weird brother

Hesperia - Magdalena Solis [2011]

2012-03-06T10:50:00.000+07:00

Realms kosmiche and ritualistic. Cinematic a la Jodorowsky et Beausoleil. From Belgium.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Individuellos - La Dusseldorf [1980]

2012-03-04T19:52:00.000+07:00

Wherein Dinger's faithful clang cleaves to punky Neu! agenda. Less Rother's silver Mercedes, more beat up VW camper rolling ramshackle Europa.

01 Menschen 1
02 Individuellos
03 Menschen 2
04 Sentimental
05 Lieber Honig 1981
06 Dampfriemen
07 Tintarella Di ...
08 Flashbac
09 Das Yvönnchen

Herrlich. Dinger war ein ganz großer Musiker.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Sterntaler - Michael Rother [1978]

2012-03-01T09:18:00.000+07:00

Assisted by Neu! and Harmonia producer Conny Plank and Can's Jaki Liebezeit, Rother straps on precision engineered guitar, bass guitar, piano, synthesizer and electronic percussion and whooshes suavely horizonwards.

Der Rother-Club.

01 Sonnenrad

02 Blauer Regen

03 Stromlinien

04 Sterntaler

05 Fontana Di Luna

06 Orchestrion

Das Bonus 1993:

Lichter Von Kairo

Patagonia Horizont

Südseewellen

Oddi wrth y brawd

The Constant Pageant - The Trembling Bells [2011]

2012-02-28T17:45:00.000+07:00

And proof, if any were needed,....

Oddi wrth y brawd

No Roses - Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band [1971]

2012-02-26T10:11:00.000+07:00

Pinnacle of UK folk rock achievement. No contest. Essential.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Six Musicians Getting Unknown - Father Murphy [2005]

2012-02-25T09:16:00.000+07:00

Italian bizarro psychedelic/art-rock trio's 1st. Rooted n twisted psych melange channeling Os Mutantes, Barrett and compatriot pop psychonauts Jennifer Gentle.

Oddi wrth y brawd

The Wishing Chair - 10,000 Maniacs [1985]

2012-02-24T12:22:00.000+07:00

That rarest of beasts: well-turned out folk rock noise from the 80s. Heady UK influence in J. Marr guitar jangle and trad. song choice. 'Triffic.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Blood Between Her Lakes - Burial Hex [2008]

2012-02-22T07:57:00.000+07:00

Not unlike a troop of ardent wiccans let loose in a disused scaffolding warehouse....

or as of whom M'Lud Yatesbury would have it in this month's patented enthusiastic Address Druidion...

"work of high ritual first conjures up its own sonic pantheon, nurtures then enslaves them, then conducts them as they writhe. Stupendous. Brothers‘n’sisters, they’ll be including this fucker in the future future mysteries when the earth has returned to Goddess worship. Imagine that Wendy ‘Walter’ Carlos had composed some lost electronic soundtrack to THE WHICKER MAN [sic]. Massed vocals, analogue pulses, mucho percussion and mucho grumbling, so all of it mainly acoustically driven stuff. Indeed, should you shoehorn a baby grand into some Mediterranean rockcut tomb and perform this material therein, it’s a synch the natural echoes of those places would replicate these recordings...pulls off a low budget Carl Orff for the Igjugurjuk Generation, or I ain’t no Inuit Shaman! Mercy me"

Oddi wrth y brawd

Sticky Fingers Sessions - The Rolling Stones [1971?]

2012-02-19T21:40:00.000+07:00

Less weary than all-bum proper but mighty ramshackle roister doister all ye same. La decadanse and Chateau Villa Nellcôte beckoned. Oh yes.

Oddi wrth y brawd

The Singing Nun - Soeur Sourire [2008]

2012-02-18T15:29:00.001+07:00

No mere novel buffoonery. Jeanine Deckers aka Sister Luc-Gabrielle aka Soeur Sourire delivers fine homespun folk bent vaguely unsinister religious. Songs more sweet than our sister's 1985 suicide. Not much to smile about there.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Mizutani - Les Rallizes De Nudes [1970]

2012-02-17T20:23:00.000+07:00

Takashi Mizutani dials down wind tunnel squall and ups Velvets 3rd album laid back vibe. Sweet.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Patience (After Sebald) - The Caretaker [2012]

2012-02-16T21:03:00.000+07:00

Leyland Kirby's custodial nom de plume references Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, inspiration also for his early musical stock in trade: sampled, manipulated 78s a-crackle with sweet-desolate-stranded 1920s/1930s dance tunes. Archival meditations on appropriation, memory, and the accretion and disappearance of cultural objects, Kirby's tracks dangle, turn slowly like rods on a disintegrating mobile.

Soundtrack to a film about writer W.G. Sebald, in place of spectral jazz-age ballroom, Patience draws from Franz Schubert, crafting melody saturated and motif uncanny. Kirby's thaumaturgy mixes emotional states - memory, decay, loss, childhood and life ahead filled with possibility - like no other.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Balaklava - Pearls Before Swine [1968]

2012-02-15T17:35:00.000+07:00

Tom Rapp's translucent exercise in constructive melancholy.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air - The Incredible String Band [1971]

2012-02-14T20:17:00.000+07:00

These are the true troubadours of the last two centuries. They explore divinity and magick from a lyrical chivalric dimension. Combine this with the interdimensionality and you have works beyond compare. SUBLIME!

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

New York City, April 2004

And I shall dance for you,

The sweetest dance that I can do.

Likky

Final true entry in the canon. Worlds they rise and fall. Last thrilling, if poignant, outing for ham-fisted Heron sitar. Talking of painted chariots, Darling Belle and the end.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Planxty - Planxty [1973]

2012-02-13T07:22:00.000+07:00

Gay devils take warning. Planxty tempered steel pays right smart. Instantly now, and see what might betide...slainte.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Tetsuo: The Iron Man - Chu Ishikawa [1988]

2012-02-11T10:02:00.001+07:00

"Inside the flesh of an ordinary salaryman terrible things have begun to take place".

And then some.

Enervating industrial hammering and skittery hyperkinetic rhythms. A nerve shredding delight.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Merrinology / メリノロジー EP - Lion Merry / ライオンメリー [1983]

2012-02-10T07:26:00.000+07:00

Now, where were we? Incommensurably wonky popfolktronic cross-dressing fiddlage from Japan...that would be about right.

Oddi wrth y brawd

World Shut Your Mouth - Julian Cope [1984]

2012-02-09T04:19:00.000+07:00

Righteous posturing. Retrenchment. Burned, bummed elegant middle-finger salute to chiselling mf knobshiners everywhere.

Bah-ba-ba-ba-bah
Bah-ba-ba-ba-bah
Bah-ba-ba-ba-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah

Y brawd be back.

Wavering, not drowning

2012-02-08T07:53:00.000+07:00

WB followers and fellow travellers, what lovely folks you are....

2 years and 500+ posts have been lost...yup, burned down wholesale by MF - it's official - and these will not be re-upped....

Howevers, Y brawd dabbles with notion of carrying on, year zero stylee.

Any advice out there? Rapidshare's incessant nagging to upgrade....what else out there? filejumbo.com? hulkshare.com? Thoughts?

(Whatever, would advise all MF bloggers employ guerilla circumspection re. file visibility and folder naming conventions.)

Watch this space a little longer....

Oddi wrth

Y brawd

End of the road?

2012-02-07T10:10:00.000+07:00

Well folks. Appears Mediafire have reacted to MU take down by taking WB down. They've only gone and deleted all previous posts.

If this is the end of the party, thanks for coming.

Keep it weird.

Oddi wrth
Y brawd

Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass [1995]

2012-02-06T16:19:00.001+07:00

Glass signature - you knows the drill: rapid, repetitive patterns, underlying reductive “melody” - takes welcome back seat to poised ensemble folderol.

Oddi wrth y brawd
music wid repetitive structures

Strange Music - Moebius & Beerbohm [1982]

2012-02-04T21:01:00.001+07:00

Electro-industrial dubby malarkey with cheeky post-punk pop twist. Tasty.

