Aucourant Records, 2008

The latest release from this Turkish Electroacoustic artist is a journey through various frightening and amazing soundscapes. Erdem Helvacioglu manages to place the listener exactly where he wants to in his auditory world, where you just let go and let him guide you on this trip.

The album opener, “Below the Cold Ocean” drops you off as part of a diving team in some cold and remote part of the world scarcely seen by human eyes. The ancient glaciers cracking and shifting, the sounds of your gear. The wildlife distant and cautious. Erdem perfectly captures the aural sense of wonderment and the fear-inducing foreboding of the unknown. 

“Lead Crystal Marbles”, the middle track of Wounded Breath, is the strongest track on the album. Throughout the 17 minutes you are completely engrossed in the sounds around you. From the opening crash of all those marbles falling, it is obvious you are in for a treat. The moments of near silence are just as interesting as the stampede of marbles bouncing and rolling around you. 

Wounded Breath slows down a bit on the last two tracks. Where “Blank Mirror” is a little stale and doesn’t keep your interest as fully as the early tracks did.  ”Wounded Breath” is a slightly too chaotic and haphazard at times, and doesn’t feel nearly as cohesive as something like “Below the Cold Ocean”.  Not to say these are lackluster pieces of music at all.  They are both very well done, but coming after three very strong earlier tracks hurts them.

Overall Wounded Breath is a fantastic album and Erdem is a brilliant and talented musician. I look forward to experiencing more of his work in the future.

To purchase this album, visit: Aucourant Records

Over the past few of months we had a chance to think about the site and the direction we wanted to take it in. Over the next couple of weeks you will notice some new items being posted.  Yes, we will still keep up with our record reviews, but we will also be incorporating even more features.

We have a slight backlog of reviews and even some interviews that will be posted in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for them.  We are also working hard on getting our old reviews back up and live. A good amount of them are currently up, but we still have plenty to go.

With the new site, we also changed the links, so please update any links you have to us.

Apologies for the disappearance, but hopefully the new content and features we will be adding will make up for it all.

- the soundsect.com team

Jnana Records, 2008

As a longtime fan of Nurse With Wound, I was both eager and afraid to hear the latest effort by Steven Stapleton and crew, Huffin’ Rag Blues. Up until it’s release it was touted as a very lounge-inspired release with vocals that harkened back to Peggy Lee. Not really knowing what to expect I put the disc in the player and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

The short opening track, “Willy the Weeper,” begins with a whimsical tune that fades into a terrifying growl, letting you know that this is still clearly a NWW release. Between the droning, free-form jazz of “Thrill of Romance..?”, the lounge organ  of “Groove Grease (Hot Catz)”, and the piano of “Wash the Dust From My Heart” the setting of this album is created. A dingy, smoky subterranean club, pulled out of David Lynch film.

Where the album strays from the lounge concept is on the tracks “The Funktion of the Hairy Egg” and “Juice Head Crazy Lady”.  The nearly 14 minute long “Hairy Egg” is mostly a traditional Nurse With Wound track for the majority of it’s length. Vocals kick in around the 9 minute mark and the underlying noises morph into the tribal drumming and animal sounds of a rainforest cacophony.

One of the more interesting choices on Huffin’ Rag Blues is definitely “Black Teeth”. The vocals by Matt Waldron make this track sound like a Tom Waits inspired Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds outtake… not something you would expect to be said about a Nurse With Wound song, especially one that apes Sheena Easton lyrics.

The highlight of the album is the track “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’”, which has an equally great remix found on The Bacteria Magnet mini LP. Utilizing car horns, car radios and other auto related samples, it seems easily to be the track on Huffin’ Rag Blues that the most fun was had making.

Huffin’ Rag Blues could be difficult for a lot of Nurse With Wound fans to get into as it is somewhat of a departure and is, on the surface, one of Stapleton’s more accessible outings. After 30 years in the making music business, it is clear to me that Steven Stapleton is still being as experimental and innovative as he was when he first began Nurse With Wound.

Saddle Creek Records, 2008

The boys of Tokyo Police Club finally gave us all what we were waiting and hoping the last two years for: a solid full length album. Granted, the Elephant Shell only comes in at just around the 28 minute mark, but that is nearly double the length of their hype-surrounded first EP, A Lesson in Crime.

What we have here with Elephant Shell is an album full of quick, catchy songs that pick up perfectly from the final notes of A Lesson in Crime. This is not to say their sound has not matured, nor that their production values didn’t go up. This is the tightest, and cleanest, the band has sounded. Here we have the quick, poppy writing replete with hand clapping and bass drum foot stomping, but with a slight loss of that earlier, punky edge.

Dave Monk has grown as a songwriter. Gone are the robots and the fears of the future that were evident on A Lesson in Crime. On Elephant Shell we find some songs of introspection and maybe some past regrets. There is a somberness to some of his vocal delivery, even a frailty at times, that works surprisingly well with the dirty jangle of his bass lines. And how can you fault someone for working the word ‘australopithecine’ into a song?

Nearly every song on this album could be a single. From the opening “Centennial” to the closing “The Baskervilles” and all the stops in between, just about every song has the ability to be that energetic, poppy single you would expect from Tokyo Police Club. They only slow things down a bit near the middle with “The Harrowing Adventures Of…” and “Nursery Academy” before jumping right back into it with the “Your English Is Good.” When the last beats of “The Baskervilles” kick out of the speakers, you are left wanting. Which is always a frustratingly nice thing.

