild”. Whatever though, it’s a great track by a great band. Check out any of Blue Cheer’s 70s records for lots more psychedelic, loud blues-rock that would pave the way for metal to come.

23. “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” – Bob Dylan
This decicion is another impossible one and while “Visions Of Johanna”, “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”, “Desolation Row”, “Highway 61”, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” etc etc ad infinitum may all be better songs, this is simply my favourite.

24. “She Sings But Once” – Bob Tilton
Bob Tilton remain one of my favourite British bands of all time. By about 1997 I had realised that a lot of the metal that had been fed to me by Kerrang was awful and reading one of those “My Top Ten” list thingy’s by someone (to this day I can’t remember who and it irks me daily as I owe them a hell of a lot, I think it may have been Jello Biafra) I happened upon Black Flag, Minor Threat and Crass in one go. From there I crash coursed my way through late 70s punk, early 80s hardcore and soon hit mid 80s emo. Rites Of Spring, Embrace and Dag Nasty all sounded like the greatest thing on earth when I was 16 (they still do) and discovering things like Moss Icon, Evergreen, Hoover, Navio Forge, Merel and Indian Summer was literally better than discovering drugs at around the same time. The one thing that seemed strange to me was that there were no bands in England making this music. Then I discovered Bob Tilton. The band were from Nottingham and released records on the Subjugation label all of which looked incredible and had the full blown emo buff-card, typewriter, bits of tracing paper and faded old photos thing going on and the music and lyrics were a match in my mid-teen mind for the best Fugazi had to offer. This track is taken from their debut LP, 1996’s Crescent.

25. “Stone Mountain” – Bong
Bong are from Newcastle and they play heavily down tuned doom-metal with, as the name suggests, a leaning towards the stoned end of things. This track is over 20 minutes long and it was one of the best things I heard in 2009.

26. “You Want That Picture” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Who’d of though that “B” would chuck up so many people who have made hundreds and hundreds of great songs? Will Oldham is another everything-he-touches-turns-to-gold guy so it was a real lottery and I just went with a favourite of mine that was under the Bonnie alias. This track is taken from the 2008 album, Lie Down In The Light which is my favourite long player of his since the Superwolf LP with Matt Sweeney. It has a nice vocal counterpoint by Ashley Webber that makes the tale the song tells strikingly poignant.

27. “Star” – The Boredoms
I kind of felt I had to include a Boredoms track because in the same way that discovering Minor Threat, Black Flag and Crass at 16 had a pretty big effect so did discovering things like Boredoms, Black Dice and Lightning Bolt a few years later. I am not even sure what you would call all of that stuff. I guess, avant-art-rock or something equally non-sensical. I don’t even like everything those bands have put out but discovering them certainly opened things up a great deal and led to lots of other things for which I have a lot to thank them for. Vision Creation Newsun is a wonderful album that if you have never heard you should go and listen to in its entirety right now.

28. “Mount The Pavement” – Born Against
Possibly my favourite punk band of all time. Born Against had it all and then some. And then Sam McPheeters on top like an angry, screaming cherry. I could bang on about their great graphics and political polemics but just listen to this track instead. It is perfect.

29. “Shivers” - The Boys Next Door
The Boys Next Door were the band before the band before Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Occasionally they sounded a lot like The Birthday Party aka the band they were about to become but this closing track from their 1979 debut LP Door, Door, which opens with the line “I’ve been contemplating sucide”, looks forward to Cave at his balladic best with The Bad Seeds.

30. “Ass Fucking Murder” – Brainbombs
The Brainbombs were formed in 1985 in a place called Hukidsvall in Sweden and have trodden an abrasive path ever since. Kind of like the Whitehouse of noise-punk they have chosen offense and total disregard for and confrontation with taboo as a medium in itself. And in that they have been hugely successful. This track is taken from their 1999 album Urge To Kill which was released by Load Records.

31. “Dunkelheit” – Burzum
A fitting way to finish. Burzum are a band more spoken about than listened to. Which is a shame because the musical project of the undoubtedly slightly unhinged Varg Vikernes is so far ahead of what now passes for black metal and equally what passed for black metal at the time it was made that The Count had and has every right to feel superior to those around him in many ways. It is difficult to describe what makes Burzum so special but hopefully a quote from my good friend Jonothan Rockwell should help clear it up so I’ll leave you with that: “it isn’t like anything else, it’s its own genre of music, it’s just Burzum”.

A Is For A Beginning

2009-10-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

This is a mix that I did for my friend Ali's website which you should check out as it is good and you can actually download the thing there.

A Is For A Beginning

When Ali first asked me to do a mix for this site I was both touched and a little nervous. I was initially nervous because I don’t actually know how to mix despite fairly regularly being asked to DJ and doing a semi-OK job of seeming vaguely like I know what I’m doing. I feared that I might be expected to churn out some 60 minute, beat matched, second perfect, Trakteratto session replete with horns and samples. Once I had made it clear that such a thing was well beyond my capabilities but that I would be more than happy to supply something more akin to a mixtape I then became nervous because even doing that is pretty tough.

I have tried and failed to make mixtapes I’ve been happy with countless times and possibly come away with a success rate of, at best, about 2%. A good mixtape requires a good theme, a cohesive selection and a great sense of pace. I suffer from enjoying too disparate a taste in things coupled with a miniscule attention span to ever make 60 or 90 minutes of anything ever hang together in a broadly acceptable manner. To negate this problem and give me an excuse to lay down anything I like under the guise of doing so beneath a thematic banner I offered to make Ali not one but twenty six mixes once monthly all beginning with a single letter of the alphabet. In alphabetical order. If you all hate the first one though just tell me and I’ll fuck off.

Tracklisting:

1. Abner Jay – “The Reason Young People Use Drugs” 
2. The Adolescents – “Wrecking Crew” 
3. Aethenor – “Untitled” 
4. Agathocles – “Mutilated Regurgitator”
 5. The Aggrovators – “Russian Stout”
 6. Akitsa – “Ode Au Temps Passe”
7. Akron/Family – “The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen”
 8. Alasdair Roberts – “Slowly Growing Old” 
9. Albert One – “Turbo Diesel”
10. Alcest – “Le Secret” 
11. Allen Ginsberg – “Dope Fiend” 
12. The Almighty Defenders – “All My Loving”
13. Amps For Christ – “Colours” 
14. Angel Witch – “Angel Of Death” 
15. Angelo Badalamenti – “Twin Peaks Theme” 
16. Antioch Arrow – “Chaos Vs Cosmos” 
17. Anton LaVey – “Satan Takes A Holiday” 
18. Aphex Twin – “Xtal” 
19. Arab Strap – “The First Big Weekend” 
20. Archers Of Loaf – “Web In Front” 
21. Ash Ra Tempel – “Bring Me Up”
22. At The Gates – “Slaughter Of The Soul”
 23. Antidote – “Real Deal”
 24. Autechre – “Dael”

1. Abner Jay (http://www.subliminalsounds.se/DOK/abnerjay.html) - “The Reason Young People Use Drugs”
Abner Jay claimed to be the “last working Southern black minstrel”. Born in Georgia to slave parents in the early part of the twentieth century Abner began playing in medicine shows at the age of 5. His records took in elements of folk, blues, gospel and Pentecostal music which he played on any number of instruments ranging from a banjo that he claimed was built in 1748 to ‘the bones’ (some old chicken and cow bones that he used to bang a beat out with). He released many LP’s on his own Brandie Records label including this cut which is from an album entitled Swaunee Water And Cocaine Blues. However, I first discovered Abner's music on a reissue from the excellent Mississippi Records (http://facstaff.unca.edu/sinclair/miss_records/index.html) a label which, if you’ve never checked it out before, you really should have a look at. It’s like a treasure trove and link to a lost world that is fast becoming forgotten.

2. The Adolescents (http://www.theadolescents.net/bios_files/band_bio.html ) – “Wrecking Crew”
The Adolescents embodied just about every aspect of early 80’s Orange County punk rock. Loud, fast and bursting with energetic, simplistic melody. One of the happiest days of my life was finding the "Amoeba" 7” on blue in that funny record shop on Belnheim Crescent that is actually two separate record shops in one space run by a couple of old guys who argue all the time. If you are into punk records go there. The guy on the right hand side as you walk in gets unbelievable stuff.

3. Aethenor (http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=84374 ) – “Untitled”
Aethenor are a band whose personnel include, but are not limited to, Stephen O’Malley (you know, the guy with the beard from Sunn O))), Vincent de Roguin from Shora (http://www.myspace.com/shoraband) and Daniel O’Sullivan. I try and mention Daniel as often possible because he’s quite possibly one of the most gifted British musicians of his generation. He plays, or has at some point played with, Guapo (http://www.guapo.co.uk/), Miasma & The Carousel Of Headless Horses (http://www.myspace.com/headlesshorses), Mothlite (http://www.myspace.com/mothlite) and Ulver (http://www.myspace.com/ulver1). He is also my age, went to school opposite me and generally makes me feel lazy every time I think about him. Aethenor play a dissonate, scraping, droning, hum that is occasionally cacophonous yet somehow strangely soothing.

4. Agathocles (http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=2649) - “Mutilated Regurgitator”
23 seconds of live fury from Agathocles. I once interviewed Eric Wood from Man Is The Bastard and he told me that Agathocles were one of the only bands whose work rate he considered to parallel his own. Have a look at how many records Eric has put out (http://www.recordhospital.org/mitb.htm) and you’ll soon realize that is no light praise. Agathocles are from Belgium and they have been playing unrelenting grindcore since around 1985. In that time they have notched up at least 150 releases. What have you done today?

5. The Aggrovators (http://www.roots-archives.com/artist/142 ) - “Russian Stout”
Taken from the 1977 collection Aggrovators Meets The Revolutioners At Channel One Studios this cut features the infamous session outfit in particularly bouyant form. The Aggrovators were essentially legendary producer Bunny “Striker” Lee’s in-house band. Along with King Tubby, Prince Jammy and Phillip Smart, Lee helped pioneer the dub sound. Jackie Mitto, Sly & Robbie and Aston “Family Man” Barret all served time with The Aggrovaters and the bands longtime drummer Carlton “Santa” Davis is credited with establishing the ‘flying cymbal’ sound that was to become commonplace in dub. The group took their name from Agro Sounds, the record shop that Lee ran in the 60’s. How has no one ever stolen that for a record label name?

6. Akitsa (http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=2224) - “Ode Au Temps Passe”
Canadian black metal horde Akitsa is basically one guy who goes by the name O.T. Other than that he is based in Montreal, has been making music for about ten years now under the Akitsa moniker and plays a harsh, raw, misanthropic take on the genre I can’t tell you too much about the guy. I first came across Akitsa after picking up a split with Prurient aka Dominick Fernow whose Hospital Productions (http://www.hospitalproductions.com/) label reissued the LP entitled Goétie that this track is taken from. O.T. is singing in French by the way so even if you can make out the screams through the shards of crackle then unless you’re fluent it will still be incomprehensible.

7. Akron/Family (http://www.akronfamily.com/) - “The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen”
I’ve always been a sucker for rootsy Americana, the more bucolic the better. Maybe it was over-exposure to The Basement Tapes as a kid? Who knows. Anyway, Akron/Family’s take on folksy roots music offers sweeps and swooshes of adventure enough to justify the lofty praise they regularly garner. If Micheal Gira is going to have you as his backing band you’re gonna need be talking a real talk I guess.

8. Alasdair Roberts (http://www.alasdairroberts.com/) – “Slowly Growing Old”
Ali Roberts plays folk music so thick and burdened by the weight of history and tradition that you fear it might buckle and bough at any minute like a huge old oak that’s just had enough of being around so long. Luckily, and much like a mighty oak, Ali’s music stands tall and unquivering in the cold winds of prevailing modernity. Once upon a time he played in the band Appendix Out and he also played in the short-lived Amalgametd Sons Of Rest which was kind of like a contemporary version of Pentagle consisting as it did of Roberts, Will Oldham and Jason Molina. Anyhow, I saw this track performed at a place called The Glee Club in Birmingham where some chick with a weird voice called Joanna Newsome was supporting him and I am not afraid to say that I was almost moved to tears.

9. Albert One (http://www.albertone.net/) – “Turbo Diesel”
Much has been made of the resurgence of Italo Disco in the last half decade and, love it or loathe it, it’s hard to argue with its infectiousness. I first discovered Italo after attending a night called Cocadisco (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17834115290) which began life at The Social on Little Portland Street and has since moved from The Dolphin in Hackney to Visions in Dalston to Corsica Studios in Elephant & Castle. Cocadisco is the baby of someone who I am lucky enough to regularly work with and has a vast and passionate of knowledge of Italo, techno, acid and just about any other form of dance music you’d be willing to cut a shape to. For introducing me to the sound and generally being one of the greatest humans on the planet this one goes out to Piers Martin.

10. Alcest (http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=19701 ) – “Le Secret”
Alcest make black metal so glacial that the guy behind it has named himself after snow. Neige has been perfecting the art of frozen, shoegazey black metal from his blot-hole in Avignon, France, for the better part of a decade. This title track from his 2007 two song EP is possibly his high water mark. Bleak, but strangely uplifting.

11. Allen Ginsberg – “Dope Fiend”
Everyone knows that Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl and was buddies with alchie-Jack and junkie-Bill but have you ever heard his blues jams? If you’ve ever read any of his stuff you won’t be too surprised by the tone or delivery. Whiged out rants and conjecture that manage to be simultaneously light-hearted and needlingly insightful. Other tracks from this mid-70’s album entitled First Blues include “You Are My Dildo”, “Vomit Express” and “CIA Dope Calypso”.