Oddi wrth y brawd

883

Lucifer Rising OST - Bobby Beausoleil [1980]

2012-02-03T21:06:00.001+07:00

Serpentine back story:

Early 60s, Bobby grooving with psychedelic chamber group The Orkustra; creepy filmmaker Kenneth Anger is impressed, asks the young musician to play title role in upcoming potboiler Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil agrees, provided he scores the music; The Orkustra piss off, hello The Magick Powerhouse of Oz. Beausoleil and Anger fall out, latter de-camps around UK, while Beausoleil hooks up with charismatic fellow named Charles Manson; murder of double-crossing drug dealer and Beausoleil lifetime sojourn in maximum security ensue.

Meanwhile.....Anger commissions Jimmy Page to score partially shot Lucifer Rising. Page produces but a trickle; project goes nowhere. Back in California, Beausoleil forms prison band, sends demos to Anger who is impressed enough (again) to give Page his marching orders and re-commission Beausoleil to score Lucifer Rising. With the nod from obliging prison warden, Beausoleil builds scratch recording studio within prison walls and slowly over next few years records sound track with help from fellow inmate musicians dubbed The Freedom Orchestra.

Musick:

Disc the first

Sound track proper. As through a kosmische melange, darkly. Shadowy orchestral realm of electronic psych-rock exploration. Stygian Popol Vuh. Stew of DIY synth and homemade effect units recorded guerilla style. Inspiring. This needs to be heard.

Disc the second

Vintage Orkustra and Magick Powerhouse efforts plus early Freedom Orchestra demo. Intriguing.

Oddi wrth y brawd

morning star
son of dawn

Privilege - Ivor Cutler [1984]

2012-02-02T15:59:00.001+07:00

Oh, the mordant wit and sinister resonance of prime Mr. Cutler. (Produced by pioneering ambient egg-head David Toop). Y brawd hadn't realised IC was a good synagogue going boy...though it all makes sense...these pieces sweat with dark sonorous Jewish melodies. Humane, skew whiff, moving.

Oddi wrth y brawd

at last it moves silence

Fluxus Anthology - Various [2001]

2012-02-01T15:47:00.001+07:00

Fluxus is...

attitude; not movement or style.
intermedia: what happens when different media intersect; how found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts mix to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
simple: small scale, short texts, brief performances.
fun.

In other words, carte blanche for pissing about. Quite literally in La Ono's case. Y brawd invites you the listener to sort vacuous piffle from the really rather good. Let it flow.

01 Walter Marchetti: Per la sete dell'orecchio (1976)
02 Juan Hidalgo: Tamaran (1974)
03 La Monte Young: Dream house (1973)
04 Ben Vautier: Some ideas for Fluxus (1989)
05 Wolf Vostell: Elektronischer dé-coll/age. Happening Raum (1968)
06 Milan Knizak: Broken music composition (1979) 3:26
07 Robert Filliou: Imitating the sound of the birds (1979)
08 Alison Knowles: Natural assemblage. Le vrai courbeau (1984)
09 Emmett Williams: Duet (1968)
10 John Cage: Radio Music (1956)
11 Joseph Beuys: Sonne statt Reagan (1982)
12 Yoko Ono: Toilette Piece (1971)
13 Dick Higgins: B.B. finally dreams about life, B.B.'s you play it (1962)
14 Philip Corner: Car passing at night, country road in Maine (1988)
15 Eric Andersen: The untacti[c]s of music (1968)
16 Robert Watts: Interview (1963)
17 Nam June Paik: My jubilee ist unverhemmet (1977)
18 Ken Friedman: Orchestra requiem variations (1967)

Oddi wrth y brawd
flux us

Get Carter OST - Roy Budd [1971]

2012-01-30T04:56:00.002+07:00

We ends the month as we begins, with vintage unglamorous UK crime, and exchanging The Sweeney's scummy London for turn of 70s Newcastle. Blighted, reeking neglect, industrial detritus, rotting slums, slag heaps, hard men and brutalised women. The Swingin' 60s are not so much buried as erased from history. Cometh the hour, cometh Michael Caine at the top of his game as randy, revengeful anti-hero Jack Carter.

In game topping form too is Roy Budd. The music clinically frames both degraded environment and Caine's muted cool and sporadic extreme violence. Seedy drinking den r'n'b intermixed with main theme variations: spine-tingling harpsichord shards drenched in gloomy reverb and echo. Opening bass-driven funk riff over tablas percussion is bleakly sublime.

Essential.

Oddi wrth y brawd

piss holes in the snow

Discipline - King Crimson [1981]

2012-01-29T12:31:00.001+07:00

Belew enlivens Fripp prissiness with elephantosity. Regulated, tight and entirely on the money. Rock as methodological stricture from men with skills. Sweet.

Oddi wrth y brawd
brouhaha

Totem Two - Master Musicians of Bukkake [2010]

2012-01-27T22:47:00.002+07:00

Part the second: electro-ritualistic excursion into outer inner reaches. Psyched guitar, analogue synth chant n esoteric heavy requiem. Deluded west Anatolian coast death cult. Outer spaced gamelan, dusty plainsong o'er celestial deserts; spiced Krishna gathering meditations. Fremen sufi sect achieving enlightenment scrawling deranged nu age psychosis on crystal walled cave of the apocalypse.

Yes, that good.

Oddi wrth y brawd
apokatastasis

Melancholia - William Basinski [2003]

2012-01-26T21:40:00.001+07:00

14 short, er... melancholy tape-loops from early 80s. Akin to Satie's less jovial moments played by Boards of Canada on faulty equipment...on an overcast day. Soothingly repetitious and proof that Mr. Basinski is more than a disintegrating one trick load of pony. Efficacious as a fistful of xanax.

Oddi wrth y brawd
better than dolphins

The Peel Sessions 1987-1993 - Datblygu [2008]

2012-01-25T20:54:00.002+07:00

As the late Laird of Peel Acres would have it: "[Datblygu are] the best incentive anyone could have for learning Welsh”.

Uchafbwynt bob dydd o'r wythnos oedd tiwnio i mewn i raglen John Peel ar radio un wrth wneud fy ngwaith cartref. Rwy'n cofio gorwedd ar fy ngwely unig un noson pan chwaraeodd John Peel gang o ferched yn canu, "whisky makes me frisky, gin makes me sin, brandy makes me randy and rum makes me come". Rown i'n ysu am gyfarfod a'r math yna o ferched yn hytrach nag eistedd mewn dosbarthiadau boring yn yr ysgol. A dyna reswm arall pam y ffurfiais i Datblygu. Down i ddim eisiau gwneud lot o arian - yr uchelgais oedd art, rhyw, drygs ac alcohol.

- David R. Edwards

We sang in Welsh with all the US/English influences because it had to be done. I didn't like the fact that Welsh music was seen to be male voice choirs, folk music and all the clichés. I suppose that I wanted to modernise Welsh language culture. Welsh is a language with unlimited potential but I didn't appreciate a lot that was being manifested in it. I tried to change things. Hundreds of people saw the point so I'm glad I bothered.

– more David R Edwards

Hundreds.....

Oddi wrth y brawd

trio

buyo

The Music of ITC - Various [2009]

2012-01-24T19:07:00.001+07:00

Incorporated Television Company's finest. Beyond luxuriating dans la funk brass bossa jazzy suspense of it all, the genius herein be not one-off the wrist successive theme after another but immersive arrays, suites if you will, comprising title music, outros, specials, alternates, incidental music and cues. Amounting to 113 tracks across two CDS.

Why is Edwin Astley not a household name? Seriously, why?

A
1-6 Danger Man [half hour series] - Edwin Astley
7-13 Danger Man [hour series] - Edwin Astley
14-15 Gideon's Way - Edwin Astley
16-22 The Baron - Edwin Astley
23-31 The Saint - Edwin Astley
32-37 Man In A Suitcase - Ron Grainer, Albert Elms
38-44 The Prisoner - Ron Grainer, Albert Elms, Robert Farnon
45-53 The Champions - Tony Hatch, Edwin Astley, Albert Elms
54-61 Department S - Edwin Astley

B
1-6 Randall & Hopkirk - Edwin Astley
7-13 Strange Report - Roger Webb
14-17 The Persuaders - John Barry
18-25 Jason King - Laurie Johnstone
26-33 The Protectors - Mitch Murray & Peter Callander, John Cameron
34-36 The Adventurer - John Barry
37-44 The Zoo Gang - Paul McCartney & Wings, Ken Thorne
45-52 Return Of The Saint - Brian Dee, John Scott, Guido & Maurizio De Angelis

Oddi wrth y brawd

more than pete townshend's father-in-law

edwin, star

Roforofo Fight - Fela Kuti [1972]

2012-01-23T20:48:00.001+07:00

Afro-Funk-Jazz tour de force. Needs y brawd say more.

