Chroniques de Mark N

J'ai trouvé ça sur un webzine nommé Cyclic Defrost.
Mark N liste les 10 disques qui l'ont marqué et en fait la description. Tout est en anglais mais ca vaut le coup de se creuser les méninges pour la traduction

Source : www.cyclicdefrost.com

Part 1 : www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?article=1223

Issue #014 (July 2006)

Mark N Selects - Part One

Mark N is one of the under-appreciated renegade figures in Australian electronic music. Immensely hard-working and driven, he has more notoriety overseas than locally, having toured extensively through North America and Europe first with his now defunct trio Nasenbluten, and later solo as Overcast and as a fierce DJ. Growing up and running things from Newcastle, a city two hours drive north of Sydney once famous for its now-closed steel works, he has enormous pride in his roots. His ‘take no shit’ attitude and deadpan, self-deprecating humour have been responsible (together with Aaron Lubinski and Dave Melo) for Nasenbluten’s noisy, grating and harsh music, which has been released on labels all over the world, including Industrial Strength. Becoming frustrated with putting music out on other people’s labels, Mark set up Bloody Fist Records - a name that still gets him strange cold calls from telemarketers. Bloody Fist steadfastly refused to release music from anyone outside of the Newcastle region. His later solo productions as Overcast are for the most part dark, menacing relentless drum’n’bass, but also explore cut ups and other tempos, whilst his highly technical DJs skills, including wins at the DMC and ITF championships, have irritated many in the local hip hop community who see him, rightly, as an outsider and a threat. Original Nasenbluten records trade for ridiculous figures on eBay, and every release from his Bloody Fist label is a collectable. Mark ceremonially closed down Bloody Fist on its 10th anniversary and moved interstate. He vows to return to Newcastle to retire, and when he does maybe the Newcastle mayor will present him with the keys to the city.

Mark was given the task of choosing ten records that have defined him over the years. He approached the task with such relish that we’ve decided to run the whole thing in interests of complete-ness.

Here are his choices in his own words.


COLDCUT: Beats + Pieces
(Ahead Of Our Time : UK 1987 : CCUT1A/B : 12")

Music by so-called ‘non-musicians’ was something I became interested in as a direct consequence of growing up throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s in the suffocating cock-rock guitar hell of suburban Newcastle. As far as I was concerned, the notion of people making contemporary music without using traditional instruments (especially guitars) was akin to ‘thinking outside the square’. Unsurprisingly, collecting records composed of fragmentary portions of pre-existing records became a nerdy obsession of mine, and during this period I was always on a keen lookout for these ‘cut up’ or ‘DJ’ records regardless of their origin or quality.

Sample-based records seemed to be in abundance throughout the late ‘80s, as new production techniques were slowly being discovered, developed, and samplers became more affordable. Even some of the more commercially successful UK sample-house records appealed to me during that time; particularly ‘Pump Up The Volume’ by M/A/R/R/S and the ‘Beat Dis’ follow-up ‘Megablast’ by Bomb The Bass – both which have, in my opinion, dated rather well. The actual story behind ‘Pump Up The Volume’, the controversy surrounding its release and resulting legal action by Stock, Aitken & Waterman is fascinating enough in itself.

But another thing that seemed peculiar to the ‘80s was that any hip hop album worth its salt would feature a ‘cut-up’ track where the artist or crew’s DJ would go solo and showcase his cutting and scratching skills. These were always the highlight of hip hop albums for me, and not only would I skip forward to those tracks whenever my attention span had been caught short by the rhyming, but I used to rate hip hop albums on the strength of their cut-up tracks alone. Each time I ran across new tracks that I liked the sound of, I would listen to them on repeat, paying extremely close attention to the edit points, structure and scratching techniques, scrupulously studying every aspect to death.

One of the first cut-up records that I became really excited about was Coldcut’s debut 12” ‘Say Kids’, which sounded exactly like it had been assembled using nothing more than records, turntables, a mixer and four-track tape recorder. The all-encompassing sonic collage, slightly rough edits and primitive scratching gave the track a ‘live DJ’ feel. Although it came off far more dense and compact than an actual live DJ set – and it wasn’t like a regular scratch showcase track on a hip hop album either.

This record consisted of actual slabs of other records - specifically, huge chunks of Kurtis Blow’s ‘Party Time’ - rather than purely manipulated fragments. It would even be fair to say that Coldcut’s ‘Say Kids’ sounded like a tightened-up, thrill-a-minute version of ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’. The simplistic use of multi-track recording had, in effect, stepped up the overall impact and density of the collage, thus restyling the slightly cumbersome and rough ‘quick mix’ technique that Grandmaster Flash had employed on ‘Adventures’. I also found that I much preferred Coldcut’s style over Double Dee & Steinski’s ‘master mix’ collage technique that, although remarkably clever, was more about clean and tight tape edits rather than the ‘live DJ’ feel.

Later on in 1987, Coldcut became affiliated with the UK label Big Life, and they released a cracking 12” by the name of ‘Beats + Pieces’. On this single, they had actually taken more of a structured and focused approach, basing the track around a looped drum break with slightly more emphasis on sound manipulation and scratching. The scratching itself is very primitive, old-school, and a little sloppy compared to what was going on in the US and elsewhere in the UK at the time, but it works in the context of this track so damn well. The drum break that ‘Beats + Pieces’ is based around is the famous first bar of Led Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’, from their fourth album Zoso. I had heard rumours about how these particular drums were originally recorded and I eventually read that they were recorded in a three-storey concrete stairwell.

[Drummer] John Bonham sat at the bottom of the stairwell hammering away in his distinct ‘muscular drumming’ style and a single microphone captured the performance from above, creating the ultra-heavy, muffled but immense resonance that makes the break so distinct and dynamic even when sped up. Although the Led Zeppelin break formed the backbone of ‘Beats + Pieces’, Coldcut’s original collage technique had not been entirely discarded - the Zeppelin break regularly gives way throughout the track to extended drop-ins from several other records. At one point a bold eight bar slab of Chubukos’ ‘House Of Rising Funk’ is scratched in twice, then further on through the track four bars of ‘Soul, Soul, Soul’ by The Wild Magnolias is roughly cut back and forth, extending it into a sixteen-bar chunk.

