On any post, if the link is no longer good, leave a comment if you want the music re-uploaded. As long as I still have the file, or the record, cd, or cassette to re-rip, I will gladly accommodate in a timely manner all such requests.

Slinging tuneage like some fried or otherwise soused short-order cook

27 January 2018

What's that Sound Drifting from the Bleachers?

Brother Ib over at SibLINGSHOT ON THE BLEACHERS has been posting up some of his poetry as spoken word readings:






"While there may be scant few who remember, and less still who give a f@ck, it does not escape me entirely that nearly a decade has rushed by since I broke my promise to defile the bleachers with a bespoke reading or two.
     Well. The ego has shrivelled, the eagle never did land, but the idea which first began percolating down through the topsoil all those years ago to where exhibitionism lies buried continues to fester like human papilloma virus nursing a grudge deep below the skin.
     The monkey may be rusty, his performance wavering, but feed it a couple of tabs of Viagra and the organ still grinds.
     And so. This year coming, plans are afoot to resolve the unconscionable and break out the mic. The logistics remain hazy. The physics untested. But rest assured, the programme is scheduled. There will be a gnashing of teeth. Amen." Ib


His first offering in the series was prefaced thusly:




"Brothers and sisters. Siblings all. As promised earlier, SibLINGSHOT ON THE BLEACHERS is pleased to present the first instalment in a series of esoteric readings culled from these very pages and brought to life by the magic of an ailing ethos digitalis. Ably backed by Gus Ghost, this first reading is dedicated to the legacy of Joe Meek. Thank you." Ib

Now the second in the series ("The second instalment in a series of readings culled from the BLEACHERS' back pages. Please bare with me. The naked essence of the recording may drift into the red on occasion. A streaker stepping off of the benches to tango up in blue." Ib) was just Ib recting "naked" & gave me the idea of dubbing some music with his vocals. After a few feeble attempts & some SOUND advice from Brother Jonder, we came up with something at least listenable.

All this mucking about led to "MIX UP ON THE BLEACHERS!"


"Fourth instalment in this series on the BLEACHERS. In which we throw out an open invitation to all visitors: take a naked reading for a test drive, and create your very own mix. Whether you're quick on the DAW or simply a budding conjuror, there are no prerequisites beyond your enthusiasm for all things dub. All we ask is that submit your end product here for download and potential issue on a strictly limited CDR. If you would like to participate in our project, we will be hosting naked readings on the bleachers for that purpose in the coming days, in addition to selected mixes by the Ghost Men." Ib


So head over to the BLEACHERS & check out what's going on. Maybe YOU are the one to make THE PERFECT MIX.

Mixmasters Unite,

20 January 2018

Come on, Ref, Clough is Fucking Codding!

 Brother Jon has been a contributor here many times before. His posts always have high visitor & download count. They are always well received. They are always well appreciated by yours truly (gives me a break, know what I mean?). Here his latest super submission. As I most always say, "Enjoy".





As I understand it, "cod" is used as an adjective in the UK to indicate an imitation.  "Cod reggae" describes attempts to adapt the Jamaican musical style to rock, pop and punk.  "The Sad Skinhead", "Redondo Beach" and "Dreadlock Holiday" are early examples.   Punky reggae and dub have been attempted by bands from the Clash and the Ruts to the Pretenders and the Bad Brains.  The Police made a career of it. 

But the commercial zone is less interesting than the interzone, where the spatial dynamics of dub stimulated punk's appetite for sonic deconstruction.  These songs might be imitation reggae and dub, but "cod" does not mean insincere or inept.  The songs are neither thievery nor mimicry.   Something is lost in terms of authenticity, but something new is conjured in these transliterations.

This is a compilation in the spirit of 2003's "Wild Dub: Dread Meets Punk Rocker Downtown" and 2012's "Spiky Dread: Punky Reggae & Post Punk Dub".