Oddi wrth y brawd
oforofor

It's A Mean Old World To Try To Live In- Reverend Pearly Brown [1975]

2012-01-22T17:02:00.001+07:00

Dig the soulful voice and lucid guitar of very right Reverend Pearly Brown. Blind street singer n preacher with religious repertoire spiritual, holy blues, gospel n slave song. Stunning.

Oddi wrth y brawd
nothin' but joy

Eight-Hand Sets and Holy Steps - Various [1978]

2012-01-21T22:22:00.002+07:00

Top drawer proto-country blues, string band and sacred music, sampling North Carolina Afro-American tradition mid 1800s - early 1900s. Dance tunes n ballads played on guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica (and bones...). Spirituals by congregation, singing group, n individual to guitar / harmonica accompaniment. Recorded in 70s by NC musicians steeped in tradition. Sparkling lodestar mainline to authentic US heritage. Don't you dare miss it.

01 Wildwood Blues Speak - James "Guitar Slim" Stephens (vocal)
02 Corinna - Elizabeth "Babe" Reid (banjo), and James Borders (bones)
03 Georgia Buck - Joe and Odell Thompson (fiddle and banjo)
04 Breakaway - Roosevelt May (vocal and harmonica)
05 John Henry - Cora Phillips and Elizabeth "Babe" Reid (guitar and banjo)
06 Going Downtown - Joe and Odell Thompson (fiddle and banjo)
07 Buckdance - Algia Mae Hinton (guitar)
08 Chicken - Percy Lassiter (vocal and guitar)
09 Out on the Farm - Elester Anderson (vocal and guitar)
10 Honeybabe - Algia Mae Hinton (vocal and guitar)
11 Boll Weevil - Percy Lassiter (vocal and guitar)
12 Chicken, Lord, Lord - Algia Mae Hinton (vocal and guitar)
13 When You See Me Praying - Second St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church
14 Lord, What Shall I Do - Thomas Burt, vocal and guitar
15 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - Roosevelt May, vocal and harmonica
16 Your Close Friend - James "Guitar Slim" Stephens (vocal and guitar)
17 Death is Coming Back After You - Rev. Rassie Moore (vocal and guitar)
18 Satan, We're Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down - Second St. Paul Junior Choir
19 Sweet Home - Algia Mae Hinton (vocal and guitar)
20 Traveling Shoes - The Badgett Sisters

21 Joshua - The Gospel Jubilators

Oddi wrth y brawd

going downtown

Totem One - Master Musicians of Bukkake [2009]

2012-01-20T20:38:00.001+07:00

Scattering pearly kosmiche globules as fires throb and sparks fly upwards. MMoB roam ancient liquid silk roads essaying Tibetan analogue synth chant, near east death cult malarkey - at one point purloining Hawkwind's Hassan I Sahba Anatolian riffage - and generally come on like misbehaving new dark age-ist raggamuffin vendors of exotic ritual n ceremony.

Oddi wrth y brawd

bukkakeru

See Mi Yah - Rhythm and Sound [2005]

2012-01-18T22:18:00.001+07:00

Basic Channel-ists Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald: burial mix series collecting vocal contributions from collaborators old and new.

Oddi wrth y brawd
OKYah

Solaris - Eduard Artemiev [1972]

2012-01-17T06:39:00.001+07:00

Disquieting, meditative electroacoustic musique concrète for the masses.

(Composed on Russian ANS synthesiser folks)

01 Part I, Bach
02 Part II
03 Part III
04 Part IV
05 Part V
06 Part VI
07 Part VII
08. Part VIII, Bach (Remix #1)
09 Part IX
10 Part X
11 Part XI
12 Part XII, Bach (Remix #2)
13 Part XIII
14 Part XIV
15 Part XV
16 Part XVI, Bach (Remix #3)
17 Part XVII, Bach 2

Oddi wrth y brawd
space is the place

Cameroon Baka Pygmy Music - Various [1977]

2012-01-16T03:26:00.002+07:00

Pejorative sobriquet notwithstanding, an entrancing polyphonic delight: work song, dance, lullaby and tunes whereby to potter around hut, hearth and rainforest. Dense, cyclical contrapuntal communal vocalising. Almost casually adept. Gamelan-like, sense a never quite revealed super-pattern shrouded in amaranthine repetition.

(Smile on Holy Warbles' tireless ethnomusicology)

Oddi wrth y brawd
jengi

No Other - Gene Clark [1974]

2012-01-14T09:50:00.001+07:00

Bare, big celestial malaise. Fear. Paranoia.

Oddi wrth y brawd

no other

The American Dreamer OST - Various [1971]

2012-01-11T09:01:00.001+07:00

01 Gene Clark: American Dreamer
02 Hello People: Pass Me By
03 John Manning: Whole Song
04 Gene Clark: Outlaw Song
05 Chris Sikelianos: Easy Rider, 1970
06 John Buck Wilkin: The Screaming Metaphysical Blues
07 John Manning: Hard Road To New Mexico
08 John Buck Wilkin: Look At Me, Mama
09 John Buck Wilkin: Sun, Moon, And Stars
10 Abbey Road Singers: Other Side Of This Life

During post-production for The Last Movie, Hopper wanders the desert around his Taos, New Mexico home, wasted n waxing philosophical. Acoustic soundtrack a shining nugget in the rough. Yippiee!

Oddi wrth y brawd

Or don't cowboys have fantasies?

Alien Dreamtime - Space Time Continuum with Terence McKenna

2012-01-09T07:09:00.000+07:00

Multi-media event live document. San Francisco February 1993. Spoken word, visuals, music n didgeridoo.

Oddi wrth y brawd
teleological

Children of the Drones - Various

2012-01-07T12:18:00.000+07:00

Spooky, warped, & wigged-out. Apparently took Fearlono (Cottage of electric Hell!) ages and whole lot of Mr Miyagi to mix. Mega-lithic.

Oddi wrth y brawd
king of the castle

Krautrocksampler - Julian Cope [1995]

2012-01-05T12:39:00.000+07:00

Essential ur-text concerning die Grosse Kosmische Musik.

"When I wrote the book, the main reason for doing so was to stop it getting mixed up with all that prog-rock crap that experimental fans love, and to introduce the word 'Krautrock' in a positive, pouting glamrock way. So many journalists pussyfooted around the term and called others xenophobic for using it, which was the main stumbling block in the way of its advancement. And Alan and Steve Freeman at Ultima Thule told me they'd been working on their tome [The Crack in the Cosmic Egg] for years but were spurred on to complete it purely because they knew I was getting mine out first. I don't feel like really updating the book much - it's a period piece written at a time when no fucker was interested and now all these neo-Krautheads are at me saying it's out of date. Fuck them!"

- Lord Yatesbury

Oddi wrth y brawd
teil eins
teil zwei

Begegnungen II - Eno, Moebius, Roedelius, Plank [1985]

2012-01-04T09:42:00.001+07:00

Something of a selection box: driving horizonwards Neu homage (Conditionierer); proto psy trance (Speed Display); gagaku influenced ambient (Mr Livingstone); fruity Eno vocal atmospherics a la Another Green World (Broken Head). Both prescient and strangely outmoded.

Oddi wrth y brawd

langer atem

Double Heads 1980-81 - Les Rallizes Denudes [Hadaka No Rallizes]

2012-01-03T10:43:00.000+07:00

Enter Takeshi Mizutani's world of total cultural assault. These late period recordings dial down squall n sub bass battering - juste un tad - and so present excellent point of entry for the uninitiated.

Also, featuring far out Rallizes stalwart Fujio Yamaguchi.

