Jason Lescalleet's Due Process - 'Combines XIX, XX' (We Break More)

It appears that Due Process was previously a trio or quartet featuring not just Mr. Lescalleet but also Ron Lessard of RRR/Emil Beaulieu fame and some other collaborators. This is billed as being led by Lescalleet so I've always filed it under L next to his others. But while the first moments of 'Combine XIX' suggest the ringing, haunting resonance of Electronic Music is going to be the vibe here, it quickly combusts into a grab bag of layers and intentionally conflicting ideas, containing some vocalisations even which give it a nice throwback 80s industrial feel. The name of this group draws attention to their working and editing methodology, though I guess almost all music is just 'processing' now, and maybe it always was. The middle drops back to breathe, and it really does, gaining some wind through a chilling, distant echo that started to bring in ringing ghost echoes. It's not a long side, and the short runtime is probably partially responsible for it sounding so good - this is experimental electronic music (you can call it 'noise' even, if you insist) that really has a great mastering job. 'Combine XX' opens the B-side with a wavering, uncentered continuation of the previous side's feel. I'm not sure what the material comes from –– if the processing in question sticks to strict source material, or if it's incorporating the work of other artists, or if it lacks the formally defined rules. But the palette is stark, carefully chosen, for this is the deep listening part of the record. Static is there as on Electronic Music, not so much a foreground element here as a mood, a colouring. About halfway through it fades into a more demonic movement, with an Ash Ra ambience, a pulse that slowly becomes relentless, and disembodied, unarticulated voices that combine with mysterious higher frequencies to resemble a malfunctioning shortwave radio. This is night music, all the way, and the explosive bursts, French accents, and squealing pitches recall the greatest mysteries of the evening sky, transcribed into sound and funnelled through a vision of these Northeastern guys. I tend to overlook this record as it's filed between two bigger 'statements' by Lescalleet, but it's a pretty well-structured and complete work of its own that was really nice to revisit here. 

Joy Division - 'Still' (Factory)

Still is always somewhat maligned by JD completists and I can understand why. It's patchy and thrown together from questionable live tapes; the version of 'Ceremony', one of the greatest songs ever to come from JD or New Order,  is actually pretty poor here. But there's a few reasons I like it anyway. One is getting to hear Ian Curtis sing the lyric 'sucking on your ding dong' during the cover of 'Sister Ray' - anything that de-mythologises a legend, even in a tiny way is welcome, and what value is Ian Curtis if we don't celebrate his humanity? Because half of this is live, it has a much more stripped down feel than Closer, coming almost full circle to Warsaw and making this a nice set of four releases to evaluate sequentially. There's a few songs from Warsaw present on the first half ('Ice Age', 'They Walked in Line'), which makes record one essentially a 'lost album' put together from errant studio sessions. Nothing here feels incomplete, and there's a brash, bold confidence among the best of them. 'Something Must Break' pulls the listener along as if on a leash, and 'Dead Souls' is a classic in its theatrical simplicity. The live cuts are rough, as they should be, and this ragged nature features some great insights, such as how fucking classic the guitar riff on 'Transmission' is. When synths are used in the live setting, like on 'Decades', it's lacking something, at least compared to the studio version - this take is so thin and compromised that I'm surprised it was included. Likewise the live version of 'Digital', a good choice to end the last official release of Joy Division, suffers compared to other versions I've heard, perhaps on that Heart and Soul box or some other compilations. I'm not sure why the raggedness hurts in this particular song as opposed to helping (such as on 'Disorder') but it leaves me wanting more. Perhaps this was always the intent with Still, or maybe it was just to stop bootlegging as Wikipedia claims. It's a curious release and this particular edition may be a bootleg itself, which is a nice absurd ending to the recorded Joy Division story. It took me awhile to get through these records since it's hard to find much to say about them, and I still failed to bring any new insights here in these four posts, yet I must admit I enjoyed revisiting them more than I thought. Whenever I think about culling records like this from the collection I usually listen again and find some sort of pleasure to justify keeping them. And it's times like this I can explain why there are 1600 LPs to the right of me. And now, it's onward to Simon Joyner!

