With an intrigue for a particular niche of old UK hardcore which takes cues from Sheffield bleep ambience, heady rave futurism and soft, almost new age synth pads, Blank Mind presents ‘Lost Paradise: Blissed Out Hardcore 91-94’. Though the records gathered for the compilation span a short three-year period and bridge the gap between scenes, the collection manages to find a sweet spot where the influence of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence, back room chill out sonics and the nascent jungle boom meet with elements of Italian piano house and slower breakbeat cuts.

Opting to focus on atmosphere to highlight shared connections; in this case the duality of often serene and calming soundscapes with frenzied breaks and bass (see Hedgehog Affair’s ‘Parameters’ and Luxury’s ‘Twirl’ respectively); Lost Paradise is a formidable collection of tracks plucked from a thriving time for British dance music experimentation. The general themes of ascension and escapism channeled through digital samplers are also inescapably linked to a turbulent time in politics, beginning in the post-Thatcher years and culminating in the year the harshest anti-rave Criminal Justice Act came into force.

Initially building the compilation around DJ Mayhem’s track ‘Inesse’, Blank Mind label founder Sam Purcell and Amsterdam based producer Tammo Hesselink began a process of swapping favourites and deep cuts to spread across this 2x12” doublepack. The compilation avoids any obvious centerpieces through masterful sequencing, allowing for moments of refrain and tempo changes in a way that helps add to their overall vision of what this music is and can be; “We wanted to frame hardcore in a different light, looking at this idea of ecstasy through the traditional meaning of the word and exploring that symbolism”. By drawing from what some might consider the softer edges of the movement, the pair offer a look into the relevance of these tracks in the contemporary era, where the past years have seen both an explosion in popularity of old ambient/new-age music and a certified jungle revival.

All tracks remastered from original DATs, with the exception of Sleepwalker's "Age Of Aquarius" which has been professionally ripped and cleaned.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: The hardcore revival is truly in full force now, with plenty of labels and producers mining this fruitful period of UK decadence. Blank Mind curate a rather special set that should have the spine tingling and the bassbins rattling nicely.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Sleepwalker - Age Of Aquarius (L.D Remix)
A2. Hedgehog Affair - Parameters
B1. DJ Mayhem - Inesse
B2. Luxury - Twirl
C1. The Invisible Man - The Flute Tune
C2. Escape - Escape (The Optical Mix)
D1. Skanna - This Way
D2. Xray Xperiments - Techcore

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book.

Recorded and self-released by the group’s own Dry Leaf Discs in 1993, City Lights is the debut record of the then duo Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris an assured arrival statement teeming with stripling angst and ambition. Lifelong chums Lambkin and Harris were barely nineteen and living at home in the seaside town of Folkestone, Kent, with few overhead expenses. The two were freshly employed as a forklift operator at a hardware store and an aide at a home for children with disabilities, respectively, affording them the time and funds to commit to a proper full-length release. Frontman Lambkin describes the album as a “microscopic examination of leisure activities, this time centered around a nightclub,” a conceit surging through its lyrics, song titles, cover art (depicting an audience of cats and mice at the Leas Club, a Folkestone fixture), and flip side (replete with fictional bandmates and pseudonymous liner notes).

On a recently-acquired secondhand guitar, Lambkin plays repetitive, brooding licks that form the record’s backbone, weaving in and out of sync with Harris’s free-form percussion and the pair’s sing-song poetry. Tracks range from unraveling nursery-rhyme ditties to extended jams awash with Casiotone and toy piano noodling. The duo’s musical hobby-horses work themselves in: the influence of Mark E. Smith’s breathless deadpan, the headless outer-edges of ESP-Disk’s back catalog, the eerie atmospherics of Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, and the deconstructed rock tunes of the Dunedin scene are all detectable, although there is a sui generis quality to the Shadow Ring’s artless temerity. “I’ve got to see and taste those city lights,” intones Lambkin on the album’s title track indeed, this is a record of naked drive and pent-up desperation, and a shimmering glimpse of what’s to come.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Double Standard
A2. City Lights
A3. Oooh Ahh
A4. Cape Of Seaweed
A5. Lyin' Eyes
A6. Cold Coffee
B1. Here Come The Candles
B2. Faithful Calls
B3. White Eyes
B4. The Visitor
B5. Snowbirds Of Alkatraz

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book.

