Amsterdam - textures, dee-tails, vistas... and Gavin Friday!

 

 meeting Kirsten for lunch

Cafe on top of an old tower in the Vondelpark

 Gavin Friday at the Paradiso - we waited 16 years for this! Brilliant! xxx

Brighton gig / The World is Fxxxed torrent

 

Next Plus gig in Brighton, details as follows...

when i'm pretty presents...

28 Feb THE LATEST MUSIC BAR, Manchester Street (Kemptown) Brighton 20h

THE SUMERIAN KYNGS










An 8 piece band creating a sound known as Psychedelic Swamp Groove! With an incredible Light Show, this diverse group of musicians – including Monty Oxymoron, the musical phenomenon and long term member of ‘The Damned’ – bring together many influences, from blues, jazz and electro to punk, rock and improv. But the Kyngs add that vital ingredient – a Groove to dance to – making each Kyngs gig an event worth catching.

+ PLUS

 

Formed in Kemptown 13 years ago, Plus use guitar, 808 and far-out vocals to create a unique noise pop/alt.rock wigout. Part performance art, part punk, part prog, totally unique.

DJ MELITA will be keeping it interesting before, during and after the acts.

Doors: 8.00pm. Price: £4 on the door

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The good people behind the (probably appropriately named) The World is Fxxxed Records have put up a torrent featuring the combined works of the esteemed noise pop combo Amy Blue with whom we have played a few times in the past (I first met them when we played together at their first ever gig at the now defunct Pleasure Unit in Bethnal Green, found them again later on myspace (don't let anyone tell you myspace isn't good for stuff like that) and have followed their career ever since, they are really good - pls check them out if you haven't already), evol-1 (which is Simon Amy Blue in more industrial/fxxxed up solo guise), a few other bands/acts they have associations with (most notably tricyclic looper which is Trev's long running bedroom tapes project) and Plus, it's got the when i'm pretty album and the mix CD I compiled a couple of years ago as an introduction to the band. All this stuff is available for free here !

modest refusal; artificial pyramid, ....

I could be erased. They have this tower. My user has information. Just to use this place. Reassurances in red. Hands in the circle. Blue steps, tower guardian. Pollution probe. Flowering distance. More power? Globed head. Fog machine, distortion space. What escapes? Reaching for the disc. Exit loop opens wide. A ray goes up and connects. It's begun. Distorted 80s radio voice. Disc interface communication. Looping down into a digital valley. Clouds, open space. XX. A butterfly connects you with the error message. Giant letters, then a giant face. Manipulate the game! Hexed language exposed! Worn out program! Digital melt! Do we make it? Pray for our side! Sharp zingers collate at the side as the butterfly follows. Reunion helmet slides lower, that is a user demand, lower. You were a fury. What's happening in the distortion? The black sky is no limit. Looping demands. Green square wanders. I still have P.O.W.E.R. . . Leave me alone, we failed. Eyes revolve. Whizzing machine. Optimism prisms. The heart of the whole system. Raise lights. Throw your satisfaction at the sliding walls. Catch the light "Your user can't help you now"....    

Fehlfarben -> Paul ist tot -> Berlin -> April 2010

I finally got around to post this photo-gallery/video I made a while ago, using Fehlfarben's seminal track played live and a gallery of photos from my trip to Berlin. 

In April 2010 I travelled to Berlin to see Fehlfarben, the legendary German post punk band whose "Monarchie und Alltag" album remains one of the most important German language rock records and one of my favourite albums of all time, for the first time on a tour promoting their excellent new album "Gluecksmaschinen". It was a great show, worth travelling for & hopefully I'll get to see them again sometimes, they don't come to London though. I took a few photos during the show (mostly a bit blurry and not that great) and quite a few photos walking the streets in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, looking at graffiti, gig posters, corners, squares, exhibitions, demonstrations and meeting old friends, so I put them together with the recording of "Paul ist tot" from that night (thanks to Gavin for the bootleg!)

