If you’re feeling a little guilty about the amount of time you spend on Youtube watching pandas sneezing or Mike Patton laughing at Wolfmother or whatever, here’s something a bit more edifying.

I only found this site last night, and already it has blown my mind. Just look at this list! And - although I don’t want to tell you what to watch, because there’s so much here - I’d advise you click on Charlemagne Palestine’s Island Song. Give it a few minutes to get going. At first, it’s just a camera strapped to a motorcyle veering down the empty streets of a monochrome seaside town with a guy growling and exclaiming to himself as he swings around corners and past holiday cottages. Then - it’s still that. It continues to be that. But as the film progresses you hear Palestine’s voice smooth out and extend, until the growls have become drones, harmonising with the whirr and buzz of the motorcycle engine, and then full-throated hollers that soar over the thrum of the machinery, part prison work-song or yodel, part hymn to motion. But before it gets too blissed, the uneasy rider intersperses the singing with a chant of “gotta get outta here…gotta get away…” It’s funny, simple, completely un-self conscious and a really awesome realization of what the mind does when the body’s moving really fast: a layer of transcendent calm disrupted by everyday loops of stress and need. The houses are left behind; we follow the motorcycle’s jerky progress to the cliffs. The film ends looking out across the sea, Palestine singing along with a distant foghorn and the hiss of the waves.

The film stuff’s only part of the site - there are also tons of brilliant MP3s and even, you know, things to read. It is amazing. Get addicted. Watch some Maya Deren. If you want funny stuff involving animals, there’s an MP3 of Marcel Broodthaers interviewing a cat somewhere which made me do a laugh even though I’m not sure how the cat feels about it all.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, November 30th, 2006
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I’m on the radio tomorrow! Tune in 11pm UK time to the mighty Kosmische show on Resonance 104.4 fm in London or here, if you’re listening online.

Because I’ve just prerecorded the show tonight, you won’t get to hear me reading out improbable track titles in a sibillant (read: tired) whisper and laughing when they are funny. Poor you. However, you will hear some completely fucking far out noises, kind of like this:

And this

AND THIS

OK, maybe not that. But it’ll be good. Check the kosmische blog on Thurs for playlist.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
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I’m doing the singles column next issue and I need your help. What I want to review are the little tiny releases, the limited 7′’ labours of love that don’t have a PR office behind them, the strange and the noisy and the noisy and the strange. The lonely and the rum. You know the sort of stuff.

I’ll go shopping at the weekend and find some of my own, but in the meantime if anyone out there is putting out such a single, or knows someone who’s doing so, you’re most welcome to send me a copy at the Plan B office. It doesn’t have to be vinyl, it can be a CD or download or even a lovely old cassette.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, September 21st, 2006
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So today, Miss AMP’s cat, Katrina Payne, went to the great cattery in the sky, aged 18 human years. Since Amp moved into a non-cat flat, earlier this year, Joe, Emma and I were Katrina’s main carers and warm laps, and we miss her very much.

It’s funny how we all miss her so. I have shared a house with Katrina the cat since early 2004 (having met her a few years previous to that), but Joe and Emma only met her recently. She wasn’t a cute kitten. Most of the time she was a mad old smelly noisy murderous bundle of black and white fur and scary claws. But she had an enormous capacity for affection and no sense of decorum whatsoever, and that made her cute and awesome right up until her most geriatric phase.

I think Katrina was born in Kent, but mostly lived in London. She was a pioneer of the Shoreditch Twat movement, living in fashionable Brick Lane in the late 90s, where she scandalised dinner parties by running around the live-work space with half-dead rats clamped between her jaws. She moved to Hackney a few years later, and lived with a cat called Foot Foot. They had lots of fights, but eventually got along. She spent her last few years living with me and Miss AMP, and then with her official favourite man Joe, with whom she formed a weird and instant bond. She also became special friends with Emma, who gave her lots of soft food and hugs towards the end.

Katrina especially loved boys, and people with allergies to her (in that order). Boys with allergies were even better - those who dared to come round to visit would find Katrina canoodling with them before they’d even had chance to sneeze. She appeared numerous times on the Flickr group entitled Indie Rock Boys With Cats, and could often be found sitting upon the chests of unsuspecting gentleman callers, stretching one paw out in a lascivious manner and yowling seductively into their faces.
When not trying to steal our male friends, she liked to catch rats, rip their heads off, and leave the heads at the bottom of the stairs as a present, with the bodies a few feet away. Like most cats, she also liked listening to Kraftwerk, putting her head into pint glasses and milk jugs, and nesting in piles of A4 paper. Unlike many cats, she enjoyed the sound of the violin, and also slide guitar, harmonium and musical saw.

