My biggest achievement of summer 2007 has been moving back to Newcastle, my biggest achievement since, ooh since moving to Leeds in 1998. Newcastle’s great.

As well as playing lots of soccer and pub quizzes, me and Sophie off of Sailors are attempting to make it even better by putting on some great gigs. Well, at least one. On Fri October 26th we’re hosting Sincabeza, That Fucking Tank, Richard Dawson and Helios which will be an exciting evening of rock and non-rock. I used to go and see Richard play gigs when we were both about 16; he was great then and he’s great now! Sincabeza are great rocking French instrumentalists, Tank are great noisy duo, possibly augmented at this gig by Giles from Kill Yourself, just like the old days! Helios are new kids on the Geordie block and sound a bit like a heavy Faraquet, I think.

I haven’t played in my band Sailors much, but some recordings we did a while back have seen the light of day by way of the excellent Gringo Records of Nottingham. YOU SHOULD ALL BUY IT HERE NOW. Due to now being scattered all over the country gigs are few and far between, but we’re playing in Brighton on November 24th and Leeds on December 1st, with two whole hosts of excellent bands including Soeza, Line, Ack Ack Ack, Bilge Pump and Trencher. Get in!

And thats it I think.

Things that have been happening with me of late…

Saint Eskimo and George Thomas & The Owls played a gig in my dining room a few weeks ago, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it was marvellous. Saint Eskimo is the most insanely loved up duo of Viking Moses and Golden Ghost, and they played a number of lovely songs including On a Plain by Nirvana, and George Thomas is a lovely and very quiet chap from Manchester who began his set with I’m So Excited and I Just Can’t Hide It. There was also home made falafel, couscous, fairy lights and collage. I’m very keen for more afternoons like this one.

Spent a few days in Iceland a couple of months back which was really really amazing. Could have quite happily just stayed there, lovely people, great food, mind-blowing landscapes. Whilst there I was lucky enough to encounter Anton Newcombe from The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and SURPRISE, he was a total cock!

Attended Field Day in London, which would have been an unmitigated disaster were it not for the fact that a) the whole shebang had cost me nothing, and b) I was too tired to really give a shit about the queues for beer/toilets/food/everything. As sunny days out in the park go it was tip top, but for watching bands etc it was pretty rubbish.

Got to see Get Hustle, a band I’ve enjoyed for a number of years. They played at the very excellent and recently refurbished Portland Arms in Cambridge and were fucking smoking. My mum was equally into it, and took some pretty excellent footage.

Speaking of my mum, she very kindly took me to see Joanna Newsom at the Royal Albert Hall last Friday which was really quite outstanding. Never been to a venue like it before, epic stuff. The new arrangements with her band sounded fantastic, and if the one new song she played is anything to go by, the next record will be as amazing as the last two (if pretty different!)

Things what I’ve enjoyed watching lately include…

Lukas Moodysson’s Container
Richard Donner’s The Omen
Terence Malick’s The New World (thanks to Dave Stockwell for the nod!)
Todd Solondz’s Palindromes

…and playing…

Super Paper Mario
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Resident Evil 4

And I guess since this is SELF PROMOTION WEEK etc I can plug the following…

This is happening TOMORROW and despite the fact I’m currently wrapped in a dressing gown and a duvet, coughing like a twat and generally feeling sorry for myself, I’m very excited about putting Meneguar on.

Then next month myself, Pink Flag and one time diskanter Ian Scanlon are putting on Grouper, Gareth Hardwick and Felix in the basement of a delightful cafe in Cambridge.

If you live within a stones throw of us you should come and check these gigs out. Despite rumours to the contrary, Cambridge is well good.

It’s Self Promotion Week according to Marceline so here’s some stuff I’ve been up/am up to…(with some visuals to go with it)

Last week I finally made it to 100 gigs with one band as Lords crossed the finishing line. We did the 100th one in the same place exactly as the first one (it even involved hiring a stage) at Susumi in Derby. It looked like this:

It gave me the nice chance to make us 3 into ZZ Top for the poster which looked like this:

Talking of which, I am still self employed though in a world of hurt with various assisting government agencies. Still, I am very busy. Local culture magazine Left Lion have pretty much ignored every musical venture I have ever been involved in but seem to like the artwork. First of all they did a really nice interview here:

Then I had the opportunity to do the cover for the current issue and opted to do a portrait of Frank Robinson, aka Xylophone Man, Nottingham’s much missed busking heavyweight:

Summer’s drawing to a close which is a shame as I finally got into the great outdoors and took advantage of working on my own time to go and see some local sights in the last few weeks. The most amazing of which is the very haunted (so they say) Sutton Scarsdale Hall nr Chesterfield. Daytime:

Night-time, DRC and Gareth surrounded by glowing orbs. It was pretty hairy:

Also visited Cresswell Crags, Ice-Age Gorge nr Worksop:

As well as plenty of day trips to Derbyshire and Norfolk. Nice.

