Garageland part 2: Sick & Twisted 12/3/04

I arrived to hear DJ Broken Yolk pulling out all the stops with a selection of high quality industrial ragga mash ups. Very nice indeed. No idea what most of it was. Probably a bit cheeky to sample Volcano Sound’s dubplates for your breakcore records, I would think. JA Soundsystems are not people I would want to mess with personally, but presumably whoever made that track feels they are well up to the job. The crowd responded accordingly

Aphasic took the stage shortly afterwards and powered up his I-book. But this was not to be your usual “watch bloke hit keys on laptop” yawn-fest, because of the simple addition of one very loud, very boisterous, very mental MC. Having someone shout out big ups to all the crews never fails to bring up the energy that extra notch and I think it’s well worth going that extra mile for your public.

Things started off bassy, with no beats. Keep them waiting! Finally, when even the MC was itching for some action, in came some crashing amens. The rest was a blur – mashed up funk with a Jah Tubbys Studio siren over the top and some effects thrown liberally into the mix. Occasionally there would be some respite with a breakdown, including one with some great resonating noises (I think from a forthcoming JUNK release?). I really enjoyed some of the slower tracks which were beginning to verge on IDM (a shit term for some good music – this wasn’t plodding noodly stuff, it was really engaging).

All the stops were pulled out towards the end, with the anthems ‘Dirty Face’ (off the Ambush Bass & Superstructure EP) and the stupid fast track off JUNK001 leaving people sweating and smiley.

Like Superman in reverse, the MC took off his shirt and transformed himself into Dionysus – DJ extraordinaire. Things got even messier from that point on, with some serious cross-fader abuse. In the first 10 minutes he’d mashed up speedcore, the Art of Noise, the Ramones, breakbeats, and bagpipes. No mercy was shown…

Is Hecate Endangering German Youth?

Last week German Customs agents confiscated a copy of Hecate’s first album The Magick of Female Ejaculation (a joint release on Praxis and Zhark International) from the warehouse of one the CD’s distributors.

Christoph from Praxis writes:

“At a previous check the title had already been noted, but not confiscated; at the time the agents just wrote down title and description, but it looks like they decided the case was serious enough to come back and secure a copy.

The procedure now is that the confiscated copy is forwarded to the ‘Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften’ (Federal Office for Youth-Endangering Writing). As there is no ‘urgency’ in this case (according to a customs official), it will take anything between 2-5 months for the office to decide if the title is indeed a danger to young Germans.

If they decide so, it would mean that the CD (and presumably the record?) is placed on the dreaded ‘Index’. This means that it’s illegal to display, promote or openly sell the title.”

The album has been dogged by controversy since even before its release, with the first printer refusing to produce the graphic, but not distasteful, sleeve.

Garageland part 1: Vox n Roll 11/3/04

Vox and Roll is a free monthly event at which authors read their work and play a few of their favourite tunes. It is in the tiny Minibar at the Garage and well worth checking, even if (like me) the thought of attending a literary event makes you cringe.

Tonights show featured two authors who have new books published by The Do Not Press.

Maxim Jakubowski was first up and read some selections from his new novel Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer. Largely about a stripper who doubled up as an assassin. It was alright but you are kind of stuck there, listening politely, even if you have mixed feelings and I didn’t really enjoy his reading voice or presence. Sorry Maxim if you are reading this via google. I can’t remember much about the tracks he played either, but one of them was the Jesus and Mary Chain.

down and out in Hoxton and Shoreditch by Stewart Home

Stewart Home is another kettle of fish. For starters, he doesn’t read, he recites – great chunks of his work, from memory. He also gets animated – pacing backwards and forwards, not standing behind a lectern. He kicked off with some material from his latest novel Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton. The bulk of the piece concerned the day to day life of a prostitute in the area and Stewart went on to explain that a lot of the book concerns his experiences living there a few years back and the ever-increasing gentrification of the place.

And thence on to the back catalogue including his other Do-Not Press book Cunt and the absolute classic A Fiery Flying Roll piece from Defiant Pose, which is included here. The piece superimposes a narrative that reveals the history and psychogeography of central London onto an account of a riot that destroys it, alongside a third text which describes an anarchist being given head whilst travelling down the Thames in a boat, reciting Abiezer Coppe’s rant. Stewart’s tracks included some obscure punk and some Funkadelic, if I remember correctly.

Exploding Cinema

I’ve previously bigged up Stefan Szczelkun’s book The Conspiracy of Good Taste and am pleased to see that his PhD thesis is now online:

1992-1999 Exploding Cinema, culture and democracy

I haven’t had time to check it all out as yet, but a brief conversation in a caff a couple of years back revealed that the main thrust was looking at the way counter-culture or underground organisations worked and disintegrated.

Stefan has been involved personally with enough of this to have some serious insight and there are some background chapters on his involvement with The Scratch Orchestra, self-build, underground publishing and other activities.

Chris Groner 31/7/1967 – 27/2/2004

I was stunned and deeply saddened to hear about the recent death of Chris Groner.

I met Chris whilst organising parts of Hackney Anarchy Week in 1996. H.A.W. was a 10 day festival of workshops, actions, gigs, films and other events held in one of London’s most anarchic boroughs. It was 10 days long because you got two weekends that way (including the Friday evening), which is how life should be. But did lead to all sorts of comments about anarchists refusing to be constrained by the bourgeois capitalist calendar (or failing that, not knowing what day it was).

The small group of people organising the festival were the usual suspects – people who had been through the mill of alternative politics and culture and were under no illusions about what was required. 6 months of meetings for a 10 day event isn’t the top of many people’s list of Fun Things To Do. But it was, inevitably: a laugh, frustrating, stupid and very satisfying, sometimes in the space of the same meeting. This was largely because of the personalities and skills of the people sitting around the table every Sunday afternoon in what was briefly to become a squatted social centre on Kingsland Road.

Chris was one of those people who managed to pull off having a keen sense of the ridiculous as well as being incredibly energetic and organised. Like many people involved with that milieu she leaves behind her a legacy of events, relationships and memories that are by their very nature never documented properly by the mainstream media. It’s up to us to remember each other and to try to place people’s contributions to the collective process of transforming the world into some sort of context.

And the world is a worse place without Chris, both because of what she did and more importantly, because of who she was. Some of the context is provided by this website, created by Chris’ friends, family and comrades: http://www.chris-groner.com

The rest of the context lies in our memories of Chris, and in trying to stay true to the beliefs that lay behind the projects, conversations and the feelings that are bound up in those memories.