Recorded in summer of 1994 at S.H.P studios (frontman Graham Lambkin’s parents’ home), the group’s sophomore record Put the Music In Its Coffin is a more sinister, saturnine affair than their debut City Lights. Coffin was many listeners’ introduction to the Shadow Ring, who had hitherto self-released their music, courting a steady stable of international fans through the magazine and mail-order catalog Forced Exposure. For their follow-up, the duo reached out to the ascending Philadelphia label Siltbreeze, whose eclectic roster of sneering, low-fidelity rock and noise connected disparate subterranean scenes from rust-belt America to the English Midlands, Dunedin, and beyond. As luck would have it, Siltbreeze proprietor Tom Lax was already a fan of the band’s first record and arranged to release both a 7” and their “difficult second album.” The connection proved to run deeper than vinyl within six months, Lax would pick up the pair from the airport for their spring 1995 US tour. This episode marked not only their first trip to the States but their first live performances at all, formally introducing the Shadow Ring to the American underground and solidifying the allure of the Folkestone pair.

From the get-go, the record has a menacing, vile ambience. Its opening track “Horse-Meat Cakes,” inspired by an anecdote by pulp author Philip K. Dick about how he and his wife subsisted off low-grade pet food when he first arrived in San Francisco, sets the tone lyrically and sonically. Subsequent tracks are filled with Rabelaisian body horror and sinewy, haptic diction. “I try to pass out vital organs, convinced that they are waste,” intones Lambkin in “Heart, Liver & Lungs,” before a chorus of detuned guitars kicks in, nearly drowning out the speaker’s account of consuming chevaline intestines. Later songs similarly detail vernacular cooking (“Caribbean Porridge,” about a cornmeal hangover cure), bodily processes (“Nocturnal Middle Rumbles,” about nighttime defecation), and creaturely conflict (“Crystal Tears” and “Spin The Animal Dial”). The album’s makeshift percussion and teenaged rawness resembles the verve of City Lights, while its screeching strings and gnarly distorted vocals give it a sparse, miasmic atmosphere that look towards the uncompromising, otherworldly experimentation of the band’s Hold Onto I.D. (1996) and Lighthouse (1997), making this one of the Shadow Ring’s most distilled musical statements.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Horse-Meat Cakes
A2. Heart, Liver & Lungs
A3. Put The Music In It's Coffin
A4. Remembering Old Friends
A5. Mustard Hooves
B1. Nocturnal Middle Rumbles
B2. Caribbean Porridge
B3. Crystal Tears
B4. Spin The Animal Dial
B5. Moonlight In Wings

Ahead of their ‘Nowhere’ 30th anniversary UK tour starting 20th April, shoegaze legends Ride have announced the details of the reissues of their early classic albums via Wichita Recordings.

The follow-up to "Nowhere", "Going Blank Again" saw the Oxford quartet embrace their prog side. Lead single "Leave Them All Behind" was an eight minute FX-pedal onslaught that somehow managed to crack the top twenty and get them on TOTP. On the other hand, "Twisterella" and "Mouse Trap" proved they could strip away the noise in favour of concise three minute pop melodies. A career best.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Releasing only a year and a half after 'Nowhere', 'Going Blank Again' was more exemplary shoegaze from Ride and really showed that they were a band at the height of their powers. Again, much like the other two reissues, this release is essential if you've not already got a copy. Also, best album opener of all time? You'll be hard pressed to beat the 8 minute goliath of 'Leave Them All Behind'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Leave Them All Behind
2. Twisterella
3. Not Fazed
4. Chrome Waves
5. Mouse Trap
6. Time Of Her Time
7. Cool Your Boots
8. Making Judy Smile
9. Time Machine
10. OX4
11. Going Blank Again
12. Howard Hughes
13. Stampede
14. Grasshopper

In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don’s extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician and represents the start of his communal “mystical” period, later crystallized in recordings such as Organic Music Society, Relativity Suite, Brown Rice, and the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.