12. The Almighty Defenders (http://www.myspace.com/thealmightydefenders) – “All My Loving”
I am not entirely sure that this is out yet or that I should be putting it on here but never mind. I guess I am biased as I know all the people involved but what’s not to love? This is basically The Black Lips and King Khan & BBQ Show playing raucous Gospel-influence garage and rhythm and blues. Like I said: what’s not to love?

13. Amps For Christ (http://www.ampsforchrist.com/) – “Colours”
A reworking of the Appalachian traditional song “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” put through the frazzeled feedback of the Amps For Christ process. Amps For Christ is the solo-ish project of Henry Barnes whose home made speakers and amplification equipment gave Man Is The Bastard its unique range of sonic brutality. With Amps For Christ Barnes has turned his experience with amplitude towards softer frequencies which are closer to free folk than the powerviolence influenced noise of his previous work.

14. Angel Witch (http://www.myspace.com/youranangelwitch) – “Angel Of Death”
While nowhere near as well know as Iron Maiden’s 1980 self titled debut Angel Witch’s first record was also released that year and I’d take it any day of the week over Maiden’s initial effort. It contains all the elements that would go on to define the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (operatic vocals, dueling guitars and vaguely heathen and satanic imagery) but delivers them with a sense of commitment and intent that few other bands of the era can hold a candle to.

15. Angelo Badalamenti (http://www.angelobadalamenti.com/) – “Twin Peaks Theme”
I am not sure what I could possibly say about this that would add anything to just listening to it. So do that. And then maybe listen to Badalamenti talking about working with Lynch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_9D5PiOjog&feature=related).

16. Antioch Arrow (http://www.myspace.com/antiocharrow) - “Chaos Vs Cosmos”
For three years of my life I lived in Nottingham, a city that has a lot to be said for itself, not least, a hugely fertile music scene. When I first arrived in town there were a bunch of kids who dressed like they wanted to be in a San Diego screamo band. There was also a band around called The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg (http://www.myspace.com/themurderofrosaluxemburg) who weren’t really from Nottingham but did actually sound a bit like a San Diego screamo band. They no longer exist but their singer Shaun plays in a band called Lovvers who don’t really sound anything like a San Diego screamo band. Whenever I remember those days I think of Antioch Arrow who were just about the best San Diego screamo band of all time. Apart from maybe Heroin.

17. Anton LaVey (http://www.churchofsatan.com/) – “Satan Takes A Holiday”
This was originally written by a guy called Larry Clinton in 1937 and was used as incidental music in spook shows and medicine shows. LaVey covered it on a 1995 album that bought together his lost recordings. Just in case you live in a monastery and don't know who Anton LaVey is: he's the founder of The Church Of Satan. I discovered this jaunty little instrumental gem on one of the Lux & Ivy’s Favourites compilations which are basically a bunch of mixtapes put together by Cramps fans containing songs that Lux and Ivy covered, played before or after they performed live, mentioned in interviews or the compiler just y’know, imagined they’d be into. They have a lot of great stuff on them and are well worth tracking down.

18. Aphex Twin (http://www.aphextwin.com/) – “Xtal”
While it may seem an obvious Richard D. James choice to go for something off of Selected Ambeint Works I can honestly say that no other single piece of music (aside from maybe “Papua New Guineau” by The Future Sound Of London) so accurately communicates the feeling of being on drugs as this track. If you have never taken drugs: don't bother. The day after sucks. This won't give you a comedown and leave you broke and crying on Monday at work. That said I find it hard to listen to this despite its overwhelming beauty because I literally feel my body semi-convulse with tidal waves of memory and borderline nauseau and bliss.

19. Arab Strap – “The First Big Weekend”
While the previous track may well sonically distill the experience of taking MDMA based substances this song lyrically encapsulates the entirety of a weekend bender so perfectly that much like “Xtal” I am always moved almost to feelings of great discomfort every time I hear it despite its incredible poignance. Its accuracy and economy are disarmingly powerful.

20. Archers Of Loaf (http://www.myspace.com/archersofloaf) – “Web In Front”
Fuck the Pavement reunion. Now THIS I would pay every penny I own to see live. Indie-rock perfection. There is an amazing acoustic version of this song on, the now sadly defunct, bands MySpace page.

21. Ash Ra Tempel (http://www.ashra.com/)– “Bring Me Up”
While Can, Faust, Amon Duul and Cluster often garner the lion’s share of Kraut credits I’d take Ash Ra in their various incarnations over all of them. Manuel Göttsching’s work is probably best realized on his infamous solo LP E2-E4 which many site as the bedrock of what would become techno but just about any piece he turned his hand to demonstrated sparks of wiley genius. This track is taken form Ash Ra’s fifth album proper, Starring Rossi, which was recorded in 1973. It was the first record with which the band abandoned the lengthy jams they’d become synonymous with for more focused song structure. The results were pretty great.

22. At The Gates – “Slaughter Of The Soul”
Most death metal tends to give me a headache and I have a head that enjoys most marginal music. It’s all too formulaic, jocky and macho. Sure Death, Repulsion Obituary and Suffication were great but post 1989-ish my interest wanes rapidly. However, there is something about At The Gates’ final LP that, despite every nerve and synapse telling me I should feel otherwise, I love. Sorry.

23. Antidote (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/antidote_main.html) – “Real Deal”
Now, I dig the Cro-Mags as much as just about anyone but if I had to choose ONE NYHC record to take to Valhalla with me it would be a toss up between the Antidote and Urban Waste 7 inches. Both those records have it all. You can almost hear the Lower East Side barreling out of them. As a side note: this cut has Bloodclot on background gang vocals.

24. Autechre (http://www.myspace.com/myslb) – “Dael”
It would almost seem unfair doing a compilation of artists beginning with “A” and including Aphex and not Autechre. While they might not have plumbed the breadth and depth that James has managed in his output there is a lot to be said in the ability of Sean Booth and Rob Brown to put an album together. Tri Repetae might just be their magnum opus but it’s a difficult choice.

NME Radar Piece: Joy Orbison

2009-10-13T11:04:00.002-07:00

A new generation of young, open-minded and musically informed producers and DJ’s including Brackles, Bok Bok and Pangea have been quietly breathing life into a dubstep scene stilted by generic, macho, mid-range basslines with more wobble than a bouncy castle for some time. Now these young whippersnappers who happily mix grime, 2-step, funky and techno without blinking have their own anthem. Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” has been universally praised, played and rewound within the scene since Hessle Audio lynchpin Ben UFO closed his Fabric Live mix with it. A perfect balance of joyous synths and warm, percussive sweeps; the track owes as much to deep house as UK garage. Joy is in fact a 22 year old from dubstep’s spiritual home of Croydon called Pete who as well as Todd Edwards lists G.G. Allin as a MySpace influence. “I was never a dubstep purist” he admits, “I’m a huge Theo Parrish fan and Carl Craig is a huge inspiration”. “Hyph Mngo” should be the sound of mine, yours and everyone else’s summer but the deafening buzz around the track remains fairly bewildering to its creator: “at the time I made it I was DJing a lot and I just wanted something to play, it was actually one of the first things I did”.

NME Radar Piece: Government Warning

2009-10-13T11:04:00.001-07:00

Despite it’s indisputable influence on the first wave of American hardcore Richmond Virginia has a since cultivated a legacy of churning out stout necked, jockish death metal bands. And Alabama Thunderpussy. Along with a small cluster of acts affiliated with the No Way record label, including Wasted Time and Cloak/Dagger, Government Warning are determined to change all that. Taking cues from early 80’s acts and distilling the fury of early Poison Idea, the puerile sense of humour and balls out fun of The Adolescents and more than a dollop of the drink-and-drug-until-you-can’t-speak-no-more approach of legendry Budweiser sponsored good for nothings Gang Green (early anthem “Arrested” details vocalist Kenny’s desire not to end up back in the slammer). The band have rapidly become one of the most talked about acts on the DIY underground since releasing their first 7” in 2006. With a 15 song debut LP charmingly entitled Paranoid Mess currently available on La Vida Es En Mus and a live show that made this writers eyeballs bleed from it’s sheer speed and ferocity at their sole UK show on their recent European Tour you’d do well to catch them next time they make it over. If Kenny can keep out of trouble with boys in blue that is.

Vice v7n10 Record Reviews

2009-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Green Day
Dookie
Reprise

5 Having emerged from the crust-till-we-rot 924 Gillman Street scene and cut records for Lookout! these three cartoon characters have been working with diminishing returns since signing to Warner front Reprise. Can’t see another album in them past this middle of the road piece of junk unless that video for “Basket Case” that seems to be on MTV every three and half seconds really pulls them through.

Frank Edwin Wright III

Blink 182
Cheshire Cat
Cargo Music/Grilled Cheese

6 This just seems to be a bunch of tracks from last year’s Buddah which came out on Filter re-recorded and polished up. If you like your punk poppy and bright eyed then you could do worse. A little less maniacal then the Green Day record and equally destined to the ditch of obscurity amid the bones of a million other pop-punk bands before long.

Angelic Airwave

Soundgarden
Superunknown
A&M

7 While it doesn’t have the spit and sawdust heaviness or riffing of Badmotorfinger this fourth go-around from the Seattle miserablists might just be the downer ode and coffin nail in the whole grunge things pallid casket.

Pat Lear

The Offspring
Smash
Epitaph

8 If I had to choose between this, the Green Day record and Blink182 it’d be this all the way. Sure it’s hardly re-inventing the Adolescents shaped wheel but it has all the stuff that will have you singing along in your headphones as you run home half cut kicking over rubbish bins and trying to waylay tomrrow’s hangover for as long as possible. Shame every cover they’ve done since the vinyl version of the first LP has sucks so bad though.

Poodles

Current 93
Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre
Durtro

10 Over ten years and at least thirty releases in and David Tibet shows no sign of giving up the avant-folk ghost just yet. Maybe he’ll be like one of those old pack horses that just drops dead one day from a life of sheer toil and exhaustion. Either way he’ll have left one of the most formidable gluts of unbridled creativity behind him, the like of which we’ll possibly never see again.

Menstruel Knight

Therapy
Troublegum
A&M

9 And it all comes together for the Northen Irish guys who you always wanted to be amazing but never quite followed through. Well, here it is in all its harsh, stop-start glory. If this doesn’t make them superstars fuck only knows what will. Worth picking up for “Screamager” alone.

Billy Blands

Pantera
Far Beyond Driven
East West

8 Did you ever see the original sleeve for this? Instead of the drill bit shattering a guys skull, like the one that you should already be holding in your hands if you have even a single iota of taste, the banned version had the drill whirring a hole in a guys ass. So much for capitalizing on the new found “commercial viability” that Vulgar Display Of Power had bought ‘em.

Ted Maul

Rodan
Rusty
Quarterstick

8 While it remains thoroughly in the shadow of Spiderland it has more than enough confusing polyrhythmic flouncy bits to make it exciting in its own right. And it has a weird butterfly that looks like it’s going to be crystalised forever in amber on the cover.

Math Jock

Sunny Day Real Estate
Diary
Sub Pop

9 Unlike every other single thing that has come out on Sub Pop in the last five years this didn’t make me want to slit my wrists headbang alone in my bedroom. Instead it made me feel like running around outside and saying good morning to people and generally that everything is going to be a-ok. Thanks Sunny Day Real Estate.

Walter Rifles

Vice v7n9 Record Reviews

2009-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Sliimy
Paint Your Face
Perezcious Music

0 Frankmusic, Miley Cyrus, Rye Rye. With an endorsement track record like that how was the first record on Perez Hilton’s own label ever not going to be a stone cold classic? The fact that the record in question is made by a genderless gnome with less testicles than Mika who appears to have stolen Macy Gray’s wig should also come as no surprise.

Perry Nutkins

Monotonix
Where Were You When It Happened?
Drag City

7 Have you ever seen Monotonix play live? Imagine if Lightning Bolt and Hella got together to do a pub rock band. But way smellier. I swear my t-shirt still smells from the time someone pushed into the drummer guy. Do they not have showers in Tel Aviv or something?

Bruce Grobelar

Hudson Mohawke
Butter
Warp

3 How did a label that defined at least three different eras of British electronic music end up releasing so much spineless piffle? I blame guitars. Before Maximo Park and Pivot got signed a so so, middle of the road album like this shoe-in for creative agency waiting room muzak would never have cut the mustard at Warp HQ. And while I’m here: what is going on with the sleeve? It likes like a psychedelic Dairy Milk advert James Bond title montage. Phew the Warp 20th Anniversary box set just landed on my desk. It’s OK guys, all is forgiven. I love you again.

A Guy Called Arthur

Harvestman
In A Dark Tongue
Neurot

8 Not quite as cast-in-stone-forevermore perfect as any Neurosis record you’d care to think of but Von Till could probably fart “The Star Spangle Banner” and I’d lap it up. You know big Steve is apparently an elementary school teacher when he isn’t making music? I’d cower behind my textbook for an hour if he were taking me for double maths. The guy basically looks like a cryogenically frozen Viking berzerker.