I was wary that these songs could not live up to the memory of seeing a large portion of them played live last year, but they do… and in some instances exceed it. The album has enough variation throughout to keep your interest, but still hold enough of what you expect from a TPC song. There is not one misstep on this album. Elephant Shell lives up to, and surpasses, the hype that has surrounded this band for the last 2 years

Cuniglius Recordings, 2007

Ye who are weary, come on home…

Kentucky Shroud, the latest release from apocalyptic-rockers Flaming Fire, has to be looked at in two distinct halves. The first half of the album has some of Flaming Fire’s strongest studio tracks to date, and the second half consists of live cuts of some of their better known songs. Even with this distinct separation, the album flows together nicely. Production is also high on this release. The studio tracks sound cleaner and crisper than any of the earlier Flaming Fire releases and the live tracks are nice soundboard quality recordings. The live tracks are from WFMU’s Free Music Series and were also the first to be added to the Free Music Archive (freemusicarchive.org).

“Natural Light Catastrophe” starts the album off with a lament about the Williamsburg scene. ‘Come on Daddy, send that check/buy those drugs and pay the rent.’ As well as the difficulty of surviving in the city, ‘I can’t afford New York’.

“Golden Skull” and “Breaking Your Own Heart (Again)” follow and are the highlights of the album. Both songs are as different as they can be from each other, but are equally strong. On “Golden Skull” you can visualize lead singer Patrick Hambrecht standing at a pulpit of fire spewing proclamations, ‘One golden skull to bring forth the light.’ While “Breaking Your Own Heart (Again)”, with it’s somber piano backdrop, has a melancholic beauty. Closing out the studio half of the album are the tracks “Inebriation!” and “Acid Trash”.

“Fire of Love”, from the album Songs From the Shining Temple, opens up the live section of Kentucky Shroud. The next live track is “Water Privatization Man” which has not yet seen a studio release. The great “High Bell”, the highlight of When the High Bell Rings, and “Kill the Right People”, also from Shining Temple, really show the energy of a live Flaming Fire set.

As the second album of 2007 released by the band, Kentucky Shroud is a solid and smart release. It not only showcases some of their newer songs, but also gives an idea of their live sound to those who may not have been lucky enough to experience that yet. The band puts on a great live show and these songs capture that intensity and energy. Pick up Kentucky Shroud today and make sure to catch their revival when they roll into your town.

4AD, 2007

In 2006, Scott Walker was commissioned to score a modern dance piece for CandoCo, a dance troupe made up of both able-bodied and disabled dancers. What resulted is a 25 minute avant-garde piece of modern classical music in four movements. And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball? is a departure from last year’s The Drift. Both works are engulfed in a foreboding darkness, but with this newer release, Scott Walker’s unmistakable voice is completely absent.

The “1st Movement” is full of emptiness. A near silence is stabbed by an unearthly sound, seemingly random until the first sounds of the strings begin. Almost like a tuning session, the musician is preparing his vehicle for the journey through the next three movements. “2nd Movement” is where the music really begins. The strings are much more prominent and the horns start to wail. There is an almost martial drumming intermittently through this track that helps build the tension.

The “3rd Movement” returns to the quietness of “1st Movement”, but there is sadness now present. There is a longing that comes off of his bow that is thrown into the screams of a decades old Suspense film’s soundtrack.

During the strongest track on the album, “4th Movement”, there is a moment of brilliance where everything swirls together in a chaotic symphony. Like a cleansing ritual a bell is rung repeatedly, beating down the demonic orchestra.

Like a lot of Scott Walker’s works, And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?, is probably not for everyone. I am not even sure is it’s for a lot of Walker’s existing fans. It is missing the one key element that really brands a Scott Walker song as such – his voice. Even still it is a strong work that bears Walker’s signature in the sounds and atmosphere we have come to know in his recent work from the last decade or so. 4AD did a good job with this limited release, the packaging is beautiful, and once these are gone they will be gone for good, so if you are interested in And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball? the time to buy it is now.

More information about the project can be found here: http://www.andwhoshallgo.com/

Last month Tokyo Police Club played a sold-out show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. The band put on an amazing performance that had the whole club moving and singing along. With a nice mix of new songs and “old” favorites they proved why they were sought after and eventually signed by the great Saddle Creek Records.

Rewind a couple hours earlier and I am meeting up with Graham Wright (keyboards/vocals) and Greg Alsop (drums) as they returned from replacing their dead tour van. We sat down at a nearby bus stop and talked about their upcoming full-length, their recent addition to the Saddle Creek roster, the formation and future of Mean Beard Records, and a number of other things.

First off, congrats on the Saddle Creek deal.

Greg – Thanks very much. Thank you.

What made you ultimately decide on that label? I’m assuming there had to be a fairly decent bidding war for you guys?

Graham – We talked to a few people, yeah. It’s hard to say, there were so many different factors at play, but ultimately it’s the one you feel best about. I mean, of all the labels we talked to, I could have made really -and we did, over and over again- made really good arguments for every single one. We basically were in a situation where it was completely win-win and Saddle Creek was one we just kept going back to. We got a one record deal from Saddle Creek which is really rare and it’s amazing for us because we like to keep our options open as best as we can and that really puts us in a position to do so. The other cool thing about Saddle Creek is that even though it’s only a one record deal it really seems like we will want to work with them again after that… they are just the greatest people… they’re doing wonderful things…

Yeah it’s an excellent label…

Graham – Yeah and I think they’re really poised to really break out of the Omaha scene and they are right on the brink of doing something big, which is exactly what we want to do as well.

Now, what is the deal with Mean Beard?

Greg – The story behind Mean Beard is just kind of… it’s with a friend of our manager, his name’s Paul. They’ve known each other for a while. We didn’t get the official story about it but he has a really ferocious beard.

Graham – Though he is really a gentle guy…. so I think it’s a…

Greg – Yeah! So there’s a bit of a… I don’t know… irony.