She had gorgeous white paws and a white tip on her tail and a really fluffy belly. Coming back from work today and hearing neither her claws clumping down the stairs nor her querulous little ‘feed me!’ voice made me feel empty and sad.

Here is a photo of her and Miss AMP, her proud owner and best human friend.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
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This is good, better than good. Thank you to the people who sent it to me, and apologies for the lack of review in August’s Plan B. I lost it in a pile of other CDs. I’m guessing it’ll still be relevant in September.

For all that I’m bored of hearing that the energy, inventiveness and fire of the experimental scene of the early 80s has never really been surpassed, that this stuff still sounds more than fresh today, compilations like this make a pretty good case for both those claims. It’s all so joyfully serious and so kind of menacing; this overriding antagonistic intelligence that glowers out of the faces of the musicians on the cover as well as from the sawing notes of Swans’ ‘Weakling’ and Sonic Youth’s ‘Shaking Hell’. Oh and there is an eight-minute Arthur Russell track too, one of his really barely-there World Of Echo-style ones that sounds like clouds and light. And Rhys Chatham. All good.

From here:www.orangemountainmusic.com

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, July 31st, 2006
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Last night’s Morgen und Nite sort out their minidisc recordings session resulted in our at least naming a couple of new tracks (look out for ‘Arc De Triomphe’, coming your way in the key of E-fuck sometime soon) but soon became the customary Friday night Morgen-Nite-Stannard listening party, with pizza and ale and puns galore. Fun!

On the menu were recordings by Espers, Strapping Young Lad, Facedowninshit, Circulus, Aerosmith, Tractor, Lotus Eaters and - my pick of the bunch - Fresh Maggots’ s/t 1971 one-off album. What was most great about it was its oddly urgent pace, and some beautifully recorded strings. Richard Youngs was evoked as a comparison, which gives you an idea, kind of.

There’s a pretty good review of it from last year here on Dusted, which takes a while to turn into an actual review but I think it’s all the better for that, exploring as it does some of the issues surrounding the current trend for folk-archaeology.

It doesn’t, however, mention the sleevenotes, which include a hilarious cutting from the local paper about a trip the band (from Nuneaton) took to somewhere in Kent to have their photos taken looking all sylvan or something. The guys picked up some Swedish hitch-hikers on the way, and on reaching their destination were pleasantly surprised and pleased when the ‘Scandinavian misses’ invited them for an impromptu swim in a pond - ‘STARKERS!’ reports the paper, gleefully, in full capitals, implying that nudity in Kent in 1971 was big news.

Also worthy of mention are the sleevenotes to the Tractor album we listened to, which included a superb list of bands playing at some interminable sounding British free festival sometime in the 70s - Gin Seng, Frogbox and Bashful Alley, where are they now?

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, July 15th, 2006
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So here’s what I played on the Kosmische show on Wednesday, in response to the commenter who wanted a list.

Nikki St George - Battle Theme from the Tomorrow People soundtrack
Thralldom - Anticipation Of An Obituary
Town And Country - Sun Trolley
Espers - Widow’s Weed
Amon Düül II - Eye-Shaking King
Josephine Foster - Verschwiegene Liebe
United Bible Studies - Tributaries Of The Styx Under Dublin
Tim Buckley - Starsailor/The Healing Festival
Sunroof! - Bear Melt
Patton/Kaada - Seule
John Martyn - Small Hours (instrumental version)

And then Nite and I are going on the radio tonight, at 9.30pm (on Resonance 104.4fm). We’ll be playing recordings of some new acoustic stuff we’re working on, plus some stuff by other people, including (so far) Nalle, Leopard Leg, Everlovely Lightningheart and Derek Bailey, and talking to Ivor, whose show it is.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, July 8th, 2006
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So tomorrow, I will be in Sweden. But you can hear my Kosmische show on Resonance 104.4fm anyway, because I’m recording it tonight and dropping it in tomorrow en route to the airport. Hopefully it will find its way onto the air at 11pm.

