(MORE & MORE & MORE) STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-04)
Equipment Pointed Ankh? Lewsberg? No-Neck Blues Band? Jane Campion, Sun Ra, Henry Dumas, Black Sabbath, Puff, Scientific Explanation of Despair, Bruce Cole, Darryl Jenifer on D.C Go-Go, Christgau?!
Serious first world problems over here at Blastitude HQ on a peaceful Sunday morning where I’m trying to choose between Equipment Pointed Ankh’s Without Human Permission LP (for the still very welcome 30th time), the entire Lewsberg discography (for the first time in full after some enticing dips here and there), the entire No-Neck Blues Band discography (for the first time in 15 years), watching the last hour of Jane Campion’s darkly exquisite 2003 neo-noir masterpiece In the Cut, having an aughties free(k)-folk golden-vegetation-referencing-scene-comp showdown between Gold Leaf Branches (2005, Digitalis) and Golden Apples of the Sun (2008, Bastet/Arthur), and, finally, listening to a 24-minute conversation from 1966 between Sun Ra and the great black poet Henry Dumas that I just found on the internet. (Now there’s a podcast!) Believe it or not (update from 4:35pm) I ended up getting to just about everything, though only about half of the Lewsberg discography (god I love Lewsberg) and certainly well under 5% of the No-Neck Blues Band discography (I knew what I was up against, and didn’t actually intend to listen to any more of it than that, which was still a good hour-plus of deep NNCK immersion).
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And then there’s this 2017 video I’d never seen before, in which the original lineup of Black Sabbath except Bill Ward on drums, who has been replaced by the capable youngster Tommy Clufetos (from the Detroit area, where he went to the same high school as Madonna, after being born in the same year his once and future band had hit a wall and lost their singer and was taking a year off in between Never Say Die! and Heaven and Hell) blasts through the first song they ever wrote together, “Wicked World,” as released on their self-titled 1970 debut. They sound great, and it’s amazing to hear them in a small room just blasting. More like Blast Sabbath, am I right? Maybe even Blast Blastath… known for their classic 1971 LP Blaster of Reality…
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And now for something completely different (but also from northern Britain): the artist known for at least a short while as Puff, also known as Coits and as Wagstaff, informally known as Joincey, formally known as A. Joinson. You may not remember this because I barely did myself, but as Puff he released a bunch of CDRs, mostly in the year 2006, many of them on the then au courant 3” CDR format, and many of those by the distinctively packaged First Person label. I have about six of these Puff releases, all sent to me in a single package that year, at a time when I was already completely overwhelmed by review copies of underground noise and experimental records being mailed to me from all over the world, all manner of different-sized CDRs and wildly packaged cassettes to this day unlistened to, but mostly still stacked in unknown piles somewhere in my house or workplace. Thing is, even though I didn’t get to them then, I knew the Puff releases were keepers, and track was kept, which has allowed me here 15 years later to be blasting ‘em on the boom box all week. Better late than never, right? They all sound really good now, and I think it’s because the sounds are varied, simple as that. Varied in approach, texture, volume, mass, any other physical property that sound can synaesthetically manifest and metaphor. Puff may be the closest Joincey has gotten to a straight-up noise project, more so than his other recording guises, which from my experience usually have a way-skewed but nonetheless identifiable folk or rock leaning. But even considered as a straight-up noise project, Puff’s discography is still quite varied in sound and approach, in a way that sidesteps an immediate ‘noise’ tag. Side note: Wasn’t this particular Northern England microscene described as ‘battery-operated noise’ at some point? I think I’ve called it that, but I got it from someone else. Maybe I’m thinking of a blurb someone wrote for that huge Anna Planeta double-CD which I feel like I mention every 6-7 years in one blog post or another. Regardless, the battery-operated restriction really shapes the aesthetic. P.S. Relatively recent Joincey spotting, in a Manchester-based free-rock trio called Silver Dick, who recorded an album called All Dayer in 2015 that was put up on Bandcamp in 2020. It’s good!