I still think that the sample and breakbeat selections featured in this track put it a notch above the many other cut-up tracks of the time. Coldcut seemed to take a slightly more cerebral approach - their aim being to continually excite and surprise the listener with a clever cut-and-paste sound collage, rather than boring them with a dull six-minute scratchathon. And by crikey, they nailed it.

Following this, Coldcut went on to put together one of the most legendary and best selling hip hop remixes of all time – the ‘Seven Minutes Of Madness’ version of Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’. After hearing their remix, Eric B famously dismissed it as ‘girly disco music’ but was obviously more than happy to collect the royalties on its sales. Coldcut cheekily replied by re-releasing the seven-minute remix independently on their own label - with Rakim’s vocals removed - and calling it ‘Not Paid Enough’. (Legend has it that Island Records paid Coldcut a measly one-off fee of £750 for the remix).

In any case, a veritable flood of pedestrian ‘girly disco music’ then followed from Coldcut as they went on to collaborate with and produce records for both Yazz and Lisa sodding Stansfield, spawning a handful of chart-soiling pop singles throughout ’88 and ‘89. Obviously the record company game was well and truly in full effect by this stage. Nonetheless, back in ‘87 when Coldcut were apparently looking for a record deal by shopping ‘Beats + Pieces’ around to several labels, they were told by one label in particular: ‘Sorry, but this just isn’t music’. The quote immediately became Coldcut’s catchphrase – and when ‘Beats + Pieces’ was finally released the catchphrase appeared on the 12” sleeve, and regularly in large bold type on their record sleeves for a long time thereafter. Even if ‘Beats + Pieces’ wasn’t ‘music’ – it’s still one hell of an incredible six-minute racket almost 20 years on.



THE ART OF NOISE : (Who's Afraid Of?) The Art Of Noise!
(Zang Tumb Tuum : UK 1984 : ZTT-IQ2 : LP)

In late 1984 I was a fresh faced 11-year-old. My parents had just bought me a small AKAI radio/cassette player for my birthday. The radio fascinated me as it had shortwave bands 1 and 2 which meant hours locked in my bedroom twiddling the dial listening to static ridden broadcasts from as far away as Russia and South America.

One rainy Sunday night I was idly twiddling the dial when I decided to see what was on the FM band. As I turned the dial around the 104 mark, a station locked on which seemed to be broadcasting footsteps and thunder. The footsteps were panning from one speaker to the other - FM stereo was incredible the first time I experienced it! I was dead impressed but wondered why a radio station would be broadcasting this. The combination of thunder and panning footsteps was creepy as hell to my 11-year-old ears, but I persevered. After a while came what sounded like church bells and organ music. Following this was a weird loop of a voice saying ‘It stopped’, accompanied by a strange synthesizer arrangement and what sounded like some sort of wounded monster groaning in pain. At this point I freaked right out and almost switched the radio off, but curiosity won out and I persisted. After a while some strange sounding drums began, underpinning a repeated fragmentary voice sample that I could not understand for the life of me. This was by far and away the weirdest thing I had heard on my radio since my 11th birthday, and I was scared.

As the music faded, the announcer shed some light on what I had just been listening to. It was some weird band I’d never heard of called The Art Of Noise and it also turned out that the radio station I had locked onto was 2NUR-FM - Newcastle’s only community radio station at the time, based at Newcastle University. What I couldn’t quite grasp at that tender age was that there were people making music outside of the mainstream stuff that I heard on the AM radio stations. The ‘music’ I had just experienced was creepy, unsettling and sort of unpleasant – but above all had not resembled anything I had heard on the radio before. As an 11-year-old it really scared me and I distinctly remember having difficulty getting to sleep that night. After a week of trying to forget about it, curiosity got the better of me again and I found myself back at the radio the following Sunday night – unsuccessfully trying to find more of the same.

It wasn’t until almost 18 months later, during my first year of high school that I saw a kid who had ‘ART OF NOISE’ scrawled across his school bag in black texta. I approached him and found out that his name was Anthony, he was two years older than I was and had all The Art Of Noise records including their new album of the time called In Visible Silence. He was miffed that someone else at his school even knew about this music and I told him of my unusual discovery on that rainy Sunday night in late ‘84.

The next day he brought me a tape copy of the full Who’s Afraid album and as soon as I came home that afternoon I played it over and over and over again. It turns out that what I had heard on 2NUR-FM eighteen months prior was in fact the final three tracks of the album in sequence: ‘Memento’, ‘How To Kill’ and ‘Realisation’. The music didn’t exactly creep me out this time around – I was growing up and had begun to gradually learn about, and further investigate, things that were outside of the norm – especially in the music world. I played the cassette Anthony had dubbed for me until it wore out, at which time I also became a rabid collector of Art Of Noise records.

The Who’s Afraid album was interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the entire album heavily relied on the use of the Australian-developed Fairlight CMI. The album was mostly 8-bit sample-based as a result, and some keen trainspotting revealed several sound samples taken from one of the group member’s other bands: Yes.

Secondly, the track ‘Beatbox’ which appeared on the album also existed in an earlier version on The Art Of Noise’s first EP entitled Into Battle. Legend has it that because so little was actually known about the members of the group, The Art Of Noise were actually voted ‘Best New Black Act’ by several US publications following the successful 1984 release of ‘Beatbox’ as a separate 12” in the USA – not an altogether bad result for five pasty white Londoners.

The group itself originally consisted of five members, most of whom came together initially to work on Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ in 1982 under the direction of Trevor Horn – who also ran their London based label Zang Tumb Tuum (ZTT). [Music journalist] Paul Morley was also an early member of the group, but had more to do with controlling The Art Of Noise’s non-image than anything musical. Their record sleeves were drenched in Morley’s cryptic ramblings alongside somewhat drab photography of spanners, statues and whatever else. They steadfastly refused to appear in photographs or on their record sleeves, preferring instead to maintain a degree of anonymity – in effect letting the music speak for itself.

Some time during 1985, three of the band members split from Horn and Morley over creative differences, leaving ZTT and taking The Art Of Noise name with them. Novelty pop singles ensued, including collaborations with Max Headroom, Duane Eddy and Tom frigging Jones. By the time all of this happened I had reluctantly bailed on The Art Of Noise as a band, as I longed for a return to the more experimental sound and amazing presentation of the ZTT releases they produced in cahoots with Horn and Morley years earlier.

