Mille Plateaux: In Memorium Gilles Deleuze

Various Artists - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze

Mille Plateaux 1996. MP CD 22

Discogs

This is the best of three of compilation albums I have which were issued in tribute to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze after his suicide in 1995. All of them are dark electronica, this one being issued by the Mille Plateaux label. I’m not entirely convinced that the link between Deleuze’s work and the music here really works for the listener, but since the label was named after one of Deleuze’s books, whether I can see the connection or not, it’s certainly there. The artists represented are very much from the intellectual end of electronica (and elsewhere). Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud for example writes regularly for The Wire in which most of the artists figured prominently throughout the 1990s. To what extent they’re directly influenced by Deleuze isn’t clear,

That this was an important project for Mille Plateux is obvious.  There are no out-takes, poor quality remixes or tracks lifted out of context from albums.  Everything here is exclusive and hangs together remarkably well, despite the contrast between the full on aural assault of, say, Steel and the more ambient character of much of the rest.   Looking down the tracklist it’s a veritable who’s who of everyone who was worth listening to in the world of electronica in the 1990s.  If you’re into this kind of stuff, it’s essential listening.

This is a double CD, but the break between the discs is of no significance, so I’ve ripped it as though it was a single, very long disc.

1. Gilles Deleuze – Gilles Deleuze
2. Happy Deterritorializations – Wehowsky/Wollscheid
3. On the Edge of a Grain of Sand- :Zoviet*France:
4. Bon Voyage – Alec Empire
5. Gigantic Tautological Machinery – Cristian Vogel
6. Indirection/Comtinuum – Christophe Charles
7. Abstract Miniatures in Memoriam Gilles Deleuze – Atom Heart
8. Heller – Gas
9. Intro-Spektiv – Chris & Cosey
10. Wunschmaschinenpark- J.Burger
11. Death Is the Begining – Steel
12. Can’t Be Still- Blue Byte
13. Starjammer – Trans Am
14. Intermodal – Rome
15. As In – Jim O’Rourke
16. You Are Here 0.9 B – Oval
17. 1001 – Mouse on Mars
18. Vital One – Ian Pooley
19 Patent – Bleed
20. Qeria for Gilles Deleuze – Tobias Hazan
21. Without End – Scanner
22. Invisual Ocean – DJ Spooky
23. Gradation d’Humor-Fetisch Park
24. Traobeik – Gilles Deleuze
25. And Line – Kerosene
26. Garator – El Turco Loco
27. Layered Layers- Beequeen

Mighty Mighty: At The BBC

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Vinyl Japan 2001. ASKCD 123 (Recorded 1986-7)

Discogs

Back in the 80s I had a phase when I was into jangly indiepop.  There’s a lot to be said for simple music with a decent tune to put a smile on your face, and Mighty Mighty certainly delivered on that score during their short career.  Being a local (to me) band I saw them, maybe 20 or 30 times, so this album brings back good memories of those years.   It’s easy to assume that bands like Mighty Mighty didn’t play particularly well, but by the end they were actually a pretty slick outfit which this album shows.

While they were fairly successful for an indie band of the time, they became disillusioned by a lack of mainstream recognition and split in 1988, just after their only album Sharks was released.

More than 20 years after they split, they’re perhaps best remembered for contributing a track (Law) to the legendary NME C86 compilation cassette, a defining moment for UK indie music.  By the late 90s the Japanese had latched on to Mighty Mighty at a time when they were long forgotten at home which led to a flurry of re-issues from Vinyl Japan.  The band seemed to be more baffled by this than anyone.

Cherry Red have just released a 2 CD retrospective of everything they released in the UK, so I’ve had to rethink my original plan to post their album Sharks here.  Instead, we have the Vinyl Japan BBC Sessions album which is more or less impossible to find now. The performances and sound are less polished than the officially released versions, but it’s still classy indiepop.

