Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Day For Night

Day for Night 

The sunken features of a satellite 

The moon tide turning as two stars collide

And love ignites            

Depth of field 

An image caught inside a Catherine wheel 

Rotating, turning now you can’t conceal 

Just how she feels 

 

The day is dressed, but still unlit 

The benzy buzzing of fingertips 

That spark a thought into a sound 

As the motorcade drives underground 

 

Edge of frame 

Peep through the curtain to that other plane 

Rewind forwards, and then backwards again 

In a looped refrain. 

 

Fade to black 

The film is over, and the screen retracts 

We leave the theatre in our stove pipe hats 

As the stars collapse 

 

The day is dressed, but still unlit 

The benzy buzzing of fingertips 

That spark a thought into a sound 

As the motorcade drives underground

 

This track is the closest to the small group of songs I recorded at West Square almost 40 years ago with Naomi. Back then it was a simple VCS3 pattern over which I laid vocals and vibes before then asking Naomi to sing them as her vocal style seemed more suited to the tongue in cheek cinema inspired tales of “mixing drinks and aeroplanes”. 

 

Here the first phrase that came to mind whilst singing over a synth pattern was “day for night” a film term that describes a now largely redundant technique of shooting what are ostensibly night time scenes during the day, but underexposing them.  Rather like back projection, day for night is far from convincing, but has its own charm. The phrase itself is perhaps more evocative than the technique. 

 

Having chosen the first phrase I decided to begin each verse with some kind of film term. As with the Naomi tracks the lyrics are mini melodramas - they could be outlines for 1980s pop videos in which lots of stylised action takes place with a performative vacuousness. There are plenty of nods to that and this, “the sunken features of a satellite takes in Bowie, Bolan and Reed in one go, “caught inside a Catherine wheel” is “Windmills of Your Mind” and so on.     

 

Musically it went from a simple backing, vibes and vocals to a full on orchestration, so much so that I had to start cutting back the velveteen layers to make any kind of sense of the mix. Vocally I tried to keep the delivery as unmannered and plain as possible, you can have too much chocolate in your box.  

This is the last track proper to be covered from the album which leaves "Bye", suffice to say it is not my dad speaking. 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Swing

 

Dance a furry foxtrot 

In your puss in boots shoes 

Hobble as you hopscotch 

Now late Chelsea muse 

 

Saucy little swindle in 

Cigarette tight pants 

All of a giggle 

Out blowing the ranks 

 

Swing why dust she swing thee 

Swing thee round the house 

Bring why dust she bring thee 

Crashing to the ground 

 

Reflecting on a fortune 

Now in the looking glass 

Cream on the wrinkles 

Blur on the past 

 

Plotting every movement 

With glass headed pins 

Waiting for the moment 

Knowing when to give in 

 

Swing why dust she swing thee 

Swing thee round the house 

Bring why dust she bring thee 

Crashing to the ground

 

As with so many of the tracks “Swing” started life as a sequencer pattern, this time a ¾ tango type pattern which you can hear at the beginning of the track. Over this I quickly improvised a vibraphone and matching vocal line and the core of the song was there so to speak, bar the usual challenge of working out what if anything the song was about - filling in the gaps between the few phrases I had already mouthed. I usually do this by repeatedly singing the lyrics to myself as I walk along the road, stopping every now and then to scribble a new line down in a notebook.  

 

The scene is 1950s Chelsea – the model is perhaps Major Rupert Rutland-Smith from the film The League Of Gentleman. In the film Rutalnd-Smith’s wife makes little attempt to disguise her unfaithfulness talking to her lover on the phone whilst taking a bath with Smith in earshot. “The war’s been over a long time” - “Nothing’s rationed anymore, there’s plenty to go round” she says provocatively. This and a host of other B & W 1950s British films provided the role models for the different characters that pop in and out of the song. For a singer prone to sibilance the lyrics are almost a self-directed/inflicted challenge. 

