Andrew Nolan - Black Creek vinyl reissue of the 2021 cassette out now on World, Out Of This. Buy here.
If you pay for Bandcamp downloads find it here, and it’s been on streaming since it was originally released.
In 2021 Aerin asked me to do a release on her tape label Seith Communiti. I was stuck in a temporary rental near Jane Street with a laptop, two delay pedals, and a synthesizer and figured why not? Everyday I walked my dog through the concrete trough containing Black Creek.
Previously all material under my own name was long form audio collages built around field recordings; a loose attempt at creating an inverse ambient music - something in the background that would push through to the foreground, something that was not designed to relax, but to quietly cause anxiety.
But after three releases I was stuck moving that style forward; it was taking me too long to make anything, turning a years worth of various recordings into coherent pieces wasn’t really doing it for me. At the same time I was reaching the peak of my frustration by the amount of rappers that were sitting on entire albums of music I’d provided them with that were clearly never going to be released. If you give your stuff away for free it’s less likely to be finished by the other parties involved.
So I took the first tentative steps at combining the two approaches and Black Creek was the result.
I have a rule that I won’t talk about process in ASBO Oskorei, so I’ll start the backwards journey these newsletters are supposed to be, but the final two songs are the time machine that get us there.
Oneironautics was a track built entirely out of the sound of the electronic lock at the apartment i was sequestered in for 6 weeks and Zeigarnik Effect was essentially the formula for the album. Both were heavily indebted to The Dream Forger, track one on side two of Techno Animal’s 1991 album Ghosts.
Freak Fucker
Bad was a basement record shop in the early 90s in Leeds, the main floor was goth and vaguely fetish gear (was it? Is this my memory filling in the gaps?) and band shirts. This was the place where 17- 20 year old me would blind buy noise rock and power electronics albums on the basis of staff recommendations alone
Ghosts was one of those recommendations.
Techno Animal was Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Head of David, Fall of Because) and Kevin Martin (God, Pathological Records), and as the decade closed out would be known for their distorted take on drum heavy hip hop, but in 1991 that’s not where they were at.
The form of Ghosts is guitars that have been sampled, looped and had all human feeling intentionally removed, the same Godflesh drum machine, but with occasionally less authoritarian sounding rhythms, and Kevin Martin playing echo heavy saxophone over the top, making it marginally more welcoming to listen to by breaking the rigidity of the drums and guitars.
You can hear Godflesh in it - the mechanized terror and authoritarian pulse - but Ghosts is far less pinned to rock and metal, it has the same early Swans influence of Godflesh, but with none of the post-punk and a noticeable Art of Noise style approach to sampling.
In 1991 I didn’t yet have the musical language to fully understand what Ghosts was, I thought it sounded a bit like The Young Gods, but with the ideas of Kollaps era Einsturzende Neubauten. In 2023 Ghosts makes the most sense to me when I place it alongside the first two Main EPs1, it’s a similar approach, but more nightmarish, more Clive Barker.
LSD and Grays
Track 1, side 2. The Dream Forger. 8 minutes of slowly building saxophone, a repeating simple phrase that gradually builds through various Robert Frippe and Channel One techniques into a deep droning mass.
If we ended up at my place under the influence of LSD we would invariably have this song on repeat in the dark with the windows open. The night sky turning neon purple and Zeta Reticulans appearing in the room and harassing us.
An 8 minute song but as a teenager it felt like it went on for hours (even without the drugs). It’s the lull in the centre of the album and every single time we listened as a group of psychedelic addled delinquents we would all collectively feel the sudden pain of the sharp shift into album closer Tough Cop/ Soft Cop’s intro guitar loop. Tough Cop/ Soft Cop made absolutely no sense to me at the time, 30 years later and with a working knowledge of samplers it’s not that hard to figure out, but god damn this was otherworldly.
Jesus. Weeping. Hold on to me.
March 22nd, 1992, Godflesh plays The Duchess of York in Leeds. I’m 18 years old, Broadrick is 23 and in 2023 this seems impossible to me, but here we are, what the hell have I done with my life? Anyway…
Godflesh were a three piece for this tour, on second guitar was Robert Hampson - see footnotes - they started with an enormous wall of bass sound and they ended with Like Rats, that’s what I remember of the music. This was the era when British crusties looked and acted like they were sent back in time from a post-nuclear wasteland and it was my first experience with being in a room with them en masse. Some cosmic horror that took the form of a whirling mass of dreadlocks and studs burst through the threshold of reality and landed on my face, cutting my lip. Great fun. Five days later I was at a rave (Ark @ Leeds Poly) and got speed in the cut and it blistered up like leprosy.
I am a Godflesh EPs guy, yes, Streetcleaner is one of the greatest albums ever made, Us and Them is a downplayed gem in their discography (Broadrick is on record as hating this album), and the best single song by the band is found on Songs of Love and Hate (Frail3), but Godflesh EPs are my go to for the band; Cold World, Slavestate, Merciless, Slateman, Tiny Tears.
Godflesh really started to make sense to me in 1991 on the Slavestate ep.