Alex Petri-Dish

Wojtek Godzisz
Wojtek Godzisz
Tigertrap Records

8 Gather round children. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A long time ago in a place called the early 1990’s there was a band called Symposium. Looking back they weren’t particularly good but I would have fought you if you’d said anything different at the time. I wanted to get their logo tattooed on my wrist and the lyrics to their song “Fizzy” engraved on my headstone. In the decade and half since I have occasionally been fairly glad that neither of these things ever went past the point of vague fancy. However, I cannot quite convey how happy I was to get the debut solo album by Symposium’s bass player and general lynchpin through the letter box and be pleasantly surprised that he appears to have morphed into some kind of Moondog character and that the music that he has chosen to make since those heady days sucks in nowhere near the same galaxy of awfulness that Hell Is For fucking Heroes find themselves in. In fact it’s really rather good and bizarrely has Alexis from Hot Chip on it.

Average Man

Black Boned Angel
Verdun
Riot Season

9 If you like things that sound like Corrupted, Asunder or the universe being chained to a medieval rack and tortured into nothingness then this might just be for you. I am guessing that the title refers to the First World War battle. It would certainly have made a chillingly accurate soundtrack to those hellish nine months.

Birchville Brat Motel

Shit & Shine
229 2299 Girls Against Shit
Riot Season

9 Wow. Shit and Shine still sound like they are playing their cacophonous racket through equipment that might have broken at some point in the late 1980’s by bludgeoning sound out of it through sheer being really angry all the time-ness and, as ever it couldn’t sound better than just about anything else I’ve heard this month. Or year.

Circle Jams

Pens
Hey Friend! What You Doing?
De Stijl

8 If you’d have told me when we ran a piece on Pens a while back that a year later they would have an actual record out on De Stijl then I am not sure what I would have done. Not believing you would probably have been involved at some point though. Well stone me and my lack of belief because here is just that and these 14 tracks sounds just as fresh and chaotically cathartic as the band did the first time I heard them. Except I think they have learned how to play their instruments just a teensy weensy bit.

Jammin' Johnson

Vice Interview: Michael Winner

2009-10-13T10:57:00.001-07:00

Here is another one for Vice v7n9, The Film Issue. It was fun.

Making A Statement Regardless

Michael Winner On Working With Brando & Directing The Most Authentic Western Ever Made

Michael Winner. “Calm down dear” and fights with Gordon Ramsay about whether his opinion is worth a dime when it comes to food or not. That’s it right? Hmm, not quite.

If you are anyone who knows anything about film then you will know that Winner lays easy claim to being one of the most successful British directors of his or any generation.

Name another Brit film maker who cut pictures with Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Robert Duvall, Robert Mitchum and Sophia Loren. Struggling? Try adding to that the fact he basically created the careers of Ollie Reed and Charles Bronson for good measure. Now whose side are you lining up on when it comes to Winner vs acne chin sweary guy?

Having defined 1960’s ‘swinging London’ with films like Play It Cool, West 11, The Jokers and I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname which invariably featured Reed and more than a little more swearing and nudity than the BBFC were happy with he casually took on Hollywood directing everything from western’s (Lawman), to crime (Big Sleep), to hitman thrillers (The Mechanic) and Horror (The Sentinel).

The defining moment of Winner’s busy Hollywood period came in 1974 when he let Bronson loose on the streets of New York to avenge the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter with indiscriminate anger and a really big gun to the tune of a Herbie Hancock soundtrack in Death Wish. While the concept of a normal guy getting mad and getting even has formed the template for a million movies since no one had done until Winner and no one has done it as brutally and stylishly since.

After keeping Vice waiting for fifteen minutes in a sitting room whose walls couldn’t breathe for memorabilia from a lifetime spent in film and well wishing notes penned by everyone from Brando to Burt Lancaster Winner sailed into the room spewing greetings, good will and orders to our photographer not to shoot him below his eyeline or else. Apparently Orson Welles once told him that it wasn’t a good look.

As well as being inhumanly tanned and in worryingly good shape for a 74 year old he also really fucking likes saying “fucking” all the fucking time. It’s kind of fucking contagious. Ramsay wouldn’t even triumph on the swearing front.

Vice: Doesn’t Jimmy Page live next door? How did you end up becoming neighbours?
Michael Winner: I’ve lived in this area for years but Jimmy and I became very close when he did the music for Death Wish 2. We got on as soon as I met because I adored him straight away. He was well into his druggy period when he did that first score for me but he did it wonderfully well. He said he wouldn’t have anyone near him while he was composing the music. He’d never done music for film before and we wanted to be sure it would synch properly because in film the music has to fit with the image to within a 24th of a second. Jimmy told us that he wouldn’t send us anything until it was finished and no one could go and see him. It was done at his studio in Cookham that Chris Rea ended up buying off him and turning it into a house. Shame. Anyway, the music is the last thing you stick on the film so we were all a bit nervous when it came in. I always edited all of my films myself and I remember running it through the machine so clearly. I’ll never forget that as I put my foot on the pedal to start the film the music and the picture moved together perfectly. It was unbelieveable. Everything fitted to the 24th of a second.

As well as Jimmy you’ve had more than a few A-List wining and dining buddies. Any favourites?
As a dinner companion or a gossip on the phone Marlon (Brando) was the nicest, loosest, least competitive person you could meet. You actually felt like he was your buddy. Burt (Lancaster) I adored but he had an edge to him. He’d occasionally turn a bit sarcastic, a classic Scorpio. Of the women I worked with, Sophia (Loren) was the best. The most proffesional and witty. She appears quite haughty but she’s not once you get through to her. Ollie (Reed) was a dear friend. When I first met him he would drink every day in this pub in Soho and he’d written this story about a man who carried his house on his back up a hill that he wanted to make into a movie. The Ollie I remember was an artist.

From the nudism in Some Like It Cool to the raunchy sex in Dirty Weekend and the sado-masochistic elements of Nightcomers your early workshocked and surprised its way through the 60s. Did you purposefully intend to push the BBFC’s buttons?
Nightcomers was pretty tricky for its day but it passed uncut in theatres. The video was cut though and the same happened with Dirty Weekend which wasn’t actually banned, just censored. You do your best to get stuff out there and you just have to work thinking “if I have trouble with the censor, I’ll deal with it when it happens”. I hit trouble many times and largely dealt with it. The censors were largely idiots, one of them was actually at Cambridge with me and he was a fucking idiot then and he was a fucking idiot as a censor. They all tended to be failed directors who suddenly find they have power over every director in the world and they misuse it.

As well as starring Orson Welles didn’t I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname also feature the first recorded use of the word “fuck” on film?
I’m not sure about that but we ran in to hot water over because of a scene between Ollie (Reed) and Carol White’s character where cunnilingus was implied. You couldn’t see anything though so I don’t know what the big hoo ha was about.

How did you make the transition from doing tose Swinging London type pictures to making movies in Hollywood?
I went over and did Lawman and suddenly I was very hot with United Artists, they loved me. Basically, with cinema if you’ve got the star you can film the menu of the Woolsey. We had Burt [Lancaster] and it was having him that really got the film going. Duvall was in it too but he was nothing at the time. Burt and I met and got along immediately but we would always argue. He threatened to kill me twice actually when he got in a temper. He dragged me up by the pelvis screaming “you cock-sucking areshole British piece of shit”, the lot. Fuck me. But he remained a dear friend and he was a wonderful man so who cares if he tried to kill me a couple of times? We did two films together and that’s really how I got into westerns and that Hollywood system. I’d never even done a western before but I got very serious about it. I had American professors come up and look at locations and I wanted to get the details correct. I asked what they usually used for oil lamps and they said that they just used new ones and threw some dust on them. I told them that was ridiculous and that they could get authentic period oil lamps for twenty quid on the Portabello Road. So the crew were all coming over from England with these things crammed in their luggage. It was the most authentic western ever made. Everything was real. We sold the set to John Wayne who was coming in and doing another movie on the set after us.

Did you ever meet Wayne?
Very briefly. I was staying in his house while we shot Lawman and I remember he was worried about the amount of raccoons there were on his land.

In 1972 you made three major motion pictures in a year. Now it takes Tarantino about a decade to do one.
It was a different world back then. We shot Nightcomers with Brando and after eight weeks we were already on to Chatto’s Land with Charlie (Bronson). Now they want twenty re-writes on every script they see but back then it was all these Jews from Russia and all they wanted was a handshake. The studios were one man and it would all happen just like that. It took me three months to get a two page deal memo out of ITV for a fucking afternoon TV show that I am working on now and it worked out as less money that a fucking Pimlico Plumber gets on a Saturday afternoon call out per hour. In Hollywood before there were fucking faxes and emails you could do a deal memo for an $11m movie in four fucking hours. Fucking unbelievable today. Plus everything is done with computers now.

Have you worked much with modern technology?
With who?

You know, computers and stuff.
Not really. There was a 70’s film festival in New York not long ago and they showed Stone Killer which got great reviews at the time. In a film like that if a car came out of a seventh story window there would be a man in it and after you yelled “cut!” everyone would rush over to see if he was alive. Or at least how badly hurt he was.

You did a run of movies throughout the 70s with Charles Bronson. How did you two first meet?
One of the great loves of my life was Jill Ireland. She told me she wanted to get married at 21 but I told her I couldn’t marry her as I was penniless so she went of and married David McCallum. She then got together with Charlie (Bronson) and when I first went to meet him before Chatto’s Land at the George V Hotel she was there and as I turned up shouted to Charlie: “Charles, it’s my old friend Michael from London” before turning to me and saying: “I’ve told Charlie all about us”. “Fuck me” I thought, “this isn’t good” but we ended up getting on very well. Much later Jill told me that she had told him that we were friends but not what had really been going on and that I mustn’t tell him. “Tell him?” I said, “the only question if he found out would be who he killed first, you or me”.

Wowsers, I wouldn’t want Charles Bronson coming after me. How did Death Wish end up coming together?
Death Wish started life as a novella by Brian Garfield that had sold about three copies to the writers family. That film is now lectured on in American universities. It was the first film in the history of the world where a civilian was the hero of the movie and killed other civilians. There have been 700 of them since. The most copied film of all time. Nobody wanted to make it and they thought I was mad, “you can’t make a film where the hero kills other people” they’d say. Well, the people he kills are nasty people, you shouldn’t like them. Anyway, I had it for about two years and they finally gave me a free ride on it. They said that of they got their money back on the script I could produce and direct it. I remember proposing it to Charlie after we’d shot Stone Killer in the back of a limousine at LAX. Charlie said to me: “Michael what shall we make next?” I said “well, the best script I have is Death Wish, it’s about a man whose wife and daughter get mugged so he goes out and gets revenge by shooting the muggers”. He turned to me and said: “I would like to do that”, to which I replied “make Death Wish? Great!” and he just said: “No. I would like to shoot muggers”.

Compared to the Daily Mail whining that you’re early British films had suffered Death Wish faced something like full-blown outrage.
They kept calling it a vicarious pleasure and I can tell you this: whenever Charlie killed anyone the whole theatre would burst into applause. London didn’t even have mugging then in the way it does now! Eleven years later someone shot a mugger in a subway in New York and it was blamed on Death Wish. If he learned that from Death Wish he was a fucking slow learner. When we made Death Wish most of the muggings in New York were committed by blacks and Hispanics because at that point they were the deprived people. The studio were nervous about how we were going to portray these muggers and they told us that we had to very careful with how we cast them. So we had mugging auditions. We bought boys in in groups of five to rape a chair and believe me: you learned something. How loose people could be, how inventive they could be, they were very interesting auditions. The chief mugger ended up being a jew and being a jew myself I knew that the jews would never complain. It turned out that this unknown jewish mugger was Jeff Goldblum. No one had a clue who he was then but he was great and he ended up doing my next film The Sentinel which also had Christopher Walken in it.

There’s big talk of a re-make of the original Death Wish, who would you like to see picking up Charlie’s Magnum?
Leo di Caprio could do it. Daniel Day-Lewis would be great at it if he shut up for five minutes.

Out of all of your movies I reckon your re-make of The Big Sleep was the most underrated. Who did that nuts soundtrack?
Jerry Fielding. He was a fucking genius. He was an American composer who did a lot of work with Clint Eastwood and even did the soundtrack to The Wild Bunch. He used to say to me: “the trouble with you Michael is that you know fuck all about dubbing sound in movies, you know nothing about it, one day I’ll teach you about dubbing”, but he was so lovely that you didn’t care. He did about five of my movies but sadly he died young because he was savaged by the Un-American Activities Committee. They decided he was a communist and he ended up conducting a pit orchestra in Las Vegas and somehow they found out about that too, picketed the hotel and he was fired from that as well. It damaged the immune systems of a lot of people that persecution and took them young. Look at Lee J. Cobb.

Having worked with some of the biggest names in modern Hollywood history is there anyone that you didn’t get the chance to work with who you feel you missed out on?
I’d have loved to have worked with Edward G Robinson. Of the newer people of course Hoffman, De Niro and Pacino. I also think that Renee Zewelleger is a wonderful actress. Very versatile. I also managed to turned down King Kong, James Bond, The French Connection and The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. Four of my many errors in life but it goes on.

You’ve directed everything from horror to crime to westerns and romances. Is there anything you’d say holds that all over the place body of work together?
Nearly all the films are about somebody who wants to make a statement or do something different. I don’t know if that reflects something in me but it seems to resonate with most people. Bronson’s character in Death Wish wanted to do something so he shot muggers. Ollie Reed’s character in The Jokers wanted to do something so he robbed the crown jewels. They are about people who want to get outside of society and make a statement regardless. They want to be seen and they want to know that they made a mark even if it’s not a gentle mark.

Having left a pretty big mark yourself why did you decline your OBE in 2006?
First of all, I did not create the Police Memorial Trust get a Knighthood so it seemed a load of bollocks. I worked for twenty years on it with my own money and managed to get up the first memorial on The Mall in over 100 years. I couldn’t give a shit about a CBE or a Knighthood so I just thought stuff it. If you look at the people who have turned down honours it makes for a wonderful list. I now put on my notepaper “Michael Winner, MA CAM OBE (but rejected)”. Fuck ‘em.