The band have also issued their “lost” second album which I haven’t heard, but since it was recorded at a time when they were just getting better and better, I’m sure it’s great.

Felt: Box1

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There’s been a resurgence of interest in Felt lately, partly because they were brilliant, but also because of the Lawrence biopic Lawrence Of Belgravia.  Lawrence, for the uninitiated was Felt’s brilliantly eccentric frontman, writer, and and svengali-like presence.  The film is well made, but because I never saw Felt live, or Lawrence in any other capacity for that matter, I found the whole experience hard to take.  It’s not just that Felt’s music is beautiful, although it is, it’s that Lawrence’s keen, even overdeveloped sense of aesthetics is stamped all over everything they did, so to see him in the film painfully emaciated, wearing a baseball cap he’s barely taken off for the last decade was difficult to take.  The man himself did a Q&A session afterwards, but his tragic presence and thick Brummy accent meant I could hardly bear to stay in the room, never mind ask him a question.

Cherry Red are doing a belated re-issue of Felt’s back catalogue; particularly welcome is the later Creation stuff which disappeared when Alan McGee closed the label down. I’m not into posting commercially available music at the best of times, much less when the musician in question is more-or-less destitute, so the 10 albums and 10 singles he delivered as promised in 10 years will remain on my hard drive, for my ears only. However Cherry Red haven’t been as thorough as they might have been with Felt – they’ve done the ten albums and a few compilations, but that misses a few bits and pieces which are well worth having. Felt justifies one of those lavish boxed sets people like me tend to buy, but no sign of that yet.

So, in the meantime, here’s a bit of a curio. In 1993 Cherry Red issued a boxed set of all Felt’s albums for the label, imaginatively titled Box. It came with a short bonus disc of non-album tracks. Box was deleted long ago and is now quite rare. As far as I can tell, none of the tracks have been re-issued, so here it is.

The tracks are:
1  Something Sends Me To Sleep (Single: Cherry26 – 3:07)
2  My Face Is On Fire (Single: Cherry45 – 3:05)
3  Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow (Single Version – 3:13)
4  Sunlight Strings (B-2 of Single – 3:14)
5  Red Indians (Single Version – 1:50)

Further listening: well obviously you should buy everything Cherry Red have re-issued, but if you don’t want that much Felt, Ignite The Seven Cannons is a favourite, and I have a particular soft spot for Poem Of The River which is worth getting just for the wonderfully uplifting Riding On The Equator.  Felt also worked well as a singles band, so any of the compilations are worth a go, especially Stains On A Decade which is the only one covering all the labels they recorded for.

Butthole Surfers: Widowermaker!

Folder

A vinyl rip at last!  This is an old one done before I had my current system, but it still sounds pretty good.

This EP came out in 1992, round about the same time as Piouhgd, when the band’s uncompromising weirdness, especially during their live shows had started to diminish.   They were panned for it of course, and it’s certainly true that compared to their landmark Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, this EP was a bit of a disappointment.

20 years down the line though it stands up pretty well.  It’s not as groundbreaking as their earlier work, but it’s a pretty good slab of psychedelic punk worth of 15 minutes of anyone’s life.

This is ripped from the UK vinyl issue on the achingly cool (back then) Blast First! label, which for reasons unknown is a 10″, unlike the US 12″ issue.  It also came out as a CD.

Further listening?  Well for me Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway To Steven catch the band at their peak.  Both are startlingly inventive and defy categorisation, but are also listenable unlike the chaos of their earlier stuff.  Get them from those delightful tax evaders at Amazon if you really must, but preferably at a proper record shop.  There are also loads of free (low quality) MP3s on their web site.

 

Coil: Colour Sound Oblivion 4 (Moscow)

coil-moscow

Still not able to do vinyl rips, so here’s something a little different.  This is the soundtrack from DVD 4 of the huge (and insanely expensive) Coil boxed set Colour, Sound, Oblivion recorded live in Moscow in 2001.

