Ekoplekz – Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1 (Punch Drunk LP and digital)

More vinyl promo goodness from the Ekoplekz camp puts a big stupid grin on my face. The many moods of Ekoplekz are becoming slightly more apparent over time. This is much more aggy, more urgent than the Live at Dubloaded LP I reviewed last month. (And the standard disclaimer still applies – I am biased. Pro-Ekoplekz.) The tracks are shorter, generally denser, and less spacey. The lo-fi improvised electronic signatures remain.

Punch Drunk’s press blurb says that Nick’s “retro futurism” is tempered with a “post-dubstep sensibility” which makes me cringe a bit and I think is oversimplifying things (although I fully understand that is what a one-sheeter is supposed to do). Intrusive Incidentalz is less about influences and homages and more about intersecting paths in a maze. Bits that recall vintage Throbbing Gristle to an old fart like me will conjur up something completely different to a teenager just falling under the spell of dubstep or (and you can scoff all you like, but they are out there – I meet their parents!).

One of Richard H Kirk’s best contributions to the Synth Britannia documentary was saying that Cabaret Voltaire were trying to soundtrack the extreme political climate and paranoia of the era they were working in. For Kirk, the Brixton riots were inspirational – finally someone was kicking back. Only the most ardent anarchist would say that the recent riots were inspirational in the same way, but they are a good indicator of where things are headed – of the desperation (and desperate opportunism) the UK is soaked with right now.

Making tracks for the dancefloor is an entirely honourable pursuit in these circumstances and will provide that flash of release during hard times for lots of people. But for me, the wonky pummeling of “Clodsteps” or the woozy splinters of “Psionik Trance”  are a more apt soundtrack for September 2011. The sonic continuities with previous eras mesh with the political and social continuities – but so do the variations and innovations. Things are not exactly the same this time around, it’s different – we’re still working through what those differences are and what they mean.

Or perhaps I’m projecting? Nick seems much more down to earth and well balanced than me. Maybe he’s just so well rounded that he’s gone to the trouble of making an album that sounds like how I feel when I have to walk down those grey corridors with a nagging hangover, again. Sometimes I find this album hard to listen to, sometimes I find it hard to write about. Sometimes I sit at my desk, blinking along with the striplights and look forward to submerging myself in it all.

“Intrusive Incidentalz vol 1″ is out now on Punch Drunk. Order vinyl direct from the label and get a free digital copy.

Great cover again by my man 2nd Fade

Ekoplekz plays Cafe Oto in October in collaboration with Bass Clef as Eko-Clef

Ekoplekz interview at Sonic Router

Ekoplekz: Live At Dubloaded (Further Records LP and cassette)

Vinyl promos are as rare as hen’s teeth these days – definitely a mark of seriousness. Although, to be honest, surplus to requirements in this case. I’ve been sent Ekoplekz CDRs, I’ve been sent Ekoplekz cassettes, I’ve been sent yer white label promos. I’ve listened to them all, several times over, and tried to write about them all as well.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the music is great. The second is that I like the man behind the Ekoplekz project a great deal, having read his music writing since the halcyon days of music blogging in the early to mid-noughties and had all my favourable prejudices confirmed when we finally met before the Ekoplekz / Hacker Farm session on Resonance FM. I like him, and I also like his approach to music production.

It’s easier than ever before to make music – and this should be great, right? A thousand urchins’ unbridled creativity unleashed and unbounded, producing sketchy or symphonic soundtracks that document 2011 or wilfuly fail to do that, chronicling some mentalist polski sklep-fueled dystopian sci-fi nightmare instead.

And yet, my inbox is filled with the same old bollocks – somebody with a very ordinary name (or an ordinarily wacky pseudonym) has made a dark/funky/disco/electro/bass/whatever “stormer” that is being played out or remixed or whatever by lots of other people with very ordinary names. Delete. I am too old for this shit.

I suspect Ekoplekz is too old for this shit too, which is why he has toiled away for years on various bits of non-computer hardware, hiding away from the world to develop his ninja skills and trying and do something else, something that catalyses his influences, but remains uniquely him. New broom might bring the hype and sweep the place clean, but old broom takes its time and finds all the corners.