Graham – You know, when we decided to create our own record label we were just like a kid in a candy store…

Greg – We didn’t have any name idea and since he was part of it we were like, “Mean Beard Records”.

Graham – Yeah.

So are you guys handling the Canadian side of it? I know it’s based out of New York, LA and Ontario…

Greg – Yeah, we aren’t entirely sure how far we are going to go with this label, like if we’re going to try and release other things or like maybe do our full-length on it… it’s still up in the air.

Like a vinyl version on it?

Greg – Yeah, maybe.

Graham – Our distribution right now is our manager walking around New York with a backpack full of 7”s asking stores if they want to sell them, so… [laughs]

So are you planning on releasing any other 7”s on there?

Greg – Eh, maybe. We’ve thought about approaching other artists and groups if they want to do just a one off 7” or anything like that. I don’t know, right now it’s just like something to do for fun, we’ll see if we really want to get serious about it.

Graham – We have lots of grand plans, but we always have lots of grand plans and it remains to be seen if they’ll pan out or not.

Greg – Our time is limited right now so…

Touring…

Graham – Yeah… touring…

You guys have been pretty much touring for 2 years, pretty constantly…

Graham – Yeah, we’ve had a couple months off here and there, but it feels a lot more constant than it’s actually been. You’re also catching us at the tail end of a 2 month long tour with another 2 weeks to go, so any answer that you’re going to get about touring is going to be pretty bitter.

So with the recording sessions coming up your going to get to take a break from that…

Graham – Well, we’re not going to be recording in Toronto, where we live, so it’s kind of just like another kind of tour, you know? I don’t get to sleep in my bed, I don’t get to see my girlfriend. It’s going to be nice to be in the same place everyday though. That’s an improvement.

And, no Vans breaking down!

Graham – We just got the new van today actually. So hopefully those days are over.

How was van shopping in Jersey?

Graham – [laughs] Van shopping was fine! Van purchasing was a horrific ordeal. We sat in that dealership for 4 hours yesterday and 2 hours today.

So you guys are heading to Massachusetts next and then coming back down here to NYC?

Greg – Yeah, we finish off in New York. It’s not too bad. Once you get on the East Coast every drive is just a few hours. People are really lucky to live here.

And it’s basically just one road up and down really.

Greg – yeah, it’s not too bad.

When will the elusive full length album come out?

Graham – Hopefully in early 2008… February-ish. We are going in the studio in September and hopefully we will finish it then. And then it takes 2 or 3 months to go through it all… so I’m sure you’ll be able to listen to the record by November, but… [laughs] buy it too!

Of course! Now, you’ve already laid down some tracks for it though haven’t you? Or was that just some preliminary stuff?

Graham - No, I mean, we’ve demo’d a bit in various ways. We did some rehearsing in a studio at one point and recorded that, and Dave’s recorded some stuff at home, you know we’ve done some really lo-fi stuff in our rehearsal space but there is not a single track that will end up on the recording.

Are we going to see any of the older material, like “Your English is Good” on the new album?

Graham – The only one that could conceivably end up on it is “Your English is Good” and I wouldn’t want that to happen.

Greg – Well, I wouldn’t say that just in case it does happen [laughter]

Graham – Yeah, it could happen, but at this point I am leaning towards no.

Well, it is a fairly limited release; there is what, 1000 copies?

Graham – Yeah. It’s weird ’cause it’s older than most of the songs on A Lesson in Crime. So with all these batches of fresh, new material we are writing all the time to me it would feel really uncomfortable.

Greg – Yeah it would be just like lumping it in there

Graham – But at the same time … you know we say that now. We’ll probably come up one song short and use it [laughter]

Is there a fear going into it? You know, with this going to be your longest release, you guys are kind of known for putting out these really short releases… your longest release is something like 16 minutes and change.

Graham – Yeah, I think I really just stopped worrying about that stuff. We’ve never set out to make short songs, we’ve set out to make good songs that we liked. And the good songs that we liked were short. And now if we put out a longer record of good songs that we like, you know, that’s all we can do. We are going to do what we do and if everyone decides it’s the worst piece of crap imaginable, then we did our best.

Hopefully that won’t happen.

Hopefully not. I doubt it. Do you think you waited too long to put out a full length?

Graham – Yeah…

It’s only been like 2 years, but it still feels like a really long time….

Graham – Yeah, it’s basically just been circumstances have dictated… I mean it was impossible to do, we couldn’t possibly have done it before now. I wish we got it out sooner just because I like new songs better than old songs, so it would have been nice to get it done, but we did what we had to do. We took the time we needed to get it to a point where we felt comfortable doing it.

I mean, we’ve been lucky in that it’s not that we blew up huge right away and now everyone’s sick of us. We’ve really been building slowly… there’s plenty of people who’ve just heard of us. To lots of people we’re still brand new. We’re not wearing out our welcome quite yet.

I read in an interview, Graham, that you had something about EPs and that retailers don’t like them and I got the impression that you didn’t like them.

Graham – No, I didn’t mean to give that impression… Making an EP, or releasing an EP, business-wise, is a bad decision to make. And, yeah, retailers don’t want to buy them and everyone who looks at them in the stores probably think “oh, I’ll just wait until their full length comes out and it will have all of these songs on there and it will be a better value,” which in our case isn’t going to happen. But, that was never a factor, when we made our EP we weren’t thinking about selling records, we were thinking about just writing songs and getting them out there. I’m thrilled with our EP. Let me set the record straight on that. I don’t think it should be any longer, I think we put out exactly what we needed to put out at the time and obviously people have agreed with us.

Personally, I’m a big fan of EPs. I am somebody who likes to listen to a whole album, I don’t really like to listen to a couple songs randomly here and there, I prefer to listen to the whole thing. And an EP is nice because if you’re driving in the car, 20 minutes is normally your trip.

