I managed to keep the January blues at bay this year until I got my tax bill, which forced me to look at the shelves and start thinking about which copper-bottomed box set might have to go. Discogs is now an exercise in window shopping. In terms of new releases I shelled out for very little, and even resisted picking anything up in the juicily stocked bins at the new World Of Echo when I popped my head in – OG Dead C, a Fahey I needed, the Terry Reed mentioned below. These limitations did not extend to the Throbbing Gristle Berlin box set, (there are a few copies left on Bandcamp, but it’s sold out direct from Mute), and which was worth every penny I don’t have. The sound is huge and clean and heavy; some of Genesis’ vocals have a profound disquiet in their guttural delivery, and the impossible tension lashes the group together with a fizzing, demonic intensity.
I saw an amazing show by Koshiro Hino and Will Guthrie, where they succeeded at doing one of the toughest things: to bring electronic and acoustic percussions together. It synced in this wonderfully wavy way, with Hino riding the rhythms from Guthrie, who seemed to be driving into jazz modes as a way to transcend the grid. I also saw Träd, Gräs Och Stenar for the fourth time in my life. They were one of the first groups I saw where, when I was just a teenager, I discovered that with certain music, you could actually talk to the band at the merch stand.
I pulled books from shelves I hadn’t got round to reading instead of buying new ones. I read the republished In Thrall by Jane DeLynn and am looking for someone to talk to about its teenage protagonist (is her agency compromised or does it remain intact?). A good book but a bad choice for a sad month was Kōbō Abe’s The Woman In The Dunes, a stressful story that chafes (and not just because of all the sand). I also found a hardback copy of Neuromancer and may reread it, which I’m convinced has some of the most heinous and/or odd covers of any book, ever. I chose not to read much news; have dropped Twitter; stopped listening to any current affairs podcasts. Sometimes it is necessary to step out of the slipstream and regroup, to wait until the sky is no longer low and jaundiced with dirty rain clouds; when the wind no longer bites at your cheeks; when the first bulbs begin to show and the memory of a hefty tax bill has faded, with the influx of a few month’s wages.
Tori KudoStudio Village Hototoguiss 2007-2022Bruit Direct Disques
I have rarely listened to anything as much as I have listened to this Tori Kudo (except for a six month period when the only CD in the car was Iggy Pop’s The Idiot). If you followed Kudo on his now defunct Soundcloud account (I didn’t) you might remember some of this material, which is where it originated. It was also released on some limited cassettes I also missed, so this was all new to me.
Lashed-together-sentimental-songs Tori Kudo is my favourite Tori Kudo, and they’re here in numbers across two LPs’ worth of material, along with other miniatures. Some of them – ‘Lickin Up The Dust’ in particular – have stolen my heart as January earworms. Revealing the final track feels like I ought to issue a spoiler alert, it is such an absolutely ideal outro, closing with a sweet, short cover of the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh (if you’re wondering if you know this, it’s the classical motif in Zardoz).
Liam GrantProdigal SonVHF
Opening with a raw rolling blues number called ‘Palmyra’, this Liam Grant album on long running label VHF is my second favourite record of the month, and the first thing I’ve really dug in on by this relatively young guitarist. Everybody seems to mention his age in write ups and features (he’s in his mid-20s), perhaps because the ground he’s treading has more often been the fancy of older souls. His trajectory is through an obsession with the Joe Bussard/ Fahey/ 78rpm country and bluegrass zone, later filtered and infused with the broad influences of DIY and underground culture. Recording is rough and often distorted or in the red, and this grit sits well. On ‘Salmon Tails Up The River’ his fingers are fluid and glittering over the strings, ‘Insult To Injury’ drops into a gentle lyricism; ‘A Moment At The Door’ is sparse and pensive and ‘Old Country Rock’, is of a moonshine-on-the-old-back-porch vintage.
