Music matters pt.2

Beware, the following blog involves a serious amount of cut 'n' paste and varying font sizes. The content is good though, a continuation of last week's instore musical offerings. We have stuff by the below,

TOTAL VERMIN
"Total Vermin’s unstoppable, drone, fluxus, nether regions UK underground documentation process shows no sign of abating and with this batch proves that if you need to know whats happening beneath the Wire radar you need to be getting in touch." Idwal Fisher. Total Vermin serves up the descriptions below...

We have about 12 of their tapes including...

TOTAL VERMIN 26: FILTHY SMEAR - CONSTIPATED ALBION C26

Dirty protest/remote collaboration between muckers Turd and Campaign. Tape noise, traffic noise, trumpet noise, bashing and crooning. Artwork by Ms Susan Fitzpatrick.

TOTAL VERMIN 27: MORAL HOLIDAY/A JARVIS C20

Moral Holiday is a synth-based solo project from Ashtray Navigations mainman Phil Todd. All swooping flourishes and animal yelps, like a caged Harmonia. Todd's former bandmate in A Warm Palindrome, Andy Jarvis (also of Sculptress, Saboteuse, et al), takes the other side. He uses guitar and synthesizers to steer his craft through these lunar waters.

TOTAL VERMIN 28: BAD ORB/PLUM SLATE C20

More in the way of eerie disembodied voices and creeping electronics from Bad Orb, a la the previous Total Vermin tape. Plum Slate in acoustic mode; feedback hum and occasional twanged strings.

TOTAL VERMIN 29: MPO/LERM - OZ OZ ALICE 1 C43

MPO/LERM is, in fact, none other than the Ceramic Hobs, with the first motion of the Oz Oz Alice Project. A potted history of the Hobs, should you need it, can be found here. This astounding document shows that Phase Eight of the Hobs is as brilliantly cracked as ever, with energy and ideas gushing out at every turn of the spool.

TOTAL VERMIN 30: SERVANTS OF CULTURE, DRINKERS OF PEARLS VOLUME I C40

The first in a series of 6 artiste compilations, this cassette comprises Dead Labour Process, Littlecreature Courses Thorough Content in Ribald Constance, Shareholder, Deepkiss 720, Plum Slate and Sindre Bjerga.

TOTAL VERMIN 9: FORD MADDOX BROWN/SMEAR CAMPAIGN C30

Manchester's Ford Maddox Brown's new age synth mask hides an ugly brute of an ogre, threatening and cajoling, and fitfully sticking his scabby coarse tongue through their shiny strawberry lips. The other side is some kind of electric wall, crackling and buzzing and shocking our weaselly protagonist as his pathetic naked frame slides flaccid from repeated attempts to mount it. Lilac tapes and inlays, with artwork from Burial Suit. 50 copies.

TOTAL VERMIN 11: GHOST OF AN OCTOPUS - "4, 10, 9, 11, 6, 8" C40

Cracked guitar and deadweight bass duo from the minds, guts and sweaty blistered fingers of a Puff/Smear Campaign alliance. Blindfolded sketching in oil and blood. A ghastly nightmare wherein you cannot find that fucking kettle that is boiling over with some horrible goddamned corrosive and you know that the work surfaces will be ruined. 50 copies, pink tapes and inlays.

TOTAL VERMIN 12: MUSCLETUSK/SMEAR CAMPAIGN C24

Heady, and heavy, live aktion from the 'Tusk, pissing off the neighbours of Manchester's Fuel Cafe in October 2006. As powerful as one could wish for, while never falling down onto any 'harsh' cliches. Two Smear Campaign pieces, a cymbal workout, and a trumpet lament. Orange tapes, green cases, colour inlays, 50 copies.

TOTAL VERMIN 14: USURPER TRIO - "PARTY TAPES" C37

"Easily the dumbest thing we've ever recorded". Ali and Malcy are joined by Grant from Muscletusk on this tape, where early japing gives way to some true out sounds. Comparitively low fidelity recording to some other Usurper releases removes the sounds from their sources, giving the listener a thorough brain-bending. Blue tapes, yellow boxes, colour inlays, 50 copies.

TOTAL VERMIN 15: GHOST OF AN OCTOPUS - "19, 21, 23, 14" C47

More heads-down fret fretting from Joincey and I. The first side (19) is one track with the both of us on guitar, a prolonged attack of double-soloing. If you know that John McLaughlin/Carlos Santana record, it's not like that. 21 and 14 see us in traditional guitar/bass mode, and on 23 we both play bass. It struck me the other day that GOAO sounds like an angrier Noggin. Without violins. White tapes, white cases, white inlays, 50 copies.