 

Musically a top of the ¾ synth pattern I added various layers of tango type instrumentation albeit warped and morphed. So in the mix one has organ, brass, vibes, piano overly foregrounded drum all building to something of a New Orleans funeral march on the chorus. In all of this the original synth sequence got a little lost so on the final mix I poked its head through here and there.

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Before The Mast

Upon the rocks where the winter waves dash 

Along the shoreline with its twinkle lightning flash 

It all happened a long song ago 

When we were drifting, our powder running low 

And all the while you were waiting on the drum 

But nowt to hear but the sad and dirty hum 

All dressed up in your bright blue uniform 

Before the mast and waiting for the storm 

 

And when it came it hit just like a fist 

The bow it buckled, and broke just like a stick 

We were tossed high into the air 

Our mouths were gagged by wind and rain and hair 

 

And all the while you were waiting on the drum 

But nowt to hear, but the sad and dirty hum 

All dressed up in your bright blue uniform 

Before the mast, and waiting for the storm 

 

The morning after, the waters still and slow 

Just a little debris in the ebb and flow 

No sign of bodies, and no sign of blood 

All hand were lost, taken down to the mud 

 

And all the while you were waiting on the drum 

But nowt to hear but the sad and dirty hum 

All dressed up in your bright blue uniform 

Before the mast and waiting for the storm

 

In 2012 to coincide with the release of the Hollow Gravity LP I recorded a session of nautically inspired instrumentals for Daniel Blumin on WFMU. One of the tracks “Running The Rigging” is a lively number using the MFB Nanozwerg and the Rota-Synth sequencer. It has a crashing through the waves, tossed on the high seas feel, and over the years I have returned to it adding more sonic layers, but to no real effect as after a while it seemed to merely drown out the riff. 

 

One approach I did try in 2013 was to add a vocal line with sea shanty phrasing. This was well before the shanty became all the rage in the pandemic, but even back then I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a tad contrived. Last year (I don’t give up do I) I tried again but this time instead of more atonal noise I added a simple set of chords. This provided the foundation for a verse/chorus structure. I kept a nautical theme to the lyrics borrowing the title of one of the other WFMU session tracks as a chorus lynchpin. The three verses are a relatively simple tale of a boat and all hands lost at sea with the chorus returning us repeatedly to a figure “all dressed up in your bright blue uniform, before the mast and waiting for the storm”.  Is it a metaphor for something, for the pandemic, for impending doom, tempting but I’m not sure that it is.  

 

Once a song structure was in place and the BPM established extra musical parts could be added and there is veritable orchestra of vibes, piano, brass, strings, scaffold poles (from an old improv session) and other sundry noises. There were so many tracks that I ran into those mixing dilemmas they earnestly discuss in muso magazines and on line. Basically you reach a point of having to decide which instruments to foreground and which to leave in a supporting role. So one may have a great vibe pattern, but even though it is counterpointing the strings, and in a different register to the brass not everything can be equally loud, and even with all the compression gizmos in the world pushing the vibes (for example) ultimately means making something else less audible. So you have to choose which child to sacrifice.

 

As an aside I think Tom Jones would make a decent fist of covering this track, one could just imagine him belting it out with that voice of his as the waves lash the deck in the accompanying video. Probably be a number one.  

 

 

 

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Idol Ferry

It’s got to be Kate Bush 

It’s got to be the Nice 

It’s got to be the Eagles 

And Three Dog Night 

 

It’s got to be Lulu 

It’s got to be the Ramones 

It’s got to be Pierre Schaefer 

And the Rolling Stones 

 

It’s got to be the Beach Boys 

It’s got to be Dick Dale 

It’s got to be Brian Eno 

And John Cale 

 

It’s got to be Organum 

It’s got to be the Seeds 

It’s got to be the Beatles 

Playing with Lou Reed 

 