What are the chances of seeing “Michael Winner” on the credits of a film again and not on an E-Sure ad?
The truth is very simple, It applies to me as it does to everyone else. They are not lining up to employ directors in their 70’s. I get calls from John Boorman and Nicholas Roeg and none of them can get anything going. That is the nature of life and the spotlight of showbusiness. It shines upon you and then moves on to somebody else. Luckily I’ve managed to somehow become this half assed food critic who knows nothing about food and I have a few TV projects on the go so at least I’ve got that. Some of the greats of that period have got nothing.

Vice Feature: Play For Today

2009-10-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

This probably the single article that I am happiest with having written. It made me feel like a real journalist kind of. It was for Vice v7n9, The Film Issue.

Break Down The Walls!

How Play for Today Changed British Screens For Ever And Ever

TV movies suck, right? Well, if you were watching TV in Britain in the 1960s the opposite couldn’t have been more true. Play for Today was a series of one-off dramas that dragged television kicking and screaming into uncharted cinematic territory via the emerging use of 16mm on-location filming and a rejection of the limits of a studio system that remained mainstream television’s status quo.

The series acted as a blooding ground for a generation of British directors who went on to define English cinema. Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Stephen Poliakoff, they all cut their teeth on Play for Today.

However, it was not just the quality of production or standard of direction that the series is best remembered for. The Wednesday Play as it began and Play for Today as it became consistently dealt with controversial contemporary issues with an unprecedented degree of social realism. A degree that was occasionally too much for Auntie.

Alan Clarke’s Scum and Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle were mired in controversy before being banned prior to transmission for their hyper-real depiction of the brutality of the borstal system, and, er, showing the devil raping a disabled, comatose girl back to consciousness, respectively. The show constantly fought a running battle between reflecting the social freedom and reality of the 1960’s tempered by the occasionally reactionary nature of the institution they were operating within.

The social and cultural concerns and tone of the series were defined by its great producers; Tony Garnett, Kenith Trodd and Margaret Matheson hold unassailable places in the pantheon of British screen greatness. It was their determination and uncompromising output that saw Play for Today regularly average audiences of 12 to 13 million viewers, i.e. a quarter of the UK population. When Ken Loach’s brutally moving Cathy Come Home was beamed into that many homes in 1969, it immediately caused debate on public housing in the House of Commons, and the housing charity Shelter was founded days later. It is hard to imagine Snakes on a Plane causing a public outcry for serpent traps to be installed as standard on 747s.

Play for Today revolutionised the possibilities of drama and how it could exist in the spaces between stage, cinema and television, as well as establishing a legacy of talent and crusading spirit that lives on in flashes even in today’s climate of vapid, apathetic cinematic consumption. Tony Garnett, ever the rebel, recently accidentally/on purpose leaked an email that attacked the current state of the BBC and offered reformative measures that you would do well to read. It found its way onto the Guardian’s website so it shouldn’t be too hard to find.
While many of those involved in the series have sadly passed away, we managed to catch up with a few of the men and women who created Play for Today’s lasting blow to the senses.

Ray Winstone

Ray Winstone was 19 when he played Carlin in Scum, one of only two episodes of Play For Today to actually be banned by the BBC. Scum was directed by Alan Clarke, written by Roy Minton and dealt with the brutality and systematic abuse of young inmates within the British borstal system during the 1970’s. The film takes in male rape, countless brawls, gay relations between the all male borstal population and a couple of suicides for good measure. The film had public morality serial soapboxer Mary Whitehouse crapping chickens and the borstal system itself was reformed not long after its release. Ray went on to work with Scorcese, Speilberg, Leonardo di Caprio and Jack Nicholson. Not bad for a kid from Paistow who got kicked out of drama school huh?

Vice: Had you done much acting prior to your role as Carlin in the Play for Today version of Scum?
Ray Winstone: No, not really. I’d done one or two things the year before—an episode of The Sweeny and a few other bits—but Scum was my breakthrough. The movie industry in Britain at the time was just collapsing in on itself. They were totally failing to build a box office but what they were doing at the BBC then was good stuff and feel lucky to have been a part of it.

Carlin maintains a strong sense of what’s fair and what’s not that ends up getting him in trouble. That sounds a little like the tale of what you went through at drama school. Is there truth behind the story of you getting kicked out?
Yeah. I wasn’t invited to the Christmas party and I got the hump. I was always thought of as a bit of a threat to the other kids. Not physically but in the way that I spoke. In that profession at that time they still weren’t used to working class kids and I think the powers that be thought they might all start talking like me. I guess I was the black sheep of the school all the way through, then I didn’t get invited to this stupid party so I sabotaged the wheels on the gaffer’s car. It was a stupid thing to do but I thought I wasn’t being treated right, and then someone grassed me up and that was it. I was gone.

How was going from being thrown out of drama school to working with Alan Clarke?
That was my teaching right there. I learnt a hell of a lot from Alan. I didn’t realise it at the time—it takes until you’re older for you to begin to work out what you can use from what you learned back then. He was great. He just showed me around the place and introduced me to the other actors. He placed a lot of faith in me and I appreciated it. I’m sure there are other people like him around, but I feel lucky to have worked with him. He was something special.

While you were shooting Scum did you feel like you were making something that would be banned, have Mary Whitehouse up in arms, see the country drawing up sides and, finally, cause serious questioning of the borstal system?
I didn’t really have a clue what we’d done, to be honest. I think the first time that it really dawned on me was when I came back from my honeymoon and came straight to the premiere of the film version in Leicester Square, at the Prince Charles Theatre. The original had been banned and never shown so despite all the chatter about it, it was only then that it all hit home. I thought it was a bit of a fucking liberty that the original got banned. At the time we were doing Scum the BBC was also making Law and Order. They were both about institutions, and in their way critical of the government. It felt like they couldn’t throw both of them out, so they tossed Scum out and Law and Order went through. It just goes to show that the government did have a certain amount of control over the BBC and over the media.

Did you have any actual run-ins with Whitehouse yourself?
I tell you what, she done me a right favour because, by banning the TV version, people wanted to see it and so when we made the film it was a smash. Really that was down to Mary Whitehouse, I’ve got to hand it all to her.

Do you feel like there is anything being made today that compares to Play for Today in terms of portraying that level of social realism they achieved in films like Scum?
That was when the BBC was still teaching people, you know? There were just great writers, directors, producers and technicians working on that stuff. Plus, it was a time when the lower classes came out into that world. You’re talking about people like Mike Leigh, [Tony] Garnett, Dennis Potter, who could talk about that stuff genuinely and you were always working and always learning from people like that. I’m not sure that’s there now.

Carlin kind of set the mould for a lot of characters that you’ve ended up playing since. Do you ever get bored of plying the hard nut with a heart?
Well I’ve played all sorts, I really enjoyed playing Henry VIII but I guess he’s the biggest gangster of all eh? I’m not gonna sit here and moan. I’ve had some pretty alright opportunities.

Did you ever imagine when you were playing Carlin that you’d end up working with Scorsese, Spielberg, Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford?
Of course not. It was terrific working on all that stuff. You had to pinch yourself every morning, you know? I think what makes Scorsese a great director, is that he makes you feel like you’re making the film with him, instead of making a film for him. Everyone gets a chance to bring something to the table so you feel like you’re in the process of making a film, and everyone’s part of that process. I think that’s the way it should be. It’s nothing new, but there are a lot of directors out there who make a film their way, and you end up feeling like you don’t even want to fucking be there. Jack was a bit of a weird one at the start. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot but we didn’t really get on at the beginning then after spending a lot of time working together we began to hit it off and now we’re ok. It’s not like I go out for a drink with the guy but he ain’t and arsehole either. I got a lot of respect for him. Harrison though, he’s a geezer through and through.

What about the English actors that you came up with? People like Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Did you ever feel like you were a little gang who came out of the Play For Today era drama to take on Hollywood?
I guess we were all working at that same time but I didn’t know Gary until I worked with him on Nil By Mouth. I’d met him at Alan Clark’s funeral, but I didn’t know him properly until we worked together. The same with Tim. I didn’t know him until I worked with on The War Zone. Sometimes I think I end up nestled in the palm of that arty farty film thing that they are quite at home in. I’m an actor, but some people probably think that’s a rather flattering term for what I do. Gary and Tim though, and I’m great mates with both of them now so I can say this, have probably always wanted to be a part of that from the start. They’ve always surrounded themselves with those kind of people. We’re mates now, but I suppose I never thought that we would be.

What else are you working on now? How about an Eddie Murphy style flick where you play all of your psychotic past roles trapped in some alternate dimension and have to battle for survival?
At the moment, actually, I’m doing a lot to raise awareness for the Sam Hallam case. Sam was from Hoxton, which is an area my family have always had ties to. I heard about it through my nephew, who knew Sam. Then Sam’s family approached me about getting involved. Every ex-con or ex-villain you meet will tell you that they’re innocent. Everyone’s got a story, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this so I kind of got hooked on it. I’ve seen the evidence, spoken to people in the area, spoken to people who were there that night, looked at the CCTV monitors and everything points to the fact that he wasn’t there. He was a kid who’d never been in trouble in his life. The report of the girlfriend of the young man who was murdered was blatantly just pointing the finger, and has been retracted since, and there’s still a boy doing life in prison. So two families end up suffering here—the family of the kid who was murdered, as the right kid hasn’t been charged, and the family of Sam Hallam. It’s incredible that the police seem to know that he’s not guilty, and yet they followed it through. The law knows he’s not guilty, and yet the boy is still in prison and nothing seems to be being done about it, you know?

Tony Garnett

Caption: Here are Sean King as Sean, Ray Brooks as Reg, Stephen King as Stephen and Carol White as Cathy in the landmark production of Cathy Come Home, which was broadcast in 1969.

Tony Garnett redefined the margins between drama, television and cinema with his use of 16mm on location shooting and unswerving adherence to capturing the everyday realistically through his work on Play For Today and his partenrship with Ken Loach. His 1969 Play For Today drama Cathy Come Home achieved what few other things that came out of a TV screen ever have: making people sit up, put down the remote and act.

Vice: You came to producing from an acting background, but weren’t you also studying psychology at UCL while treading the boards?
Tony Garnett: Well, that’s a grand word for what I was up to. After school, I ran away and acted in the theatre for a couple of years, and got turned down for national service because I had a weak right eye. I won a state scholarship which was worth over £300 a year, which in 1957 was a fortune. However, I realised that unless I went to university I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. So I decided to come to London, where all the action was, and applied to the psychology department at UCL so that I could pick up my grant. I wasn’t really in the college much, as I was acting. On one of my rare visits to the psychology department, my tutor stopped me and said, “I saw you on television last night. It’d be so nice to see you in a seminar occasionally.”

How did you make the transition from prancing around in front of the camera to making decisions behind it?
I grew bored of the passivity of acting. Only a handful of actors can ever decide what gets made and I was never going to be one of them. I was asked by Roger Smith to join him on what was to become The Wednesday Play. Fuck knows what they saw in me but I threw myself into the work, initially as a script editor, and one thing led to another. We spent a year developing the shows, and then put out 35 original, full-length features in a year.

That is some work rate.
It was exhilarating but extremely hard work, particularly because Roger and I were also finding new writers. Our policy was to look for people who had something to say, and then help them say it. We’d just go anywhere and do anything, talk to anybody and cast our nets around for the material. We wanted people who would write about what they cared and knew about.

With a background in theatre, what was it that made you so adamant to escape the confines of the studio and become so puritanical about ensuring the filmic nature of Play for Today?
At that point, TV drama was an abortion, it was ridiculous, it had one parent in the cinema, another parent in the theatre, and all the disadvantages of both. My first aim in working in television drama was to abolish it. We wanted to be out in the world, both for aesthetic and political reasons. The 16mm camera was coming into use, which meant that we could get out there, shoot very effectively and quickly, and represent things as they were, rather than mess about in a studio making a load of phoney drama. I didn’t like television drama. I wanted to get rid of it.

That ability to reflect contemporary reality so vividly was probably Play for Today’s most resonant suit. Was it something you were conscious of at the time?
I, and I don’t think any of us, thought of the future. We were living in the present and making the work for the moment, hoping to have an impact on the consciousness of people at that time. What I wanted to do was be a part of making things that reflected life around me. Also, we actually wanted to work on television. We had none of that cinema snobbery. It was almost impossible to get films made consistently in the UK at that time and most working people were sat in front of the television, so that’s where we wanted to be. It was very exciting to produce a drama and have 12 or 13 million people watch it all on the same occasion and then talk about it the next day. We were also determined that working class people should be represented on the screen in a realistic and dignified way, which they had not been up until then. They had been acted in a patronising way by middle-class actors and written from the point of view of the posh. We were going to do something about it. And I think we did for some time. With the arrogance of youth, I thought I could make a film and change the world.

If not the world, then Cathy Come Home certainly had an effect on the public consciousness in England.
It didn’t change much of the reality though, did it? Look around you. You see more people with housing problems now than there were then. The only positive result was that the people who made it have very nice places to live now. Really, all the films do is resonate and affect people’s way of looking at things. They don’t change anything directly, that’s not their function. It reflected who we were at the time, but I think Ken and I would say now that it’s a bit soft and liberal. If we made it again with the politics we have now, it would be much tougher.

