Nuclear-nightmarish-ambient darkness in the vein of Lustmord, Thomas Koner and Atomine Elektrine. The duo (Michael J.V. Hensley and Steve Hall) also founded two others amazing "deep listening" projects under the name Blood Box and Veil of Secrecy. [SOURCE: PROG ARCHIVES]
Label:
Drone Records – DR-15
Format:
Vinyl, 7", 33 ⅓ RPM
Country:
Germany
Released:
Dec 1995
Style:
Dark Ambient, Drone
Tracklist:
A Deliver 8:48
B Remove 8:51
Notes:
First edition (1995), limited to 250 hand-numbered copies, packaged in handmade silk-screened covers.
Second edition (1998), limited to 300 copies on black vinyl in black-on-red printed sleeves.
The Walking Floors were a Post Punk DIY band all from around Basingstoke in Hampshire, UK. The band began life as The Brothers K in 1978, but changed to The Walking Floors with a change to Ian Sturgess on bass in 1979. Drummer Mike Barnes and Ian Sturgess also worked with The Lemon Kittensduring 1979-1980, appearing on the latter's 'Cake Beast' EP and providing back-up at a number of memorable live appearances (a spectacularly mismatched support slot with Killing Joke has entered music folklore). The Walking Floors most notable live appearances were probably their handful of gigs supporting The Diagram Brothers in London and an appearance supporting The Lemon Kittens at Reading University in 1980. This single was recorded at the R.M.S. London studio and the engineer was Andy Le Vien, same for the Airmail first and only single. [SOURCE: LAST.FM]
Label:
My Death Telephone Records – TEL 001
Format:
Vinyl, 7", Single
Country:
UK
Released:
1981
Style:
New Wave, Punk, Post-Punk, Jangle Pop
Tracklist:
A No Next Time 2:29
B Removal 3:38
Notes:
Fold-out sleeve, housed in a plastic bag with sticker.
Monomaniacal home-recordists-cum-outsider-musicians are getting to be a rather common breed, but Columbus, Ohio’s Jim Shepard was hunkered down in his primordial lair back when most people thought “lo-fi” meant listening to music on a transistor radio. Far more devoted to noise than most one-man/4-track operations, Shepard -who hung himself at home in October 1998- had a flair for carving out blocks of blue-collar art-rock that rivals fellow Rust Belt survivors like Destroy All Monsters and Pere Ubu (in its heyday). He also tempered the smart-guy sound-assemblage with a dark and smoky garage aesthetic born of toxin-laden practice spaces and beer-soaked lunch hours out behind the plant.
Shepard inaugurated his insular experimentation back in the late ’70s with Vertical Slit, a free-ranging, amorphously constructed band that laid out its lattices of scree around the leader’s extraordinary guitar constructions. You can hear bits of MC5er Fred “Sonic” Smith, Sonny Sharrock and Can’s Michael Karoli in Shepard’s alternately piercing and massaging use of feedback, while his lyrics coat everything in sight with overlapping bile and black humor. An array of cassette releases and micro-pressed records -in editions ranging from 100 ('Slit and Pre-Slit') to a whopping 300 ('The Live EP')- were excerpted for 'Vertical Slit and Beyond', a revelatory 1976-’90 compendium of isolationist howl that would be impossible to replicate in an age of networking and backslapping indie-rock support groups.