It’s got to be Iggy 

It’s got to be the Cars 

It’s got to be Stockhausen 

And the Spiders From Mars 

 

It’s got to be the Monkees 

It’s got to be Wings 

It’s got to be Momus 

And his Pretty Things 

 

It’s got to be the Faces 

It’s got to be the Clash 

It’s got to be Stackridge 

And Wishbone Ash 

 

It’s got to be Ian Dury 

It’s got to be the Slade 

It’s got to be Johnny Winter 

Eating Marmalade 

 

It’s got to be Dory Previn 

It’s got to be the Rats 

It’s got to be Beyonce 

And her Stray Cats

 

It’s got to be the Blockaders 

It’s got to be the Skids 

It’s got to be Barry White 

And his Heavy Metal Kids 

 

It’s got to be Amen Corner 

It’s got to be the Fall 

It’s got to be Burt Bacharach 

And Lynsey De Paul 

 

It’s got to be Hot Chocolate 

It’s got to be the Cream 

It’s got to be the Sweet 

And Tangerine Dream 

 

It’s got to be Delia Derbyshire 

It’s got to be Judge Dread 

It’s got to be Adam Ant 

And his Medicine Head 

 

It’s got to be Scott Walker 

It’s got to be UFO 

It’s got to be Magama 

And Status Quo 

 

It’s got to be Marc Bolan 

It’s got to be Mungo Jerry 

It’s got to be Billy Idol 

And Bryan Ferry! 

 

It’s got to be 

It’s got to be

credits

 

Another sequencer delay line pattern this time with the BPM and delay time just offset enough to allow for a scrolling or combing effect. The sing over produced the beginnings of a list song. Having got the first couple of acts in place I sat down with pencil and paper and sketched in the rest. I decided to not try too hard, there are some contrivances such as the deserts verse “It’s got to be Hot Chocolate, It’s got to be the Cream” etc, but generally I left the associations between acts fall pretty much as they came to mind. Most of the names are from the 1960s and 70s canon with the odd noise act such as The Blockaders and Organum. I can’t remember why I left Storm Bugs out, it would have rhymed nicely with the Fugs. Anyways inspiration wise the list song has many antecedents though if there was a model of sorts for this one it is “friends” by Adam Ant.  

 

This is another track I left to mature for more than 36 weeks in a cool cellar before rerecording the vocoder vocal, and adding further instrumentation: a hand clap pattern (“Three six nine, the goose drank wine. The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line”),  drums and in a nod to Kraftwerk’s “Europe Endless” an extra sequencer pattern with romantic strings. 

 

I’m mindful that in including in these sleeve notes the various reference to popular songs I may be overly foregrounding the influences as if they were at the forefront of my mind when putting the tracks together. Whereas it is more the case that having been soaked in popular (and unpopular) music for 60 years they seep out whenever one opens one’s mouth and start to sing over a track

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Oozie Bluzey/Glazing Over

That oozie bluzey moment when the ceiling caved in 

That bluzey bluzey moment with a startled grin 

I feel like I’m crying now the moon is bad 

Sitting on the corner watching wallpaper die 

Wallpaper die 

 

That bluzey bluzey moment when you walk past my door 

Quest a world end the nightmare before 

That bluzey bluzey moment what more can I say 

A bluzey bluzey moment when you played it away 

That bluzey bluzey moment when you called in today 

That bluzey oozie bluzey jack-a-oozie jack-a-oozie bluzey 

Jack-a-oozie jack-a-oozie bluzey 

Jack-a-oozie jack-a-oozie bluzey 

That bluzey bluzey moment when the ceiling caved in 

Drunk like a pig on whisky and gin 

That bluzey bluzey moment when you walk past my door 

That bluzey bluzey moment of the nightmare before

 

In another room I make videos, artist moving image videos or whatever this week's term is. The emphasis is often on the sound to image relationship and one particular piece of software I use produces tones in response to shifting forms. One ‘composes’ both sound and image simultaneously. Occasionally though the sound produced offers potential as the basis for a song. Oozie Bluzey uses one such sequence. 

