The Jelas are a puzzle. Blood Smash is the trio’s new EP conundrum to be unravelled by the hardy listener – the EP literally is a puzzle. Each song has multiple ‘shapes’ according to the inner sleeve that matches whatever combination the listener feels fit.

In fact the songs themselves sound jumbled, with each player carving out their own line regardless of what ever noise that attempts to overwhelm them. The male/female singing is blended and pushed further out, triggering a nicely jarring tune. Different keys clash, drums slow to super snail-pace – it’s a compliment that The Jelas sound like they’d be great to see live.

Blood Smash isn’t terribly well produced and has a flat demo feel. It’s hardly a criminal offence and I like a good old messy and rough record, but the drums deserve better mic work, or whatever it is that producers do. With terrific cartoon designs and a tidy aesthetic, Blood Smash is worth buying just for the great cover art, and £5 isn’t an unreasonable price. A decent release from Bristol’s fledgling independent label, Ingue Records.

The Jelas

Ingue Records

Pascal Ansell

(Originally posted November 2004)

DAVENPORT: A minor love letter

Dear beloved,

Let me introduce you to my favourite band of 2004. Personally speaking, these past twelve months have been pretty thin on the ground for ‘proper’ releases by bands on ‘proper’ CDs and vinyl, and slowly but surely I have found myself increasingly immersed within the ever-burgeoning world of ‘free’ music and homemade CDR labels. Thanks variously to the element of random chance and a couple of excellent UK-based distro kids (namely Melody Boa and Shoryobuni), I bought my first Davenport record a few months into this year, and was instantly smitten. Being the voracious music-consuming monster I can be (when meagre finances allow), I knew I had to seek out everything I could by this mysterious group. The problem was, as soon as I thought I’d managed to get everything I could, something new would pop up. Here’s a list of Davenport’s discography, as of 25 October 2004:

• self titled CDR – limited to 20 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)*
• Springtime on Saturnalia 3″ CDR (on PseudoArcana)
• self titled c60 cassette – limited to 23 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)
• Little Howling Jubilee 3″ CDR (on 267-Lattajjaa)
• Loki’s War 4.6.04 – limited to 18 copies CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• Free Country CDR – limited to 93 copies (sold out on Foxglove)
• Sun Your Open Mouth 5.18.04 CDR – limited to 41 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Maths Balance Volumes CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Son of Earth CDR (out now on 23 Productions)
• O, too high Ditty for my Simple Rhyme CDR – limited to 100 copies (sold out on Time-Lag)
• Owl Movement CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Seen Through CDR (on Haamumaa)

I’m pretty sure all this came out this year. And then there’re at least a dozen more releases in the works. They might even squeeze out a couple of new CDRs before the end of the year. I certainly wouldn’t bet against it: there’s a whole two months to go just yet.

So who the fuck are these pricks? And how the hell have they managed to release so much material? And why do it in such ridiculously small quantities? Here’s the official bio from their website:

“Davenport was started in Madison, in the Summer of 2002. It was originally a vehicle for folk song experiments by Clay Ruby. By Fall [otherwise known as Autumn] of 2003 many others had been invited to participate in improvisations, rituals, and recordings with Davenport. Since then there has been a surge in activity and output.”

What this means is that Davenport is a loose collective with a rotating cast that revolves around Clay Ruby. Some releases have only a couple of contributors; others feature a massed army of new-psych pseudo-folk avant-dreamers, wielding anything they can get their hands on: guitars, organs, drums, kongas, vocals, all kinds of percussion, and an awful lot of stuff you can’t readily identify, which they probably picked up from the street on their way to practice. Inevitably, there’s a whole lotta on-the-spot experimenting and improvising going on. Davenport apparently record live pretty much every single one of their get-togethers and performances, and then pick the cream of the crop for release. What is so breathtaking is the range and sheer quality of the crop. Don’t get me wrong, Davenport aren’t some awful ‘genre-straddling’ bunch of electrotwats or Jamie Cullum or whatever his name is; it’s the depth of mood, feel and texture that they generate which allows for some fantastic diversity between recordings. Here’s a reverse-chronology guide (call it a whimsy) to a few selected highlights of the Davenport 2004 oeuvre (and roll on the new stuff, which I’m told is even better)…

Continue reading »

Broken Arm’s ‘Shields Mystical’ CD is worth picking up for its fantastic cover alone:

What’s more, it’s printed onto nice rough card so it’s a tactile delight.

What’s more, the music is great and it’ll be directly up your street.

What’s more, the band features diskant.net alumnus Hugues Mouton. A man you can trust.

Broken Arm, yo.

