jihad

Muslimgauze
Mussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass (1999)

The Gauze ought to be the greatest band ever, with their mix of electronic stuff, vaguely Arab traditional instrumentation, and radical Islamist sloganeering, but they end up sounding rather dull and unexciting. Fortunately Mr Gauze is no longer with us, so I will not have to fear his retribution for saying this, though armies of jihadis are no doubt already plotting my doom.

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Pandagauze

Cor blimey mate, get a butchers at those curtains!

I was in London recently, where everyone talks like that. I did surprisingly little of a musical nature. Well, I met some friends in a café and had the recurring conversation about how I really ought to engage with the music of Steely Dan sometime. I visited some record shops but nothing caught my fancy and I was conscious of having a mountain of new music to try and absorb, so buying anything else was a bit less than appealing.

But I did follow an old friend and quaffing partner to a concert event in Islington. I resolved to follow him to this event, which was taking place in the upstairs room of a swanky enough pub similar enough to that Lexington place where we saw Oneida. When I arrived, Kat Flint was just starting. She was something of a folkie and played an endearing version of modern folkie music, with other musicians. If you like that kind of thing she would be worth investigating.

Then we saw The Unrecorded. They were interestingly experimental but not in a way that stopped them being immediately appealing. They included bass playing (with impressively threatening lines) as well as a variety of synthy keyboards and stuff. And drums. And they had a woman doing vocals who was doing that sampling herself and singing over it thing. It felt a bit like Fursaxa fronting an experimental rock band, which would obviously be the best thing ever. The self-sampling made for an endearingly avant-garde quality, while having a load of musicans there as well stopped things falling into that predictable self-sampling pattern of doing a succession of songs that simply build and build in complexity.

As well as their own songs, The Unrecorded did a couple of covers – some folkie tune called 'In the bleak midwinter', a song called 'the deep blue sea' (or maybe it was by a band called the Deep Blue Sea, I am so out of touch with today's hip sounds) and a Radiohead cover (wait, come back!). But the overall effect was very impressive and I recommend them to anyone who likes interesting music.

They have a website.

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Lucky Cat Survives 19 Storey Fall

Silly cat Sugar managed to fall out of a window on the 19th storey of a Boston, Massachusetts building, tumbling somewhere between 45 and 60 metres to the ground. And she survived with no broken bones or cuts from the fall, with some bruising being her only injuries. The Animal Rescue League treated Sugar after her fall, reporting that cats spread out their limbs like flying squirrels when they fall, which can turn them into a feline parachute and slow down their descent. Even so, Sugar's survival is something of a miracle and her owner has installed a screen on the window from which the cat fell.

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Alone in the Dark Wood

Fursaxa
Alone In The Dark Wood (2007)

Ms Fursaxa is an interesting purveyor of strange music that manages to surf on the borders of psych, folk, avant-garde improv, and much much more. I saw her once at ATP and thought she was amazing, for all that I only caught her last song. It was one of those things where the artist builds a song by doing something, sampling it, then playing over the sample, sampling that, and so on. She seemed to do this far more impressively than the various chancers I have seen replicate the trick since then. This record is enjoyable enough, but I think she is maybe best appreciated live. She has a certain presence that lends a ritualised quality to the creation of her music, like she is some kind of hierophant working spells before us. But I will still listen to and enjoy this record. It too has its magic to work.

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Beaver Trap Plans Abandoned

Beavers became extinct in these islands some time ago but are now living wild in Scotland once more. There was a limited official programme to reintroduce them but many more have escaped from private collections – with speculation suggesting that some people may have deliberately released the dam building rodents without authorisation. This has predictably led to moaning from the kind of landowners who moan about things, and the Scottish government began to draw up plans to round up the rogue beavers. This programme has now been abandoned – the beavers would have been very difficult to round up and a programme to exterminate them would not have played well with the public.

There are now apparently some 300 feral beavers in Scotland. They are expected to spread over the southern and western Highlands, possibly making incursions into northern England. Beavers are understood to have positive impacts on the environments in which they live, though they may compete with anglers over fish stocks.

The unauthorised reintroduction of vanished animals to these islands seems to be a bit of a thing at the moment. As well as the beavers, wild boar populations have returned to Ireland and England. Now there is also talk of reintroducing the lynx and the wolf to Scotland, something that will strike fear into some and excite the imaginations of others.

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More Bear Action

Here are two bear cubs looking at a giant crow.

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Bears Discover Tools

Bears are well known for being large, fierce animals. It seems now that they might also be surprisingly intelligent. A brown bear in Alaska was seen recently picking up a stone and scratching itself with it, revealing that rudimentary tool use is possible for these animals. In some respects this is not completely surprising, as bears have quite large brains for their body size. However, they are relatively solitary and it had been thought that it was only social animals (like chimps, humans, or New Caledonian crows) who would have their intelligence boosted such that they would start messing about with tools.

At the moment it is not known whether this particular bear is the first ever to use a tool, or if it is merely engaging in behaviour that is not uncommon but not previously observed. Reports that the bear in question is training other bears and building a wooden town with human-sized cages have been hurriedly denied by members of the scientific community.
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Little Blue Penguins – Very Small But Very Fierce

The Little Blue Penguins of New Zealand may be small, and they may look like cute little fellows, but it turns out the males are all very fierce. The territorial birds are forever laying into each other and inflicting terrible injuries in an effort to gain status and impress the lady penguins.