Anyway, it’ll be the usual psych gubbins, interspersed with mystery Black Metal, Schubert lieder with electric guitars and whatever else I can get my hands on this evening. Thanks to youneedamesssofhelp for helping me compile it and doing the washing up - at the same time!

In other news, Ghostly International’s podcasts are awesome and you can get ‘em here. Check the Bodycode and Dabrye ones. They are pretty fine and crunchy.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006
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Sunday night’s Zorn fest at the Barbican confused, confounded and astounded in not-quite-equal parts, and left me with a semi-rhetorical question - why, and how, did John Zorn come to be using as his latest musical starting point the life and/or works of Aleister Crowley, and was this at all an effective starting point?

I know this is a disingenuous question that I could answer with a few Google searches and conversations with more well-informed friends, probably, but I’m choosing not to, because the ‘why?’ was my first response to the music itself. Therefore I’d rather try to answer it myself, as a listener with a small working knowledge of both Zorn and Crowley.

To backtrack a little, Sunday saw the live premiere of two new Zorn compositions. One was Moonchild, a sort of noise/rock song cycle performed by Joey Baron, Trevor Dunn and Mike Patton. The other was the lengthily titled Evocation of a Neophyte and How the Black Arts were Revealed unto Her by the Demon Baphomet, which was performed by a group of singers plus harp, percussion and bassoon. Inbetween the two performances we were shown a Kenneth Anger film of Crowley’s paintings, shot lingeringly in the style of Tony Hart’s Gallery, while Zorn mixed a live soundtrack (heavy on the atmospherics) over the top. Man, he was bad at noses, that Crowley guy. And eyes. And hands. And breasts.

The film - and, unfortunately, its soundtrack - are a bit of a come-down after Moonchild, which is a dizzying, brilliant piece of art. At first, sitting neatly in my comfortable seat with maximum leg-room, I’m a million miles away from any kind of ritual, transcendent space and - more importantly - even further away from any chance of participation in the music that’s unfolding. This is wholly OK, because there’s a lot to process musically, but I do keep thinking that I should be feeling more involved, what with the Crowley thing and all - what with the notion that this performance constitutes a ritual, or, at the very least, some kind of acting out of the conflict in the novel itself, which deals with a battle between different facets of magic. This is the problem already with using a concept like Crowleyian magic(k) for a piece of music like this. Whatever your knowledge of the novel, or of Crowley himself, you’re likely to be making some kind of word associations at this point; expecting something; holding out for some maximum effect.

Luckily, my preconceptions tend towards the following tags when it comes to Crowleyian doings: camp, hierarchical, delusional, destructive, funny. A sense of sick fun that holds within it the power to get inexplicably out of hand, to the point where its protagonists are not sure how it got so, and have to invent something on the spot to explain themselves. All of the above apply to the music, but because it’s music and not impenetrable writings or bad paintings it’s much more oblique, powerful and timeless than its source material. It’s also much more reasonably ordered - Moonchild is (flexibly) scored - and offers more of a taste of (a short-term immersion in) a system than full adherence to the system itself.

So I prefer music to magic - but that’s not really what I’m trying to say. What I am trying to say is that as Moonchild progresses, I find myself genuinely lost within it, to the point where my sense of time doubles back on itself and I feel like I’ve lost some minutes somewhere in another era. There is nothing intrinsically unfamiliar about the performance itself. Patton crouches, bounces, gargles and screams; Dunn plays heavy, queasy bass; Barron pounds the drums with a quicksilver menace, managing to be simultaneously mammoth-sounding and avain - a kind of inverse Boredoms-music, dedicated to dark rather than light. Each movement follows a trajectory of creeping menace followed by thundering tantrums, or vice versa, and includes at least one sonic peak, a kind of noise-gasp where everything sparks together, the circuit is closed, there’s triumph for a moment before the questioning begins again.

But these limitations make for fascinating listening, as you find yourself navigating the piece’s vocabulary with more and more ease, and finding within what are essentially avant-rock/hardcore ’songs’ some genuine moments of warped reality. Talking of reality, it could be argued that this performance of Moonchild is as realistic a picture of (my idea of) magic as I could have hoped for: 99 per cent devising ways of calling into the void and hoping for some answer that there’s something beyond, and 1 per cent hearing it calling very occasionally back at you - and being shit scared when it does. All kinds of rock music, with its aura of scattershot testosterone, are well known as vehicles for boys wishing to dive into the dark side, but tonight’s reading of the subject matter was weirdly inspired. I started off the set sitting up straight, hands neatly folded, and ended it knocked almost backwards in my seat. Had I not been at the Barbican I might well have rolled upon the floor in excitement or set fire to myself by accident like I did that time at the Lovecraftian chaos ritual.

The Bpahomet thing – while set for an enticing grouping of singers and musicians – had almost the inverse effect, to the point where I wondered if it was perhaps intentional. Was Zorn now trying to show us the flipside of Crowley’s influence: his preciousness, his not-very-weird-at-all weird Englishness, his ridiculousness? Was he trying to create a set-piece that could in fact have come from some upper class 1920s ritual by way of 1970s TV terror (ie the age of the extended vocal technique and microtones being used in scores for BBC teatime programmes: those were the days, eh) and am-dram horror? I guess probably not, but as the white-frocked soprano uncertainly aah-ed and whispered (“I summon theeee”), and the choir did likewise, and the big drums and bells went boom and clang, it was hard not to shake the fustiness and mustiness from my head. It was music to hear behind heavy velvet curtains, echoing around heirloom furniture. It was as dilettantish as any posh sorts messing with Satan are likely to be. As summoning of demons go, it was one of the least terrifying I have ever witnessed.

Which brings me back to the question I started with, which is why Crowley? Have I answered that yet? In my own head, yes: the rococo terror of the second piece coupled with the primal intricacy and energy of the first sums up to me both the awful silliness of Crowleyian magic and the undertow of genuine force (I resist here the tendency to say force of ‘evil’ because that’s a whole ‘nother can of chaos – let’s just say ‘force of force’, because that’s more accurate) that characterises both what I know of Crowley and what I know he means to others of the generations that came after him. However, I’ve no way of knowing at this stage whether this is Zorn’s intention at any point. There’s part of me that feels he’s almost taken Crowley at face value here, which is shocking because I thought only weirdoes in the early Eighties did that, but also really beautifully audacious and funny. There’s also part of me that senses the fascination with a home-made belief system, and the translation of that into musical form. I’m also reminded (by the paintings) that Crowley’s own artistic output was so impenetrably amateurish and wrong, but also so singular and idiosyncratic and obvious, that he can serve as a good jumping off point for better, more accomplished art. The awful music committed in his name, of course, devalues that point somewhat, but I think it works in relation to Zorn. Fundamentally silly, or fundamental? The composer’s devil salute to the audience after the obligatory classical congratulatory love-in at the end leaves me none the wiser.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
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Dear PR who sent me the album by Mikaela’s Fiend,

I can’t remember which PR you are, but I think you’re one I trust, and that your CDs come in foreign-stamped packages, and I like those. Anyway, you sent this through in good time for last issue, and I put it on the albums list and no one picked up on it or reviewed it, the fools! I should have done it myself, but I was super busy and I thought maybe someone else would do it. I described it as: “Two teenage boys who are like some kind of baby Lightning Bolt from Seattle. Sick riffs and fake-jazz-metal drumming and some occasional samples and an audience of shy noise kids with their arms folded.”

I think that last bit of the sentence put people off, so maybe it should have continued “…watching while the band fling themselves around and go nuts and bounce off stuff!!!!” Anyway, my fault either way, but now I’m doing a ritual cleansing of all the music from my desk, and the best things I’ve found/refound so far are a new album by Metalux, and this Mikaela’s Fiend release (We Can Driving Machine on SAF records. It is definitely the most fun of the two. It’s one of the most truly playful albums I’ve heard in ages - pretty much every song works on the premise of “OK, so what happens if we…?” and then the premise of “YAY!!! That’s what happens!”, and it doesn’t matter that much if other people have made that discovery already, because it’s so fun trying stuff out, and it sounds great.

Mikaela’s Fiend are basically a pretty good guitar-and-drums-and-ring-modulator representation of the sound of how it feels when you’re in a moshpit and you fall over but it’s OK, times a million, in a few different time signatures, at full volume, wildly distorted and all sped up. Thank you for sending me their album, it is loads of fun.

FMMxx

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, June 1st, 2006
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