The boxed set was put together by the late Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson in the period after the death of John Balance, almost as if he knew his own end was not so far away.  It compiles on 16 DVDs all their live performances for which reasonable quality audio and video exist.

I’m rarely at a loss for words to describe music, but I’ve always struggled to explain why I like Coil so much.  Others have no such problem, but what they write is usually enough to put anyone off.  I guess it comes down to the emotional engagement which is at the heart of all great music, and while their recorded output is at times unlistenable, there’s always a rawness to it which is compelling.  Here though is a blog which deals with the problem of writing about Coil unusually well.

In life, Coil were never very good at making their music available, and in death it’s got a lot worse.  Their web operation, Threshold House still exists but these days there’s very little to buy.  Of note is The Remote Viewer which seems to be the only CD now available, and the download of Worship The Glitch.

Micky Greaney: And Now It’s All That

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Well this is an odd one to start with.  Firstly it’s not even a vinyl rip because my phono stage is making an annoying humming noise, so until it’s fixed, I’ll have to stick to CDs.  Secondly, this album has never been released, and it has no artwork or even track titles.  So why bother?

Micky is one of music’s great underachievers.  He’s been called Birmingham’s greatest ever songwriter.  In the 90s he had residencies at Ronnie Scott’s in Birmingham and London.  He recorded an album with John Leckie at Abbey Road.   Despite this he’s released nothing at all, at least not officially, and rarely performs.  Plagued by health problems, a lack of confidence, maybe alcoholism and a general lack of organisation, things never really got moving for Micky, and after the Leckie recording, he disappeared completely for many years.

Various figures on the local music scene have tried to take him under their wing and kick start some sort of comeback, believing that if only someone took care of everything so that all Micky had to do was turn up and sing, all would be well.  All attempts failed after a few low key gigs and Micky fell back into obscurity.

I’ve seen him live quite a few times.  Mostly just Micky and an acoustic guitar, as often as not in a tiny cafe in a garden centre, always with a small, but enthusiastic audience.  His material is mostly superb, and his delivery absolutely gut wrenching.  His intensity puts me in mind of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, although his style is completely different.  Given half a chance Micky goes for big jazz influenced arrangements, but really he’s at his best alone with an acoustic guitar.  All the extras tend to drown out much of what makes him worth listening to in the first place.

His debut album, “Little Symphonies For The Kids” was self released, and as far as I can tell was never available other than from Micky himself.  I bought my copy from Micky after a gig.  I may post that at some point in the future since it’s no longer available.

The Leckie album was recorded in 1996 but never saw the light of day for reasons that were never really clear, although it was at about that time that Micky’s health took a dive and he disappeared from the scene.

A couple of years ago he recorded a particularly intense acoustic gigs, promising to release it as a live album.  True to form though it never materialised.

He’s currently in the midst of his latest comeback, which is rather more organised than anything I’ve seen before.  He has a band, great new material, and is gigging, albeit very rarely. The band is great and it’s easy to see why Micky enjoys playing that way, but I much prefer him solo. He’s even shot a video of some of the new material, but still nothing has appeared officially and the gigs are as rare as ever.

At the start of this particular comeback, at a free gig in the bar of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, something astonishing happened. Mickey was selling CDRs of the legendary John Leckie album. I’d long since given up hope of ever hearing it, but here it was, and in two versions no less: normal and extended. Both were just folded up in a sheet of A4 paper with no tracklisting or artwork. After that there were no more CDs for sale, at least not at any of the gigs I went to.

So here it is, the long lost Leckie album in its extended form. It’s overproduced of course and as a result a bit blanded out, but Mickey’s superb material and delivery are there. If anyone has a tracklisting for this, please get in touch.

At this point I’d like to direct you somewhere to buy Micky’s music, but since there’s none available, all you can do is watch out for gigs (rarely outside Birmingham though) and do a search on youtube