Nina GarciaBye Bye BirdIdeologic Organ
More guitars now, on a record I’m predicting will get picked up quite widely (it’s on Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label, with an approving write up from Thurston Moore in the notes). I’d never heard of Parisian guitarist Nina Garcia before, perhaps because it’s the first under her own name (previously she performed as Mariachi and has a couple of cassettes under that moniker). An old bio on Discogs translates to “Guitar, pedals: that’s it”. Lots of these pieces have the immediacy of sketches – she mulls on a particular sound and what might come from its repetition. Some tracks become insistent and relentless, others have a pace that stops time, even when the sounds are harsh or swarming. The quiet breaths of ‘Ballade Des Souffles’ is an exception. There’s a simplicity to the processes and patterns, with timbres that feel more affiliated with sheet metals than strings, as if the root input was not a guitar but Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures. She’s touring this album pretty extensively across the UK and Europe from now-ish through to the end of April.
Oksana LindeTravesíasBuh
I’ve recently been listening to a lot of old private press loner synth stuff from that brief period when synths became affordable and portable enough to have in your spare room and people ran off their own cassettes from home – people like George Garside and Rick Crane (hat tip on this to Nate Young’s Baker’s Dozen). This is the second release on Buh for Venezuelan composer Oksana Linde and it fits right in that mould. Her previous release didn’t stick with me, and right now I’m not sure why – I wonder if I found it a touch light in a new age-y way – but this one has landed with me solidly and is on repeat. It has that same sense of world-building-for-one that I find in Garside and Crane, where the music feels less about the spiritual introspection or functional music that drives DIY new age synth work, and instead conjures imaginative spaces: science fiction narratives or cosmic dramas, unfolding in questing synthetic choruses.
Judith HamannAuneShelter Press
Hamann has studied with and performed work by Charles Curtis and Éliane Radigue (they have their own OCCAM – River XXIV work for alto flute and cello from 2019), along with a clutch of other composers. This, the latest in a handful of solo releases, is named and framed around an aune – a measurement of cloth which is not only about length or weight, and which differs from place to place. It is, apparently, known as an ell in the UK, for any fabric heads out there. This measurement frames the record, as a way of describing the sense which governs structure and significance within the compositions – I take it perhaps as an attempt to weigh a song and its contents, when there is no objective gold standard by which to do so. This is subtle work, its slow folds constructed from cello, voice, and location recordings – elements that are regularly combined elsewhere, but here serve to loosen the division of the senses: a way of looking and a way of listening. Probably because of the title, I kept thinking of fabric and light – an image of a woman in a fabric shop pulling lengths of ivory cotton from a roll; of casting a clean sheet over a bed in morning light; of gauzy curtains and an open window.
Terry ReedOn Way To AlphaSiltbreeze
Speaking of the spaceways… I dropped onto the Siltbreeze site to pick up a Jim Shepard they’ve recently reissued and ended up On Way To Alpha, courtesy of this Terry Reed mini LP. Its title track is an undeniable tune and a half, and I especially love the Robert Plant vocal leaps. It took me a while to move past it, I just kept hitting rewind, but then realised the second track ‘Into The Dream Block’, and third ‘The Year ’83’ could be jammed together into a single extended piece with breakdown and resolution, and in fact they are all On Way To Alpha. It’s only the oddly furious minute-long outro ‘Angry Eyes’ that feels out of step. Nobody seems to know much about Reed except that he recorded this and released it on 7″ around 1975. It feels like something that could have been discovered lurking in a Paul Major Sound Effects catalogue, or in Patrick Lundborg’s Acid Archives. I checked the latter, and found no sign of it.
AOB
AOB is a late pickup of an album by Ignatz & Marcia Bassett, called Dream Of Autumn Electrified Blues I & II.
One of my first writing gigs was for a long-defunct Manchester blog, covering vaguely experimental, mostly electronica releases, which is the first place I think I ever came across Ignatz, aka Belgian musician Bram Devens. This felt like a welcome blast from the past, from a specific period in underground music, pre-Discogs, when I was always trying to escape indie sleaze quicksand and had zero contacts to ask about who would sell me DIY CD-Rs. At that time I received a comp which I grew to love dearly, because it signalled a way towards the CD-Rs I dearly desired, collecting Ignatz’s cassette work. Cut to the chase, this all means I was glad to receive this collaboration from Ignatz and Marcia Bassett, and was surprised to learn it was the first time these two stalwarts have played together. Pitching itself as a psychedelic blues soundscape, it’s gauzy and foggy, with shifting mists of mussed feedback and liberally applied delay. ‘Part Two’ is the one, its pitches wibbling and bending like light refracted through a prism.
