I was gonna hold back this review until I had up to date Les Waters contact details, but actually I think I'll post it anyway. If this sounds like yr. cup of tea, just get in touch and I'll sort you out..
 
LES WATERS – IN MY BRANE

I’ve been pondering for months how I can possibly go about writing words about this singular CD.
Let’s start with; it has 43 tracks. My top six song titles from it are as follows:

1.Giant Vicar
2.Two-Fisted Astronauts
3.From Pastryary to Caketember
4.Lord Montague’s Robot Land Crab
5.The Wizard’s Sleeve
6. Bun Emplacement

Yes, hairy-faced dark-dwelling freak-noise bastards rejoice, it’s the belo-fi surrealist musical slapstick demento-rock answer to ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’!

At times whilst listening to it, I also feel the need to publicly define it as follows;

A non-stop cavalcade of almost inexpressible delight.

A bit like Noxagt channelling the spirit of Man or Astroman?.

Perhaps an earnest social experiment wherein residents of institutions catering to the ‘special’ are given a selection of inexpensive musical equipment and asked to do their best to create sound to accompany the concepts suggested by the song titles..

A collection of terrifying and fragmentary Swell Maps demo tracks, recorded on "that night they don’t like to talk about", as remixed by a drunken and incoherent Kid Koala.

An album featuring a song, if it may be termed as such, entitled "Sir Walter Raleigh’s Wicker Space Lab", which actually makes an effort to fully justify such a title.

A fine example of the sound and general creative aesthetic currently associated with Load records, as discovered 5 years too early by a gang of maladjusted Goon Show fanatics on the South Coast.

A textbook example of how to apply the concept of comic timing to caveman-friendly one note guitar riffs, weird clattering drum patterns and exquisite dialogue samples.

There are some songs on which Les Waters sing. It sounds like the senseless howling and gruntings of men and women awakening after having been subjected to lobotomies. Seriously. It’s rather unnerving.

But nevertheless, this remains the single funniest collection of sounds I’ve ever listened to in my life. The 42 seconds of ‘Phant Biscuits’ or the 23 seconds of ‘Egg-Leg Pete’ or the 31 seconds of ‘Balloon Farmer’ are guaranteed to fill me to the brim with an inebriated joy of life and its myriad weird possibilities, at any moment of the day or night.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemen, Les Waters. We shall not see their like again.

Today I’m listening to Gorkys Zygotic Mynci’s ‘Bwyd Tyme’ and it’s absolutely beautiful and mental. I wish I’d heard this back in 1995 so I could have sought them out and been friends with them. Just to think… whilst I was fuming in my bedroom listening to Nirvana, these guys not too far away were recording nutty psychedelic folk-pop masterpieces… it’s much crazier than the stuff they’ve done in recent years… it has that brilliant uplifting sense of weirdness that makes me smile and think that this music made by people who are my friends, even though I’ve never met them. It goes absolutely mad towards the end.. it sounds like the Animal Collective or Can or something… I think they were experimenting with some funny stuff up in them there Welsh hills… what awesome dudes.

I'm shocked that I've only just discovered the greatness of Arthur magazine.

It looks to be a great publication, focusing heavily on the current new-psychedelic-underground (or whatever) scene, along with various other things, the uniting factor behind them seemingly being that I like them all.

(Unfortunately, the price to have a copy shipped to the UK is rather steep, although it says on their site that Rough Trade carry copies so I might bother them about it..)

And I then discover that the magazine is edited by none other than Jay Babcock, original founder of Barbelith way back in the mists of time when it was nowt but a place for Invisibles obsessives to check up on that obscure reference in vol.2, issue#16, page 23, panel 1.

Rather like finding out some old forgotten school chum is now the singer in a really cool band. (Well ok, not quite that good, but the same sort of feeling.)

The magazine is sponsoring an absolutely awesome looking festival in Chicago, complete with beautifully whacked out artwork and a line-up of bands with names such as "Spires That in the Sunset Rise" and "By Lightning to the Womb". I SO wish I could go.

It seems psychedelia is back and badder than ever in the US "scene", and that makes me happy as Larry, even though I haven't actually heard most of the music yet.. exciting stuff!