TOTAL VERMIN 23: KYLIE MINOISE - PAJAMA PARTY! C19

Ill-tempered, bludgeoning, searing and ripping noise from one of the best in town. 50 copies on pink tapes, in yellow boxes, with colour inlays.


Check out Total Vermin's blog for more tapes, cd-rs and more good stuff here . You can listen and buy from them direct, or buy instore from us at £4.  Onward!

Klaus Kinski : Happiness Happiness/Caesar 7 inch - Ankst 

"They make the most unhinged and primal racket that I have ever heard. It’s mercurial and surreal: the Birthday Party fronted by a psychotic Spike Milligan. If you like your music unstable, bust into a thousand unexpected shapes and ultimately thrilling, this band are for you."  Adam Walton (BBC Radio Wales)

Pick it up instore for a 3'er. Listen to a pizza the action here . Artwork by the devilish Dylan Hughes




Irma Vep - Goodbye 33, Hello Plastic Furniture cdr album - Icecapades

One of possibly four recordings currently in the shop by Irma Vep, freewheeling Manchester outfit chief-commisioned by Ed Stevens. Comfortable on a Tightrope says of this album,

"Recorded with the assistance, equipment and expertise of Karl Sveinnson and contains the heaviest and most rocking Irma Vep songs we've had the good fortune to hear. Multi-tracked guitars (one locked in hypnotic grooves, one searing) and propulsive drums, chants and incantations. Another total mindblower.

Cover art by Miriam Avery. Ltd to 50 copies"

But instore for £5 or head to Icecapes

Speaking of COMFORTABLE ON A TIGHTROPE, we endeavour to carry everything they ever release. We've got a tape or two at present but to truly get down on it - keep them peeled to their blog and online shoppe. Regret ye not!

Speaking of fan favourites, we've been carrying GOLDEN LAB RECORDS since day dot at Good Grief! Manchester's première boutique record label issuing limited runs by artists they love. We have the following, wordings by Golden Lab...

The Howling Hex Rogue Moon Ltd LP (ROWF14)

Strictly limited to 500 copies

Out Now!

Neil Hagerty is the former guitarist/singer with Drag City heroes Royal Trux and has spent the past six years carving out an incredible groove with The Howling Hex. This is their ninth album to date and the only one to be released on a label other than Drag City who agreed to this one-time-only release after The Howling Hex found a sympathetic ear in Golden Lab

Four tracks penned by Hagerty, the rest of the total twelve by a variety of collaborators – all produced by Hagerty, all weird and amazing. There’s bits of bizarre sound art, broken poetry, a coulda-been-a-90s-dance-anthem, rock songs, a ballad, and tons of sweet guitar playing. The title track alone is worth the price of the record, with its haunting, counter-melodic, phasing synth and guitar arrangement.

The LP is on 140g black vinyl with beautiful sleeve art produced by Lucy Jones of www.itsmountpleasant.com and is strictly limited to 500 copies. We are incredibly proud to be able to issue this wonderful record and it’s already moving fast, so get in early if you want copies.

£12

MV&EE Limits b/w Jacked-Up 7″ (ROWF 13)

The first 7″ in our singles club, by MV&EE with The Golden Road is out now. Side A is called ‘Limits’ and it’s a full Golden Road blaster with riffs as meaty as a New York deli sandwich, ripped-up MV vocals and swirling EE vocals through a fat Leslie speaker. Side B is a sleww, stonnnned (possibly 4-track) recording called ‘Jacked-Up’ with a haunting, almost dissonant vocal from MV and one of the greatest examples of Erika Elder’s intuitive, whacked-out electric mandobird playing we’ve yet heard.

£6

MV&EE WITH THE GOLDEN ROAD Moment Spacing/Bong Judge 7″ Ltd to 500 copies (ROWF5)

This summer loving bliss festival of a record is everything we hoped it could be and more. Side A, “Moment Spacing” is a two-and-a-half-minute blast of “ooh-la-la-la-la-la” joy that wraps a posi+ aura around the world. B-side, ‘Bong Judge’ is the stoned, slowed down, phaser-drenched, stretched-out basement tapes version of (almost unrecognisably) the same song running at six+ minutes. The most beautiful record we heard in 2008.