Graham – Exactly! An EP.

Do you guys plan on releasing any more EPs down the road?

Graham – The thing about us is our songs are so short, I mean a full length album judging by the songs we are writing is going to be a half hour long [laughs]. I certainly wouldn’t rule out putting out EPs in the future, but we’re really slow songwriters so there’s lots of bands that I love, bands like Okkervil River, that was the first one that sprang to mind, but uhh there are lots of bands who put out a record than they put out an EP – then another record… and I think that’s amazing they have so many songs to work with. We have to cherish every single thing we write. It’s taken us two years to get to the point to write a full length and we are still not even done writing songs yet. And after that if we have a burst of creativity and write 25 songs I would love to put out another EP, who knows.

I’m always surprised when I see comments on like last.fm about you guys, where someone has just heard “Your English is Good” and is amazed… I’m always surprised that people are still just finding out about Tokyo Police Club..

Graham – It’s weird to think, you know…. to me it feels like, not that we’ve made it big, but that we’ve done so much. But then I think about it and two or three years ago, I never would have heard of our band. Really in the grand scheme of things, we are nothing. We’ve sold not-that-many records, we’ve got some favorable reviews, which is great, we’ve played some cool shows, but in the overall grand scheme of things we are absolutely at the zero point. I think if you start off in the negative numbers and you push your way up to zero, and I feel like we just about got there, now we are ready to start climbing into the proper world.

A few days before PTV3, the latest incarnation of Psychic TV, were about to start their tour in support of Hell is Invisible… Heaven is Her/e I had the chance to talk with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. We chatted about Psychic TV’s first studio album as PTV3, Pandrogeny and Gen’s various other projects.

Photo by Dan Mandell

Just to get it out there, I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time, probably the last 17 years or so.

It’s weird for me. You know? To think that people… there’s a lot of people who grow up and I was just always there. I was always in the music landscape. Strange thought. It’s hard for me to really imagine.

Well it’s great in that sense, because there is always a back catalog to go back to.

Yeah, the Throbbing Gristle stuff is pretty much all available. And I just got an email from Sleazy, there’s gonna be a box set of DVDs of all the video documentation of TG live.

I wondered if that was really going to come out soon.

He’s mastered all the DVDs and he’s finishing the artwork.

Any idea on when that will be coming out?

My umm… I have been trying to find out from Mute. They have not given me a date, however I do know they’ll probably try and bring it out for Christmas. It’ll make a Special Christmas gift.

I’m actually excited about that. I think people who’ve imagined Throbbing Gristle live… that to actually see what it was like for the first time is going to be very exciting.

Yes, definitely looking forward to them. I was very excited about the DVDs when I first read about them…

I suspect that there’ll be quite a few… new bands that will… take that as a sort of starting point, having watched. And sort of re-interpret what they imagine they are seeing in terms of our somewhat deadpan approach.

There’s one of those gigs in particular at the Illuminated 666 club in Manchester where we played and Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, and Nico’s band at the time were in the audience, a lot of people. A Certain Ratio were in our dressing room and I had been having a really bad day with the other members of TG, I was in a really cranky mood. I was trying to get A Certain Ratio to leave the dressing room because I wanted to be alone and they wouldn’t go, so I pulled out this knife and I sliced my arm, my right hand, one slice on the back of my hand for each finger. Very beautifully done, very symmetrical. And it started to gush blood and they still didn’t want to leave. So I got my mustard gas and sprayed them all in the face, and that’s when they finally left. But, when you watch the video you will see that my right hand when I am holding the microphone is still streaming blood. And when I am turning certain knobs on the signal generator and so on. There’s a bootleg of that gig actually with a close up of my right wrist where you can see the wounds bleeding. So that’s going to be interesting for people to see… The whole day was very weird.

I’m sure a lot of days of shows with Throbbing Gristle were weird.

[laughs] Yeah, right.

Jordie Valls, of Vagina Dentata Organ, was there and he saw that I was getting into more and more of a bad mood, so he decided to take me out. He said, “let’s go find something to eat. Get some fish and chips.” And we went out, I was stomping along grrr looking at the ground grrrr and I didn’t notice but there were all these Hell’s Angels up the street and they saw me coming along and they were starting to say all these things. They wanted to create some kind of situation and, he only told me this afterwards, but apparently I just marched right through them and shoved them out of the way. [laughs] I told them all to fuck off. [laughs] And they were so shocked at this tiny person being so aggressive that they didn’t do anything, they just backed off. It was a good gig though, it was one of the nights that I invented “Something Came Over Me”. So, with all being well, there is a good version of that on there.

Personally, I can not wait to see these shows.

When you see the Manchester gig think about me knocking the Hell’s Angels out of the way. Groaning and moaning and being really obnoxious.

Now, with Hell is Invisibile… Heaven is Her/e, I honestly didn’t know what to expect from it. Of course, the Throbbing Gristle album came out earlier this year and it was far better than I ever could have expected it to be.

[laughs] I’m on a roll, aren’t I?

I thought, “oh no, he can’t have two great “comeback” albums. And, it was great.

Ohh, I’m really happy with the new album. I really, really am. I think that Hell is Invisible… in a way, for me, encapsulates all the things I wanted Psychic TV to be from the very beginning. And I think it’s probably the most perfect album I have ever done.

You know, I would actually probably agree.

I think it’s just got all the aspects that I’ve always played with and investigated. Cut-ups, and symphonic structures, strange edits like Frank Zappa and Lumpy Gravy. Sort of otherworldly film music, landscapes and ironic psychedelic stories and parables. I really think it’s the best thing I have ever done. I really do. I think my singing is better than ever.