The musicians in Don Cherry’s New Researches, hailing from Brazil, Sweden, France, and the US, converged on Chateauvallon from all over Europe. The five-person band—Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard “Doudou” Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos— performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki’s carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air. The music in the Chateauvallon concert aspired to a universal language that would bring people together through song. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the Indian theta “Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na,” and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance—including pieces that would later appear on Don’s albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out)—all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia from the puppeteers. “Relativity Suite, Part 1” notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau.

A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos’s masterful demonstration of this single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work to come as a member, with Don, of the acclaimed group Codona. The sounds of children playing on the ensemble’s achingly tender rendition of Jim Pepper’s oft-covered beacon of spiritual optimism, “Witchi Tai To,” lends the proceedings an especially intimate, domestic glow. Given the context of the star-studded international jazz festival, the concert’s laid back, communal vibe feels like an attempt by the Cherrys to show Don’s jazz audience that he was moving on. At the same time, however, Don was extending a warmhearted invitation for them to come along for the ride. With liner notes by Magnus Nygren. Released as part of Organic Music Societies, a Blank Forms project that also includes a book, art exhibition, and performance series devoted to Don & Moki Cherry's collaborative practice

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro: Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na
2. Butterfly Friend
3. Elixir
4. Amazwe
5. Interlude With Puppets
6. Ganesh
7. Elixir Reprise / Witchi Tai To
8. Resa
9. Relativity Suite, Part 1
10. Berimbau Solo
11. Interlude / North Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn
12. Elixir Reprise / Ganesh
13. Ntsikana's Bell / Traditional Melody

In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers’ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales. That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer Göran Freese—who later recorded Don’s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs—invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummelnäs, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months’ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don’s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessions are finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.

On July 20, the musicians gathered at Freese’s summer house included Bernt Rosengren (tenor saxophone, flutes, clarinet), Tommy Koverhult (tenor saxophone, flutes), Leif Wennerström (drums), and Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) from Don’s Swedish group; Jacques Thollot (drums) and Kent Carter (bass) from his newly formed international band New York Total Music Company; Bülent Ates (hand drum, drums), who was visiting from Turkey; and Don (pocket trumpet, flutes, percussion) himself. Lacking a common language, the players used music as their common means of communication. In this way, these frenetic and freewheeling sessions anticipate Don’s turn to more explicitly pan-ethnic expression, preceding his epochal Eternal Rhythm dates by four months. The octet, comprising musicians from America, France, Sweden, and Turkey, was a perfect vehicle for Don’s budding pursuit of “collage music,” a concept inspired in part by the shortwave radio on which Don listened to sounds from around the world. Using the collage metaphor, Don eliminated solos and the introduction of tunes, transforming a wealth of melodies, sounds, and rhythms into poetic suites of different moods and changing forms. The Summer House Sessions ensemble joyously layers manifold cultural idioms, traversing the airy peaks and serene valleys of Cherry’s earthly vision. In the Swedish Jazz Archive quite a few other recordings from the same day were to be found. Some of the highlights are heard as bonus material on the CD edition of this album. The octet is augmented by producer and saxophone player Gunnar Lindqvist, who led the Swedish free jazz orchestra G.L. Unit on the album Orangutang, and drummer Sune Spångberg, who recorded with Albert Ayler in 1962. 

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. The Summer House Sessions (part 1) (23:59)
Side 2
1. The Summer House Sessions (part 2) (23:26)

Manuela Iwansson is a force of nature. Beginning as vocalist in now-defunct Swedish punk group Terrible Feelings, Iwansson's solo music harnesses the doomed romance of early 80s post-punk with a leather-bound flourish of late-70s hard-as-nails rock music. No one really believes in Rock 'n' Roll any more, not in these times of eroded faith and disillusionment but we still believe in the redeeming power of the night. Manuela Iwansson's music soundtracks the drama of the nocturne; grimy bars that breathe acrid smoke like veils over lovers parting, the paranoia of the illicit, the thrill of darkness, the transformative power of holding hands against the storm, doomed and righteous. Strangers on a Train surges forward on a taut post-punk beat and aching Cult-like guitar riff, Iwansson's narrator lamenting an ending, stations whirring past her field of vision.The chorus feels like a stadium of fists held aloft in unison, belying the cloying tale, perhaps, of an awkward break up. It's an unabashed anthem caught between leather and lace.

