Skunks
were a
British power pop / punk group active during the late 1970s.
The band formed in 1977, using the name Dole Q. In 1978, the band changed their name to Skunks and played shows opening for Buzzcocks, Police and XTC, amongst others.
While opening for Generation X, Skunks were discovered by Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and Alex Harvey who brought them to Eel Pie Island Records to record a single in 1978. They also played on the John Peel show.
Skunks would change their name once again to Craze when they got signed to Cobra, a division of EMI.
Label: Eel Pie – EPS 001
Format:
Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Single
Country: UK
Released: 1978
Style: New Wave, Power Pop, Punk, Punk Rock, Jangle Pop
Not a particularily inspiring set of two instrumental non-album songs by Albini's second pet project Rapeman. "Inki's Butt Crack" is just 3 minutes long, and consists almost solely of some meandering, almost folky sounding riff first played on bass, then also on guitar. Then there are some more hardhitting guitar chords, then again meandering, and the same riff played on violins at the end. Sounds like a lame version of Slint, although Rapeman at least gets credit for pushing this out in the same year as 'Tweez'. "Song Number One" sounds actually like it would be a decent fit inside 'Two Nuns and a Pack Mule', although the lack of vocals does hurt it a lot. Pretty cool bass however. [SOURCE: RATE YOUR MUSIC]
Label: Sub Pop – SP40
Series: Sub Pop Singles Club
Format:
Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Single, Limited Edition
Country: US
Released: Aug 1, 1989
Style: Alternative Rock, Post-Hardcore, Noise Rock, Math Rock, Art Punk
Tracklist:
A Inki's Butt Crack
3:15
B Song Number One
2:45
Notes:
10th release in the 1st volume of the Sub Pop Singles Club.
Edition of 2500 (1500 copies issued on black vinyl).
Labels on both sides are jokingly marked 'Time 1:00'.
"Inki's Butt Crack" is credited on the label to (Spencer, Moore, Mascis),
as in Jon Spencer, Thurston Moore, and J Mascis -but this is also a joke.
The song is a variation on Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave)".
Philip Brophy, born in Reservoir, Melbourne 1959 is an Australian musician, composer, sound designer, filmmaker, writer, graphic designer, educator and academic.
In 1977, Brophy formed the experimental group → ↑ → -more often written (though wrongly) as Tsk Tsk Tsk or Tch Tch Tch, (pronounced tsk tsk tsk)- with Ralph Traviato, Alan Gaunt and Leigh Parkhill. Sometimes compared to Andy Warhol's Factory, the group produced experimental music (Brophy on drums or synthesiser), films, videos, and live theatrical performances exploring Brophy's aesthetic and cultural interests, often on a minimal budget.
Over the ten years of the group's operation it involved over sixty of Brophy's friends and acquaintances including musician David Chesworth, and visual artists Maria Kozic and Jayne Stevenson. They performed in a wide range of Australian venues including pubs, galleries, university campuses and the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre. They also performed or exhibited in Europe, including London's ICA. Brophy dissolved the group in the late 1980s, issuing a retrospective book "Made by → ↑ →", but continued to work with Kozic for some time.
In 1980, he founded the Innocent Records label with fellow Melbourne musician David Chesworth. Throughout the early 1980s, Brophy wrote numerous compositions and multi-media pieces. In the late 1990s, Brophy founded the Sound Punch label, and released both solo works, and collaborations with Maria Kozic, Bill McDonald, and fellow RMIT academic Philip Samartzis.
After the dissolution of → ↑ →, with whom Brophy had made numerous collaborative film and video works (including Super-8 and 16mm versions of "No Dance"), he set his ambitions on making higher budget films, and became more involved in sound design.
In 1988 he made an experimental short film "Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat". His first feature film, "Body Melt", was released in 1993, and was funded by the Australian Film Commission and Film Victoria. Two short films were produced in 2004, "The Sound Of Milk" and "Words In My Mouth - Voices In My Head (Anna)". [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]
Label: Present Records – PRE-010, Present Records – MX303123
Orange Disaster was the first incarnation of The Perfect Disaster, with Phil Parfitt joined by Ken Renny (bass), and Alison Pate (guitar). This line-up released this seven-inch on French Vogue Records -an international label founded in France in 1947-, with different songs on the B-side that in the 7" 'Something's Got To Give' released 1980 in Neuter Records, Catalogue Number OD 01. After this they changed their name to The Architects of Disaster. Parfitt and Pate were then joined by Tony Pettitt (bass), Nod Wright (drums) and Paul Wright (guitar). This line-up disbanded, having released one single. Nod Wright and Tony Pettit then left to form Fields of the Nephilim with Parfitt recruiting Grant Davidson (bass) and later John Saltwell (bass), Dan Cross (guitar), and Malcolm Catto (drums). They returned in 1984 as The Perfect Disaster. [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]
NO was an Australian Post-Punk and Electro-Industrial band from Melbourne formed by Ollie Olsen (vocals, sampler), Michael Sheridan (guitar), John Murphy (drums, percussion), Marie Hoy and Kevin McMahon.
