#psychodisco

CREAMO COYL presents 

FIVE RECORDS I GOT DURING QUARANTINE

Architects Office - Caswallon The Headhunter [Silent; 1986]

Architects Office was a conglomeration from Boulder, Colorado, which is in the western half of the United States. Known primarily as a hippie haven, Boulder is, in actuality, boring as fuck. I once spent hours digging through a musty record store only to come up empty. Then again, at the time, I wasn’t hip to the Office. Probably flipped past a stack of sealeds, but I doubt it—this album exudes cool/weird vibes. In fact, the cover of Caswallon The Headhunter is a still from a Stan Brakhage film. As a sort of John Cage of cinema, Brakhage was an avant-garde institution, and Architects Office collaborated with him over a period of years. Based on a story written by Brakhage’s wife Jane, Caswallon The Headhunter’s full stage production included a theatrical backdrop, elaborate costumes, detailed choreography and original films, in addition to AO’s real-time soundtrack. Caswallon is the only proper vinyl offering that Architects Office managed to get out. Considering it was the salad days of home-taping and mail art, they mostly released cassettes. Architects Office was not possessive, as their name can testify. My copy is warped and the jacket is taped together, but it plays mostly fine and thus I am able to enter the mythical world of Caswallon whenever it strikes my fancy. A mist-shrouded olden time when “...nobody would shave their pubic hairs...” and warriors would “...use lime-wash to make their hairs stand on end” (punk!). Close your eyes and imagine what effect “The Third Ill-Fated Disclosure” had on a medieval past featuring King Arthur and the denizens of the British Isles contending with invading Vikings and the iron-fisted rule of the Roman Empire. As a man and a woman recite the narrative, tape manipulations engulf the surroundings. Sheets of synthetic noise rain down amid sounds of flung crockery, violent chewing and animals howling in the night. “Exhausted 329.4” foregrounds heavy, labored breathing that segues from faintly erotic to possibly torture-induced, culminating in a disturbing climax. “Party/Party 327.5” makes use of a conversation that Stan Brakhage tape-recorded in 1949. Time enters a slipstream and vanishes into the vortex. By the end of the second side, treated horns and liquid electronics take on slightly more recognizable shapes, but retain the “flock of druids bathed in moonlight” scene-setting. Caswallon The Headhunter calls back to ancient oral traditions while anchoring it in the modern era via musique concrete techniques. Pierre Henry meets Ursula K. Le Guin and they exchange stories across the fire-pit. Michael Moorcock brews the coffee and after the tales are told, everyone gets a good night’s rest.

Blue Daisies - Wilt [Iridescence; 1985]

Based in Los Angeles, The Blue Daisies played fractured rock music that was pleasantly bent and flirted with the avant-garde. The scrap of info that put the Blue Daisies on my radar was the fact that Steve Stain was the drummer. Steve Stain is responsible for the delightful, bizarre, slightly unhinged and certainly unheralded The Brain Feels No Pain (New Alliance; 1986) album. Subbing for Steve on a few songs on Wilt is Brad Laner. After starting as a teenager in Earth Dies Burning, Brad went on to be in Severed Head In A Bag, Steaming Coils, Electric Company and Medicine, to name just a few. Freak cred established, I plucked a cheap copy from the ether. At first glance, the cover throws you for a loop cuz it looks kind of like some kind of post-youth crew/proto-moshcore nightmare. But this was 1985 and punks sporting corporate logos and baseball hats was still a few years off. Blue Daisies tapped into the West Coast “tribal post-punk” scene that began with Savage Republic, shared a smoke break with Fourwaycross, and ended in tragedy with Perry Farrell’s Psi-Com. Labelmates for the Daisies included the aforementioned SR, Half Japanese, Eugene Chadbourne and even the first appearance of Sonic Youth/Lydia Lunch’s classic “Death Valley ‘69.” Wilt is fun, noisy, grinding, and plenty (of fools) would say “dated.” “Slot,” with its clanging percussion and slurred chanting, seems like a product of Stain’s fevered cerebrum. “Suck Me” is a sarcastic anthem for punks who want to move like ragdolls that ends in a psychedelic rave-up. On the flip, “Dance Dance Dance” further jerks the puppets around, much to their delight. “Everything And Nothing At All” was actually re-purposed a couple years later for the Blissed Out Fatalists album (reissued in 2012). “Es Amor (Hand Job)” subverts LA “punk-funk” with junk percussion and turntable abuse. Closing cut, “Beautiful Kid,” leans full-force into this emerging sound, dodgy rapping and all. In a parallel universe, Blue Daisies is still out there, touring arenas with Fishbone and Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