Live 14 Aug. 1980
1-1. 造花の原野 (7:21)
1-2. 夜より深 (16:16)
1-3. 白い目覚め (6:24)

Live 14 Aug. 1980
2-1. 夜、暗殺者の夜 (12:27)
2-2. Fantastique (13:06)
2-3. 夜の収穫者達 (8:32)
2-4.The Last One (27:50)

Live 29 Oct. 1980
3-1. 夜より深 (15:43)
3-2. 氷の炎 (19:27)
3-3. 夜より深 Part 2 (11:00)

Live 29 Oct. 1980
4-1. Enter The Mirror (12:20)
4-2. 夜、暗殺者の夜 (13:22)
4-3. The Last One (19:23)

Live 23 Mar. 1981
5-1. 夜、暗殺者の夜 (16:00)
5-2. 夜より深 Part 2 (30:41)

Live 23 Mar. 1981
6-1. The Last One (24:24)
6-2. 氷の炎 (20:57)

Oddi wrth y brawd
1
2
3

Shut It! The Music of the Sweeney - Various [2001]

2012-01-01T22:17:00.000+07:00

Thames TV go a cockney blaxploitation bundle.....the slags.

I sometimes hate this bastard place. 'Sa bloody holiday camp for thieves n weirdos. All the rubbish. You age prematurely trying 't sort somma them out. Try n protect the public n all they do is call you fascist. You nail a villain and some ponced up pin-striped 'Ampstead barrister screws it up like n old fag packet on a point of procedure. Then pops up for a game of squash n a glass of Madeira. He's taking 'ome thirty grand a year and we can just about afford ten days in Eastbourne n a second hand car. Aargh...it's all bloody wrong my son!

- Gospel according to DI Jack Regan

Oddi wrth y brawd
fancy a drink?

Chant And Be Happy! - George Harrison & The London Radha-Krishna Temple [1971]

2011-12-31T20:22:00.000+07:00

Go on, have a chant.

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda y'all.

Oddi wrth y brawd
bhaktivedanta manner

Paris 1919 [re-issue] - John Cale [1973]

2011-12-30T09:52:00.001+07:00

Stately and abiding eccentricities notwithstanding, Cale's most beautifully accessible opus. Arguably, his chef d'oeuvre. Burned out, nostalgic and dislocated; literary and geographical allusions to loss and wandering. Ugliness crystallised as candy.

Re-issue offers essential alternates and outtakes: two Paris 1919 mixes for strings and piano? Hanky Panky Nohow drone mix? C'mon...

Oddi wrth y brawd
ten murdered oranges

Farewell Sorrow - Alasdair Roberts [2003]

2011-12-29T08:59:00.000+07:00

Sound of Roberts coming into his own; channelling spirit into quiddity. Achieves a kind of magic and elegance that Ashley Hutchings once managed so adeptly. Elegant.

Oddi wrth y brawd
walk abroad in an evil hour

Plunderphonic - John Oswald [1989]

2011-12-28T09:28:00.001+07:00

Plunderphonics: making new music out of previously existing recordings. Beatles, Jackson, Beefheart, Presley, Stravinsky.. no one's safe from this bad boy.

A plunderphone is a recognisable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded. Whistling a bar of "Density 21.5" is a traditional musical quote. Taking Madonna singing "Like a Virgin" and rerecording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognise the source. The plundering has to be blatant though. There's a lot of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we're doing.

- John Oswald

Extraordinary re-framing n re-folding. Speciality stock in trade: breathing soul, quiet excitement and occasional heartbreak into the overly familiar / schmaltzy.

Oddi wrth y brawd

blatant

Oiseaux Du Birds of Venezuela - Jean C. Roche [1973]

2011-12-27T05:53:00.000+07:00

Post-Christmas double tooth pain travails coming down. Work your magic, birdies.

"At night fall, around even the meanest of ditches filled by the daily rain, myriads of toads and frogs struck up a concert, which, through its sheer intensity, muffled all other surrounding noises. When I penetrated the forest, I could hear bird species literally by the dozen and individuals by the hundred, all calling and singing together at dawn and at dusk... This time I have not devoted a side of the record to the presentation of species one by one, preferring above all to provide a musical illustration of the Venezuelan atmosphere."

-liner notes

Oddi wrth y brawd

ocumare

Dolig (sa'm amser gwaeth i farw) - Mr Huw

2011-12-25T14:58:00.000+07:00

http://mrhuw.com/

'Dolig Llawen!

Oddi wrth y brawd

Spectral Christmas Eve - H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James

2011-12-24T15:19:00.001+07:00

Our entrée, if you will, a beery amuse-bouche: Mark E. Smith "reading" Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. Never mind that this is all but unintelligible to anyone born outside a 2 mile radius of Salford and not a committed jakey. Watch as MES gets increasingly, twitchily mushy-mouthed and continuity moves beyond human ken (check pissed chuckle at 06:13; baffling wardrobe change; head in hands losing it denouement 09:22). Cheers.

Our main course this night before Christmas comes courtesy of unassuming genius Fearlono - last known abode Cottage of Electric Hell! - who has taken classic cinema adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and hand-crafted source audio eerie and atmosphere disturbing into lovingly isolated and creepily assembled continuous mood piece.

Pass the brandy, will you dear?

Oddi wrth y brawd
all i want to do is save the children. not destroy them.

Mary Never Wanted Jesus - Genesis P-orridge & Thee Majesty [2005]

2011-12-23T15:32:00.000+07:00

Art project Christmas the fourth.

Fluxus rooted artist John Armleder's Villa Magica label showcases Christmas record obsession: festive music conceptual, kitsch and literal. John invites invites Genesis to contribute. Disarmingly charming.

01 Mary Never Wanted Jesus
02 Have Mercy
03 Dramaqueen (Mary)
04 Only Love Can Break Your Heart
05 I Like Thee Holidays
06 Jesus Walked On Thee Water
07 Rudolf Thee Red Nosed Reindeer
08 Little Drummer Boy

Oddi wrth y brawd
GOP

Yn ddistaw ddistaw bach - Huw M [2010]

2011-12-22T14:58:00.000+07:00

Welsh Christmas the third.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://huwm.bandcamp.com/album/yn-ddistaw-ddistaw-bach"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Yn ddistaw ddistaw bach by Huw M&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Check Huw M at bandcamp.

Oddi wrth y brawd

full download

The Masque of Bruma - Golau Glau [2011]

2011-12-21T14:19:00.001+07:00

Uncanny Christmas the second.

Haunted carols, radiophonic mummers play and Ghost Box remix gift from Ye Advisory Circle.

01 The Yule Cat
There is an Icelandic myth. A giant cat comes on Christmas Eve to eat anyone who did not receive new clothing as a gift. You must finish all work with the wool before Yule...

02 The Owd Tup
Golau Glau's radiophonic take on the mummers play 'The Owd Tup', which was mostly performed in the Sheffield area and is based around the traditional folk song 'The Derby Ram'.

03 Wassail Branch
The wassail branch is decorated with holly, ivy and tiny silver bells. The city creeps into the season...

04 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Golau Glau's folky, electronic take on this traditional carol.

05 Oak Moon (Advisory Circle Radio Edit)
Remix of 'Oak Moon' from 'Myrrh & Myth' by The Advisory Circle (Ghost Box).

06 Coventry Carol
Golau Glau's Italo-ish take on this 16th century, very beautiful mummers carol about the Murder of the Innocents.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://golauglau.bandcamp.com/track/the-owd-tup"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The Owd Tup by Golau Glau&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Oddi wrth y brawd
full download

Carols From Herefordshire - Sproatly Smith [2010]

2011-12-20T13:54:00.000+07:00

Wyrd Christmas the first. Psych-folk for midwinter feasting.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://sproatlysmith.bandcamp.com/album/carols-from-herefordshire"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Carols From Herefordshire by sproatly smith&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Oddi wrth y brawd
the moon shines bright

Bummed - Happy Mondays [1988]

2011-12-19T18:08:00.000+07:00

A right pisshole, long hair, beatniks, druggers, freeloaders, Happy Mondays, tsk...Happy Mondays. Petty thief louts about to go very large indeed. Call Mad Cyril.