01 SNAKEFINGER:  The Man In The Dark Sedan (1980)
02 A.MORE:  Judy Get Down (1979)
03 BILL NELSON:  Youth Of Nation On Fire (1981)
04 ELVIS COSTELLO:  B Movie (1980)
05 LONDON UNDERGROUND:  You Don't Know (1983)
06 PIGBAG:  Six Of One (1982)
07 FAMILY FODDER:  The Big Dig (1982)
08 KALAHARI SURFERS:  Township Beat (1985)
09 ANTI SOCIAL WORKERS:  Who's Watching You? (1983)
10 DIAGRAM BROTHERS:  I Didn't Get Where I Am Today By Being A Right Git (1981)
11 23 SKIDOO:  Another Baby's Face (1981)
12 SLITS:  Man Next Door (Version) (1980)
13 BASEMENT 5:  Chip Butty (1980)
14 SINGERS & PLAYERS:  Follower (1982)
15 MEDIUM MEDIUM:  Guru Maharaj Ji (1983)
16 BLACKOUTS:  Everglades (1985)
17 HOLGER CZUKAY:  Witches Multiplication Table (1981)
18 MR. PARTRIDGE:  I Sit In The Snow (1980)
19 RESIDENTS:  Love Leaks Out (1980)
20 FLYING LIZARDS:  Postscript (1995)

Eat Cod,
Jonder

07 January 2018

Who Killed Jack Ruby?

Wishing you all temporal tangos, mandible mambos, beryllium blues, & bad teeth this New Year. I believe we are in for "DEEP SHIT" this year, so I'm trying to be uplifting my Self.  From deep in my soul to all...

We all've heard MC5, Velvet Underground, the Dead Boys...but how many of us are familiar with Jack Ruby? Yeah, sure, he shot patsy Oswald before that sad tool could spill the assassination beans, but who is this relatively unknown Jack Ruby?




Jack Ruby came alive in 1973 through vocalist Robin Hall, guitarist Chris Gray, multi-instrumentalist Randy Cohen, & classically-trained viola player Boris Pearlman (notorious himself as Boris Policeband...search out Stereo / Mono by Policeband elsewhere on the web...readily available & a great listen), who were later joined by bassist George Scott (of James Chance & the Contortions / 8-Eyed Spy / John Cale). The first incarnation of Jack Ruby recorded two tracks in a Times Square recording studio in 1974; their signature tune, the nihilistic proto-punk "Hit & Run" & (the first song I ever heard from Jack - this shit made a great sandwich) the bizarre number entitled "Mayonnaise", based around Boris' amplified viola & primitive electronic 'beats' sequenced on Cohen's Serge synthesizer.

These two cuts were used to hustle additional studio time from Epic Records through Sly Stone's A&R, Stephen Paley. Jack now gave birth to three more anthems of arch art-punk: "Bored Stiff"; "Bad Teeth"; & "Sleep Cure" were recorded in a rapid-fire five to six hour session at Columbia Studios in May 1974. On these three song in particular we hear the Jack Ruby sound: Cohen patching musique concrete sounds through the Serge; Gray's banshee guitar playing & Hall's snotty vocals.

Fast forward two years. Cohen has left & is writing for Letterman. Hall & Gray want to reactivated Jack Ruby as a live-performing unit so they hook up with George Scott. This line-up played harder, faster, & louder than any other band in New York at that time. Their rehearsals at Matrix studios & dusk-to-dawn parties at the Bowery apartment behind CBGB's shared by Gray & Scott are legendary. Casa Jack Ruby was a mecca for NYC punk & No-Wave musicians. Hall quit the band unexpectedly in 1977, days before their first scheduled gig. Jack Ruby continued on as a power trio with Gray, the only original member left standing, taking over vocal duties for a couple of shows they played with Teenage Jesus & the Jerks that headlined the Fleshtones. They played one last riotous show with new vocalist Stephen Barth at Max's Kansas City, before calling it quits.




"     Hit & Run is a two-disc set (Hit - CD1 & Run - CD2) of everything (nearly...a fantastic cover of Hawkwind's "Brainstorm" is a much missed ommission - ed.) Jack Ruby recorded between 1973 & 1977 (across four incarnations of the band) that should see them acknowledged as one of the most radical and brilliantly original groups to emerge from the 1970s New York City music scene. Remastered from recently-discovered master tapes, the first disc collects all five of the band's studio recordings, which although forty years old still sound thrillingly-urgent and modern, alongside a 1977 cassette of a band rehearsal, and a 2013 remix by producer Don Fleming. Disc two contains another side to Jack Ruby; a series of largely-electronic, avant-garde pieces from 1972 and 1974—nine short tracks that play like a library record, book-ended by two longer ones—some of the earliest extant recordings made on a Serge synthesizer. What Jack Ruby left is a remarkable legacy of recorded music—hidden for decades, now-revealed—constituting a previously-unheard secret history of the New York City music scene of the early 1970s."    Jon Savage


Jack Ruby - Hit & Run 2xCD, Saint Cecillia Knows CEC002, 2014.
all decryption codes in comments