The album is recorded off the mixing desk, so it lacks crowd noise but is excellent quality (mastered at D&M in Berlin, no less). I think Dubloaded was the first Ekoplekz performance and remember reading that Nick was pretty nervous about it all, but it comes across great. If the Vortex gig in Hackney earlier this year (thanks again to Johnny Mugwump) was anything to go by, Ekoplekz live is one human with a table full of gear, all of which might or might not function at various points throughout the set.

[photo from here]

The album has a hesitant start. You can almost see Nick turning on his various bits of archaic kit and giving them a thump to get them going. This intro bleeds into a swirly Radiophonic Workshop riff, which then gets joyfully tweaked and fucked about with. An off-kilter ambient interlude follows with occasional farty noises, fading into some beats and synths not entirely dissimilar to the best bits of Throbbing Gristle’s “Heathen Earth” album. Pulses. Themes. Thematic pulses.

The beginning of side two is quite minimal, but as with all great minimal music it’s configured to feel like there is still a hell of a lot going on. A more technoey jagged loop shatters the tranquility and Nick starts dubbing things up especially for me. We enter rugged urban nighttime soundtrack territory, where the streets are empty and not always well lit. The journey ends with some rhythmic headfuck material.

I’ve played this lots, often twice in a row. It just… works.

Soundclips and Order direct: http://www.furtherrecords.org/fur-041.html (or get from your usual supplier)

http://ekoplekznews.wordpress.com/

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I’ve had time for Tony White ever since I saw him read from his novel “Charlieunclenorfolktango” above a pub somewhere in Farringdon in the mid 90s. He would have been on the same bill as either Stewart Home or some of the Attack! Books writers, or both – because those are the only literary events I was going to at that time.

I guess one of the reasons I like his work is that it covers similar ground to many of my obsessions – the London of squats and raves, industrial culture, reggae, slang. Tony’s Piece of Paper Press site is great place to get lost as part of your procrastination strategies.

He has just published “A Porky Prime Cut” – an ebook which covers a fictional teenager growing up and getting into 70s reggae, William Burroughs, and Throbbing Gristle – the latter’s logo becoming an unlikely totem…

The text conjurs up some heady memories for me – growing up in the south (St Albans for me, a lash up of Bournemouth and Poole for the fictional protagonist) and getting into all sorts of weirdness, as well as the violence from others this entails in small town England.

You can download A Porky Prime Cut for free here. It’s in “epub” format so you might need to download a (free) utility to read it – but that’s pretty straightforward and is all explained here.

Tony has performed a reading of “A Porky Prime Cut” recently at the National Portrait Gallery, and has posted an mp3 on his blog.

I would also thoroughly recommend Tony’s blog post on “street talk” scare stories from last year. And his other books, of course.

With 64 pages, this is the biggest issue of Datacide yet!

It also includes a contribution from me. No time for an extensive review, but all of the material here is well up to the usual high standard.

FEATURES

Christoph Fringeli – “Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor”

Stewart Home – “Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organized crime & the law in 1960s London”

John Eden – “Shaking the Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown”

Alexis Wolton – “Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins”

Neil Transpontine – “Dancing before the police come”

Christoph Fringeli – “From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Industrial”

Nemeton – “From Conspiracy Theories to Attempted Assassinations: The American Radical Right and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement”

R. C. – “How to start with the subject. Notes on Burroughs and the ‘combination of all forms of struggle’”

Matthew Fuller and Steve Goodman – “Beat Blasted Planet. An interview with Steve Goodman on ‘Sonic Warfare’”

Terra Audio – “Free Parties”

Gorki Plubakter – “This is the end… the official ending”

FICTION

“Sonic Fictions” by Riccardo Balli
“Digital Disease” by Dan Hekate
“Infra-Noir. 23 Untitled Poems” by Howard Slater
“Office Work” by Matthew Fuller

PLUS

Record Reviews
The Lives and TImes of Bloor Schleppy
Charts

ORDERING

Available now for EUR 4.00 incl. postage – order now by sending this amount via paypal to praxis(at)c8.com, or send EUR 10 for 3 issues (note that currently only issues 5, 7 and 10 are still available, but you can also pre-order future issues.

