Phyllis Wood: The Chalkhurst Requiem

It is 1970s Britain. A fetid grey smog hangs over the country. Moisture drips from the black branches of diseased trees. In the front garden of a semi-detached house, a young boy plays with the local dog, chewing on its ears and slapping its rump. The dog is delighted, but the boy is bored, his actions filled with a crushing ennui. Entering the house he finds his mother’s rationing book lying open on the table. From it he can see that the only food they'll be getting that week will be five pounds of butter and a bit of an egg. Sick of butter and bits of egg, he slumps down onto the sofa and lets the warm death of sleep begin to fog his eyes.

I am this boy (I am not sure if that was obvious already). A noise from the TV stirs the boy (or “me”). It is a noise the like of which he (I) has (have) never heard before. Wrenching my eyes open, I am confronted by a monstrous, demented creature. Although I am aware it is contained with the TV screen, it is as if it is filling the room, bearing down on me from all angles, swamping me with all the horror in the world, its eyes, lit with the fires of hell, burning rivers of terror down my face. If I had to describe the sound it is emitting, I would say it was somewhere between a banshee’s wail and a hydra’s cough. But I don’t have to describe it. This was the cry of the Flanjus, a chthonic beast familiar to millions as the arch nemesis to Professor Jake in the eponymous TV series. This was the cry that shook the nation out of its torpor. This was the cry that signalled my entry, aged 8, into the world of adulthood.

Although I have watched every episode of the subsequent 54 series of Professor Jake, the cry of the Flanjus remains as powerful to me as ever, and when hearing it I cannot help but be taken back to that afternoon that I have just described in unnecessary detail. I have my own son now (the goon is 2.7 years young!), and although it may be misguided I often try and replicate my first experience of the Flanjus’ cry for his benefit. Creeping up on him when he is sleeping, I attempt my own vocal approximation of the sound. What it lacks in authenticity, I like to think it makes up for in volume. Pubert often seems upset, however, at my attempts to amuse him, and usually I end up just chucking him a burger and leaving in disgust.    

And so we have arrived, tediously and circuitously, at the subject of this review: Phyllis Wood. This spectral enigma was the creator (or ‘creatress’, for the feminists) of the Flanjus’ cry. After joining the BBC in the early fifties as a humble postmistress, Wood worked her way up the lardy pole to become the backbone of the BBC’s sound effects and theme music department. From the late fifties to the early nineties she worked on thousands of TV programmes, some of them remembered fondly (Prisoner 281, Waffle and Spork), others not (What’s in Uncle Arthur’s Big Cheese Hands?, Frank Furter and the Sour Kraut). She was also responsible for the sound effects in all those frankly terrifying government educational films about how to stand in the parlour (whatever that is) and melt with dignity in the event of a 20 megaton nuclear bomb falling on the country.

After the day was over, however, the lights switched off, and the actors packed away, Wood would slink back in to the BBC studios, turn the equipment back on, make about a gallon of strong coffee (half milk/half no milk, mixed together) and set to work. It was during these clandestine sessions that she produced the work that she is most critically respected for. This music, released posthumously in a steady stream since her death in 2004, amounts to over seventy hours of raw, punishing sounds. But it is all merely a prelude to the album I hold in my hands today, The Chalkhurst Requiem.

This song cycle, produced over the last ten years of her life in her house outside Guildford, represents the apotheosis of her talents. It is a powerful and moving work that asks of the listener something more than the usual passive acceptance, and rewards tedious persistence. The emotions in the music, however, were given an extra dimension after it emerged recently that Wood had been one of a pair of conjoined twins. Separated at the age of two, Wood's twin was taken away and brought up in a different family. It was pathologically feeble, however, and died aged 43 after scraping a meagre living as a laboratory assistant in a minor university (Hull). The trauma of this separation though, haunts Wood's music. Song titles such as Wrenched From My Side In A Tangle of Skin And Bone, The Hurt I Suffer Is Still So Real  hint at her pain.

