We Call It Acieed!

I'm back on 3 Triple R 102.7 FM's Max Headroom this Thursday 21 November with "We Call It Acieed", an hour of music featuring the Roland TB 303.
Expect a pretty condensed summary.

Stream it here.

This comes after an excellent live acid set by Hieroglyphic Being at the Residence for Melbourne Music Week. Jamal Moss played a kind of free-improv house, starting with heavily tweaked 303 riffs before adding drums and going predictably berserk. It was noisy, oddly funky, and riveting, and he had a pretty big crowd dancing. Here's an excerpt from a comparable set in September:



More acid that's got me hooked of late is "The Future" by Innershades, with the 303 banging out a basic bleepy bass riff, but jeez its good:



And acid maestro Tin Man's latest for Acid Test "Mystified Acid" is good too:


But perhaps not as good as "Devine Acid" from last year:


And this old clip of Mike Ink live is super:

Jacuzzi International - continued

The Max Headroom feature on Jacuzzi International for RRR aired Thursday 26 September 2013, thanks Dan and Lorne for their input, and for such golden times. It can be streamed here.

Given the paucity of information on Jacuzzi International and the bands under its umbrella, I thought I'd post a few links to what scraps exist.

Mandogalup films has posted a number of Jacuzzi related and otherwise Perth band live shows up on Youtube. All videos are of interest but highlights include...

a Bing show at the Palmerston Street Witch House, where Myles used to live and where many a good time was had. I'm seated in the middle:


A Still gig, the first ever I believe, at a party in the backyard of the West Perth apartments where various pals lived. Dark but sound is great:


Bluetile Lounge at the Paddington Ale House, 1996:


Jacuzzi instigators Mustang at the Old Melbourne in 1990, well before my time:


Plenty more on there including O!, Molasses, Mukaizake, Adam Said Galore...

Literature of the period is equally scarce but David Gerard's Party Fears Zine is a goldmine. Of particular interest are the live reviews from 1993, featuring review of a Jacuzzi gig at the Jacuzzi venue par excellence the Shenton Park Hotel. Here it is:

KISS MY JACUZZI — MUSTANG! / FEENDS / O! / BLUE TILE LOUNGE / CHRIS HANN — Shenton Park,  Friday 22nd April
Party at Club 96, then down to the rock awards show where everyone’s a winner, baby.
Chris Hann of the Wooden Fische gave a short solo set to start, and it worked fine. Blue Tile Lounge are a band I’ve never gotten into a whole lot. Actually, I can’t stand ’em. REM as slackers. Not my scene. I was in the front bar. (Let’s just pause for a moment and thank the front bars of this world.) Lots of people I know disagree, though lots of people I know agree.
O! were bound to be interesting, seeing as Nick seemed to have been alcoholically transported to another world prior to this show (you shoulda seen him on the verandah of 96) and Bill was on his way there ... they kept it together fine ... ish. “Outskirts” (first on the tape) is my favourite O! song, by the way.
The Feends are not quite the greatest band in the world, but they know it so that’s okay. Cheat-markers-on-the-keyboard rock’n’roll is the new apocalypse. Remember: it’s just a thin line between ninety-nine percent pose on stage and the full one hundred. I’ve thought Samantha Wilson was a natural-born pop babe star since I’ve known her, so it’s good to see it coming true.
Mustang! played their second show since John Campbell rejoined and they were a lot more together. Took till the third song or so (second was one of John’s anal one-chord art-rock numbers that requires absolute precision timing and probably sheet music ... but you could tell it was a great song), but they cooked from then on. The new songs are killers. Three working vocalists is great too. The performance wasn’t one hundred per cent, but it was certainly at least ninety and that’s enough when the songs are this good.

Also interesting is the Perth News #19 bit in which Ross Chisholm writes bios for Perth bands of the time, including all the Jacuzzis. Mention is made elsewhere in party fears of Chisholm reportedly working on his next Perth band family tree, being the Jacuzzi family tree. Sadly to my knowledge this never saw the light of day. Plenty more at Party Fears on earlier Perth music.

Of related interest is this interview with Kim Williams of House of Wax, originally published in Uzurlikzurli #3, February ‘98. 

And some of the music played on the show remains available for download via Guy Blackman's Chapter Music. Particularly check the Kill Yr Idols cassette, the earliest Chapter release with available downloads. Also available on the Double Figures comp is Bluetile Lounge's excellent 'Concrete Tunnels'.


Feel free to add any other vital Perth links in the comments bit.

Jacuzzi International

Thursday 26 September at 7pm I'll be joined by Lorne Clements (Baked, Bing, The Good Band) Daniel Erickson (of Bluetile Lounge, Mukaizake and Still) to present Jacuzzi International for Max Headroom on RRR. Blurb below:

Before the internet, before the mining boom, before $6 coffees and $15 pints of super, Perth had Jacuzzi International.

In the early nineties, Jacuzzi International was a loose collective of Perth-based underground rock bands who shared the bill on a number of gigs which were followed by after-parties featuring jacuzzis.

Encouraged by isolation, international indifference and $1 middies, the Jacuzzi bands attracted strong, well, decent local support, favoured insular cross-band collaborations and created a (small) number of strange and largely forgotten musical experiments. With Jacuzzi International guests Daniel Erickson (Bluetile Lounge, Mukaizake, Still) and Lorne Clements (Baked, Bing, The Good Band), tune in for some Jacuzzi doozies and peripheral Perth hits from before it all went down the toilet.