Is it true there was a degree of improvisation on Cathy Come Home?
Some, but it was just well scripted and well acted. What Ken and I hated was what we called writing-writing and acting-acting. Writing that sounds written and acting that you can tell is being acted. With some actors you see the cogs turning and other actors you can’t, they are in the moment. You’re not watching the actor, you’re watching the person. The same goes for the writing. That’s the difference and that is what we were after.

Was it inevitable that you and Loach ended up making a film like Kes together?
Ken and I were working together throughout the Play for Today period and he was directing a lot of those shows. We became mates and it became quite clear that our thinking was very close. The overlap just evolved, I had an ally and together we fought the battle. Kes was just the most wonderful demonstration of what was going on in the country at the time. Just systematically throwing away a good proportion of each generation. It came from a wonderful story by Barry Hines and strangely Ken wasn’t originally going to direct it. When he stepped in though it all fell together.

What moved you to publicly criticise the current state of BBC drama?
I felt bad for all the generations coming through, and angry at the BBC—which lives off creativity—organising itself in a way that stymies it. The traffic of the energy needs to be coming up from the writer, through everyone including the organisation, rather than down through the swamp of management. Back when we were working on Play For Today you had an organisition thin on numbers and high on creativity. Now you have system fat on numbers and very thin on creative output. The BBC has to make a decision. Does it want the safety of creative death or whether it wants to be alive and vital.

Kenith Trodd

Caption: This is Michelle Newell playing Patricia Bates in Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle from 1976. After being left comatose in a hit-and-run accident, Newell’s character remains this way until she is raped by the devil, played by Michael Kitchen, and then miraculously regains consciousness. The original transmission was banned and not shown until 1987. Sting played the devil character in the 1982 remake. True story.

Kenith Trodd is one of the few British producers that people who know more about cinema than you mention in the same breath as the great directors and screenwriters of the last four decades. The son of a crane driver, he graduated from Oxford and went on to define British drama as part of the original team behind Play For Today and through his ongoing relationship with the gifted but troubled Denis Potter.

Vice: How did you find yourself entering the world of making films of plays on television?
Kenith Trodd: Through a back door. After Oxford, I started an academic career initially in West Africa and was about to take a junior lectureship at Sussex University when Roger Smith, who was gearing up The Wednesday Play slot at the BBC, asked me to join him. “I can’t stand the fuckers I’m working with,” he told me. The big Oxford literary honcho who was endorsing me for the job at Sussex said I’d embarrass him if I turned it down but boats are sometimes for the burning and I went off to a small office cell at TV Centre.

What was the climate like at the BBC when you began work at The Wednesday Play?
There was a real feeling almost immediately that the likes of myself, Smith and Garnett were the young Turks who were, in a way, taking over the place, and I’m sure being obnoxious to those around us. However, the climate was one of such expansiveness and freedom that you did whatever you could when you could. The head of drama was Sydney Newman, a Canadian who looked like Stalin and his mission was to sweep away the fustiness of the output and swing it lustily into the 60s. The television service was only a couple of decades old and there was a sense of openness, almost as if we’d been handed a box of matches and we could start a fire if we wanted to. Providing we did not burn the whole building down, we could then do it again. But, not to be too nostalgic, it also felt embattled and not completely unfettered.

In what sense?
On my very first week on The Wednesday Play, we were told on the very day of transmission that they were banning Potter’s Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. Myself, Garnett, Roger Smith and Potter were ushered into Newman’s huge office. He knew that potentially, and particularly in Potter’s case, he had a situation on his hands and that we could become a liability. So he resolved to keep us talking and basically get us drunk. The scotch came out and, after an hour or so of him reassuring us that it was not always going to be like this and that he would fight for us, Dennis managed to lure the two of us up to my office where he called every newspaper he could so as to get his version of events out there first. When I eventually returned to Sydney’s office he was winding up his comforting schmooze with a sharp hint of a real dialectic: “ everything will be fine but whatever you do fellas don’t trust me.” So it was a rather complex environment. There were certainly limits and we were trying constantly to push them. The limits were sometimes sexual, and sometimes arbitrary, but mostly they were political.

How about the other cases of censorship? Brimstone and Treacle springs to mind.
At times it was ridiculous and focused on language. I remember that they made us alter a line in Leeds United from: “You can’t ride two horses with one arse” to “You can’t ride two horses with one nose,” which doesn’t even make sense out of a fairly innocuous line. I remember bartering for how many “bloodys” I could have but with Brimstone and Treacle the attack was wholesale. The tale involved a disabled girl, looked after by her devoted parents, who had been left a vegetable after an accident being raped back to life by the devil, who cons his way into the family home. I thought Brimstone and Treacle was a brilliant multi-edged moral comedy. It was innocuous compared to Double Dare, another Potter we did at the same time, but Brimstone and Treacle hit the unfunny bone of the director of television, Alasdair Milne, who was a fairly straight-laced Scot and who told me that he found the piece “diabolical”. How he did not see the verbal connection there I don’t know.

Play for Today’s consistent ability to reflect, comment and influence contemporary society certainly seems retrospectively pretty remarkable.
We did tend to focus on stuff that was radical in tone and there certainly was quite a lot of that motivation in some of the things we did, and, looking back, a lot of the work that stands out is from that tradition. There is no doubt that there was certainly a coupled drive towards portraying issues we felt were important as opposed to “anyone for tennis?” dramas, and doing so on film with cinematic rather than verbal priorities. It still remained well into the 80s a writer’s medium and I worked regularly with many who were not ideologues and who embraced television as their utterly preferred medium—Simon Gray, Stephen Poliakoff, Colin Welland, G.F. Newman and William Trevor among them. The better directors, of course, longed to be big screen filmmakers, and Pat O’Connor, Roland Joffe, Ken Loach, Roy Battersby and Jon Amiel graduated to high-profile movie careers. But in the 80s especially, when there were bleak times for “real” British films, we were able to have it both ways and thrive on our smug aphorism: “The British film industry is alive and well and living in television”.

How would you compare the British TV climate as it was when the Play for Today brand thrived and how it feels now?
Then, expansive and confident. Now, retracting and desperate. Then, the producer was key and king. Now, producers are minor functionaries way down the power and decision-making chain. Then, the press was already prurient and mischievous, but basically supportive. Now, it’s more of a bitch engendered out of its own uncertainties and an enemy of creative promise. Then, television was a duopolistic consensus and TV institutions were actually more secure than their political masters. Now, the politicians would probably have to intervene either to prop up the old institutions legislatively or allow them to cripple. Then, four channels. Now, the number is uncountable. Then, Whitehouse. Now, Murdoch. Then, Dennis Potter. Now, profit. Then, the audience. Now, the consumer. Then, the VHS was the only alternative platform. Now, there is the internet. Once we had to satisfy at least one of three juries: the management floor at the BBC, the viewer, and the press. These were hardly strenuous commercial criteria but meeting one of them usually allowed you to try again, as the competition between channels became more intense the climate grew more commercially preoccupied. In the early 80s I remember Potter saying to me, “Everything is now for sale.” In the early 90s he was calling his cancer Rupert.

Margaret Matheson

Caption: Here are Joolia Cappleman, Sam Kelly, and Richard Kane in Mike Leigh’s Who’s Who from 1979. The play satirised contemporary class attitudes and snobbery. All fair game for Play for Today.

Margaret Matheson’s brief but highly regarded period as producer on Play For Today not only saw her defining a role that few women had previously tussled with but serving up perhaps the most controversial work of the entire series in Scum.

Vice: You were a victim of censorship, particularly with Scum. Did it feel during the later period that you were involved with Play For Today that things were less free?
Margaret Matheson: There was a checks and balances arrangement whereby the heads of department would know what you were up to and stop it if they didn’t like it so you weren’t given total freedom, but it was very close to that. The overall head of drama at that point was a naval chap called Shaun Sutton who was baffled by the whole Scum ordeal. I remember bumping into him in a corridor after we’d shown it to the press and he was under the impression that Alan [Clarke] and Roy [Minton] had somehow managed to make it behind my back. He couldn’t conceive that a girl would have had any part in it.

Did you face opposition being a woman in what was, essentially, a big old boys’ club?
There had been women ahead of me, particularly Irene Shubik, who had co-produced The Wednesday Play and the early period of Play for Today. She was a very strong, powerful woman getting her work done. If anything, being a female producer worked to my advantage in the sense that I could get away with more. During my stint, Stephen Gilbert was sacked for work relating to Solid Geometry and there was never any possibility of me getting sacked over Scum.

How did Scum not get called up at any point in the checks and balances process?
The trouble did not begin until we’d finished. Everything had gone flying through. Alan came into my office on my first day and I think it was the first script I read as a producer on Play for Today. He was very keen to make it. We didn’t just want to do it to cause trouble, it was a great script and if you are working on Play for Today you want to be making something that is relevant and something that is going to be striking. We are talking about an era where TV was watched and had an effect on the cultural climate. I certainly aspired to influence public in opinion in the way Tony had with Cathy Come Home. That seemed to be me to be a very just pursuit.

So when did the trouble start?
Back then they had very long deadlines for The Radio Times, and it was in the listings when the channel controller, and ultimately the director of television, intervened. I knew that the research had been very thorough before the writing. We knew what we were talking about and as part of the production process there had been a lot of authentication to ensure that we were doing it right. Jimmy Cellan-Jones, who was head of plays, was a great supporter, but once it caught the eye of those at the highest levels that was it.

What was their problem? The suicides? The beatings? The brutality? Ray’s Winstone’s accent?
As well as the feeling that it was unrealistic, that so many things happened in such a short space of time the executives thought that the audience would be confused as to whether it was drama or documentary due to the level of authenticity. We all thought that it was perfectly clear that it was a drama and very much a play for today, in that Ken Loach tradition. With the time pressure on the BBC from having the listing in the Radio Times there was still hope that it would be shown, so we agreed to some edits.

What did you have to cut?
We took out the moment of impact when Carlin swings the sock with the snooker ball, as well as the second suicide. We accepted the cuts because it was more important for us to have it seen than not.

How did you react when you knew that it was beyond saving?
Alasdair Milne, who was the director of programmes, told us that the BBC was categorically not going to show it. So we showed it to the press. I think we wanted to try and get some kind of campaign going. We did it absolutely without the knowledge of the BBC. I took the print to the Coronet Theatre on Wardour Street, which was a preview theatre, and invited along all of the media. In those days, Soho was still seen as a real den of iniquity so the idea of the press seeing a stolen print in a basement on Wardour Street added a bit of colour to the whole saga. On the whole, they loved it and it caused a big stir, if only from the controversial aspect of the BBC having spent whatever amount of money on it and then putting it in the trash can.

It must have been a pretty bitter pill knowing that no one would see what you had worked so hard to create?
Yes. It was an iconic performance by Ray but my memory of him was mainly how young he seemed. They were all just boys but they were very serious about their acting and Alan drilled them so they were very well rehearsed. They became those characters. It was the first film most of them had done and many of them had never even acted. Alan managed to be both a fearsome leader and director, but somehow also endear himself and convince them that he was one of the lads, and in doing so got the most out of them. He was extraordinary. Especially considering that it was very hard work and very depressing. It was such a gruesome story.

Which directors did you most enjoy working with on Play for Today?
They were all different but Alan was certainly unique. He was complex, driven and committed to giving a voice to those who had none. I think his body of work shows that. The wonderful thing about Play for Today was that they didn’t all work but you had the creative freedom to keep trying things. Also, with the sole exception of Garnett, the genius in the tower, we were all located together on the tenth floor of Broadcasting House and it really was quite a melting pot. You had writers, directors and producers all on one floor, and down on the ground floor at any given time at least two large scale dramas being filmed. Even with the independent production companies of today, that atmosphere of camaraderie and cross-fertilisation is impossible to recreate. There was of course the social purpose but we didn’t just want to change the world and be very left-wing. There was also an artistic purpose. If there was some kind of a chord running through the work it might be that they cover aspects of society that the average viewer might not have known about and I would hope that they managed to capture and show the everyday in a new and different way.

What made you leave Play for Today?
Scum had been banned and a couple of other things that I had been working on had been censored so I was starting to think that they were taking the mickey and that I was being watched and would eventually be closed down. I had felt up until then that I could do anything and get away with it. Part of it was daring and part of it was thinking that we weren’t going to stop if they banned us. Eventually that climate changed and it began to feel like things were always going to be interfered with. It had been a fantastic opportunity and I had had an absolute ball so I thought why not take a break, have some twins, go to America where my husband had just got a fellowship, and come back and cause some more trouble later?

You went on to work on Made in Britain, Oi for England and Birth of a Nation. Would you have made those pictures without your background in Play for Today?
I was a head of department by that point so the context was different, but mischief was certainly always very high on my list of things to do. It was just a different kind of mischief.

Vice v7n8 Record Reviews

2009-10-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Rot In Hell/The Process
Split 7”
Feast Of Tentacles

9 How many 7” records have you bought recently that come with a beautifully screened pamphlet reproducing the Marquis De Sade’s Works of Hate complete with contemporaneous woodcuts of ye olde orgies huh? Well if you buy this one you’ll also get two of the most misanthropic sides of Process Church inspired hardcore going for good measure.

Charles Jamson

Thou
Tyrant
Southern Lord

9 Who knows what they put in the swamps out in Louisiana but it sure makes for some great doom-drenched sludge metal. If you’re missing Eyehategod then this reissued 2007 set from kindred NOLA spirits Thou courtesy of Southern Lord has come chugging and screaming out of Baton Rouge to batter your ears to a bloody pulp right in the nick of time.