In the last years of her life, the pain was not only psychological, however, but also physical. The scar from the separation that ran down the right side of her body caused her such agony that she could only relieve it by the heavy use of medicinal marijuana. As she would beaver away with her synths and reel-to-reel tape recorders, her retired accountant husband would roll up enormous joints and feed them to her (a figure of speech there. Wood didn’t actually eat the cannabis cigarettes. Imagine that, her old gob munching on a big doobie. I’m “laughing out loud” just thinking about it). This drug use inevitably comes out in the music, which is all pleasingly monged.

So there you have it, Phyllis Wood, a woman whose singular artistic vision ran through every work she produced, from the Flanjus’s cry, to music for embarrassingly racist 70s TV shows, to the Siamese dream of the Chalkhurst Requiem. A demure accountant’s wife, a sound pioneer, a terrifier of children, and a stoned genius. Wood was all of these things. You’re not fit to lick her boots. 

Dylan Wall: An Interview

Dylan Wall plays artlessly with his tuna, his long and peeling index finger poking and prodding the bleeding lump. The ghost of a smile dances around his withered lips. A sore weeps quietly on the side of his neck. The silence is deafening. With one eye still on his meaty fish, he casts the other up to me (how does he do this!?) “ummm … yeah … so this place is so great, I come here all the time … you know, when I’m in town. This tuna’s a new one for me though, it’s a bit … you know”. He smacks his lips and they make a dry sucking sound. It’s disturbing.

Wall, lead singer of Emperor Shapes, is sat opposite me in London’s Pudendia, a fashionable fusion restaurant that serves the sort of preposterous towers of food that sickeningly skinny men like Wall would mainline if you only looked away for five seconds. It was his choice to come here. How could I say no? It’ll cripple me with expenses but at least it means I’ve secured an interview with this frustrating elbow of a man. As I watch his tuna lying stinking in a pool of exquisite death, I suddenly realise I haven’t said anything for almost ages. I look back up at him and, as if to emphasize our silence, a flake of skin detaches itself from his chin and floats down onto his dish. I swear I can hear it land with a plip onto his tuna. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“So Dylan” I say, spluttering out my words in a rain of phlegm, hoping to direct some towards the tuna which is now irritating me tremendously, “Emperor Shapes have a new album out, And The Blood Fell Like Rain O’er Fields and Gardens. How about a few words on that?”

“Oh yeah, man. I’m really happy with it. Me and the band have been working on it for like, four years. The whole thing’s kind of borne out of where we were writing it. You see, we decided to write it on this farm, like way out in the country, like properly isolated you know? The nearest convenience store was like, twenty minutes’ walk away. The idea was to keep it as a working farm, but the thing about farming is that it’s like, really hard, you know. I mean, it literally never stops. All year round. You get up at dawn then work until night time. There’s hardly any time to write and record an album. That’s why it took us so long. We’d rehearse and write at night but we’d all be so tired that we’d be falling asleep. Viv the drummer actually collapsed during the recording of the track Polyphonic Spectroscope. You can hear her clattering into her drum kit about halfway through. I wanted to re-record it but Simon the producer wouldn’t let us as he was on milking duty in the morning and one of the cows had an inflamed udder.”

I nod along to this little story but Wall catches me slightly unawares when he stops so abruptly. Although, as is abundantly clear, he’s not the sort of man to be bothered by conversational gaps, I  pursue the role of interviewer regardless, my mouth forming words almost by instinct, “I think you can hear it in the playing, you being tired I mean. It’s of a uniformly low standard throughout the album really. I’m sure you’d be the first to admit that …”

“Oh totally, man, yeah. It’s appalling. And it’s not just the playing either, the lyrics and the songs are extremely poor too. As I say, what with the farming, there really was no time to concentrate on any of the necessary processes for writing or recording music. But you know what? After only four years we produced something. I think that’s testament to our determination in the face of almost overwhelming odds. And the fact that it was largely our own decision to inflict these odds upon ourselves only adds to that, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

A shard of salted lamb caramel catches in my throat and I croak out a noise which I hope Wall doesn’t take for agreement. I scan his face to check but he just stares impassively back at me. Eager to change the subject I spit out a question too banal to repeat here. Wall nevertheless gives an answer, perhaps out of some misplaced loyalty to this tired interview format.