Born in Melbourne in 1958, Ollie Olsen has produced much innovative music in Australia. Ollie studied electronic music mid-70s under Felix Werder, a German composer living in Australia who had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the late 70's Ollie formed one of the first electronic bands, Whirlywirld, releasing a number of recordings on Missing Link Records. During the next ten years Ollie formed experimental outfits Hugo Klang and Orchestra of Skin and Bone, then the hard-core industrial techno band, NO.
Michael Sheridan formed in 1983 the jazz punk outfit Great White Noise. Soon followed by an improvisation group Slaughter House 3, with Jon Rose and John Gillies. By the mid 1980s, he moved to Melbourne and formed Trans Waste with keyboardist Jamie Fielding. In the late 1980s he formed the electro-punk band NO with Ollie Olsen and Marie Hoy, and played with Michael Hutchence in band Max Q. He also joined Ollie Olsen in the outfit Eccohomo (also spelt Ecco Homo). Following he formed Dumb And The Ugly with John Murphy and David Brown. Soon after 1990, he joined Peril with Tony Buck, Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki.
John Murphy played with many artists since the early 1980s while living in both Australia and the UK, and from 2006 until his death in 2015 in Berlin. From being a member of groups such as The Associates and SPK, working extensively with artists like Death In June and Ollie Olsen, and having many solo projects, his work has covered a wide range of genres and styles.
'Glory For The Shit For Brains' pushes the boundaries of good taste, nice and stubborn and a f*ck you attitude. Similarly here, either you think it's dregs or you see the rays of sunshine between the dark clouds.
Modern Art was an electro/synth rock band formed by Gary Ramon in the early 1980s. The band played live only on several occasions and the project did see the release of a slew of limited cassette only releases, and two studio albums. After moving in a more psychedelic direction, Ramon disbanded Modern Art and formed Sun Dial in 1989.
The most extensive of singer/songwriter Martin Newell's various projects, Cleaners from Venus recorded some of the finest -and most neglected- British pop/rock of the 1980s. The Cleaners' failure to find a wider audience is due at least in part to their unconventional method of distribution. After a short, bitter experience in the music business recording for a large label, Newell retreated to his home studio at the beginning of the '80s, determined not to have to play by the usual compromising music business rules. As the chief of Cleaners from Venus, he and cohorts recorded several albums on their own, and distributed them via self-produced cassettes that were chiefly available by mail. There were thousands of such acts working in this manner in the cassette underground, but most of them were either off-puttingly amateurish or forebodingly avant-garde and experimental. Cleaners from Venus were distinguished from the usual lot because they specialized in extremely witty, cheery, and compact pop songs.
The original first released edition of this tape (1986, UK) comes with printed labels. It was released under license by Calypso Now, original by Color Tapes (catalogue number Color 19). Various cassette colors were used for the licensed
release, and also the color of the paper for the cover varied (mostly
grey as scanned or white). Calypso Now was a Swiss independent cassette label run by
Rudi Tüscher (Hotcha) that released around 200 cassette productions from 1983 to 1988, most of them licensed from other labels. Also, these tapes were copied over the years as needed, so the actual cassette used depended on what was available on the market at the time, and the covers do not always carry mention of the Calypso Now label and practically never an order number -that was due to the punk idea ("Be there or be square").
After 1989 the label became home to Hotcha's band Pull My Daisy until 1992, where all activities stopped.
La 1919 (aka La 1919 Spontaneo) are a Milanese avant-progressive band that first started life in September 1980. The brainchild of Luciano Margorani (born 19th July 1961, in Milano) and his friend Piero Chianura, the band have released five albums to date. Their sound is electronic-based, but still consists of traditional rock-band instruments, such as electric and bass guitar (with assistance by clarinets and saxophones on later releases). Mostly though, the band uses keyboard effects and tape looping, combined with a Fripp-ian and Frith-ian guitar sound, supplied by Margorani (much more evident on their second and third releases), with overlying electronic drums, culminating in a unique sound that flirts with jazz, no-wave, post-punk and electronica, yet is remarkably progressive rock in its basic state. From 1982 to 1983, La 1919 were part of the "Coopertiva L'Orchestra" of Milan and they eventually released their debut album 'L'Enorme Tragedia' on cassette only in 1985.