 

I'm not sure why I adopted the stylised blues drawl but that is what came out when I opened my mouth and attempted to sing over it, indeed the vocal line is the first take recorded with the laptops built-in mic. The thin sound and occasionally half formed words seemed to fit the bill and so I left it at that. I sat on the track for a couple of years before adding the synth bass, percussion and guitar parts.

I don’t know why you believe in me 

For I’m no ghost of substance 

Just a see through gossamer man 

No shape no form no feet no hands 

Who slides unseen right down your screen

 

My recent solo albums have all had at least a couple of instrumentals indeed at one time my albums were all instrumentals but for Not Even My Closest Friends it is pretty much songs all the way except for “Glazing Over” which is half-way between the two forms. It contains a reworking of part of the vocal from “Ghost of Substance” but stretched out of shape and mixed in with – well to be honest I can’t quite recall, a montage of various electronic bric-a-brac. The element binding it all together are jazzy chords (probably augmented or some such thing). The synth sound used for the chords was one you would find more often on a deep house or chill out track but here it blends in nicely with the clatter to hopefully give that floating between collapsing stars kind of vibe.   

 

 

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes - . You Know She

I met her in the hallway just at the break of dawn 

I was all out of battery, and a long way from home 

As the algorithms fluttered I felt so confused 

You took me in hand, and you showed me what to do 

 

Two weeks later inside a Brighton flat 

With marble floor ways, and gold plated taps 

You showered me with presents, and the warmth of your bed 

The little tricks you showed me really turned my head 

 

My, my little angel 

Can’t bear to see you cry 

But oh my little angel 

You know she can’t be denied 

 

You asked if it was OK to bring a few friends round 

Just a little party with drinks, and light and sound 

And after all you’d done for me well how could I say no 

To a tight fitting costume, and a naughty little show 

 

And then when you mentioned the need for sacrifice 

You know I was the first to sharpen the knife 

The freeing of the spirit, the cutting of the flesh 

All on the kitchen table laid out for magick sex

I had recorded a busy bubbling little sequence/synth pattern, singing over it resulted in two very different vocal lines - one was a first verse about meeting somebody in a hallway being "all out of battery and a long way from home". Lyrically it was a rehash of a phrase (By Steven Ball) from the Storm Bugs “New Resolutions” track namely “I went out on my own I even left my phone at home”, and the "meet me on the corner" verse from Lindisfarne. The second vocal was almost Roy Orbison-esque - "my little angel" and seemed to suggest a different direction altogether. It took a while to do what was really obvious - combine the two approaches. 

 

Having arranged the rendezvous in verse one it wasn't entirely clear what should happen next.  Around this time I watched an online video about the exploits of sometime Hastings resident Aleister Crowley who enmeshed his willing disciples of both sexes into his majick circle though a process of rituals. This scenario of a desire for (often mutual) destruction and debasement then loosely became the basis for the remainder of the song.

 

Drums, bass and a time stretched organ part were added and the track seemed to be grooving up nicely, but was perhaps a touch too creepy. A last minute addition of a double tracked vocal gave some distance, and sound effects snippets from an old B & W film gave just a hint of humour taking the track over the finish line.  

 

 

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes - The Red Knight Begins

 

As the landscape folds away 

A Crumpsall Riddle for another day 

Slumber heads beneath the arch 

Velvet co-ordinates in the dark 

 

A life that’s lived in short sweet gasps 

Between the benches of municipal parks 

A life that slips between the sheets 

The foolscap pages of empty streets            

 

The red knight begins 

Upstaged by the dusky harlequin 

Checkmate as the pawn starts to sing 

Enraged by the bishop’s diamond ring 

That illuminates a corner of the wing 

Where the queen parades 

Her capture of the king 

 

As the landscape folds away 

A Crumpsall Riddle for another day 

Slumber heads beneath the arch 

Velvet co-ordinates in the dark 

Last year I bought a keyboard called the Arturia Microfreak which has quite a nice arpeggiator, which when coupled with a delay line can produce proggy sequences with an early Genesis feel to them. 

