I am somewhat obsessed and naturally drawn to the idea of ordinary people making extraordinary music. I relate to it. Recently I have seen lots and lots of gigs where extraordinary people make very, very bad music. By ‘extraordinary people’ I mean people who have made an effort to be larger than life. People who dress so well it can’t be anything but a statement and therefore the pressure is on me, the observer, to react to it. This intimidates me and I admit it. It’s because I don’t relate to it. The way I figure, it’s music that binds together the people I am talking about. If you spend longer working out your image than you do thinking about what you’re going to sound like then you’re side stepping the point. It’s possible to do both of course and I love a sharp band or performer but when the balance squeezes out the music I feel short changed. Like going into Asda for some ice cream and coming out with a magazine. It’s not what you went in for, good though it might be.
If this ‘intro’ serves to make Blackhorse sound boring I can assure you they are not. Neither are they particularly earnest which is what this kind of talk usually leads to. Don’t think I’m getting all Noel Gallagher – “it’s about the choons maaaaan”.
Far from it.
It’s all about the riff. Blackhorse pound the riff. They hammer it. It’s tribal at times. Like Lungfish they believe in making their point comprehensively and that if something’s worth playing it’s worth playing for 10 minutes; and like Can they have an ability to push the riff to new parts of the brain so it reverses and changes and harmonises while staying exactly the same.
By manipulating the sounds with a multi tracker, samplers and a laptop, unique clashes are created that are at times dark and at other times wonderfully harmonious. Considering I think the band Primal Scream are a bunch of total chancers, they were almost on to something good on Vanishing Point (especially when Kevin Shields started remixing them) and when a harmonica is introduced and looped in the first song I conclude Blackhorse may share this opinion. The first half is instrumental, the second has female vocals and this difference suggests a band in embryonic stages, which they are, but their ability to morph parts into each other and maintain a level of intensity for 30 minutes means that even though they’re still growing they can present something that never looks under formed or slight.
If these folks had a band uniform and some public-transport-unfriendly hairstyles they would be proclaimed as the revolution. However, the fact they don’t and they don’t care and most importantly they are THIS GOOD is a small revolution all of it’s own.

I just searched Google for something (quite innocent!) and it returned results with the following 2 headings:

1. Trousers to his manga gay porno an old codger is wacking off when…

2. Free Banana Tits

what??