The way to describe the sound of the first side of this tape at first listen is a mixture of Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, and Canterbury-prog music. The first track, "Questo Caldo", with the seeming androgyny of the drums (meaning they sound both electronic and acoustic, creating a neutrality in its binary of sound), goes a good job to introducing the sound of the album. "Molto Azzardato" could be described as dark ambient mixed with a bastardization of Frippertronics. Nevertheless, it creates an interesting environment. The last part of the track, which gives us a duo of synthesizer and guitar, paints a dreary picture with the nearly-unsettling distortion of synthesizer. The third track, "Senza Tregua", has a sound that could be noted as proto-IDM. There's really nothing left to say, other than it's a great track. The beginning of "Dornier Cordaianthus" sounds Eno-esque. To the untrained ear, one would say that it would be devoid of influence, but a good example of a more accessible version of this would be Gang Of Four.
The B-side starts off with "L'Enorme Tragedia", with both band members' voices playing a big role for once. They eventually give way to the avant-rock style that this album seems to do so well. The tracks on this album in general feel like they're feeding off the one trick they can pull (a mixture of industrial and prog). However, the third track, "Metzengerstein", feels a little fresher as it mainly focuses on the percussion rather than guitar. Mechanic rhythm comes to mind when listening. The fourth track, "8'35", while lying about the supposed track time, gives us a more indie rock setting, something that if cleaned up would probably be on a college radio. "La Caduta" begins with a lo-lo-lo-fi cymbal playing behind a droning synthesizer. The album had a This Heat influence from it, and hearing the vocals from this track, one can definitely hear it coming through. The muffled narration, which is the formation of a short sound collage, definitely gives a new perspective to the sound. [SOURCE: RATE YOUR MUSIC]
Karuna Khyal's 'Alomoni 1985' is something very special - unburied treasure, indeed - thoroughly corrupted rock n' roll, steeped in ragtag R&B and crisscrossed by croaked vocal mantras and deliriously dizzy slide guitar. On the first of the albums two 20+ minute fractured tracks of rambunctious, bass-led "song," 'Alomoni 1985' invites comparisons to nothing less than a low-rent 'Faust Tapes' - less dependent upon Faust's bucolic demeanor and rigorous studio-as-instrument directive - or a particularly gone Magic Band outtake (free from the Captain's authoritarian censorship). And while Karuna Khyal is at least more deserving of the "Japanese Faust" descriptive misleadingly bestowed upon Brast Burn, even this seems bluntly dismissive of a unique, remarkably potent brand of madness. Liberally laced as it is with dated Canned Heat-isms, copious shofar-squawk harmonica riffing, grim oompah/cosmic jug-band plod, smears of visceral feedback, and truly insidious tape-work, 'Alomoni 1985' is most uncannily analogous to the early catalog of Hapshash & The Coloured Coat, which directly inspired the first communal stirrings of Krautrock.
Heaping historical complication upon confusion, the smoking second half of 'Alomoni 1985' winds through a noisy tribal exorcism-cum-hoedown. With a bacchanalian commotion of scrappy percussion, a dozen shades of vocal damage (overtone chants, wordless mumbling, tuneless singing, raucous whoops and hollers), gusts of modulated (wind? synth?) noise, and spurts of volatile, psychedelicized improv, Karuna Khyal bursts through the free-music barrier - albeit in a stomping, stumbling Cro-Magnon fashion. No-Neck Blues Band adherents take note. Surviving lore about Karuna Khyal, however, places 'Alomoni 1985' quite a few years earlier (maybe), in Japan (maybe), with an unknown (maybe), substantially more menacing quantity either cut adrift of its contemporaneous musical timeline or orbiting decades ahead of such. But consider that such modern concerns as Ectogram, Ulan Bator, Ghost, and all aforementioned and kindred souls could have stickered their names on the cover of 'Alomoni 1985' without anyone batting an eye. It just doesnt add up, does it?
In fact, so many questions concerning Karuna Khyal persist for any information about this enigmatic crew. 'Alomoni 1985' may lack the provenance needed to calibrate its actual historical import, but the album remains a compelling oddity -brash, bristling, baffling, and all but inexplicable. One is left wondering what might have become of Karuna Khyal, whatever year's model 'Alomoni 1985' represents. [SOURCE: RATE YOUR MUSIC]
Label: Voice Records – VO-1002
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo
Country: Japan
Released: 1974
Style: Avantgarde, Psychedelic Rock, Experimental Rock, Krautrock, Noise Rock