 

Growing up in the 1970s Genesis represented everything wrong with music, too much instrumental noodling, ridiculous lyrics about mythical figures not to mention theatrical costumes. All in all there seemed very little relation to everyday life (these perceived negatives were for many of course the attraction). If punk had never happened maybe I would still feel the same, but it did and gradually I have begun to appreciate the often wistful English pastoralism of Gabriel era Genesis.

 

Thus I decided to go with the proggy sequence adding a first vocal line - “As the landscape folds away” drawing on the idea of a foldable topography. This owes something to an episode of Father Ted in which Ted tells Bishop Brennan that he must stay the night as owing to the rain “the roads have been taken in”, and a line from the Battered Ornaments “When the crosswords and the safety-pins/Solve themselves and close for the night”. This is that magic hour when shopkeepers take in their wares and pull down the shutters, school kids dawdle home and teas are prepared. In this case our sleepy characters retreat to (underneath) the arch to perform “velvet co-ordiantes in the dark”. The verse goes on detailing a semi marginal existence in and around a municipal park again somewhat early Gabriel in origin – see “Social Security took care of this lad” and

"Isn't it time that he was out on his own?"

Over the garden wall, two little lovebirds, cuckoo to you

 

As mentioned a lyrical tendency in Genesis was to Tolkien and 70s sci-fi inspired tales of mythical movements of Kings and clans often using the chess board as a metaphor. I took this as a ground for the second verse projecting a sequence of plays that starts with the Red Knight and ends with the “capture of the King”.  

 

Musically this part required umpteen overdubs (bass, three lines of percussion, strings, flutes, organ) to give it some presence, even then it wasn’t until a somewhat ridiculous fuzz guitar was added that it seemed to work.      

 

Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes - Morphover & Curl

Please take your partner’s hand 

Position your bodies for the lifelong dance

Please take your partner’s head 

On intimate manoeuvres in the conjugal bed 

 

Morphover and curl 

Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl 

Morphover and curl 

Ticker tape religion in a changing world 

 

Please take your partner’s eye 

Examine every detail of that little white lie 

Please take your partner’s feet 

Retracing every step now until we meet 

 

Morphover and curl 

Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl 

Morphover and curl 

Ticker tape religion in a changing world 

 

Please take your partner’s breath 

An iron lung together now from birth to death 

Please take your partner’s life 

Always forever now man and wife 

 

Morphover and curl 

Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl 

Morphover and curl 

Ticker tape religion in a changing world 

 

Morphover and curl 

Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl 

Morphover and curl 

Ticker tape religion in a changing world

 

This started life as a slow doom laded number with a simple bass line, and gravity defying Shepherd Tone. There was a touch of TG’s “Persuasion” about it. Coming back to it a couple of months later I tried doubling and then quadrupling the bass line in frequency and overlaying all three parts – a ‘trick’ I’ve been employing for 40 years. This produced the main plucked sequence you can now hear. Guitar, drums, brass and vocals later – much later, and you have the track. 

 

Lyrically the idea of each verse starting with a dance instruction “please take your partner’s hand” came with the first hum over, but what these instructions were to be only took shape after some wrangling. Every time I sang “dance” the Men Without Hats song came to mind and to counter any such tendency the dance instructions became ever more macabre. The lifelong dance ending with the sharing of an iron lung. The obligatory Bolan reference comes in the line.  