Loads of people are getting married. Congratulations to Barn from Soeza and his wife Sanna; my cousin Matt and his wife Joanne and future weddings: this weekend is former Reynolds yelper Matt and Kerry and in a fortnight’s time it’s Ian Scanlon’s turn as he marries Jane. That’s not all, Phil from Lords is going to be a Dad in December; a month that also sees my 29th birthday for the 2nd year running.

Here’s me and DRC enjoying Barn & Sanna’s wedding party deep in Sherwood Forest:

Lastly, plenty of music going on.
Listening to: new High On Fire, Pearls & Brass, Ike & Tina Turner, Nuggets, Silver Jews, Sir Richard Bishop, Get Hustle Tour CD, Mulatu Astatke, Moondog, Karate and the new Bilge Pump album “Rupert The Sky”.

Doing lots of music stuff too. 2nd Lords LP called “Everyone Is People” is so close to being finished it hurts but probably won’t see light of day until 2008. Read about it here: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=13689829
Not much gigging going down though with baby action on the horizon so lots of time to do other things…
Myself and Neil from Wolves Of Greece are still sporadically making up 2/3 of The Resurrection Men with Andy from Clambake when time permits. We’re also involved in a new band called The Evil Hawk which sees it’s gigging debut in Nottingham on oct 27th with Chrome Hoof. It’s the new project by Michael from Hellset Orchestra and is kind of like Queen.
I’m also kick starting a new band with Katy from Not In This Town called Horsey.
Not to mention Felix which has been on hold while Lucinda took part in a Channel 4 documentary about photographers. See her get stitched up by editing in January 2008.
Last but not least, Edwin Pouncey wrote these nice words in The Wire:

Me and Neil, together with Chris from Hirameka Hi-Fi are also part of Glenn Branca’s orchestra for the performance of Symphony#13 for 100 Guitars at the Frieze Festival at London’s Roundhouse on October 12th. Totally shitting it.

Hope everyone is well!

Well, there’s nothing like a self promotion opportunity to bring a slacker like me out of hibernation.

Here’s the most important thing I’ve been doing: Crania Draft Massif

We’ve just released an online charity compilation album, motivated by the fact that charity singles are, without fail, utter crap on account of having to appeal to the greatest possible number of people, leaving kind-hearted alternative music fans the world over in a rather unpleasant position. So a bunch of weirdos with samplers have been persuaded to remix their (least) favourite charity records, and we’ve compiled the results into 3 CDs worth of disgusting and excellent music. The mp3s, all available from the link above, are all free, but we ask that if you download them you donate some money to Cardiff & District Samaritans, who do great work, are staffed and managed entirely by volunteers and are funded pretty much entirely by donations.

If anyone fancies actually reviewing the album, let me know and I’ll post you some CDs rather than downloading the whole lot.

Erm, what else – oh yeah, you can also buy my new album, which I produced specifically to get rid of a bunch of silly red plastic boxes that I found in my shed:
myspace.com/nationalsubnormal. Mention Diskant when ordering and get some free detritus in the envelope!

• Finished off uni application forms… today.
• Voice aches from singing in small local opera (Mikhail the Russian novelist!) & Karl Jenkin’s ‘The Armed Man’ at local choir. Baritone range can’t cope with top e’s.
• Playing semi-frequently with guitar&drums duo Fee Fi Fo Fum http://myspace.com/feefifofumisaband
• Listening to… Miles Davis – Porgy and Bess, Hella – Total Bugs Bunny on Wild Bass, Sunn O))) – Black One, The Essential Dave Brubeck, Joe Pass – Virtuoso #2, Leadbelly – Midnight Special, Don Caballero 2, Captain Beefheart – Trout Mask Replica.
• Teaching guitar lessons to slow youngsters.
• Working on vocal & Free Compositions with the great yet terrible Sibelius program.
• Trying to keep hair on.

Posse out. Px

Songs of Green Pheasant AKA Darren Sumpner is what makes this measly company car 30k Diskant drudgery an unexpected lark. Seemingly living the sublime life; rural Sheffield artist, teacher Duncan Sumpner presents Gyllyng Street – his third release on the ever-burgeoning Fat Cat label.