"Paul is tot" (Paul is dead) is the coda of the Monarchie und Alltag album, the last song, it's very famous, it's long, monotonous, depressing, dirgey and very simple and effective. Most tracks on the album are pretty fast and snappy, this one is mostly melancholic and brings back memories for me, trying to find a perspective where there is none, and generally capturing an atmosphere of utter defeat, an inability to communicate, a somewhat shell shocked ambivalence towards anything you can say or wish for, a moment in time, an empty room after someone has left, an absence, and lots of memories. This live version is actually quite playful and muscular in its delivery.

Some of the things you can see in this video are....: 
0.06 a defaced poster of Mireille Mathieu
0.15 view of the white house right on the Spree in which a friend lived in the 80s and 90s. I have no idea where he is now as he doesn't live there anymore and I've lost touch. The whole area has been gentrified. He used to live there pretty cheap in a massive flat overlooking the river and all these derelict warehouse buildings on the East side (that are now clubs, galleries, corporate offices), when the area was right by the wall and a bit of a dead end...
01.17 Fehlfarben bow out after two encores
03.13 The long running Cafe Jenseits in Heinrichplatz had to close down due to rising rents but was squatted for the time being.
04.21 The legendary SO36 punk rock venue, Germany's CBGBs. or something...
04.36 Genesis P. Orridge collage exhibition
04.42 Chez Frank
04.56 Tray-cee K u l t s t e i n
05.10 The Dennis Cooper shelf, chez Nico
06.10 Frank in the Cafe Kaiser in the big complex of shops, cinemas, etc that is now on Potsdamer Platz. In the 80s this was a wasteland by the wall, one of the buildings standing was a semi derelict ballroom where we saw Sonic Youth in 1986 together, an incredible show. This ballroom, the Kaisersaal, was also used in the seminal Nick Cave live concert scene in Wings of Desire, and is now incorporated into the complex and restored and used for functions, they actually allowed us to go in there and have a look at it again and I can sort of remember it....
06.25 Frank outside Mr Dead and Mrs Free record shop with the new Fehlfarben album in the window. This shop was around in the 80s already and seems to have survived!

i was on a landing touching...

avantgarde patterns, strokes zooming through the skies, searching, flickering, losing a battle, waving goodbye, when the wave arrived, one by one, at once, enormous, a lost world and a total measure and everything we saw and sensed and ever did, ballooned into one enormous wave, leaving us stranded, drowned, and very small.

a dreadful silence fell, mobile phone tsunami pics, seconds tick away, the voices over the crumbling port, small pleasure boats, run with the voices

cut through the corners, flooding corridors, oh here come houses, sprinkling inside the running news stream. debris slide. evacuate. toxic car chase. wash away the points failure

THE LAUGHING GNOMES

photos from the ancient island of Delos, near Mykonos, Greece in June. Mainly inside this one temple... this track somehow seems to sound like a further fuxxed with & warped copy of Dino Jr.s Freak Scene but the truth is it literally came out of nowhere, it's a first take! 

the room gets sparse as I trace the bloodline. when it was funtime my deep trace ran out and fell into a tree. just so you know... as if I knew you would do such a thing. the sexy airs ... down there where you can watch all the animals. get out there. but I feel truly detached from the party, as if all you're saying wouldn't matter much beyond today, the good day would last but what comes next is so much darker, you won't believe it now, anyway. and then what you can speak is so much more distorted even from what is confusing now. and confusion is next. I want to further disintegrate. let me get fractured inside my little frame. noone knows what's inside. my castle. let me in, I'll let you out and then scream goodbye inside your little ears tonight. scream your little ears off tonight. let you go outside then come back and not know where you've been. and then I say let's take over because you want to, you want to, you want to be the knife that cuts through. right through to where the veins are. and the laughing gnomes

Plus & Pink Choppers at Corsica Studios

Hi - I'm just looking at the new look of this thing, hmmmm... I haven't posted for a while but as far as I'm concerned this blog is still going, it's just... a lot things that used to sort-of happen here, have been eaten by my fb habits, it's just easier to upload photos there and you can get an instant response....

