Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But Parent

This is a bit late, I was without wifi over Christmas.  I'd love to say this was because I was visiting relatives in far-flung Bogota, or something exciting, but actually the phone line got cut when snipping down ivy.  Happy new year, and that.

MOTHER/ FLAT LAGER, Engage Events, Wheatsheaf, 14/12/19

Bands can spend thousands procuring industry advice on how to conduct themselves, from stage presentation to the minutiae of social media communications, but we will suggest Flat Lager’s approach as a pretty solid one, and won’t even send you an invoice: bundle onstage looking like a dog’s dinner that even the dog has turned its nose up at, wear a T-shirt reading simply “EAT SHIT”, and dive straight into a punky bunfight of a track which is basically “Louie Louie”.  The band’s take on grin-wearing garagey punk includes some almost funky drums, and jerky switches that they don’t always hit, but which work all the same, so that they mostly resemble EMF trying to become Fontaines DC.  Good solid fun in other words, even if the energy dips in the middle of the set. Our band brand consultancy would further advise them to go offstage having leapt about whilst nicking “I Wanna Be Your Dog”...but seems they’ve worked that out themselves.

Mother have also thought about their presentation, coming onto a dark stage lit by two long and slightly wobbly looking tube lights, possibly left over from the time Blue Peter taught us how to recreate Luc Besson’s Subway. Still, the set dressing is the only negative in 45 minutes of lovely, taut, serrated rock.  Each song seems to leap off the stage like a spawn-hungry salmon flinging itself up a waterfall, vocal melodies engaging and straightforward, like those of vintage Ride, and the music concrete-heavy but light on its feet.  The rhythm section, featuring Easter Island Statues and Max Blansjaar drummer Thomas Hitch, is incredibly powerful, bringing a supple groove to the songs – imagine Big Audio Dynamite or Tackhead with the hip hop dialled down and Jimmy Page riffs filling the gaps.  There are perhaps moments when the vocals could have a little more character, but this is music of heft and texture, rather than pop storytelling, so it’s no biggy (and, if in doubt, bring out a megaphone).  Mother have already come on impressively since we saw them 6 months ago, and a brand new song is tonight’s highpoint, so it’s not too hard to imagine them as serious contenders in 2020.  Screw the brand, let’s make some noise.

And Mick Navigate?

Let's be honest, there are so many childhood TV references in here, the review might as well have been written by Peter Kay, but I still like it.  There are some amazing photos of the night, by Fyrefly Pothography, which I'm sure you could locate online if were less lazy than I.

PADDY STEER/ MANDRAKE HANDSHAKE, Upcycled Sounds, Tap Social Movement 8/11/19

Whilst good bands can survive with awful names – Fuck Buttons?  Prefab Sprout?  The bloody Beatles? – it’s always nice when saying the name out loud doesn’t make you want to immediately apologise, or change your entire social circle out of shame.  For this reason, we are glad that one of the most interesting Oxford bands to arise in the last year are no longer called (shudder) Knobblehead.  Fortunately, the newly christened Mandrake Handshake are still an expansive ramshackle collective with a fine line in hypnotic slowburns and they still have a man who looks like James Acaster in a Grant Wood painting on tambourine and unsettling falsetto.  Some of their early furry freak bothering has been judiciously pruned, and they now ride gloriously sleek, machine-oiled psych grooves into the sunset, like Stereolab with the Marxism and Cluster replaced by mescaline and granola. 

By contrast, Paddy Steer couldn’t be messier, looking like a half-mad shaman mage who is kept in the basement of Flourish & Blotts and only let out after closing to catch scampering pamphlets, sitting amongst vast electronic devices that couldn’t look more home-made if he’d glued macaroni to the edges.  Musically it’s also a slapdash bricolage, fat Egyptian Lover basslines snaking through Jean Jacques Perrey bloop-showers whilst floppy, funky drums try vainly to hold things together. Sometimes it sounds like three “Rockit” era Herbie Hancocks obliviously occupying the same point in space time, and sometimes it sounds like a half drunk Daft Punk jamming with Old Gregg, but it is never less than spell-binding.  If some pieces resemble a confused man in a Gallifreyan collar trying to invoke the early 80s with barely recalled themes to Sorry, Roobarb and Kick Start played on broken machinery, well, perhaps that’s exactly what they are, but whether the drastic envelopes applied to sequenced riffs and sudden spasms of spring reverb are uncontrolled or artfully assembled it’s a trip.  Join us in the crowd when he next comes to town – we’ll be the ones in the home-sculpted papier mache Metal Mickey head-dress.

Are Fronds Eclectic? (No, They're Mostly The Same Solo For Hours)

Quite an interesting review, this one.  In short, I felt that the Bevis Frond were quite dull, and seemed to play for an eternity.  I suspect my response was coloured by the fact the only thing I know about them in advance was an LP with Anton Barbeau, and his concise psych-pop songs aren't really indicative of what they do.  Still, they were so likeable on stage, and I respected their approach to dredging up old songs for fans and merch pricing so much, I effectively gave them a positive review...or at least tempered by bile.  Birds Of Hell were honestly great, though, and Shotgun Six are worth a visit.