Gyllyng Street expands on the now seemingly diminutive 4-track recording of his self-titled album. Twice the number of tracks were used in the mix, and it shows with the multifarious goings-on. It’s a joy to not have to listen to a nondescript ‘whole’ in a tune, and Sumpner mostly retains the attention span with all sorts of chimes, percussion and guitars (to name a few) that will please the ears. For an artist that proposes the ‘epic’-ness in every tune, this is refreshingly novel, brimful with unshakeably memorable melodies, thankfully lacking the insipidity of artists going for this same style.

Where the latter half of the album palls slightly, all this is put into perspective when considering the ineffable ‘King Friday’, the most inspiring track on ‘Gyllyng Street’. It starts off in that relatively comfortable innocuous indie/Brian Wilson fuzzy mode part of town, and then… It builds: drones, voices, cymbal tapping, then childhood chimes arrive, dark noise; a crescendo of intensity, and BLAM! The shuffling beat, the resonant chords and sultry vocal harmonies of a multi-tracking genius. One diverse musical engineering brain, releasing unexpected rapture, clinches this reviewer’s stressed head.

This album was written about the dissolute street in which Sumpner grew up by and took the name for this triumphant second long-player. It is supremely focused, an experience in motion. Buy it, listen to it, at least, for heaven’s sake, have a go with it’s zenith: ‘King Friday’. SOGP sidesteps the awful post-rock cliche of the wishy-washy epic 6-minute moment, and accomplishes the nigh on impossible. This is bona fide excellent, wholly unpretentious grandiose music.

Pascal Ansell

http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/artistInfo.php?id=99

Dear oh dear. What has happened to diskant this past month, you must be wondering? Well, I have to say I am wondering that myself. There really has been no action through September so I haven’t bothered with a newsletter. I assume, like me, the rest of the diskant team have been caught up with other things. I am famously against our writers promoting their outside interests on the blog but for one week only it is being actively encouraged. Come on diskanteers, tell us about your upcoming gig, your new record, your new band, your annual charity all dayer (ahem). That is, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

I will begin.

The main reason I have been neglecting diskant shamefully is in order to become An Artist. As you may or may not know, I make purses, brooches, stationery etc. under the name Asking For Trouble and I have been asked to be part of the Gifted exhibition at no less than The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh! I was rather gobsmacked and have spent the last month feverishly sewing in my spare time (yes, I still work full time as well) to get my twenty purses all handstitched and delivered for this weekend. Anyway, if you are in the area please do come along and see the exhibition. It takes place from November 16th-January 6th and is free entry. More info on my website as I know it.

I also run an online shop for my crafts and, since I have neglected you, you can all have 10% off for the month of October. Just enter DISKANT at the checkout and you’ll get 10% off your order. I ship internationally and thanks to the wonder of internet postage I can get your order posted super fast. Why not get your Christmas shopping started early?

Lastly I am GOING TO JAPAN in two weeks, as everyone who knows me is sick of hearing. We have an itinerary as long as the distance from here to Tokyo and I really really cannnot wait.

So, how about you?

Experience some full-on churning metal guitars, blast-beating drums and guttural roars for vocals courtesy of Newcastle-based quartet Jinn. Yep, they’re a grindcore band, and this album burns through 11 songs in the space of 21 minutes. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but Jinn become an increasingly impressive prospect during the course of this album – huge blasts of uber-distorted guitars judder to a halt as the band turns on a dime to begin a new musical passage, quickly shifting gears between songs that deliver blow after sickening blow to the head. They’ve been described as the UK’s best hardcore band, and this is probably the hardest, most furious and enveloping album I’ve heard from these shores for a wee while. Not that I’m an expert, mind.

Hardcore and thrash-derived bands such as Jinn are invariably far more impressive melting your face off at a gig than on record, but they do a fairly decent job of capturing their sheer weight and power – they even scale the heights of sounding almost as high and mighty as the legendary (if increasingly dull) Isis at points, which is definitely something to be proud of.

However, I do have a couple of complaints about this record that I need to get off my wheezing, pitifully under-developed chest:

1. Jinn share a conundrum with so many thrash/grindcore bands who want their guitars to make an absolute din but then have those breakdowns where the guitars go clean for maximum devastating dynamic effect: if your guitarists set their gear up to have that Massive Metal Wall-Of-Thrash effect (and Jinn’s can be a particularly impressive wall, decorated by all kinds of monumental brutalist architecture) for the majority of the time, how can you avoid it sounding brittle and hollow when you wind back to a simple guitar sound? Unfortunately for Jinn this conundrum remains largely unsolved; on the few occasions that the guitarists let up on their fevered thrashing they end up sounding like they’re plinking away something bought at the Early Learning Centre. Mercifully, this doesn’t happen that often or for too long.
2. While the singer’s bellowing is eternally indecipherable it is certainly powerful and effective, so there’s no reason to completely undermine all that good work by exposing quite how shit the lyrics he’s mangling are by printing them in the CD booklet. The brief epithets that make up the lines of songs such as “Its Not Getting any better” and “Vikings Bloody Vikings” may be intended as cryptic allusions, poetic descriptions, or even sparse prose inspired by gothic horror, but lines such as “The mask of a hooded wizard mourns your eyes / Sorrow lies enrage your soul” bring to mind the dreaded insult of ‘sixth form poetry’. That said; the imagery of the album’s closing line, “Vengeance on a dog” does take some beating.