Fast-forward to early 2005 – I am tarryhooting around London with an old friend and associate from my Bloody Fist days named Dan. He is working in London as a motorcycle courier risking life, limb and sanity on a day-to-day basis. We are sitting in a Stoke Newington cafe poring over a Rock Landmarks Of London book. Dan is keen to visit some of the important locations where musical history had been made. I was along for the ride with only a mild interest in these so called ‘landmarks’. We continually thumbed back and forth through the book, making a list of things we wanted to see and slowly nutting out the order in which we wanted to see them. I turned to the index and cast a lazy eye down the list of A’s….
…Almond, Marc / Animals, The / Ant, Adam / Arden, Don / Arriva / Art Of….
‘HOLY FUCKBALLS!! It’s got Art Of Noise in here!!’

The café went dead silent. Everyone turned to look at me. I felt like a bit of a bell-end but my embarrassment was short lived once I found page 82. There it was – Sarm West Recording Studios on Basing Street in Notting Hill. I scanned the page and found out that this location was where Trevor Horn ran his ZTT label, and recorded stuff by loads of artists including all the early Art Of Noise material. Suddenly I revised my interest in this whole ‘rock landmarks’ visitation bollocks.

So off we went – visiting The 100 Club which was the hub of the punk scene circa 1976, Gerrard Street near Leicester Square in Chinatown where Led Zeppelin formed, The Samarkand Hotel off Ladbroke Grove where Jimi Hendrix popped his clogs, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Kings Road Sex clothing store where The Sex Pistols formed – and a bunch of other famous locations along the way. All mildly interesting I suppose, but I knew where I wanted to be.

45 minutes later I was there, standing outside the amazing Sarm West complex on Basing Street just off Portobello Road. The building was originally constructed as a church and looked rather menacing in the day’s fading light, what with its security cameras dotted above the windows and doors. Dan waited patiently as I did the whole sad trainspotter photography routine. For me, this building was the place where the most important record in my collection was conceived, produced and recorded 20 or so years earlier. I had wasted so much of my life listening to the Who’s Afraid album that I desperately wanted to knock on the door at Sarm West and tell someone about it. However, the fear of being met with a steaming wall of indifference by whoever happened to be there working late was too much for me. Over the years I’ve never really given a fuck about Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin or The Sex Pistols – but I left Basing Street that evening in silent reverence.


SEVERED HEADS : Clifford Darling Please Don't Live In The Past
(Ink Records : UK 1985 : INK016D : 2xLP)

Near the end of my time at high school I met a dude in my year that had relatively unusual taste in music. After a few conversations with him I discovered that we had a few things in common, including being fans of Severed Heads (although he was more of a fan than I was). Prior to meeting him I had only been familiar with a couple of Severed Heads releases on Volition – Hot With Fleas, Greater Reward and the like. Being more immersed in hip hop at the time I had a limited appreciation of them but knew that they were Australian, based in Sydney – and had the best band name on the planet. Ever.

After spending a bit of time with this new-found high school friend, he introduced me to a number of Severed Heads' pre-Volition releases including one which had the most impressive title as far as I was concerned: Clifford Darling Please Don't Live In The Past. This Severed Heads album in particular was not entirely 'musical' – and certainly not 'musical' in the traditional sense – a lot of it seemed to be composed with tape loops and other bits of found sound, some of it quite jarring and uncomfortable to listen to. The experimental pieces on the album were interspersed with pieces that sounded a little more like left-of-centre synth pop. I found out soon enough that the album was a compilation of sorts released by the UK label INK Records in 1985, and consisted of older Severed Heads material from 1979-1983, recorded while [sound artist, later of mid-‘90s experimenters Size] Garry Bradbury was still a part of the band.

My friend and I were amazed, amused and inspired by everything this record represented; to our ears this album was remarkably dense, unpredictable, industrial, sonically unusual and spectacular all at the same time. Even the band name 'Severed Heads' seemed to be a firm ‘thumb in the arse' of the 1980s music scene. And why were we so excited? Well, we were young, looking for trouble and surrounded by an endless barrage of boring, predictable 'traditional' pop music – Boom Crash Opera, 1927, Cold Chisel, INXS, Noiseworks, Screaming Jets, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Testament, Pseudo Echo, The Doors, Manowar, Bros, Def Leppard, Red Hot Chili Peppers, AC/DC, Megadeth, Metallica, Midnight Oil, Guns 'n Roses and The Angels were the most often scrawled band names found on our school's dunny walls, playground seats, textbooks and classroom desks. (One of the funniest misspellings I remember was when some deadshit had actually scrawled 'The Angles' instead of 'The Angels' on the back of one of the toilet cubicle doors).

Apparently all these bands were to be the 'soundtrack' to our collective youth. Fuck that. I disapproved. In fact, my new friend and I both disapproved. Strongly. We wanted more of a challenging soundtrack ... perhaps something that we would not easily forget. And on a purely personal level, the best possible spanner in the works was perfectly represented (at the time) by hip hop – which to a Newcastle cock rocker's ear was the absolute antichrist of music – drum machines instead of real drums, shouting instead of singing, and record scratching sounds instead of guitars.

I was also on a keen lookout for anything else which made long-haired precious 'muso' types fly into an over the top dignified rage, spewing forth ill-informed tirades in passionate defence of 'real music'. I've always detested 'musicians' and their fucking persistent 'holier than thou' whining about somebody else's form of expression. Back in 1980's Newcastle I was surrounded by many of these people and it wasn't unusual for me to often wake up in a cold sweat - heart beating wildly - having just vividly dreamt of dragging a kicking and screaming 'muso' out of his ivory tower, removing his ponytail with a blunt knife and stuffing it down his fucking throat. On the other hand of course, I was probably just an arrogant and elitist little prick who liked to think of myself as being above my peers because I had now discovered something which no one else could (or wanted to) understand . . . pffft . . . whatever…

What I am 100% sure about is that the Clifford Darling album of early Severed Heads material stood as one of the lonely beacons of intrigue amongst the steaming quagmire of musical dogshit that I found myself wading through during my final days of high school. Clifford even became the proudly touted soundtrack to my entire [Higher School Certificate] study sessions. As a whole, the album also opened my ears up to other sonic possibilities beyond the realms of cock rock, unchallenging pop and 'metal up your ass!' – all of which my largely insipid peers seemed enthralled by.