THE BEVIS FROND/ BIRDS OF HELL/ SHOTGUN SIX, Divine Schism, The Jericho, 26/9/19

Local heavy psych favourites Shotgun Six deal in glassy-eyed riffing, and their main technique is to keep riffing until one of them starts hitting a big gong (not to be confused with hitting a gig bong, though this may also be relevant).  For all their New York cool, what they most resemble is a 60s London blues basement band gone wild.  They’re effectively The Yardbirds, if the yard were a prison yard and the birds were being forced to trudge round it until they’d walked off their heroic drug intake.

“This song’s set in the future.  And Great Yarmouth”.  The epic followed by the bathetic, it’s a perfect summation of Norwich’s Birds Of Hell, who spend 30 minutes squeezing huge emotions into cheap synthesised pop songs, and the bulges where they won’t fit make for fascinating listening.  “Spiderman’s Let Himself Go” is a melancholic rant about life on minimum wage delivered over the sort of cheeky tune Moogieman might come up with in a pensive moment, whereas “Practice Punching My hands, Son” is a breezy ambient wash coupled with an impassioned meditation on the complexities of masculinity that could have been penned by Idles.  It ends with a tossed off gag, which suddenly defuses the tension, as does the fact the vocalist looks like Cheech Marin with Heidi’s hairdresser.  This is the sort of excellent set you want to watch again as soon as it’s finished, to catch the subtleties you missed.

Less of a danger with The Bevis Frond, where one could pop to the bar, the loo and the local Co-Op, and return to find them on the same solo.  For theirs is psychedelia of the Keep On Chuggin’ school, exemplified by expansive blues-based rockers something like Hawkwind down the Sunday afternoon pub jam, where you might be forgiven for thinking a long solo exists to let one of them visit the carvery.  Not that we’re saying long-form rock and adept fretboard flightpaths are bad things, and the band does it with an affable effortlessness it’s impossible to dislike, but the best moment of the set is “He’d Be A Diamond”, a lovely little folky jangle that sounds like Richard Thompson trying to get on the C86 compilation.  Frankly, though, a cult band like this has bought the right to do whatever they want; when was the last time you heard an act with a discography stretching back over 30 years say “we’re going to do a new one” and get a rousing cheer?  So chug on, dear Fronds, you’ve earned it.

Kris T Ambience

I had to tidy this one up a bit.  The version in Nightshift was bashed straight into an email on a tablet in a hotel in Leeds on deadline day, and I hadn't noticed that one sentence was about as long as the LP it was reviewing.

KRIS T REEDER – TIME TO FLY PART 2 (ELR XL Records)

Improvising trombonist Kris T Reeder has, we’re informed online, been “tokenised on the Ethereum blockchain”.  It takes us five minutes of searching to work out that this is not satire, just something we have no hope of comprehending.  Still, if it had been a wheeze it would have summed up this album, which embodies Vicky “People Like Us” Bennett’s concept of irritainment: art which is defined by its very ornery awkwardness.

Take opener “78 Free”, built on a chunky 4/4 bass drum kick which is a sloppily chopped loop, regularly dropping a fraction of a beat. This sums up the intriguing tension at the heart of the album, a clash between the jazzy expressiveness of free improv trombone, and cheap clunky electronica.  “Go On Then” pits rusty ‘bone tension cues against wildly oscillating synth in a style that might be called Noirstep, but might also be mistaken for someone testing the parameters of a Korg in a shop with an improv masterclasss in the corner, and “Pain Threshold” subsumes some relaxed hippo-parping notes in a storm of electronic chirrups and buzzes.

There are points where the album feels more sonically balanced, the interplay between Autechral beats and fluent trombone runs in “For Deep Experience” working well, and the title track’s SNES reproduction of a New Orleans second line groove possessing an ineluctable swagger, but generally this record is as frustrating as it is enjoyable.  But so much free improv has become a closed stylistic paddock decades after its inception, this deliberate oddness is actually a good thing, and we encourage all readers with a taste for the leftfield to seek Reeder out.  And if you work out what to do with a tokenised blockchain whilst you’re at it, be sure to let us know.

Supernormal 2019 Pt 3

After that Cocaine Piss are a mild let-down, a sneery NY punk clatter with Melt Banana yelps which would fine in The Library, but seems a bit thin for a headline set (not to mention short).  We preferred Viridian’s improvised set, with warm woodwind and projected slides of dried insects, perhaps in homage to the spider looking over the field.

SUNDAY

The final day starts quietly, with David Bramwell’s The Cult Of Water, a magical realist lecture, in which a time-travelling pedestrian touches on psychogeography, etymology and riparian religions.  Bramwell is the creator of The Odditorium, see locally at Wilderness and Irregular Folks...though, after a day at Braziers, he may need to recalibrate the first syllable.

In the Barn Sarah Angliss’s Air Loom is possibly the highlight of Sunday, redolent of vintage horror soundtracks with tiny bells, theremin, electronics and some sort of keyboard dulcimer or micro-spinet (the full description is available backstage, allegedly, though that feels like a trap), and Sarah Gabriel’s glorious soprano.  There’s a folk element to the vocals, but an arch concert hall distance to them too – ideal for anyone who wish The Wicker Man soundtrack had more Shcoenberg.  And then there’s a drum solo over a recording of a building being demolished, which criticises our new PM, and a wistful song about the moon.  Perfect.   