Not that I’d ever dare raising any kind of issue with Jinn in person; they’d probably tear my face off and feed it to their beloved pooch.

www.myspace.com/jinnoffline
www.superfirecords.co.uk
www.myspace.com/righttorefuse

I have to start this review with a confession: Army Of Flying Robots are a Nottingham-based band who have played all over the city in a myriad of venues (including a good friend’s kitchen and an erstwhile art gallery), yet I have somehow conspired to miss their live performances for 4 solid years. Please take this as a guarantee of objectivity for this review of their debut album then, dear reader, than of incompetence on my part.

After incongruously beginning with what sounds like a pick-scraped guitar slowed down and run through enough echo to make worthy of a horror film soundtrack, AOFR quickly establish their blueprint for grinding twin guitars underpinned by heavy bass and manic drumming, supporting a truly larynx-shredding vocal performance from frontman Henry Davies (seriously, you can almost hear the fibres from his throat coming away one at a time). AOFR are a band that love to occupy that middle ground between hardcore punk-rock and grinding metal, but with intelligent beatdowns, the odd flailing thrash and even an occasional let-up or slow build-up in intensity, they bring far more to the table than yer average so-called ‘grindcore’ band. Not bad considering most of the songs barely scrape the 2-minute mark.

Davies’ singing does conform to the general standards of indecipherable howling, so it’s handy to have the lyrics written down with explanations about subject matters in the liner notes and it’s always good to see nuclear weapons, American foreign policy, casual male chauvinism and globalisation of corporate interests getting a bashing. I’ve got to mention the truly ugly artwork you have to plough through to read these things though – not aesthetically pleasing in any way. Even if they have a song called “How’s That For A Kick In The Cunt?”.

Back to the music: at barely 29 minutes, these 11 songs will leave your body exhausted and your ears squealing with pain. That’s probably nothing compared to their infamous live shows, but you’ve got to say it’s mission accomplished, don’t you?

www.armyofflyingrobots.co.uk
www.superfirecords.co.uk

For me there are two different types of film score that work well. The first are thos with songs by established artists that punctuate a film, illustrating the scenes and rooting them perfectly in time. The Commitments and Trainspotting are good examples of this approach. The other are scores specifically written for films which can never be separated from the imagery that they seek to highlight.

From the latter category, there are two soundtracks that stand out. I rushed straight out and bought them both after seeing the films and whenever I listen to them I get an immediate sense of the story. The first is Michael Nyman’s haunting soundtrack to The Piano. The second is Gabriel Yared’s score for Betty Blue/37° Le Matin.

Jane Campion’s The Piano is the story of a mute Scottish woman who travels with her daughter and her beloved piano to a remote spot on the coast of 19th century New Zealand for an arranged marriage, and who begins a stormy involvement with her illiterate neighbour. Nyman’s almost naive music works on an emotional level, and transports you immediately to the windswept beach when you hear it. The score veers between the Caledonian character of the main protagonist and the contrasting barrenness of the new world she finds herself in. It has an almost Wicker Man feel to it. The orchestral immediacy – yet jarring forcefulness – suggest the frustrations of her mute world.

Jacques Beineix’s passionate love story, Betty Blue, tells the tale of handyman and failed novelist Zorg, who has his life turned upside down by Betty, a free spirit whose passion for life veers towards the pathological. Its brief ode to love, ‘Betty et Zorg’, is an eerie piano theme punctuated with one discordant key that leaves you with a lump in your throat as it is repeated throughout the film to
highlight the girl’s descent into madness. It becomes a motif for the differing moods in the film. The bluesy version creates a sense of loneliness and isolation, yet when it is played as a brass solo it evokes pure joy and love.

The Nyman piece is more fluid, Yared’s fragmented, but they are similar in as far as it is the title track that dominates and guides each soundtrack. There are no conceptual or intellectual ideas here. Both are memorable because they are emotional roller-coaster rides, romantic, haunting and almost primeval. They strike a chord with anyone who has been in love or lust and both manage to illustrate beautifully the mind of a troubled soul by means of beat and string.

Buy The Piano in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store

Buy Betty Blue in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store