Be Somebody Else, It’s Fine
(Chocolate Monk - choc.513) CDR $8.00
They say repetition is the key to unlocking the lizard brain. Yup. Chlorine’s scabby fingers needle the lock, hinges and front piece. Feel the nimble fumbling in your head. Graeme Hopper scoops time into small piles and sets a direction like iron fillings clustering round a magic magnet. The multiple click-click of metallic pegs acts as a lubricant. I’m willing and ready. Surreptitiously-captured voices plough fever-drenched narratives. Make room for glottal beat-boxing, Lear-esque nonsense and hummed tunes to self. I smile at the shuffle of some rattling shells or the pale blue Farfisa mood. Some machine whirrs as an owl flutters wildly in the gears; then our poor feathery professor gets snaffled by a bigger (yet unseen) beast. I tidy out the shed, one ill-judged elbow starts a cascade of paint tins to bounce playfully off the shins and forehead. Edition of 60
Ultra Fluff
(Chocolate Monk - choc.477) CDR $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
In the late summer of 2019, Graeme Hopper and Joe Murray met up on Saturday afternoons to jam. After a few sessions, a pattern emerged. Chlorine’s deconstructed percussion / electronics set up and Posset’s Dictaphones, megaphone, and vocal jaxx started in a hectic, everything-playing-at-once ecstasy, an overload of sensory information with the emphasis on texture and rhythm. After some time, busy layers sloped off, colors became clearer, and the vigorous back-and-forth of frantic improvisation settled into a steady psychic pulse. These raw jams were further messed with, looped, sliced and taped back together. Expect lightning-quick “v- vas-h” and elongated “whumm.” Climb inside a seashell to appreciate the tight, creamy crenulations. Feel the air get sucked out the room by the electric pressure blowing out your speakers. This marriage of real live-room jam and abstracted studio-sweat is not unique. But the light hand on the tiller and hurling the moral compass into the frothing waves just might be. Edition of 60