We'll be playing music from the main Jacuzzi bands but with only an hour, and a limited collection, won't make all of them, so apologies in advance for those we miss.

While no recordings of Bing exist Lorne kindly sent this recent 'where are they now?' image (L-R Myles Durham, Lorne and Mark Richardson):

... and Bluetile Lounge from back in the day:

Schweiz Rec

This track is an understated and under-appreciated gem that's been banging about my head for ages. Nothing special but everything fits just perfect. Surprised more hasn't been made of it, as I love it:



Schweiz Rec is who done it, only other thing to his credit is this for Workshop 10, also splendid:


Schweiz Rec is Patrick Harz, of which little is known, but a couple of credits in discogs dating back to 1995. In 2004 he produced 'Acid Love' with Peter Grummich, which Boomkat describes enticingly as harking back to classic Donna Summer. Grummich is an old Kompakt stalwart responsible for some early scorchers. This is one:

Scarlatti, K34

Finally found a Scarlatti sonata that's within the realm of my modest abilities. Even so, it will take me some time:


Guitar transcriptions work well too:


Here's Horowitz, a Scarlatti master, in Moscow, 1986, on the preceding K33:


Note the 'hushers' in the audience. Interestingly just read this about this concert:
‎

In 1986, Horowitz announced that he would return to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1925 to give recitals in Moscow and Leningrad. In the new atmosphere of communication and understanding between the USSR and the USA, these concerts were seen as events of political, as well as musical, significance. Most of the tickets for the Moscow concert were reserved for the Soviet elite and few sold to the general public. This resulted in a number of Moscow Conservatory students crashing the concert, which was audible to viewers of the internationally televised recital.

The recording was later released and became a bestseller. Here he is playing my favourite, K466:


And to end by fucking it all up, this Lady Gaga-Scarlatti Echojam/mashup thing, actually pretty good:

In the wee small hours, with DJ Jus Ed

I recently had the pleasure to go out late at night and see DJ Jus Ed playing records. I had fun, but the 2am start time meant I caught little of Ed’s performance. The Liberty Social is a fine small venue, with a good sound system, a not-too-reverent approach to DJs (i.e. not placed on too high a pedestal, although on this night Ed was a good foot or two higher than Patrice Scott, Portable and Vladislav Delay’s ground level performance on my first visit), a friendly audience and good cheap beer on tap. Located in the basement of heritage listed Tomassetti House.

Best of all was the small room out back, an old catering fridge converted into alternative dancing space, with DJ (at ground level) playing records (slowed disco/Balearic stuff) to a maximum audience of 10. No photos sorry.

Doors opened at 10, so we delayed our arrival to midnight, and still hardly anyone there. At 1am the warm up DJ was playing Omar S’s ‘The Shit Baby’, a killer, to an empty room.


I told him it was killer and had a quick shimmy, but scarpered to the Fridge where a handful were dancing, and kept at it. By the time of Jus Ed’s arrival, I was too drunk and tired, and not long afterwards hit the road.

Why can’t nights like this start at 10pm? 11pm? Midnight even! At 2am, what hope is there.

Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life

Soon on Zer0 books, Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures . Excerpt below, but more here.

The slow cancellation of the future

It is the contention of this book that 21st Century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire And Steel in their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed.
In his book After The Future, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the ‘the slow cancellation of the future [which] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.’ ‘But when I say ‘future’’, he elaborates,

I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.

My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19)

While the background is of less relevance, I was reminded of the final episode of Quantum Leap, where Sam, after completing his final mission, disappears within - or outside of? - time:


Given that this was 1993, as futuristic thinking was beginning to close down, this seems strangely relevant and portentous. More here.

Oneohtrix Point Never: R plus Seven

Oneohtrix Point Never is one of the few artists these days whose new releases I eagerly await and R Plus Seven, his latest and first for Warp, is impressive right off the bat. The Wire describe it, and indeed all his music (using 'Describing Bodies' as the perfect example), as sensual, and I'd agree, in a highly contemporary, fractured and digitised way. Trite and overused cliches perhaps, but it does seem to evoke the sexiness of shiny mass produced contemporary objects: plastics, silicone, chrome; shapes and forms that could only be generated by computer.


These ideas have been the subject of his cover art and concert visuals, both in his solo 'free from' show in Melbourne last December, and in <i>Reliquary House, the MOMA commissioned modern-sculpture-soundtrack work he produced with Nate Boyce (also performed in London last October). In the former, he began by focusing on static shots of humdrum household objects - chair, teapot, hammer - these remaining on screen for far longer than expected, developing a kind of Dadaist absurdity and charm through prolonged repetition. It didn't stay like this, but Ive forgotten how the rest went. Maybe like this:



With Reliquary House, absurdity and humour, again through repetition and prolongation, was even more prominent, the music seeming almost secondary. Many in the audience got up and left throughout the show, some within the first moments, and the music was noisy and harsh, glitched shards of white noise, a seasick, woozy low end, and skipping voice samples, all of which could be perceived as irritating. I thought it wonderful, a beautiful pitched dialectic between grand portentous dread and silliness, never quite resolved.


Something present in all his music, especially the Echo Jams.


Not much to say about the new album, seems similar to his December live show, but it is extremely immersive. His synths have always been thick, viscous things, and here they're massive. Even lighter passages seem to pierce like shards, with jittery samples like echoes reverberating around your head. Again cliche, but does seem to accurately reflect our era of pervasive capitalism, the all-sensory-overload of malls and business parks. That it does so with such frightening seduction is a telling comment on the workings of our modern world.