That was actually one of the points I was going to make. I think lyrically it’s one of the strongest and I think your vocals are just great on it. What would you attribute that to?

A couple of things, I don’t know if you know the story of how PTV3 originated, but you know I met Lady Jaye, my other half, in 1993 in NY, fell madly in love, and still madly in love all these years later… and she didn’t know I was even in a band when we fell in love. She had heard Throbbing Gristle, but she didn’t make the connection, and she remembered hearing “Hamburger Lady” when she was still in high school and thinking it was a really interesting track, but one of her best friends from her teenage years was this guy Edward Odowd… Edley. When we moved to New York in 1996 we started to hang out with Edley, you know for dinner and just listen to records and talk. And he said to me, “you really should start Psychic TV again.” And I said, “Why?”He said, “’because you write good songs.” It may seem weird to people now, but I never thought of myself as primarily a songwriter. I’ve always been into these cultural ideas and ways to change the world and all these other things, but I never really separated it out and thought “I write songs.”

I think songwriting was definitely more of a byproduct of getting your art and ideas out there. You know?

Exactly! So, he said he would make a CD of what he thought were my best songs and he said, “listen to this and pretend it’s by someone else, not you. And you will realize that these are just really good songs.” So he did that and I listened to these songs, most of them were from the Allegory and Self era, the more psychedelic stuff. And he was right. I listened to them, as best as I could, objectively and I realized that I did love them as songs. They still stood up very well. They were actually songs that could be for some degree, timeless. I would say to Lady Jaye, “am I being egocentric here, or is it true that I can write some really good songs?” She said, “no, no you’re a great poet. You really do write catchy melodies and choruses, you’ve got a knack.” So between her and Edley they taught me to see myself from a completely different perspective. I’ll never give up being into trying to change the world, of course, but they also made me appreciate and respect myself for being able to do the songs that worked. I think it was that confidence they gave me, to reassess what I did that really helped me with this album. And even with the TG one. To stretch and to sort of think of each song as a story and imagine it was the person telling the story. How would they feel, how would they sound. And I got sort of so involved in a Marlon Brando, immersed into the emotions kind of acting role, that for example with “Higher and Higher”, the anti-war song, I was actually sobbing and crying at the end. In those choruses at the end I’m crying.

It comes through…

I’m actually crying my eyes out because I started to imagine the pictures, the film of centuries of these beautiful young people being tricked into going out and fighting and ending up lying in the mud somewhere, their life draining out of them. And the people who had tricked them into doing this, being these demons that keep coming through over and over again that go off and sign some kind of agreement later with their enemies. And ultimately it was meaningless, you know? The sacrifice was for nothing. That hypocrisy that leads to so much suffering really touches me, and by believing in myself more I think I was able to find the voices much more than ever before, much more accurately than before.

That was one of the things that got me at first about the album. How vocally strong it was, and you know, you figure it’s been 10 years between your last studio album as far as for Psychic TV…

I’m really happy that you like it. Because I am so pleased with this album. You know, if somebody said which album would you like people to listen to and throw away the rest, I would say keep this one.

Really?

I think it’s the most perfect, yeah.

There’s others that have wonderful moments and that are very groundbreaking and new, but I think this is the one that will last the longest in terms of quality. And for once, we have a new album with material on it that I think is strong and then we are going to tour starting in a couple of weeks. And we’ll be touring with the same stuff that is available in shops. That has never happened to us before.

Never, really?

Never ever. Nothing has ever fallen into place in the right way before.

“New York Story”, that one began as a poem I was writing and I was performing with Thee Majesty and we were in Paris a couple of years ago at the Cartier Foundation playing and I started to improvise with this poem with Lady Jaye and Brian Dahl, and again it was very much like the same thing. I closed my eyes and I could see the film. A lot of the songs are very much like films for me. And I watch them and I start to describe what I’m seeing. It becomes very, very real. And I was watching the film of this couple in New York and it was lots of different people I know, and maybe they were junkies, or maybe they were just mutually disruptive, there were all these different dynamics in their relationship that were negative and, by the end of it, I was crying again. And the following day in Le Monde, the daily paper in France, they did this whole review of the concert and they were talking, respectfully, about how I had been crying my eyes out at the end and there was even a half page cartoon as well.

I’ve learned to, to become the songs I think. In a very deep way. It sounds maybe difficult for someone who’s not performing to understand, but there’s so many bands, I think, that perform to a formula. I’ve talked about this to people. People who have noticed that I am singing differently, or more profoundly, and we’ve talked about it, and they’ve said most bands will develop a formula or style that works and the audience enjoys it and responds to it. And there are two versions of that band. There’s the ballad or fast, but you recognize the vocal style and it’s always the same. But with PTV3 it’s not like that. Each song has a person, a character, that’s singing. They’re speaking through me. And through my vocal cords, but there are different voices for different stories. And i think that’s what should be happening. It shouldn’t be always the same voice telling different stories, it should be different voices telling different stories.

So with the breakthrough of being encouraged, and loved for what I do by the band, I think I have been able to have this big sort of new, improved ability. Of course it brings a great responsibility too because you have to remember how to become the people in the stories. So it’s very emotionally draining.

And we just found out that Cargo who released it, are so happy that we are doing a vinyl version. It will be a double album and one will be orange and one will be pink and there will be one bonus track, because the one thing I was sad about was that on this album there was one extra track that Lady Jaye did the vocals for, she wrote a lyric and vocal, and there was no room on the CD. So now with the double-vinyl album it will be on there. So it will be the absolute perfect version of the album.

Is that going to be available only through your site or will it also be in shops?

That’s a good question, and I honestly can’t be sure. I know we’ll have some and we’ll be selling them at gigs too. So people should look for it via our website and/or at gigs. I think they are going to do at least 1000 to begin with, but if it’s popular I’m sure they’ll keep going.