Not many could follow that, but John Butcher is amongst the few.  This solo set finds him visiting every space in, and outside, the Barn, faultlessly imitating, in turn, the birds that live there, a bubbling alembic, and tapes rewinding, before exploring feedback without going anywhere near the mouthpiece.  Extended technique on its own is only diverting, but with a true musical sense it can be joyous.

Sadly, Jamie Bolland’s Satie performances on the house piano are too approximate for our tastes, but the walk back to the main field brings a magical moment, where a lad tries to entice younger children onto the adventure playground netting with the line “Come on, kids, living is over-rated”.  Or is it a performance called “Existential Jungle Gym”?

Oxford’s Basic Dicks welcome us back to the main stage, their hardcore downpour swift but invigorating.  “I Am Man, Hear Me Bore” is a standout, though with that in mind we should perhaps not elaborate.

We learnt a lot in Nightshift boot camp – fifty ways to enrage bar blues soloists, how to spell Xymox, what that pyramid is on the front of The Pleasure Principle – but not how to make notes in a packed dark Vortex filled with dry ice whilst manhandling a glowing umbilical cord and dancing like a loon. Bodyvice, Natalie “Lone Taxidermist” Sharp’s features glowing vertebrae, anatomically accurate viscera unitards, slowly ramping avant-techno, and a faceless giant playing clarinet.  This ecstatic carnival has an undertow of eldritch horror, drawing morbid fears from a medical imaging consent form.  MRI James, be born, be born.

One final trip to BEEF is required to cool off, where Bell Lungs gift us with Broadcast dream pop, concluding with a wonderful number that’s like an incursion on an Irish wake by someone fixing bad transistor radio wiring.  They are followed by an unexpected encounter between a tap dancer and a sewing machine, not a collaboration between Comte de Lautréamont and Lionel Blair, but Tap Sew (someone please book them for Tap Social, just for the euphony).  The close-miked Singer in the band chugs as expected, but sounds are also sourced from apertures being opened and threads being plucked, whilst the tap shoes are used, not so much for dancing as pawing and scraping the floor, like a lackadaisical toro.  Together they make fascinating chitinous rhythms unlikely to be found in any other festival field this summer. 

 

Newcomers to Supernormal are often gleefully astonished by what they find, and the old regulars are always welcoming.  There’s no better example than our last act, Italian prog-skronk rockers Zu.  Halfway through their set the drummer stands up and shouts exultantly, “This festival is fucking freaking weird!”.  The crowd returns a vast cheer, and the math-honk headbanging begins afresh.  We’re already looking forward to Supernormal 2020: set the controls for the heart of the spider

Supernormal 2019 Pt 2

Rashad Becker’s woozy techno sounds like a drum machine on a choppy ferry crossing, and Zad Kokar has a vocalist like a tantrum toddler Jack Goldstein, and both are good, but the night ends with two powerful sets.  Lia Mice in the Vortex, a sort of driftwood chapel perfect for immersive performances, proffers supple electro, abetted by a Space: 1999 extra whacking what looks like a neon road sign and sounds like electric church bells falling down a synth well.  New Jersey’s Dälek closes the main stage.  Underneath an industrial crust, their take on hip hop is surprisingly old-school (well, alright, early new-school if you’re going to be pedantic), tightly wound but simple raps over kicking rectilinear beats.  And that is more than enough.

SATURDAY

As we enter the site on Saturday, a druidic figure invites us to “come into the centre of the spider”.  Nah, you’re alright.  Nothing good is likely to come from that invitation, surely.  Said spider is actually a vast wooden Louise Bourgeois affair, which is ritually paraded around the field on Sunday.  Thankfully the first act is inviting in a more winning manner.  Jacken Elswyth’s set of banjo tunes and pedal-controlled shruti drones is simply lovely.  Although they share some stylistic space with Gwennifer Raymond, there is none of her mercurial grace, just simple, limpid melodies played without a fraction of ego.  There’s no grandstanding, no tricks, and no criticism we can make of this charming, hypnotic set.

Charming not being an accusation to level against Isn’t’ses, who collar us on the way up from the Barn, dressed like Lia Mice’s robocrew after a hard night on the Castrol GTX spritzers, howling “we will invade your personal space” over cheap electronics.  Well, that prediction’s rather late, Nostradamus, but top marks for being a memorable act, when you’re not even on the bill.  Then, off they go to find another listener/victim.

Most things at Supernormal are alternative in some fashion, but occasionally they’re just alternative to “any good”.  We get very little from Stanfeld, a generic punk act only singled out by how badly they play (“They sounded better in soundcheck,” confides a volunteer, “mind you, they played one at a time then”), but they are followed on the Red Kite stage by No Home, a solo punk whose songs sound at first like fragments of grunge demos, but whose steely, bellicose intensity is spell-binding (though where the similarities to Kate Bush, Oneohtrix Point Never and Nina Simone come in we can’t fathom; perhaps the programme writer spent the day on the super-strength Brainbiter cider, a few of which would doubtless melt our commemorative reusable pint skiff).

Back in the Barn, where things tend to be more sedate, Copper Coims, a duo of duos, is making a chthonic clatter, all echoing rhythms and distant, reverbed tones, like far-off rolling stock.  If hell is a tube train that never arrives, then Lucifer is the son of Mornington Crescent.

