Radiophonic Dub 2 Electric Boogaloo
Strawberry Fields Forever, or, Vibrating Walpurgis Rhythms and Veiled Cosmic Pulsing
Andrew Nolan - Radiophonic Dub out now, vinyl available from Phage, streaming everywhere and on my personal Bandcamp.
Or buy it in person at my next show (July 15th at The Garrison in Toronto w/ Lucretia Dalt & Stefana Fratila)
Art by Che Uno aka Cura Designs
Eight songs, this is the description on bandcamp:
As a child my favourite sounds were:
The Tardis materializing.
Davros delivering a monologue to the Fourth Doctor.
Anytime in the King Tubby and Yabby You album (pink/ purple cover, that one...) where it sounds like your speakers are broken.
The fade in at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever.
Intro music to Chocky.
The sirens in Cool C - Juice Crew Dis.
This is my love letter to that era.
Nothing is real.
My childhood bedroom had an excess of furniture in it, old wardrobes and dressers that my parents didn’t want to get rid of lived in my room. In one of the drawers in the dresser behind my bed i found a paper bag of sleeveless 45s. The two I listened to the most were Kenny Rogers and First Edition’s 1969 cover of Johnny Darrell’s Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town, and The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever (1967).
On the streets. I get so excited.
Kenny Rogers and First Edition received multiple plays for two reason.
The part where all the instruments drop out and the drums and percussion sound like a someone having a great time fooling around with some cardboard boxes. Loved that.
The distinctly odd lyrics I couldn’t quite figure out at the time, but knew were pointing me somewhere outside of the traditional realm of pop music as I had experienced it.
I knew it was about a man upset with a woman. The line about getting a gun and putting her in the ground was clearly unpleasant, but confused me because it’s a jaunty and fun song; it’s the kind of sentimental novelty trash that you can imagine precocious kids the world over dancing and singing along to to please their visiting relatives. Except it’s a man feeling sorry for himself.
It wasn't me that started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore
And yes, it's true that I'm not the man I used to be
Oh, Ruby, I still need some company
And then he wishes he could kill his wife.
She's leaving now 'cause I just heard the slamming of the door
The way I know I've heard it slam one hundred times before
And if I could move, I'd get my gun and put her in the ground
34 years later Jonathan Canady would release his vile masterpiece - Deathpile - G.R. (Hospital Productions/ Force of Nature Productions) - and bring this same scenario to its gruesome finality.
The navy sent me on duty for six months
You couldn't wait, Marsha You found a new man
A new man that pimped you out
I came home from the navy
To a fucking whore
He turned you into a prostitute, Marsha
Or maybe you were one all along
We have same sad man returning from the war to an unfaithful wife.
By track 6 - Known Victims - we have the names of 13 women murdered by Gary Ridgeway. 1
Calm down, Ringo
Much less unpleasant than Kenny Roger’s wife hating proto-power electronics veteran was The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever.
Like Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town the thing that drew me in was the novelty of the song (the mellotron intro) and what kept me coming back to it was something I couldn’t reconcile with the rest of the song (the fade in at the end).
There’s really not very much to the fade in that happens at around the 3:35 mark and lasts for about 20 seconds but it was certainly enough to have me return to it repeatedly. The song ends then discordant flutes fade in, Ringo plays the sickest drum break any boy band would ever give the world, guitars repeat a single note, the flutes come back and it all fades out again. Parts of it sound like they’re going backwards, the flutes sound like they’re probably a tape loop, the drums sound like they’re comped from multiple takes.
To me this was the sound of a hidden song lurking beneath the threshold of experience briefly revealing itself before disappearing again. It was a glimpse of an inverse world, an unholy mirror of the original. I wanted more. Did all music have a hidden form only able to be accessed under specific circumstances?
A few years later and I’m no longer a frenzied child but an angst-ridden frenzied teenager. I read a lot of HP Lovecraft2 and come across Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God that lives at the centre of Chaos and who appears accompanied by the sound of frenzied drums and shrill flutes.
Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. - The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath
Once more for the people in the back.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fullness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth? - Dreams in the Witch House
Other than signalling the arrival of Azathoth The Beatles never really meant much to me, it was mostly the music of the old and the tedious3. The music that people who didn’t like music would dismiss all other music to. As if the merit of Second Annual Report, From Enslavement to Obliteration, or Long Live the Kane could somehow be gauged by being measured against Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Of far more lasting interest and influence to me were Faust, who managed to take the hidden inverse song beneath Strawberry Fields Forever and materialize it fully.