Continue to Part 2 >>

]]> http://soundsect.com/interviews/2007/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-an-interview-pt-1/feed/ http://soundsect.com/interviews/2007/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-an-interview-pt-2/ http://soundsect.com/interviews/2007/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-an-interview-pt-2/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:15:00 +0000 Tom Gilbert http://soundsect.com/staging/?p=59

(cont’d from Part 1)

Photo by Dan Mandell

Obviously you’ve talked about the process for a few of these songs, but what I was wondering is what was the process of writing this album as a whole? Did it stem from the live shows with PTV3 or did you say, “hey I got this concept…”

It was a very ad hoc mix, some of the songs began years ago. Something like “Just Because” was part of the live show as “I Like You” in the ’80s, but it never resolved itself. The same with “Lies and Then” which was something that was played live, but never recorded as well. So they were stories that I could return to and think about for 10 or more years. Some of them are ongoing concepts that I have been sort of refining and looking for the perfect final version. And then other ones were written on tour live.

Like “New York Story’ came out of Thee Majesty and then was switched across because it had the possibility of being a more traditional song, “Maximum Swing” came out of sound checks on the last tour. We were in about the 4th week in our European tour and Lady Jaye was walking along in front of me and Markus the keyboard player and completely spontaneously I looked up and saw her hips swinging and I said to Markus, “wow, look at that, she’s got maximum swing.” Which was a phrase I never used before. So it’s a very organic process. Some of them were very intuitive and others more intellectual.

“Milk Baba” was a very strange one, the instrumental. We had been working on the album for over a year and one evening I went over to our rehearsal studio space and David Maxx said he had this idea for an acoustic 12-string thing, so I said “oh, play it.” So he started to play it and I said keep recording and I just ran into the vocal booth and hummed along, and that’s the take. The only bit we added was with Lady Jaye when we were in Nepal together in 2003 we stayed in this place in the Himalayas, a town that’s on the edge of a lake. And the guest house was on the other side of the lake, so we had to get a row boat taxi. And we are sitting in this rowboat and the man rowing is there, but he had his two children with him who had come home from school. And they started to sing these Nepalese nursery rhymes while we were being rowed across the lake. And that’s the actual sound in the background, the boat being rowed across the lake and those two children singing spontaneously. The Milk Baba is actually this holy man that has a small dwelling near the burning ghats where they burn the dead bodies in Kathmandu and he had nothing but tea, milk and sugar to eat for nutrition for over 20 years. He had these dreadlocks that were more than 20 foot long. He became one of our friends over there and I have a recording of him singing Hindu prayers, but they didn’t work with the music so we just left it with his title. There is actually a Milk Baba.

So it’s varied. The two or three songs that I always felt were worthy of being finished and recorded definitive versions and then there are new ones. Since we finished this album we’ve already started to write several new songs…

I was hoping there would be more…

Oh yeah, there’s more [laughter]

What’s nice is that we don’t feel obliged to only create something new. There’s still some ideas from the past that I never finished, and I have no problem with looking at them again and finding the definitive version of them.

I don’t know why sometimes people feel like when you put something out there, that that’s it. It doesn’t need to be touched again.

Right.

If you reconnect to that song and that moment…

It starts to be revealed with a completely different meaning.

Exactly. You should just run with it.

Yeah, we’ve been doing that. It’s been exciting. I mean, you can tell with this album that I’ve been very fortunate. Edley found me the best musicians. They are all incredibly proficient, but they are also very loose. They can follow me in an instant on stage with a movement of a finger or a twitch of my eyebrow, they know what I mean and they’ll go with me. And something that used to last for 3 minutes can last for 30 minutes just by a few body movements and signals. I think I am also more confident because of the strength of the band. This band is able to sound like and play like I always dreamed, right from 1965. Finally I’ve got the exact machine.

That really stands out from this album. It’s got such a Garage Rock, Psychedelic feel to it, which Psychic TV has always touched upon and been a part of and it’s the strongest I think on this album.

Definitely, but you know what’s really annoying? We get bracketed into this Industrial thing and it’s so frustrating because we’re not Industrial, we’ve never been Industrial. We’re Psychedelic, it’s never been a question that we are Psychedelic.

Well I think you’re going to be cursed with that just because of Throbbing Gristle and…

I know, it’s just it’s very frustrating. And a lot of the times when we are touring the promoters thinking they are being kind will book Noise, Laptop bands or Industrial bands, and it really doesn’t set up the atmosphere for what we are doing at all because our stuff is celebratory and joyful. And we are investigating relationships, identity and human behavior but in a very positive and open way. And we have to work for one hour just to get the audience to understand what we are not before they can surrender to what we are.

You know though, I found my way to you through listening to Nurse With Wound, Skinny Puppy and from a Noise/Industrial sound…

So, it’s a legacy I’m just going to have to live with? [laughter]

I doubt you’ve gotten the new Thee Majesty album yet.

I actually just got it yesterday.

Oh, you did! Oh, wow, you are keen.

It’s funny I wasn’t even aware that there was one coming out and I was in one of my local shops, Cafe Soundz in Montclair, NJ, and the owner was like, “oh, you know the new Thee Majesty is coming out” and I told him to put me down for one and let me know when it’s in. I just went and picked it up yesterday.

I’m also really happy with that one.

It’s a really good album, I’ve only gotten to listen to it once so far…

How am I doing? Three new albums, three different bands. All good. Did I tell you about the new Throbbing Gristle album we’ve done?

There’s already another album?

