cyberinsekt

New Zealand indie music, Flying Nun records and the Dunedin sound: chances are you'd never have heard of any of these without Point That Thing Somewhere Else. It's one of the tracks from The Clean's 1981 EP Boodle Boodle Boodle, the first Flying Nun release to turn a significant profit and secure the future viability of the label (and probably the scene itself). I love the insistent, trebley guitar on this track. It stays low in the mix, but it's absolutely the most vital part of the song, and keeps you listening to the end. Very un-rock, thank you.

The Clean - Point That Thing Somewhere Else
(alternate download)

The Contemporary Noise Sextet (formerly known as the Contemporary Noise Quartet and the Contemporary Noise Quintet, for reasons which should be evident) are a Polish jazz band. Or are they? They're certainly Polish, and they're definitely a band, but whether this is jazz or not is open to question. Their music is not, as their name might suggest, noise in anything other than the broadest sense of the word. In fact, it's quite mellifluous. It's rather like a bit of '90s experimental rock, but played on jazz instruments. All good. I have heard some of their material that veers dangerously close to dodgy prog, but Nautilus isn't that. Taken from their 2008 album Unaffected Thought Flow, it's warm and exultant, with plenty of close harmony playing. It's like some wordless anthem. A bit on the gorgeous side.

Contemporary Noise Sextet - Nautilus
(alternate download)

"It's a topsy-turvy world, and maybe the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill. And these are our beans."

And what beans they are: tangy, full of zing, likely to burst out at unexpected moments. Why this London purveyors of noisy mathrock decided to name this track after the finest lieutenant in the police squad, I have no idea. But it's a great piece, sizzling with treble, static and some chewy drum rolls. Just the sort of refreshing noise you need in weather like this.

Three Trapped Tigers - Drebin
(alternate download)

As a child, I was prone to recurring nightmares. My sleep was plagued with packs of wolves, ferocious lions, and trains with giant needles stuck on the front of them that would run into my eyeballs. But on waking, all of that vanished. Well, all of that apart from the giant eyeball needle thing. That's still making me feel a bit faint even now. No, in my waking hours the thing I was most scared of was the long red-legged scissorman, who sneaked into the rooms of boys who sucked their thumbs, and SNIPPED those thumbs right off. If you're going to terrify small children, you should terrify them with the best, and I had been exposed to Heinrich Hoffmann's The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb.

Here's the dark cabaret version of that same tale, as performed by The Tiger Lillies from their adaptation of Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter. It's gruesome, macabre, and sung in a falsetto eerily like that of Dame Edna Everage. Make sure a small child is within earshot, leave the door ajar, and play this one loud.

The Tiger Lillies - Snip Snip
(alternate download)

Here's the thing: if you're going to play proper space rock you really need a saxophonist. I know you didn't want to hear that, but it needs to be said. I don't care if you think saxophones are naff, or if you think they're not rock enough. You're wrong. You need one.

Seven That Spells know this. G is from their 2010 album Future Retro Spasm, and while the rest of the band lay down a pummelling, hypnotic single-note groove, sax player Lovro Zlopaša has his blue touchpaper lit. Stand well back and wait for the Terry Riley bit.

Seven That Spells - G
(alternate download)

Moustache? Check. Rollneck cardigan? Check? Hammond organ? Check. Man, Alan Hawkshaw had it all. Some of the finest late night London library jazz funk fell from his fingers. Beat Boutique is pure session groove, 90 seconds of '60s beat music with some terrifically dirty brass. The party doesn't start swinging until this comes on the radiogram.

Alan Hawkshaw - Beat Boutique
(alternate download)

On his 61st birthday, William Howard Arpaia wrote his first song. Seven years later, when he decided to release his first album, he'd written an estimated 2,500 of them. That's more than one a day.

To call them "songs" might be stretching it a bit. William Howard Arpaia was one of the most prolific proponents of song-poems that strange industry has ever seen. Song-poems were the vanity press of the music world. The companies behind them would advertise in magazines, saying that they needed poetry to set to music. After their clients' lyrics were accepted - and they were always accepted - they'd then be told that they needed to pay a fee to have them pressed, usually with a promise that further copies would be sent to radio stations. It might have been a scam, but it also produced some of the most naive music and unusual music ever recorded.

Listen, Mr. Hat is unusual in that it's actually William Howard Arpaia's own voice that appears on it. Usually all the production was done entirely in-house, but it seems as if Mr. Arpaia was a particularly valued customer and was allowed to record them himself. The result is a piece of outsider magic that's recited rather than sung, a crewcut middle American grumble against modernity. A very special bit of music.