Behind me, a man wearing an Australian Rugby shirt cut down into a sleeveless vest as a fashion item is yelling
‘PLAY YOUR F*CKING DRUMS!’
His friend has a quite nice two-tone dye job on his hair and is wearing a blazer with a military vibe to it. He is yelling far more random outbursts but in a similar vein:
‘NICE SONG!’
and
‘LEARN HOW TO PLAY!’ are two of them.
There is a girl standing behind me with her back to me and she is punctuating everything she says with weird muscle spasms of either her cigarette hand or the hand clutching a glass of white wine, which is pissing down my back every time she says anything.
Despite this I am grinning like a fool.
Just an hour earlier all these people were dancing to the opening band. I don’t remember what they were called which is sort of stupid because I am reviewing this. They had guitar, vocals and drums. The female singer had an amazing voice.
Amazing because it was Siouxie Sioux’s and she must have stolen it. It made me hope Siouxie was having a quiet night in and not out at a party where she was supposed to be the life and soul, as without her voice it would have been hard for her. I hope she has called the authorities. Anyway, people were dancing in a sort of robotic way with fag hand outstretched, occasionally stopping to pull out a camera phone and record the moment.
This is Liars Club and despite the overwhelming sensation of being someone’s Dad at a disco, I always have a decent time.
Everyone is dressed in a way that proves they must have some disposable income. Not because their clothes are expensive but if you’re wearing a lemon golf sweater with matching visor, a Columbo rain mac and spats then you best not be getting public transport back to Bulwell.
So anyway, if I was going to create a band that best typified the worst parts of Liars Club then it would be the first band, name not known. One girl in particular who always reminds me of Princess Di for some reason, strutted back and forth in front of the stage so often checking herself out, I couldn’t even deal with being in the room.
When they finished, there was a sudden influx of not-quite-so-well-dressed folks waiting for the second band. NYC’s Magik Markers. Not often a band on Ecstatic Peace gets to play Liars Club.
Even when they were setting up there seemed to be a gulf between them and the environment. I mean; they look sharper than I do (not hard) but they seem out of place. It endears them to me. As does the roadie for the last band (name not known) who is so obnoxiously in-their-face when they are setting up that I can physically feel the tension between them.
He brushes the bassist aside to search for something he dropped with about 6 Maglites and prevents them from starting playing. It’s a pretty weird scenario.
The DJs were still playing as they started up but they didn’t f*ck about. They are immediately amazing. I don’t know how much of that is to do with the band and how much of my enjoyment they engineer or how much comes from the sheer weirdness of the situation. My favourite gigs have so little to do with the band and if they’re on form and so much to do with surroundings and little coincidences and events that transpire. This is the perfect example.
The change that has come over the singer is empowering in itself. She has her foot on the monitor, glowering at the crowd and spouting forth fast jabber preaching while punctuating this with tons and tons of guitar noise’ less played, more wrestled. I spend the first 10 mins crouched down at her feet before feeling supremely uncomfortable and having to move back a bit. They deal less in the build up and more in the total crescendo in immediate form. The guitar and bass are set up to give no time to notes and everything they do on them spews forth differing tones and noises (but never notes). It’s hard to tell whether they are unschooled or if they’ve managed to liberate themselves from any knowledge they might have had. Or if they are just plain furious.
They clear the back of the room pretty quickly and as I move back myself to get a good view the gig gets better and better as their howling and slashing mixes with people’s heckles and utter confusion. I can’t stress this enough. Magik Markers are f*cking BREAKING some of these kids. They don’t know what to do ‘ I don’t know what to do either except just laugh my ass off. It just serves to highlight how much of a ritual most of what passes as alternative culture has become that something can baffle so easily.
It just keeps getting better, reaching a peak where the guitar breaks down, leading to impassioned ad lib lyrics about guitarists with no hands but a big heart. Princess Di stands up in this part and in some kind of drug induced stupor begins trying to catch her own tail and latch onto a beat or something familiar, clutching at the singers face and feet and her own camera phone. It’s ghoulish and perfect. At times it’s like she’s about to cry and she looks really lost. I am caught between horror and crippling laughter. She is looking back at us all, not sure what to do, looking completely vacant and behind her the singer from MMs is going absolutely apeshit on her twenty dollar guitar with an electric toothbrush.
The drummer seems to want a better vantage point and climbs onto the bass drum leading uber male roadie man to rush onstage mid song and physically pull him off. It looks for a moment like a fight is going to happen between them but roadie dude is a mountain of a man and the howling noise continues to soundtrack blank shrugs and ‘what the f*ck is going down?’ expressions from the band.
Finally the bassist takes off her bass and lies it down to begin pounding it with any available object. I genuinely feel this is on the verge of getting properly out there and uncontrolled and that Magik Markers will play all night when the tech dude runs on and turns the bass amp off ‘ obviously borrowed gear. It’s a perfect end. I am moved to heckle the roadie without even thinking and the whole thing leaves me feeling super energised.
I missed the last band but nothing was going to top that, it was incredible. Half of the people I went with hated it and half loved it. I don’t know ifI loved the band but as a gig it was unbelievable.
The only thing that could have made it better was to find out the roadie and Princess Di girl were part of Magik Markers all along thus making it the best piece of theatre ever acted.

Addition! March 2006 – James Smith proves himself to be a god amongst men by putting footage of this show on You Tube. Click here!!!