Oddi wrth y brawd

we likes that, turn it up

Performance - OST [1970]

2011-12-18T00:07:00.001+07:00

Featuring comical little geezer, bohemian atmosphere and performance that makes it all the way. Madness, nothing is true, everything is permitted. With a bullet.

More at http://rocketremnants.blogspot.com/2010/05/wot-performance.html

Oddi wrth y brawd
And there were damsels and young girls there, who dallied with them to their hearts' content, so that they had what young men desire. Thus it was that when the old man decided to send one of his assassins upon a mission, such as to have a prince slain, he would send for one of these youths and say, 'Go thou and kill, and when thou returnest, my angels will bear thee into Paradise; and should'st thou die, nevertheless, I will send my angels to carry thee back into Paradise.

E2-E4 - Manuel Göttsching [1984]

2011-12-17T13:11:00.000+07:00

30 years ago this month Manuel Gottsching recorded a long - 59m20s - track called E2-E4.

Pump's & Sounds' own David Elliott:
"I was living sur le continent at the time and, with my friend Wolfgang, met Manuel exactly a month before (in Cologne, playing a concert with Klaus Schulze) and exactly a month after (in Berlin, interviewing various musicians). We got wind of the track, but it didn't get released until two and a half years later in 1984 on Schulze's In Team label, split over two sides of vinyl. I gave it 5 stars in Sounds. It's a wonderful piece of music - racey sequencers, just two chords and some fine guitar - but it wasn't until 1989 that it became 'known', courtesy of the Italian Sueno Latino club remix".

Meant only as something to listen to on a flight to Hamburg, it's since been compared to Eno, Reich et al and in The Wire as "in its own unassuming way, one of the most revolutionary and important albums ever made".

You better believe it. Disco minimalist heaven.

Oddi wrth y brawd
cabin doors to manuel

Anthology - The Walker Brothers [1995]

2011-12-15T19:57:00.001+07:00

Before Scott's dark passenger takes the wheel, the bros essay a fine line in majestic teeny-bop hokum.

(Is it y brawd or is there more than a touch of the Napoleon Dynamite about our Scott in this vid?)

Oddi wrth y brawd

vote pedro

Jams For Da Stars - Spectre Folk [Pete Nolan]

2011-12-13T22:41:00.001+07:00

Strung out scuzzy lo-fi VU improvisations. Magik Markers' Pete Nolan takes a deeply psychedelicised minor key promenade at 3 o'clock in the morning, probably.

Oddi wrth y brawd

jammers

Hex Enduction Hour - The Fall [1982]

2011-12-12T13:43:00.000+07:00

m.e.s

HEH was a big fuck off to the music industry. It was probably the first time I'd got to the point where I knew I was alone with my ideas. And you can go one of two ways: either you curb your thinking, rein yourself in and buy what they're telling you, or you follow your own path, regardless.

And so I just went for it on that album. But, I must admit, throughout parts of the recording I thought that this is it. This is the last one we're going to do. To a certain extant I always think like that, with every album - even now. But the feeling was a lot more acute with Hex. When you're mired in the shit of the times with bland bastards like Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet, you start to question not only people's tastes but their existences. You're not going anywhere with all that shit. I wanted an album to be like reading a really good book. You have a couple of beers, sit down and immerse yourself. None of those fuckers did that. I don't even think they attempted it. I'd rather listen to the Polish builders clanking away next door than any of that crap.

k-punk

Mark Sinker: 'Scrawny, gnarled, gaunt: Smith doesn't waltz with ghosts. He materialises them.'

Who can put their finger on the Weird?

It’s taken me more than twenty years to attempt this deciphering. Back then, the Fall did something to me. But what, and how?

Let’s call it an Event, and at the same time note that all Events have a dimension of the uncanny. If something is too alien, it will fail to register; if it is too easily recognized, too easily cognizable, it will never be more than a reiteration of the already known. When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

I didn't know then, that, already, in 1983, The Fall's greatest work was behind them. No doubt the later albums have their merits but it is on Grotesque (1980), Slates (1981) and Hex Enduction Hour (1982) where group the reached a pitch of sustained abstract invention that they - and few others - are unlikely to surpass. In its ambition, its linguistic inventiveness and its formal innovation, this triptych bears comparison with the great works of twentieth century high literary modernism (Joyce, Eliot, Lewis). The Fall extend and performatively critique that mode of high modernism by reversing the impersonation of working class accent, dialect and diction that, for example, Eliot performed in The Waste Land. Smith’s strategy involved aggressively retaining accent while using - in the domain of a supposedly popular entertainment form - highly arcane literary practices. In doing so, he laid waste the notion that intelligence, literary sophistication and artistic experimentalism are the exclusive preserve of the privileged and the formally educated.

But Smith knew that aping master class morés presented all sorts of other dangers; it should never be a matter of proving (to the masters) that the white crap could be civilized. Perhaps all his writing was, from the start, an attempt to find a way out of that paradox which all working class aspirants face - the impossiblility of working class achievement. Stay where you are, speak the language of your fathers, and you remain nothing; move up, learn to speak in the master language, and you have become a something, but only by erasing your origins - isn't the achievement precisely that erasure? ('You can string a sentence together, how can you possibly be working class, my dear?')

The temptation for Smith was always to fit into the easy role of working class spokesman, speaking from an assigned place in a given social world. Smith played with that role ('the white crap that talks back', 'Prole Art Threat', 'Hip Priest') whilst refusing to actually play it. He knew that representation was a trap; Social Realism was the enemy because in supposedly 'merely' representing the social order, it actually constituted it. Against the Social Realism of the official left, Smith developed a late twentieth century urban English version of the 'grotesque realism' Bakhtin famously described in Rabelais and his World. Crucial to this grotesque realism is a contestation of the classificatory system which deems cultures (and populations) to be either refined or vulgar. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argued, 'the grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms of, designating what is high and low'.

Instead of the high modernist appropriation of working class speech and culture, Smith's pulp modernism reacquaints modernism with its disavowed pulp doppelganger. Lovecraft is the crucial figure here since his texts - which first appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales - emerged from an occult trade between pulp horror and modernism. Follow the line back from Lovecraft's short stories and you pass through Dunsany and M R James before coming to Poe. But Poe, also played a decisive role in the development of modernism - via his influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and their admirer T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land’s debt to Dracula, for instance, is well-known. The fragmentary, citational structure of a story like Lovecraft's ‘Call of Cthulhu’, meanwhile, recalls The Waste Land. More than that: as Benjamin Noys argued in his paper 'Lovecraft the Sinthome' the abominations from which Lovecraft’s strait-laced scholars recoil bear comparisons with cubist and futurist art: Lovecraft, that is to say, turns modernism into an object of horror.

The textual expectorations of Hex

Hex press release: 'He'd been very close to becoming ex-funny man celebrity. He needed a good hour at the hexen school...'

Hex Enduction Hour was even more expansive than Grotesque. Teeming with detail, gnomic yet hallucinogenically vivid, Hex was a series of pulp modernist pen portraits of England in 1982. The LP had all the hubristic ambition of Prog combined with an aggression whose ulcerated assault and battery outdid most of its postpunk peers in terms of sheer ferocity. Even the lumbering ‘Winter’ was driven by a brute urgency, so that, on Side One, only the quiet passages in the lugubrious ‘Hip Priest’ – like dub if it had been invented in drizzly motorway service stations rather than in recording studios in Jamaica – provided a respite from the violence.

Yet the violence was not a matter of force alone. Even when the record's dual-drummer attack is at its most poundingly vicious, the violence is formal as much as physical. Rock form is disassembled before our ears. It seems to keep time according to some system of spasms and lurches learned from Beefheart. Something like ‘Deer Park’ – a whistle-stop tour of London circa 82 sandblasted with ‘Sister Ray’-style white noise - screams and whines as if it is about to fall apart at any moment. The ‘bad production’ was nothing of the sort. The sound could be pulverisingly vivid at times: the moment when the bass and drums suddenly loom out of the miasma at the start of ‘Winter’ is breathtaking, and the double-drum tattoo on ‘Who Makes the Nazis?’ fairly leaps out of the speakers. This was the space rock of Can and Neu! smeared in the grime and mire of the quotidian, recalling the most striking image from The Quatermass Xperiment: a space rocket crashlanded into the roof of a suburban house.