William Howard Arpaia - Listen, Mr. Hat
(alternate download)

Borag thungg, earthlets. I first read Alan Moore's comics sometime around 1980. Sounds magazine was a rival to NME and the Melody Maker, back when music was popular enough to support three competing weeklies. He wrote and drew a strip for the mag called "The Stars My Detestation", and being a young sf fan I was quick to notice the Alfred Bester reference. Unfortunately, I was completely clueless about music, and had no idea why he was writing as Curt Vile. Have the strips ever been reprinted? I've certainly never seen them since, so maybe Moore hates them or it's too difficult to find the rights holder.

Anyway, here he is with a spoken word piece from his album Angel Passage, with dramatic musical accompaniment by Tim Perkins. Heaven reels under the cultural density of Moore's prose, full of allusions to the psychogeography of London and William Blake as a psychedelic messiah. Wouldn't the world be a more interesting place if Russell Square really was a lysergic smear? Think it so, dear reader, think it so. You'll want to hear this, I'm sure.

Alan Moore - Heaven
(alternate download)

The Satanique Samba Trio may have the best gimmick in all music, and here at Doklands we love them for it. That and their music, of course, which is a spiky and wholly irreverent mix of avant-garde jazz and tropicalia. If there's anything else coming out of Brazil that's as good as this, then please leave comments below.

Self-Destructing Samba-Reggae comes from the SST's recent album Bad Trip Simulator #2, and it's an example of truth in advertising. A few bars of samba-reggae, and then a great echoing boom as things start to fall apart. Repeat. Ever so much fun.

Satanique Samba Trio - Self-Destructing Samba-Reggae
(alternate download)

I remember 1982 as being a pretty horrible era for music. Everywhere you went it was dreary synth pop and over-privileged new romantics. I was keeping my head down at the time, building oscillators and playing around with homemade electronic music. So it was that I failed to notice the emergence of Shriekback to join the new wave of funk bands such as A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo. They would go on to be more commercially successful than either, but I'm still partial to their earlier, more primitive recordings. Here's an early single, My Spine is the Bassline. Dave Allen's bass on this is incredible, it sounds as if it's digging through the audience like a JCB. It was originally a single on Y Records, which has to be one of the greatest small labels ever. It only lasted 3 years or so, but it saw releases from The Slits, The Pop Group, Sun Ra, Diamanda Galas, Steve Beresford, Pigbag and Shriekback. Crucial leftfield entertainment.

Shriekback - My Spine is the Bassline
(alternate download)</a.

Les Rallizes Dénudés are one of the great cult bands. They pioneered the Japanese acid-drenched psychedelic sound, adding huge swathes of feedback to their music. You can hear them in the bands that followed, from Fushitsusha to Acid Mothers Temple to Boris. They starting playing together in 1962, although the band itself wasn't formed until '67. They lost their original bassist in 1970, when he hijacked a plane and flew it to North Korea. You don't get much more rock'n'roll than that.

This recording of More Deeply Than The Night comes from their album '77 Live. It's the sound of some huge sauropod swaying across the musical landscape, heavy and echoing. All the feedback you could want, but what's perhaps most surprising is that at it's heart there's a fairly standard blues progression in there. Really good stuff, sonically groundbreaking and massively influential. If you've never heard Les Rallizes Dénudés before, you've really been missing out.

Les Rallizes Dénudés - More Deeply Than The Night
(alternate download)

Zakir Hussain is regularly rated as not only one of the greatest tabla players, but also one of the greatest drummers full stop. Perhaps you've heard his music before, enjoyed it, but couldn't quite see why he was rated quite so highly. Wonder no longer. Punjabi Dhamar is a 16-minute piece that uses a simple repeating melodic patter as the base from which Hussain launches one of the most remarkable performances you're ever going to hear. It's not just the rhythmic tricks he plays. It's not just the insane level of technical prowess and speed. What makes this recording so remarkable is the joy that he manages to communicate to the listener. I can't listen to this without a huge smile spreading across my face, and getting as excited as a little kid. Praise doesn't come any higher.

Zakir Hussain - Punjabi Dhamar
(alternate download)

The duo of That Fucking Tank are sometimes described as a mathrock band. This proves one thing conclusively, namely that many people have as little understanding of maths as they do of music. Forgive me if I'm woefully fucking ignorant, but I thought the whole point of mathrock was extravagant time signatures. Nothing like that on Mr. Blood: it goes from basic 2/4 to 6/8 to 1/4, which is at least novel, I suppose, if not exactly tricky. Not that it needs to be tricky, you understand. That Fucking Tank are all about the minimal riff, and they certainly deliver that.

Additionally, Mr. Blood sounds like it was recorded inside a big tin box, which is always a plus. It's stripped down and tightly bound, in a 1980s DC punk kind of way. You can find it on the 2009 album Tanknology.