People say Steve Davis is boring.  Oh, and that’s a bad myth.  Whilst his snooker peers make us think of pub carveries and The Sunday Express, Steve thought (pot the red and) screw that, became a respected prog DJ, and played synth in The Utopia Strong, a trio featuring Monsoon Bassoon and Cardiacs guitarist Kavus Torabi.  Even if you don’t admire Davis’s influence on the modern safety game, you can admire this set, which makes nods to early Tangerine Dream and Labradford’s stately drifting.

On the main stage, Mesange impress with their portentous Current 93 pronouncements and violin drone euphoria, making a far bigger impact than when they supported All The Pigs at the Bully recently.  Hen Ogledd, who follow them, are a less streamlined proposition, a harp-led maximal pop band who, at their best sound like Prince played by Bis, or a striplit chipmunk chart act, but who are sometimes annoyingly scrappy.  By contrast, the Netherlands’ Lifeless Past are honed and varnished, a tight syn-drum and guitar duo in thrall to The Cure and Joy Division, who succeed in being the right band at the right time, and energise our flagging old limbs.

Comedian John Finnemore has a sketch about football commentators applying national stereotypes to all the players, observing how often we hear of a “clinical German defence” or an “exuberant Brazilian striker”.  With this caveat in mind, we still feel that Japanese psychedelic bands who make it to the UK tend to be masters of the slow, steady build, and Qujaku’s monumental set is no exception.  They start subtly, with sax like 808 State’s “Pacific” over scowling rock, before tumescing slowly over 40 minutes until someone is twatting what might be a satellite dish to pounding, cloud-seeking rhythms, and the sound becomes nebula-huge, and swallows us all.

Back at BEEF we can’t see The Funnel at all, but we hear excellent sounds: swannee whistles in purgatory, shawm of the dead, dessicated B12 electronica, austere Russian vocals.  We’re told they’re wearing broken iPad tabards.  Sounds legit.

Having been amazed by Giant Swan at a previous festival, we have to check out Mun Sing, one of their number playing hobbled techno. His jerky moves in veiled headgear make him look like an apiarist mummy, but the music is glorious.  Like much of Autechre, no matter how abstract it threatens to get, there’s an electro groove kicking things forward.

Speaking of kicking things forward, Petbrick’s double-pedalled bass drum must have a concrete block in front to stop it sliding.  There are electric hums and spin cycle rhythms in there, but the drumming is improbably brilliant – we’re standing far too near the kit to hear a balanced sound, but can’t bear to move. Sepultura alumnus Iggor Cavalera is beast on the skins, yet no matter how punishing the beats become, there’s a secret swing to the rhythms.  Maybe that’s his Brazilian heritage (leave it, Finnemore).  Tracks could develop further, but that’s like complaining a boulder doesn’t have enough corners.  Just admire the boulder.  Even if it just fell on you.

Weekend at Bernays'

Here's my review of the amazing Supernormal festival.  It's in the latest Nightshift, but you can read some extra stuff here that there wasn't room for.  Even bearing that in mind, there are some acts I saw but didn't write up - there's just so much to experience at SN, you need a whole magazine to capture it.  But, if by some miracle any reps from Grigg, Kelly & Sneddon, Bellies!, Kinlaw & Franco Franco, Jon Collin, Steph Horak, Handle, Roman Nose or Golden Oriole are reading, I enjoyed your sets; if anyone involved with Secret Power or Jessica Higgins are reading, sorry, not so much.

To get the pun in the title you'll need to visit the site and keep your eyes peeled.  My advice is to visit Supernormal next year regardless, it really is ace.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 2-4/8/19

FRIDAY

We’ve attended our share of festivals, but Friday at Supernormal is the most delicate wristband application we’ve ever experienced.  There’s also a nice programme for £1, “or whatever you’ve got”.  Yes, once again, despite featuring acts that scream at us as vehemently as Wackford Squeers guest-hosting Infowars, and despite a queue to meet Satan in a caravan longer than that to meet Santa at Macy’s, Supernormal has proved itself to be the friendliest festival in existence.  Staff are constantly helpful, even the gloriously stoned barman who finds the names of all the drinks unfeasibly hilarious, and we’re treated as welcome guests rather than walking wallets.  In return, as if to prove that decency engenders decency, the audiences are some of the most receptive we’ve been part of.  Sarah Kenchington’s bike-propelled instruments, including ping-pong ball bagatelle percussion and aquatuba, are received so rapturously she visibly blushes, even considering malfunctions (her set mostly sounds like a Wookie in labour, which may or may not be the desired effect, but is quite an experience).  Similarly, we witness Ugandan wedding party musician Otim Alpha arrive on Sunday afternoon, clearly uncertain about the tiny shed onto which they’re unloading, only to see them beaming thirty minutes later as their Casio bangers instigate one of the most rapturous receptions of the weekend.

The performances begin on Friday afternoon with a slightly sparser crowd for late additions Nape Neck, whose mantric rants are no wave, but without the wave.  We especially enjoy their bassist marching on the spot like they’re in an am dram reading of Kipling’s “Boots”.  Rather more refined, but still intermittently serrated, is Bug Prentice, featuring Oxfordshire’s own Ally Craig on vocals and guitar, and guest bassist, Jenny from Lucy Leave.  The music is often twitchy and angular, but the true glory is Ally’s voice, a wry crooning rasp, like warm wind through ironic pampas.