Strafe Für Rebellion - s/t (Pure Freude; 1983)

Dunno why this group isn’t world-famous, but if I can help make that happen—even with an abbreviated spiel in a punk zine—well, let’s get this fuckin party started. A collaboration between Bernd Kastner and Siegfried Syniuga, the German duo transmutated and emancipated lovely and harrowing sounds from the jealous gargoyles that hold them close. These guys levitate up to the draftiest sections of the castle and come back with true alchemy in the form of song. Shorthand description goes like this: If Nurse With Wound was a rock band. Not good enough for you? Strafe Für Rebellion laughs in your face (“a soundless message of death” according to the following LP and the one that eludes my grasp). “Bum Bum” immediately puts your hackles on notice as an assortment of clattering, knocking and thudding sounds join with warped vocals and all of a sudden you are witnessing an infestation of ghosts. Eerie and thrilling—the Strafe Für Rebellion experience in a nutshell. “Siamang” approximates mutant disco as played by the succubi that live in the walls of Dracula’s fortress. “Blaue Mig” is a terrifying trudge, like Swans set loose in the primate enclosure. Strafe Für Rebellion’s sound palate is extensive—field recordings, shakers, violins, Turkish lutes, metal-on-metal and layers of voices like otherworldly choirs. The b-side is even more haunted, almost like Syniuga and Kastner had already used up so much creative energy this early in their career that Mephistopheles has come for his due way ahead of schedule. (Faust had perhaps more of an influence than just the Tapes). Alas, I do not have the accompanying 7” that came with the LP, so to that I say—”Send it to me, please, goddammit.” If you extract any pleasure from the dark, twisted genius of groups like Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, Die Tödliche Doris or Village Of Savoonga, then you deserve a dose of “punishment for rebellion.” 

John Fekner City Squad - Idioblast (Vinyl Gridlock; 1984)

This record is pure, unfettered joy on twelve inches of polyvinyl chloride. Not sure where I first heard “I Get Paid To Clap,” but it was love at first machine-drum thwack. Vinyl Gridlock put out three flexis and two 12”s, but most of this material is on the sole LP that Fekner and his City Squad eked out during the mid-’80s. Idioblast is a lost classic, a future shock narrative ahead of its time, and yet completely of its era like few artifacts before or since. The cover tips you off from the jump—a crude but effective collage featuring slogans like Toxic Junkie, Industrial Fossil, Growth Decay and Soft Brains Watch The Screen And Buy The Jeans. Hell, the first lyric on the album is “The place to be is on the space shuttle/if you’re brave enough to get on it,” which seems to anticipate the Challenger disaster two years later. NYC native John Fekner was a pioneering artist who specialized in stencil and graffiti art, so his interest in hip-hop transcended mere novelty. All of the tracks on Idioblast directly reference the ideas that inspired Fekner’s visual art. His guerilla stencil works on decaying public structures in the late ‘60s are crucial antecedents to the graffiti explosion a decade later, in which he also played a key role. As an MC, he acquits himself well on “Rapicasso,” almost justifying that endearingly corny title. Splitting the difference between hip-hop and new wave, “The Beat” is like Thomas Dolby meets Run-DMC and should’ve been a radio staple for at least one sticky summer. Channeling Fekner’s slogan-stencil aesthetic, “Travelogue The 80’s” is a tour de force reminiscent of Negativland’s experiments in audio culture jamming. Overtop dueling drum machines, television news samples tell the tale of society spiraling into deadly farce courtesy of fundamentalist thought and rampant corruption. “2 4 5 7 9 11” opens side two with a Howard Beale soundbite and proceeds to lay down a funky, melodic jam that could soundtrack either a couples roller-skate or a drug-fueled evening out. My favorite part is the breakdown where the female MC lays down her bars in an android-like cadence. This kind of goofy, political rap would soon morph into the humorless pastiche of Consolidated, but it’s fresh as the day’s first bagels on Idioblast. “I Get Paid To Clap” is irresistible, another duet between a cool chick and a hip dude as panned noises mimic the cacophony of the city. They want to know: “R U A Vidiot?” Up to this point, John Fekner City Squad is in rare company alongside pioneering post-no wave beat outfits like Death Comet Crew, Rammellzee and 3 Teens Kill 4, but the last two songs throw you off-balance yet again. “The Sight Of The Child” features a nameless youth describing his post-apocalyptic world over a bed of bluesy harmonica. “Wheels Over Indian Trails” comes blowing in on drippy acoustic guitar like some ‘70s private press obscurity as an earnest Fekner sings about white Europeans colonizing the New World and defacing the natives’ land. Initially, the song seems miles from the congested urban pollution of the preceding tracks, but it works somehow and solidifies the idiosyncrasy of this peculiar record. Luckily, I was able to procure a sealed version of this epochal release and I am pleased to report that the Another Four Years! 6” flexi does indeed keep Idioblast close company during these dark times. One last lesson on the cover lands particularly hard in the current moment: Beauty’s Only Screen Deep. Indeed.