Bert Jansch - 'Moonshine' (Reprise)

Another promo copy - Reprise must have really been pushing Jansch hard back then - and a record that splits the difference in two axes, those of solo/band, and traditionals/originals. This is the Tony Visconti record, taking Jansch's songs and arranging them in full-fledged styles that mostly suit the material. For a guy who did classics such as "Heroes" and Indiscreet, Moonshine probably ranks fairly low on his list of accomplishments, and he doesn't try to reinvent the wheel here. The full-band arrangements mostly hew close to the nature of Jansch's character, which is warm, intimate and romantic. If anything, the arrangements lack a bit of teeth; there's an 'adult contemporary' feeling to a lot of this, even the solo guitar pieces, but maybe that's just musical maturity. Jansch never came off as brash or impetuous in the earlier record, but I keep thinking back to that song 'Soho' on Bert and John, which isn't the most ragged vocal line, but it bursts with youth and energy. There's nothing like that here, but instead lengthy, thoughtful meditations on loneliness and the passing of time. And if you like putting music into the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy (I don't, though I frequently do on these pages because I'm a lazy and unscrupulous writer) then this feels extremely Apollonian, at least compared to the band arrangements on Birthday Blues. This isn't a criticism; the harp on 'The January Man' is lovely and always just escaping Jansch's guitar, and the medieval leaning  arrangements on the title track are kinda fun. But the title of the record doesn't feel like it should refer to a Bacchanalian revelry (if that's what the cover art is trying to suggest), but rather literally the light of the moon. 'Night Time Blues' is probably the best cut here, a long Jansch original that uses the fiddle and Danny Thompson's probing basslines to cradle and support the vocal, which wonders through all manner of solipsistic thoughts during a sleepless night. It's both comforting and a tiny bit unsettling, and a case where the arrangements and production really benefit the material. There's drums throughout but they're always a bit mellow, mostly Laurie Allen but with Dave Mattacks on 'Yarrow' (a steady, almost military rhythm which fits the song, a tale of quarrel and death) and the great Danny Richmond on 'The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face'. Jansch must have been super excited to work with Richmond, given how much he wears his love of Mingus on his sleeve, and this is a really harmonious and beautiful jam around an insanely romantic lyric (by Ewan McColl). Richmond sounds like he just showed up and played a standard 'jazz' pulse behind it, I daresay phoning it in a bit, and he's mixed oddly low given his stature - but the result works well. The final cut, 'Oh My Father', contains an electric guitar (by Garry Boyle) against Jansch's standard cow-stick, and Visconti on electric bass. It's some out of place here, though it situates this record firmly in the world of 1970s pop-rock; the buzzing electric airspace makes this sound almost like a bizarro Steely Dan track or something. I'm not sure how I feel about it, and I bet Jansch wasn't sure either.

Richard Hell & the Voidoids - 'Blank Generation' (Sire)

Far be it from me to care about musical 'authenticity' - to even think such a concept should exist - but I rather affectionately think of this album as an example of 'fake punk'. But what is real, what is punk, yada yada yada - boring conversations, sure. What I mean is that Blank Generation fits a lot more with the genre of 'classic rock' than with Crass or Black Flag or even the Ramones, that's all - it's a bold statement, all attitude, an invented persona glossed up and sold to the kids no different than it was done for early Dylan, Elvis, Iggy, Johnny Cash or any other male greats. That the Voidoids were a solid rock band with great guitar interplay and a knack for anthemic songwriting is often overlooked behind all of the alienation and youthful romanticism, but at this point in history the fun outweighs the sense of posturing (for me). Robert Quine and Ivan Julian are the stars here, the former ending up on Lou Reed's The Blue Mask later; I'm not always sure who is the 'lead' player but they are both aspiring guitar gods, and there's some totally shredding solos here (another reason I've never felt comfortable considering this to be 'punk' - because my punk world is more austere and principled, not so hedonistic in terms of rock and roll's supposed excesses circa-1975). Hell's lyrics are mouthy and sassy, occasionally brilliant ('Another World') and often faux-brilliant, which is a different kind of brilliant but still brilliant (the sex-obsession here is primal and raw, with the first three songs all drenched in sensuality and body-talk). The guitar lines leap out with pierces and stabs, high pitched enough to be slightly annoying and anti-social, at least in terms of mid-70s rock, and Hell's sneer takes centre stage most of the time. I always found the recordings of Hell with Television to be disappointing (or at best, just a curiosity); never heard Destiny Street either. But Blank Generation is a satisfying listen for sure. Best song: 'Betrayal Takes Two' (weirdly covered by King Missile, and they did it well); it's a catchy, uncentered insight into human relationships that's still charged with post-teenage bloodflow passion. Best baller move: (not-)singing the 'blank' (depicted as '_____' in the lyric sheet) on the album's title track, a true anthem of discontent. 'I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born' is just about goddamn perfect no matter how you look at it.