£6

Beach Fuzz Rooftops is Halos CD-R (ROWF4.5)

The first ever outing for Beach Fuzz is 21 minutes of rainbow droning guitar and keyboard with spatters of drums and splurges of vocals and shenai. Very few copies left of this release, limited to only 100 copies.

£6

Neptune untitled/improv LP (ROWF4) – Ltd to 500 copies (last remaining copies)

Big, brutal circular saw rendered instruments of sheet metal, homemade with the express intention of wrangling out of them just these unearthly, anti-spiritual cranks of flailing bombast. Three non-macho men creating moments of pant-shitting quiet, waiting mockingly to deliver the next splurge of their This Heat inflected version of masculinity. Then there are others – Donna Parker, Jessica Rylan (aka Can’t) and Kevin Micka (aka Animal Hospital) – firing tones and surges of weirdness into the mix. These are technical people hollering “fuck technicality” in favour of hunkering down in the ZONE. As ethereally, achingly beautiful as it is sickeningly nasty. And on gross-out orange and brown acid-dipped vinyl to boot. Get one while you still can.

£12

Weirding Module Sounds from the Hibrane c36 tape (ROWF 18)

Ltd to 70 copies

OUT NOW

Michael Troutman is best known as one third of the insanely great Ecstatic Peace Michigan garage punk trio Awesome Color, in which he plays bass and throws all kinds of crazed shapes. That considered, his solo project is pretty much completely off the expectation mindmap. Golden Lab first heard Weirding Module on the Beach Fuzz US trip when he played a duo set with Non Horse (aka G. Lucas Crane of The Vanishing Voice) and it was one of the most beautiful, strange and simply awe-inspiring sets we’d ever witnessed. Lucas even cried a little bit afterwards, it was so good. For Michael’s part, and like this wonderful, tripped out, transcendental, mellow brain-melter of a tape, it consisted of a number of analogue synths manipulated through various Moogs and what-have-you to create lightly pulsating tones and drones that loop in weird places and always have you guessing as to when they’re gonna come back around, even when they’re as familiar as the smell of your Dad’s farts.

If you listen to this tape tired, don’t expect to make it to the end of it. It’s the most therapeutic fucking thing you’ll ever hear. That said, LISTEN UP! Because it’s so fucking worth staying awake for. It’ll seep into your ears and worm around your brain and fill all those squidgy, grey grooves with a jelly-like liquid of pure weirdness. When you hear it, the name and the title – they make total sense.

£5

Beach Fuzz untitled c54 tape (ROWF 17)

Ltd to 70 copies

This is the first set from the slightly tweaked Beach Fuzz line-up with Fliss Horrocks now playing guitar. Seven tracks of clattering drums, chugging and wailing guitars, screaming keyboards, mellow, lilting pastoral improv and moaned vocals.

£5

Bridget Hayden untitled CDR (ROWF16) out now

Recorded at The Bowling Green pub in Manchester on 17th November 2008, when Bridget was on tour with Marcia Bassett, this is a maximal 25-minute set of epic guitar brutalising and deep, moaned vocal incantations. Employing a bow and ‘metal’ effects pedals, the resulting cacophony is orchestral in scope, rendering almost unreliable the memory of one woman and her instrument. Somewhat akin to Bassett’s duo with Matthew Bower, Hototogisu, the deeply layered tones created by Hayden offer, upon first exposure, a somewhat icy auditory experience, but as the recording settles in, the richness and sheer breadth of sound wraps around you like a feather quilt and shifts your perception almost 180 degrees. A truly magnificent set from this former Vibracathedral Orchestra member.

Limited to 80 copies with sleeves printed on recycled paper using soya based ink

£6

A Wake Two Indiscriminates CD-R, Ltd to 80 copies (ROWF12)

A two-guitar jam that dreams of Royal Trux around the time they were recording the track ‘Friends’ but you know how dreams distort everything.

£6

xNoBBQx Skewer 10″ LP, Ltd to 300 copies (ROWF11)

We first came across Australian two-piece xNoBBQx in Piccadilly Records last year when the Siltbreeze vinyl reissue of their first CD-r appeared on its shelves. The Siltbreeze label being a bastion of all that is great in terms of dirgy, lo-fi, transcendental unmusicality, we were thus intrigued to hear this slab. And, we have to say, it was one of the greatest shop-listening experiences of all time. Here was a duo, probably of fully grown men, bashing away at their instruments in a manner that suggested they had never really learned any ‘proper’ technique and it was all the more mind-bendingly good for it. We later read a review, in fact, that put it thus:

“So what exactly is the difference between an xNoBBQx recording and a couple of 14 year olds bashing instruments in the garage with record pressed down on one of their mum’s old tape recorders? Probably not a whole lot, actually, but I get the feeling that’s precisely the point.” (Cyclic Defrost)

Well, it’s a helluva point. The duo, in spite of or, perhaps, due to their unabashed simplicity, manage to create sounds that are warm as an old-fashioned blanket, each piece having the ability to induce a state of complete, dribbling mental stasis. It’s disjointed, scratchy and ‘difficult’, yes. But it also manages to be completely absorbing. If you like your rock deconstructed to the nth degree, we highly recommend you dig this.