Oh yeah! [laughter]

I know there was talk of one being done, or that you have recorded some stuff for it, but…

Oh, it’s done, well it’s recorded. I went to England in May and Throbbing Gristle did this concert at the Tate Modern, a huge modern art gallery in London, which was really great. We played for an hour and a half, we did about 40 minutes of new Throbbing Gristle music and then we did Derek Jarman film soundtracks. But then we did six separate three-hour sessions at the ICA Gallery in London and that was ironic in that I was banned from there in 1976 for the first Throbbing Gristle gig. And now they are inviting us back. What we decided to do with our follow-up album was a cover version of the entire Desert Shore album by Nico…

Yeah, this is the 12 disc set that’s available now, right?

Well that’s just an intermediary release, that’s the unedited sessions. There will be a proper finished, mixed cover version of the album too.

So it’s going to mixed down from those sessions?

Uh huh, yeah. So, that’s the next TG album.

That was stressful. I was in this little tiny vocal booth at the ICA and there was no air conditioning because it would ruin the sound, it would interfere. And they had halogen lamps int the vocal booth so I was just sweating like a pig, as they say. Then the rest of the band would play me Nico’s original song through headphones and then they would play me their new music for the song and then I would have to memorize the lyrics, figure out where to place the lyrics, and make the lyrics do justice to Nico’s song. Out of the blue, in front of an audience. And in three languages. English, German and French. That was tough, it was really tough. But Sleazy’s been emailing saying he’s been listening to it and that I did a great job.

About the Thee Majesty, Vitruvian Pan, from what I read about the recording, the vocals were all pulled from various performances you did?

Yes, right.

They were just cut together?

Yes, Brian Dahl decided it would be like an aural game of chess. So he took various live Thee Majesty concerts from Europe and France, one of them being the one where we invented “New York Story”. And he separated out the vocals using software and then he took my various improvised vocals and he did cut-ups of those to create new songs. And even on one or two tracks he even used my voice to create, by processing it, he created the rhythms too. So the whole album is based on my improvised vocals. Except for the track about the Do Do. Which was when my children were small, I think they were about six and eight years old then, I used to tell them stories to help them fall asleep. So we created this world, The Land of Do Do. Once in a while I would record them on cassette these stories so that when I was away on tour or busy the babysitters could play them my voice telling them stories. So that was my recording of a bedtime story for my children, but it has a nice metaphorical story about not taking things for granted and so on. It was my way of teaching them good values.

I did want to talk a bit about the Pandrogeny. The Pandrogyne, more than anything else, is the most influential piece of your art right now. It’s throughout Hell is Invisible…, it’s throughout the new Thee Majesty album. Gender play has always been a part of your work, going as far back as the COUM days. What took it to that next level for you? Was it meeting Lady Jaye?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely meeting Lady Jaye. The first day we met she started to dress me up in a very androgynous outfit, with a skintight bottle-green sort of velvet jumpsuit with a leather miniskirt, high heeled shoes from John Fluvog. And she started to put all these pretty jewels into my dreadlocks, so from the very moment we met, she understood and recognized a sort of androgynous and hermaphroditic aspect to me. Which I thought was remarkable given that she had no idea who I was. So from the very beginning we were really playing with and exploring switching roles, switching genders. As time went by we just carried on playing, very much in a playful way. And we started to have long talks about the implications, why it fascinated us, and so on. The first level of the investigation was that we realized it was a way to express absolute love. To want to be… not to just be with each other but to look like each other was kind of an expression of love. The same as having a mutual orgasm or making a baby. Making a baby in some way is Pandrogenous. A baby is two people combined. So we were thinking about that and looking at that and we took it very serious because we are both performance artists as well. Somehow it just started to become important and we would think about why. Something to do with DNA, why do we want to refuse to accept DNA? Do we have to just have babies to become like each other or are there other ways to do it? And so we found ourselves more and more entranced by the idea, looking like each other in a really physical way. And finally in 2003, on Valentine’s Day, as a statement of intent we both had breast implants of the same size on the same day. We were very lucky that our cosmetic surgeon, not only was he a good one, but he also thought it was a great idea.

Yeah, it’s gotta be tough to find some doctors to perform what you are asking them to do.

Yeah, we were really sort of nervous that he would turn around and say “what the hell are you talking about”, but when we said, “we want to look like each other for an art project,” he said, “oh, ok.” Which was unusual because most of the time they insist that you have to have one or two years psychotherapy and all this other stuff, but he knew straight-a-way we were very serious. And so, that was the first step really. The more that we explored it and the more that we began to live that way we started to see deeper meanings in what we are doing, that it wasn’t just about trying to be each other, to become one being, there were more implications. In fact, one of the things we started to incorporate into our thinking was the idea of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, that when they collaborated on cut-ups of writing, that the result was not created by either of them but was created by something else that they called the Third Mind. So we looked at our bodies as being representative of two different beings utilizing those bodies to create a new being that we call the Pandrogyne. Neither of us were the Pandrogyne, only the two of us together were the Pandrogyne. And that’s why we began to call ourselves Breyer P-Orridge. Neither of us were the owner of what it was, and it only existed when we were together.

That was sort of Stage Two, then we began to look at the contradiction of DNA and the way the human species is and we began to see that there’s a disconnect between the human species’ evolution, psychologically and in terms of it’s behavior patterns, and the environment. In prehistoric times the aggressive binary male dominated behavior pattern of attack something that’s different, attack something that’s other, protect and control replication of babies, and protect and control women. All those different impulses and behavior, those were all prehistoric, and while they helped us survive in prehistoric times when the environment was very brutal and frightening and there were all these predators, that it was no longer the same. We’ve now created an amazing, beautiful, technological environment with cellphones and computers and space stations and yet we’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing, to change our behavior. And there’s a terrible disconnect and a terrible danger involved between how we behave and what we create. And there needs to be, for our own survival as a species, there needs to be some kind of reconciliation of behavior and consciousness with the environment. Which requires us to evolve.