I wrote a review of ATP and found most of it concentrated on Slint so I scrapped it and decided to write this piece about why I love the band instead.
I can’t understate how important Slint ‘ or the idea of Slint ‘ was and still is to me.
I have always made and been fascinated with (largely instrumental) sparse, dramatic music. I come from the Fens where any car journey, even between the closest 2 towns, means time spent looking at absolutely nothing and somehow wordless music fits it perfectly. There’s so much on the horizon that’s packed with stories but yet remains totally unspoken. The first band I was in rehearsed in 2 places ‘ a theatre in the neighbouring town 12 miles away and a cattle shed on a disused railway track that was literally in the middle of nowhere. It was supremely bizarre but at the time it seemed normal.
If you’ve ever been to the Fens you know it’s a place of maximum weirdness. One night I was driving my friend Nick out to his house (where the cattle shed rehearsal space was) and a puma ran across the road in front of the car. No shit. We sat there in the car at his house for an age before either of us dared bolt in through the door.
We mentioned this to Nick’s mum. She calmly told us that when opening the curtains in the mornings she had frequently seen big cats in their back garden. A local farmer told us he loses sheep regularly to a black panther and told us he keeps quiet about it because he doesn’t like a fuss.
I went to a party in Nick’s only neighbours house and ended up locked in a bathroom while the host went apeshit with a hedge trimmer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre style.
My neighbours were much worse. I grew up with the Yorkshire Ripper, the Krays and Dennis Nielson in my town, thanks to the major industry being a maximum security prison.
There was a spate of UFO activity one summer. I saw a white light bolt across the sky above me in early evening light. I was pretty stoned. A crop circle showed up two days later which we spent a long evening laying on our backs in the centre.
I’m talking about a place in the world where everything’s really visual and taken as read without much need for clarification. People talk endlessly in the Fens but they just go over and over small details about nothing much. The big stories are taken as read and never verbalised. Local gangsters floating face down in drainage dykes, bloated to twice their normal size. The happy couple and kid running the local bar have the same surname and they’re not married ‘ know what I mean? And it’s their kid. Or the whole town closing on a Saturday because of fear of rioting when the National Front comes to town in support of Tony Martin (remember him?).
Instrumental, dramatic music makes sense in this landscape. Especially when the only time you listen to music is in the car, looking out at all this quiet, mysterious land. It’s what unsaid that gives the drama.
I was already into Mogwai, having seen them with Pavement at the Astoria. Then going to see them on tour I got to see Aerial M a few times and they made perfect sense to me. The weird chords, the euphoric but sinister sounds. Everything was a little woozy and unusual and it seemed to fit with my life somehow. This was pre-internet for me so it took a while for Slint to filter down and the connections to be cemented between them and the music I was starting to like but when I got Spiderland it was a real revelation. This music was so expansive and creepy ‘ creepy is the key ‘ that it was custom built for living where I lived.
The pace and the air between the notes coupled to the genuinely unsettling vocals seemed to sound so amazing played at night driving along the A47, or sitting on my friend Kevin’s car bonnet one night as the Whittlesey Wash had flooded and the road was off limits, illuminated by moonlight as owls flew overhead. Slint seemed to be about the unspoken stories and rumours and plain unsettling quality of the small community. The music itself had a real narrative; the notes were saying something and the vocals just reinforced it. It was perfect.
It was impossible for it not to have an effect on me as someone learning to play guitar and just starting to make music of my own.
I remember the first time I went to a real recording studio the engineer asked us to bring in records we liked the sound of and one of them was Spiderland. I think Shellac was another and maybe King Crimson’s Red. I don’t think any of the music I have ever made necessarily sounds like Slint but there are certain parts I can remember being directly influenced to the point where it was in tribute.
The irony was that right at the time I was starting to play music, Pajo from Slint was living down the road in Norwich. That seemed to further confirm some sort of link and when bands like Navigator (from Norwich) popped up on the radar it seemed like a lot of people were having the same ideas.
When I moved to a city it seemed like Slint disappeared from my listening tastes. I did not stop liking them, Spiderland and Tweez and the EP were there but they weren’t listened to as much. That was maybe around the year 2000. I kept up with the post Slint releases. Aerial/Papa/M especially. It seemed perfect that a heartbreak weekend spent going mental in Scotland was soundtracked by 2 gorgeous Papa M shows in 2001. The For Carnation and Palace too had a profound effect on me. I had heard them before but it seemed like moving to a city was the catalyst for them making sense as they were so intimate that they offered a place to escape to that was completely insulated. I am such a geek I even used Pajo’s old Palace/For Carnation guitar to record the last Reynolds album as it belonged to my housemate who bought it from Pajo a few years before.