And the high-school friend who introduced me to all this? That was one Aaron Lubinski, with whom I would go on to form Nasenbluten a few years later.

Over the years we both maintained an interest in Severed Heads, particularly the early material that Garry Bradbury was involved in. We also learnt of Tom Ellard’s amusing disdain for what he referred to as 'Cliffords'. These were people who apparently only liked the ‘early’ Severed Heads stuff. That definitely described us and we (somewhat childishly) revelled in it.

We kept up with Ellard's Severed Heads activities but became increasingly disillusioned, particularly when [the seminal] 'Dead Eyes Opened' was remixed and reissued in the mid-‘90s. It had been turned into a horribly effeminate little affair with its limp-wristed skipping percussion; all of the gritty elements that made the original 1983 version so quirky and interesting had been well and truly strained out. Even though the remix was not directly Ellard's doing, I guess we were pissed off that a much revered track had been turned into exactly the sort of wimpy unchallenging fruity dance music that we (as Nasenbluten) wanted to pulverise.

After this particular remix of ‘Dead Eyes Opened’ hit the Australian charts, Severed Heads went on tour around the country. The live act consisted of Tom Ellard and Paul Mac playing keyboards on stage with video accompaniment. They were booked to play with [Melbourne industrial band] Snog at the Newcastle University "Bar On The Hill" on some lost Thursday night in 1994.

Someone at the Newcastle Uni Student Union thought it would be funny to book Nasenbluten as the 'warm up' act. Needless to say we dived at the opportunity to warm up for an act that had meant so much to us during a certain period of our lives (even though we were in the advanced stages of Clifford-style disillusionment). We arrived for sound check sometime late in the afternoon to witness several big heavy-duty road cases full of equipment being hauled backstage and unpacked.

We casually strolled in with a couple of Amiga 600s wrapped in ratty bath towels and plastic shopping bags. Aaron may have even been using a picnic basket as his road case at the time. Our warm up set was booked at 8:30 and we made a point of playing our least palatable and most extreme pieces – to a slightly miffed and largely indifferent crowd of drinkers. Before we did this we made quite a dent in the Severed Heads/Snog 'refreshments rider' which was backstage – much to their chagrin. By the time we finished, all of us were extremely drunk and keen to try and stir up some shit with the headlining visitor and his predictably aloof entourage.

There were a few friends who had come along with us to the show (also proud Cliffords), and one had brought his copy of Clifford Darling Please Don't Live In The Past to try and get Tom to sign it. We knew that Tom probably wouldn’t take too kindly to this request and we were keen to see how he would react. After plucking up the courage, we approached Tom with the album and made the request.

Amazingly, Tom regained our instant respect without saying anything. He simply rolled his eyes, snatched up a black marker and wrote on the back of the cover in very small letters: 'I Disapprove' T.Ellard.

Part 2 : www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?article=1232

Mark N Selects - Part Two

PART TWO

HIJACK : Hold No Hostage / Doomsday Of Rap
(Music Of Life : UK 1988 : NOTE21 : 12")

This 12" was probably the be-all and end-all of hip hop for me. The unmistakable sound of late-‘80s Britcore. Fast, heavy, uncompromising, didactic and furious. Kamanchi Sly spitting his (rightfully) elitist and perfectly calculated lyrics over fast breakbeats is something that totally mesmerised me when I first heard it, and still gives me goose bumps every time I drop the needle on it. Kamanchi's sharp tirade against the competition is delivered at breakneck speed, and he only comes up for air to make way for the insanely fast and technical cuts of DJs Supreme and Undercover – which are also beautifully executed, amazingly creative and still untouchable to this day.

I was a big fan of Hijack's first single, but this 12" totally nailed things for me – the tempo, attitude and elitism all being turned up a notch since ‘Style Wars’. I realised at the time (perhaps stupidly in hindsight) that this record embodied exactly what I wanted and everything I needed from hip hop as a whole – calculated tirades, fast, heavy breakbeats and precision cuts. I didn't give much of a fuck about anything else in hip hop and I still don't – much to the chagrin of the many scene purists.

There were some great records which followed this Hijack 12", but none quite managed to harness the raw power of Kamanchi's delivery and Supreme's production on this specific release. Over the years I remember quite a few people going berserk at Kamanchi Sly's affected American accent, but again this failed to really bother me as his amazing vocal delivery far outweighed any 'faux accent' criticism.

Back in late-‘80s Newcastle, word got around my school that I was into 'that poofter rap shit' and I would occasionally arrive home bruised and bleeding, lock myself in my room and put this record on. Upon listening closely to this record again and further reflecting on those days, I can now confirm that this 12" alone was worth every punch and kick I received.

As the ‘90s started to wear on, the hip hop records I was hearing had generally relaxed quite a lot – gone were the precision cuts and shouting tirades over up-tempo breakbeats. Instead what graced my ears was an unstoppable wave of wafer thin fragmented drum samples, R’n’B style production with sing-a-long choruses, whole albums about getting stoned and a glut of uncharismatic MCs rhyming so loosely that it sounded like a bunch of half-asleep arseholes reading out their fucking shopping lists. To be fair, there was probably a lot of amazing underground hip hop going on throughout the ‘90s that I missed out on, and these days I'll occasionally hear a good underground hip hop record that gets me all excited again, but I don't necessarily go looking for them as they seem to be few and far between. A lot of time is instead spent with my collection from the late-‘80s period – rediscovering things I had forgotten about or marvelling at some of the primitive production and (still) amazing cuts.

And what of Hijack? It's a great story – it apparently ended in complete bitter acrimony with DJ Supreme parting company from Kamanchi Sly, Undercover and the rest of the crew in 1992 or thereabouts. Amazingly, Kamanchi Sly and Undercover went off and a few years later made a dodgy chart-topping house record that they maliciously released under the name DJ Supreme. Rumour has it that they still haven't spoken to each other since the break up, despite all the retrospective attention Hijack are now receiving. Kamanchi Sly did release a hip hop 12" in 1996 titled 'Death Before Dishonor' under the name Mr Blonde, which tells his side of the break up, and this year DJ Supreme released a DVD called Turntable Trixters which virtually tells the whole story of Hijack from his perspective, despite a lot of unnecessary and annoying commentary by people who obviously had nothing to do with Hijack at the time. Kamanchi Sly is also releasing solo hip hop records again, of varying quality. And while there seems to be a large internet community continually shouting and begging for a Hijack reunion, I for one hope that it never happens. Nothing is ever as good as it used to be. May the legend never be diminished!