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And by the way, I didn’t get to it on the aforementioned Sunday (which it turns out isn’t today), but I did eventually have myself that aughties free(k)-folk scene-comp showdown between the Gold Leaf Branches 3CDR (2005, Digitalis) and Golden Apples of the Sun CD (2004 Bastet, 2008 Arthur/Bastet). Listened to all three of those Gold Leaf Branches discs at least twice, believe it or not, even if the third one, as a 16-year-old CDR that was packaged according to concerns more aesthetic than protective, really crapped out not quite halfway through (all the remaining tracks would just endlessly skip). Discs one and two worked great though, and wow, so many artists (59!) playing truly wide-ranging and heavily experimental styles, representing all the aesthetic opportunity that came knocking with the very concept of DIY post-internet free-folk music, yet another fertile ancient-to-the-future post-post-post-post-post-punk time-spiral explosion, really a great listen for as long as your CDR copies will hold up. Also a very global comp, with several artists from the 2000s Finland free-folk explosion represented (Kuupuu, Lau Nau, Maniacs Dream, Keijo & the Free Players, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Master Qsh), as well as that wild Australian collective called Music Your Mind Will Love You that I’d forgotten about (Terracid, Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, Snowfoxx… I was able to find some CDRs from the label that have been on my shelves all these years, but none of them play or even read at all), some stand-out American tracks by Drekka, Hush Arbors (always liked this guy’s forlorn falsetto singing style), and a surprising number of projects that either are or include Branches curator Brad Rose and do not overstay their welcome at all (Alligator Crystal Moth, Oxblood Reincarnations, The North Sea, The Golden Oaks, The Juniper Meadows). There’s also the British group Rameses III, who I knew of but never really heard at the time; turns out they had a really developed and lovely chamber/classical post-rock austerity thing going on, as I’ve learned from a few subsequent deep listens to their releases Jozepha (2004, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon), Honey Rose (Important, 2007), and For José María (2010, Under the Spire). Compared to this wide experimental sprawl, Golden Apples of the Sun, as compiled a year earlier in 2004 by Devendra Banhart, is really just one tight pop banger after another, seriously sounding like the kind of music you could hear on commercial radio, certainly adult alternative radio like WXRT in Chicago. Tracks by Vetiver, Vashti Bunyan & Banhart, Currituck Co., Iron and Wine, Little Wings, and more go down as smooth as CBD/CSN-infused shea butter. The only artists that keep things a little more thorny are Matt Valentine, Jack Rose, and CocoRosie with their amazing “Good Friday,” the only track I’ve ever heard by them, the only track I really want to hear by them. (Weren’t they proto-cancelled way back around 2010 for doing something racist? OK, I’m looking that up now and, yes, that’s correct, but also… did you know that they lost their family home back a few months ago, August of 2021, in what I assume were the California wildfires? Whether you like them as artists or not, that’s quite a bummer.) Accordingly, the only artist that appears on both comps, Six Organs of Admittance, gives Golden Apples “Hazy SF,” a super-catchy hook-laden track that you’d swear was a cover of some soft-rock hit song your Mom & Dad used to blast on AM radio back in their old hippie days, while Gold Leaf Branches gets a darker, minor-key, and more traditionally ‘trembling’ Six Organs song. None of this is a bad thing; Golden Apples is a great CD, which despite its pop perfection is still imbued with a psychedelic glow, and you can’t have psychedelic without noise in their somewhere, especially in such a completely post-digital Century as the 21st. (CBD: Cannabidiol, CSN: Crosby, Stills, and Nash.) POSTSCRIPT: Kinda fun to look at this particular movement in hindsight, as a thing that kinda got real around the time of the first Six Organs of Admittance LP, which was 1998, or the first Terrastock festival, which was 1997, and truly peaked in 2004-2005 when these two comps came out. Golden Apples of the Sun was released on April 1, 2004 by Arthur Magazine’s in-house label Bastet, just before curator Banhart was pictured resplendent and ascendant on the May 2004 cover of the magazine (although I first heard of him from a smaller feature back in the second January 2003 issue). In October 2005 he headlined a show in Chicago; I got in for free because the Bunny Brains were opening, and free(k)-folk had clearly blown up. I mean, he had the Logan Square Auditorium packed with young adults and teenagers, and there he was parading around the place and the stage like he was literally Prince. It was a good show! (But, to think that his true artistic pinnacle was still to come, and not for another 8 years…)
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This split CDR from 2004 on Kitty Play Records by Dead Machines and The Scientific Explanation of Despair is making me like The Scientific Explanation of Despair, whomever that was. No bio or alias on Discogs, not a whole lot of releases for a CDR/cassette-culture underground/noise artist, and none at all after 2006. I see they also did splits with Current Amnesia and 2673, who are both kind of Philadelphia/South Jersey area if I have that right, so maybe it was someone from around there. I like Dead Machines too, and they have the first two tracks and like 25 minutes on here, but something about that third track, the 15-minute stone-solo close-out vibe of Mr./Ms./Mx. Despair, kinda steals the show after the live duo vibe of Dead Machines. Both are good!