In many ways, however, the most suggestive parallels come from black pop. The closest equivalents to the Smith of Hex would be the deranged despots of black sonic fiction: Lee Perry, Sun Ra and George Clinton, visionaries capable of constructing (and destroying) worlds in sound.

As ever, the album sleeve (so foreign to what were then the conventions of sleeve design that HMV would only stock it with its reverse side facing forward) was the perfect visual analogue for the contents. The sleeve was more than that, actually: its spidery scrabble of slogans, scrawled notes and photographs was a part of the album rather than a mere illustrative envelope in which it was contained.

With The Fall of this period, what Gerard Genette calls ‘paratexts’ – those liminal conventions, such as introductions, prefaces and blurbs, which mediate between the text and the reader – assume special significance. Smith’s paratexts were clues that posed as many puzzles as they solved; his notes and press releases were no more intelligible than the songs they were nominally supposed to explain. All paratexts occupy an ambivalent position, neither inside nor outside the text: Smith uses them to ensure that no definite boundary could be placed around the songs. Rather than being contained and defined by its sleeve, Hex haemorrhages through the cover.

It was clear that the songs weren’t complete in themselves, but part of a larger fictional system to which listeners were only ever granted partial access. ‘I used to write a lot of prose on and off,’ Smith would say later. ‘When we were doing Hex I was doing stories all the time and the songs were like the bits left over.’ Smith’s refusal to provide lyrics or to explain his songs was in part an attempt to ensure that they remained, in Barthes’ terms, writerly. (Barthes opposes such texts, which demand the active participation of the reader, to ‘readerly’ texts, which reduce the reader to the passive role of consumer of already-existing totalities.)

Before his words could be deciphered they had first of all to be heard, which was difficult enough, since Smith’s voice – often subject to what appeared to be loud hailer distortion - was always at least partially submerged in the mulch and maelstrom of Hex’s sound. In the days before the internet provided a repository of Smith’s lyrics (or fans’ best guesses at what the words were), it was easy to mis-hear lines for years.

Even when words could be heard, it was impossible to confidently assign them a meaning or an ontological ‘place’. Were they Smith’s own views, the thoughts of a character or merely stray semiotic signal? More importantly: how clearly could each of these levels be separated from one another? Hex’s textual expectorations were nothing so genteel as stream of consciousness: they seemed to be gobbets of linguistic detritus ejected direct from the mediatized unconscious, unfiltered by any sort of reflexive subjectivity. Advertising, tabloid headlines, slogans, pre-conscious chatter, overheard speech were masticated into dense schizoglossic tangles.

Who wants to be in a Hovis advert any way?
‘Who wants to be in a Hovis/ advert/ any way?’ Smith asks in ‘Just Step S’ways’, but this refusal of cosy provincial cliche (Hovis adverts were famous for their sentimentalised presentation of a bygone industrial North) is counteracted by the tacit recognition that the mediatized unconscious is structured like advertising. You might not want to live in an advert, but advertising dwells within you. Hex converts any linguistic content – whether it be polemic, internal dialogue, poetic insight – into the hectoring form of advertising copy or the screaming ellipsis of headline-speak. The titles of ‘Hip Priest’ and ‘Mere Pseud Mag Ed’, as urgent as fresh newsprint, bark out from some Voriticist front page of the mind.

As for advertising, consider ‘Just Step S’ways’’ opening call to arms: ‘When what you used to excite you does not/ like you’ve used up all your allowance of experiences’. Is this an existentialist call for self re-invention disguised as advertising hucksterism, or the reverse? Or take the bilious opening track, ‘The Classical’. ‘The Classical’ appears to oppose the anodyne vacuity of advertising’s compulsory positivity (‘this new profile razor unit’) to ranting profanity (‘hey there fuckface!’) and the gross physicality of the body (‘stomach gassss’). But what of the line ‘I’ve never felt better in my life?’ Is this another advertising slogan or a statement of the character’s feelings?

It was perhaps the unplaceability of any of the utterances on Hex that allowed Smith to escape censure for the notorious line, ‘where are the obligatory niggers?’ in ‘The Classical’. Intent was unreadable. Everything sounded like a citation, embedded discourse, mention rather than use.
Smith returns to the Weird tale form on ‘Jawbone and the Air Rifle’. A poacher accidentally causes damage to a tomb, unearthing a jawbone which ‘carries the germ of a curse/ of the Broken Brothers Pentacle Church’. The song is a tissue of allusions - James (‘A Warning to the Curious’, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad’), Lovecraft (‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’), Hammer Horror, The Wicker Man - culminating in a psychedelic/ psychotic breakdown (complete with torch-wielding mob of villagers):

He sees jawbones on the street/ advertisements become carnivores/ and roadworkers turn into jawbones/ and he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime. / The villagers dance round pre-fabs/ and laugh through twisted mouths

‘Jawbone’ resembles nothing so much as a League of Gentlemen sketch, and The Fall have much more in common with the League of Gentlemen’s febrile carnival than with witless imitators such as Pavement. The co-existence of the laughable with that which is not laughable: a description that captures the essence of both The Fall and The League of Gentlemen's grotesque humour.

White Face finds roots
On Hex’s second side, mutant r and r becomes r and Artaud as the songs become increasingly delirial and abstract. 'Who Makes the Nazis’ - as lunar as Tago Mago, as spacey-desolated as King Tubby at his most cavernous – is a TV talk show debate rendered as some Jarry-esque pantomime, and composed of leering backing vocals and oneiric-cryptic linguistic fragments: ‘longhorn breed… George Orwell Burmese police… Hate’s not your enemy, love’s your enemy, murder all bush monkeys…’

'Iceland', recorded in a lava-lined studio in Reykjavik , is a fantasmatic encounter with the fading myths of North European culture in the frozen territory from which they originated. ‘White face finds roots’ Smith’s sleeve-notes tell us. The song, hypnotic and undulating, meditative and mournful, recalls the bone-white steppes of Nico's The Marble Index in its arctic atmospherics. A keening wind (on a cassette recording made by Smith) whips through the track as Smith invites us to ‘cast the runes against your own soul’ (another James’ reference, this time to his ‘Casting the Runes’).

‘Iceland’ is rock as ragnarock, an anticipation (or is it a recapitulation) of the End Times in the terms of the Norse ‘Doom of the Gods’. It is a Twilight of the Idols for the retreating hobgoblins, cobolds and trolls of Europe’s receding Weird culture, a lament for the monstrosities and myths whose dying breaths it captures on tape:

Witness the last of the god men ….

A Memorex for the Krakens

Oddi wrth y brawd

hexen school: hail the classical

The Hanged Man - Ralph White [2011]

2011-12-11T08:17:00.000+07:00

Not a million miles from Jerry Garcia's twilight fountainhead Americana excursions, Ralph White home-spins old weird folk, proto-blues and country into psycho-meditative textures. High-lonesome drawl wavering around the melody (Jerry again), Dock Boggs banjo drone, fiddle, button accordion and - wahey - African kalimba. Edition of 100 copies. Ralph's version of Harder They Come an especial treat.

Check http://ralphewhite.com/

Oddi wrth y brawd

gallows medley

Mwandishi - Herbie Hancock [1974]

2011-12-10T15:06:00.000+07:00

Electro gadgeteer Herbie manipulates reverb unit, stereo tremelo and echoplex, taking us in directions spacey. Our man's 5 year tenure as keyboard factotum and accomplice in Miles Davis' post-bop electric experimentation very much to the fore. A worthy extension of "Silent Way" philosophy and pinnacle in early 70s afro-rock-electro-jazz-funk fusion.

Heavy on groove and low on wankery withal. Nice.

Oddi wrth y brawd

play fewer notes

Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upwards - A Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra[2001]

2011-12-09T07:30:00.000+07:00

Gorgeous post-rock chamber contretemps. God speed you...