Hey Hey!

Sorry for the lack of recent updates, I’ve been, um, you know… arsing around, wasting my life away, that sort of thing.

CDs currently piled around my hi-fi, any one of which I could probably choose to write ill-thought out reveries about;

Many albums by Can, enhanced by additional cartoons, courtesy of Mr. Fraser Geesin
Venom – Black Metal (punk as fuck)
Robert Wyatt – shleep
Fripp & Eno – no pussyfooting
Ornette Coleman – Tomorrow is the Question!
Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica
Fairport Convention – unhalfbricking (lovely, lovely stuff)
Charlie Parker – ‘boss bird’ compilation
Black Sabbath – sabbath bloody sabbath
Neu! 2
Brian Eno – another green world
Tales from the Australian Underground compilation (If you like to rock and are fond of songs, BUY THIS NOW!)
The Gossip – undead in NYC (makes Pussy Galore sound dedicated and professional)
Several Terrorizer cover CDs (why, fortheloveofgod, why, do I keep subjecting myself to all this second rate death metal?? Track of the month: Carcass by miles. Last month’s had some killers on it though.)
Double Leopards – live at 5000 strings
John Fahey – America (haven’t listened to this yet)
Apples in Stereo – her wallpaper reverie
V/VM – sometimes good things happen
The Mountain Goats – protein source of the future now!
Weird War – if you can’t beat em, bite em
Hang on the Box – for every punk bitch & asshole
Several CDs of Sunn O))), Boris and Melvins MP3s (I *heart* doom)

Sorry for the list, cos obviously you music fans all loooaaathe lists so much. Without the metal it would look the most pretentious, tasteful wannabe hip music connoisseur bunch of stuff ever, wouldn’t it?
Er, yes. Ha ha ha, he laughs uneasily.

I certainly picked the right month to grow a beard.

Oh, and while I’m here; Boards of Canada owe their entire EXISTENCE to Brian Eno, don’t they? I feel a fool for not previously knowing that.

My more thoughtful recent musical musings have been taking place here and here, if anybody's interested.

Off to write a strongly worded letter of complaint to the BBC about the increasing marginalisation of John Peel’s show... seriously.

I’m now the proud owner of one of these:



It makes some absolutely awesome droning psychedelic racket when turned up full.. VERY Acid Mothers Temple.. I think they must have bought a whole shipment of the things. So that’s cool. It is, however, quite difficult to make it sound like a sitar, or at least, a sitar that’s not disintegrating through a hyperspace gateway to a distant galaxy. This is mostly because when you turn the knobs down to under halfway, there’s a MASSIVE drop in volume and the effect is inaudible. As such, it’s not a great deal of use in regard to conventional rock music – I’m still unable to recreate those glorious Chocolate Watch Band / Strawberry Alarm Clock moments – but ESSENTIAL for space-rock psychedelic droning.
What would improve it I lot I think is if it had separate controls for what essentially amount to two separate effects – the twangy sitar sound, and the spaced-out phaser sound. As it is, you can’t get the former without the latter, and combined with the signal loss on lower settings this means a choice between utter drone freakout or nothing. I haven’t tried it in combination with distortion and delay yet, but it should be pretty stormin’.

In other news;

I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but... did anyone check out that great programme on Radio 2 last week in which Paul Morley narrated an alternative history of popular music in terms of how it related to modern composition and the avant garde? It was really cool… you’ve got to love someone who appears on the most populist radio station in the country and totally disses the Beatles and Radiohead (YES! THANK YOU!) before envisioning an alternative timeline wherein “Stockhausen is Chuck Berry, Can are the Beatles, Throbbing Gristle are the Sex Pistols..” and so forth. Admittedly most of the artists discussed were pretty familiar to avant-rock fans, but all the same hearing snatches of all this amazing crazy music, and tracing how certain ideas and sounds travelled through it and developed into the language of electronic/dissonant sounds we take for granted in today’s pop music, was pretty exciting and inspiring stuff. It’s certainly inspired me to fill in some gaps in my musical knowledge by heading down to the library to scoop up armfuls of Can, Neu!, Eno, Throbbing Gristle, Robert Wyatt, John Cale etc. Sadly I drew a blank on Le Monte Young, Sun Ra and Faust, but I guess I’ll bump into them when the time is right.
The only beef I had with the programme’s presentation was that it had a tendency to suggest that innovation and experimentation was the only thing that made music worthwhile… no room for emotion, tradition or entertainment value in Mr. Morley’s shiny, clinical Wire-subscriber world!