Sealionwoman in the Barn brings forth waves of crepuscular jazz-folk, from just voice, double bass and all the reverb, finishing the set like Cocteau Twins at a funeral in a culvert, but it’s HAQ 123 who bring our first visual treat.  Despite two of their members being too young to get into most gigs with their ages combined, they play a sterling set of Sabbathy metal, enlivened by the presence of a fully berobed Death and some sort of rave Kermit.  They then announce an official stage-diving section after the set has finished, a revolutionary step forward in gig efficiency only a genius could come up with; these kids will probably be billionaires by the time they’re 35 (or underwater, depending on which predictive model is correct).

Sexton Ming’s Porridge Van, an act even more baroquely stupid than their name, ups the ante by starting with a doom glove puppet show we christen Punch & Jud0))), and moving on to full inscrutable mumbling noise panto, but set of the day award goes to Gwenifer Raymond, who, in sitting on a stool head down in concentration, has zero theatrical presence – unless you count hilariously swearing like a dyspeptic docker between numbers  -  but her beautiful tangles of guitar and banjo notes are stimulating enough on their own, conjuring images of Appalachian chase scenes and crazed blues arachnids spinning downhome Mandelbrots. 

Henge’s reverby stoner psych, with a whiff of classic longform rock as hinted by a Neil Young T-shirt, are probably the band most in the Supernormal wheelhouse, and are strong, with bonus points for an unexpected shakuhachi solo, and the singer’s white powdered face, instigating a game of Ghost Or Baker?  File them with Norwegians MoE who turn in a dirty chunky set we originally think of as amphetamine doom, before realising that’s just rock music –not everything needs a new genre name, even at Supernormal.  However, we’re not sure what to call Mark Vernon’s melancholy collage of old cassette messages and ambient tones, something like an 80s Scanner who could only pick up conversations by stealing answer machines and dictaphone tapes. He also adds some eerie Sea Devils dictats by talking whilst deflating a balloon into his mouth.  Sift on the tiny BEEF stage are equally spectral, telling a fractured tale of Northern Ireland border crossing ghosts, but the macabre atmosphere is undercut by the amusement of watching them squint at their scripts and remember that night time is generally dark.

 

Never Mind The Trollops...

I am perhaps guilty here of having more fun with sententious statements than actually reviewing the song.  If so, I shall redress the balance by asking you to listen yourselves, which is all reviewing is for anyway, really: https://soundcloud.com/thedollymops (alright, admittedly it's not up as I type this, but I guess it will be soon).

THE DOLLYMOPS – LOVE GROWS PALE (FourTwenny Records)

Time defuses all offence.  Spend your Sunday re-enacting the Battle Of Naseby, nobody blinks; recreate Bloody Sunday and it’s considered bad taste, but for the people who died they were much the same.  Similar story with The Dollymops, named after a Victorian term for a part-time sex worker.  Seems as though if they were called The Sluts or The Amateur Slatterns, people would rightly call them out as chauvinists, but somehow the quirky Dickensian atmosphere softens the blow.  That’s the band all over, really, skirting lamebrain yob punk and pulling themselves back from the brink with a theatrical flourish and a cheeky vaudeville wink.  This track doesn’t have the spice and storm of their previous new wave kickabouts, but it rattles along in a quieter way, reminding us a little of The Police in their less reggaefied moments, with exercise book poetry which shoots for Elvis Costello but lands at early Brett Anderson.  It’s not their finest work, but raises a smile, rummaging through post-punk like it’s a kids’ dressing-up box (and remember, a pirate outfit is fine, but Boko Haram is best avoided).

Strange Party?

Warm, isn't it?

ODDBALL, Isis Farmhouse, 8/6/19

This week the leader of the free world told us that the moon is a part of Mars.  We laughed at the time, but, spending a day in the colourful whirlwind that is the Oddball festival, suddenly such maverick cosmologies start to seem feasible – after all, we’re gearing up for Iffley lock to become a distant banlieue of Saturn with the Sun Ra Arkestra’s first ever trip to Oxford, and by six pm, a glance into their eyes reveals that a fair percentage of the crowd seem to have taken a psychic trip to Proxima Centauri, even if their physical husks still walk among.

And whilst we’re considering something as topsy-turvy as Commander Trump piloting Spaceship Earth through the inky galaxy, how about having the comedown before the trip?   We’re used to Moogieman making quirky, scientifically accurate new wave, like Robin Ince fronting Devo, but today he and drum machine prodder Stefano Maio turn in a set so bleak and unpsychedelic it’s actually otherworldly.  Imagine a John Carpenter soundtrack playing on a slowly decelerating Victrola whilst razor-honed guitar chords accompany the deadpan pronouncement “Don’t get lost”, and you have a set highlight.  New song “Journey To The East” is pretty much just a squelchy synth ostinato with some sententious metaphysical pronouncements intoned over the top, and is basically the opening to Sapphire & Steel rewritten by a paranoid Gurdjieff.  It’s brilliant, but (ironically) disorienting, and we’re glad we had the beautifully cascading kora notes of Jali Fily Cissokho to ease us into the festival.