£10

Sequin Trails Maiden Midst CDR (ROWF10)

Janina Angel Bath’s unabashed approach to cranking out sun-drenched, ecstatic drones overlaid by seedy saxophone and deep, almost Nico-esque vocals has us melting into our sofas. We came upon Sequin Trails through this here myspace, which is normally a bit too postmodern for us. But the fact that there was dayglo, facepaint and tonal honking involved really won us over. The recording is blown-out and buzzy and all the better for it. And it traverses muddily pulsating rhythms through to pure note elongation that zaps the senses and focuses the mind’s eye, like listening to one’s own tinnitus. This is so deep, it may be bottomless.

Out now, limited to 80 copies.

£5

Peeesseye I Woke Up and Drank a Bottle of Cheap Kojak CD-R (ROWF8)

Peeesseye made the scene at Dylan Nyoukis’s Colour Out of Space festival last summer and hopped over to Manchester to play a show at the Town Hall Tavern, the recording of which forms the content of this incredible slab of dense droning harmonium, scraping, buzzing, subtly soloing guitar and pulse-free, scatter-drumming. We can’t recommend this enough. Ltd to 80 copies, sleeves printed on recycled card w/soya based ink, no less

£5

Greg Kelley & Alex Neilson Passport to Satori LP (ROWF6)

Limited to 500 copies.

“Fuckin fuck fuck fantastic duo LP by trumpet mangler maestro Greg Kelley and Scottish drum freak Alex Neilson called Passport To Satori (Golden Lab Records). Just kills. First side is straight up awesome lips on brass spoot ‘n spit tone with sweet tap tap. Side two is more manic, more off the fucking wall with Kelley sending air sound through sickened pedal puh while who one of these drunk fucks starts whooshing some kind of synth hell—really great improvisation and it takes you straight to that Satori joint (or whatever that place is) where blowjobs are as good as free jazz.” (Thurston Moore & Byron Coley, Bull Tongue)

£12

Again, we'll be stocking everything by Golden Lab as soon as it drops and they are with copies. Check Golden Lab online and buy direct here

SEX IS DISGUSTING of Brighton is good, we've got a couple of 7"s released by thems. They is,

Fair Ohs - Summer Lake / Easter Island 7"

"This debut 7" follows a well-received tape of early material which was self-released on their own imprint, Suplex Cassettes, and a split live tape with friends Male Bonding on Italian Beach Babes Records. Their early material evoked images of Das Oath covering Billy Childish, a caustic 100mph exercise in ‘speed-garage’ which blended abrasive noise, an unrelenting tempo and influences picked up from the Back To The Grave compilations. 

Those expecting their debut 7” to tread similar ground will be surprised but certainly not disappointed. Not only have Fair Ohs lost the Thee from their moniker but also have lost the speed, feedback and spit evident in their early material, replacing it with a knack for joyous pop, influences spanning the globe and time (from Paul Simon's "Graceland" to Circle Jerks through to the Legends Of Benin double LP, a collection of classic afro-beat and afro-funk) and a healthy disregard for rules. Winding tropical guitar lines meet pounding drums and reverb-drenched vocals with the resulting splendour sure to appeal to fans of Abe Vigoda, Paul Simon and Talbot Tagora."

£4.50

Listen! Buy in the Good Grief! online store

Human Hair - S/T 7"

"Featuring Henry Withers (of Lovvers) on guitar, Human Hair are a whirl of yelped sloganeering, intricate riffs and lurching repetition that sounds continually new throughout. Evoking The Birthday Party, Pissed Jeans and The Jesus Lizard, yet never directly echoing any of them, they peddle creepy post-punk with a dirty lo-fidelity crackle."

£4.50

Listen! 

Buy in the Good Grief! online store

Thus concludes today's musical round-up. There's more than mentioned in the shop so if you're not dying on your feet, get up off your arse!