THUG : Dad/Thug
(Black Eye Records : Australia 1987 : BLACK4 : 7")
The year is 1987 and Tex Perkins (yes, that Tex Perkins) is obviously bored. Tex has a couple of mates named Peter Read and Lachlan McLeod who are also obviously bored. And probably drunk. Very drunk. Hence, Thug is born and becomes the 'only way to live'.

Most of Thug's recorded output was apparently produced on the cheap and primitive electronic equipment that (as I understand it) one of the band member's flatmates had lying around at the time. Most of the sounds are completely overdriven and the recordings are rough as hell, which adds to their charm. At some stage or other during 1987, Thug's collective boredom and drunkenness culminates in the obtuse electronic pulsating racket entitled 'Dad' - which Sydney's own Red Eye Records sub label Black Eye thankfully immortalised on 7".

What Tex and friends also didn't realise (or care about) at the time, was that this particular two-and-a-half odd minutes of idiocy was possibly one of the defining moments in Australian 'dickhead music' history – flattening anything of a similar nature which either preceded or followed it (TISM, Mr. Floppy, Lubricated Goat, Painters & Dockers, etc).

If you listen closely to the first minute of the track you can just make out these lyrics under the crunching rhythmical distortion: He's over there / He's looking good / Do it now / Fuck your dad!

Charming. The remaining ninety seconds of the record continues in the same fashion, but with the shouts and screams of 'Fuck Your Dad!' becoming more and more intense, frenzied and insistent. Then as abruptly as it began, it's over and done with.

As you might expect from this, Thug's live performances were apparently quite the spectacle – gigs would often degenerate into the members belting each other up on stage. Legend also has it that the entire audience at one particular gig were somehow covered completely in flour. A colleague of mine introduced me to this record only recently and upon hearing it for the first time I laughed so hard I think a bit of piss came out.

When this same colleague unexpectedly bumped into Tex backstage at a gig some years ago, the opportunity to broach the Thug topic was not wasted. Tex apparently downplayed a lot of the Thug material, brushing it off with the comment that a lot of it was just 'unlistenable noise'. Maybe so, but to these ears Thug remains infinitely more interesting than any other Tex Perkins related project – and more genuinely amusing than almost all of the Australian 'dickhead music' which continues to limp around in Thug's wake.

And when [English confrontational noisemakers] Whitehouse released their new album recently, I couldn't help thinking to myself that even those sad old bastards could probably have learnt a thing or two about confrontation from our Tex back in the late ‘80s.


EUROMASTERS : Alles Naar De Kl--te
(Rotterdam Records : Netherlands 1992 : ROT009 : 12")

I was sick of hip hop by 1992. I hated what it was turning into and everything about it – especially the people who were becoming part of its scene. In hindsight all I really needed was a bit of a break from it, but at the time I desperately wanted to react against it and if there is one record in existence that saved me from becoming a bong smoking, head nodding, hip hop cliche-gurgling deadshit – it was this one.

'Everything is bullshit' is the rough translation of the Dutch title, and the sheer fuck-off-ness of the record remains unsurpassed to this day. I had read about this underground 'gabber' scene emerging from Holland in the early ‘90s, based around the working-class kids in the Dutch industrial city of Rotterdam. It was a while before I heard any of the music though, as the record store I was frequenting in Newcastle at the time refused to stock it. The first time I did hear the music properly was on a pair of crusty headphones at Disco City in Crown St Sydney. I was unemployed at the time and had less than ten bucks in my pocket, so I couldn't afford to buy anything that day. I was gutted. I also remember that [store owner and DJ] Lance famously refused to have those records on the shop sound system as it 'scared the customers'.

Anyway, the week after 'Alles Naar De Kl--te' was released I read a scathing review of it in one of the UK dance music mags – describing it as 'unlistenable 250 BPM noisecore'. Needless to say I was sold on it there and then. I'd never heard electronic music much over 140-150 BPM ... but 250? I thought it was a printing error, but I immediately ordered it from C&C Records in Newcastle and about a month later it arrived.

Shipment days at C&C Records were total chaos. Everyone who bought records in Newcastle – from collectors to bedroom DJs to club DJs – all crammed into C&C Records' 15-square-metre store to listen through and fight over the monthly shipments. On this day when I fought my way to the front and played this record on the shop system it was met with slack-jawed disbelief, screwed up faces and howls of derision. I had found my Mecca. The things people hated about this record were exactly the things I loved about it. It was practically anti-everything I had ever heard, and a big juicy phlegm ball in the eye of any self-gratifying purist.

The record was too fast, too distorted, too 'unlistenable', too harsh, too 'unmusical' and way too much to handle. This record also managed to cover just about everything which was gravely forbidden in the world of electronic music production at the time, being deliciously devoid of any funk element, and based almost entirely on an insanely overdriven TR-909 and mixer feedback. And it had a load of Dutch gobbledegook shouted throughout. After that day the guys at that store never looked at me the same way. To make matters worse, the cartoon-style cover featured a crude caricature of Rotterdam's famous Euromast driving a tractor along the road away from Amsterdam and towards Rotterdam. In the path of the tractor is a house DJ running for cover, his records spilling out everywhere. Behind the tractor is being towed what appears to be Amsterdam's severed penis and testicles on a trailer.

I later found out that this record was a by-product of the Amsterdam/Rotterdam rivalry that was rearing its head around this time. The difference between the musical scenes was quite apparent, with Rotterdam flexing its heavy industrial sounds in response to Amsterdam's effeminate snooty house scene. In my head something clicked. This record had to be a joke but I didn't give a fuck.

All I knew was that year zero had finally arrived, and with the help of some friends it was time to get Newcastle on the fucking map.