Hair & Skin Trading Company - 'Psychedelische Musique' (Freek)

One of the great joys of this gradual and probably quixotic project to work through my vinyl accumulation in alphabetica order is the discovery of records that I didn't remember I owned, or didn't remember what they sounded like. Psychedelische Musique has been hiding here for years, spun only once or twice since I first purchased it, secondhand, back in 2001. 'An American comes to the UK to buy an American record?' said the shopowner with a sarcastic drawl (and you can guess which infamous shopowner it was, if I tell you said shop was located in Leicester) but I didn't let his intimidating aggressive nerdyness deter me - who gives a fuck where I'm from or where a record is from or where it's purchased? And anyway, this isn't an American record - both the band and the label are British, so I don't have any idea what the fuck he was going on about. It's strange I remember that exchange more than I remember the music. This was £8 well-spent, as I knew the moment I dropped the stylus and heard the ringing, pulsing electronic drones that open it (even if I subsequently forgot about them). This is pastiched together like a 90s version of The Faust Tapes, with a variety of, well, 'psychedelic music' techniques applied throughout. Side one has a long, slow spacious passage in the middle with some ominous clanging and echoing roomsound, like Labradford if they had an interest in backwards sounds. Other parts are thicker, and even with a bit of rock-hypnotism at play ('Tor' has lurching guitars, though not too high in the mix, and lazy-ass vocal intoning making it feel like a sketch, an Elephant 6 interstitial track gone rogue) and a generally dark (or at least uneasy) vibe throughout. Side two opens with a pounding heavy goth guitar jam, abruptly ending with a tape splice, as if they were suddenly channeling White Zombie but then changed their mind and left it on the record anyway as a joke. It feels a bit incongruous with the rest of the record, which assembles studio trickery, a post-This Heat soundworld, with the dark surrealism of Thunder Perfect Mind-era Nurse With Wound. There's not a lot of distinction between the organic and the electronic, and the swirling backwards sounds are well-applied. Maybe it's time to see what else they did or what they've done since.

Le Drapeau Noir (Chironex)

The new wave of free British music is here! I gravitated around these circles for a few years so I saw a lot of interesting stuff happening in the UK, which was music being made by young, dedicated musicians with strong roots in the free/jazz antecedents of the 60s and 70s, a strong influence of punk/hardcore/indie, and a willingness to tie up all these strands into something strong and personal. Chora, from Sheffield, are leaders among that and this one-off project, Le Drapeau Noir, features some of them (I think) and maybe some people from the Hunter Gracchus (also from Sheffield) and most certainly Pascal Nichols from Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides, as his drumming style is inimitable. The label says it's all three bands together, which if you think about it, should be a cacophonous mess - but instead we get a cacophonous bucket of beauty. This above-mentioned druming style anchors the three jams on this self-titled LP, allowing harmonium, flute, and what sounds even like a tamboura to weave in and out of the order/chaos edge. While made only a few years ago, it dowses into the more floral currents of 1960's jazz, yet updates it with a communicative sense of collective joy. By the end, the explorations are tonal, as a thick blanket of drones comes together with each member confident, listening, yet free. It's a remarkable coming together of minds, perhaps meant only as a one-off thing, but thankfully having made this document. Which is great, because these things are lovely to listen to!

John Davis - 'Pure Night' (Shrimper)

At one point, John Davis sounded so extreme to me.  The songs were so loose, so open, and so fey, that there was nothing for me to latch onto.  Over time I came to love this;  Pure Night is pretty much the Davis M.O, laid as bare as you could be.  It's an LP that was modeled after a cassette, as tape space/hiss is the main ingredient.  As minimal as this is, I'm not saying it's mostly silence - just music that is very aware of how to breathe, breathe, breathe.  'To Care Today' is the one foray into rock music, or at least it has a drumbeat, but even that feels loose and empty.  Most of the songs are just fragments, a few words, some plucked strings, maybe a phrase like 'Looking out/over fields of green' (from closing track 'Blind Love').  But Jandek this is not - Davis has a strong musicality that adheres to conventional elements of beauty, just in a totally unwrapped style.  There's a few moments of intensity - 'Angels surround' is perhaps the masterpiece, where the concrete-like tape collage and various folk/rock influences converge into a sea of madness.  'No One Around' builds on a strummed acoustic chord progression, being my mixtape choice from Pure Night.  Davis's world is barely held together, yet utterly beautiful.  Pure Impressionism may have been a more descriptive title, though the enticing glow of night skies infuses every song.  The guitars sound piercing and flanged at times, probably due to the warbling cassette 4-track this was recorded on.  I'm a sucker for music that conjures up these moments - quiet, majestic and still, perhaps a bit adolescent in the way they reflect wonder and awe.