Buzz Aldrin

Gruel
Gruel
Feast Of Tentacles

8 Another platter of putrid disgustingness from the good folks at Feast Of Tentacles who really should get some kind of lifetime achievement award for overlooked consistent quality of output or something. Apart from that Kamikaze 7”. What was that all about? This is a double album of psyche infused doom from Leeds that would make a good soundtrack to a huddling naked in the corner of a cold, dark room and weeping yourself to sleep.

Perry Nutkins

Battletorn
Reflect The Filth
Grrman Records

10 Omid who plays the guitar and yells in this two headed thrash monster of an outfit was on the cover of our Obsessions Issue eons ago hanging out in front of his ginormous t-shirt collection. If you want to know what this record sounds like go have a look at the article on Viceland and you will soon get a good idea. Sadly this is the last will and testament of Battletorn as they are splitting soon. William and Omid: your rackets will be missed.

King Cringeson

El Grupo Nuevo De Omar Rodriguez Lopez
Cryptomnesia
Rodriguez Lopez Productions

0 In what alternate reality am I living where normally sane people are actually excited about the one with glasses from The Mars Volta’s solo record? What even gives this guy the right to have a solo record? And then call it “Cryptomnesia” on his own label that he has named after himself? I’m sure he is a lovely guy but, oh wait, Biff Tannen just walked past. Or was it Griff?

Doc Brown

The Fiery Furnaces
I’m Going Away
Thrill Jockey

1 This is everyone’s favourite kooky brother/sister duo’s eighth record. No, you did not just have an eye spasm it really is their eighth album. Who knew you could ride a one trick pony so long? Is she still dating that waxwork model that sings in Franz Ferdinand?

Alexis Petri-dish

Dieter Moebius
Kram
Klangbad Records

8 I am not sure where Moebius makes his records but I’d like to imagine him tinkering away in an old potting shed with a few reel to reels and a four track sampling bees in flight and the swish of a dandelion in the breeze then looping it all ad infintum. He remains gloriously out of step and yet forever two paces ahead of the pack.

Perry Nutkins

Necro Deathmort
The Beat Is Necrotronic
Distraction Records

5 I hate to sit on the fence but this one has me foxed. One minute it’s Sunn O))) the next it’s Squarepusher then it’s all a bit like the run out groove of a Philip Jeck record. None of these things are bad individually but I was never a man for raspberry and bacon sandwiches.

The Milky Bar Kid

The Horror
Spoils Of War
Grot Records

8 I am pretty sure that The Horror is basically late period Voorhees without Lecky on vocals. Well, Horror singer Andy has some equally abrasive pipes and it must still be grim up North because this second effort offers 15 songs of total and utter anger and aggression wheeled out in staccato 90 second blasts. More please.

Circle Jams

Sian Alice Group
Troubled, Shaken Etc
The Social Registry

10 Like listening to rain tinkling on broken glass the Sian Alice Group make fragile and gorgeously realized pastoral anthems that make me want to weep tears of joy and beat my breast like one of those crazy Scottish warrior guys in Braveheart and scream at the top of my lungs and run around in a field and generally make me happy about being a breathing thing that wakes up every day.

General Store

Lemonade
Debut Album
Sunday Best

8 All over the place party music that fidgets from dubstep to b-more to synthy electro and back again in the blink of a breakbeat. You remember that house party you were at where you wished you knew who the hell made the crazy racket coming out of the speakers at 6am? Wonder no longer.

Acid Drew

Lovvers
OCD GO GO GO GIRLS
Wichita

9 Sometimes I want to run around London screaming, “wake up!” Buy this today and realize what America, Europe and just about everywhere woke up to 12 months ago. One of the best bands making a garage punk racket out there are right under your noses.

Jam 69

The Pastels/Tenniscoats
Two Sunsets
Geographic

8 C86 survivors and serial Scotch collaborators The Pastels have a ram shackle meeting of minds with Japanese minimalists Tenniscoats. What shouldn’t work does and out of the grinder comes one of the most endearing pop records of the year as well as a contender for best track title in “Start Slowly So We Sound Like A Loch”.

Jim O’Fork

Nodzzz
Nodzzz
What’s Your Rupture?

8 Straddling the mountain of chatter that preceded its release with ease these ten tracks of Richman-like quirk and earnest pop may only last for sixteen minutes but if you don’t hit play again as soon as it ends your ears have become cold, frozen, soulless, stalagmites and will probably drop off fairly soon.

Day Ravies

Pissed Jeans
Kings Of Jeans
Sub Pop

10 The last time that Pissed Jeans played the Old Blue Last I became convinced that they were the best band in the world. Ever. I was sure of it. I told myself that listening to other music was pointless and that Hope For Men could never be bettered. Then I kind of forgot these vows until bam! Now all I am listening to is King Of Jeans. Again and again and again. You should too.

Bruce Grobelar

Vice v7n8 Literary Reviews

2009-10-13T10:53:00.002-07:00

all.hope.abandon.
Phil Hawkey
Self-published

This was received accompanied by a letter scrawled in the hand of what looked liked an unhinged six year old in brown crayon on sheets that appeared to have been roughly torn from a school exercise book. I was sold before I’d even opened the ‘zine which turned out to be one of the most deranged series of disturbing illustrations of strange dick-nosed devils, dismembered, tattooed bodies and masturbating Mexican wrestlers with vaginas for assholes that I’ve seen since, well, ever. Please write to again Phil, we want you to draw stuff for us. Look, even his MySpace URL is great!

myspace.com/iamdemon

DANCING EYE ISSUE ONE
Mark Oliver and Peter O’Dowd
Dancing Eye Illustration & Small Press

Coming on the heals of Phil Hawkey’s schizoid ‘zine, which you hopefully should have read about up there, and with all hope thoroughly abandoned it was with trepid hand that I picked up Dancing Eye. Fortunately this lovingly put together collection of illustrations was just the right side of slightly weird to pull me out of the fug and come out smiling. A bit like doing just a little bit of ketamine as opposed to that time you did a whopping great line you thought was something else only to spend the rest of the evening eating your shoelaces.

dancingeye.co.uk

THE LAST MAD SURGE OF YOUTH
Mark Hodgkinson
Pomona

Sorry Mark, I am not going to lie, this book spent a while by my toilet looking neglected. Then one day I was having a good session and picked it up. And then I couldn’t put it down. Literally. I even read it walking down the street. I don’t recommend this; you look like you are trying to be a character in a Belle & Sebastian song and tramp straight into bus stops. If you can imagine The Rotters Club, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and The Commitments being melded as one then you would be vaguely in the right ballpark but if you are the owner of a penis and like music then don’t sleep on this one.

pomonauk.com

THE JUNIOR OFFICER’S READING CLUB
Patrick Hennessy
Allen Lane

If you want to know what it would be like to be a soldier in the British army circa right now then stop reading this and go buy The Junior Officer’s Reading Club. Not only do you get the grit, blood, sweat and horror of what really goes on on the frontlines of Iraq and Helmland but Hennessey also ably describes the boredom, futility and seeming pointlessness of so many aspects of a soldiers day to day life. He almost makes it seem like being in band. Albeit a band that could get killed by SCUD missiles at any given moment.

penguin.co.uk

LUBA
Gilbert Hernandez
Fantagraphics Books

A hulking great doorstop of Hernandez courtesy of the never less than brilliant Fantagraphics. If you are not familiar with Love & Rockets (aka one of the greatest comic series of all time) which Gilbert made with his brother Jamie (and sometimes their other brother Mario) then I am jealous that you will get to go and discover those books for the first time and you probably should before having a go at this. Luba was one of the main characters in the final Love & Rockets arc Palomar and this phone book sized hard back collects literally everything the hammer wielding ex-mayor got up to after her former home was leveled. I won’t give anything away other than let you know that it is just as good as anything else Los Bros Hernandez have had a hand in. In other words: perfect.

fantagraphics.com

LOOPS ISSUE ONE
Domino/Faber

Well-liked independent record label teams up with fusty but well-respected publishing house to have a go at cornering the kind of music writing that Greil Marcus would get excited about. In fact where is Greil? Nick Kent’s here. Nick Cave too actually with a new bit of fiction from his forthcoming novel. The standout is an essay on Spacemen3 by young whippersnapper Richard Millward who you may remember from the Fiction Issue two years ago. Not blowing our own trumpet or anything. Just saying. If you can imagine a version of Granta for people who subscribe to Mojo you’d probably be selling Loops a little short but you wouldn’t be too far wrong.

dominorecordco.com

Vice v7n6 Record Reviews

2009-10-13T10:53:00.001-07:00

Thee Oh Sees
Help
In The Red

8 Who knows who John Dwyer was trying to kid when he dropped the first Oh Sees record under the OCS moniker and it was all willowy folk and whimsy. We all knew he couldn’t stay away from the vein-burstin’, neck-throttlin’, mike-chewin’, garage-psyche he practically invented with Pink & Brown, Coachwhips and The Hospitals for long. And he didn’t. Here are all the bits he left off the early Oh Sees records played twice as fast to make up for lost time.

Perry Nutkins

Current 93
Aleph At Hullicinatory Mountain
Coptic Cat

10 How many albums in your record collection feature contributions from a former Adult Video Network ‘Best Three Way Sex Scene’ award winner? While it might seem as relevant as a Highland Caber-toss champion playing the next Dr Who the appearance of Sasha Gray on David Tibet’s latest is made all the more worthwhile by showings from Matt Sweeney, Andrew W.K., the bloke Coil who collectively rattle out eight of the most chillingly perfect songs you are likely to hear all month/year/decade.

Beezer Guttler

The Crocodiles
Summer Of Hate
Fat Possum

9 Once upon a time I saw a screamy hardcore band called The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower at The Victoria Inn in Derby. If you’d tried to tell me then that two of the members of that band would go on to make a shimmering, Jesus & Mary Chain does mid-period Velvets album on a country label I’d have eaten my Orchid t-shirt off my own back and scoffed my Saetia records for dessert. Sometimes the sound of being completely and totally wrong is a wonderful thing.

Jerome’s Dream

Vennt
Vennt
Housepig

9 I am not sure if I should even talk about this one. It was such a terrifying experience listening to the thing that I’m worried it’ll sense I’m discussing it and come hurtling out of the speakers to rape my ears all over again. Vennt make truly disturbing sheets of power electronics roar into waves of crushing doom to devastating effect. I can’t tell you much more about the band other than it really wouldn’t be a surprise if they had nicked their band name from the Von song of the same title.

Ken Angry

The Bastard Noise
Our Earth’s Blood IV
Cathartic Process

10 Five discs and over five hours of singular, bloody-minded brutality, cro-magnon electronics and sonic disintegration. Hardly a month goes by without an emission of bilious carnage from the Bastard Noise camp and we wouldn’t have it any other way. This release is a veritable high summit of international ‘skull-servants’ with Merzbow, Christian Bass and Surrounded all popping up within the confines of this handsomely constructed, die-cut nugget of Bastard history in the making.

Jam Is The Bastard

Magnolia Electric Co.
Josephine
Secretly Canadian

9 Someone recently told me that Jason Molina now lives on Brick Lane. Can someone please email me at james@viceuk.com to let me know whether this is true or not. I have been hanging out there a hell of a lot lately so that I can casually bump into the guy and gushingly tell him how he possesses the greatest voice of his generation and other embarrassingly over the top grovellings and there are only so many bagels one man can eat.

Pilly Nelson

T.I.T.S.
Second Base
Upset The Rhythm

8 Come on ladies. Your Animal from Sesame St on drums, Geezer Butler bass lines and whole heap of haunted forest clincking and cloncking over the top sure makes for a good listen but a band called breasts going for that album title? I bet they’ve never told their mothers.

Snowy

That Fucking Tank
Tankology
Gringo

8 Being named after a line from Apocalypse Now and with a litany song titles that appear little more than a pubescent excuse for wordplay (“Bruce Springstonehenge”, “Keanu Reef”, “Dave Grolsch”), you’d be forgiven for expecting That Fucking Tank to be mal-nourished, over-excitable sixth formers. The fact that they’ve been playing together over a decade and a half and have honed overdriven, melodic math-rock to within an inch of its life though means that all is forgiven.

Gary Stringer

Tortoise
Beacons Of Ancestorship
Thrill Jockey

5 I had this noodling out of my headphones for almost half an hour before I could be bothered to check what it was. It was a moderately pleasant half an hour. I didn’t feel aurally robbed or anything. But silence would probably have worked just as well.

Dean Dirg

Here We Go Magic
Here We Go Magic
Western Vinyl

5 Apparently everyone at SXSW had a huge hard-on for this. Which is strange as it basically amounts to average singer-songwriter guy Luke Temple’s laptop project. It’s nice enough in its own little meandering loopy way but you can’t ignore the odd whiff of patchouli that makes the whole thing smell a bit like a Devandra offcut that fell off the dreamcatcher head dress and into a Korg.

Cliff Thorburn

Deastro
Moondagger
Ghostly International

4 Wow, this sounds like the kind of aspirational disco-pop that they’d play in an elevator in Argos to try and stop you from killing yourself when you realized that for some reason you were in an Argos so big that it had elevators.

Bushkin

James Blackshaw
The Glass Bead Game
Young God Records

10 Wowsers, who’d a thunk an ex member of The Lights Alive would end up putting a record out on Micheal Gira’s label? Blackshaw remains one of this countries best kept secrets but you can forget all the Takoma/Tompkins Square and “tnext John Fahey” pigeon-holing that tend to follow him around. This set sees him casually bolster his acoustic roots with orchestrated, strings, piano and voice with consummate ease. Is there anything he can’t do?