BURZUM : Filosofem
(Misanthropy Records : UK 1996 : AMAZON009 : 2xLP)

In late 1996 I was staying in a small, cramped apartment in Leipzig, in the old East Germany with the two other Nasenbluten guys. We were on a four-month European tour and our between-gigs base was in Leipzig, close to where our distributor operated from at the time. It was fucking freezing – one of the coldest European winters on record – and I even remember it being minus-18 degrees outside at one point. In the small two-room apartment we had a shower, toilet, three beds and a telly. Nothing else. As the apartment was devoid of a fridge, we had to utilize one of the outside-window sills as our makeshift freezer for any food we wanted to store, as well as using it to make our beer cold after lugging cases back from the local supermarket. We were all bored as hell – homesick, skint and pissed off at the waiting time between shows (sometimes two weeks).

I distinctly remember Aaron killing time by creating ridiculous cut-and-paste collages out of all the German junk mail that was pushed through our door – some of which went on to form the sleeve artwork for a couple of our later records. We were so sick of each other’s company, living on the smell of an oily rag and not being able to communicate with the landlord or anyone else due to the language barrier. To make matters worse, the telly in our flat was one of the old GDR-issued TV sets that had been in use since before the Berlin Wall had fallen, and it could only receive certain channels broadcasting on the VHF band. One of the only channels we could receive with any English language programming whatsoever was MTV Europe. Then throughout December all three of us became extremely ill with what seemed like an ultra-potent combination of every conceivable flu known to man.

And so there I was on New Year’s Eve 1996, laid up in bed, my body aching and head throbbing wildly with some insane East German strain of the flu. The other two guys were well enough to be outside getting drunk and helping the Germans usher in 1997 by throwing fucking big and dangerous firecrackers around in the snow like mad men. I was gaping at MTV in a totally delirious state while trying to ignore my migraine and the absolute chaos erupting outside the apartment window – telling myself that it would all be over soon.

I began drifting in and out of consciousness, and remember coming around at one point and noticing a strained guitar drone emanating from the TV’s little speaker, accompanied by shots of what looked like a bleak wintry landscape on the screen. I drifted off again and when I awoke a few minutes later it was still going – in what seemed like a dreamy flu-induced slow motion. This time I stayed conscious long enough to notice the title and artist as it appeared along the bottom of the screen towards the end of the clip – it was ‘Dunkelheit’ by Burzum – and to my flu-addled mind it sounded amazing.

I awoke the next morning and wondered whether I had dreamt it or not. I’m still not sure whether the flu had heightened my perception of the music that night but I wanted to hear ‘Dunkelheit’ again to satisfy my curiosity. When I finally arrived home after the tour I tracked down the album Filosofem. After getting it home and dropping the needle on the first track ‘Dunkelheit’, I recognised it straight away. It was a melancholic seven-minute masterpiece that featured droning guitar, slow-motion simplistic drumming, keyboard and the occasional (barely decipherable) vocal. I still couldn’t understand why it had been on MTV that night but for whatever reason it had been the perfect flu-suffering music. Up until that point I had never been a fan of any metal at all, but this album was something that I could tell had a great affinity with the environment in which it was created – the Scandinavian winter.

A couple of other tracks on the album were in the same vein as ‘Dunkelheit’, but the remaining tracks took on more of an ambient/minimal dark atmospheric approach. Although some have categorised this album specifically as ‘black metal’, I found it to be far removed from my perception of ‘black metal’ as a genre. In any case, I was never a part of the metal scene in any way, shape or form – nor did I know much or even give a shit about it – so soon after buying the Filosofem album I learnt quite a few interesting things about Burzum which knocked me for six.

Enquiries revealed that Burzum was apparently a one-man musical tyrant by the name of Varg Vikernes who played all parts and instruments on the Burzum recordings. Filosofem was the last album he recorded before being sent to prison in 1993, and it wasn’t released until three years later. He is still serving out a 21-year sentence in a Norwegian prison for arson and murder. He was convicted of burning down several Norwegian churches in the early ‘90s, and stabbing to death the lead singer, Euronymous, of [another Norwegian black metal band] Mayhem in early 1993. Footage of his court appearances at the time must be seen to be believed – especially his ‘cheeky’ smile as his sentence is being handed down for Euronymous’ murder. Also, when police originally arrested Varg they apparently found 100 kilos of explosives stored at his home – the intended use of which can only be imagined.

Since his imprisonment he has (amazingly) recorded and released two purely electronic ‘pagan ambient’ albums from his prison cell, the first being Daudi Baldrs, which would quite possibly rival any big-budget soundtrack music in substance, feeling and depth alone. After the following album, which was in a similar vein, the prison authorities took his synth away from him and his Burzum project has remained on hold ever since. In 2003, he was granted a short leave from his (at the time) low-security prison and when he failed to return at the agreed time the police sent out a search party. Rumours have it that they eventually found him in possession of a stolen car and a number of rifles, rounds of ammunition, a GPS unit, bulletproof vests and a false passport. Unsurprisingly, extra time was added to his sentence for that effort.

Varg currently spends his time behind bars reading, writing books and articles, corresponding with fans, postulating on what is wrong with the world and spewing forth his highly dubious opinions on racial purity [and white supremacy] to anyone who will listen – all from his cell in Tromso, Norway. Whatever happens to Varg once he is released from prison is anyone’s guess. There are rumours of another Burzum album in the same style as Filosofem, but nothing has been confirmed and, all dodgy political leanings aside, the man is undeniably talented and has made some amazing and beautiful music. Insofar as contemporary music history is concerned however, Burzum will be remembered by those who know of his antics as one bad Norwegian motherfucker who makes Death Row Records’ Suge Knight look like an angel.


Part 3 : www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?article=1233

Mark N Selects - Part Three

PART THREE

PANACEA : Tron / Torture
(Position Chrome : Germany 1997 : CHROME06 : 12")

Back in 1997 the drum’n’bass ‘techstep’ era was in full effect. The manic amen break edits and booming 808 kicks of jungle had been strained out and replaced by a creepy doom atmosphere more aligned with some of techno’s scarier elements. The overall sound was cold, clinical and machine-like with obsessively tight percussion almost completely starved of syncopation, save for the occasional understated appearance of an unchopped break. In fact, most of this musical movement sounded as if it had nothing to do with humans whatsoever – just a bunch of ‘emo’ machines revelling in their miserable existence.