So when Slint announced a reformation I was surprised and a little disappointed. Looking back now I think maybe it’s because I’d just forgotten what Slint actually sounded like. They have unwittingly become the flag bearers for a particularly odious, head music coming out of cities (mainly Chicago) that I got wrapped up in and then got repulsed by as gigs became more and more like Dungeons & Dragons fanclub conventions. I think I was lumping Slint in with the bands that followed them.
I don’t know anybody from Slint but I emailed Pajo anyway. It went along the lines of:
“Don’t do this. It undermines the stuff you’re doing now which is amazing. However, if you do do this I will be at the front cheering you on because I am a fan and I am also a cocksucker”.
Unsurprisingly I did not get a reply.
So, like a cocksucker, I bought a ticket and I went. The event wasn’t much of a party. It was arctic in it’s weather conditions and much of the weekend was spent getting battered by snow of biblical proportions. It got to Friday and I still hadn’t thought about Slint’s music at all. I think in my head I had an idea like
“Slint? They’re a math rock band from Chicago”.
Then all of a sudden I started to think about the band and why I liked them and I began thinking about their songs. Even surrounded by drunk students in Slint hoodies I started to get excited.
I did not even drink on Saturday and got to the front for Slint. Sure enough everyone else who 2 days before had said
“Yeah, Slint are OK but I’m not that fussed about seeing them”
was down the front pressed against the railing with dribble coming out of the corners of their mouth.
The tension, not only of the moment but of the whole weekend with the weather and the slightly down feel, was unbearable.
There were no “hello”s or “thank you”s. The 4 band members edged onstage, on time, in total darkness and started with “For Dinner”. The sound was great. Maybe it was because I was so close to the front but it was plenty loud, especially when it seemed The Melvins were playing on half power the night before.
The first surprise was that Brian McMahan handed guitar duties over to his brother Michael for songs where he sang. It proved to work well as the intricacies of the vocals on the records were replicated perfectly, even over the din the band could cook up. Second surprise was that certain vocal duties were handled by Britt Walford (whilst drumming for the verses of Nosferatu Man and sitting with guitar for Washer), leaving McMahan side of stage to interject where needed but largely to stand still looking awkward in the half light. Each song ended with the lights being taken down to total darkness and complete onstage silence. Rather than seeing it as being a cold emotionless recreation of the records like many criticised it for it seemed more to me to be completely in keeping with the creepy, sparse mood that made me like Slint in the first place. I think maybe people were judging Slint by their supposed contemporaries stage show (Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Mogwai etc) when in fact the key to what makes Slint amazing is that they had no contemporaries.
Unreleased song Pam managed to wipe out the math rock genre with one foul swoop. It was stupidly heavy. It was missed from the second London show set list.
Glenn was a real “hairs on the back of the neck” moment. It too was heavy but only in it’s pondering, sluggish, malevolent manner. I had forgotten how amazingly heavy Slint are.
The Tweez tracks were played faithfully, even the processed guitar sound which sounded incredible blaring out of the PA.
The people around me were insane. One guy shouted and whooped constantly, which is cool because I was excited but there’s something weird to me about cheering on songs that have this level of menace. It seems perverted.
They closed naturally with Good Morning Captain. It sounded amazing. Photographers scrummed with each other at the end to capture the precise moment McMahan yelled “I MISS YOU!”. The band all looked visibly shaken to be playing the music and for once I felt a myth was bizarrely kept in tact by a reformation.
Even when the couple next to me whooped at the opening bars and began slow dancing I found it easy to lock it out and enjoy it, if that’s the right word.
Other ATPs have been curated by party bands of a certain nature (maybe not Autechre but I missed that one) and people’s criticisms seem to come from the sombre mood of Slint’s performance. I personally can’t believe that a music this wilfully odd could attract as many people as it did and so I felt a lot of people simply did not like Slint full stop, rather than thinking the gig was bad.
I am a cocksucker, they did a great job. They reminded me of what a unique and personally important band Slint were to me which is surely the point right?
It took me back to a time and a geography that I won’t get back. I think it’s notable that when bands like Slint and Mogwai and Navigator etc moved away from the countryside they began to change their sound ‘ Mogwai within the band and Slint by breaking into different sections each a polar opposite to Slint.
It happened to me too. As soon as I got a city I found my musical tastes veered towards vocal music, or angry music, or dense music. Slint no longer made sense. That’s also why those Chicago Slint variants and the whole math genre fail so miserably to inject their music with any of the other worldlyness Slint had. They’re city people, their music is out of sorts with their environment and somehow misses out on a kind of truth that comes with being in touch with your surroundings and a language you can build up with the people you play with if you’re on the same wavelength. The post-Slint bands frequently took the bustle of Slint but took it as being evocative of their lives and surroundings. They extracted something from Slint’s music that wasn’t the key element. The aggro in Slint’s music is more of a calm and storm approach. It’s not about busyness or anger or aggression. It’s about tension and drama and a suppression of the things other bands scream about. It’s timeless. It’s real country music. Slint could never have come from Chicago, they are totally rural. Like me, which is why I love them.