Here a male Little Blue Penguin shows off to his mate after winning a fight.

The Little Blues also learn which of their fellows are the most fierce and are careful not to try fighting a penguin who could peck the shite out of them.

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2011: My favourite new tunes

Why look! It is a listing of my favourite new tunes from 2011. New-to-me, that is.

Black Mountain Transmitter Black Goat of the Woods [start]
From Black Goat of the Woods (2009)

The beginning of this mysterious Irish record.

Nico Ari's Song
From The Marble Index (1969)

A track from Nico's first properly spooky solo album.

Bo Hansson The Old Forest and Tom Bombadil
From The Lord of the Rings (1970)

A rare reference to Tom Bombadil in something adapted from the Tolkien classic.

Leonard Cohen The Partisan
From Greatest Hits (1975)

Laughing Len covers a Second World War resistance tune.

Richard Thompson Bonnie St. Johnstone
From 1000 Years of Popular Music [live version] (2006)

Richard Thompson has described this as a "Bad mother" tune, perhaps missing the point that it is not wickedness but desperation that makes a woman act like this; to me the song is more akin to 'The Well Below The Valley' by Planxty.
St. Johnstone is another name for Stirling or Edinburgh or somewhere else in Scotland.

The Dewara Family Folk Song
From Seb Bassleer's recordings of Rajasthani street music (2008)

Robert Wyatt Sea Song
From Rock Bottom (1974), Wyatt's first solo album.

Beny Moré Yiriyirbon
From The Essential Beny Moré (a 2006 compilation released decades after the Cuban sensation's death).

Blue Öyster Cult Career of Evil
From Secret Treaties (1974)

Tom Tom Club On, On, On, On…
From the first album by the Tom Tom Club (1982)

Dean & Britta I'll Keep It With Mine
From 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests (2010), an album of music to accompany Andy Warhol screen tests. This was for Nico's.

Luke Haines Inside the Restless Mind of Rollerball Rocco
From 9½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early '80s (2011)

This almost did not make it onto the disc, but now I think it is one of the best things here.

Ween The Stallion Part 2
Ween Your Party
Both from Thom's Ween TOAD (2011). 'The Stallion' is originally from All Request Live in 2003, while 'Your Party' appeared first on La Cucaracha (2008)

I was thinking of including 'Piss Up A Rope', but there is an outside chance my niece might end up hearing this.

Richard Thompson Oops… I Did It Again
From 1000 Years of Popular Music [live version] (2006)

The crowd are approaching this as a piece of novelty cover version fluff, but Thompson sings it like it is one of his own dark love songs.

Jane Weaver Turning In Circles
Jane Weaver Hud A Llefrith

Both from The Fallen By Watch Bird (2010). These are by no means the only two good songs on this sensational album, and they may not even be the best ones.

Mount Vernon Arts Lab The Black Drop
From The Séance at Hobs Lane (2007)

Featuring Isobel Campbell on cello.

Broadcast & The Focus Group We Are After All Here
From Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009)

Magnet Festival / Mirie It Is / Summer is A-comen In
From The Wicker Man (1973)

Warning, features invocation of a deity.

Black Mountain Transmitter Black Goat of the Woods [end]
Another except of the 2009 album.


As always, I will make a copy of this CD-R for anyone that wants it, and I promise to take less time to send it out than I did with my 2010 discs.


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Are these yours, sir?

More record reviews. Brace yourselves.

Belbury Poly
From an Ancient Star (2009)
The Focus Group
Sketches and Spells (2005)

And what have we here? Why, it is a veritable Ghost Box corner. For these are two records released on that popular label, acquired by as part of the insane festival of rampant consumerism that occurs in the run up to Christmas. For those of you who are not as cool as me, Ghost Box are that label who do music that has acquired that "hauntology" genre name from those people who like to invent genres.

These two records are a bit different. The Belbury Poly chap is mostly synthy music, sounding like they are trying to recreate the instrumental interludes on a late 1970s schools and colleges programme, only obviously with pieces that go on for more than 30 seconds. As has of course been noted elsewhere, Mr Poly is recreating the sound of analogue synthesisers on a digital computer programme – oh the irony. One slight disappointment with this is that despite the cover (atmospheric shot of a star shining through a stone circle, Children of the Stones style) and the title, the record is not particularly spooky. People call this music hauntological (don't they?), and while it is haunted by the past, the haunting is not very threatening.

The Focus Group record, meanwhile, would in broad outline not surprise anyone who has heard the record they did with Broadcast, excepting of course that it does not feature Trish Keenan vocals. For the rest of you I can reveal that it features lots of fragmentary music that sounds strangely evocative of the lost world of the past, sometimes drifting off into vaguely Wicker Man territory and so on.

Both of these records are enjoyable and I can see myself getting much pleasure from listening to them again, but I think maybe my affair with this record label is coming to an end. Fascinating as these records are, I reckon I get the idea with both of these artists now and would derive very limited marginal utility from additional records by them. So that might be it for me and Ghost Box.

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