The UK music press and discerning hipster scum were all up in arms about it and I was fucking loving it as one might expect. I had just been on an extended European tour with Nasenbluten during 1996/97 and had picked up some amazing techstep records, the main one being of course the [seminal] No-U-Turn compilation Torque. Other favourites from that era were Stakka, Skynet & Psion’s Audio Blueprint work, Dom & Roland and Technical Itch’s work on Moving Shadow as well as the rest of the No-U-Turn stuff from that time.

Right at the end of the Nasenbluten tour, we were killing time hanging around at our UK distributor when a box arrived from Germany full of new releases. One of the records was on a label I had never heard of called Chrome and was by an artist I had never heard of called Panacea. According to the distributor this was a German drum’n’bass record that was causing a bit of a ruckus amongst the UK drum’n’bass purists. Any time a purist gets the shits with something you know you should investigate it . . . and so I did.

The track ‘Tron’ was a monstrous distorted seven-minute drum and noise epic that twisted, turned, ducked and dived in a manner hitherto unheard of. The record seemed to follow a drum’n’bass template, but I was floored by the immense combination of rough percussion and a piercing mid-range bassline, which came across heavier, angrier, darker, denser, juicier and more challenging than any UK drum’n’bass I had ever heard. The record probably had more in common with German industrial hardcore and early DHR [Digital Hardcore] stuff than with any of the UK drum’n’bass at the time. I got the same feeling that I had when I first heard gabber five years earlier – and I immediately wanted more. ‘Tron’ also received bonus points after I trainspotted a sample of The Mover’s ‘Nightflight (Non-Stop to Kaos)’ track – an early record by the German PCP guys.

When I arrived back in Newcastle I played ‘Tron’ to anybody who would listen, including my flatmate Mick who was also a fan of the uglier techstep side of UK drum’n’bass. He flipped as expected. Mick was also playing various drum’n’bass shows in Sydney and Newcastle at the time, and he started introducing ‘Tron’ into his sets. I hooked up a reliable source for a steady supply of the forthcoming Chrome releases over the following twelve months.

I found that most of the Chrome releases that followed were in the same vein but none quite attained the fierceness and overbearing mid-range damage of ‘Tron’. Panacea also released an album on Chrome titled Low Profile Darkness that was probably a defining moment in anti-drum’n’bass. ‘Drum and noise’ was a much more appropriate description of the album as the percussion at times sounded like people bashing metal garbage lids with truncheons. The reaction from the UK purists was enormous, delicious and thoroughly predictable. My flatmate Mick and I still both enjoyed a lot of the UK drum’n’bass – particularly the colder, scarier more clinical records – but we could also see the bigger picture. Any action (even musical action) has an equal and opposite reaction – and in 1997 Panacea stepped up and proved the theory once again.

One of the funniest things in the drum’n’bass scene is when producers and DJs crap on about ‘pushing boundaries’. This became quite an amusing scene cliche at the time and it still is. Mick was booked to play a Sydney drum’n’bass gig towards the end of 1998, and decided to act as the cat amongst the pigeons, putting together a set of his ugliest UK tunes alongside a rather large helping of the German releases. When he had finished his set, one of the self-appointed Sydney drum’n’bass scene ‘dons’ waddled up in his fucking puffer jacket and asked Mick what he thought he was doing. Mick (being the eternal smartarse) told Mr Don that he had just ‘pushed the boundaries’. The Don thought to himself for a moment and then fired back: ‘Look mate, I know what ‘pushing the boundaries’ is and you didn’t push ‘em – you fucking smashed ‘em! We’re not here to smash boundaries mate … that’s not what drum’n’bass is about!’. When Mick arrived back in Newcastle the next day and informed me of this particular sequence of events we laughed ourselves flat.

Mick was never booked to play in Sydney again. Ever. God bless him.

X : Dyslexia
(X : Australia 1997 : X-2 : 10")

Sometime during the mid- to late-‘90s, gabber split off into a bunch of sub-genres – one of them being the amusing microcosm of speedcore. In the same way jungle fetishised the amen break to a certain degree, speedcore fetishised heavily distorted square-wave kick drums at comparatively ludicrous beats-per-minute. To my ears this appeared to be a reaction to the predictable and relatively ‘safe’ speed of gabber, which had started to slow down to around 180bpm towards the end of the ‘90s. Not only had gabber slowed down, but it had also become nothing more than another form of polished formulaic dance music – all the early ‘90s rawness, experimentation, ‘loose cannon’ antics and aggression had been strained from it as the big wigs of the scene slipped into comfortable formulas, European chart success and fat royalty payments.

Speedcore emerged during this time when a small amount of disgruntled renegade producers, labels and distributors broke away from all the fanfare. These producers wasted no time in removing a lot of the ravey and more accessible elements of gabber, focusing their attention instead on increasing the overall tempo, abrasiveness, brutality, mood and confrontational aspects of the music – all with wildly varying degrees of success. Of course the most difficult thing with the speedcore micro-genre was to always maintain forceful rapid-fire low-frequencies at immense speed – and keep it interesting. (Any dickhead can run their sequencer at 300bpm – but it takes a creative dickhead to justify it).

Usually as the tempos increased, the rapid retriggering of the kick drum prematurely cut off any of the preceding kick drum’s decay, thus removing a lot of the intended force. In effect the kick drums had no time to ‘breathe’. A good speedcore record (and there were some) would usually be centred around a distorted kick drum with a good, low-frequency punch and a quick but forceful decay – tight enough to be retriggered at speeds largely in excess of 250bpm and still maintain an unhealthy serve of bottom-end brutality. Not a lot of producers realised this and as a result the production of good speedcore became a black art.

Down here in Australia at the time there were a bunch of us who were active in the speedcore domain. A handful of the Bloody Fist roster were experimenting with extreme bpms as were a few guys in Sydney – namely a pair of German immigrant brothers who went under the name Rage Reset. The thing that set Rage Reset apart from the Bloody Fist guys was that their production was always a cut above. With most of the Bloody Fist stuff we were just taking the piss – exploring, experimenting, being reactionary and putting harebrained theories into action without giving two fucks - but the Rage sound usually came off bolder, more austere, more focused and with much more attention to detail. As a result, their records dated far more gracefully than most of the Bloody Fist stuff from that time.