Did anyone else watch the documentary on the AIDS epidemic that swept through the LA porn industry that was on Channel 4 last night? Pretty crazy stuff. Don’t you just hate it when some American (usually) man gives this as an excuse for his actions?
“We live in America. Wasn’t this nation built on the right to freedom of expression?”.
This was used by some producer guy to justify making a ‘Gonzo’ porn movie where the female character is a reporter in Iraq who gets captured and raped by Bin Laden before being rescued by the Marines, whom she blows off as a sign of gratitude.
I have no issue with porn and neither do I care what anyone does to anybody else as long as both parties are equally willing and able to decide. But justifying the rise in aggressive, nasty, humiliating, non-sexual (i.e. not related to the act of sex itself) pornography by saying it’s a person’s given right to make it? Hmmm….

http://improveverywhere.com/mission_view.php?mission_id=42
If I find out there’s a diskant version thats been bolstering the crowd at Lords gigs I am going to be unhappy though.

They aren’t about “promo” – what they’re about is kicking the shit into the kids, man. They see music as a void. In the capital (thats London) there is a disgusting trend for style over substance. This band buck that trend. They mix Krautrock and Electronica. They are also crazymental and drink and do drugs. They are from Leicester.
They are KASABIAN.

Howdy. I can’t get Cute FTP to work on this PC so I’m going to plug something on the Weblog instead.
The Telescopes were part of the whole shoegazing scene back in the 80s and were on Creation Records. That kind of sums things up in a neat way but doesn’t really do them justice. One of the reasons I ended up in Nottingham is because I made friends with Emily Kawasaki who lives up here and so I ended up coming to the city more and more. She is a mentalist Telescopes fan.
They split, became Unisex and then reunited as a new beast: no drums, no bass, just some old samplers and plenty of noisy guitars. Anyway, they’re playing Nottingham next Tuesday the 12th April with Fog (Ninja Tune) and because of holiday date confusions, I’m playing guitar for the night so if you’re near here then come along and support my nervous brain!
It’s at Cabaret (The Old Vic) on Fletcher Gate and tickets are at www.damnyou.co.uk

I think this allowed right? A film review?
I was excited about seeing this. I loved Cohen’s film Lost Book Found and the Fugazi Instrument documentary. This is billed as Cohen’s look at consumerism and the mall culture that dominates America. It’s also a narrative piece with actors rather than a documentary piece. With Cohen’s skill for the visual it sounds great – right?
About 45 minutes into this I was unsure whether or not to scream at the top of my lungs or run full pelt out of the cinema. By 100 minutes I wanted to strip off, paint myself red and run through town.
I challenge anybody to watch this film twice. It seems to last about 3 weeks. As an accurate representation of the monotonous, numbing quality of shopping malls it hits the nail on the head. But as a film, fucking hell. It’s my somewhat simplistic opinion that films should either entertain or enlighten and hopefully a mixture of both. Don’t mistake the word “entertain” for “shallow”. I mean, films should engage the audience and get them on board.
By the end of the opening sequence of Chain I had a good idea of what it was about, the angle it was coming from: consumerism = bad. I get it. Everyone in the cinema gets it. I can’t believe there are many people who would flock to a Jem Cohen movie who also like to check out the bargains on a Bank Holiday Monday or who eat at McDonalds. We’re all lefty liberal arty farty types, we agree with what’s being said so now what? Now nothing.
Considering his past work and the way he deals with subject matter this was like a sixth form film project. Sure, it looked amazing at times and the opening sequence soundtracked by Godspeed was phenomenal but there was a distinct lack of any depth in it at all.
The film centres around 2 characters: a young girl living rough and taking menial jobs, always centred around the mall (played by Mira Billotte of the band White Magic) and an Oriental businesswoman who ploughs a lonely path trying to push her business into America. They are both trapped by the world they’re in and even though they come from opposite ends they meet in the same place and live parallel lives.
Film students always make films about the homeless but because they’re so rich and middle class they make a hash of it. They get their mates to pretend to be homeless, or ill or whatever and it’s laughably one dimensional. The characters are like that in Chain. You’re never given a reason for why Billotte’s character is trapped going from mall to mall. You don’t know why she’s sleeping rough. It’s mentioned in passing that she ran away and she films herself for a tape to send home but the character is given such a shallow foundation you can’t empathise with her. You just don’t know whether you’re supposed to like her, feel sorry for her or even what she thinks. Ditto for the businesswoman. Both character’s monologues are delivered in flat, unemotional tones that serve to instantly remove any human feeling you might have for them.
I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking it sounds good because of this and I missed the point. You might be right but like I said, the point is a loose feeling of anti-consumerism and that is it. It’s a 5 minute short at best. It’s not a 100 minute feature.
You fucking sit through it.