Jam 69

Vice Feature: Suiting Up & Crusting Out

2009-10-13T10:50:00.001-07:00

Here is a diary that I kept for a week that I spent living as a crusty punk for Vice v7n6.

MONDAY:

I’d arranged to stay with some friends who squat a huge abandoned house off the Walworth Road in South London as no true anarchist would stay in a flat where you pay for things like warm water, electricity and council tax to get your rubbish actually taken away.

I managed to successfully steal the bleach that would be required to turn my planned mohawk green from Boots on my way south to the squat but I did spend £2.50 of my only three remaining pounds on some ‘Forest Green’ dye at an Afro-Caribbean hair salon around the corner from the squat where the lady just seemed too nice to thief from.

My friend Karley had decided that she was in charge of Gok Wan-ing me from overweight and underachieving average guy to lean, mean anarcho machine. The only implement for shearing my hair into a mohawk that we could find was a pair of blunt stationary scissors, which did a suitably DIY job of cropping my mop. Health and safety is not a punks main concern so the bleach was applied directly to the remaining tuft of hair with a mangy goalkeepers glove to protect Karley’s hands. While the bleach settled in I learnt a new skill: sewing. No self-respecting crusty guy leaves home without a Los Crudos patch and I made a pretty ok attempt at affixing some patches to an old denim jacket I’d cut the sleeves from.

Washing off the bleach in the freezing shower was a pretty uncomfortable experience but I tried to keep up the give-a-shit pretence right up until the dye was sploged all over my bonce and I realized that my forehead was rapidly turning green. Luckily it didn’t stick to my skin as well as it stuck to my hair and after donning a pair of cherry red Doc Martens I’d borrowed I felt I’d just about pass hanging around outside an Amebix show drinking White Lightning before falling asleep in my own urine having passed out from hurtling abuse at ‘the man’.

TUESDAY:

Night one in the squat involved surprisingly little debauchery. They even had a TV and watched the News At Ten. Aside from sleeping on the floor and waking up feeling like I’d never be able to walk again it had in fact been a bit of a let down. No all night weed smoking or intense, heated political discussion or even a minor police siege to speak of.

To amend matters I decided to pack up my sleeping bag and worldly possessions and have a drink at The Foundry; a bar, art space and slop house for Spanish cycle couriers with tribal tattoo’s and single dreadlocks. Surely I’d find like-minded souls here? Turns out not. Although I did find an organic ale called ‘Eco Warrior’ that I managed to persuade someone to buy me a bottle of. It tasted of mud and parsnips.

After ‘borrowing’ some cans of K cider from a newsagent I walked across Hackney Downs and went to borrow my friend’s dog Busy who was overly-pleased to have someone with astro-turf for hair to play with and savaged my mobile bed in excitement. Not believing in leads I lassoed Busy with a makeshift belt and headed out wandering. It was pretty fun having people crossing the street with looks of total panic on their faces but the police car trailing me all the way back across the river to South London was not so enjoyable. Turns out Mohawk plus pitbull equals a pretty real deal punk look.

WEDNESDAY:

Having now been overturning the system by refusing to engage with it for over 48 hours I felt it was time for a celebration. My squat buddies told me that they would be into partying so I went down to their local off license and discovered how punks can afford to get drunk: three liters of White Ace cost only £3. In a flush of excitement I spent £9 of my new friends money on 9 liters of the stuff and retired to the squat.

Coupled with the occasional bump of ketamine I can now confirm that drinking several liters of White Ace leads to an almost lysergic experience. Particularly when you realize that you haven’t eaten for over two days due to having spent your only money in the world turning your hair green and rotting your guts with cider that most street sleepers turn their noses up at.

Fuzzy headed I collapsed in a corner and woke up intermittently to throw up into a shopping bag that I later realized was riddled with holes and had been leaking vomit all over my t-shirt. When I finally awoke feeling like someone had crushed my head repeatedly with a captive bolt my t-shirt for the week was saturated with a heady White Ace/bile combination and I had unexplained cuts all over my forehead. Much more like it.

THURSDAY:

While I had decided that washing was off limits for the week whether I became puke saturated or not I realized that I was going to have to eat sooner or later. Having slept for most of the day to avoid hunger and kill time my new squat buddies Lauren and Kerri told me that there were some bins behind the Marks & Spencer’s in Elephant & Castle that were a goldmine for just-out-of-date food

By this point I was completely broke and would happily have eaten left over Fillet O Fish off of McDonalds tables but some Marks & Spencer’s ready meals? That sounded like heaven in a little vacuum-sealed parcels of goodness.

We had to wait until midnight when most of the staff would be gone before setting off. Kerri was pretty optimistic after previous raids had yielded untold gourmet wonders and bought along one of those shopping trolleys that your great aunt Edna might use. All of this positivity had me salivating but all high hopes were dashed as we rounded the back of M&S to find a huge security fence had been erected.

Dampened but not dispirited we pulled the fence apart for Kerri to slip inside. After a thorough root around in the huge dumpsters our worst fears were realized: we had been beaten to the punch by fellow freegans. All that was left were some chocolate éclairs. My stomach was basically eating itself by this point so I ate four and each slightly sweaty, turd shaped dough popsicle tasted better than the last.

FRIDAY:

After a week of cider and sleeping on floors I decided it was time to get back to nature a little. I’d heard that west-coast powerviolence veterans Capitalist Casualties were playing at crust hangout The Grosvenor in Sockwell so decided to spend some time in the park round the corner from the venue before catching the show to commune with the trees and stuff.

Having sat for a while on a swing I felt decidedly uncomfortable and decided a couple of cans of Special Brew would make everything a little better. As I sank my second I realized that maybe in the same way Rastafarianism legitimizes huge consumption of weed maybe being a crusty punk is just a big excuse to be a functioning alcoholic.

A few pints of artfully appropriated Guinness later and I wasn’t so bothered. My new punk brethren seemed to accept me with open arms and when it was announced that Capitalist Casualties had missed their plane there was a real sense of community and beery commiseration all round.

I might not have slept too well, eaten virtually nothing and drank my bodyweight in cider but at least my new, slightly smelly buddies made for better company than the odious suited hordes that come spilling out of All Bar One every night.

Vice Interview: Sleep

2009-10-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

Possibly one of the highlights of my life period. Interviewing the reunited for 48 hours only Sleep lineup of Matt Pike, Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius backstage after their second show at the May 2009 ATP vs The Fans Festival with Rayner.

PROCEEDS THE WEEDIAN, NAZARETH! (BEFORE STOPPING AGAIN FOREVER)

After Fifteen Years Sleep Come Out Slugging For 48 Hours Only

A little while back I remember sitting idly talking about dream reformations with a friend on iChat after it had been announced that some nah-man-it’ll-never-happen-I-hate-that-motherfuckers-fucking-guts-I-can’t-stand-to-be-in-the-same-room-as-him band or other reformed. I can’t even remember who. In a world where every band is happy to jump through a blazing hoop and onto a festival stage for a buck or 70,000 it’s hard to keep count. Just you watch, the Stone Roses, The Smiths and for all I know the fucking Beatles will have reformed to play Glastopollooza ’09 bought to you by HMV and Carling before I’ve finished typing this sentence. But, back to that iChat conversation. My friend and I decided that the reformation to blow every other reformation out of the water, hook line and sinker would be Sleep.

No dead members, no missing presumed dead members, no members who had started playing avant-jazz clash nose flute spirituals. Nope. All three members of the band who had cut Jeruslam/Dopesmoker and Sleep’s Holy Mountain (arguably the definitive stoner rock articles) were all alive, well and playing brilliant music that took the constituent elements of Sleep and drove them as far down their divergent paths to logical end points as possible. Juts imagine them together playing those songs again…

But it was always too much to ask. At that point the split that had driven guitarist Matt Pike to High On Fire and the rhythm section of bassist Al Cisneros and drummer and Chris Hakius to Om hade taken place years previous and to compound this it had more recently been announced that Hakius had walked away from Om. With the bands founding trinity cast asunder it seemed unimaginable that a few short months later all three would step on stage together and play the most devastatingly perfect pair of shows I will probably ever see at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the UK on the 9th and 10th of May.

Somehow we made it back stage to ask them: whowhatwherewhenwhatthefuck?

Vice: How did it feel playing those songs after almost a decade and a half?
Matt Pike (guitar): It was really emotional, and really got out a bunch of stuff. It’s been a really long time since we’ve done that together. It was good and I think that was the experience for all three of us and probably our fans and anyone who heard it tonight too. But whatever, it was pretty deep for me anyway.

Did you play the songs informed by what you’ve all been doing since or just go back and play them as they were when you left them?
Al Cisneros (bass): When I had my first rehearsal with these guys after such a long time, I wanted to do things in the old Sleep songs that I would do now if we wrote them, but they didn’t belong there. So I just went back to the complete mindset of 1992, and really spent time going into that space.
Chris Hakius (drums): The body has a may of remembering what it has done before. The muscles and memory cells remember the methods.
Al: And everything else just happened

In terms of equipment did you go back to what you were using then?
Matt: I was suing the nine string guitar I use in High On Fire but we had the Orange Matamp out there tonight so compared to High On Fire you are talking apples and oranges.
Al: And Toni Iommi’s key which really made a difference tonight but it was actually, pretty close.

You’ve said this is it but is it something that you would possibly do again?
Matt: Whatever the Universe tells us to do we will listen.
Al: We had talked about it in August at my wedding, when all three of us were together for the first time in a long time and we decided that all three of us were interested and once we’d decided to do it a call came through the next week so it was suddenly like “wow, we’re doing this”. The whole thing has been blessed from the start.
Chris: It felt like the time was right and as he says the universe spoke to us so we listened.

Vice v7n5 Record Reviews

2009-10-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

What with this being The Brazilian Issue and all we decided to get a real life Brazilian lady to review the CD’s for us. Meet Andrea Villas. She used to live in Rio but left to study bio-mechanical engineering in Italy before following Pete Doherty to London because she “really, really wanted to be a groupie”. But don’t hold that against her. These days she mainly likes Of Montreal and electro-house. Interesting combo. Let’s see what she makes of this months pop parade. Valeu!

Leona Naess
Thirteens
Kid Gloves

Vice: Apparently Leona used to be Ryan Adams’ girlfriend.
Andrea Villas: Oh really, I like his music. She sounds very new age though. Very zen. Not like Ryan Adams. I don’t like it.
Why not?
Lot’s of people have a voice like this. It is just boring. I think she is probably into Kabbalah. Enough.
OK, you’re the boss.

Sizzla
Ghetto-Youth-Ology
Greensleeves

If you met Sizzla in the street what do you think you would talk about?
Weed? I like smoking. This is good weed smoking music. I like it.
If you and Sizzla had a competition to see who could roll the best joint who would win?
Him. In fact maybe I’d have a chance, he looks like he’d just smoke a pipe. And maybe he would be already stoned. So, maybe me.
Is reggae popular in Brazil?
Yes, but the people who listen to it don’t have dreadlocks. People in Brazil are very clean. They would just think that if you had dreadlocks you were dirty.

Sonic Youth
The Eternal
Matador

Next up: Sonic Youth!
I love Sonic Youth!
Don’t you think they’re a little old to still be jamming out like they’re 16 these days?
I have never seen a photo of them.
You love then but you have no idea what they look like?
It is not important. I love that song of theirs “Superstar”.
This record has a song on it called “Anti Orgasm”. Do you think it will be as good as “Superstar”
I get obsessed by certain bands and this sounds amazing so maybe I will become obsessed by Sonic Youth again. I love it.

Church Of Misery
Houses Of The Unholy
Rise Above

Are you a big fan of Japanese doom-metal?
Not really. Most metal in Brazil just sounds like Sepultura and I never liked them. Did you know that Igor the drummer from Sepultura runs a very big clothing label in Brazil?
You learn a new thing everyday.
This just sounds like traffic to me. Traffic in a very busy city. Maybe New York. The guys in this band look like they are trying to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney all at once too. I don’t like it.

Sexbeat Vol 2
Self-released

This one is a compilation of a bunch of lo-fi bands with names like Haunted Fucking and Winter Drones.
I like it very much. It is very psychedelic.
Psychedelic? Would you like to listen to this on mushrooms? It would bum me out I think.
I remember the first time I did mushrooms and listened to music. I thought that the woman who was singing was just screaming and she was singing just about Satanism and I felt like I was in the film Star Wars. It was by the Thames and it was scary. This music is nice though. It would be a good vibe.

British Sea Power
Man Of Aran
Rough Trade

This is definitely creepy.
Yes this is scary, in a good way though. It sounds like a soundtrack.
Good spot, it is indeed a soundtrack that British Sea Power did for the classic 1934 film Man Of Aran. This band are very keen bird watchers.
Really? I like parakeets. Not parrots though. My uncle had one and it just imitated the neighbour who shouted at his dog. So with the nieghbour shouting about his dog and the parrot shouting about the nieghbour shouting about his dog it was very loud.

Mika Miko
We Be Xuxa
Post Present Medium

Why does it say We Be Xuxa?
I don’t know why.
Xuxa was a children’s TV presenter. She was huge in Brazil. Everyone knows her.
Like Michela Strachan?
I don’t know her. She was as big as Cheryl Cole. An icon. Everyone loved her. She had an affair with Pele and that just made her more popular.
Do you think this album is about her?
I don’t think so. I like this though, it is like punk rock music. They sound very angry.