Saw a poster for a Zine-O-Rama to be held in Edinburgh at the Forest Cafe on the weekend of 4th & 5th February. It’s part of a wider event called Don’t DIY Alone:

The DIY (do it yourself) ethic refers to the principle of being self-reliant by completing tasks oneself as opposed to relying upon “specialists” to complete them. The term can apply to anything from home improvements and repairs to healthcare, from publishing to electronics. DIY questions the supposed uniqueness of the expert’s skills, and promotes the ability of the ordinary person to learn to do more than he or she thought was possible.

Why Do It Together? Groups of people can include a vast range of skills. By coming together and sharing our skills for free, we challenge hierarchies of knowledge and also the commodification of knowledge. By creating as a group, we can build networks and celebrate a different way of living.

What’s “Don’t DiY Alone”? A gathering in Edinburgh to share skills and have a good time, 5-8th February 2009.

How can you get involved? Contact us at diyedinburgh@riseup.net to organise a workshop, or come along in February and learn some stuff! Go to our online forum at diyedinburgh.freeforums.org and start organising now! Contact us for a copy of the posters to put up in your area.

More proof that there’s no real new music any more, just retreads and rethinkings of what’s gone before. Still, it’s not like that’s a new state of affairs I guess; but the arc of history seems to be getting ever shorter these days. The Asteroid No.4 are a shoegaze-jangler band, referencing those heady late 80s/early 90s days of Ride, Stone Roses, experimentation with cheap LSD, frolicking in parks, etc etc. They pull it off pretty nicely, moving from a dreamy Neil Young-tinged opener in ‘My Love’, through a droney freakout session over ‘I Look Around’ and ‘Hei Nah Lah’, ending up with the simultaneous invocation of My Bloody Valentine and a combination of Ride’s first two albums on ‘She Touched The Sky’.

The album is subtitled A Treasury Of Witchcraft And Devilry, hinting at either some kind of Stones-go-Satan cheeky devil-raising or some hard-drug shenanigans that’s best left alone. Across the whole album we’re only a couple of times exposed to the true devilry of bland, pseudo-epic songwriting, and as a piece it sits firmly in this odd neo-shoegaze place that’s all the rage right now. There’s reverb and echo aplenty, and enough of a nod to authentic late ’60s psychedelia to make this more than a simple knock-off. It’s their fifth album too, I believe, so they’re certainly persistent and no foot-draggers. I have my fingers crossed that right now The Asteroid No.4 are sitting cross-legged in kaftans, smoking hookah and creating action poetry – anything less would be unbecoming.

The Asteroid No.4
The Committee To Keep Music Evil

I’ve decided to do a blog of my own as well as writing on Diskant. It’ll be an anything goes type thing, photos, artwork, music and writing. You can guess I am sure: http://honeyisfunny.blogspot.com/

(Originally posted September 2004)

[Before I begin ranting, let me just clarify that I am in no way a Metallica fan, and nor was I ever one. But…]

Fuck! I think I’ve finally found a film that I can safely say YOU HAVE TO FUCKING WATCH THIS about for 2004. It’s the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster. I tell you, it’s the new This Is Spinal Tap.

No, seriously. You know how Tap was just crammed full of classic, unbelievable moments, hilarious quotes, and godawful haircuts? You know how there’re moments where you find yourself exclaiming out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and then there’s others where you’re howling in painful laughter? Well, SkoM probably matches it in all of these regards. It’s so much more than I was expecting. This thing was made during the recording of their new album, just after bassist Jason Newsted quit, and saw the entire band go into therapy, James Hetfield check in and out of rehab, and an awful lot of squabbling, sulking, repressed anger, and an insane amount of money spent on doing nothing.

I tell you, this film has got everything. I was going to reel off a list of highlights, but there’s just so goddamned many. I could write for hours. There’s the interview with Newsted, who’s hilariously candid about how he got bullied as ‘the new boy’ for a full ten years before he finally had enough; which is boosted by Hetfield saying that he’d driven him out because he felt threatened by Newsted’s desire to promote his other musical project, whilst merrily recalling that he never let the fella have any creative input at all into Metallica. There’s the bit whilst everyone sits around in the studio for A YEAR waiting for Hetfield to work up the botheredness to come back to work; during which Ulrich finds the time have a therapy session with Dave Mustaine, who breaks down in tears about how he considers himself an utter failure since he got sacked as Metallica guitarist back in ’82 (note: Mustaine has sold fifteen million albums in Megadeth). And when Hetfield deigns to come back, you get to see him sulking like a baby when the others dare to listen to tapes of sessions outside of the strict noon-’til-4pm schedule that he has to work by. Then there’s the band’s laughable attempts to work together on lyric-writing, which reaps some of the worst teenage poetry you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear outside of a GCSE English class populated by tragic Goths. Oh yeah, and there’s the awful lumpen riffs all over the place…

And this is just scratching the surface. There are just so many classic moments.

Continue reading »

(Originally posted March 2004)

It always feels awkward to launch straight into a bunch of barely-related rants masquerading as reviews for these column things, but how the hell do you introduce a series of moans about music as disparate as I’ve found fit to write about this time around?