 

Please take your partner’s head 

On intimate manoeuvres in the conjugal bed 

 

Which is a reworking of a line from “Dreamy Lady” 

 

Night is the right time 

To get acquainted with my head 

In my bed

 

So what of the chorus? The lyrics here are tangential to the verse not reinforcing the death spiral narrative but offering a respite by way of a collage of cut-up and processed lyrical imagery. Musically the rising Morphover & Curl was meant to lift and hang slightly suspended rather akin to the way the line in the 1970s Martini advert  did  'It's the bright one, the right one. It's Martini'. Hinting at some sort of take off – in the advert it was a balloon here it segues to the Shepherd Tone. 

 

I experimented with autotuning the chorus to accentuate the dynamics of the lift off, and it did have that nice yodelling aspect especially on the word Morphover, but it was a little too much and in the end I left just a touch of it in the final chorus.      

 

 

Shingles - The Storm Bugs Singles (and a couple of Dingles)

 An imaginary compilation of the three Storm Bugs singles, plus a couple of the Dingles.

First up the Table Matters EP (1980) on Loop records.   

 Then in 1981 it is Metamorphose on L'Invitation au Suicide.

Fast forward to 2002 and it is The Bugs Are Back EP on Klang Galerie.

Then the Dingles (download singles), we released several of these in 2016 - they were later compiled on the Certified Original and Vintage Fakes CD-R. Here is a choice selection.   

lo-fi glitching electronica, surreal ambience, and bleak sonic collaring

 Another review of the Storm Bugs A Safe Substitute re-release on Klanggalerie. This one was written in December but I have only just found it. It is especially good in its use of adverbs and adjectives to describe the music. 

 

Storm Bugs - A Safe Substitute [KlangGalerie - 2020]

 

Originally released in 1980 A Safe Substitute was the debut release from London based experimental duo Storm Bugs. It offered up a selection of darkly woozy & grimly uneasy sound-scaping that moved between stark industrial texturing, lo-fi glitching electronica, surreal ambience, and bleak sonic collaring. Here from the guys over at KlangGalerie is a most needed CD reissue of this release- bringing together the albums original four tracks, with three bonus tracks. 

 

It’s marvellous to see Klang Galerie reissue this great example of early 80’s industrial unease & clattering grim ambience- and let's hope there are some more Storm Bugs reissue planned for the near future, as they certainly had their own distinctive sound.   

The release is presented in a glossy four-panel digipak- on it's outside, and inside artwork, we get blurred & reflective pictures of a UK clothes shop from the 1980- which fits well with some of the themes of the release. And we get minimal text info on the back cover. I’m not sure what the pressing is on this, but I’m sure it can’t be huge- as I know more often than not KlangGalerie titles do go out of print.   

 

The album opens up with the longest track here “Mesh Of Wire/ Car Situations/ Mesh On Wire (Reprise)”- this comes in at just over the sixteen & a half minute mark, and gives you really of a primer of what to expect on the rest of the album- as we find drifting & blurring blend lo-fi chopping beats, wavering & unease synth textures, floating female & male voices- either snipped & dragged, or left eerier & stark, rattling or clicking metallic tones, or wonky pitch shifts- all making for an eventful & unease sonic soup. By track three we come to the six and a half minutes of “Solely From”- here we find a great example of murky early techno-meets- industrial  sound making with its blunt blend of piping synth lines, snaking loose beats, and metal-on-metal rhythmic rattle. The original release finished with the wonderful ominous-titled “Blackheath Episode”- which is nearing five minutes of chugging & biting electronics, woozy pitch swift harmonics, and more seared/ bouncing sampled junk elements.   

 

On the bonus side, we get three tracks, and these are from the same period as the other tracks. We have the scarping-meets-brooding march of “He Rose Up Again”, the creepy scuttle & tribal snap of “333”, and the more quirky & roughshod junkshop sinister dada of “Table Matters Soundtrack”. These three tracks sit well alongside the original album tracks, and push the CD length up to spot on the forty-seven minute mark.  