Also from the Praxis Webshop.

Ramleh’s power electronics output of the 1980s completely passed me by at the time. I had some of their tracks on compilations I later binned or sold, but nothing really made an impression – until they reinvented themselves as sludge psych rockers in the mid 90s. But more of that some other time.

I guess there are a lot of reasons not to like early Ramleh. Certainly I don’t think I’m over-hyping the situation by saying that most people won’t like their work. That’s almost certainly part of the appeal. Simon Reynolds mounts an off the shelf moral case against the group, and power electronics in general, over at his “Rip It Up And Start Again Footnotes” blog.

Personally I’ve warmed to them over the years (and even to Whitehouse), as I think there is something in there which puts them in a different league to the generic atrocity-merchants who followed in their wake. There are elements which are sonically gripping and Gary Mundy (Ramleh’s only permanent member) has clarified his positions articulately and usefully over the years, whilst still maintaining the crucial mystique of the work:

“There was no right-wing viewpoint to any of the stuff – we made an error in judgment in testing out the bounds of offensiveness.” (interview in Grim Humour)

“The lyrics I write tend to come from a more miserable, sad place, I think. It’s not particularly violent. Although it’s noisy, it’s not a real in-your-face attacking kind of thing. [...] Someone once said – and I hadn’t really thought about it before – that our music is more from the viewpoint of the victim, rather than the aggressor.” (interview in Niche Homo)

“My personal outlook at the time was a kind of weird amalgam of anarchism, libertarianism and a warped kind of socialism. I sympathised with some of what was being done at the time but it was all so negative and humourless, and a lot of people involved with these left-wing organisations were such wankers, it was difficult to to want to associate with them.” (interview in As Loud As Possible)

Mundy’s Broken Flag label has been seriously reappraised in recent years, with a ludicrously lavish boxset coming out on Vinyl On Demand, a nice piece by David Keenan in The Wire and various releases finally making the journey from cassette to vinyl or CD. “Awake”, a further eight CD set of Ramleh’s 80′s output is forthcoming on Harbinger Sound.

Martin of Beyond The Implode has already covered some of the collector mania in his piece about Ramleh’s “Hand of Glory” single, which has been referred to as one of the ultimate records of the genre. All of which piqued my interest when it was repressed for the second time as a twelve inch last year:

“The Hand of Glory” is the pickled hand of a man who has been hanged. Particularly a hand that has committed murder. It’s said to have magickal properties – enabling one to open any locked door, or rendering other people motionless. Gary Mundy credits this aspect of Ramleh to his co-conspirator Jerome Clegg:

“Jerome was getting very into reading about medieval torture and satanic rituals at this time. I was getting more interested in concepts of morality and freedom. My influence came through more in our next phase but Hand of Glory is more Jerome’s subject-wise. Musically it was very much a joint effort. The vocals are less like the previous Ramleh records, they sound more desperate than angry. It’s a curious record. It’s very uncomfortable listening without completely trying to blast you out of your chair. It was the last recording of ours that I would call ‘power electronics’.”

The first thing to say is full marks to Harbinger. I ordered direct from the label and found them friendly and prompt. The presentation is stark, but well done. A satisfyingly thick slab of vinyl with black labels. My copy is hand numbered 53 out of 100 copies. It’s all nicely fetishistic, which I think is what people who dig this stuff are looking for.

“Squassation” starts with some static noise, followed swiftly by a droney bass rumble. Other noises, echo and some indistinct screams are added to the mix. It’s a brutal soundscape which stays pretty constant, no pummeling rhythms or anything like that. At the heart of nothing very much happening is the worry that something not very pleasant might be about to happen.

“Prossneck” has some darkside seventies sci-fi synths and a male voice reading an account of unpleasant things being done to someone. It’s pretty good to get fucked up to, but I worry about it inducing masochistic tendencies – I always feel pretty great when side one has finished.