“So the first music I ever got into was just stuff my parents would play around the house, mainly musique concrete. It was basically just the commercial stuff but I still loved it. I remember my parents would invite their friends over and we’d all dance to Schaeffer’s Intermezzo or Henry’s Danse Electromatic. It was crazy, I was only four years old but I knew all those songs off by heart. It was around that time too that I started building my own instruments. I was making them with anything I could find lying around, like bones and crazy shit, breezeblocks, whatever. I used to wire up crickets and get them to chirp in time. Sure, the stuff I was recording around then was basically just bad imitations of Schaeffer’s tunes but it got me started you know? I've probably got some of those instruments still lying around in my parents’ cabin. Most of the crickets would probably be dead now though ...”

Wall trails off and looks through me. He seems lost in reverie as he delicately excavates his ear with his fish knife. I prompt him – “So then at college you got into the tape loop scene right?”

“Yeah, yeah. It was really big at my college. We’d be up for days cutting and splicing. There were a lot of drugs around of course – crab apples, two-bit theatemines, benzideath. They helped us keep the energy levels up you know but they took their toll in the end. I completely lost control of my arm for a week and a bit. It was like, totally independent. It used to make phone calls to Methodist preachers without me knowing. Of course it could only wave down the phone so it wasn’t too much trouble. I made friends with Peter Onions too. He now records under the name Chocolate Haircut of course. He was crazy. He was picking up all these alien broadcasts on these little receivers he’d make. He’d transmit back, talking to the aliens about his favourite types of Japanese tea and how to scavenge furniture and things. I think the aliens stopped responding after a while though…”

“Great” I say, hoping to impose a sham of finality on the interview, “so I suppose you’ve got a lot of ideas in the pipeline, touring perhaps, or maybe thinking about a new album?”

“No, not really” he says as he gets up to leave. His chin is flaking badly now, leaving a snowstorm swirling over the table. I cover my mouth as I wave him goodbye. He grabs what remains of his tuna with his translucent fingers and lurches towards the exit. I watch him leave. His scarf catches in the door and unravels itself from his shoulders, but he is oblivious as he wobbles onto the pavement. I would say he was inscrutable, but I’m not entirely sure what it means.

Backstreet Abortions: Ketamine Coma EP

Cards on the table (and all over the floor following last night’s curry and poker), I don’t know who this band are. I have never heard of them. I found this EP in a skip, and have decided to review it. Maybe I am still drunk. But Jesus, try and look this band up, go on, they’re not even on the internet. How cool is that? (said in a high-pitched voice). Sure, many artists talk of being ‘post-internet’, but who really goes the whole way? (Rhetorical question. And anyway, the answer is Backstreet Abortions. (fuck I’m drunk!)). You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this EP had been left in a skip in Salford as some sort of marketing scheme directed at their potential fans (actually, thinking about it, I would be mildly surprised - that would be a totally unsustainable business model).

I haven’t got much to say about the actual music (this will become clear in the next paragraph) so I will just waste some words writing about the boring artwork. And it really is boring. Seriously, snoozeville (so drunk). The front cover features what I assume to be the band (four men, beards, wispy nightsocks) posing in front of a wall. A WALL MADE OF BRICKS. There was no apparent irony here, which leads me to two conclusions: 1) there is no irony 2) there is so much irony that it is blinding, like not seeing the forest of irony for all the trees of irony. I’m pretty sure 1) is correct. On the inner sleeve the band pose against the same wall four more times. In one shot what I assume to be the guitarist holds what I assume to be a fox.. This confuses the irony issue. On the back cover is a picture of a dead bat, the leathery shit all covered in sparkles. The issue of irony is now so confused, my only recourse is to drink heavily and vigorously.   

So what do Backstreet Abortions sound like? Well, what don’t they sound like? (again, rhetorical question. The answer is everything). That’s right, everything. Seriously, dudes, narrow yourselves down. Imagine a rigid python in a storm. Try and be like the python - firm, erect, and only snapping at the tastiest music nuggets. Because at the moment, it’s not Ketamine that would give me a coma, or even the industrial quantities of alcohol, it’s this EP. (Actually Ketamine would also give me a coma).