Hit CD -
Hit & Run
Mayonaise
Bored Stiff
Bad Teeth
Sleep Cure
Beggars Parade
Neon Rimbaud
Out of Touch
Hit & Run (‘77)
Bad Teeth (Don Fleming ‘Instant Mayhem’ remix)

Run CD -
Destroy / Lost
Beryllium Blues
Parietal Cha Cha
Lithium Serenade
Hydrogen Lullaby
Palaatine March
Sphenoid Waltz
Sodium Nocturne
Temporal Tango
Mandible Mambo
Ghost Note

Enjoy,

01 January 2018

Let’s Get Graphic about No Wave...the Fucking Youth of Today


Just Another Asshole was a No Wave mixed media publication project launched from the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 1978 to 1987. Barbara Ess started the title in 1978 as a personal 'zine: a crudely photocopied compilation of her collages in a makeshift transparency on which the titled was painted in bright red nail polish. Ess served as editor for all seven issues of Just Another Asshole. [1]





Issues 3 & 4 were co-edited by Jane M. Sherry; issues 5 through 7 were co-edited by Glenn Branca.


Issues #1 & #2 were 'zines comprised of photocopied high-contrast cut-outs of appropriated newspaper headlines & détourned news clippings, many of them either banal or tragic happenings: fluke accidents; random murders; pedestrians killed by falling debris; television hypochondriacs; & botched suicides. Ess came up with the publication's title after reading a New York Post article about a deaf-mute boy killed by an intruder he couldn't hear: "There was a picture of the boy, and he looked so sweet. I made a color Xerox of it, and I wrote on it 'just another asshole' ", she recalled. Although the 'zine started as a response to the alienating & dehumanizing effect of media, which exploited the same images & headlines that Ess used for their shock & entertainment value, JAAsshole evolved into an exploration of  that media's potential, when used in the right hands, to foster community & collectivity among like-minded artists.

Issue #3 was a tabloid format. This issue was co-edited by Jane M. Sherry. JAAsshole put out an open call for contributions in which ''anything submitted will be accepted, no matter what, no matter by whom''. The final product included contributions from Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Carla Liss & as many as forty others. It accompanied the ''Library Show'' exhibition at Colleen Fitzgibbon's East Village gallery. [2]

Issue # 4 was a four-page spread in the February 1980 issue of Artforum. [3]

Issue #5 was a compilation anthology LP of 84 artists' &musicians' work. The LP was released with the help of White Columns. It consisted of short, experimental music & spoken word recordings, no track longer than one minute (the cover states ''77 tracks x :45 sec. x 83[sic] artists'').




Issue #6 was a paperback book. Anthologies played a major part in defining the various attitudes of downtown N.Y.C.  No Wave work. JAAsshole #6 is one of the great seminal writing compilations. Edited with Glenn Branca, this issue outlines the variety of styles & aesthetics that were developing in the early 1980s. In all, sixty artists & writers are represented, including works by: Kathy Acker; Eric Bogosian; Mitch Corber; Brian Buczak; Jenny Holzer; Cookie Mueller; Richard Prince, Joseph Nechvatal, Judy Rifka, David Rattray, Arleen Schloss; Kiki Smith; Tod Jorgenson; Lynne Tillman; Anne Turyn; Ann Rower; Reese Williams; David Wojnarowicz; & Barbara  Kruger.

Issue #7 was Thought Objects (??? - I think No Wave was done by then)? This final installment of the Just Another Asshole project was co-edited by Glenn Branca & published in 1987. This publication includes photographs by Alice Albert & others as well as essays by Rosetta Brooks, Tricia Collins & Richard Milazzo, John Hilliard, Gary Indiana, Cookie Mueller, David Rattray, Carol Squiers, Amy Taubin, & Lynne Tillman.

For this blog, for this crowd, for this here New Year, we feature for your listening scarification...Just Another Asshole #5 - The LP.



all decryption codes in comments

 Side 1 / Cut 1 –
"Eggs Benedictus" – Larry Simon
"Kojak / Wang" – Dara Birnbaum
"Untitled 2" – Carla Liss
excerpt from "Times Sq. Show Audio" – Bobby G
"Incantation" – Wharton Tiers
"True Confessions" – Carol Parkinson
"Untitled 10" – Nina Canal
"Shift" – Lee Renaldo"
"Untitled 5" – Jenny Holzer
"Sound Stroke" – Annea Lockwood