Not that the confronto-delic aesthetic that endures in V-3 (a combo Shepard put together) exactly conforms to that of the whippersnappers who have sprung up over the years. In fact, his last-sane-man-on-earth stance might be even more pronounced in this setting. [SOURCE: TROUSER PRESS]
Label:
Iron Press – none
Format:
Cassette, Album
Country:
US
Released:
1989
Style:
Indie Rock, Lo-Fi, Post-Punk, Slacker Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Neo-Psychedelia, Noise Rock, Experimental Rock
Long before Derek (nee Deke) Dickerson became a virtuosic twangy roots music figure (in such outfits as the Dave & Deke Combo and on various roots and rockabilly country solo records), he was the musical force behind the unabashed frat rock revivalist quartet The Untamed Youth. 'Some Kinda Fun', the Untamed Youth's debut LP, is a note-perfect time-travel machine to the days between the reign of surf and psychedelia (which makes sort of revisionist history sense when you consider that The Untamed Youth came from Missouri). Drenched in reverb and riding along on a tide of Farfisa organ and Pabst Blue Ribbon, The Untamed Youth reveled in the simple pleasures of girls 'n' hot rods (granted, not the most inventive ground) with a fidelity to the spirit and letter of the source material some 25 years down the line that, even if you can't get next to the retro factor, is admirable. Of course, NYC's Norton Records label specializes in just this kind of atavistic pleasure and The Untamed Youth were the prize young 'uns among Norton's stable of wild and wacky, thankfully not forgotten recording artists such as Hasil Adkins, King Uszniewicz, and The Flat Duo Jets. With 'Some Kinda Fun' you get the whole package -from liner notes by "Bugger Waller" of "K-ROD Radio" to photos of the boys hanging out, Nuggets-style, in repose next to a hearse next to a barn in Middle America. But all this clever packaging would just be pretentious if the music wasn't so darned hot. Dickerson rides the reverb, expertly picking his twangy way around the aforementioned Farfisa, both of which ride over Steve Mace's bouncing, boundlessly energetic basslines and F. Clarke Marty's fill-happy surf and stomp beat parade. Better still -and unlike many retro-obsessed groups of beer-loving young men parading around the garage rock circuit- you believe Dickerson when he says "I wanna girl and a hot rod" or when he extols the virtues of his "antique '32 Studebaker hearse." From surf to turf, The Untamed Youth take a trip down a musical memory lane by refusing to believe that the past is gone and things aren't so simple. And for 31 minutes and 43 seconds you believe 'em. [SOURCE: ALLMUSIC]
Label:
Norton Records – ED 207
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album
Country:
US
Released:
Jan 1989
Style:
Surf, Garage Rock, Rock & Roll, Frat Rock, Surf Rock
Take It was an english post-punk and minimal wave band. Their members were Igor (keyboards, vocals, also in Blue Screaming and Collective Horizontal), Simon (guitar, vocals), Alan Tyler (vocals), Paul Platypus (guitar) and Dave Morgan (drums). Inspired by Vic Godard and his "swing jazz" period at Club Left, the band's career culminated in a successful performance at the world famous Ronnie Scott's in Frith Street, London. They released only two 7" singles, 'Man-Made World' (1979) and this 'Armchairs / Trends And Relations / Twenty Lines', both on the Fresh Hold Releases imprint.
The Snifters were a punk band from Amsterdam (Netherlands), also known as Cirrus Minor (from 1966 to 1970) and Mantra Energy Band (from 1970 to 1976). Members were Sandor Kleinsma (vocals, keyboards), Ruud Jacobs (vocals, keyboards), Nico Arzbach (lead guitar, and also in bands such De Dijk and Stampei), Ton van Wier (guitar), Dick van Wier (bass) and Ab de Jong (drums). They only released the 'I Like Boys' 7" on the London-based label Lightning Records in 1978. It's hard not to break into a grin listening to "I Like Boys" with its manic energy, sex-crazed frontman, and drum machine propulsion.
Luis Mesa is a Spanish electronic pioneer now disappeared from the scene, he was a true precursor of noise. He published his first cassette in 1983 at the same time that he founded his record label IEP (Investigaciones Estudios y Proyectos). He began in the eighties with groups like Esplendor Geométrico, Macromassa, La Otra Cara de un Jardín... He recorded with other pseudonyms such as Merz (with José Manuel Mesa, Alfredo Alvarez and Oscar Mayoral), Recursos Ajenos and Bercomice.
When Pink Military split up in 1981, singer Jayne Casey formed the more electronically oriented band Pink Industry along with Ambrose Reynolds (who had played with Casey in Big In Japan in the 1970s, and was an early member of Frankie Goes to Hollywood), the duo initially using several other musicians, later becoming a trio with the addition of Tadzio Jodlowski. The band's first release was the 'Forty-Five' EP featuring lead track "Is This The End?", released in February 1982. The band's debut album, 'Low Technology', was released the following year, reaching number 12 on the UK Independent Chart. A second album, 'Who Told You You Were Naked', followed later the same year, and peaked at number nine on the Indie chart. Between 1982 and 1984, the band recorded four sessions for John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show. After a two-year gap since their previous release, the band returned in 1985 with the 'New Beginnings' album.