 

 Rating: 3 out of 5

 

Roger Batty

 

 

 

Storm Bugs - A Safe Substitute - An industrial Classic From Years Ago.

Review in Polish of the Storm Bugs A Safe Substitute CD re-issue on Klanggalerie. This is a loose translation.

An industrial classic from years ago.  

If you follow the leads from classic industrial in the late 1970s towards earlier genres, in retrospect, you can see that psychedelia and krautrock (including kosmische musik) had the greatest influence on the birth of this genre. This can be heard perfectly in early Throbbing Gristle recordings. No wonder: after all, Genesis P-Orridge was a veteran of the hippie counterculture and was well versed in the music created at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to the Throbbing Gristle albums, these influences also appeared in the works of younger musicians who appeared on the British post-punk scene. Storm Bugs group was one of them.  There was actually one man hiding under this name. Philip Sanderson who came to London from Medway Towns to study at Goldsmiths Collage. By chance the school had a completely modern recording studio - and the new student quickly settled in there. He invited a few friends - Steven Ball and Sarah Pomeroy to collaborate on creating songs. As their music began to take shape, Sanderson launched the Snatch Tapes cassette label - and released recordings of a trio that became known as Storm Bugs.

 

 The band's debut release was released in 1980 - and now it returns for the first time on a CD released by the Viennese Klanggalerie label. It is a fascinating document of the early stage of industrial development. Psychedelic influences can be heard in the first four songs that make up the sixteen-minute suite: the processed voices are mixed with guitar distortions and orchestral loops ("Mesh Of Wire"). The songs based on a mechanical rhythm derived from kraut rock ("Hodge") have a more hypnotic character. On the other hand, creating music out of noise, overheard by the makers of musique concrete, enlivens the bonus compositions ("He Rose Up Again" and "333"). The sum of all these elements makes up the ravishing music: on the one hand immersed in a surreal atmosphere straight from psychedelia, and on the other - boldly attacking punk ugliness, focused on grinding loops and factory sounds. All this already has a trance nerve, which is a feeling of the later experiments of such bands as Cabaret Voltaire or SPK, which introduced industrial into the club culture in the first half of the 1980s. and fascinates.

 

Original Polish text here:

https://www.nowamuzyka.pl/2021/02/08/storm-bugs-a-safe-substitute/

Get the CD here:

http://www.klanggalerie.com/gg337

 

Pillbox by Ice Yacht - Review in The Sound Projector

The Best Defence

Under his Ice Yacht guise, Phillip Sanderson put out the cassette version of Pillbox (SNATCH TAPESTCH 219) in July 2020 and at time of writing (October 2020) that physical edition has already sold out. Sanderson proudly points out it’s the first Snatch Tapes cassette release since 1981, reminding us of his post-punk noise and DIY roots and the trails blazed by this great label (home to Organum and Alien Brains as well as Storm Bugs). As to Ice Yacht, he hasn’t used this alias since the 2015 tape Pole Of Cold on the German label Fragment Factory, which aimed to deliver a bit of ambient electronic dronage themed on a sea voyage topic.

Pillbox is supposedly painted from “a more industrial palette” according to creator, but if so it’s certainly on the more humane and approachable side of that sometimes bleak and dehumanising genre…I mean the tones are generous and rich, mysterious and eerie where the usual industrial mode is to settle for “frighten all listeners” with visions of apocalyptic doom, hopefully set against background of an iron foundry. This may have something to do with the creative process behind these four cuts. Rather than working exclusively in studio (be it virtual or otherwise), Sanderson started out by collecting odd sounds from nearby Romney Marshes, before taking said tapes home to manipulate through treatments and blend into feedback loops, as surely as making bread with fresh yeast. In method, execution and (to large extent) final production, the record is closer in spirit and intent to any given INA GRM LP or release on Disques BAM, highly sympathetic to the Schaeffer-approved mode of transmutated recorded sounds. My favourite cut is ‘Slow Water’, whose limpid and melty qualities we enjoy, transmitting sense of travelling through some surreal underwater scape.