Side 1 / Cut 2 –
"The Smith-Leroy Comedy Team" – Michael Smith / A. Leroy
"Dinner Time" – Chris Nelson
"Untitled 15" – Willie Klein
"Simply Riding a Dream" – Mitch Corber
"Untitled 8" – Mark Abott
"Untitled 3" – Dan Graham
"On the Promontory" – Michael Shamberg
"Radio Song" – Anne DeMarinis
"The Fucking Youth of Today" – Thurston Moore

Side 1 / Cut 3 –
"Red Ants" – Andy Blinx / Don Hunerberg
"Calvin Klein" – Vikky Alexander
"Dear John" – John Howell
"Untitled 12" – Salvatore Principato
"Penumbra" – Nigel Rollings
"Grand Central Station" – Peggy Katz
"Highway Patrol" – Eric Bogosian
"Happy Police Horn" – Herr Lugus
"Door Stop" – Amy Taubin
excerpt from "The Machines" – Remko Scha [4]

Side 1 / Cut 4 –
"Talking Art" – Susan Russell
"Untitled" – Bill Buchen
"Well, Alice" – Verge Piersol
"Tell the Story" – David Hofstra / Lynne Tillman
"K-4" – D. Brown
"Dogs" – Sandra Seymour
"Index Circa Seventy" – Phill Niblock
"United Technology" – Barbara Kruger
"Fetish" – John Rehberger



Side 2 / Cut 1 –
"Turtles Travel Slower on Asphalt" – Paul Mcmahon / Nancy Radloff
"Dub Bums" – Bruce Tovsky
"Untitled 9" – Martha Wilson
excerpt from "Slowly I Turn, Step By Step, Inch By Inch ...." – Ned Sublette
"Faspeedelaybop" – Glenn Branca
"You Will Start Out Standing" – Gail Vachon
"Deutschland Etude" – B. Conan Piersol
"A Natural Death" – Gregory Sandow
"Dirty Tape" – Stephan Wischerth

Side 2 / Cut 2 –
"Warhead in the Forehead" – Bob George
"It's True" – Judy Rifka
"Long Song" – David Garland
"32 Bad Movies" – Mark Bingham
excerpt from "Strangers in a Strange Land" – Michael Byron
"It's Hot Love" – Glenda Hydler / Susan Fisher
"Untitled 7" – Laurie Spiegel
"Entrada" – Barbara Ess
"Untitled 6" – Kiki Smith
"Untitled 13" – Shelley Hirsh

Side 2 / Cut 3 –
"Foreign Waters" – Peter Gordon [5]
"Watch Out - Verse 5" – Arleen Schloss [6]
"Sweden - Den Mother" – Tod Jorgensen [6]
"Voices and Chambers" – David Rosenbloom
"Untitled 4" – Doug Snyder
"Floating Cinema Excerpt" – Jon Rubin
"Untitled 14" – Thomas Lawson
"Pipe Music" – Harry Spitz
excerpt from "64 Short Stories" – Rhys Chatham / David Linton
"Salutations Roma" – Isa Genzken

Side 2 / Cut 4 –
"New Sneakers" – Daile Kaplan
"Working Youth" – Kim Gordon / Miranda
"Untitled 11"– Sally A. White
"Crown of Thorns" – Joseph Nechvatal
"Friend Heart Alarm" – Steven Harvey
"Radio Off" – Sammy Marshall Harvey
"Untitled 1" – 0:51
"Evelyn McHale" – Rudolph Grey
"Die" – Richard Morrison
excerpt from "Metal and Plastic" – Z'EV

Vitin e ri të Lumtur,



[1] – In the musick world, Barbara Ess has performed & recorded post-punk music with bands since 1978, including The Static, Disband, & Y Pants. She often performed at art galleries, at the Mudd Club, & at Tier 3.





[2} – After studying abstract art at Duke University, traditional painting, printmaking, & drawing at the University of Chicago, in 1974 Jenny Holzer moved to Manhattan to participate in the Whitney Museum's independent study program where she began her initial exploration of language as art. She began her ''Truisms'', philosophical concepts in simplified phrases for everyone. These then became black script on anonymous sheets that she wheat-pasted on buildings, walls, & fences around NYC. Her pieces encouraged pedestrians to scribble messges on the posters & make verbal comments. Holzer would often stand nearby one of her posters & listen to the conversations her art started, This interaction with the art was Holzer's real goal. In 1982 for the first time, Holzer installed a large electronic sign on the Spectacolor board in Times Square. This piece was sponsored by the Public Art Fund program. The message was part of her Survival series which commented on the great pain, great delight, & great ridiculousness of living in contemporary society.






