SYED KAMRAN ALI / LUDO MICH / PASCAL NICHOLS
The Wet Black Poodle Transforms
(Singing Knives) CD $10.50
Recordings from November 2011 in Manchester and Sheffield of performances by legendary Flemish Fluxus artist, performer and filmmaker, with the Harappian Night Recordings mastermind and the percussionist from Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides. “Mich is in mind-bending form here,” observes our mole inside Volcanic Tongue, “Forsaking established ‘sound poetry’ modes for spontaneous body strategies, snores, bursts of song and screams, at points getting into an amazing Patty Waters-esque riff on ‘black,’ at others channeling the ferocious osmotic tongue of Blixa Bargeld circa “Negative Nein.” Ali and Nichols bolster the industrial ritual feel with metal tones, tonal skin sounds, weird moments of gamelan drone and sudden explosions of full bore improvisation that nod to the kinda volcanic interplay of the Music Improvisation Company or the large scale percussive constructs of Tony Oxley.” Edition of 150. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2013
Carrion Hut
(Singing Knives - SK016) LP $25.00
Originally a CDR with early editions of the Inside Wino Lodge LP (No Fun 2009), Carrion Hut is infused with prickly, invasive gurgles and rumblings. Let’s turn over the snort-by-snort to Daniel Baker of The Quietus: “‘The Frosted Growth’ is an exercise in muddy barbarism; Nyoukis’s non-verbal snarls, multitracked into a paranoid ooze that revels in its own ugliness … [and] gleeful incantation[s] ... recall the genuinely unsettling soundtrack work of Blood Stereo collaborator and Fluxus-inspired multidisciplinary artist Ludo Mich…. [V]ocal manipulations and rackety anti-percussive creaks … [and] a brutally realist approach to psychedelia through ritual” are “best captured on 'Late Night Vocal Gravy', a side-long experiment in the rendering of hallucination through sound in which Nyoukis patiently channels psychological dysfunction through bodily suffering and blurts it out into his tape deck…. 'Strange New Ache' ... is a Kafkaesque whirligig…. Like an animalistic satire of a society that has gorged itself silly on everything from junk food to credit ratings, there is vulgarity in abundance on Carrion Hut, but that isn't even half the story.” Screened jackets. Edition of 500.
Nothing To Offer
(Singing Knives) Cassette $11.25
On one side, a stunning twenty-one-minute solo performance in a synagogue in Ivrea, Italy, as part of the Musiche Possibili festival, showcasing Welch’s combining of intense subjective engagement with the moment and objective awareness of the entire composition of his improvisation. Voice emphasizes the weird nature of drumming where multiple, separate limbs skip between cooperation and counteraction. Two pieces on the flip (both recorded in a sauna in Scotland) emphasize a unique synthesis of various legacies of spoken word innovation — individual (John Cage, Henri Chopin, etc.) and communal (katajjaq, etc.) — experiments in narrative form, the innumerable ways that bodily movement and bodily sound can generate each other, the spaces between poetry-making, novel-making, essay-making, song-making, play-making and myth-making, and anti-architectural sculpturing, such as that by Jimmie Durham, which seeks to liberate materials from unfortunate associations with monumentality, stability and permanence. C42