Slow goes the goose.
The simplified story is this: in the lates 60s Polydor were looking for The Next Beatles and via Uwe Nettelbeck (picture a German Tony Wilson) took a chance on Faust. Faust took Polydor’s money, set up a studio on a farm, lived communally, did a shit ton of drugs and faffed about with weird barely musical ideas.
From Faust, Stretch Out Time: 1970-1975, Andy Wilson (2006)
Nettelbeck struggled to herd his pack of fleas in some kind of direction and keep the label off their back. Every so often they would send a tape of work-in-progress to Polydor, though these were as likely to contain studio experiments or location recordings as they were any kind of group playing or rock music; one was made up exclusively of recordings of the traffic passing through Wümme on a single day, another contained “pure blasts of noise, the sound of someone cleaning dishes and us all trying to impersonate a female choir.” Nettelbeck nevertheless managed to persuade the label that they were making progress. For an entire year he succeeded in keeping Polydor at bay. Finally they could be put off no longer. They demanded to hear the results of their investment, so the group hurriedly convened to assemble their first album: “we tripped and took LSD, and we had to make the record in one night.”
The result was 1971’s Clear/ Faust.
First song (of three total), Why Don’t You Eat Carrots? contains brief fragments of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones before launching into delirious carnivalesque music, tape loops, field recordings, and just straight up noise.
Hans Joachim Irmela (quoted in Wilson 2006)
It’s like a compressed history of music and the idea behind it was that we would show that all this was good once, The Beatles etc, but it was over, it was no longer enough, we demanded a complete severance with it. Now comes the noise, the new thing.
The Red List split album between The Endless Blockade and Bastard Noise (20 Buck Spin/ Deep Six, 2010) was originally conceived as a collaboration (and the Blockade side contained some of that DNA, you can hear it in the structuring). When it was still a collaboration and not a split one thing I was keen to do was give a nod to Faust. The plan was to take the main musical refrain from Why Don’t You Eat Carrots? and rework it into our style, using it as a reference to Faust in the same way that Faust referenced The Beatles.
Faust at their best were in the same area as the fade in at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, the madness under the surface breaking through and infecting its surroundings.
To finish in the same way I finished last week’s piece, I sometimes wonder what the musical landscape of today would look like if The Sad Skinhead was more influential than Here Comes the Sun.
Recently read:
The White Hands and Other Weird Tales - Mark Samuels
Mark Samuels excels in the short story format and it’s unfortunate that his work is largely consigned to the world of respectable small press obscurity. A broad theme that appears regularly in his work (without being an attempt at creating a mythos) are of occult external forces seeping in to the world, replicating rapidly, and leaving our physical, social, and cultural worlds barren and subordinate. This is absolute cosmic horror and the meaning and motivations of powers beyond our experience are neither revealed nor understandable. If this appeals to you pick up any collection of his short stories.
Recently listened to:
Hypervirulence Architecture - Hissing
In keeping with today’s theme, Hissing is death metal that sounds like a dimension beneath ours making itself known. I don’t know how to describe this and do it justice, most things that you read about and sound like they’re probably “blackened avant-garde death metal” are either joy-free technical abominations with a half-arsed attempt at some kind of discordant “jazz” influence, or they’re woefully inept howling into the void from people who if you’re trying to be nice about: “well, at least they have a hobby and are keeping themselves out of trouble.”
So I cannot bring myself to say this is somehow avant-garde metal, because no one is ever telling the truth when they put those words together. But Hissing manage to be both weird and grounded in genre and neither an intellectualized/ elevated response to something that frankly doesn’t need it (metal), or sputtering inanities being passed off as “outsider”.
Are people still drowning guitars in reverb and forgoing the use of a high pass filter and calling it The True Audial Essence of Death? Thankfully Hissing is not that either.
The G.R. of the title stands for Gary Ridgeway or Green River. Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, was convicted in 2003 of murdering 49 women between 1973 and 1998. G.R. still stands as the most genuinely unpleasant album I can think of, and I don’t *recommend* it to anyone, it is not entertainment.
Honestly most of it went over my head and I had to re-read it all in my 20s to make sense of it, I can’t pretend I was avidly devouring Poe and Lovecraft at 16. I tried and failed. Judge Dredd and Harry Harrison were more my speed, though I did think Robert E Howard’s Conan series was great.
And god damn it I was young and exciting!