Anyway, Plus. This band is still going too but nothing much has happened since Simon died (see previous post). We were going to look into playing a London show at some point but it just seems so difficult to work things out it's easier taking a break. I guess. Also, that new album is still as finished as it was 6 months ago... (and it will come out!) But I finally got around to uploading most of our gig at the Corsica Studios 18.06. mainly a memorial gathering/gig for Simon Wring, with three bands playing who he was involved in, we were sandwiched between the Pink Choppers, George and Vikki who played with Simon as Rail previously, and the mighty Gallon Drunk who Simon played bass with. We played only 6 songs and it was quite a hard thing to do, a bit sombre and subdued and it took us a while to work out which songs to play, but it turned out to be one of our more focussed shows, and fortunately 5/6 of it was filmed and recorded by a really good camera so it's quite classy footage, if I may say so:

We played: Antique Doll / Tired Eyes / 48 Hours / Bijou 80s Breakdown / Shades of Green / Double Shine Dustbowl Future


so this is "Antique Doll":




followed by a longer video featuring "48 Hours", "Bijou 80s Breakdown", "Shades of Green" and "Double Shine":



if 48 Hours is a bit peculiar (as it mostly is) just move forward :)

and here are two of the three tracks played by Pink Choppers

"Lagoon"



& a really fun cover of "Walk like an Egyptian"



there's some GD footage too, which I may post but I think I'll ask them first...

thanks, xx

RIP Simon Wring

Our friend Simon has passed away last week.

I don't really want to go into the details but let's say it wasn't a complete surprise, he had got himself into a state where it was something that could be on the cards. Still, it's a shock and very, very sad...

He was an old friend of our drummer John, but I've known him for quite a long time too. We always felt he was the unofficial fourth member of the band. From the early days, and apart from demos, he did all of our recordings, and he also did sound for us quite a few times. I always remember going into Waterhouse Studio, a little place he set up with a friend underneath a church opposite Stratford shopping centre, for the first time and recording our first demo, and I'm not sure I even have a copy of it anymore. I was just so excited to be in a recording studio for the first time, and Simon was the perfect gent, very capable, precise, and supportive. From that time onwards he became a friend. He would always oversee everything we recorded and later, once he closed the studio, we would just be in his house to do it. He sometimes would add a piano motive, or other sounds to a song of ours (Shades of Green, for instance), and would reportedly work on that for hours, he was a bit of a perfectionist. But otherwise he often favored a first-take, spontaneous approach to recording, he didn't like recording too many takes, and more often than not, he was right. Our new album, which is finished you know, was probably one of the last things he worked on, there were several sessions, recording, mixing, etc. It's actually quite a while ago now, and the last time I saw him was at our last London gig in July last year which he recorded. 

He also played bass in Gallon Drunk, went on tour with them a few times, and was tour manager for Bright Eyes, The Wedding Present, and others. For a while he was always off on tour, and his house was full of music memorabilia and photographs.

Anyway, here are a couple of videos, from his short lived project Rail that played our "when i'm pretty" night a couple of times at the Cross Kings:






(Vicky and George have now regrouped as The Pink Choppers, btw)

 and with the mighty Gallon Drunk at the Corsica Studios (apparently they called him "The Bison"):



RIP Simon, I'll never forget you & thanks for all the music!

Thomas x

when i'm pretty in Brighton

Crayola Lectern soundcheck:

Bella Kardasis and Paul Farrington, moody, ambient improv collaboration by the daily sea swimmers:

Crayola Lectern:

a genuinely lovely & mesmerising set by all accounts, listen to a short snippet here:



and then it's...

BACKSTAGE AT THE PLUS GIG:

I dedicated the set to the people of Japan, I was still very much in shock from the news reports. We played: I know I know Colony Collapse / Double Shine Dustbowl Future / The Tenderness of Wolves / Bijou 80s Breakdown / Lemonade Laminate / The Cracks of Language / Rotating Futures / They're Watching at Home and finally Shades of Green. By the end we seemed to have lost/scared off most of the audience though. Still, we've got the photos to prove it...

Rotating Futures, we're almost there...

when i'm pretty presents... March 16 Brighton The Latest Music Bar

Wed 16. March, 20h

Brighton, The Latest Music Bar, Manchester Street . 

£ 4.—on the door

when i’m pretty presents....