On the flip, Blank Surface is a bona fide AA track. Tight drums and an elastic bassline make the song feel like a lost 80's goth pop single, Iwansson's lyrics feel like the self dissolving into a thrilling melancholy, the narrator's very selfhood evaporating with the dry ice. Much of Blank Surface reminds the listener of The Cure mixed with a kind of DIY stadium rock rendered with the perfect charm by Iwansson's vocal performance, a tool which manages to sing of vulnerability with an enviable confidence. Rock n Roll is dead, good riddance; we're creatures of the night.

Consistently heralded as one of the most influential punk albums of all time, Richard Hell & The Voidoid’s “Blank Generation” celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with a 2CD and 2LP deluxe release for Black Friday, Record Store Day. With participation from Richard Hell, the album will be remastered and packaged as it was originally released in 1977 (unlike subsequent reissues) with a second disc of previously unreleased tracks including alternate studio versions, out of print singles and rare bootleg live tracks from their first appearance at CBGBs.  The booklet will contain additional photos (the iconic cover was shot by Richard’s ex-girlfriend, CBGB’s “house” photographer Roberta Bayley) with memorabilia and liners from Richard.

When squirming black mold in a dingy Bayshore, CA, warehouse became sentient, creaked and took humanoid form it created Blank Square and their singularly oddpunk debut, Animal I — sounding like the weirder end of Flesheaters but with a sterility that can only be contemporarily compared to Total Control’s Aussie hardcore no-wave and then with a pinch of what made DNA and Mars amazing. This album is captured with plenty of concrete and sheet metal kept in the mix and a highlight towards dissonant syncopations, as if it was recorded in a empty room minus one chair and definitely down a flight of wet, cement stairs. Featuring saxophone with a mild but nauseating-at-times rippling slap delay, the band cruises on a rhythm section that sounds like the they’ve got another house show to play tonight after this one. Rectangular in all the right places, it’s uncomfortable, like sleeping in a car. For listeners who love art in their sax punk, reaching waaaay back into California’s punk history (SST would’ve undoubtedly dug this). There you go, weirdos.

TRACK LISTING

1. One Way
2. Bangers
3. Empty My Head
4. Fuc'd
5. Bad Acid
6. Quark
7. Put A Lid On It
8. I Was High
9. Charmer
10. Exit Saint
11. Tape Measure
12. Youth Trash

Blank Realm's transformation across the Australian mystic from sprawling spaced out psychotic punk blues, through the startling maverick pop psychedelia of ‘Go Easy’ to the widely acclaimed ‘Grassed Inn’, continues in its unrelenting quest for that quintessential synergy of chiming pop anthems.

Hook-laden throughout they unleash their wild yet tender new album ‘Illegals In Heaven’ which offers up freaked out reflections on life, love and circumstance. As knowing as the Chills or the Pretenders, loner ballads are as gnarled and world weary as Dylan in a cacophony as bruised as Royal Trux yet with the playfulness of Half Japanese.

Recorded and produced with Lawrence English (head of the Room40 label) on a late night at The Plutonium studio in Brisbane, the album sees them on their first foray into a recording studio. While it wasn’t exactly Abbey Road, it truly captures the chaos and majesty of the band’s formidable live shows.
It would be all too easy to say that ‘Illegals In Heaven’ is their finest work to date, but the simple truth is that Blank Realm have been without peers for a trilogy of albums, so it just might be as Sarah huskily intones, "Gold" too.