Greg Kowalsky
Tape Chants
Kranky

This guy makes all of his stuff by looping cassette tapes and changing the amplitude to make a wall of sound.
This is it?
For about half an hour per track yes.
Hmm, I could get into I think. I might jog to it.
Jog to it? It is just a half hour of tape looped drone!
Maybe do the cooking or cleaning then. I like it. It is like the beginning bit of Pink Floyd, Live at Pompeii. But going on forever.

Kissy Sell Out
Youth
Marakesh Records

I don’t think I can get past this guys haircut.
Oh, I have seen him lots of times. I like this very much. Two thumbs up.
Would you go on a date with Mr Sell Out?
Yes. I think he is handsome.
Wow. Where would you go?
To The Dorchester. And I would have a brie and proscuito sandwich. That is my favourite.

Shitmat
One Foot In The Rave
Planet Mu

How would you dance to this?
This is proper rave music. I can imagine listening to this on a beach in Goa.
Do you think this would go down well in Brazil?
Maybe at a bailie funk yes. They are kind of set in their music there though. If you could get it on the soundsystem then they would probably dance to it all night all night, you’d just need to get this on there.
How do they all dance all night?
Do you mean drugs? You’d be surprised there is not that much cocaine or ecstasy there. There is more in London. Just lots of weed and Cachaca.

Kap Bambino
Blacklist
Because

This one makes me ears hurt a bit.
I love it. I love electronic music like this. I have a special dance for music like this.
How does it go?
It is a bit like a robot dance but at the end I swing my hair around. I did it to my boss’s daughter the other day and now she always asks my boss if auntie Andrea can come around and do the funny dance.
Do you think that Kap would be into your dance?
Yes.

Graffiti Island
The Graffiti Island 7”
House Anxiety

This guy has a funny voice huh?
Yes, I like it though. It is interesting. I think this one is psychedelic too.
Really? I guess the lyrics are pretty weird.
It sounds very dusty.
Dusty?
Like, not very clear sounding.
I think that’s on purpose. They call it lo-fi.

Lee Harris Meets River Styx
Angel Headed Hip Hop
Arkadia

I think Lee Harris is a big deal on the UK counter-culture scene. Which means that unless you subscribe to High Times you may well not have heard of him.
I have not heard of him. I like this though it is very relaxing.
I can almost smell the patchouli oil and dream catchers.
Is he the old guy or the rapper.
I think Lee Harris is the old, sage–like Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout voice and River Styx is the rapper. I don’t think that River Styx is his real name.

Ebony Bones
Bone Of My Bones
Sunday Best

The first track is called “W.A.R.R.I.O.R.”, who’s your favourite warrior of all time? Excluding Mel Gibson in Braveheart because that is the default answer to this question.
That is really weird I was going to say Braveheart and I don’t even really like him.
I don’t know why but everyone say that.
Can I choose Obelix?
He isn’t real but I guess he is better than Mel Gibson pretending to be Scottish.

Stuart Murdoch
God Help The Girl
Rough Trade

Talking about Scots have you listened to much Belle & Sebastian?
Of course, this sounds quite like them but with a girl singing.
I think the idea was that Murdoch wanted to write the music and just have a load of different girls sing the tracks. Maybe he was after an advanced speed dating program like that movie Audition. But without the grizzly ending.
I have not seen that film. I quite like this but I prefer the full band I think. Next!

Man Like Me
s/t
Our Time Records

I love it!
Wow, that much?
Yes, it is really fun. I think I have heard this before actually.
I think “Oh My Gosh” has been around a while yep. It sure seems to have you dancing.
Yes it is one of my favourites so far. Two thumbs up. I think he would be what you call a ‘cheeky chappy’.
That description is probably used in every review of this guy ever and even when we get a Brazilian in he still gets lumped with it! Sorry Johnny.

Akron/Family
Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
Crammed Discs

I always thought Akron/Family was a folk band but this sounds really clunky and all over the place.
It is good though, it sounds like a peacock pecking at the ground.
Do you think it sounds like any other bands as opposed to animals?
Maybe this is the first one that sounds like Of Montreal? Or maybe Animal Collective? 9.5 out of 10!

Lindstrom & Prins Thomas
II
Eskimo

This record actually has 99 tracks on it but they are all about 10 seconds long and it is split into 8 parts.
This is like that tape music we heard before. I would like to listen to this when I was cleaning. I have a lot of people staying at my house right now, a lot of family and it is very stressful but I could put this on and relax.
How do you decide who gets a bed when you have lots of family round?
It is my flat so I get a bed and my mum is a mother so she has priority too, after that it is chaos.

Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
Warp

Where do you think these guys are from?
Perhaps from Serbia?
What makes you think that?
The instruments, they sound quite eastern.
Do you think that they sound anything like a grizzly bear?
No, but I love bears. They are great. I don’t like turtles though, have you seen them having sex? Watch it on YouTube, it’s disgusting.

Double Dagger
More
Thrill Jockey

This sounds a little like what the soundtrack would be to a death scene in Twin Peaks. How would you like to die?
I think I will get knocked over by a car because I am always walking across the street listening to music and almost getting hit.
But is that how you would like to go?
No, just how I probably will. Erm, maybe the lethal injection would be OK? Or in space. Yes in space, if you were there you would be there for a good reason.

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds
Dracula Boots
In The Red

As well as having the best name of all time this guy has played in The Gun Club, The Cramps and The Bad Seeds, pretty good going.
I really like this one. It’s one of the best so far. More thumbs up. It sounds really old but in a good way.
This track is called “I Found A Peanut”. Where is the best place you have ever found a peanut?
I don’t eat many peanuts but I eat cashew nuts. I found a cashew nut in my hair once after it had been stuck in my hairbrush.

The Heads/White Hills
Collisions Vol 1
Rocket Records

This album just has two tracks. One from each band.
It sounds like Led Zeppelin but slower. I think it would be good music for a vampire film.
Have you ever seen a vampire?
No. But once my next-door neighbour had a party because her son got married and I looked down in the street where they were all having the party and they all looked like vampires. They all had white skin and red mouths.
Maybe they just like staying indoors and eating lots of raspberries?
No they looked really weird. I have a photo, I will show you.

Wooden Sjips
Dos
Holy Mountain

This band are called Wooden Ships except they spell it Wooden Sjips. Do you fine English spelling strange?
Yes it is fairly difficult but I mainly just have to speak it. I had to learn English and Italian and Portuguese as well in Brazil.
Why Italian?
I lived there and was studying and that was when I ran away to follow Pete Doherty.
What was it about Pete that made you run away from your studies?
I just loved the idea of being a groupie and I loved the music and it seemed like more fun than studying bio-mechanics.
Have you seen him lately?
No, I am going to see him with my mum in a few days, the showdown!
Yikes!

Isis
Wavering Radiant
Conspiracy

This one sounds like Sepultura too. His voice is very low. Like he has a sore throat.
When would you listen to this?
I don’t know. Maybe if I was really angry. Or trying to annoy someone.
Isis was an Egyptian deity, have you ever been to Egypt?
No but I would like to. The Nile and the pyramids. It is not at the top of the list but it would be nice. Not like this band, they do not sound nice. I do not like it at all.

Au Revoir Simone
Still Night, Still Light
Moshi Moshi

Can you speak French as well?
Not really, I like French cheese though, especially Brie.
It’s OK, they don’t actually sing in French. They just have a silly name.
I might listen to this on my day off. I hate waking up, it is like being born, or ripped from the womb. On my day off I do not get up until midday. I could get up and listen to this. It would make me happy. I bet the girls aren’t as saintly as they sound though.
Why not? Their voices are super angelic,
You know nothing about girls. It is always the girls who look like goodie goodies who are total sluts.
So you think Au Revoir Simone are sluts?
Yes,

Hey! Tonal
“Hey! Tonal”
Africantape

I love the artwork!
It looks like it might give you an epileptic fit if you weren’t careful.
I like it. It is crazy!
This song is called “If Flash Gordon Was A Sk8r”. Who is your favourite superhero?
I don’t know. I don’t know too many superheroes. Maybe the singer in this band. I really, really like it.

Willie Isz
Georgiavania
Lex

How do you feel about hip-hop?
I know nothing about hip hop but this doesn’t sound much like hip-hop to me. It just sounds a bit depressing.
So you don’t like it?
No, I can’t stand depressing music. I liked Interpol and Radiohead but if I listen to anything like that for too long it makes me really down and I have to stop.
I wonder if Willie ISZ would be into being compared to Radiohead and Interpol?

Savath & Savalas
La Llama
Stones Throw

I thought this was going to be a hip-hop recod but it appears not.
I hope this has no female choruses.
What, like a Lauryn Hill bit?
Yes! I hate Lauren Hill. Why does everyone like her? She annoys me so much that I can’t talk about it. It is the kind of music guys would play when they are trying to sleep with you. It makes me run for the door or out of the window.
You have run out of a window?
Yes, it is easy, you just have to pretend you are going to the loo or going to the off license and then you just leave.

Vice v7n5 Literary Reviews

2009-10-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

THE PLEASURE AND SORROWS OF WORK
Alain De Boton
Penguin

I am not going to sit here and lie to you. I have not read this. Nor will I ever read it. You want to know why? OK, here’s why: I dislike the guy. Dislike is in fact perhaps, far too light a word for my feelings towards Alain de Boton. It would be easy to take pot shots. His first name is kind of an airy fairy version of a good solid name that works well for you average sheet metalworker and his surname sounds like, well, you get the idea. Plus he’s bald and baldies are always funny right? Wrong. All of those things are obviously not funny in any way to anyone beyond the age of 11. If you were agreeing with me a sentence ago I don’t like you either. Nope, it’s not his name or his appearance. Both of those things I’m actually a little envious of. And therein lies my dislike for the guy. He inherits millions from his dad which he never touches, he has a sparkling academic career, shits books every couple of years like it aint no thing and has a nice family, pretty cool looking house and, oh yeah, he can distil complex concepts about the very meaning of life, the universe and everything into easy to swallow lumps that would even make my alzheimers ridden granddad stop and go: “hmm, this guys onto summat”. Yep, I admit it. I want to be Alain de Boton. And for that I hate myself. And thanks to being the cause of this self loathing de Boton is not getting a minute more of my reading time.

penguin.co.uk

ON’T ROAD 11
Self-released

I have this friend called Tom Lamb and every time I went round to his house as a kid and go get some milk or whatever from the fridge I’d giggle like a little girl at this postcard that seemed to be stuck on there forever. It was just a photo of a sign somewhere in the countryside that said: “Beware. Lamb’s On’t Road”. Since then, every time I’ve drive around Yorkshire I’ve kept my eyes peeled for a similar sign. I’ve never found one. And then I turn up to work one day and this is staring at me. I don’t even know where it came from. If you gave it to me can you let me know? Just email: james@viceuk.com OK, so it may be missing the whole Lamb bit but it is full of stuff about two of my favourite things: punk rock music and traveling. If you like either of those things this comes highly recommended, even if only for the spot on Wanky’s review.

Ska1ska@yahoo.com

UNLOVEABLE
Esther Pearl Watson
Fantagraphics Books

Hopefully you remember Esther Pearl Watson as the co-author of Watcha Mean, What’s A Zine? If not, then all you need to know is that she is an artist, writer and illustrator from Fort Worth who allegedly moved around a lot as a kid because her dad had a habit of making giant UFO sculptures out of salvaged car parts which pissed the neighbours off. And everything she does is amazing to the power of a googleplex. All the moving around must have had a great effect on Esther because she really does make some of the best comics out there. This one is wholly based around the diary of a girl called Tammy Pierce who was a high school student in 1988 and for some reason left her diary in petrol station bathroom. Esther found the diary and drew it’s contents. Unloveable goes from split-your-sides funny to just-a-bit-of-dust-in-my-eye sad in a hairs breath. I wonder if Tammy and Esther have met since?

fantagraphics.com

SQUINX! 1
Self-released

This little sheaf of stapled fun is bought to you by the never less than constantly debauched Squallyoaks gang. You may know them from such other interesting outlets as everyone’s favourite disco for girls who like other girls: Girlcore, or being readily available as human installations for various Mathew Stone related thingies or for bands like Cupucabara or even just for living in a big squat in South London that is almost certainly a health and safety hazard to the whole surrounding area. All things considered it is a miracle this thing ever made it into being. That it is a great read in places and limited to the fairly bizarre figure of 276 makes it all the more so.

squinxzine@gmail.com

THE UNHOLY HAND 2
Self-released

When the first one came out I was blowing around all manner “best ‘zine in the UK” maxims but guess what? This one might just be a notch up from the debut. Sure, it took Nathan a while to get it together but how are you going to argue with a handmade, hardbound cover, interviews with Pulling Teeth, the excellent (and overlooked) Mentally Challenged and Mike fucking Williams from Eyehategod as well as a short story about pigeons, an introduction to savant metal, an essay on the image of the goat in black magic, a bit on Blood On Satan’s Claws and a heap of tastefully twisted illustrations? I’m not sure that you can. Go. Buy. Now.

myspace.com/theunholyhandfanzine

COLUMBINE
David Cullen
Old Street Publishing

Remember? The thing Micheal Moore got all riled up about? “Marilyn Manson did it!” All that kind of stuff. Believe it or not it has somehow been a whole ten years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their high school killed twelve of their fellow pupils, hurt twenty three more and then turned the tools on themselves. If you really want to feel like you know every agonizing detail of the personal trauma that led to the spree then here it is in under 500 pages. The detail will give you goose bumbs and at points you might want to look away but I defy anyone to not gorge on this in a single sitting. Makes Moore look like he was preaching to 4 year olds.

oldstreetpublishing.co.uk