Nevertheless though, It was such a good programme (and so daring for Radio 2!) it almost made me want to give up listening to Black Sabbath rip-offs 18 hours a day. Not quite though.

It’s been a funny old week, so excuse my lack of updates. Flooded living rooms, rain storms, Arthur Lee playing new material that sounded like the most bizarrely generic cheery pop songs ever, work upheavals, broken guitars, and to cap it all I spent four hours yesterday possessed by a fungal intelligence from another dimension.

Phew.

Well anyway, a good soundtrack to some of that was Comets on Fire’s ‘Field Recordings From the Sun’ which I’m finally getting my teeth into. The sticker on the front has a quote from Julian Cope likening it to a “soaring, barnstorming Martian invasion, like the Stooges gotta deal with the U.S.A.A.F.!” Which almost nails it, but hmm, I’m not sure – I’d say it’s more like Mudhoney jamming on the wings of a dog-fighting X-Wing. But that’s just splitting hairs. Either way, myself and Julian are certainly in agreement that it’s a massive and crazed enough pile of skronking guitar abuse to make even the most jaded of our fellow unshaven noise-worshippers sit up and pay attention.

Basically what we’ve got here is a load of wild, long-winded, semi-improvised rock n’ roll shit which takes the use of effects pedals and similar gadgets in rock music to previously undreamed of levels of chaotic excess. This is music filtered and fucked with to such an extent that it’s near impossible for the different band members to play in time with each other or create anything resembling a conventional tune… it sounds like they’re trying, but there’s so much delay and echo and god knows what getting in the way that the different guitar lines find themselves actually shooting backwards and forwards through time and crashing into each other, instantly collapsing the whole enterprise into a drooling chaotic mess of shrieking jet fighters, duelling laser blasts, collapsing skyscrapers and howling feedback demons as the musicians lose sight of the tune altogether and decide “fuck it..”, heading off instead into yet more multi-layered improv noise-solo carnage, battling with the disintegrating shards of what they were playing five minutes ago. Basically, this is the closest approximation yet of the perfect Thurston Moore/Kevin Shields wet dream extravaganza which somebody must some day record. Oddly, it sounds very similar to Mainliner, Kawabata Makoto’s pre-Acid Mothers Temple noise rock group, who you should check out immediately if you like this sort of thing.

As such, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m rather fond of this album. At times the utter chaos and lack of structure can get a bit irritating and you wish they could focus a bit more, but no sooner has that thought passed your mind than you’re lost deep inside it again, freakin’ out to another amaaazzziinng frazzled assault on the heart of the sun. As you may have gathered from all the hyberbole, this is a great album to try and review.. I keep having to restrain myself from writing stuff like “If Pink Floyd set the controls for the heart of the sun, Comets on Fire sound like they were fucking born and raised in the centre of it!”. And so on.

I have two particular favourite bits on ‘Field Recordings from the Sun’:

Firstly, ‘The Unicorn’, the acoustic interlude in the centre of the record on which Ben Chasny (of Six Organs of Admittance renown) weaves hypnotic psyche-folk finger-picking patterns whilst a faint hum in the background gradually grows into a storm of raging electronic noise that completely consumes him. It’s an absolutely beautiful track with a similar atmosphere to Sonic Youth’s ‘Providence’, and it offers a fascinating glimpse of the possibilities for future Comets on Fire outtings beyond just fucking the shit out of supercharged vintage echo boxes.

Secondly, the bit towards the end of the final, and best, track – ‘The Black Dog’ – in which, almost by accident, all the spiralling madness comes to together for a moment into one colossal, perfect riff and it’s just like.... The giant black sun slowly rising over the barren earth the day after the final battle as gigantic mechanical war insects stalk amongst the charred remains of what was once humanity.

...

Whoa. And to think some people still listen to Morrissey.

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