Do you think that has something to do with the resurgence of the occult and New Age, you know coming in from the 60s on up, and I think it just keeps growing…

Oh definitely, as you know I was involved in all that too. One of the alchemical symbols of perfection is the hermaphrodite. And the symbol that’s a return to the divine and a connection with God is the hermaphrodite. So we are saying that’s not just symbology, that’s also a fact. That we do as a species have to become hermaphrodites again. We have to represent everything. We can’t be separated from anything. It’s not either or, it’s not black, white, male, female, good, bad, Muslim, Christian, rich, poor, etc. All of those are divisive and dangerous and destructive. We have to create a world where things are inclusive and about similarity and about evolution to become the same. That there is nothing to fear from letting go of one’s fear of the unknown or fear of the other or fear of something different.

Letting go of the Ego pretty much.

Exactly.

So we’ve chosen to use our bodies to represent that absolute need of the species to evolve. If we don’t evolve we’re doomed. If we don’t change the way that we relate we’re doomed. We must let go of attacking and being violent towards things that are different. We have to embrace things that are similar. We’ve got to love each other ultimately, and we’ve got to love every aspect of each other. And stop being afraid. So that requires a change that’s really radical and very deep. It requires a complete change in behavior. That’s what the Pandrogyne is representing.

That answers one of the next questions I had, which was is that going to be the next necessary evolutionary tool? Because I agree with a lot of that.

I know it seems very radical, I think it seems kind of weird, but it makes complete sense. There’s no need to be trapped into this male-female dichotomy, and from all of that is where everything else, violence and war and conflict, comes. There’s no question that patriarchal power deliberately suppressed female power. And that’s not healthy. None of it’s healthy. It’s not working, we only have to look at the world right here and now where there is so much polarization and bigotry and hate and fear that controls everything, to know that it doesn’t work. The old models don’t work. We need new models and our proposal is that yes, we have to embrace something that is completely different. And not be afraid. And accept that we can be anything we might want to be. I mean we don’t want to just become hermaphrodites, we want us to be able to let go of the idea of a human body being sacred and realize that the human body is a material object that carries around consciousness. That’s the statement.

How have you felt that, most importantly, your fanbase, has taken to Pandrogeny?

Well, I would argue that so far people have been incredibly receptive. Surprisingly so. On a crass level, me running on stage in a miniskirt with my titties, no one’s bothered. People seem to get it. I really think our fans are very intelligent.

And I think it’s one of those ideas who’s time is here and in it’s own slightly wacky way it’s describing a very serious issue and it’s down to this choice: do you want the human species to survive and be proud of itself and just to exist to create the most wonderful and fantastical and miraculous things that it can do (travel into space, travel through time) or do you want to be at the mercy of bigoted, greedy, power-hungry, retarded politicians who want to destroy the species just for their own ego? Which do you want?

How have you found the press to be with regards to this subject?

Everybody we’ve talked to so far has been seriously and sympathetically interested in the idea. Which is remarkable, I thought it would be much harder to get people’s attention and to get them to listen in a fair way. I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone that we’re in a very dangerous place. The human species has been in dangerous places before, but this is the first time that idiots are in power. This is the first time the have the tools to make destruction beyond belief. And they are already doing terrible destruction to the environment, but they have no sense of shame, or guilt about any more destruction that they create. They are so locked into this binary perception of things. And so obsessed with a prehistoric view of behavior and the way that the world works. We are all in terrible danger of a new Dark Ages at best. It’s about survival of the species, and the creation of a species by itself, for itself, for a future that’s wonderful. I think we’ve done it.

Related Links:
• Genesis P-Orridge Official Homepage
• Hell is Invisible… Heaven is Her/e review

All Photographs by Dan Mandell (www.danielmandell.com)

Downtown Records, 2006

Art Brut’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll was originally released nearly a year ago on the UK Fierce Panda label. After nearly everyone has already bought the import, the album is finally released stateside on Downtown records. Thankfully, Downtown was smart enough to include three extra tracks not found on the original Fierce Panda release to ease the pain of a double dip… though Art Brut’s songs are so good you almost welcome re-buying the CD.

The CD opens with the band’s first single, released prior to this album’s inception, “Formed a Band”. It is definitely one of the strongest tracks on the album, and a perfect introduction to Art Brut and frontman Eddie Argos’ vocal, and lyrical, style. The lyrics are delivered over a simple, energetic guitar rock style in a speak-sing manner. Argos isn’t just singing a song, he is telling you a story, a story full of wit and simple honesty. “Look at us, we formed a band.”

Another strong song on the album is their second single, “Emily Kane”. This is a song Argos wrote to win back his old girlfriend from 10 years ago, his first love who (surprise!) is named Emily Kane. I think every guy who listens to this song has a girl in his past that he instantly thinks of when he hears this track, it just captures the innocence of childhood “romance,” for lack of a better term, and the memories (and possible regrets) we still hold onto. “There’s so much about you I miss/The clumsy way we used to kiss.”

This is a band that understands what they need to showcase in their songs. The music is definitely secondary to Argos’ lyrics and delivery. I don’t mean to sound too negative about the music, it is actually quite catchy and the band members are fully capable musicians. In fact, I am sure they are dumbing down the music in favor of putting Argos’ contributions front and center. Which, is exactly what was needed.

Bang Bang Rock & Roll is an extremely strong release, hopefully Art Brut will be able to keep their wit and honesty going forward.

“I hope this song finds you fame/I want schoolkids on buses singing your name”

I think it is safe to say Eddie Argos has succeeded in what he set out to do.