There’s an outstanding representation of Oxford acts, from The Elephant Trip’s smoking-is-cool, shades-indoors-at-night Black Angels grooves, to Tiger Mendoza’s suet-fried melding of lysergic hip-hop beats with leather-clad rock guitar riffs, courtesy of Chris Monger from Shotgun Six (surely a shoe-in for Oddball 2020), to grief-pop heroes Flights Of Helios, who tonight get the balance between the band’s Pink Floyd vistas and Chris Beard’s stricken angel vocal spot on.  In fact, the festival’s only poor decision – apart from a few people’s final pint – is the installation of an onsite barber, whom we saw doing no business all day.  Who wants their aerials cut, man?

Whilst the day offers plenty to perplex sonically, perhaps the oddest experience is finding that the pub itself has been inexplicably rechristened the Android Garden, and that behind the bar instead of pint-pourers we find Chief Mixalot DJing some late 90s drum and bass classics - anyone witnessing the rare sight of Nightshift dancing is advised to repair immediately to the Psy-Care healing tent for a lie down.

We come across some new names during the day, Ia(i)n Ross clearly being such a new name that the event’s programme can’t decide how to spell it.  His amniotic synth washes are pleasing, but not as exciting as the old-fashioned hardware techno of ex-Vienna Ditto scamp Nigel Firth debuting as Oxford Audio Archive.  Plenty of acts on today’s bill, especially the spoken word artists, are gnomic, but Nigel’s the only one who’s gnomelike, sitting cross-legged behind a coffee table of teetering gadgets, and giggling quietly like he’s just got the jokes in Alice In Wonderland. His messy, but euphoric electronica has the glowing warmth of Pete Namlook, the ludic lo-fi chutzpah of Aqua Regia, and the sleek insistence of Hardfloor.  It’s enjoyably unpretentious, but when a Bollywood spectre starts to haunt a scrapbook jungle collage, it’s actually rather lovely too.

Perhaps the cream of the local crop, though, are expansive indie psych rockers and tambourine fetishists Knobblehead, who turn in an outstanding set of huge chugging tunes, mixing wild vibing with good honest melodic catchiness, part Brian Jonestown Massacre, part Jefferson Airplane.  At some points the blaring trumpet and tuneful chants even recall James circa Seven.  This is comfortably the best set we’ve seen them play, possibly because it’s the first time they’ve all managed to fit onstage simultaneously.

After all this, The Sun Ra Arkestra is an unusual headliner, but if this isn’t the sort of festival where expectations can be ravaged, nobody here has even tried to power a Moog by plugging into a leyline, and if bandleader Marshall Allen, at 95, hasn’t earned the right to do what the fuck he wants, then we’re from Betelgeuse (NB by this point, we aren’t entirely sure we’re not from Betelgeuse).  Tonight, they mostly eschew the frenzied freedom and synthesised abstraction of much of the back Ra-talogue for a smooth but slightly abstract lounge swing, including a surprisingly straight take on croon classic “Stranger In Paradise”.  Gavin Bryars once tried to capture the music of the Titanic’s band as they sank underwater, but the Arkestra make the sound of a Reno casino band melting into their daquiris, and if they seem to be treading water occasionally – space is the placeholder – and it isn’t the stellar voyage we expected, they sure can Pleaides tunes.

And then, it’s out onto the towpath for a moonlit stumble back to the mundane world.  Should the planets align, and Oddball return next year, we’ll certainly be there at the outset, ready for take-off.  Start the countdown, commander Trump...and smoke me a covfefe, I’ll be back for breakfast.

Jolly Jack, Ta

"Bank holiday comes six time a year, actually it's seven, and there have been occasions where another has been granted for special occasions, eg the millennium".
"Do you want to have another crack at that, Damon, mate?"

Happy bank hol weekend, you rapscallions.

JACK GOLDSTEIN/ MAX BLANSJAAR/ DESPICABLE ZEE, Beanie Tapes, Deaf & Hard Of Hearing Centre, 12/5/19

Despicable Zee’s recent EP Atigheh is likely to be one of Oxford’s releases of the year when the dust settles, but we were interested to see how Zahra Tehrani would translate its chilly introspection to the live stage.  Tonight’s performance is denser and more oppressive than the original recordings, whether that entails adding an insouciant MIA grove to “Counting Cars”, or smothering sample lattices with drums and synthesised skreek drones.  Electronic drum pads add some salad crisp snare tones, but there are one or two moments when acoustic drums overbalance the sound, reminding of us of that early 90s moment when bands like Pop Will Eat Itself explored building rock songs around sequenced backing, generally ending up with clunk-funk rhythms that didn’t quite gel.  This is a minor criticism, though, and it’s impressive that Tehrani has taken such a strong recording, and created a different, but equally intriguing, performance.

Max Blansjaar’s set is less intense, consisting of primary colour poster paint pop, all light bouncy guitar and smiling vocal lines. Imagine rough demos of 1987 hits by Go West or Wax, and you are in the right zone, although there is a choppier Graham Coxon feel to “You’re Always On My Mind”.  As much as we love Self Help and Easter Island Statues, who provide Max’s rhythm section, the strongest track is a solo piece, which resembles “The Girl From Ipanema” rewritten by Lou Barlow, featuring bonus kazoo.  It’s enjoyable stuff, though we do feel that, for a set of pure pop, there could be more euphoria – we want whoops of wild abandon, not quiet, contented smiles.