Side two features two parts of “The Hand of Glory”. I never notice when one ends and the other begins, personally. It builds on the noises of side one, but adds a cacophony of tortured voices, including one repeatedly shouting “No!’. It’s been said before by people more versed in this stuff than me, but there’s a properly horrid psychedelic edge to a lot of this – real bad trip stuff. After a few minutes even the screams become somehow normalised, everything melds together into this occasionally jagged, occasionally dulling experience that you can drift in and out of. I really like it, but I’d be hard pressed to describe why to anyone else. I guess its akin to a banishing ritual in some ways – a catharsis which sucks in all the shit you have had to subject yourself to – and spits it out… if not back at the aggressors, then somewhere else.

It’s no coincidence that my interest in this sort of thing has re-emerged during a time which has been slightly darker and depressive. Or maybe it’s just the onset of my mid life crisis…

I don’t need shelves and shelves of this stuff in my life, but I’m very glad I own a copy of The Hand of Glory.

Unfortunately for power electronics collector nerds, Ramleh’s masterwork appeared in my life at the same time as this:

As you can see from the cover, this is the Original Version – none of your repackage reissue business. The sleeve is in stark black and white, resembling that classic Broken Flag starkness. Also it’s in MONO – the true hallmark of extreme audio product. Oh and Blaster looks eerily like TG-era Genesis P-Orridge on the cover:

Stylistically the phallic nature of the falling chimney resembles the notorious artwork for Whitehouse’s “Erector” album. Deconstructing the cover means  we are able to read its meaning as “an enormous wilting penis, falling on Genesis P-Orridge’s head”.

But where Genesis was content to pursue his art through extreme performance, Blaster eclipsed the entire industrial and power electronics scenes through both his performances and day job. “Laughter With A Bang” is a recording of a Live Action that took place at a meeting of the Congleton Round Table in May 1967 – nine years before Throbbing Gristle’s debut at the ICA, and fifteen before Ramleh was launched.

It commences with Bates prowling the stage and slowly building up the intensity of the event by baiting female members of the audience. He then whips out some GELIGNITE and talks about using it to blow up your mother in law. Peter Sotos never had chops like this!

Later on there’s a section where a small amount of the gelignite is added to a bowl of water and bubbles away like some of the sound effects on Whitehouse’s “Dedicated to Peter Kurten” LP. On one level, Blaster Bates was simply a slightly “blue” after dinner speaker telling stories about his work as an explosives expert. But to my mind he was also a precursor to the whole industrial music movement.

The Shower of Shit Over Cheshire is the highpoint of the album, combining expectation, black humour and the beauty of release and destruction at its end. If power electronics acts had soundclashes, and someone played Whitehouse’s “Shitfun” after this, they’d be laughed out of the room.

“Laughter With A Bang” went gold at the time of its release and was followed by seven further albums, all as starkly packaged as anything the Come Organisation would sling out in the eighties:

Obviously you might think this is all just a coincidence, that there is no real connection between Blaster Bates and industrial music. I would point sceptics towards Throbbing Gristle’s classic 2nd LP “D.O.A.” and the track “Valley of the Shadow of Death”. This is a solo piece by the late Peter Christopherson, featuring covertly recorded conversations. One of these conversations includes an account of an entire row of houses being demolished and discussions of the merits of the explosive properties of white phosphorous. Whilst this is all delivered in a brummie drawl rather than Blaster’s Cheshire burr, the parallels are clear.

Blaster stopped demolition work in 2001 after a stroke, AT THE AGE OF 79. He was blowing things up until he was nearly eighty! He carried on his Live Actions after that, eventually passing away after heart failure in 2006.

It is doubtful that Vinyl On Demand will be producing a lavish retrospective boxset of his work. The twats.

Over 50 pages of leftfield guitar-based music, good attitude with tasty DIY layout and graphics.

The Ramleh interview is especially good, focussing just as much on their underrated guitar work as much as power electronics. They also ask Ramleh mainstay Gary Mundy about Croydon and dubstep artist Burial – a nice fresh approach.