That Fucking Tank - Mr. Blood
(alternate download)

Here's some more Steve Marcus for you. He was a pioneer of jazz/rock fusion, before anyone really knew what it was supposed to be. Later, Carlos Santana would come along and spoil it for everyone, but for a moment in the late '60s this was one of the most exciting things going. Saxophonist Marcus guitarist Larry Coryell fused the cosmic power of Coltrane with raw rock. Theresa's Blues is the opening track from the 1968 album Count's Rock Band. It's vibrant, energetic, and builds towards an absolutely glorious cacophony. 'Trane would have been proud.

Steve Marcus - Theresa's Blues
(alternate download)

I'll let you in on one of my sources for finding new material for this blog. There's a music-based social network called blip.fm that has styled itself rather closely on Twitter. I follow several interesting folk there including Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. Lots of quality blues rock numbers on his playlist.

The blues this isn't.

Atomic Guitar Mark I & II was recently on display at the Tokyo Art Fair. It's an installation consisting of a pair of yellow Stratocasters plugged into two amps, standing beside a radiation suit. Why the radiation suit? Well, over the guitar strings are placed transducers. Thay're plugged into a geiger counter. And those are plugged into radioactive soil samples, contaminated with the fallout from Fukushima. It's the sound of particle decay. Amazing.

Fuyuki Yamakawa - Atomic Guitar Mark I & II
(alternate download)

When - and note I say when rather than if, as I think by now you're sure to agree I've earned it - when I get to curate Meltdown, I'm definitely inviting Alan Morse Davies along to do a spot. Come on RFH bods, you know I'm the guy for the 2013 festival. I'll save you a bit of time and pre-emptively accept your offer, okay? You know I'd pick more interesting acts than if you gave the job to Nitin Sawhney or Björk or whoever. Although Björk would be rather cool. We could do it together if you want.

Anyway, Alan Morse Davies. If you're a regular reader you'll know how good this Welsh composer is. New listeners may wish to start with his racy minimalist Night Falls Fast, those who like noisy layered complexity might try his monstrous Amusement Park Phases. But I'm not convinced he's ever done anything better than this treatment of Claude Debussy's swoony Clair de Lune. Davis took a vintage 78 recording of the work, pressed in 1927, and has manipulated it, slowing it down and stretching it out to several times its original length. It's become something impossibly beautiful in the process, shimmering and romantic. Absolutely the most gorgeous thing you'll hear this month.

Alan Morse Davies - Clair de Lune
(alternate download)

Back in 1990 Birdland briefly set the music press alight with their mix of pop-punk, garage sensibilities and storming live sets. The four peroxide moptops blew audiences away with their roaring feedback and walls of sound. Maybe they didn't always have the songs to go with the sound and the attitude, but Wanted from their Sleep With Me EP is an absolute belter. Maximum tuneage.

Birdland - Wanted
(alternate download)

If you write about music every day for five years you're going to forget a lot of details. I was sure we'd had some Geoff Mullen on Doklands before. Actually, I was pretty sure it was this track, so instantly familiar does it sound.

On Great Auk Part III, Geoff Mullen combines acoustic guitar and shimmering, mournful drones to great effect. It's all very hazy, with sounds getting lost in the echo like breaking waves, and sometimes a cry of feedback cuts through; the call of the bird itself. It's taken from a mammoth 6 CD compilation album called Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box, where every track is named after a different extinct species. Released in 2005, it was 8 hours of drone from artists both well-known (in relative terms: Bardo Pond and Fursaxa are both featured) and obscure.

Anybody want to listen to the whole thing and tell me what I'm missing? For now, just enjoy this.

Geoff Mullen - Great Auk part III
(alternate download)

Bad news: In 2005 Leonard Cohen's accountant stole $5m from his pension.
Good news: This prompted him to start touring to sellout crowds, and he has now more than recouped his losses.
Bad news: Two solid years on tour did a real number on his voice. Although critics were generally too kind to point it out, the decline from 2008 to 2010 was saddening.

Here's something from happier days. Cohen has always been one of music's great humourists, and lyrically he was top form through his 1988 album I'm Your Man. It may seem peculiar to consider a song as resentful as Everybody Knows as humourous, but he stays wryly amused throughout its tale of regret, betrayal and disaster. It's one of the bitterest songs in his repertoire, but he always sounds as if he is smiling inside when he sings it. And there's something about that 1980s production, full of synths and backing vocals. It's as if Cohen can't believe his ears. The world may have turned to shit, his music may have turned all showbiz on him, but he'll sing anyway, dammit.

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows
(alternate download)