Although Jack Goldstein seems to balance sweaty pop abandon with the diffuse reticence of an academic at their first conference on Coptic etymology.  After having the organisors make us all stand up he treats us to a long, rambling monologue about pop tropes and presentation.  We’re not sure whether the message is that lofi artists should admit they’re no different from mega-stage pop Pepsinauts and so make a theatrical effort, or that a classic song will work anywhere so keep things simple. It’s possibly both.  What we are sure about is that Jack, leaping round the venue in a camel tracksuit like a life coach on a busman’s holiday, is always a pleasure, and that backing tracks mixing 80s pop, 90s rave and (inevitably) The Beach Boys sound great anywhere.  The campaign for Goldstein Eurovision 2020 starts now!

Your Future, Our Clatter

I'm listening to George Melly reading various poems about jazz.  He sounds wankered.  Good lad.

RATTLE/ FARM HAND/ AFTER THE THOUGHT, Divine Schism, Fusion Arts, 26/3/19

It’s been some years since Matt Chapman Jones performed as After The Thought, but we assume the music has been quietly playing somewhere all the while, the stately melodies and soft, glowing synth pads hiding behind the moon or in the spaces between electrons waiting for him to plug in again and broadcast them.  Wielding a guitar, keyboard and a Tetris endgame block of pedals, Chapman Jones ladles Mogwai noise onto John Carpenter motifs, simplicity taking us by the hand, and bouncing us between fuzzy warmth and isolationist eeriness.  Don’t make us wait so long for the next one.

Another person who would be welcome to come back over the Severn Bridge is Shape Records founder and Islet member Mark Daman Thomas, AKA Farm Hand.  If After The Thought’s palette is relatively sparse, Farm Hand’s is positively digi-Spartan, consisting of loops or tinny backing and vocals that tend to be so smothered in reverb or effects that lyrics are largely indecipherable, although when he tells us the songs are about “summers in rural mid-Wales” or “eating nettle soup”, we believe him.  There’s a playfulness in the performance, Thomas prancing around, cracking jokes and jamming over a recording of himself greeting each and every one of us by turn, but although his set is a cheerful lo-fi joy - a market stall knock-off of Fixers’ cyber-euphoria – there’s also a strangely monastic feel to much of it, like religious rites corrupted into secular games.   Perhaps there’s never much distance between druid and clown.

A scribbled note on the door of Fusion Arts reads “No drumming tonight.  Sorry!!”  But, seeing as Nottingham duo Rattle had dragged a pair of drumkits all the way to Oxford, we guess they decided the ignore the injunction.    In common with the other acts, their music is ostensibly simple, but powerfully hypnotic, repetitive interlocking patterns occasionally decorated by tuneful little chants.  Like vintage techno or even vintager New York minimalism, there’s a shudder of excitement when a chugging groove is punctuated by a new element, a sudden authoritative snare crack or floor tom tattoo (or some sparingly utilised dubwise FX from a gent hunched over a tiny mixing desk).  Rattle sound like a robot Art Blakey playing under some demonic skipping rhymes.  You try keeping that sort of wonder out with a handwritten sign, mortals.

The Zee! The Zee!

Fascinating aside, I agreed with the editor to change "youth worker" to something more specific about The Oxford Young Woman's Music Project, because we weren't sure whether youth worker was an accredited position, like social worker.  I've left the original text here because it's less clunky.

If you don't already, you should support YWMP, they're ace.

DESPICABLE ZEE – ATIGHEH (Self release)

The latest release from local drummer, producer and youth worker Zahra Tehrani has an accompanying book, a rough-snipped 70s sepia collage of photographs of her father after his emigration from Iran to the UK.  The music has a similarly handmade feel, combining fuzzy loops and vocal snippets with the artful looseness of a Kurt Schwitters piece, and also a similar air of parallel pride and melancholy.  The EP feels wonderfully like a low key, dewy-eyed version all your favourite highbrow electro-pop: “We Won’t Stop” is late Bjork without the grandstanding and abstract frocks, “Counting Cars” is The Knife with verdigris tarnishing all the shiny cyborg surfaces, and when the drums kick in on “Sidhe” it’s like a timid, battle-weary Add N To (X). 

“There are holes in our children’s memories”, claims the opening track, and although Atigheh is allusive and mysterious, lyrically and sonically, it may be about what is lost and what is gained as cultures meet and merge.  Whilst the booklet tells of the marriage of an Iranian man and an Irish woman, the low-level police persecution and a hilarious British culinary baptism in a plate of beans on toast, it also tells of the beginning of a new family.  The conflicting statements in “Counting Cars” are that “no matter where we land we always feel alone” and “keep on going, keep on living, keep on striving”.  The booklet states simply “roses grow limes dry up”. Debit/credit.  Regardless of whether this is the message, the EP has a soft, wintry beauty we recommend to anyone who appreciates understated electronica and intelligent pop.  Like a blurred and washed out old family snap, Atigheh is life-affirming and achingly sad at the same time.