Oddi wrth y brawd

voice of the turtle

The Royal Tenenbaums [2002 re-release]

2011-12-06T22:37:00.000+07:00

A soundtrack borrowing two songs from Nico's Chelsea Girl, a Self-Portrait Dylan gem, and Nick Drake's Fly signals class and a coherent if dour chamber pop insouciance. Thematic coherence cuts closer to the bone on a fine Elliott Smith track about suicide (!) and recalling co-writer Owen Wilson's own "cry for help" some years back. For all that uplifting, and a must listen for anyone with a yen for John Cale's sweet sad viola playing (think parts Paris 1919 and Songs For Drella). Incidental compositions by Mark Mothersbaugh (a long long way from Devo) hold up splendidly.

Oddi wrth y brawd
Let's shag ass

The Weed Tree ep - Espers [2005]

2011-12-05T05:11:00.002+07:00

Expanded to sextet, nucleus Greg Weeks, Meg Baird, and Brooke Sietinsons enter string n wind thickets of guitar, cello, recorder n miscellaneous tonal embellishments invariably veering towards the melancholic. Placid surfaces belie discontent: loss, unrequited love, isolation and similarly disgruntled emotions from traditional folk canon. Selections from folk standards bear out the romantic misery - Rosemary Lane (farewell Bert Jansch), Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair - as do covers predictable - Nico's Afraid; Michael Hurley's Blue Mountain (top-notch) - and miscreant - Durutti Column and Blue Öyster Cult. Flaming Telepaths, BÖC's heavy paean to heroin exigencies is slowed down to narcotised stupor as Weeks wields arc-weld axe. Heavy indeed.

Oddi wrth y brawd

dead king

Blood and Bone ep - Inner City Unit [1985]

2011-12-05T04:26:00.000+07:00

Mr Turner's crusty punkadelic acidrockin' shenanigans.

Oddi wrth y brawd

sphynxter

Dead Man - Neil Young [1995]

2011-12-04T06:25:00.001+07:00

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
- William Blake

Young improvising alone to Jim Jarmusch's acid western. Mostly solo electric guitar with acoustic, piano and organ. Interleaved dialogue excerpts - seldom works but here yes - and Johnny Depp getting away with reading William Blake.

Maximally postmodern distant cousin to Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. (On screen we meet characters called Benmont Tench and Lee Hazlewood (!)).

Music and film in black and white. Death's journey in mystic shades of grey.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
- The Judge

oddi wrth y brawd

do you have any tobacco?

Gone With The Bin - John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett [1981]

2011-12-03T06:52:00.000+07:00

Cheryl's gone home (her body made her do it). Cor. Aylesbury's holy raspberry fool and perhaps the bravest man of all.

Make this the big one for Otway.

Oddi wrth y brawd
block buster

Dub Gone Crazy: The Evolution of Dub at King Tubby's 1975-1977 - King Tubby & Friends

2011-12-01T03:27:00.000+07:00

Maximal aural hallucinatory manipulation riddim. Gone spiritual w/ shuddering bass n delay. Power and glory.

Oddi wrth y brawd

dreada

Sender/Receiver - I Am Spoonbender [1998]

2011-11-30T03:00:00.000+07:00

"Tosses all manner of monkey wrench into what actually are, structurally speaking, mutated pop songs, melding avant-noise, sound collage, musique concrète, and video game belches; what comes out is wildly imaginative...actually reaches a level of noir-like viscidity."

Jaki Leibezeit devotees take note: here be lockstep drumming.

Oddi wrth y brawd

de nieuwe uri

Kraut- Bloody- Rageous! German Psychedelic Underground Vol. IV - Various

2011-11-28T23:39:00.000+07:00

01 Turn In - The Ravers

02 Let's Do It Together - Blackbirds 2000

03 Wild Woman - Jo Hamann

04 Israfil Part 1 - Haboob

05 Munich City - Big Bertha

06 Dear Prof. Leary - Barney Wilen & His Amazing Free Rock Band

07 Wild Man - Cannock

08 Exodus II - The CT Four Plus

09 Let The Thing Comin' Up - Staff Carpenborg & The Electric Corona

10 Voodoo Woman - Mike Lewis & Conny Plank

11 War Child - Drum

12 Can't Get It - The Speeders 03:57

13 Jesus And The Rockers - Karl Lenfers & Peter Janssens

14 On My Way - Andorra

15 World Is Satisfied - Jam

16 Don't Forget To Love - Don Paulin

17 Child Of My Kingdom - Tusk

18 Please, Please Love Me - The Monks

19 The Million Game - Can

20 Demon's Dance - Al Capone

Check out spurensicherung.blogspot.com for Kraut Mask Replica; Tune In, Turn On, Drop Kraut; Get Off My Kraut.

Oddi wrth y brawd
krautesque

Obscured By Krauts German Psychedelic Underground Vol. III - Various

2011-11-28T02:37:00.000+07:00

01 Faust - Extract 7
02 Staff Carpenborg & The Electric Corona - Lightning Fires, Burning Sorrows
03 Sefil - When To You Come, I'm Wait For You
04 Jam - Friends

05 Inner Space - Coitus, Ergo Sum

06 Mother Sunday - Midnight Graveyard

07 Blackman Lane - Hunger

08 Proud Flesh - Devil Flight

09 Live Experience - Before Dead a.k.a. Cry For Betty

10 Swinging Safari - Toccata

11 Tyll - Tim

12 Trafo - Auto-Bahn

13 Yet - Try To See Her Again

14 Anima Sound - Trinity 2

15 Lony & The Misfits LTD. - Birthday

16 Tomorrow's Gift - At The Earth (Part 1)

17 Slut - Heavy Surf Sound Blues

18 Michael Anton & Amok - Jesus Makes You High

19 Dave Pike Set - Mathar

20 Exmagma - Marilyn F. Kennedy

21 Trede Selection - Sound Too

Check out spurensicherung.blogspot.com for Kraut Mask Replica; Tune In, Turn On, Drop Kraut; Get Off My Kraut.

Oddi wrth y brawd
atom herz mutter

Hungry Krauts, Daddy! German Psychedelic Underground Vol. II - Various

2011-11-27T04:59:00.000+07:00

01 Old Lumber - Water sprite

02 Staff Carpenborg - Corona - The every days way down to the suburbs

03 Hide & Seek - Crying child

04 Sound Machine - Woman

05 Lepra - Sesam, sesam

06 Coram Publico - Bodensee

07 Doldinger's Motherhood - Negrito

08 Gash - In the sea

09 Gottfried Von Hüngsberg - Die Insel

10 Caleidoscope Inc. - Kind of sadness

11 Thanes - Beginning word

12 Giants - Broken earth

13 Those - Orion 2000

14 Bokaj Retsiem - I' m so afraid

15 Golgotha - Dies Irae

16 MG Improvisation - Improvisation Nr. 2

17 Club 13 - Elegy on the death of a late famous general

18 John Bassman Group - His name was Tom

19 Tuning fork - I'm a dreamer

20 Inner Space - Agilok & Blubbo

Oddi wrth y brawd
kosmiche schnitzel

Kraut! Demons! Kraut! German Psychedelic Underground Vol. I - Various

2011-11-26T09:28:00.001+07:00

01 Aero Sound - Ready for Take Off
02 Staff Carpenborg and the Electric Corona - Shummy Poor Clessford Idea in Troody Tarpest Noodles

03 Margareta Juvan and Can - I'm Hiding My Nightingale

04 Trash - Living in a Garden

05 Motherhood - Negresco #4

06 Exmagma - It's So Nice

07 Guenther Kaufmann - Our Love

08 Heart of Blues - Smoking Takes You Faster to God

09 Jo Hamann - Give Me All Your Love

10 Checkpoint Charlie - Feeling Sad

11 Just We - Something Like It

12 Shanandoa - Dies Irae

13 Giants - He He Ho

14 Elegy - No Direction

15 Limbus 4 - Kundalini

16 Les Etoiles Filantes - Something

17 Magic Group - Magical Land

18 Electric Sandwich - China

19 Uncertain Midnight - Leaving the World

20 Can - Kama Sutra

21 Exmagma - Zink Tank

Oddi wrth y brawd
durch die Kraft Christi i dich zwingen

The Owl's Map - Belbury Poly

2011-11-24T04:44:00.000+07:00

Familiar Ghost Box trooping of the tropes: Garner's The Owl Service; Machen machinations; the Great God Pan; Toopian sinister resonance of the uncanny; 70s local television rurally themed programmes.