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Of interest to Screamin’ Mee-Mees fans… Bruce Cole’s private record collection is for sale on Discogs via seller Jason Rerun aka Jason Ross, “whom Cole called his manager.” Browsing the listings is just a little bit like hanging with Mr. Cole (RIP) and browsing the proto-post-punk goodies sprawled on his shelves while he throws stuff on… crack open a Busch beer and light up a cig for maximum effect.
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Whoa, Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains gives one of the better off-the-dome explanations of Washington D.C. go-go music I’ve ever heard, on episode #160 of the You Don’t Know Mojack podcast. First of all, SST freaks have gotta peep this podcast if you haven’t already, where a couple of very Canadian music lovers talk extensively and knowledgably about each and every release on the SST label, in order, one release per episode, usually including an interview with, if not someone who played on the album, someone who was there on the ground at the time, everyone from Chuck Dukowski to Ed Fromohio to Steve Shelley to Carducci (very appropriately selected for a Saint Vitus episode) to Mugger himself, not to mention Linda Kite, who was driving the van when D. Boon died, or Maura Jasper, the ultra-distinctive classic-era Dinosaur Jr. cover artist. The podcast is particularly recommended to all fans of SWA, Wurm, Zoogs Rift and Tom Troccoli’s Dog, but the episode in question is devoted to SST 160, the underrated Bad Brains Live album, and aside from all the excellent Bad Brains content, during the interview the co-host Brant innocently asks “Can you explain go-go music to me?,” and let me tell you, Jenifer’s free-form answer really breaks it down, transcribed as-is: “Well, that’s an interesting question. Go-go music is like indigenous, like, D.C., like… it’s a combination of… first of all, you have to peep that D.C. — where it is, you know what I’m sayin’? D.C. is not south, D.C. is not north. That’s one factor that’s a trip about D.C., and it being all black, back when all this was forming, like actually called Chocolate City. So go-go was invented by Chuck Brown, right? And go-go actually means like a go-go dancer, like when you go to the go-go, know what I’m sayin’? And, it’s like James Brown meets havin’ a good time on a pocket, y’see? When you’re talkin’ about go-go, now you’re talking about pocket, you see? That’s why go-go never really had original songs, only a few, and they were kinda strange. Go-go was about, like, almost like hip-hop, right? But (like) with a DJ using samples, go-go could be like a pocket of like say Grover Washington ‘Mister Magic,’ slowed down to a D.C. ‘we not southern we not northern’ individualized city culture music, see what I’m sayin’? It’s kind of unique. That’s why you’ll notice, D.C. don’t really have a rapper. Man, you figure rap is like a big thing, you know? It’s multicultural, everything. But the one city… every city got a rapper except for Washington D.C., and Washington D.C. is what’s known to be what they call Chocolate City!” A couple moments later: “We never really actually liked hip-hop, to be honest if with you, if you had to ask me sociologically. D.C. never really liked hip-hop, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s a city thing.”
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Just peeped this random Christgau Consumer Guide from August 30th, 1988, featuring reviews of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, EPMD, fIREHOSE, Patti Smith, Van Halen, solo albums by both Page AND Plant… and much more. Wow. I still don’t think I’ve read another music writer, including Meltzer himself, with a higher ratio of “what the hell does that even mean” moments per sentence, and not in a good way. Like, Meltzer may be going way off topic, but even at his most absurdist, his basic turns of phrase make a lot more sense than Christgau’s. I will forever read Christgau with teeth clenched in anger, and can barely tolerate him forever, but as constantly insufferably annoying and sometimes outright offensive as he is, he still says great lucid stuff about someone or another at least once or twice per column. At least his writing can be wrestled and wrangled with and chewed on, unlike so much music writing, whether good or bad, at its constant setting of unseasoned soft-serve beige.