The interview with Bruno Wizard of proto- UK punks The Homosexuals is a bit “all over the place” largely due to Bruno’s exuberant personality, but that makes for a much better read than the usual band interview.

“Suggested listening circumstances for the unemployed single male” is a nice feature and I also enjoyed the articles on “Geocaching” (GPS enabled treasure hunt / derive) in Hackney, “Mixtape Wars” (in which three people do compilation tapes and comment/disrespect on each other’s) and the rant on punk/hardcore record collecting.

I was less bothered about the other band interviews because I’d never heard of them… maybe I should investigate…

Niche Homo is avaiable from here.

Who Makes the Nazis?: What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? My Time as a Death In June Fan.

An autobiographical post about my time as a neofolk obsessive and how I gradually came to reject it all.

Who Makes The Nazis is a new blog which is “Keeping an eye on the neo-fascists currently burrowing their way into a subculture near you…” off to a good start with yet more on Tony Wakeford, but also some more general ruminations on the neofolk scene which are very well argued. I especially liked the comments in this entry about artists who harp on about exploring extreme material, but seem unable to come to any conclusions or opinions about their favourite subject matter, even after a quarter of a century.

I was also thrilled to see Martin rev up the Beyond The Implode war machine with a piece entitled “10 youthful musical rituals I (sometimes) miss“.

Datacide magazine have started digitising the archival pieces from their predecessor, Alien Underground, which was a great zine covering techno, noise and politics in the mid 1990s. Pieces so far on the Criminal Justice Act, Digital Hardcore Recordings, Sakho, and a lot more. Even the record reviews from back then are a nice reminder times gone by…

Datacide contributor Flint Michigan has a great interview with Arthur McDonald of early Factory Records act The Royal Family And The Poor over at Mute Magazine.

Matt owns a lot more boxsets than me:

These Trojan sets, compiled by Steve Barrow, were the most accessible way to get into Black Ark stuff in the late eighties. They foreshadowed Barrow’s later work with the Blood & Fire label – incorporating great selection, sound quality and design. And also the excellent Arkology 3 CD set on Island.

Sort of “Occult Roots of Big Beat” set, featuring mad breakbeat tunes from across the board. I got this ridiculously cheap (I think 6 quid?) from Berwick Street in the mid 90s.

Test Dept’s first LP with grainy photo inserts. This must have been the first box set I ever bought, in the mid eighties. Ordered via the back pages of “Record Collector” magazine. Also the first record I ever picked up from a Post Office depot, something which seems second nature now! Some if not all of this was produced by Genesis P-Orridge. Another Some Bizzare classic.

This used to be ubiquitous – peaking out of people’s record shelves at you when you visited them for the first time. Shorthand for a particular background and all-encompassing worldview which many of us have now jettisoned most of – but the traces remain. Lots of 4o year old anarchopunk “sleepers” out there, biding their time.

This set includes a whopping great booklet featuring the tragic tale of Stonehenge Free Festival founder Wally Hope. And a full colour poster by Gee Vaucher (which mine is missing, boo!)

I had this on tape for years and then finally found a copy in Reckless Records in Islington (RIP) for a good price in the late 90s.

Vagina Dentata Organ
THE LONDON PUNK TAPES
Exhibition
15 JULY – 26 SEPTEMBER, 2010
ARCHIVE

La Ramblas 7, Barcelona 08002

During 1976 and 1977 Jordi Valls recorded live on nine audio cassettes some of the early punk gigs in London. These tapes, featuring The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, Subway Sect, Billy Idol & Generation X, The Slits and Buzzcocks, capture the true sound of punk — raw, countercultural and subversive — as a phenomenon that had a radical impact on popular music and fashion, first in Britain and America, and then worldwide.

Arguably the most interesting aspect of punk is its vital, visceral energy, and the demonstration that the only thing that really matters is the intention, the power of the imagination, and nothing more. Sound, photographs, an audio-visual with punk iconography by Franc Aleu-Urano Films and an installation combine here to profile a rebellious attitude firmly committed to its time.

More information

Vagina Dentata Organ on Uncarved