A rarefied furrow, rewardingly ploughed. Get with it.

Oddi wrth y brawd
chalchiuhtecolotl

Christ Was Born On Christmas Morn - Various [1971]

2011-11-23T06:07:00.000+07:00

Effluvium prophylactic. Join Blind Willie McTell, Blind Mamie Forehand, Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers (featuring Frankie Half-Pint Jaxon - naturally) in dispelling rising tide of noisome yule pap.

Oddi wrth y brawd

aint it grand to be a christian

Operation Hummingbird - Death In June [2000]

2011-11-20T07:22:00.000+07:00

June 30 1934 Hitler launches the Röhm-Putsch aka Operation Hummingbird: political murder spree including liquidation of Röhm's paramilitary Sturmabteilung. Death In June...hmmmm(ing).

Under-rated entry in Douglas P.'s martial oeuvre. Stirring.

Oddi wrth y brawd
behind the mask

The Triumph of Light...And Thy Thirteen Shadows of Love - Ordo Equilibrio [1997]

2011-11-19T07:17:00.000+07:00

Kinky, overwrought and in thrall to C93-DIJ cyclic monotony n strum. Nevertheless, some tasty atmospherics created. A rubber-wrapped future beckons in the cold meat industry.

Oddi wrth y brawd

under the rose

Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude - Nature and Organisation [1994]

2011-11-18T05:25:00.000+07:00

Michael Cashmore enlists fellow travellers Tibet, McDowell, Stapleton n Douglas P.. Wicker willow the bone white goddess. Thunder perfect n rociscrucial.

Oddi wrth y brawd

beauty destroyed

Clocks Are Like People - Circulus [2006]

2011-11-16T05:07:00.000+07:00

Ancient wind instruments, vintage Moog synthesiser flourishes and what can only be termed, reluctantly, as Elizabethan harpsichord "work outs". Highly mannered, make that preposterous, baroque 'n' roll. Somehow, all captured in lead pantaloon's juxtaposition of period klobba and Specsavers eye-wear.

The whiff of generic coming of age 70s teen TV prog theme. Utterly, bewilderingly po-faced.

Oddi wrth y brawd

dungarees and dragons

The Road Goes On Forever - The Highwaymen [1995]

2011-11-14T07:17:00.000+07:00

Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings.

Oddi wrth y brawd

so what's it to you?

A Moment of Forever - Kris Kristofferson [1995]

2011-11-13T07:03:00.000+07:00

Free, twinkling-eyed spirit. Human, humane n holy. Still wild enough for you.

Oddi wrth y brawd

under the gun

The Best Of George Formby [1994]

2011-11-12T07:09:00.000+07:00

Indulge y brawd's occult attraction to George's insistent cheeky chappy double entendres and relentless right hand. With his ukelele in hand (or his little stick of Blackpool rock), mother, what'll he do now?

Oddi wrth y brawd

oo 'eck

The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane - Jeffrey Lewis [2001]

2011-11-11T05:53:00.000+07:00

Robyn Hitchcock reincarnated in New York basement as lo-fi outsider folkie. (Tip o' the titffer to the good Dr Watson under whose auspices such fine entertainment reaches this parish.)

Oddi wrth y brawd

paranoid in golders hill park

The Essential Film Music Collection - Bernard Herrmann [2006]

2011-11-09T05:49:00.000+07:00

Il Maestro. Vertigo, Taxi Driver, Psycho, Cape Fear, Citizen Kane, North By Northwest... Come on, what you waiting for?

Oddi wrth y brawd
He was disappointed with the world, so he built one of his own
You call that bein' hip? What world are you from?

Vinonaamakasio - Shogun Kunitoki [2009]

2011-11-07T05:25:00.000+07:00

With what our North American cousins are wont to call a "sophomore" effort, SK dial up the prog flourishes while sticking to core MO: synth and organ driven blissed out minimalist repetition in T. Riley styled psych face off. Grappling bravely with cliche - grandeur via crescendo a la Godspeed - winning through by building intensity upon small sound bank fortified into maelstrom of melodic texture. Tidy.

Oddi wrth y brawd

fonal folks

The TIE Fighter of Love - Darth Phader [2010]

2011-11-06T06:46:00.000+07:00

From the dark side, with a smile. Sorcerer's psychotropic ways bring new hope at 142.25 BPM.

Must listen; search your feelings, you know it be true.

Oddi wrth y brawd

x wing of peace

Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland - Shpongle [2009]

2011-11-05T07:02:00.000+07:00

Collaborative psybient antics from Simon Posford n Raja Ram. Darn good.

Oddi wrth y brawd

electroplasm

North Sea Radio Orchestra - Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone Session [2009]

2011-11-04T06:24:00.000+07:00

Keeping it wonky...

1. Ivor The Engine Theme & Variations
2. Uncle Feedle (from the children's TV series 'Bagpuss')
3. Phantom

... they like to play in churches. NSRO

Oddi wrth y brawd

jones the steam

Smokin With The Alien - Spectre Folk [2009]

2011-11-02T21:00:00.000+07:00

Homespun dark folk magus wid Tim Buckley scent. Psych folk hypno-noodling rarely sounds as goood.

Oddi wrth y brawd

ready to wreck

The Singles 81 - 85 - Depeche Mode

2011-11-01T22:32:00.000+07:00

Y brawd unleashes la pop we likes to call synth...

Dreaming of Me - Deadpan vocals, programmed rhythm rejoinders n candyfloss melody

New Life - Tinky bonk excursion groping in dark for switch to torchlight o success

Just Can't Get Enough - y brawd can, you will

See You - Vince splits, world gasps, Depeche fade, No? No!

The Meaning of Love - Lead melody line musically identical to last hit

Leave In Silence - Heard more melody coming out o Kenny Wheeler's arsehole

Get the Balance Right - Have often wondered why God bothered with Depeche mode

Everything Counts - And the bland played on...

Love In Itself - Continuing willingness to puncture preconceptions

People Are People - Laughed the first time it came on

Master And Servant - Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy versus the Red Baron"

Blasphemous Rumours / Somebody - Routine slab o gloom; God gets given ticking off

Shake the Disease - Football hooligans as sensitive wimps

It's Called A Heart - .....

Young lads from Basildon and their urgent dancing...

Oddi wrth y brawd

get enough

Angelic Gematria - Burial Hex [2011]

2011-11-01T05:39:00.000+07:00

Kabbalistic conversation on All Souls Day.

Oddi wrth y brawd

א ב

Anymore For Anymore - Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance [1974]

2011-10-31T06:46:00.000+07:00

Criminally under-rated. Ronnie's hard luck n humour hobobilly arguably the only truly righteous import of Basement Tapes / Old Weird America esthetics married to homegrown quintessential English gypsy ramblin' minstrel vibery. Most will be familiar with Small Faces / Faces glory years but these solo fruits of long coda into ill health and obscurity be revelatory.

Yes, essential.

Here are Ronnie and pals on.....sweet Jesus....the Basil Brush Show.......

N cop this transcendental piece of English pastorale. To the country what Waterloo Sunset is to the urban mise-en-scène ...

Oddi wrth y brawd

bottle o' plonk

Hooked Up Classics - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra [2010]

2011-10-30T15:06:00.000+07:00

Improbable, nay preposterous, one man quirky electro-funk take on 80s disco cheese Hooked On Classics series. Safe to say, an acquired taste sparingly indulged.

Oddi wrth y brawd

pong ping

Dead Magick I & II - Dead Skeletons [2011]

2011-10-29T15:50:00.000+07:00

Psychogothic churn n moil occult merchant.

From Iceland.r

Oddi wrth y brawd

The World Ends: Afro Rock and Psychedelia in 1970s Nigeria: Various

2011-10-28T20:59:00.000+07:00

Thanks to Edo over at Know Your Conjuror for these mighty platters of on the one uber-grooves. Will get you n yer pals shimmying n swaying - guaranteed.

Oddi wrth y brawd

unity and faith

peace and progress