Strange Fruit (Abiku) - On Top Of A Hill EP (Babel; 1983)

This little record has the distinction of being the only one on this list that I picked up at an actual brick-and-mortar store (Ridgewood NY’s Deep Cuts). It was a serendipitous find, as only a few months prior I had gotten a bit obsessed with this long-gone Michigan band. Featuring a pre-Crucifucks Steve Shelley, a pre-Two Dollar Guitar Tim Foljahn and Steve Miller from The Fix, Strange Fruit must have ruled the Kalamazoo art-punk scene for their brief existence. Or maybe everyone hated them. Based on this three-song 7”, you can see why Sonic Youth snatched Shelley up when they had the chance. While it’s obvious that at least one person in the band had a copy of No New York, Strange Fruit’s songs have a loose but feral quality to them that is casual in its violence; a sense of sickness curdling into cruelty. Their sound is a cauldron in which stirs noise guitar, tumbling rhythms and enchanted singing from goth-chanteuse Sherrie Feight. I’m imagining a bill with Strange Fruit Abiku, L-Seven and Dark Arts from Chicago. That’s a witchy night full of promise and premonition. What’s with the name? The single is under Strange Fruit, but “Abiku” shows up all over the packaging. By the time they made their LP (Sin Eaters Picnic) the following year, the band had added Abiku to the proper name. And then there’s another LP on Babel that seems to be a split between Abiku Red and Ark Of Bone (which may be the same band). That one is called A Phosphorus Seed and based on the one track I’ve heard, it’s as high-quality as the flagship act. Mysterious shit, indeed! At first, I thought the copy I had picked up was a late ‘80s repress, but further research indicates that it is indeed an original. Fortunately, Steve Shelley has finally made some moves towards getting this music out there. Under his Vampire Blues label, he released a digital version of On Top Of A Hill which adds three more tracks that are just as good as the original material. Sin Eaters Picnic is even better than the single, so here’s hoping Steve reissues it, or perhaps I’ll stumble onto a copy one of these days.

Spin Age Blasters with Creamo Coyl airs every Tuesday from 3 PM til 6 PM (eastern standard time) on WFMU(.org).

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Psycho Disco 3 : un entretien fleuve avec BYRON COLEY, l’un des plus dignes représentants de la deuxième vague des critiques rocks américains. MOZART de San Francisco/ Oakland causent de faire exploser le hardcore, et de pourquoi ils sont le seul groupe de “punk arty” de la planète. Deux cas irrécupérables de nerdisme musical vous guident dans les tréfonds sub-underground de la HATE-WAVE suédoise des années 1980 et de la vague pop UKDIY. + chroniques de disques, de livres, et d’élucubrations plus ou moins imbibées sur plein de trucs, le tout livré dans des couvertures salopées une par une dans la backroom de la Luttine.

Nic Fit, nouveau fanzine de Lyon, grand retour du fanzine de genre fait par un passionné pour des passionné-e-s ! Là on est dans le punk HxC pur et dur, au sommaire des chroniques, un article sur Brandon Ferwell, report de concerts de Black Flag, itw Government Warning, Deletär, Marée Noire et l'on apprend que Nic Fit vient de l'argot américain et signifie être vénère à cause du manque de nicotine, tout un programme. Zine par Phab, qui faisait il y a quelques années les zines en mode ciseaux+colle UHU "Think Positively" à Nantes!