I was wondering whether I should protest that my favourite film of 2003, All The Real Girls (enjoy the fucking waiting for anything to happen if you click on that link), didn’t even get a mention in diskant’s round-up of last year’s films, but it all seems a bit pointless now. Or earlier today I was wondering about the socio-political implications of Friendster on a community/scene, but that’s probably because almost all of diskant’s staff members have been mugged by this particular online popularity contest, and it’s hugely distracting when you’re trying to write shit like this. Plus, I get to count Will Oldham amongst my friends, so nerr. Ahem. Whatever.

Anyway, this Growing album, The Sky’s Run Into The Sea, on Kranky/Southern has been hanging around waiting for me to review since last October, so maybe now’s the time to actually get around to it. Fittingly, following January’s tribute to Sunn 0))), here’s another band mightily influenced by shotgun enthusiast Dylan Carson’s Earth project and its massively detuned guitars. A mysterious art trio, Growing comes across as much more of a minimalist art project than a band. Their ‘songs’ are drone pieces that shift from textured rumblings of electric guitars into cymbal crashes, or the occasional startling, scratchy melody. Sometimes, as the first track exemplifies, this works fantastically – we shift from an opening gambit of five minutes of soothing ambience into an appropriately stoned chugtastic* riff by a very loud guitar, which quickly fades out into the same riff played on an unplugged guitar. All very affecting. But there are some moments on the album that just grate – some of the textures of the distorted guitars are more annoyingly fuzzy than warm and entrancing, and the movement of the last song into a folk melody hazily sung by a few folks but dominated by a yowling guitar is actually not very good at all. I’m sure that the guitar is supposed to be reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s infamous shagging the Stars & Stripes up the arse, but to these ears it sounds like he was reincarnated as a stillborn baby that’s playing with someone else’s mucky shitter. Not good. Bad, bad. Which is a shame, because about half of this double LP is class.

Continue reading »

– – ALBUMS – –

Stunners:

Flying Lotus – Los Angeles. Real headphone hip hop. Massive beats and dirty samples – it’s rare to call a rap album beautiful but this sets the yardstick. Yum Yum Flying Lotus.

Volcano – Paperwork. Read my review!

Flake Brown – Help the Overdog – ditto. Good old, peculiar folk.

Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna. Wildy danceable – a dizzying 11 tracks. Grime track Princes surprised the hell out of me but is the album’s best.

Not Too Shabby:

Bjork – Volta. Good tunes but where the hell were Chris Corsano or Brian Chippendale ?

Jonquil – Lions

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend

Gushpanka – Gushpanka

– – GIGS – –

Brudenell Social Club = my new home:

Acid Mothers Temple,

Oxes + Bilge Pump,

Daedalus,

Oxes,

Dalek + Zach Hill

Others

Charlottefield – Wheatsheaf, Oxford, 12^th Jan (last gig??)

Volcano! – The Library, Leeds

DJ Yoda’s Magic Cinema Show – Oxford Academy

– – 3 GOOD THINGS – –

Sweden

Mackerel

Flying Lotus

– – 3 BAD THINGS – –

Damon Che – Drums,

Gene Doyle – Guitar,

Jason Jouver – Bass

(WHAT are Don Cab doing???!?!)

Desert: Delia Smith’s How to Cook Book 1, singing Dream of Gerontious, Thame Choral Society and the Bernwode Singers, an England-free World Cup = great and unbiased viewing, Sweden, Czech Republic: teaching English + tasty Czech beer, Leeds Uni, interviewing Zach Hill, Leeds Festival Chorus, Oxfam Headingley, Room 237, Scandinavian Soc, North Hill Court, Samba and Reggaeton, Exodus at the West Indian Centre, Leeds University Union Music Library, Reggae Reggae Cookbook, Moscow Philharmonic + sardines at Leeds Town Hall, meeting Judith Bingham (blog here), Viva Cuba’s house band, BBC Manchester, Poulenc: Gloria

From the lovely folks at UK DIY:

Zine makers from across the UK are invited to send a copy of their most recent zine to be included in a forthcoming exhibition at Turnpike Gallery in Greater Manchester. The exhibition, UK DIY, explores the emergence of alternative, subversive, political craft taking place across the UK as a new generation reclaim and re-define craft, adding a distinctive tongue-in-cheek edge, and features craft that crosses over with music, science, technology, activism and street culture. The exhibition runs from 14 February – 25 April 2009.

Zines should be posted to UK DIY, Turnpike Gallery, Civic Square, Leigh, Greater Manchester, WN7 1EB. Please include your name and the town/city where you live. Please note that we are unable to return zines at the end of the exhibition.

Deadline for submissions: Monday 9 February 2009.

For more information please contact Louise Clennell, Gallery Co-ordinator, 01942 404469, email l.clennell AT wlct.org or visit www.ukdiycraft.com