Country Joe and the Fish - 'Electric Music for the Mind and Body' (Vanguard)

The title is apt because this is pretty electrifying 60's rock - the guitars are truly racing with electricity, tinny and sharp, and honestly some of Barry Melton's noodling is exhilirating in its exploratory way. 'Death Sound Blues' takes a blues-bar pattern and amps it up with a malevolence unequaled by anything short of Neil's 'Revolution Blues'. A blues basis is throughout most of the record, and Melton takes lead vocals on 'Love', which actually injects a nice hot blast of white soul into the proceedings. It's a little pedestrian but his guitar solo has just enough creaking and clanging to carry it through. 'Happiness is a Porpoise Mouth' twists a weird singsong sex fable into a carnivalesque nightmare, with organs and buzzing, treated guitars to really make it sing. I'm generally surprised by how much bite this has; I haven't played this in well over a decade and remembered it being sorta wishy-washy. Wishy-washy it's not, but bouncy-bouncy and jingle-jangle it can be when it's not being ethereal and dark. 'Sad and Lonely Times' is such a tune, despite the lyrics. Some days I'd prefer the hazy tracks of side 2 to side 1's sharper bite, but I guess it depends on the horizon of a given day. The album's nadir ('The Masked Marauder', a bit of goofy cartoon theme music) is immediately followed by it's zenith, the closing 'Grace'. This is a wispy, wet ballad with guitars played above the headstock to create an almost musique concrete feel. Shimmering cymbals, a haunting riff, and just the right echo and resonance make this a full-on masterpiece in the truest Terrastock style.

Don Cherry - 'Eternal Now' (Antilles)

In Sweden now, Cherry is leaving his Ornette Coleman-influenced roots behind and working with musicians much closer to 'folk' than 'jazz', and also three guys I've never heard of. There's also no pocket trumpet or cornet to be found here, so maybe that's some other indication of his intended direction. (I've never actually been sure if he plays the cornet and the pocket trumpet, or if it's the same thing and just mislabeled by a lot of people). The opener, 'Gamla Stan - The Old Town by Night' sounds like the murky moody post-Mu direction, based around a h'suan (you know, the ancient Chinese instrument). It drifts gently into said night, suggesting a world more influenced by Palenque than Peking, but maybe that's just me. 'Love Train' is the smooth sexual force of Don Cherry, not the O'Jays, but actually it's Bernt Rosengren who is delivering the erotic salvos. Cherry, who composed the piece, stays on piano (with Christer Bothén) and directs the piece through a simple structure with occasionally erupting chord bangs. The taragot is Rosengren's instrument of choice, which is a wooden sax from Romania. When the notes change there's a bit of grift, and a much more mellow tone than a resonating sax bell would provide -- almost like a tenor sax crossed with an Indian shenhai. It's the closest to a proper jazz feeling on the whole record, as Rosengren knows how to work the reed. The gongs and Tibetan bells are felt more that overtly heard, and it's a nice slice of something different that appears to be something familiar. Bothén's own 'Bass Player for Ballatune' disrupts the smooth vibe, closing out the side with a pounding, Charlegmangian piano workout for six hands and two keyboards. It's dense and seems far longer than it's actual running time (3'45) -- and perhaps attempts to define 'eternal now'. On the flip we get 'Moving Pictures for the Ear', a repetetive tribal percussion jam over which Cherry extemporises on harmonium and vocals. I saw the No Neck Blues Band once and they got into a jam that sounded exactly like this, and the harmonium here floats around the same way their keyboard did. It's so simple, yet compelling - my highlight of the album - not so much because it's a convincing work of ethnoforgery but because the piece offers so much in a simple structure. The rhythms are there to pick apart and the timbre of the dousso n'Koni, in conjunction with the harmonium, make it endlessly psychedelic. 'Tibet' takes things full circle, with it's slowly expanding sound clouds -- Cherry bleating on the Pkan-dung, which the liner notes assure me is 'a Tibetan ritual trumpet constructed from the thighbone of a virgin'. It's the sparse journey you'd expect, a truly placid exploration that nonetheless manages to be interesting and with momentum. Overall, Eternal Now is a beautiful record to listen to, though maybe slightly leaning towards the dark side of "look at all of these cool ethnic instruments". Or actually, it straddles that line, as there's enough intuitive musicianship here to master anything unfamiliar, preventing this from being a mere educational exercise.