Psycho Disco 4, le fanzine toujours plus en marge qu’au milieu, est dispo dès maintenant ! Au sommaire, un magnifique entretien avec Henry Barnes (ex-MAN IS THE BASTARD) autour de son projet AMPS FOR CHRIST, inclassable OVNI folk-noise californien. MYSTIC INANE racontent dans le détail leur tournée en Europe, y compris les bastons, les clébards & les grands moments de solitude. Les SHIFTERS parlent de leur quotidien à Melbourne, de cafés turcs, et de leur processus de composition. Nagawika et la rédaction rendent un hommage bien mérité à GASMASK TERRÖR, le groupe d-beat de Bordeaux récemment défunt. Ajoutez plein de chroniques disques/ cassettes/ groupes, des TOP 5, une impression en bonne partie en bichromie, des conseils de plats polonais qui semblent chelous aux français, des récits d’auto-stop et une grosse poignée de dessins, et vous obtiendrez notre… meilleur numéro à ce jour?!

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- PSYCHO DISCO #3 : Troisième numéro en trois ans pour le fanzine qui délègue tout ce qu’il peut. Au programme un entretien fleuve avec BYRON COLEY, l’un des plus dignes représentants de la deuxième vague des critiques rocks américains, héritier de Lester Bangs et Richard Meltzer, membre fondateur du fanzine/ magazine culte Forced Exposure, actuel taulier du label Feeding Tube, auteur d'un bouquin sur la no-wave avec Thurston Moore et de deux recueils de textes et de poèmes en solo, bref, putain c’est BYRON COLEY quoi. 40 ans de contre-culture, des hippies aux petits-fils des punks, passés à la moulinette. MOZART de San Francisco/ Oakland causent de faire exploser le hardcore, et de pourquoi ils sont le seul groupe de “punk arty” de la planète. Deux cas irrécupérables de nerdisme musical vous guident dans les tréfonds sub-underground de la HATE-WAVE suédoise des années 1980 et des morceaux les plus incontournables et POP de la vague UKDIY. Et bien sûr une tripotée de contributeurs pour une avalanche de chroniques de disques, de livres, et d’élucubrations plus ou moins imbibées sur EDGAR HILSENRATH, les meilleurs BD punks de tous les temps, PJ BONNEMAN, JAY REATARD, les groupes australiens du moment et même les plans baignades à ne pas louper aux alentours de Grenoble. ATTENTION! Ce zine contient des morceaux de TERMINAL BOREDOM, TOTAL CONTROL, LITIGE, S.A.V, ZERO GAIN, PINKU SAIDO, TAULARD et LEVANDE BEGRAVD. Le tout livré dans des couvertures salopées une par une dans la backroom de la Luttine. 3 euros

- PSYCHO DISCO #1 : Au sommaire, des interviews quasi-exclusives de GOOD THROB, les reines du post-punk primitif à l'anglaise, ainsi que de SACCHARINE TRUST, les rois de la glauquerie made in SST Records, qui nous parlent de leurs début en Californie, d'hélicoptères de la police et des techniques de dragues des années 1980. Mais notre fine équipe couvre aussi Robert Crumb, les chanteuses pop japonaises des années 1970, les meilleures cassettes de groupes finlandais que vous ne connaissez pas, le sujet crucial des "polices poilues" dans les noms de groupes crust, les meilleurs disques de POISON IDEA qui ne sont PAS Feel the darkness, les blessures de concerts, ou des choses comme VEXX, FUTURE PUNX, LES BEAUX GOSSES, ALICE COLTRANE, LE CRI DE RALIEMENT, RIHANNA OU MIDNIGHT RESSURECTOR. Le tout avec une couverture (un peu) sérigraphiée, merde, mais que demander de plus?! 3 euros

- CODA fanzine : le zine gratos de Eugenio (auteur de l'excellent Rien! an audiographic novel) : oma333 [interview] / Dead Cells [review] / David Richardson [drawing] / sps [comic] / p.a.p.a. [comic]. Gratuit, à venir chercher chez nous ou sur notre stand quand on est de sortie. (Sinon, vous pouvez choper le pdf en écrivant sur leur page)