Tender as a Ghost: The Blunt Diaries

In 2001 I was leafing through the detritus in a bucket chucked under a table in one of those emporiums that literally (not literally) groan with the weight of a thousand unwanted memories. It would be fair to say that my life had taken a turn for the worse a month or so before that time and I was dealing with a lot (A LOT!) of unresolved issues, most of them to do with my would-be wife and a series of incidents of mistaken identity in lifts. My life was in the gutter, yes. And gutters stink. (I often wonder why this came as such a surprise to me). Having my head jammed in that bucket as I lay suppurating under a table, forcing ghostly tears out of vestigial eye-ducts, actually represented a significant improvement in my day-to-day activities at that time, and in retrospect it was a turning point so significant in my life, that it has taken me over ten years to realise it.

Here's what happened (this bit is quite long and is not really about anything, certainly very little relating to the album in the title of this post. If you want to know more about that, there's a couple of sentences at the end. I wouldn't take them out of context though. This means therefore that you either read this long-winded and tedious exposition of something that is of probably little interest to you in the vain hope it might improve your understanding of a collection of hastily written words about an album no one is frankly going to listen to, or you go do something else (drink port, rinse your elbows, practise that new knot, for example)):

With my head in that bucket I inhaled deeply, aiming to numb the panic attack I think I was having, and as I did so I felt the fetid dust tickle inside my sinuses and experienced a feeling I hadn't had since childhood. My childhood. I'm not sure what the feeling was, or even if it has a name. Probably not. Suffice to say, the panic receded and was replaced in my mind-hole with images. Images of things. Calm things. Clowns, velvet razors, anagrams on Sunday afternoons, crêpe . I'm not sure how long I lay there. If you told me a week I wouldn't be surprised. Equally, if you told me just a few seconds I wouldn't be surprised either. I really don't know is my point. After however long it was, I extracted my head feeling pleased I'd resisted the urge to walk away still wearing the bucket like a pointless helmet.

I looked at the bucket then reached into it with my arm and hand and extracted what I assumed had been the cause of my Proustian reverie. It was a small bundle. All string was all over  it and around it and hanging off it. I bit through the string, my strong youthful teeth tearing the ancient fibres apart, and spat out the remains wildly (in retrospect I'm not sure why I did this). I found I was holding in my hand a collection of prints. Hazy, undefined, momentous, transient … these were words I'd use to describe the images, although I'm not sure how I'd use them all in one sentence. Call it intuition, call it the instinctive workings of an enormous and febrile intellect, call it what you will, but I knew I held in my hands something of astonishing cultural import(ance). I emerged from under the table in a state of liquid ecstasy (quite literally (not literally)), my hands and feet and other extremities all out of  control in a spasmodic and frankly delightful manner. I threw some coins at the man (both tiny and ursine) and staggered home.

There is a book to be written about how, after months of painstaking and largely fruitless research, I began to stumble on the smallest clues as to the origin of these prints, and how I eventually pieced together the narrative surrounding their creation. If I had an advance from a publisher and a lot of time I might write this book. I have neither however, so will sum it up in a short sentence: I had found the last known works of the forgotten photographer and visionary Linda Blunt. Ten years later of course, the work of Linda Blunt is studied in every university in the land, ‘Bluntian’ is a recognised aesthetic, and exhibitions have opened in major cities across the world showing Blunt’s work (who can forget at the Mori gallery in Tokyo how the exhumed and animated corpse of Linda Blunt was used to welcome visitors. It was truly hilarious).

Although Blunt went unrecognised and unloved during her lifetime, eventually dying cold, naked, and penniless (I assume) sometime during the seventies, her place in the great pantheon of imitable artists is now assured. She is the spiritual godmother to movements such as distinguished pre-representationalism, Kajagooism, and depressed colonism, and her influence across fashion, music, art, geography, french and literature can only be overstated if you try reasonably hard. She means many things to many people, but she means something quite extraordinary to me. Her works tell me of all the possibilities of what it means to be a human. In my dreams she speaks to me, her words coming down a spidery silver filament from the heavens. They are what make me get up in the morning. They make me question and the they give me answers. They guide me and they heal me.

I don’t need fame and accolades – some people choose to recognise my part in the Linda Blunt story, others don’t. It is up to them. I used to think all that mattered was that I had Linda Blunt’s work, and that no one could take that away from me. I used to think that, that is, until I listened to The Blunt Diaries by Tender as a Ghost. The shock and disgust I felt as I listened to this album was indescribable. It was like having my heart ripped out (does this count as a description? In which case, maybe it was describable). How dare these little turds trample over everything that is holy and sacred? I’m guessing one of them studied Blunt at college, roped in some friends, flung random instruments at them and decided that was enough work needed to record an album. Linda Blunt’s diaries can be used for many things, but I suggest in future people think long and hard about shouting them over the cacophonous wailings of maladjusted foetoids. Did it make me sick? Perhaps, but what’s it called when you start throwing up pieces of internal organ?

Jack's Lemmon: A Fistful of Fudge

 Although, Jack’s Lemmon, the Brooklyn-based masked multimedia collective, have been treading their own preposterous and shit-strewn path to artistic charlatanism for over six tedious years now, this film-flam of an album represents their first foray into music. We should have seen this coming, sneaking up on us from behind like a bear in the woods that has raided our grandmother’s wardrobe and is poised to bludgeon us over our heads with a single blow of its perfumed and elegantly-gloved paw. In fact those of us who were bothered to hover a peeper over any of the Jack’s Lemmon’s throbbing media outlets, where they haven’t stopped blabbering about this for months, did see it coming. Let’s hope it gave them time to duck.

Jack’s Lemmon first caught the piss trail of media attention with their series of art pieces distributed across the Canadian wilderness. It was called Caught in a Web of a Thousand Souls (seriously). It was basically a series of small churches (I think) constructed from the accumulated detritus of launderettes or small businesses or catteries or something (I should look this stuff up). They were designed to crumble in the elements, perhaps evoking a ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’, as if any of Jack’s Lemmon have ever had one of those. The reputed audience in the vicinity was a small clutch of squirrels, many of them children, and a possible moose (possible in the sense that it was possible that a moose could have been present, not that there was an animal that was possibly a moose, or possibly something else, like a … … well, is there anything like a moose, I mean, really, is there?) Nevertheless, some human forms were able to see this spectacle when satellite images of the pieces were relayed to the bored indifference of street-dwellers in twelve major cities across the world. Apparently it was all something to with ‘urbanisation’ and ‘community’ and ‘memory’ and blah and blah and blah. Other projects ensued, too numerous and badly thought through to go into any detail here about. Suffice to say, if you can picture an ill camel in a steep sided reservoir you’re pretty close to one of them. If you can't picture that, just end it all now.

Which brings us to this album. Yes, there’s a concept, and no, I don’t know what it is. Why would I? What I can give you is this; the entire album is one long 52 minute track. It feels more like 58 minutes. Trust me. Recordings of funeral sermons have been cut up and provide the beats. The 'd' of a 'dearly beloved' is a snare. The thud of the coffin hitting the earth is a bass drum. The wail of a grieving relative is some sort of woodblock I suppose. Over these beats are layered the grunts and groans from pornography soundtracks, stretched out and pitched up and down. A synthesiser doodles away in the background for the entirety of the album. I think a cat may have been walking on it. Finally, recorded samples of the band's own bodily functions punctuate the mess. It's worse than it sounds.

Adam Fluid is listed as the producer, presumably because he is the only member of the collective with any technical or musical ability in that he once illegally downloaded some music editing software and apparently he learnt the recorder for a few years at school. To be fair to the goon though, the production “ain't bad”. Notes sparkle, groans groan, and the thuds thud right where they should (somewhere deep in the bowels I'm led to believe). It's just a shame it sounds about as enjoyable as a wank into a fusebox. You can't polish a turd. But you can squash it into the carpet with your foot. I encourage you to do this.

Thorstein Gullheart: The Maggots' Incest

Thorstein Gullheart return with The Maggots’ Incest after a much-welcomed ten-year hiatus. Or should that be returns. What or who Gullheart is remains a closely guarded secret – his/their/its appearance on stage gives away few clues; the giant squelching dimly-lit mess could be the work of a collective of bodies, human and non-human. But who cares really? This reviewer, for one, had enough of the sort of droning stretched-cat blues that Thorstein Gullheart produced in the ninties. The thought of having to listen to this slime-fest backwater of a genre with this album is almost too much to bear.

In an interview earlier this year Gullheart issued this statement about its music from behind a curtain (and through a vomit-encrusted vocoder no-doubt): “Thorstein Gullhearts considers its music to be plugging into a matrix of free form signifiers constructed from the personal artefacts and disposed consumer shit of cultural masses, both at once life temples and garbage landfills, and by re-evaluating, reconsuming, and (re)presenting the nodes and faces of broadcast media entities, creates a meta-commentary that calls into question the cultural imperialism of discourses surrounding and underpinning the narratives of our age.”

It’s possible that even Thorstein Gullheart itself doesn’t understand this mangled fuck-up of a sentence. Unfortunately though, it’s the sort of waffle that pervades this whole album. Once, around 20 years ago, Gullheart babbled some half-interesting word nuggets, but ever since a stage blackout in ’96 where the pulsating pus-globe exploded, showering the audience in fuck-knows-what sort of slime globs, it has barely even expressed anything remotely approaching intelligibility. ‘Waffle, TV, Consume! Consume!, arachnids, blah, WTF, flange bucket, resist everything and sit on my face’ goes the first track (I’m paraphrasing). It is a testament to the sheer level of piss-in-a-sink awfulness of the rest of this album that I returned to this track for its vaguely hummable coda after sitting through the other ‘songs’, the marrow solidifying in my bones.

Apparently Thorstein Gullheart has already started recording its next album. I bet the recording studio stinks. What a tit.

Cassandra Blackhurst: Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water

 Cassandra Blackhurst returns with her sophomore effort continuing on where she left off with 2008’s debut Autumn, Come Unto Thee. The Tokyo-spawned, Ohio-raised, Columbia and Harvard-educated, and London-poisoned singer/multi-instrumentalist still trades in the same woozy, leprechaun in a box, broken synth‘n’plinth structures that marked out her first album, but this time strips away much of the urgency in the ‘found’ percussion, leaving the bombastic hits and squeals largely as something ‘not quite there’. They echo and they moan as before, but this time wander uneasily over the deeply textured surface of her voice, occasionally ricocheting with such force as to leave the listener bewildered, angry, or in the case of this reviewer, with an accidental glob of sick in the back of his/her throat.

On first listen, Blackhurst’s music reads like an equation. Parentheses, multiplications, addition and subtraction. These jostle up alongside each other like a 5am comedown where once mutual euphoria is tinged with shyness and embarrassment. At times it is as if Blackhurst herself is not even sure where to place these functions, and is comfortable to let them find their own positions. This is where the careful listener is rewarded, the songs unfolding in his/her/its ears like an origami swan picked apart by elves.

If the functions are variable, the variables, whether functioning or defunct, are not. Blackhurst connects the dots, draws the arrows, and circles the O’s and Q’s between proto-Italo-funk, acid-tingled rave-athon post-cock, sub-Sakamoto twinkling and hyphenated posture-jizz. And although these genres are all recognisably present in ooh, roughly 94% of Blackhurst’s songs, it’s as if she has raised an arched eyebrow to them before smashing them into the pigswill with her pale, and frankly stinking fist. Bobbing around in the trough, we (the listener/reviewer/pretender/proclaimer) are liable to pick through these remains like an elderly relative at the buffet of a wake where all the food has been replaced by wool. One may worry that Blackhurst would sneer at the very behaviour required to untangle the threads of the now sodden knitted cake that represents her music in this tortured and ill thought through metaphor, but she would do well to know that a sneer is one half of a smile and wink.

As with a clutch of other albums released in the last six months (Julio Stetson’s Namesake for Cherry and Tears/Tears’s Nothing But Whatever You Said It Was Or Would Be, to name but three) Blackhurst’s comes with a ‘story’. This is a clever move from the multi-singer/instrumentalist/future-banger as it serves as something to pad out reviews. Following the death (and subsequent re-birth) of her father, this former ‘lazybones’ has been holed up in a hermits' retreat in the mountains, recording the farting forest and wringing it dry for sound textures. The squawks, cries, and quacks of the wood-dwelling shitbrains provide the vertebrae of the album, and can be heard underpinning everything from the warbling drum blasts of Again, My Love to the wang-out guitar cockstorm of Only Under Stars.

Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water is an album. Is it? At around 43 minutes and 14 songs it certainly feels like one.