'New Beginnings' is haunted. Not haunting, it's far too unassuming and slight for that, but haunted. Everything about it sounds like a recorded echo, making the album feel like its own ghost striving to make itself known but only succeeding at being felt. Pulling that off in short bursts is hard, but sustaining the same overall feeling for a full album would seem almost impossible. At its best it's also incredibly beautiful and surprising on top of all those things -the mournful sax on "What I Wouldn't Give" and the skeletal desolation of "The Beech" stand out immediately, as does the proto-Autechere (of all things) feel of the title track -but for the most part it's merely trance-inducingly listenable. Not quite a lost classic but certainly worth keeping around. [SOURCE: RATE YOUR MUSIC]
Ohne Unter Titel was an Neue Deutsche Welle and experimental band formed in Berlin. Members were Nina Hagen (vocals), Kiddy Citny, Leffy Leffringhausen (aka Lefty Flamingo, co-founder of Das Cassetten Combinat, co-owner of Combinatsstudio and musician member also of Frau Siebenrock Combo and Lemmy Und Die Schmöker), and Manon Pepita Duursma (also in Malaria!, Matador and Mutabor!). Also Known As Ohne Untertitel, O.U.T., O.U.T. Production or OUT Production, all their releases were issued by Das Cassetten Combinat, a very shortlived but influencial german cassette label, production company (O.U.T. Production), studio (Combinatsstudio) and shop from West Berlin, run mostly by Kiddy Citny and Leffy Leffringhausen in 1981, but also sometimes by other members of Ohne Unter Titel.
Label:
Das Cassetten Combinat – 0113, Das Cassetten Combinat – 81023
Format:
Cassette, C30
Country:
Germany
Released:
1981
Style:
New Wave, Experimental, Synth-pop, Minimal
Tracklist:
A1 Fremde Sprache
A2 Genius
A3 Kraft Und Mut
A4 Keine Zeit
B1 Bin Ich Denn Im Urwald
B2 Blondes Ding
B3 Sonie
B4 Fragen Über Fragen
Notes:
The catalog number is listed as "0113" on the cover. It is actually "81023".
The tracklisting on the cover is different from the actual appearance of the individual tracks. The listing here on discogs reflects the actual running order and appearing tracks.
In the driving "I Live Alone," Ann Prim's machine-gun vocal echoes a monotone Greta Garbo by way of Marlene Dietrich. The band had a powerful presence live in concert, and lots of angst that gets subdued when translated to vinyl in a studio. Good production work by Ann Prim and A. Kirby, who goes by the name of Kearney Kirby, became the trademark of these warriors. Everything is so serious with November Group -"Night Architecture" sounds and feels contrived, but that doesn't take away from its beauty. Whether Prim and Kirby were doing this as a calculated business move (which MCA recording artist The Rings appeared to be doing before them) or if these songs emerged because it was their art at the time, isn't the point. For what it is, it is very good. Where an instrumental version of "Put Your Back to It" might have been fun, actually putting an instrumental like "Night Architecture" on a disc is a bit redundant. All this techno rock seems to work well sans vocals on the dancefloor anyway -and the voice takes so long to kick in on "Heart of a Champion" that side two is very much like one long dance mix. "Heart of a Champion" is excellent, though it shows the group's limitations; of all their material it sounds the most dated. This is Devo in a very serious light. "Heart of a Champion" is "Whip It" with a longer chorus. It is the first track, "Put Your Back to It," which is the hit. This is the original long version of a song they would re-record for their A&M Records disc, 'Work That Dream'. Don Foote on vocals and bass, and Alvan Long, the drummer who appeared on the first November Group EP, left for their own group shortly after this. Although not very original, these are good sounds worth finding and dancing to again. [SOURCE: ALLMUSIC]