Plus – Plus formed in Kemptown over 10 years ago. They use guitar, 808 and far-out vocals to create a unique noise pop/alt.rock wigout. Part performance art, part punk, part prog, you won’t have seen anything like them. Celebrating new album “Rotating Futures”.

www.myspace.com/mmmplus

Crayola Lectern – Torrid piano songs spew forth from Crayola Lectern, aided and abetted by Jon Poole (Cardiacs) on Casiotone and Al Strachan (Hamilton Yarns, Willkommen) on flugelhorn.

www.crayolalectern.com

Bella Kardasis and Paul Farrington

Daily sea swimmers Bella Kardasis and Paul Farrington will perform together for the first time on dry land. 

Bella Kardasis composes music for choreography, film, and animation.works using guitar, violin and piano.

http://soundcloud.com/bellamusic

http://www.kardasiscompositions.50g.com/

Paul Farrington works as a digital artist and musician under the name of Tonne. He has been primarily a graphic artist; however, he has increasingly been working with interactive technology which is music-driven. To that end he has been developing applications for making music. With his first release titled 'Soundtoy' published in 2002, he has been described by The Wire magazine as an "interactive software visionary". His interactive 'Soundtoys', which he has created for Depeche Mode, Mute and Moby, have set the benchmark for music 'packaging' in a post-print landscape.

Farrington's audio has also featured on numerous labels worldwide including BiP-HOp and Klitekture. His 'Soundtoy' CD - a collaboration with Scanner, si-cut.db, and Hakan Libdo - was a precursor to many similar audio/visual experiments, suggesting possible audio futures. Pauls interactive installations have been exhibited in the UK , Spain , Canada , USA , Germany , Italy , France and Croatia , and workshops have taken place in Sweden , Austria , UK and Ireland .

http://soundcloud.com/studiotonne

http://www.studiotonne.com/

& Space Disco DJs

Plus gig in B'ton: 29.09. at the Latest

I've been meaning to get back to the blog but it seems the only times I'm posting at the moment is when we've got another gig! Oh well, next week on Wednesday we're returning to the Latest Music Bar in Kemptown. Come along, if you're free! We're playing second so should be on stage sometimes after 9 pm!

when i'm pretty presents....:

The Lovely Brothers: a dysfunctional family of performing buffoons whose cabaret tunes combine tongue-in-cheek satire, pop plagiarism and punk mayhem.
www.myspace.com/thelovelybrothers

Plus: brooding noise pop & alt.rock wigout. www.myspace.com/mmmplus

Broken Star: Improvised guitar, keyboards and visuals.
www.myspace.com/brokenstardust

& Space Disco DJs. Compered by Brighton poet Naomi Foyle

Wed 29.09. 20h @ The Latest Music Bar Brighton, £ 4.-- on the door

14 - 17 Manchester Street, Brighton BN2 1TF

Hobson's Choice Night

Hi - I'm putting on another night featuring my band Plus and friends, next Wednesday 28.07.! Since the untimely recent demise of the fabulous Cross Kings bar and venue (RIP), which had to close as they were being evicted by their landlords Enterprise Inns, we had to move it, but, fortunately for some, it's still going to be in Kings Cross, for now at least. The Kings Cross Social Club is just around the corner from the Scala and the Big Chill House, on the corner of Kings Cross Road and Britannia Street, see it on the map here: http://tiny.cc/k4cqj. We're in the upstairs bar from about 8 pm, Plus should be on stage by about 10 pm. All dee-tails, pls see below...

cheerios, thomas x

when i'm pretty presents... HOBSON'S CHOICE SPECIAL featuring:

PLUS - noise pop with improv elements. www.myspace.co.uk/mmmplus
OF ARROWE HILL - gothic blues and psychedelia, solo acoustic set. "short, bittersweet'n'twisted alt-country by cult hero Adam Easterbrook" Tom Robinson, 6Music. www.myspace.com/ofarrowehill
(THE LEGENDARY) TOO DRUNK - garage rock. www.toodrunk.co.uk

DJ Gavin Hobson playing psychedelia, avant-metal, drone, noise, garage rock etc.
 £ 3.-- on the door
Wed 28.07. 20h @ KINGS CROSS SOCIAL CLUB (UPSTAIRS BAR) 

2 Britannia Street, London, UK WC1X 9‎