Hardened tough-nosed listeners may prefer the title track, a steely glimpse of eternity in just 13:30 and shot through with a becoldened sense of menace (one possible link back to the industrial mode). This ‘Pillbox’ cut also happens to open the session and evidently is intended to usher in the mood of the general project like an architect’s anteroom. Many layers and leading towards a rather cluttered attic of the mind, which may be why ‘Slow Water’ hits the spot in terms of imaginative thirst-quenching. On the other hand ‘Pillbox’ keeps building to a relentless, noisy future where many sonic clobbers await the unwary and unguarded face. This leaves us with the two short tracks ‘Ice Spikes’ – an evocative title if ever there was – does the creator see painful instruments of death when he beholds the humble icicle? Noise here is an ugly clatter of metallic percussion getting nowhere, a chaotic brew. Heavily disguised source materials given extra alienation through wobbly studio processing. For enjoyable “pop music” fare (in this context, tune ye to ‘Up and Over’, less than 90 seconds of Glass/Reich styled repeating arpeggios disguised as library music. Love this piece of semi-pastoral miniaturising, but it seems out of place in remaining company.

Lockdown conditions in the UK have helped shape this work, giving Sanderson ample time to meander in various environs and consider his creations, mulling them over like so many stewed pears. 

 04/02/2021 Ed Pinsent

http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2021/02/04/the-best-defence/

A Safe Substitute by Storm Bugs Review From The Wire - January 2021

Storm Bugs - A Safe Substitute on CD

Continuing the 40th anniversary of all things Snatch Tapes out this week on Compact Disc is the Storm Bugs A Safe Substitute cassette from 1980. The release is on Klanggalerie re-uniting the Bugs with the label who released the Bugs are Back EP in 2002. Rather than hype up the release myself here are a few words on A Safe Substitute. Firstly from the much missed Mutant Sounds blog

"…this is everything a fan of left field D.I.Y. song structure perversion (U.K. stylee) could hope for. Much of what's heard on A Safe Substitute (fragments of which would re-appear elsewhere) were generated from that great old British analog beast, the VCS3 synthesizer, a machine used to more tonal ends by the likes of Franco Battiato and Pink Floyd and here providing swaying pendulums of corroded bloop, greyscale warble and hollowed out rhythms triggered from filter fucked arpeggiations, upon which they graft passages of alternately morose and plangent song structure fragmentation."

..and from the Idwal Fisher Blog 

On “Hodge” a shortwave jamming signal is fed through the VCS3 with the LFO chopping up the remains. The result is a thudding beat in which radio waves float in and out of hearing range, the beat becoming louder as the signal fades “Blackheath Episodes” uses three synths to produce a rhythm track in which varies modes of the beat are tweaked whilst the two VCS's provide background drones. Over on side one is where we find the vocal treatments. On an eerie “Mesh of Wire'” vocals are fed through two reel to reels, with a background of plodding ritualistic thump. On “Objective'” the thump becomes a slowly sequenced funeral beat with the addition of a haunting cornet and a drifting voice extolling the virtues of beans. The hard to dislodge tape murk covers the whole release like a fine film of gauze but its not a distraction. Early 80s cassette releases will always carry with them the aura of lo-fidelity and as such this gives Substitute a patina of dirt that the passing thirty years has failed to shift. Wiping the muck of this release would be like polishing up and old master. It doesn’t really need it.

Accompanying the original recordings on the CD are three bonus tracks. The first is the soundtrack to the Table Matters film shot on Super 8 by Steven Ball in 1980. The CD sleeve images are all taken from the film which was recently transferred to digital and can be seen here.  The second bonus track is "333" an alternate version of "Nein Nein Nein" and lastly there is "He Rose up Again".

 A Safe Substitute is available from all good outlets such as Rough Trade, etc.