Cabaret Voltaire - 'Mix-Up' (Rough Trade)

It's nice to transition from the Buzzcocks to Cabaret Voltaire, though I wouldn't normally make any connection between these artists. But it's a good transition: alphabetically from B to C, and geographically from Manchester to Sheffield, but approximately contemporaries, right? And both artists persevered where so many of their brethren hung it up after a few records. Listening to early Cabaret Voltaire, especially after the explosion of the "noise" underground, is a bit revelatory. For one thing, these guys are mostly into hi-fidelity recording, so the dictaphone-recorded basement jams are nonexistent. There's a bit of hiss present from the tapes, but even that's pretty mangeable, and when it layers up against whatever unorthodox recording techniques are being used, it makes a destructive futurescape that feels like it's pulling itself apart. Apart from the jammy live track 'Eyeless Sight', this is a beautiful, strange studio record that worships slow, searing electronics. They take their time to build up slowly in a few places - 'Heaven and Hell' is one such example. And while that's just a sketch as far as traditional songwriting goes, it's a good statement of purpose: electro-acoustic dualism, loaded with attitude and edge, with harsh, dissonant details. There's a lot of rhythm on Mix-Up but it's either synth bursts or tape loops. Chris Watson's loops are the smirking antithesis of Martin Swope, more foundational and less reverb-laden -- even when they're actually quite sparse. 'Photophobia' is one such example, a lengthy spoken piece that holds to a center, accelerates into unsettling territory, and leaves a spooky film. The Seeds cover ('No Escape') shows their roots, unless this was meant as mockery. 'Fourth Shot' has a guitar line that is searing and bright, which is why Cabaret Voltaire have always felt closer to a band like Suicide than to their fellow Sheffieldians, Throbbing Gristle. There's a liberal use of what now sounds to me like Casio beats, such as on 'Expect Nothing', though I'm sure it was sophisticated technology for the time. It actually injects a nice bit of twee into the car crash of audio. These guys play it slow and let things unfold, knowing that's where true horror comes from -- when the drums do become the main focus ('On Every Other Street') it actually get a bit scary. The cover is a blurry Max Headroom/white noise photo that doesn't really indiciate their Dada influence, or is that just in their name? I remembered this as being a patchy record but now, this sounds like a band with a vision.

Gato Barbieri - 'In Search of the Mystery' (Get Back)

This is an ESP classic from '67 that Get Back lovingly reissued on 'HQ 180 GRAM PURE VIRGIN VINYL' and it sounds great. Barbieri's deep, sexy sax tone resonates with that wide vibrato throughout. It's almost as wide as Ayler's yet it's modulated totally differently. Where you get a guttural energy from Albert, Gato kicks it out no less emotional, yet with totally different emotions. It's hard for me to look at this cover picture and not see something crafty in Gato's expression. So whenever I listen to this, I can't help but think that he'd be the wrong saxophonist to leave your girlfriend with alone, let's say you're at a party together and they're chatting by the keg. I'm sure he's a standup guy in real life but 'In Search of the Mystery' is free jazz's seduction music. The whole of side 1 really burns slowly, like a flickering candle that won't go out. Sirone is on bass (I love his work with the Revolutionary Ensemble); here, he's joined by Calo Scott's cello and there's times when I'm not sure who's doing what. You'd think there'd be some great interplay between the two, and while there are moments (mostly occuring on the second side), they really play second (and third) fiddle to Gato's deep reeds. It's the B-side, with 'Obsession no. 2' and 'Cinematque' that gestures towards more dissonant, grating Braxtonisms (though not too much - there's still something politely accessible about it all). I don't know if he found the mystery but I always want to listen to this in the late hours of the evening. A chillout/comedown record? But fiery as well, just not abrasive in the slightest. Barbieri's later Latin experiments scare me away but he forever gets a pass from me for Escalator Over the Hill and Liberation Music Orchestra, so he kept the right company.