“Blank Realm are still bent on mixing the diamonds with the rough, and on Grassed Inn that particular swirl is at its most intoxicating.” Pitchfork 8/10

“Balancing the arty with the party to make for a set of danceable, hook-filled songs that bubble and bloom with an almost biological rampancy, shooting out tendrils of strange, snaking melody in every direction like vines enveloping a ruin” Guardian 4*

“A cracking selection of scuzzy, fuzzy psych-rock songs that recall Royal Truax and Sonic Youth” Uncut 8/10

“Blank Realm generate scruffy, VU’s-Sister-Ray-loving grooves, coloured up with blooping synths, and yowling, way-off vocals” Mojo 4* 

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Catchy but cool as you like jangle'n'fuzz psych pop/rock from down-under. A big hit on the shop stereo.

TRACK LISTING

1. No Views On It
2. River Of Longing
3. Cruel Night
4. Costume Drama
5. Dream Date
6. Flowers In Mind
7. Gold
8. Palace Of Love
9. Too Late Now

Neneh Cherry releases her first solo album in 16 years - a collaboration with RocketNumberNine, produced by Four Tet, and featuring a guest appearance by Robyn. The 10-track album, recorded and mixed over a five-day period is, out on Smalltown Supersound. It follows 2012’s 'The Cherry Thing', a collaborative record with free jazz, noise collective The Thing, which featured new versions of songs by The Stooges, MF Doom, Ornette Coleman, amongst others.

While her energy and demeanor may not have changed since the days of Rip Rig + Panic, musically, 'Blank Project' is a departure from anything Neneh has previously done, initially written as a means of working through personal tragedy. What stands out upon first listen is the album’s sparseness: loose drums and a few synthesizers are the only accompaniment to Neneh’s wildly poetic, sometimes-spoken, sometimes-screeching, soul-flooded and raw vocals. The space created by this minimal aesthetic leaves room for occasional pistes and flurries of rapid, yet throbbing and thunderous instrumentation. Featuring combined elements of beat poetry, avant-electronica and beautiful vocal melodies, it’s a record that uses simple ideas to create something entirely original. And despite the personal struggles Neneh was working through in writing this new material, the songs are far from introverted.

With 'Blank Project', Neneh continues to arrive at moments in musical history when there is an opportunity to subvert ideas of popular culture. She is subverting once again, only this time, although this record is musically bold, Neneh sees the stasis she’s challenging isn’t musical or societal, but her own.

STAFF COMMENTS

Philippa says: Neneh Cherry follows her collaboration with Nordic free jazz noise collective the Thing with the intense electro-percussive album ‘Blank Project’, first unveiled at the Manchester International Festival. The guttural analogue synths and pummelled kit drumming of power duo RocketNumberNine (brothers Ben and Tom Page) provide the backing for Cherry’s distinctive emotionally vulnerable soul-flooded vocals, while Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden proves to be the perfect producer for the project, stripping tracks back to their essential elements. The first solo record Cherry has made since the death of her mother, ‘Blank Project’ is stark, bracing, brooding and reflective. There is anger and sadness here, but this isn’t a sad record. This is a life-affirming angry howl at the world, a cathartic blast of intensity that leaps from the speakers. In an era of often soulless synthetic emoting, it’s good to have some raw emotion back with us. Raw like, er, Cherry!

TRACK LISTING

1. Across The Water
2. Blank Project
3. Naked
4. Spit Three Times
5. Weightless
6. Cynical
7. 422
8. Out Of The Black (Feat Robyn)
9. Dossier
10. Everything

Blank Tapes bring us the debut album release from Bass Clef, aka Ralf Cumbers. Having spent years refining and distilling his sound, Ralph finally locked himself in his tiny studio in Hackney. Eight months later he emerged with a clutch of demos that contained some of the freshest, most dazzling beats that the label's posse had heard in years. Opting out of the race for the latest sequencer / processor / sound card that drives much IDM, Ralph is somewhat of a connoisseur of vintage analogue equipment. Utilising just an old four track cassette recorder, a drum machine, a sampler, an ye olde synth and valve compressor, Ralph has conceived a striking and original debut. Think of the viral dub spaces of Mad Professor, the DIY intimacy of Third Eye Foundation or the brain-teasing beat programming of Afx, all with live interventions on trombone, theremin and cowbells (always a good combination!) and you're nearly there.