Slavestate (the song) is built around a loop taken from Stakker Humanoid’s 1988 self titled absolute banger of an acid house track. Stakker Humanoid (original mix) starts every bit the standard genteel dance music of the time, then at 1:15 it all gets ripped away and the track’s main refrain takes over. Once the rug gets pulled from under the listener this is a harder and more sinister, less loving face of the rave culture of the time.
Godflesh take a loop from Stakker Humanoid, drop the tempo, and build the song on top of it, make it their own entirely by pulling the dystopian shock of the original out and working it to its logical conclusion. Slavestate would not exist without Stakker Humanoid.
Would Slavestate have stood the test of time if Godflesh used Praga Khan’s 1992 Injected With a Poison - a song that did a far less effective bait and switch between utopian and sinister than Stakker Humanoid did - as its basis instead4? Justin, I’ll send you $20 if you flip some of the harder parts of that song on a future release.
Godflesh would use this formula several times, building songs on top of preexisting electronic hits. Witch Hunt from 1999’s Them and Us repurposes Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance to significant effect, turning it from goofy novelty dance hit (cards on the table, I am a huge Digital Underground fan) into an oppressive and depressive new form. Landlord from 2023’s Purge drum track is an undisguised (they want you to know what it is) flip of Hardnoise’s timeless UK hip hop classic Untitled (1990). 5
This could all become talk about Godflesh and an interest in subverting culture and dance music, subverting and repurposing technology, but lets not overthink this and instead apply Occam’s Razor here: there’s always been a genuine love and understanding of dance culture and electronic music at the heart of Godflesh.
Intensive Care play our first show in four years on September 21st with Godflesh and Cell Genesis at Lee’s Palace, Toronto.
Next post will be after Garshas drops, in a week or two.
Recently read:
The better biographies attempt to present a timeline and offer complete answers to endlessly repeated half-truths that go unexamined and pass into fact.
Charnas does both very well here. The unexamined half truths he convincingly takes to task are that Dilla was a drummer who played a sampler and that he intentionally left in mistakes or played everything by hand.
In non-biographical chapters Charnas uses very understandable (and not dry) music theory to explain what Dilla was actually doing and how changes in music technology allowed his style to take shape and take root. It’s hard to disagree with Charnas conclusions and it made me listen to Dilla with fresh ears again.
Recently listened to:
Killing Sound - Razor X Productions
Let’s continue to show Kevin Martin some love. Killing Sound (The Bug and The Rootsman in collaboration) was released by Rephlex in 2006 and is barely available on the internet. Some of the songs you can find on streaming if you you look very carefully, a couple of songs have been on youtube for a while but it was earlier this year the entire collection was uploaded. At the time of writing it’s had 234 views in the 8 months it’s been uploaded.
Stripped down aggressive dancehall; Hard vocals, hard beats, blown out bass, dub sirens, primitive time-stretched textures. The structures of the songs are largely attained by stacking rhythmic sounds then pulling layers back again.
A lot of the vocal tracks cut off sharply or trail off unnaturally, which makes me think much of this release is various acapella recordings recycled into new forms and suggests one possible reason as to why it may not be so readily available digitally.
Highlights for me include my first exposure to Warrior Queen, Boom Boom Claat with Cutty Ranks on the mic where the synths sound like someone took Joey Beltram presets and repurposed them to be the soundtrack to violent mass insurrection.
And best of all, WWW featuring Mexican. Mexican (who is he? Any leads please let me know, my own searching has been fruitless) regales the listener with a tale of him getting a brand new top of the line 2001 computer and downloading a shotgun that can hold 21 shots leading him to become the most sought after hit man. Mexican also vividly asks you to imagine him dressed all in black kicking your door in and shooting you in the head before he escapes and everyone tries to find him to give him killing contracts. Deliriously violent stuff.
It’s lazy of me, but generally when people who are into metal or industrial ask me for recommendations outside of their genres of choice that still sound raw and hostile I usually point them towards Razor X Productions. This is genuinely one of my favourite releases of the 2000s.
Hydra, 1991, and Calm, 1992. Main was Robert Hampson’s post-Loop band, highly recommended. Hampson appears on Godflesh’s Pure and Cold World, and GC Green would play bass in Main for a while.
I am at this show, thank you internet, and a particular thank you for not actually having 18 year old me visible in the photo. If you took the photo and want credit or a removal just let me know.
There is a part in Frail that immediately makes me think of Bryan Adams 1984 AOR monster hit Run To You and with no sarcasm that makes this song even better. The second best Godflesh song is Suction from the Tiny Tears ep, the lyrics are semi-lifted from an REM song.
Listening to the episode of 60 Songs That Explain The 90s about The Prodigy’s Firestarter sent me down a rabbit hole. I was equally horrified and enthralled (for the wrong reasons) by a contemporary listen to Injected With A Poison (We Don’t Need That Anymore). Drugs are bad.
Even at the age of 50 as soon TLP says “witness the strength as i commence” I’m on my feet and want to punch holes in walls before he’s even got to “stand up for deliverance”. At this point it’s a when and not if I’ll do a post that goes deep in to Hardnoise (plus Son of Noise, early Hijack, and early Gunshot).