At the beginning of her art career, Barbara Kruger was intimidated to enter New York galleries due to the art scene which was an atmosphere that, to her, did not welcome "particularly independent, non-masochistic women". However, she received early support for her projects from groups such as the Public Art Fund that encouraged her to continue art making. She switched to her modern practice of collage in the early 80s.






Hot on the heels of Pussy Riot's condemnation of Russia's politicized justice system & suppression of freedom of expression, millions of young women have been caught donning balaclavas in solidarity with feminism for the first time. Echoing scenes of riot grrrl rebellion & Guerrilla Girls anonymity, certainly, the call to charter communities of supportive & creative women via music is nothing new. An apartment on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn served as host to infrequent practices for DISBAND members Martha Wilson, Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, & Diane Torr (a rotating membership, which at some moments has included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy, Barbara Ess, Daile Kaplan & many others). Amongst the numerous No Wave bands in New York in the late 70s & early 80s who predicated on negation, DISBAND represented one of many new spaces for women who rejected the mainstream culture of the time.

DISBAND did not come out of any specific tradition, but instead, members made their own by blurring the lines between performance art & live music. None of the members were technically skilled in music. As Martha Wilson states in the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces, "We did play some instruments: plastic bags; newspapers; hammers; Col. Sanders' chicken buckets, bed sheets, hotel bells".





[3] – Ingrid Sischy, before becoming a photography & art critic for The New Yorker (1988), before taking the helm of Interview magazine (1989), long before becoming a contributing editor for Vanity Fair (1997) was the unlikely editor of Artforum magazine. The beloved South African native, who passed away in July, 2015 at the age of 63 from breast cancer,  became the editor for Artforum in late 1979. When the issue arrived on newsstands, it caused a great stir. It was utterly unlike any previous issue of Artforum. The contributors included the photographer William Wegman, the English conceptual artists Gilbert & George, the conceptual artist Joseph Buys, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, the editors of the radical feminist magazine Heresies, & the editors of the art journal Just Another Asshole. The whole thing had an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised yet oddly poised air. The cover of Sischy's first issue was a reproduction of the cover of the first issue of an avant-garde magazine of the forties called VVV. Sischy had borrowed the original cover from David Hare, VVV's former editor. Someone who had not come from John Szarkowski's MoMArt photography department might not have been as overjoyed as Sischy was by the cigarette burn & the spills that stained it, but she correctly gauged the surreal beauty that these ghostly traces of past life would assume when photographed, as well as the sense of quotation marks that they would help impart to the notion of a cover about a cover.




[4]  – Remko Scha - Guitar Mural 1 featuring The Machines C60, Taal Beeld Geluid, 1982. This is a recording of mechanically produced music from an installation in Corps de Garde, Groningen, Netherlands, October 1981. The Machines are a group of fan motors, electric drills, & electric sabre saws. They play electric guitars by means of rotating strings, rotating metal brushes, vibrating metal bars, & vibrating ropes. When the rotating / vibrating speeds of the motors are varied, different rhythms emerge from their interaction with the guitars. From the beginning of the 1980s until his death in November of 2015, The Machines was Remko’s band, though he never struck a note on any of their instruments during the group's lifetime. Not directly. Described on Scha's website as ''a group of electric motors who play electric guitar'', The Machines was an exercise in automated music, a hybrid of kinetic art & minimalist punk rock.






[5] – Peter Gordon - Star Jaws, Lovely Music, Ltd LML 1031, 1977. Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra; recorded & mixed by Peter Gordon with "Blue" Gene Tyranny; lyrics by Peter Gordon & Kathy Acker. Sensuous music expressed through a slick pop-rock language with simple harmony, generating a pop-classical hybrid. Saxophone solos, teenage-love lyrics, synthesizer effects, & conventional bass / drum parts mixed with quite a bit of intellect & abstraction. In addition to his own work or that with his Love of Life Orchestra, he has appeared on or composed music for albums by Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, David Johansen, Elliott Murphy, The Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Lawrence Weiner, and Arthur Russell.






[6] – Wednesday at A's was an on-going performance jam held in Arlene Schloss' Lower East Side loft on Broome Street. It began in 1979 & continued until 1981. During its tenure, the venue offered performance, art, & music featuring artists such as Jackie Apple, Eric Bogosian, as well as Schloss herself. Musical acts drew from the New York Punk / No-Wave scenes, featuring performers like Alan Suicide, Thurston Moore, & Glenn Branca, Flyers for Wednesday at A's were produced at Tod Jorgensen's Copy Shop on Mott Street - a nexus for what came to be known as the "New York Color Xerox School" which was an integral part of JAAsshole.  NØ