All You Can Art Dubuffet

The second consecutive review where I've referenced Stewart Lee.  Perhaps I secretly want to be a comedy reviewer.

ART BRUT/ CASSELS/ HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN & UNCLE PEANUT, Crosstown, Bully, 18/2/19

Here Are The Young Men & Uncle Peanut are very upset with an old review in this very periodical, and have written the song “The Day The Hipsters Stole Our Look”, to prove that they look stupid on their own merits.  In fact, they don’t really look like hipsters, they look like lorry drivers suffering PTSD from a particularly harrowing ghost train.  Sour grapes aside, they’re great fun, each track a garish punk-hop rant rarely breaching two minutes.  Fans of Oxford’s Restructure will find plenty to enjoy, especially in their tale of brash kids who think they’re pop stars cluttering up a perfectly good pub.  Far more amusing than a band with such an infuriating name has any right to be.

Fun not being something Cassels are supposed to be.  They’re all math-grunge settings of 5000 word essays on neoliberalism and voting habits in the Cotswolds, aren’t they?  Well, yes, but tonight, they find time for a few jokes and a surreal discussion on relative drum popularity (snare for the square, rack tom for the maverick).  Also, angular as the songs might be, they no longer seem to be played by the sort of hyperactively awkward kids who get holes in their blazer elbows before the first week of term is out, but by a couple of riff-sucking rock heavies with a taste for both Sabbath and Shellac.  This feels like a new version of Cassels.  We really like them both.

“Popular culture no longer applies to me”, intones Eddie Argos toward the end of Art Brut’s fascinating set, a return to touring after 7 years, and nearly twice that since they were famous.  The question is, what does someone clearly in love with the magic of pop do when then they lose track of it entirely, and what does an absurdist do when our media landscape is more absurd than any fantasy.  The answer is, just admit it, play everything twice as loud and for twice as long and see what happens.

With their spoken and barked narratives and chugging, minimal rock, Art Brut are The Nightingales without the Beefheart abstraction, The Blue Aeroplanes without the well-thumbed paperbacks, Ten Benson without the Wire write-ups, and a comedy band without any jokes.  In fact, the best parts of this set are two long wayward monologues that are purest Stewart Lee (“You think I’m improvising this, but you can buy a CD of me saying the whole thing...even that bit, about the CD”).  Let’s be honest, a lot of the songs are pretty crap, but the experience as a whole is irrepressibly gleeful, and, at the end of the last song, as we all raise our hands as one to a bit nicked from “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, suddenly it’s all oddly moving.  How did that happen?  Wasn’t this all a joke?  Does it matter that Argos and Emily Kane are now Facebook friends?  When did the hipsters steal out look?  Where the hell did all those years go so quickly? 

Improv/Comedy

This was about the most fun a review has been to write since some of the old Truck shakedowns.  I'm amused that it requires specific knowledge of two quite different, but equally obscure, cultural byways - it's a bit like a sketch I wrote the other day which hinged on the listener knowing about both Borges's influential literary techniques and Lennie Bennet's Lucky Ladders.  Never to be performed, I fear.

THE BOHMAN BROTHERS, Oxford Improvisers, Old Fire Station,15/1/19

There’s a doctorate to be written about the crossover between leftfield comedy and improvised music.  There are high profile fans, of course – Stewart Lee got air time for an improv duo through his Comedy Vehicle series, as well as facing the Celebrity Mastermind third degree on avant-guitar trailblazer Derek Bailey, whilst Vic Reeves snuck an Evan Parker solo onto a top 20 album (“Pack it in, Parker!”) – but there is also a partly shared outlook.  Perhaps it’s because both stand-ups and improvisers are often relegated to the sort of pub corners and dysfunctional function rooms that the lowliest of toilet venue rockers would sneer at, perhaps it’s that both art forms always make the most sense in an intimate live environment, or perhaps it’s just that in both cases the unexpected is rarely regretted or ignored, but embraced and incorporated into the show. 

The Bohman Brothers combine the absurdity of the oddest comedy with the most dadafiedimprov.  They have the classic comic double act dynamic, one uptight and starchy in his collar and tie, the other relaxed and wayward in a potting shed sweater.  It’s Morecambe and Wise, Bert and Ernie, ego and id.  An introduction in which welcoming platitudes are haltingly and exhaustingly mumbled over a recording of car crashes has the surreal mundanity of vintage Ted Chippington, a feeling bolstered by the fact that the duo make their close-miked scrapes and percussive skitters, not from catgut and drumskin, but from rubber bands, classroom geometry sets and a couple of fetching old-school toast racks. 

We’ve sat through self-conscious art music trying not to laugh before now, so it’s wonderful tonight to see guffaws invited with such deadpan hilarity, and cut-up texts - think Burroughs meets Mark E Smith meets spam emails - are delivered impeccably: after all, timing is a key concept in both music and comedy, and The Bohman Brothers’ strange, yet strangely ordinary, performance embodies both.  Coincidence, perhaps, but we are overjoyed that the final word enunciated, in a hilarious exchange of contrasting extracts from an old guide to tree frogs and a medical Mills & Boon novel is “mother-in-law”.  Fluxus?  They’ve only just met us!