Rage Reset ran three labels; Rage Records being the main one with UHF and X being the sub-labels. Their main output was on Rage Records, with a few unknown and other guest artists appearing on their UHF imprint. Their X label however, was something special indeed. Overall there were three releases on X - two 10” releases and an 8(!)”– all of them existing in painfully limited pressing quantities. I suppose their idea was to ‘hide’ behind this label as the releases have very little (if any) information on them, and shipped in clear plastic sleeves. Although there were a few rumours about who was involved with the third X release, the second one was definitely a Rage Reset record through and through. This record also came and went quietly – nobody in the scene seemed to take much notice, preferring instead to pay attention to some of the more gimmicky and idiotic speedcore records doing the rounds at that time (a few of which Bloody Fist were responsible for). But the first time I heard X-2, I knew that it single-handedly blew every other speedcore record – and our entire back catalogue – out of the water. One track in particular clocked in at 270bpm and made use of an amazing sample that I could only describe as some sort of humungous growling monster – the volume of which strobed between the heavy quick-fire kick drums at various points throughout the track. The other thing that set this track apart from many others in its genre was its amazing ebb and flow. Over a four- to five-minute period the mood morphed between creepy, ambient, tense atmospherics and an immensely thunderous and violent 270bpm rage. The balance and impact was perfectly devastating – especially when played on huge rigs with massive subs.

And so, it was time to hang up the boots – Rage Reset had nailed this speedcore bollocks in one fell swoop. X-2 was well produced; extremely heavy, sharply focused and scary as fuck – perfect soundtrack music – and everything ‘gabber’ could have been but would never be. As far as I was concerned this record was the new yardstick … nothing I heard after it even came close to its beautiful apocalyptic intensity, and I gradually lost enthusiasm for the speedcore genre as a whole. I still play this record out when time and place permits – and was playing it in Europe as recently as last year when I was touring.

This is probably one of the most underground and slept-on Australian records in any genre of electronic music – but it can still take heads off almost 10 years after its release. Hell indeed hath no fury like X-2.


DESTINATION : The Trip / Nowhere
(Narcotic Network Recordings : Germany 1997 : NNR02 : 12")

Throughout the 1990s there existed a small and legendary dedicated group of German guys who went under the name PCP (Planet Core Productions). They had their own distribution company PCD (Planet Core Distribution) and countless in-house labels, all based in Frankfurt. A large majority of the records on these labels were also produced in-house. Their labels variously covered techno, gabber, industrial hardcore, trance, hip hop, acid, drum’n’bass and whatever else they thought they could turn their hands to. The main in-house producer was The Mover (Marc Trauner/Acardipane), and he was later joined by Stickhead (Miroslav Pajic). Although a dab hand at programming many styles, The Mover specialised in what some people termed ‘Phuture Techno’ or ‘Doomcore’. This style was characterised by a dark, melancholic or sometimes menacing atmosphere – often programmed at slower tempos and sometimes having very little in common with other techno music of the time. Original pressings of records by The Mover are well sought after by PCP fanatics worldwide – and rightly so – much of his distinct ‘doomcore’ style has not been matched since.

I became an avid collector of PCP and related records after hearing The Mover’s beautifully miserable Final Sickness LP in 1993/94. There was also an in-house PCD label called Kotzaak which catered for their heavier industrial hardcore output – most of which came courtesy of The Mover’s protege, Stickhead. Although mostly known throughout the 90s for his cracking hardcore records, Stickhead (in true Mover style) was also well-versed in the creation of incredibly austere doomcore. A few notable records were recorded and released on several PCD labels under various monikers such as Rat Of Doom, Frozen and Reign. In 1997 PCD started yet another in-house label called Narcotic Network Recordings. There were only to be three releases on this label before PCD dissolved completely in the late ‘90s. The second release on the label was under the name Destination (another Stickhead alias). This record featured two tracks, the first side being somewhere between illbient, electro and experimental techno and the second side being a remarkably encapsulating beatless 10-minute dirge.

When I initially obtained the record in 1997 it was just another new PCP related release for my collection – I quickly skipped through the A-side before filing the record alongside the others and forgetting about it. A year later a friend and I were having a couple of quiet drinks one night and listening to some PCP records from my collection when I finally paid close attention to what was actually on this record. Side A was quirky and kind of interesting but was easily forgotten. The track ‘Nowhere’ on side B however, turned out to be one of the most amazingly sombre and morose pieces of music I had ever heard and it immediately put a downer on the entire evening. At the end of the night I apologised to my friend and filed the record away.

I remember from that point on I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the entire piece again. Why it was on the B-side of what amounted to an experimental techno record was anybody’s guess. This was a serious example of powerful music that dealt with the seldom-acknowledged normal human experience of grief, mourning, sadness, bereavement and sorrow. The record was obviously for listening to only in times of quiet contemplation or solitude – and without a fucking dance floor in sight.

And so I left the record alone, as I had no need to go there. That is, until six years later at the beginning of October 2004 when I found an occasion to play it. I had decided to move onto pastures new after spending 31 years in Newcastle. Everything I knew and loved was there but I was about to leave it all, possibly for good – for no other reason than ‘life being too short’ to stay there any longer. Oh … and the shitty hot weather. During one of my final evenings in Newcastle I was alone and busy packing everything up in my apartment when I found this record and noticed that the turntables still hadn’t been packed away. It was the end of an era in my life and I knew what I had to do.

So I dropped the needle on it and sat there crying like a little girl for fucking ages.
That was the very last record I listened to before bidding Newcastle farewell – and happily, I haven’t felt the need to listen to it since.




Bonne lecture

c'est excellent ! merci beaucoup

ouais c'est bien la classe!

ça explique pas mal de chose, surtout pour les influs hip-hop assez flagrantes du monsieur.

C'est bizarre il parle pas de ma rencontre le we dernier ?! :shock:

Any time a purist gets the shits with something you know you should investigate it . . .

et le texte sur le dernier disque est touchant ...

En effet, on l'imagine mal chialer comme une madeleine! Et pourtant...

Cela dit, à l'écoute du morceau on peut le comprendre.

PASSIONNANT !!!

Merci beaucoup :bravo2: