Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman (and book reviewer collaborator to the Monolith Cocktail) Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Playing with format, language and font, with half-thoughts of waking hours, death and the occult, Rick merges dream-realism and a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence, where angels dare to tread. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal. Parts One & Two were debuted during August, followed up by Part Three and Part Four. We now continue with the next three chapters in the opus, Water, V and The Nurses below:
WATER
To ‘sleep’
to then, to this
X X X
6am. Saturday. No work today. I can indulge in my one true passion: inventing elaborate and complicated water features. I pull myself from the bed with little fuss, excepting from a little resistance from my well-worn joints, and enter the bathroom to begin my morning routine.
Whilst brushing my teeth I stop short suddenly. I stare at my reflection, mouth open, brush still in hand whilst foam of toothpaste drips onto the floor. I stare at the man staring back. Same thinning grey hair, same deep wrinkles around the eyes, same strong jawline; essentially the same person this myself has known all of our lives. But something is different and undeniably so. I stand still as a corpse.
Is my presence so obvious?
A few moments pass but the suspicion remains.
After completing my morning tasks I sit down. Dark wooden floors mopped. Dishes clean and put away. Overalls on. Each and every room clean, fresh and empty save for the necessary furniture, the only evidence that somebody exists here. My mind feels free enough to plan the day ahead.
I step out of my back door, my back door to paradise, and into the cavernous hangar-type building I call my laboratory. It’s a separate world. Scattered chalkboards full of equations and diagrams… unique tools of my own invention… blueprints… countless sculptures and prototypes varying drastically and dramatically in size… Dead-Centre is The Clearing.
The Clearing is home to my masterpiece.
My masterpiece:
A model of an unrepentant imposing concrete tower, hexagon shaped – looking from a bird’s eye view split into four equal parts, formed by a cross-like walkway. These four parts are huge open-top water tanks whose depths reach down a quarter of the height of the building, and, in each quadrant, a colossal tap.
This is the object of my attentions and affections. All is perfectly detailed and dimensioned. It is a work of art.
Today is the day I contact the Mayor to commission this magnificence. I sit down and begin my letter.
The phone rings.
I frown.
I answer.
There is no immediate response.
I hear somebody breathing and so wait patiently for the silence to be broken. Though it seems as no reply is to be forthcoming, I can’t bring myself to put down the phone, but I don’t seem to be able to speak.
So I simply wait, transfixed by nothingness.
All I can do is stare at my creation. Hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Hello? Hello?
It’s a lady’s voice, gentle and kind. I don’t recognise it.
“Hello? Is that XX?
Speaking?
Hello dear, my name is XXXXX; I believe you did work for a friend of mine – XXXXX? She recommended you. Well, anyway, my house is flooded and I was wondering if you could come and sort it out? I’ll pay double for the labour.
No, no… that’s okay XXXXX. I normally work on a Saturday so it’ll be normal rate. I have nothing else booked in today so I’ll head straight out. What’s the address?
XXXXX said you were a gentleman! The address is [REDACTED]. Do you need the postcode?
No. I know where it is.”
I gather and check my tools, exit the hangar through a solid metal door straight into the garage and set off in the van.
The day is a grey one. The light fog drifting through the damp, empty city and the build up of clouds prevent any sort of meaningful light brightening the place up. Autumn by the sea and mountains. However, the closer I get to my destination, the more aggressive the fog seems to get.
This is ridiculous.
I slow to a stop; I can barely see less than a metre ahead of the van now and I’m fearful of hitting somebody.
It’s fortunate I know this district well. The pipework in the surrounding streets is growing increasingly unpredictable and giving me a good source of work and a greater source of Sisyphean toil. All is illogical… perverse… obstreperous…
I arrive only a couple of minutes late at the large, traditional home of XXXXX. The fog makes the short walk from the back of the van to the front door of the house a task ludicrously more difficult than it has any right to be.
I knock loudly upon the door to which there is no immediate answer.
Again. Again no answer.
A slow, low creaking noise creeps behind me as I head to the van to check my notes. I turn quickly expecting to see XXXXX but do not do so. All that greets me is a growing uncertainty; my loud greeting into the aether beyond the door, the empty darkness, responded to by silence…
…then – now – a distant thumping of metal on metal, hidden away by a thousand walls.
I step inside, suddenly into light. There is no XXXXX but there is a note:
Dear XX,
I’ve had to leave to tend to an urgent matter. Please, conduct your work as normal. I should return in time to pay you, but if not, I have left out some cash in the office.
The issue seems to be coming from the loft so I’ve unlocked the door for you.
Yours,
XXXXX
Ps. Please help yourself to food and drink – I have set out a lunch spread for you in the kitchen.
I put the note back in exactly the same place I took it from. I am aware of myself, deeply, and the significance of every movement that is departed, now, long since decided for us and long since distributed unto us all.
In the loft there isn’t much light; in fact it is as though the fog has drifted itself into every corner of everywhere. My torch offers no guidance, only a lazy uninterested flickering which soon subsides.
I look for CXJXXXZXNSLEKPWMD
SDJFO)JEPWOF$_)R@UEFJ
This is RVOJFJ{WRPMF{PE)${RU)@£UF
THIS IS ALL WRONG SXXXXXJPOCJQ
wrong
This is all wrong. What is this pain?
I am bowled over in agony.
Somebody is inside my loungs, pushing outwards with all their might, stretching the membrane as if forcing a whole new world into and out of my chest. The distant industrial thumping is drilling its way into my eardrums; the thin, sharp, absolute point of the bit teasing and slicing at the sound-dam entrance to my brain. Flesh on flesh. Metal on metal. Bone on bone. A blinding magnesium fire-light and I am gripped by something momentous, so comprehensively, and everything is excruciating. I slump, begging for release.
A ghostly voice sings to me, just to me, from a world away.
It gets louder and the growing spectral choir now reaching a crescendo. Abrase and unrelent
Pain seeps in and seeps out from every pore, ebbing and flowing for-ever and ever-more.
Circle-come-Cycle mania blood and shit
Body broken against wall
Mind, Spirit
Everything else capitulate
The pain dissipates as though it was never there at all, awaiting another day, another place, another time, Another Self to attack once more.
I heave myself up off the ground and make my way to the water tank on the other side of the loft. The fog has, like my pain, dissipated into sudden nothingness. Everything dissipates into nothingness. I find the leak in the mass of copper pipes leading into and away from the tank. Or at least I think I do. Under closer inspection and after some confused attempts at stemming the steady flow, I follow the pipes along to the connecting wall between this building and the next, having to crouch under the beams, on this, my great voyage into an oceanic mystery.
Something, some dust in my eye
Fall…
Make contact with the wall and try and use it as a support to keep upright
Fall through …. Frail plasterboard?
This body follows the whole of This Self
This is a shock.
I’m in a new place, dark and cold. I gather my thoughts and survey the wall; it is a solid brick thing, the only fragile part of which is the exact small square I fell through.
[DISSIPATION
THE DROWNING HAD TAKEN HOLD; WOULD HAVE SOONER HAD WE BEEN A LESS PERSON
THE LAST BREATH, HEAVENLY SO, FELT,
OR CAME, AS. A
WELCOMING
RELEASE…
RELIEF…
TAKE
ME
AWAY FROM US.]
The eyes that looked, that stared – even – were careful in their judgement, though a lack of light was somewhat of a deterrent. No sooner had XX thought this, and taken a tentative step forward, some dull, flickering light bulbs alighted. They hung very low from a ceiling that was at least four times XX’s height. Only a handful of the lights worked – no matter how (un)reliably – just enough for him to make out his surroundings. He was stood in a shadow filled corridor that stretched out a fair distance ahead of him, though he could not see beyond a tight bend, and behind him stood an improbably large set of heavy, wooden doors. The industrial thumping XX had heard throughout XXXXX’s house was more prominent and exaggerated with a powerful, echoing reverberation. The air was damp and dank, the concrete walls, stacked with rotting leaden pipes, appeared wet, soaked in fact, with huge patches of mould spread out intermittently along the narrow and claustrophobic passageway.
As the body of the surging river forces its whole self into such a cosily fitting gap – the mouth – it spreads out into the great, open void of egotistical pleasure; a reward for the hardships and energy expended in getting there. This is a cycle. Aptly so, XX had forced himself into – or out of – a new place.
He had reached the end of the corridor and was now in a sort of darkened lobby which contained only one door, the room organized around it as though this was the main feature. An unmanned desk sat to the left hand side of the room, though XX didn’t stop to examine it, and what appeared to be a cordoned-off museum exhibit sat to the right. He was sure the place was abandoned. He came to the submarine-like steel door which would not open as easily as he would have so wished.
His fingering of the cold steel brought about a momentary lapse in his newly found focus, causing his mind to drift to a place not dissimilar from the one he was stood in. Charcoal greys. Rotting pipework. Dampened mouldy walls, air, breath, flesh and all that came with it. Regaining himself, XX fought with the door that locked him from his unfortunate discovery, gracefully heaving and ho-ing, fighting their way to a mutually impossible conclusion; the door wanting to remain shut and the old man wanting safe passage through it. He stopped to consider all-things and all-passages and all-events for a moment, possibly two, and cast his cautious eye all the way over the door, though the half-light made it difficult. He gasped and took a step back. An astounded ‘What the…?’ escaped from his hung-open mouth.
A mighty, wrought iron plaque stood proudly above the door, announcing to the world its gratitude for the grandeur that its creator bestowed upon it. There could be no mistaking the names written in gold, though they were shockingly aged and faded:
XX
How could this be? The light bulb directly above him awoke from its deep rest and illuminated his immediate surroundings so comprehensively so that it revealed more questions than answers. On the museum exhibit wall was another plaque. This plaque had on it two illustrations – one portraying XX in an impressive stance, the other a picture of the apple of XX’s eye; his brutalist concrete high-rise, still an unborn foetus back in the laboratory to his mind. He must be the new life, growing, in a manner of speaking, in the womb of his own magnificence. Underneath the illustrations was some writing from an unknown author:
“Today, I fully realized, for the first time in all my lives, just how far from the ground I really stand, and, perhaps more tellingly, just how wide the breadth of my shoulders span. I am power, I am might. I am the wits of man and I am the strength of concrete. The complete understanding of one’s worth is not to be underestimated and I give these words unto you in the vain hope that you, too, find your ultra-place:
Small is beautiful. BIG IS SUBLIME.
I will be there behind you, casting my Colossus shadow over and around you.”
XX wasn’t sure what to think of either the words or the premise, though he could feel it strike a primeval chord deep inside. He lightly touched the smooth, handsome plaque, admiring the handy work. His touch met that of the building.
XX heard urgent sprinting footsteps. He saw only a dark figure running furiously at him. For the first time the poor old plumber felt a stabbing panic breach his chest. He threw his full weight at the previously immovable submarine door, which now lay open, and passed through.
‘Wait!’ was the shout, begging as though all life depended on it, ‘Please! Don’t go up there! Listen to me! Come back!’. A big man, the guard was short of breath and panted heavily. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the floor. He reached the door. He stopped. He bent over. He shouted limply up to XX: ‘Mr XX, please…’
XX, in his unfamiliar state of terror, had not heard any of this. He had bolted through the door and didn’t stop to look back.
Through the submarine door was a staircase. It led only up, was narrow and dark, and after every 10 steps it would turn 90 degrees to the left; XX did not know what could have been waiting for him around each corner, but he did not pause to dwell on this. And so, running – limping – as fast as his ageing and stiffened legs would allow, he duly followed his ascension.
The Guard sat back down at his huge mahogany desk in the now-lit lobby; he didn’t know what else he could do, such was the magnitude of the shock he felt towards his neglect of duty.
After what felt like several hours, but in reality was no more than five minutes, XX realized that nobody and/or nothing was following him. So he stopped. He sat down and rested his head against the dry, but still warm, concrete wall. He sat silent. Almost sleeping.
The strange, alternating lights and shadows perplexed XX. There were no windows, no lights or candles. He couldn’t tell how far he’d come up from the lobby, and it was equally impossible to estimate how far he was from the top because of the closed-off nature of the stairs.
XX climbed higher, he didn’t stop, and he was fully committed to that until he reached the next floor – if there was one. Sweat had begun to emerge upon his brow and his lips and mouth were crusted and cracked with thirst. The feet that gave themselves completely to their owner, his will and his command, were now just pools of blood in their work-boot home. The owner himself was nothing of substance anymore; he had sweated and walked and suffered so much. XX wearily placed one foot in front of the other. It was automatic. He was stooped, his eyes barely open.
XX took his last breath. He stumbled a step further. Just one, for that was all he could muster. He swayed gently; a reed in the wind. The violence would come later. A hand, outstretched… the strain found something. A jutting out of something… cold, calculating… a handle to a door, a door to a rebirth. XX let his weight fall against it and into another new world he fell. Instantly, XX recovered, his exhaustion forgotten, his death postponed. The echo from his boots upon the metal floor was something new; beauteous tinny waves lapped against him in what was a change of tidal formalities from the dull thud of subdued concrete.
The old man stopped in the centre of… it wasn’t exactly a room… he felt he should know each nook and cranny of this building… He was in the centre of what would have been the cross section of two corridors, had there been a ceiling. The corridors cut the hexagon shaped building into four equal quadrants. The same steel of all the other parts of the building were here disturbed by huge windows looking into each quadrant. They were colossal water tanks and if XX squinted, he could see he was still a long way from the top of the building and the gigantic taps that stood proudly up there. Each one as imposing as a cathedral.
XX opened the door to a new, better staircase. One that would hopefully oversee an altogether more peaceful journey. It went up in a spiral, made of more charcoal grey steel, the walls that shut it in made of glass. All of the four taps turned and the sound of crashing water drowned out all, any and every thing else. Immense oceans of water fell all around but not touching XX’s little space of sanctity. The tanks began to fill up. Curiously, they followed the exact pace he went as he made his way up the new staircase. He felt like a child again, bounding upwards to the roof – he would look and try and see if he could spot his house from up there, he decided.
XX finally reached the top; there was a ceiling to the corridors after all. He climbed through the hatch. It wasn’t as expected.
…
This is a town. Low buildings, trees, dirt roads, and, in the middle distance on all sides, hills all coming together to build the impression of a real place. How can there be land in the sky? Or: how can there be another land underneath this land?
…
There is no way back. Stairs sealed. Tanks filled and deeper than imaginable.
…
All is becoming lost.
…
A meeting with The Governor:
They sat in silence. The heavy emptiness of all things rested unevenly upon XX, and the glare across the desk from his compatriot, which grew fiercer every time he tried to begin to say something and end the torture, made the unease all the more unbearable.
Finally the strange official spoke, seemingly fuelled by the tension he himself had built in all the glory of cycles and circles. He addressed XX severely.
‘There is no necessity in small talk; forming the words and sounds, using the mind’s power to do so to fit them into an order so that I may understand, is a heinous waste. Much like the solution you so dearly crave to a problem that doesn’t exist. You are here, you are not there. There is there and is not here. The paths do not cross. They intertwined once and you were stupid enough to be present at the juncture. Now, as ever, beyond here is not there, but instead is nothing. You cannot be here, it is not allowed, but if you do not fight to remain, you shall be nowhere. This is my first and final warning.’
The meeting was concluded.
Holed away in this internment of confused longing, XX could barely face the non-containment and non-existence of his so-called mission any longer. It was as if he had trapped himself in this invisible prison; not so much not wanting to be here and not wanting to escape (nor having the want to do both either) but that some force – the will of the town and its inhabitants perhaps – had applied itself to trap him without meaning to, and resented its own inability to set his poor, extinguished soul free.
What caused him most anguish about this was that a man of problem/solution, punishment/reward (somebody who could even pre-empt these problems and punishments with such a logical defiance) was left at the mercy of no-things and all-things with no room to manoeuvre. Never one for philosophical grandeur, XX disliked that he had lifted the veil and saw what lies behind the world a little, and disliked the glimpse that seemed to him to be bludgeoning him mind, body and soul, repeatedly, to a mass of bloody pulp. He discovered, now, that it was not possible to break these parts of being without dying, to experience the complete loss of subjective self identity.
Enough. Should he continue in this vein and vain… He was sure he could end this, no matter how delusional, he could, he swore to himself. There is a way out and the will has to be done. It could be done and would be done with no triumph and no glory. This most complicated of contusions would be and should be confronted with the simplest of thought and therefore simplest of consequences. He began his work. He would use an aid dive to the bottom of a tank and force his way through.
X X X
All the fight has left my body. I feel all the lighter for it. All the thoughts and panicked urges are drifting away, just as my limp torso is now doing. I’m sure I can even see them all
leaving myself. I allow the gentle floating to carry me
away anywhere to
peace. to death to nothing
anywhere.
The Guard marches with officious duty, footsteps from the heavy black boots thundering, echoing off the damp concrete and metallic walls, following him to his scene-of-action and making him grow, as though these blows of noise adds to his height and breadth. He wanders like this through the maze he has been assigned, knowing all of the right corridors and how to open the impenetrable doors. With the reverberations accompanying him through my masterpiece, all forgotten, all decayed, he can’t help considering himself as some blind and unknowing St. Peter. He isn’t as important as all that, but his imaginations help fuel the passage of eternal time until one day he can leave.
Without prejudice or needing to alter his stride, he comes to the door he was searching for. It’s a curved door at the bottom of one of the four impossibly huge tanks. He turns the handle exactly so and the seal breaks. He steps with agility, almost wary that the powerful echoes of his gait could deafen him in this most cavernous of places. He finds the body – my body – where expected, hoists it over his shoulder and sets off once more with no moment nor pause to consider the drowned body lolling like a puppet under his control. Now even more imposing, with this second flesh upon his own and the noise of his boots still thundering, The Guard makes his way to his given destination. He opens the door, steps inside and puts my still-wet carcass down amongst the piles of other bodies, all in the same state. The sound of piercing radio static floods everything and everywhere and The Guard shuts and locks the room of resting death and continues onwards along his path.
V
Pier Paolo Pasolini, as Giotto, says “Why produce a work of art when it’s so nice to dream about it?”.
Pasolini, by being Giotto, is an Ascender/Descender. Maybe I will awaken to find myself as himself. Maybe he is Giotto being Pasolini and re-being Giotto. Or maybe I will awaken to find nothing, nothing at all. These things and links and contrivances are so easily spotted when you/me/we spend more than half the time living as others. Angels climbing and reclimbing and declimbing Jacob’s Ladders.
Sleep please let me sleep
Detach and disassociate to a disappearing degree. There is trouble, sometimes, observing the things around me, as though everything is not in its proper place. The edges of everything just ever so slightly out, agitated in the atmosphere, not quite fitting, outlines blurred, making the presence of this world around me sickly with the soft pillowy aura surrounding everything within it. As a child – though now I’ve come to realize I was never a child, it was just the same body but containing a different being – I recall vividly the feeling of a dream where everything was like this, the pillowy soft air, invisible but encasing everything. I woke up laughing hysterically and deeply confused. I vomited almost instantly, as I have started to frequently do now. The Partner and other background cast members that support my existence are convinced I am sick. There is not enough evidence to prove this. How can I be sick or dying when I am living everywhere and everyone? You are dying and will die. All of these people cast members are dying and will die. All of the people I inhibit are dying and will die. But I will not.
This is discovered, nailed to my own calf:
“If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself; it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world, and becomes part of a whole.”
I wish for Goethe to be dying and dead.
THE NURSES
My body has hit the water. My body has been submerged by the water. My body is part of the water. The water is part of my body.
My Water Body moves on and on with no sense of direction but with a clear sense of destination.
The moment is stuck in time, an Immortal Hour, and is happening even now. Only subtle changes with each Immurement, each eternal recurrence; this time I hear the sweet voice cooing to My Water Body along the threads of The Spinner:
“The locked-air is freezing, but the Immured is not left wanting. Except a change of mind, though the heart will stay the same. And that heart now has to feel nothing; unaware of the suffering, of all the pain… of everything outside those enclosed walls… of anything except the Great Immurement… of nothing except nothing, nothing ever again… nothing but nothing ever again.”
This eases the journey of My Water Body this time, and then for all-times after it. The Body Of Water erodes My Water Body, it empties all of the heaviness and empties all of the emptiness.
The immortal spirit comes clear from within My Water Body and I hum happily:
“Destroy yourself. Whatever comes next will be better.
Erode me, O dismantling waters, and carry me with that emptying tide.
And carry me to me, I to I, mine to mine.”
I am living underwater. I am drowning in slow motion – all the while following the length of thread as decided by The Alotter.
I come to The Unturnable point of the journey. The Nurses, led by The Three Fates, all swan-swim to, through and then away from my bodies…my body’s place of rest, where the emptying tide ceases to be. The dismantling waters have stripped it to the soul. The Nurses, they gather me safely in.
This is where the rainbow ends and now into the Hymns to which I am faithful:
The Nurses will finish all things you left half-finished.
The Nurses will never let thy works diminish.
The Nurses will deliver your little love notes.
The Nurses will erase from memory all the cruel things you spoke.
The Nurses will return your body to its former glory.
The Nurses will make sure it’s no longer bloated and watery.
The Nurses will overlook your fixed stare and filthy laugh.
The Nurses will undo all the bad things you did in the past.
The Nurses will listen to all the things you are not saying.
The Nurses will focus thy mind whilst you are praying.
The Nurses will think you unblemished.
The Nurses will tell you you don’t need to be quite so apologetic.
The Nurses will reach out to you with no pity.
The Nurses will softly whisper to you a little ditty.
The Nurses will wish for something greater, always.
The Nurses will listen even though you’ve always got something to say.
The Nurses will…
In their hospital I see them spin everything and everyone and everywhen onto webs. All these things and all things more are interconnected this way. The suspension of lives and of stars, of accidents and of coldness, of happiness and of surgeries; everything IS everything else. All matter is all of us and every myself. The Fates as The Nurses have cut my thread in just the right places, in just the right way to leave me suspended and unended, that I may observe this secret of the universe and I thank them. I find my thanks are just another thread and they already know.
With thanks to them, in return, I am threadless, I am lifeless and I am free.
NOVEL SERIALISATION
AUTHOR: RICK ACV
Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Playing with format, language, font, with half-thoughts of waking hours and occult merge with dream-realism and a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal. Parts One & Two were debuted earlier this week. We continue with the next chapter, HOTEL NOTHING/III, below:
HOTEL NOTHING
I’m stooped and my joints don’t seem to want to acknowledge my directions for them.
I gather my thoughts. All there is, is nothing to me.
A phone rings and I answer it, but for a few moments the words spoken appear in vision as a series of symbols and guttural colours. Flashes from the language axis. The world has spun in a new direction without me and I’m left behind; in a strange place and a strange time, now I can reach towards something new.
Then I am comforted as everything falls into place. Those symbols I saw before me, as that mysterious voice spoke, shift into something I understand a little easier and then turn to vapour, finally vanishing as I reach out with a curious finger.
Almost suddenly, I fall back out of a comforting understanding into something terrifying as I actually listen to the voice. This is a panicked unknowing. I have never felt this way before.
In response to my ‘hello’ the voice says “Good afternoon. I hope you are well.” I see strange flashes of someone and something. “I hope you are well.” it repeats and continues “I assume I am speaking to Mr Hanshiro?”
“Yes.” I utter, in the almost-exact same voice as from the phone, only mine isn’t as deep.
The voice continues to tell me about an important letter I will receive and to make sure I deal with it immediately.
The someone and something I see without seeing is a man in a back room. I recognise the man as myself for some reason, though his features are obscured by bright light.
I am aware of this self as though I have lived it all my life. My stomach turns.
“May I ask to whom I am speaking?” I say with as little suspicion as I can muster. My opposing line responds with a polite ‘of course’ then on to “
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
My ears may bleed. My brain may catch fire. My limbs may collapse in on themselves.
The answer was drowned out by a bell sound so abrasive…. I briefly lost myself.
I come back to myself, This Self.
A letter drops to the floor in this neat, bare office-house. As I read it, the inner voice is one I don’t recognise and the disturbing biloquism only further serves to disrupt my adaptation to my new surroundings.
The letter:
Dear Mr Hanshiro,
I write to inform you of the regrettable and unfortunate death of your dear insert family name. In his her will, he she passed on to you the UNRESTRICTED ownership of the Hotel Nothing in the [REDACTED] district in [REDACTED].
Under his her instruction, the keys will be passed to you by ourselves, [REDACTED], on his her behalf. Please come to us at your earliest convenience in order to conclude this matter. We are situated on [REDACTED]. I look forward to meeting you.]
Yours Sincerely,
[REDACTED].
***
I arrive as a recipient of a substantial inheritance outside the vast building. There are swarms of people around the entrance. I make my way through the crush, passing hot flashes of hot fleshes. I come to a corridor full of people only occasionally moving forwards – I spot the door behind the reception. Only one sweating, stinking shape of human is permitted through at a time.
I need some water.
I am old and tired and hot. This airless hole will be the death of me, I begin to not-even-worry, and instead just accept the fact. The noise is deafening.
***
The receptionist and I shout to no avail as she allows me through the door.
There is only one chair in here and another door. I make to sit down but a young woman, drenched in sweat, angered and flustered points to the door.
“I’ve been sent this letter…”
My voice is weak and pathetic before it’s cut off by her simple, straight-to-the-soul statement:
“Yes, that’s why you’re here, you have no more relatives, go through the door.”
I do so and find inside a cavernous room an empty desk, atop of which is the keys to my new empire. I am so tired.
I am so tired of being close to death that I ignore my own hesitation, take the keys and make my exit. There is no-body and no-thing and I am back in the cool rain that has shifted here from another day.
X X X
I arrive at the place. It’s an imposing, pristine concrete thing, looking for all the world like a Las Vegas hotel stripped totally bare, picked up and left to just simply exist in some industrial wasteland purgatory. There are well-tended gardens that are clear boundaries between two worlds, from the Hotel Nothing to the wild and overgrown wasteland that surrounds and suffocates all else. The extreme and striking border forms a perfect square around the hotel, even taking in some woodland, and I can’t help but allow my mind to wander and wonder about halos… their meaning… what shapes they may take and any significance of any of this.
Taking a slow and ambling walk around the grounds, stopping to smell the roses, it crosses my mind; an old creaky man such as this-myself is just as easily pleased by the gentle and pleasant as the ease of the confusion that comes to the limbs at the end of their use. There is a remarkable freshness inside the Lines and I could swear that it’s brighter than I have ever experienced, whereas as the whole of the sky, all within and without it, was pitch grey just a few metres and moments previous.
There is a pond and marsh which I cross over on an immaculate wooden walkway, feeling no effort in my movements and have to check I am not floating into the day. I haven’t felt this graceful for years. The path I am on takes me back towards the back of the hotel, but in my way is a maze.
There is no way around; all-ways seem to lead up to and then away from the building so I reluctantly enter this maze that has somehow bloomed from nowhere. I walk and walk and walk and I encounter no Dead Ends. I do-not and can-not understand. I am walking in circles, the length of which are undeterminable. I think as quickly as my slowing mind will allow: I put down my hat on the ground and walk on.
I carry on for several minutes, still gliding, effortless, and can feel panic rising from the very soul of me. Suddenly my joints ache, my breathing is hard and the Glory Of The Day becomes as a recurrence of a terrible memory. I go to lean upon the hedge-wall and find myself going through a door right to the centre of the maze. All centres. All things must have a centre or they are unthinkable. I have found this one. In this centre, a strange man is sitting at a small table with an empty chair facing him. Upon spotting me he pours us both a cup of tea and beckons me to join. I shuffle forwards. His face is powdered white. A brilliant white. Total white. I want to feel apprehensive but can’t. I feel nothing. I decide I will decline the tea, remain standing and simply ask for directions.
Now I am sat opposite him.
Now he stares. His features seem to change.
Now he speaks.
The Mystery Man greets me. I ask him for directions.
“In time. Why not take the tea? It’s hot and delicious.” He smiles. “I insist you join me.”
I ask about the maze and its impenetrable nature. Or actually, the ease in which it is penetrated but the difficulty of getting out.
“Surely the new owner is not in a rush? The place and employees take care of themselves.”
His smirk bothers me now. Feelings, all feelings, are slowly returning.
I agree in supposition and ask how he knows who I am, careful to mask my un-nerve.
“May I ask how it is that you already had the keys? Or how it is that two versions of you held a coherent telephone conversation; both in the present but one in the past and one still in the future?”
I take notice of his voice. Something about the thick-lightness makes my stomach knot in almost-nausea.
I can no longer mask anything and I make my confessions to Him, of how bizarre I found his question and how confused – to the point of fear – I am. All of this without saying a word.
“I may not. Drink your tea, Mr Hanshiro.”
I do so and it’s delicious and warming. Just as he said. I tell him.
“It’s a recipe I’ve had for hundreds of years.”
I suggest he misspoke and assume he means his family have had it for hundreds of years.
“If you would prefer, sir.”
I wish he would not speak. That voice. That voice of all-substance and no-substance.
I put all thought out of my mind ask how to get to the Hotel Nothing from here once again.
“Look to your right.”
I open my mouth to speak but the mystery man so forcefully stares into my eyes and it feels he is controlling them, directing them to where he instructed.
The maze is no longer there. Well, it is, but it’s nothing more than a painting upon the ground. An optical illusion. I turn back to the Mystery Man, dumbfounded, but find nobody there. I sit in silence. I do not care for how long. I go to put the cup on the table. There is no table.
The table is not a table. That, too, is a painting on the ground.
Along with both chairs.
I’m squatting mid air and at this realization I recognise the agony most of my body is in.
I slowly make my way to the hotel.
A SHIFT.
Huge, open hotel lobby. There isn’t anybody. Any-Body at all.
A pressed bell.
A deafening noise.
The noise down dark corridors. The noise in the hidden staff spaces. The noise everywhere.
Abandon hotel lobby.
A story of an old, disfigured ex-prostitute on a radio.
Sleep.
A RETURNING AND RECURRING SHIFT.
I enter my hotel and find a row of people all in a line awaiting my arrival. All are hotel staff it seems and all are ignoring the growing, silent queue behind and beyond them.
A man with a young face and an old body approaches me.
“Welcome back Mr Hanshiro! Glad to see you’re better.”
His eyes widen with horror.
Everything but his face is old, decrepit almost, in ways that are obvious yet these ways I cannot process.
I have to ask what he means. I have to. So I do.
Please forgive my ignorance, sir, I meant to simply say ‘welcome’. I am the manager of your Hotel Nothing, my name is Mr John; you may call me Mr Manager if you find it difficult to recall names.”
I do not like these people.
I assure him I can recall names perfectly well. I ask Mr John to show me to my quarters.
He seems affronted.
He pleads.
“Well, that really isn’t part of my job… besides, there are things we must see-to before anything else.”
His suit is sharp and expensive looking. It appears to me as funeral attire. I understand nothing of business. For now, I’ll agree to whatever I’m told. I just want to rest.
His countenance is changed and becomes abrupt and impatient. He storms to the employees and angrily urges me to follow.
One at a time the employees bow to me and walk away without saying a word and without looking back. This takes a long time and then all is finished.
I ask Mr John how useful this time was spent without learning their names.
“Mr Hanshiro, please, that introduction was just fine. You will learn the names over time, and even if not, you probably won’t need to anyway.
I nod.
I have no energy, none to waste on further questioning.
I’m taken into the office behind the front desk. Here, there is a familiar looking young woman; she seems shy and speaks to me in a language My-Self in This-Self understands. She tells me her name – Catherine – and that she is the junior manager. This exchange is easy and welcome.
“I will show you around and to your room if it pleases you, sir.”
I would be pleased to go straight to my room and gather in my rapidly fracturing being.
She looks unsure and explains they aren’t the orders she has received, but will make an exception.
I should think so.
We make our own way without Mr John and come upon a lift, into which I happily step, thinking of a time in the coming futures where I will be well-rested. Catherine tells me of how she rose to her position through merit and excellency, whereas…
“Mr John took advantage of your absence to seize control of the running of this place…”
There is a blackout for less than negligible amount of time. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe nothing at all.
“Mr John took advantage of The Owner’s absence to seize control of the running of this place.”
I do not feel this is appropriate.
“I hasten to speak ill of my colleagues – or indeed anybody at all – especially if they are not present, sir. But this may be my only chance.”
This is too much stress for today. I try to tell her she may see me first thing tomorrow and tell all so I may sort all.
“Please! Mr John is a degenerate and a deviant. He claims to love me, that he can’t be without me. He is probably watching and listening in to us. Right now. He just wants to control me. He spies on my everywhere I go. There are cameras everywhere. Everywhere!”
I’m aware of Catherine adjusting her breasts but I ignore it and tell her I will sack the disgusting pig.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“He is… irreplaceable… it isn’t possible.” She says this with a disarming nonchalance. Just a few seconds ago she was begging for my sympathetic ear and now she is completely and totally resigned to her treatment. “A necessary evil.”
I start to press her further on this but notice she has now bared her breasts and I become enraged. I express my contempt.
“He’s watching even now. My flesh will blind him to our discussion, blind him to his own fury. I think he’s gone. Would you like to touch?”
She turns to me with sparkling eyes.
I am filled with horror.
No…
Please no…
She approaches and presses up against me. I weaken. I try to push her away and in doing so I touch her naked skin. It burns me. I retch and cower in the corner. Catherine is concerned and strokes my hair, unknowing of the panic I am stricken with. Her breasts are in my face. The air is unbreathable and I can no longer cope.
The lift doors open.
I run.
I am in a room with only one door. Catherine is looking on, uncomprehending.
I force my way into the darkened space. Harsh pulsating lights begin to flash on and off, strobe-like, as a gently throbbing music plays, quietened, as though through water. The room is covered from floor to ceiling with breasts. I vomit uncontrollably. It lands on the ceiling. It stays there. I see a door and crawl towards it, pulling myself along, wishing for nothing but the retching and heaving to subside. The door is a towering vagina and I have no choice but to have to go through it.
I am birthed into a blinding whiteness.
My senses come to me intermittently.
A crowd of women.
They fuss over me.
They clean me.
They cut the newly attached umbilical cord from me and I scream in agony.
I am put onto a moving surface and am carried away into The White.
I drift.
I am moved.
My existence is vapour-light.
I am in yet another room. Everything is monochrome. Empty but for two small tables, each with a telephone atop. An old man. I think of him as Il Duce. He is at the furthest one. He faces me.
Il Duce indicates towards the phone on my table.
Pick it up.
His lips do not move but his voice comes to me down the phone.
He stares into the whites of my eyes. He stares into the total depths of me as he un-talks.
“Do no fear me.”
Who are you?
“I will not answer.”
Why not?
“There could be any number of reasons, but I am not here to discuss them.”
How come you have appeared to me?
“I am to recite to you a warning, from a different story, from a different time, but it applies to all human life at some point in different ways and the point has now come in yours. Will you listen?”
I will.
I awake in my room.
I think about what he said.
There was a story of a gatekeeper and a man seeking passage through the gate. The gatekeeper denied the man entry on unknowable and unchangeable grounds.
I recognised this as a story from deep within another story.
X X X
I arise, I dress, I stop; I feel eyes upon me. I allow them to continue for a few moments and I begin to hear a rising, heavy breathing which digs its way just so into the centre of me, forcing itself through ears, through mind, as though this is all I have ever heard. It becomes piercing as I search for the source and I in turn become manic as it turns to pain. This is unbecoming of me. I burst out of my room and with this expense of my energies I fall to my face in a silent living area in a confused St Vitus dance. Catherine is sitting on a couch, looking me over.
“Come here Mr Hanshiro.”
I respond with a blank look.
“Come on, it’s okay.” She is insistent and I lose myself to her maternal authority. I go over to her, childlike and pathetic.
“Rest your head upon my lap. Shh. I’ll make it all better for you.”
Catherine starts to sing softly a lullaby as I comply and, soon, she is stroking my hair.
I tell her I think I am getting a cold.
She leans down and starts to kiss me sensually. Paralysis and transfixion.
“Poor baby. Do you want a feed?”
…
“Do you want a feed from mummy?”
This is not what I want. She begins to take out her breasts. Again. What does this life, this myself mean? Why is she starting with this indecent nonsense again?
The shift.
“Mr Hanshiro?”
…
“Mr Hanshiro?”
We are sitting on the couch, together but apart, still in this silent living area that is nowhere.
“Do you want to get some food? From the bar?”
Confused and erring to begin with, I respond in agreement. I want to get out of this dark room.
Catherine smiles.
“I’ll organise some company for us.”
I’d much rather you didnt, Catherine.
“I’ll organise some company for us.”
I am so taken aback by the strength in her will in just those six simple words that I don’t argue.
These people have total control over me.
This place has total control over me.
And every-thing and every-one else.
Total Body Control, whether in-body or out-body.
Hotel Restaurant:
This is viewed from outside this myself, at times.
Catherine and myself sit at a table with a couple that look exactly the same as us. The setting changes from time to time between two places. It starts as normal, smoky restaurant and bar, high-ceilinged and large with constant chatter, waiters milling about busily and there is a band playing some unintrusive music on a stage. The other place is a tiny, perfectly square room that contains only our table and a bar that isn’t quite right. On the wall in front of us is a projection showing the ‘rest’ of the restaurant and all its inhabitants.
Catherine: I’ll do the introductions then shall I, darling? (I see myself begin to stir as though woken from daydreams long and old) I’m Catherine and this is my husband Mr Hanshiro. Nice to finally meet you.
Mirror Catherine: It’s lovely to meet you, too. I’m Catherine and this is my husband, Mr Hanshiro.
Catherine: (Turning to me) Catherine and dear Mr Hanshiro live in the hotel. They’re high up in a sub chain of command here.
The constant state of confusion I am mired in within my hotel is starting to become tedious.
I view ourselves and theirselves through tired eyes slowly burning as they discuss how it is that both sets own and run the place in parallels without any knowledge of each other’s domain. This goes on for a while until Mirror Catherine suggests and hints at things of a sexual nature, before Catherine confirms it without me understanding the real meaning. We are all turned towards the idea of going to our room under the pretence, in my unaware understanding, of continuing our meal there.
Catherine violently rides me in a rape that I cannot and do not fight against. I watch this and can do nothing.
X X X
This is now the next day or the next time or the next whenever it is. I seek out Mr John and try to make a complaint about Catherine. He calls me a liar and we argue until he tells me she has already been removed and hidden away somewhere. I am ill and I am tired and I care little for any of this. I dismiss him. The room behind the office simply marked ‘Manager’s Bedroom’ appeals to me.
Inside the tiny room is a human sized nest on the floor. There is little to describe about the rest. It feels so empty and so bare that I cannot help but question its existence and quantum lack-of-presence.
There is a phone. I am drawn to it. I pick it up. The voice on the other end sounds familiar.
“Hello?”
Good afternoon. I hope you are well. I assume I am talking to Mr Hanshiro?
“Yes that’s correct. What is the nature of the call?”
Information. You will receive a letter in the post today that carries with it some weight of importance. Please pay it with your upmost attention.
“May I ask who I am speaking to?”
I do not know. This Self is no longer My Self. I watch myself disappear from my own view as I slip away.
III
The partner sits upon a step.
The partner is upset.
The partner weeps and lets the realism that THEIR partner is less and less present become the biggest prescience.
I am further and far removed from the usual world and it has its effects and affects. I understand that there are consequences to every action as I am not a moron.
However, which place is it whereby the actions count for anything? Even something… It feels less and less like the usual world.
I must try and make it up to the partner in this world. Just in case.
NOVEL SERIALISATION
AUTHOR: RICK ACV
Following in the wake of his debut novel THE GREAT IMMUREMENT, which we serialised during the summer of 2020, Vukovar helmsman Rick ACV now follows up with the surreal, esoteric and challenging Astral Deaths & Astral Lights. Playing with format, language, font, with half-thoughts of waking hours and occult merge with dream-realism and a languid sense of discomfort: a sorry state of existence. William Blake and Austin Osman Spare meet Kōbō Abe in the hotel lobby portal of the never-world: personal and universal.
Part One now follows:
THE ASCENDER/DESCENDER
I am The Ascender/Descender of the Lord’s ladders. I get no closer nor further away from Him and His glory; these steps go sideways.
I am an angel, continually changing the affairs of man.
I die nightly and daily there is less of me.
This will continue until there will be less than nothing left.
I
The conscious part of the mind is useless; it only serves to reinforce the separation between ourselves and that which we desire.” – Austin Osman Spare.
This is how to misinterpret and misunderstand someone and something.
Then:
“Rest uneasy.
Consciousness as a forfeit-too-far.
The body’s surrender to silent sleep is not something to underestimate nor un-understand.
____ has begun to experience something disarming in its simple explicity and with an overwhelming lack of disturbation to make this a truly unpleasant experience:
Faces appear. Faces appear in the mind’s eye. Faces unrecognized. Faces constantly morphing into each other, hundreds in number, maybe more. They are as detailed as if they were in the extreme presence.
The faces start to bring a warm feeling of familiarity – the process of the passing of awareness. Lulled. Now. Now it comes. Now as the faces change and interfere with one another’s faces, sleep is on its way.
Only it isn’t sleep.
How can it be?”
This is what I found on a piece of paper in some forgotten pocket. I say forgotten but for how long it has been neglected I have little-to-no-idea. There are those places that drift into view through the mist and the grey-light and you have little clue as to where from and what for they came. You will tell yourself that they are a portal to another world. They must be, as they give something that alters your world-view so drastically that they cannot exist permanently within this world. That’s what the neglected pocket is. And that’s from where the paper did come. Only now, it isn’t paper. It is a recollection of something that is happening right this second, even. As this is being read by whoever’s eyes may be reading, it is also being written by the author long dead. The literal sense of the author being long dead will far outlast the metaphysical.
“It’s a fundamental flaw in the human condition that we appreciate beauty only in absence. We are stars that died centuries ago and our love and light is only fully absorbed after the final fade out. A pin prick in the night sky, a microscopic peephole into heaven. I find myself looking up at the sky in the kind of cold winter night that briefly recharges my belief in the value of existence hoping that through one of these peepholes I will catch a glimpse of your face.” – Daniel Shea.
Every night is the changing of the faces before ascending/descending into the other lands, other places – other people.
Maybe just as an observer, but it doesn’t feel that way.
This is exhausting.
This is all consuming.
This is life-threatening; as The Ascender/Descender, I become far removed from the usual world, to reside in the constant present.
The Constant Present:
A place with no consequence no matter the action. The past cannot be rewritten through changing eyes nor waves of fury. All futures remain an imaginary and far away world.
THE LADDERS
I awake in the body of the dejected and in the mind of the cunning.
I recall the conversation with my blind Father from yesterday and I move with ease from the scorched ground, away from his bitterness and into the bright sunlight that forms a halo around this Earth. The promise that the Holy warmth fills me with is sudden and I know I will one day be the victor.
I have a feeling that my victory will soon be of little consequence.
The first steps upon my journey are undertaken and the hard ground feels welcoming underfoot, I have reassurance from the single, solitary trees that line the path also, as I know there will be place-to-rest within their shade should I need it. A shade within their shade, a sculpture by the sculptor.
Things quickly change, as though in a dream.
What sets this feeling off and the feeling of inconsequential victory is a sudden glimmer in the sky, as though the clouds are glinting and sparkling and shimmering.
It can’t be a dream. I know I am not myself but I know that this self is Their self. There is no disconnect.
This must be a visitation.
The destination moves towards me and I needn’t approach.
I look more closely at the shimmering sky and the little bursts of light; it begins to form waves of awe, waves of silver-white Godly brilliance and I am moved to almost-tears. I cry out, a noise that I have never before heard from myself. His compassion rains and reigns down over and upon my sacrificial spirit, as right before me appears and disappears a Great Ladder. Its shape and form can only be made out by the agitated atmosphere that surrounds it, and I notice the world that was around me has melted away into the unveiling.
Everything comes into focus and the spectre of His love comes clear; the extent of his intent of creation is now known within me and the purpose of his Angels brightens the flesh under my flesh as I observe the moving up and down, passing through their other selves.
Blessed be the path between Heaven and Earth.
Blessed be the Angels, ascending and descending to and from bodies and lives.
Blessed be Me; I understand now that I am one amongst the many Angels Of Light that give cause to the lives of all, the perpetual movement between bodies, the constant Hand in the Constant Present.
I don’t forget the argument with my Father as I am armed with more than just my cunning now.
II
To sleep and to never have to wake. To wake and to never have to sleep. That would be the dream. To be in a constant, secure state and to be exempt from eternal flux is a set of circumstances, I imagine, that would yield a lifetime of peace and contentment.
I do not have a care for the unambition behind this.
I have little enough feeling on anything in the usual world as it is that the idea of having to fake guilt and guiltiness seems too much like an inconvenience.
My absence in the usual world may well be with its setbacks – mostly minor. I’m aware but have such little interest that I’d much prefer to defer to another note. I don’t really know where they come from, but they handily explain my ascensions and descensions. The ladder itself and the actual Astral Dances are fine within my control. These scraps, however, assist the very Innerself to easily given and easily forgotten unexplanations.
This note:
“The ladder is not a physical image and thing and device, but metaphysical.
That said, a literal interpretation is best suited.
It can’t be explained why.
…
In fact, this makes no sense whatsoever.
…
When _____ slept, was his vision of those angels on that path so on-the-nose?
It is hard to believe a creation that touches the Glory Of God can be so unimaginative and so plain.
What are these steps, then, and how do they appear to _____ as they are traversed?
The Death Of The Author will hereby be leaned on (again and always), as perfect an excuse as there Ever-Was and Ever-Will and Ever-Is.
And now
After all this straying
The path becomes lit once more with a fantastical and strictly Holy sense of wonder.”
I am so alone. I stare at the ceiling. I can’t understand the time of the day. You’re so alone. We’re all so, so alone.
This house is a home but I feel like vermin. I didn’t wash today. Again. And now the day is over. Again. I don’t want to sully the fresh-scented sheets. That could be my excuse.
I could just sit and wait and pass through the darkness at the close of day and avoid the coming transformation.
Light or dark, it will still happen, I remind Ourselves.
Myself.
“Lie back and take it like a man.”
Here are the faces.
Here comes the shift.
Here is Thee Transformation.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 440: Vukovar ‘The Great Immurement’
April 21, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Vukovar ‘The Great Immurement’
(Other Voices Records) 23rd April 2021
In the metaphorical (and actually quite literal) wake of last year’s chthonian mini-opus The Colossalist, Vukovar now bring us the second chapter of their most recent incarnation and equally as consumed with vague auguries of fallen empire and gothic yearned romanticism, The Great Immurement.
In an atmospheric sonic vision of Bosch’s triptychs, this latest (the 9th album proper) work marks the second in a triumvirate of albums under the ‘Eternity Ends Here’ series (The Colossalist being the opening account in this saga). As with the previous industrial, post-punk and spiritual hungered epic, The Great Immurement pays homage to the dearly departed; featuring as it does the final song that the group’s co-conspirator of recent years and inspiring guide Simon Morris recorded with them. As a codex, nee mini-requiem, that last impassioned-esoteric-pop-song-hidden-in-a-mire, ‘Cement & Cerement‘, is a brutalist romantic anthem from the crypt of mental fatigue: pitched somewhere between Joy Division and Alan Vega catching a lift on Death In June’s vapour. Morris committed suicide in 2019 but his spirit continues to affect the band; looming large over both this and the last album. If you ever need to know just how influential but also how personal his death was for Vukovar, who’d managed to corral the much-venerated underground figure (notably for his instigation of The Ceramic Hobs) into their ranks, please take time out to read, one of the founding members of this pyre of a band, Dan Shea’s stark but intimate account of their friendship (an account the Monolith Cocktail published back in 2020; coincidently just a week before lockdown in the UK).
Morris may very well have been part of Vukovar’s constantly imperiled lineup if he hadn’t decided to vanish and leave this mortal realm as he did. His involvement was part of one of many changes in the band’s fortunes. Pressing forward though, constant warden and co-founder Rick Clarke is not only joined by another Hob and oft collaborator, Jane Appleby, but once more embraces his foil Dan Shea, who for various reasons in a fraught dynamic left to pursue other projects, notably, with fellow Vukovar stalwart (though missing from this lineup) Buddy Preston, forming the low-rent, lo fi bedsit synth Beauty Stab duo. In what is a convoluted historiography and rock family tree nightmare, and in what maybe seen as a case of ‘pop eating itself’ Meta, the neu- Vukovar inception actually cover one of Beauty Stab’s anthems, ‘O Eden’. Adding a certain gravitas and making a last supper out of the original, it now kind of makes sense as a Vukovar song that never was. Both versions are great it must be said, though the Stab’s was more Soft Cell, whilst this appropriation is more OMD misty march of yearned reverence; swaddled by a shapeless noise and opportune stabbed high piano notes: still bloody magnificent.
Followers of the blog may recognize the name of this latest waltz-at-the-end-of-time, The Great Immurement being also the title of Clarke’s voyeuristic supernatural peephole entombed book, which we serialized during the pandemic nightmare that was 2020. Though separate from the album’s themes and concepts, an illustration (etched by the celebrated Andrzej Klimowski; a great coup for Clarke and the band that was) from that sordid travail dons the cover – as it also did The Colossalist.
The Great Immurement, as the title suggests, denotesa certain sense, anxiety of confinement from which to break free. And so most of the album’s music seems to smoother, even overpower with an echo chamber of reverberated voices, malingering traces of spirits, competing opinions and fallen angels. There’s even a fallen ‘Icarus’ figure, trapped in multiple veils of sorrow, industrial fizz and vapours; with a searching, decried vocal attempting to escape the ether.
In the feted mode of spiritualism, Vukovar turn to the Psalms; another cry of freedom soundtracked by pleaded despair, communal deliverance and a brilliant stark but intimate voice that channels Ian Curtis, Ian McCulloch and Charlie Megira. An estranged linger of religion permeates the entire album in that kind of post-punk battle between haunted Catholic gilded guilt and alternative pathways of spiritual guidance, bordering on the occult. The sort of practice that Coil, Fritch and Current 93 had a kink for. It won’t come as a surprise to find out that Vukovar recorded a collaborative album with the Current’s Michael Cashmore (2018’s Monument), or that Coil, and the affiliated Tibet and Balance all prove an obvious inspiration. They even re-purpose Current 93’s ‘Rome For Douglas P’; turning the source into a vortex vision of Suicide on a quickened sordid rock ‘n’ roll charge with the renamed ‘When Rome Falls’: A real crushed but energetic industrial soul boy vocal is echoed in a backbeat tunnel, as the funeral pyre flames rise over a new Rome.
In the middle of this vacuum you might well hear the lingers and outright borrowing of a Siouxsie’s Banshees, early Cure, Christian Death, Talk Talk and even a less pompous Sisters Of Mercy. Yet Vukovar don’t do things the easy way; contorting, obscuring and vaporising the melodies, riffs and the niceties, even vocals as much as possible without losing the intrinsic value of their message and new romantic lament. True confessionals, aspirations and pained release caught up in a venerable maelstrom, Vukovar’s middle passage of ambitious anguished caustic industrial soul, experimentation and empire crumbling Cassandra oracles continue to impress; ringing even more inspiration from the macabre and mentally gruelling. We can only await the final piece of this fated triptych with baited breath.
The Vukovar Cannon As Featured On The Monolith Cocktail:
2020: Cement & Cerement (here)
2020: The Colossalist’ (here)
2019: Cremator (here)
2018: Monument (here)
2018: Infinitum (here)
2017: Puritan (here)
2017: The Clockwork Dance (here)
2017: Fornication (here)
2015: Emperor (here)
Also…
Rick Clarke’s The Great Immurement
Opening Chapters (here)
Parts 4-6 (here)
Parts 7-9 (here)
Parts 10-12 (here)
Parts 13-15 (here)
Parts 16-18 (here)
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Dan Shea’s Lockdown Jukebox: Part Two
July 24, 2020
Selection/Horror-Lit/Dan Shea
The Monolith Cocktail is grateful to have coaxed a number of guest spot contributions from the impassioned and adroit musician/writer Dan Shea. Roped into his family’s lo fi cult music business, The Bordellos, from a young age, the candid but humble maverick has gone onto instigate the chthonian Vukovar (currently working through a trio of ‘greatest hits’ packages here) and, with one part of that ever-shambling post-punk troupe, musical foil Buddy Preston, the seedy bedsit synth romantics Beauty Stab (who’ve just this month released their second single ‘French Film Embrace’, here)
An exceptional talent (steady…this is becoming increasingly gushing) both in composing and songwriting, the multi-instrumentalist and singer is also a dab hand at writing. For his debut, Dan shared a grand personal ‘fangirl’ purview of major crush, the late Rowland S. Howard (which can be found here), on the eve of Mute Records appraisal style celebration reissue of his highly influential cult albums ‘Teenage Snuff Film’ and ‘Pop Crimes’. This was followed by an often difficult, unsettling, potted with dark comedy, read on Dan’s friend and foil Simon Morris (of the Ceramic Hobs infamy; the piece can be read here), who took his own life last year.
Now, from his lockdown quarantine, Dan furnishes us with his new series of ‘imaginary film screening jukebox’ selections come loose horror fictions. Part Two awaits….
Lemon Kittens – The Hospital Hurts The Girl
“Not all lives matter. Not the lives of the people who make people like us into people like us. Not at all”
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“Some fires have to be put out. No one cares for the sentience of the flame. I invite you closer, with that, to a darker fire.”
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“What’re you cunting on about you drunk cunt?”
Listening to music in the shower is a pointless exercise as the water drowns it out. Drinking in silence in the shower is pure desolation. Listening to music in the shower while drinking, baby, that’s where it’s at. O the cruelty of duty. Memory shards hath made me a glow ghost.
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I closely inspect the plughole. She’s not down there. Ronette, baby, how could we fall so far? Karl Blake’s stentorian voice washes over me as I drain the rest of this can of Perla. It seems she only appears in the drain when I’m blinking so I stop blinking. The water is hot, but not that hot. Not as hot as it was when
“Well, you know”
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A series of still images:
A small child falling down the stairs. The doll body photographed mid air.
A bird falling from the sky. The bird is photographed mid air.
A dignified old man, clasping his hands in front of him. His granddaughter is playing with a toy monkey.
An echo, maybe your echo.
John Cale – Taking Life In Your Hands
Gersten called. It was the strangest thing. I didn’t even need to switch my phone on to hear her speaking. When we last spoke I’d called her drunk out of my mind because I’d deluded myself that she’d committed suicide. She said she was worried about me and wanted to check I was okay. I reassured her that I wasn’t.
“Sampling is such an integral part of the process for many that sample clearance isn’t a worry unless you sell a million records anyway. Incidentally I am quite pissed and thinking about weird fetishes I have developed. Like attractive women coughing, dunno what that’s about. Gerst, I frequently imagine you in humiliating situations but ones where your beauty is fully showcased.”
Our favourite client called around as well. He wanted to check I was okay. I reassured him I wasn’t then I sucked his dick. I wish people would stop pitying me and checking on me.
‘magine et main line the scene – he’s pissed on supermarket spirits that he’s drinking out of a Pepsi bottle in the snow and you’re doing exactly the same. He’s sat outside a pub smoking the lonely remnants of a fag. And then i come along, also the lonely remnants of a fag.
The echo resounds, maybe even your own echo.
Gersten angel angelangelangelangel.
It’s at this point it becomes clear that there is either more than one narrator or that the narrator has lost his fucking mind.
A bird falling from the sky. The bird is photographed mid air. Fish are flopping gasping and rotting on the dried up riverbed. The dog kids have arrived. The grey pin prick holes are opening wider to close again when you look away. The moon stands still on the day I am finally calcified.
David Bowie – Subterraneans
Low is a great album about depression. It really captures that feeling perfectly. I read a section in a recent Bowie biography recently about him totally losing his shit when John Lennon died. Otherwise he came off as quite cold and calculating.
Low was finishing on the afternoon Gersten came into my life. I was sat, hungover, in my living room listening to Low when a mist descended upon me. Not a metaphorical mist either. The air was electric blue and sugar. My senses were not all that was fogged. As Subterraneans wound to a close, Bowie’s lonely sax honks amid the churning proto Coil electronics, there was a knock at the door.
I waded through the fog to the hack door. I had presumed it was someone who knew me, as it’s common knowledge I only really answer the front door to get a pizza. An attractive woman in her late 30s was stood there. G.
“Dan I need to hide out somewhere for a while. Things just aren’t making sense.”
She kissed me and I didn’t care that I didn’t know who she was but she somehow knew who I was. When a film noir beauty shows up, as soon as you’ve felt her up enough to be clear she’s not packing heat you let the dame in and pour her a drink.
The first time a client came around was a bit of a shock I’ll admit but I just busied myself in the living room. The first time a client asked me to join in was even more of a shock but now we work only as a pair. It’s cool. I get to live out my Dennis Cooper fantasies even as my late 20s takes me from twink to otter.
The broad certainly had a hold on me, a vice like grip on the verge of splitting my balls like an egg.
I envision us now. The party is over and I’m on the verge of disappearing into the couch. I’ve put Roy Orbison’s bizarre attempt at disco Laminar Flow on to gently encourage people to fuck in the off direction. Our mute TV shows only static. You step in front of me in your black velvet dress. I unzip it to find you have nothing on underneath. You climb into my lap, Gersten/Ronette/Naomi and this comes on.
Rowland S Howard – Dead Radio
I’ve always found pale skinny boys who look like they take too many drugs smoking to be a turn on. Now it turns out, thanks to you, I’m turned on by women doing it.
I was SCREAAAAAMING into a microphone between your legs as you dumped the ashes into a can of Red Stripe. We were both naked. This was streamed across the world and we both got ourselves off to the video after the fact.
This tension in glances, this French film embrace this lustful tarantella. I carve my initials into you with my tongue. You’re the most beautiful woman of my nightmares. Your voice is lullaby soft and ethereal chimes sound in your wake. I press my face between your thighs and whisper your name into the depths of you.
I refuse to watch this one disappear. I call her up, I’ve fallen off the wagon and I’m making no sense. I’ve not eaten for days because I’m conscious of people wondering who the fat guy she’s with is. Maybe he’s a community pet she looks after. Maybe the council make her drive him around.
I was having one of my nightmares about past abuse and I woke up sweating in her arms. She calmed me down until I closed my eyes and saw her ceiling spider crawling. He reopened the eyes and you said softly to him “Supplanter?”
Vukovar – Voices / Seers / Voices
One of my clients was Dan from Vukovar. Apparently his then girlfriend had paid for him to hook up with me and G, she was a stern faced American lady who sat and watched. Anabella her name was. What he lacked in confidence he made up for with a strange, hand flapping autistic charm.
One SNOWY CALM CRISP FUCK morning I awoke to find someone had dumped a fridge behind my house. IN THERE I FOUND A CASSETTE. I WILL TRANSCRIBE THE TRACK LIST FOR YOU WHEN I AM AT LIBERTY. AT PRESENT THAT DAME IS MONOPOLISING MY TIME LIKE CYNDI LAUPER.
Dan wouldn’t stop going on about this guy called Simon, stank of booze and insisted on us playing Rowland S Howard while this was all happening which suited me. Everything was amazing and cool to him, like he was American or something. He was strangely insistent on blowing me on the shower and he kept inspecting the plug hole as if I he could see her peeking out.
What gets me isn’t the lurid neon atrocity but the revelation of the lack revealed. Gemma Barker. I’m like Sotos but I fetishise the aggressor not the victim. My art will bleed into your world and you will question even traffic lights. Show me what you are and I’ll show you what I’ve already taken. Relax, baby. It’s done.
New Order – Dream Attack
I remember the first time I met Ronette. We’d been talking online for a long time and she flew over from Germany for us to both stay in an Air B’n’B (bed and breakfast) in Hulme. I wanted to go there but my passport had expired and I was skint. She looked a lot like Gersten come to think of it.
I was greeted at the door by a dishevelled Welsh man in a bathrobe called Ralph who gave me the key to the flat and we sat and had a cup of tea and bemoaned the fortunes of Blackburn Rovers. My mate Cam had a trial for them. Good guy, Cam. We met in a dream.
I was listening to Technique by New Order and then I got a text. “Sweetie I’m outside”. Me and Ronnie met for the first time with Dream Attack playing, and Ralph was there. We kissed like our lips were molten.
Part of the reason I love Dream Attack is that despite Bernard’s obvious lyrical shortcomings, “I can’t see the sense in you leaving” is such a great line. Such a practical Northern way of looking at it. “Do you have to go? It’s a bit pointless.”. I couldn’t see the sense in Ronnie going that time. Or when she went down the plug hole. That was really fucking weird.
Dan Shea
Our Daily Bread 376: Harry Cloud, Murmur Tooth, Randolph’s Leap, Euan Hartley And Friends…
April 21, 2020
REVIEWS/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea joined the Monolith Cocktail team in January 2019. The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. His most releases include The Bordellos beautifully despondent pains-of-the-heart and mockery of clique “hipsters” ode to Liverpool, and, under the guises of the Idiot Blur Fanboy moniker, a stripped down classic of resignation and Gallagher brothers’ polemics.
Each week we send a mountain of new releases to the self-depreciating maverick to see what sticks. In his own idiosyncratic style and turn-of-phrase, pontificating aloud and reviewing with scrutiny an eclectic deluge of releases, here Brian’s latest batch of recommendations.
With all live gigs and events more or less quashed for the foreseeable future, buying music (whether it’s physical or through digital platforms such as Bandcamp) has never been more important for the survival of the bands/artists/collectives that create it. We urge you all to keeping supporting; to keep listening.
Murmur Tooth ‘A Fault In The Machine’
(Self-Release) LP/ Available Now
Murmur Tooth is Leah Hinton, a young lady from New Zealand who is now based in Berlin, and is the vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer writer of this very fine album. Hinton is also blessed with a lilting almost folky voice filled with the kind of emotion you really do not associate with doom laden synth pop.
A Fault In This Machine is a dark sedate sultry affair; a dive into the night time of someone else’s life a life, where you spend the day hoping for that certain person to appear who lifts the boredom of a life that is not exactly happening.
There is a realness and dreaminess to these lyrics that draw you into Murmur Tooth’s existence. It really is a beautiful sounding and beautifully written album, one of the highlights being the lovely ‘Rain Rain’, a stunning piano ballad that for some reason has my mind wandering back to my teenage years of the 80’s when dark synth based pop ruled the roost: a song I would recommend to any other old timers like myself who can recall the majestic Wonderful Life album by Black.
Leah is a real talent, one that should be embraced and celebrated for A Fault In The Machine is a warm, soulful, dark and real sounding synth album wrapped in a blanket of subtlety, and that is something one does not hear everyday.
Vukovar ‘Exhumation: The First Death Of Vukovar (2014 – 2019)’
LP/Available Now
Vukovar have decided to release a ltd best of cassette; a band that could and should have been a lot bigger and better known than they currently are, but they do have the habit of shooting themselves in the foot, so much so I doubt any of the band have any toes left. And here is another prime example; instead of releasing on one of the many labels they have released their seven plus albums on they have self released it instead – an action akin to The Beatles releasing Sgt. Pepper as a boiled egg or Shakin’ Stevens appearing on Top Of The Pops and not thrusting his hips in a cartoonish sexual manner. But lack of business sous aside the tracks on this collection are essentially a best of, so are the most commercial and ear friendly to the general public and would make a fine introduction if not released in such a ltd hipster fashion.
The songs are all of the highest quality and show their many influences, from their debut single Wedding Present Monster era like ‘Nero’s Felines’ through to the should have been all over the radio ‘New World Order’. There early to mid 80s post punk synth sound is truly a wonderful thing, as demonstrated on ‘This Moment Severed’ and ‘Clockwork Dance’. The album is jammed full of greatness and it’s a bit of tragedy that not more people will get to hear it. Maybe they will release the next as a ltd edition self hum.
Randolph’s Leap ‘Petrichor’
Single/Available Now
Has Power Pop I wonder replaced Irn-Bru as the drink of choice in the band land of Scotland? For what we have here is another Scottish band showing their love for Teenage Fanclub/Big Star, with this lovely nifty little piece of perfect McCartney-ish like strum along pop. This really is a lovely thing: The sun is in the sky there is nothing to do nowhere to go but you can lose yourself in this little subtle gem.
The Legless Crabs ‘Irregular On The Cellular’
Single/Available Now
Have you ever wondered what Legless Crabs sound like? Well I will tell you: they sound like the true spirit of rock n roll; they are the aural equivalent of the apple of your eye slowly self peeling the beauty of The Shaggs covering Jesus And Mary Chain. It is a thing of great wonder and maybe my new favourite band. You heard it here first; the Legless crabs are the future of rock ‘n’ roll.
Crumpsall Riddle ‘Looking After The Duck’
(Wormhole World) Album/Available Now
It’s a strange old time so the ideal opportunity to lose yourself in the strange world of Crumpsall Riddle: Old synths, old keyboards, the occasional guitar and jazz bass and flat caps and folk music and ranting and singing sweetly acapella style – I could be making up the flat caps bit, but who knows. These are songs improvised over three sessions, so have a lovely made up at the moment feel, which I enjoy as it is like having a permanent record of madness, the unveiling of inspiration hitting and the fading as quickly as it arrived and then moving onto something else like speed reading somebody else’s book collection whilst listening to the Bagpuss soundtrack as whistling Jack Smith rifles through your girlfriend’s knickers drawer just out of view. Anything could happen or be happening in the strange world of Crumpsall Riddle.
Harry Cloud ‘The Pig And The Machine’
(Whiteworm Records) LP/Available Now
What we have here is a blaze of magic mushroom stoner bubblegum stoner psychedelia, a lo-fi inventive curse of tomorrow and yesterday when morrow meets tomorrow in a slaphappy kind of way. Imagine if your radio was wired to play the soundtrack to your most out there sordid wish, this could well be playing as it jumps from the semi classical to the music that the not quite best looking member of a 70’s edition of Top Of The Pops audience would wiggle her arse to: not sexy but getting away with it.
This album is inventive, dirty, funny, dark and moving in so many ways. Like all great rock n roll should be it is a album that at times sounds like it is arguing with itself; sometimes being far too clever for its own good, but you love it all the same. How could you not when there is song as beautiful as ‘Haunted Hayride’, or, as weirdly rocking as ‘Browser’ – the sound of the Mothers Of Invention covering The Pixies. An album that could easily get on your tits, or, an LP you could love and fall in love with – and I have not quite made up my mind yet -, and for that he gets a big thumbs up from me.
Euan Hartley And Friends ‘Ten Years At The Bottom’
LP/Available Now
Euan Hartley is singer with the band the Pit Ponies, and this is a LP four years in the making in which he worked with various musician friends. And what I like about the album is that it seems to mean a lot to him, which trust me, is not always the way. It has a lot of heart and a lot of pain seeping through the songs. Euan has quite an impressive voice like he has been gargling from the same glass as the godlike Robert Wyatt, and the music is pure [in the best way]; DIY indie style, not the generic, ‘I have a beard and Fender Jag way and am looking forward to playing the local music festival’ kind. The songs are way to quirky and heartfelt for that especially the Casio embraced beauty ‘Beatrice’ and the wonderfully weird chopped up Flaming Lips like ‘Selfies’.
Ten Years At The Bottom is a album filled with songs of purity soul and heartache and despite being made over a long period of time with various friends and his peers the album sounds like a album and not just a collection of songs lumped together: and what a fine collection of songs it is. Also, it is available as a pay what you want to download from bandcamp, so I honestly don’t know what your waiting for, get downloading.
Meat Whiplash ‘Don’t Slip Up’
(Optic Nerve) Single/15th May 2020
I normally do not bother reviewing old music as I don’t write for Mojo, and there are so many new records and songs released daily that deserve attention that sadly do not get the attention they deserve, and its so easy for a label to reissue some old song than putting the time in finding and promoting a new and up and coming band; for nostalgia is all well and good but in thirty years what will there be to be nostalgic about if the new is not embraced and loved? So I will say that this is a reissue of the one and only Meat Whiplash single released on Creation Records many years ago, and very good it is too; all Mary Chain fuzz guitars and early Psychedelic Furs vocals. They of course morphed into Motorcycle Boy who I saw live a few times back in the day -see I am getting nostalgic now. Why damn you Optic Nerve records and your excellent Optic Sevens reissue series…you cunts.
Sunbourne Rd ‘Teenage Lyrics’
LP/Available Now
Yes it’s that time again, when I start to review catchy guitar pop. Dare I call it power pop without being arrested by the power pop police for wrongly diagnosing the LP?! No I’ll risk it: it’s power pop. It has power and is pop, and for once although obviously influenced by Paul McCartney, it is more Wings Paul than Beatle Paul: which I like as such subtleties make a difference.
What we have here is a compilation of eight singles released between 2014 and 2017 by Sunbourne Rd who hail from Northern Italy. And they obviously release fine catchy guitar pop with nods to all the usual power pop icons like McCartney, Rockpile, Mott The Hoople and their ilk. Nothing truly original or different just eight finally written songs bathed in melody – which is what we want in our power pop. And just how many times have I used the words power pop in this review? Recommended for all those who like their pop with power.
Chinofeldy ‘Stay Home’
Single/Available Now
Another band from Scotland and another catchy 60s influenced pop song: it really shows just how wonderful the Beatles were, that 50 years since they split up they are still a huge influence on bands today. I suppose you may as well learn and borrow from the best. What we have here is a benefit song for the NHS; a worthy cause we all, I am sure, agree on. So you may as well download this lovingly produced slice of 60s influenced pop and do yourself and the much-underfunded NHS a favour. You know it makes sense.
NEW MUSIC ROUNDUP/Dominic Valvona
The Perusal is a great chance to catch up, taking a quick shifty at the mounting pile of singles, EPs, mini-LPs, tracks, videos and oddities that threaten to overload the Monolith Cocktail’s inboxes each month. Chosen by Dominic Valvona, this week’s roundup includes Clovvder, Escupemetralla, John Johanna, Twisted Ankle and Vukovar.
John Johanna ‘The Eastern Harmony and Gospel Demonstrator: Outtakes and Demos 2015-17’
EP/Available Now
No stranger to this blog over the last couple of years, having made our albums of the year features for two years in a row, first with 2018’s afflatus gospel rock mini-album I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes, and then in 2019 with the Book Of Enoch imbued gospel-raga-blues and Radio Clash cosmology Seven Metal Mountains LP, the Norfolk anointed artist John Johanna has made a name for himself crafting a brand of infectious musical gospels and hymns, sourced from a myriad of Biblical and worldly religious tracts: The good book according to Johanna you could say.
During the interim of a new album, and just when we could do with some spiritual levity, Johanna has just put out a collection of ‘outtakes’ and ‘demos’ made during the years prior to the already mentioned debut I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes. Though straying from the North American and African American liturgy on his two more recent albums, these earlier trails and tribulations often sound like meditations on Southern American gospel and soul. For example, the rustic lo fi backbeat echo take of the Jordon vision, ‘Deep River’, has traces of the Deep South’s own reverent bluesmen but also an air of The Everly Brothers. You’d be hard pressed without prior knowledge to pick out the covers from originals, but Johanna produces hymnal takes on Thomas A. Dorsey‘s pre-war standard ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ – lending the stalwart standard a touch of Canned Heat at their most holy – and E. M. Bartlett‘s 1921 ‘Just a Little While’ – giving it a kind of early spiritual rock ’n’ roll feel.
An apostle at the crossroads, much of the material on this compilation woos, shakes, stamps to a country-blues-psychedelic accompaniment, led by a cosmic cowboy.
It’s quite refreshing in these cynical and hysterical times to champion a man of Eastern Orthodox Christian faith – the ‘God’ word and Christianity in general has become an anathema in polite society; looked on with suspicion or extreme prejudice in these apparent libertarian and virtuous times. Wishing to commune and share his beliefs on record, Johanna navigates both the happy-clappy conversion and pulpit to record atavistic sentiments and longing in a modern fusion of hypnotic sounds. The Eastern Harmony and Gospel Demonstrator : Outtakes and Demos 2015-17 is a great collection of a burgeoning artist on a pilgrimage of communion.
Related posts from the Archives:
I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes LP Albums Of 2018
Seven Metal Mountains LP Review
Vukovar ‘Cement & Cerement’
Video/Track/Available Now
Today’s airing is taken from the recently, without fanfare, dropped EXHUMATION: THE FIRST DEATH OF VUKOVAR (2014 – 2019); the first of three self-congratulatory ‘best ofs’ and collections of newish musics from one of the most criminally ignored British bands of recent years, Vukovar. If you’ve been a keen follower of the Monolith Cocktail and kept abreast of the many trials and tribulations of the Chthonian apostles of industrial, Gothic and post-punk, then you will know that this ever-evolving trio (at least in foundation) have imploded and broken up on countless times during their brief existence – though that is up for debate, as in theory the Vukovar are not dead and buried yet; continuing to exist as they do in one incarnation or another. During that short span of five years they’ve released seven totem albums of quality hardcore divine comedy and paradise lost, and plenty of despondent augurs. Sitting on enough material to fill another trio of albums, they’ve hit a snag of late, splitting up but also losing one of their chief inspirations and creative foils, the late tragic Ceramic Hobs instigator Simon Morris. Morris, one of many collaborators of the ‘underground’ and mischievous scenes to work with the band, joined them on their swansong LP Cremator – a curtain call at least for the original lineup. Vukovar’s seventh album proper and so far last just happened to also be one of the bands best and most accomplished efforts to date.
And so whilst awaiting that future vision of the band and stream of future albums the group now takes stock – the first time that they have in that five-year period -, releasing a triumvirate of highlights, and lowlights over the next month or so.
From that first compilation in the triptych series (as they call it), and framed as the first broadcast of what would have been the unholy Simon Morris communion extolled NeuPopAct, the last song the fated genius recorded with members of Vukovar, the Alan Vega/Charlie Megira in Brutalism romance ‘Cement & Cerement’, seems both a tribute and sad resigned glimpse at what could have been if he hadn’t committed suicide late last year. Watch this space, as they say, for more on those albums over the coming weeks.
Related posts from the Archives:
Vukovar ‘Cremator’ Review
Vukovar ‘Puritan’ Review
Vukovar ‘Infinitum’ Premiere
Vukovar/Michael Cashmore ‘Monument’ Review
Dan Shea on Simon Morris A Tribute
Clovvder ‘My Mother Was The Moon’
Available Now
Emerging once more from the ether, the Gothic duo from the Uruguayan port of Montevideo has chosen to return with a cover of the morose King Dude ‘My Mother Was The Moon’ hymn. Equal in atmospheric veiled vaporous invocations, Clovvder’s siren wafts gossamer style, weaving a new black magik interpretation of the original’s fateful lyrics. Magic realism poetry and despondent esoteric romanticism combine to evoke a most haunting requiem, from a duo that seems to create veiled invocations in the gap between never worlds. Truly atmospheric and mysterious.
Related posts from the Archives:
Clovvder ‘Traits’ Review
Twisted Ankle ‘Landlord Laughs’
(Breakfast Records) Single/17th April 2020
A macabre contortion of sinewy no wave and crushing post punk the leading polemic single from the future self-titled Twisted Ankle debut LP is a tumult of unkempt rage threatening to boil over. A broadside at those sneering all the way to the bank with the profits of their rentals, ‘Landlord Laughs’ twists the ongoing housing crisis into a sort of neo-feudalist nursery-rhyme: a kind of updated Ring a Ring o’ Roses if you like, which the band, only half-mockingly, envisage ‘little primary children will skip around the merry tree chanting ‘where did you put it?’ and asking ‘Mummy, what’s a house?’ in future days. Though written before the current lockdown, this reference to the children’s sing-along playground game is prescient; inspired, though many have argued its not, by the great plague, it resonates with the end times epidemic currently throttling the life out of society.
In effect, the Bristol experimentalists ‘mirror the decaying social order of quarantine Britain’. The increasingly tormented track uses samples of the noises Boris Johnson makes in between words, set to a brash and burnished
Known for their bizarre theatrical live shows, Twisted Ankle has emerged over the last few years as one of the most unique acts in the South-West. A strange mix of post-punk, dissonant jazz and macabre humour, they’ve long been a prominent fixture on the live circuit, supporting Mclusky, JOHN and Fraud’s across the last year. Yet their recorded output has been unusually slim: until now. If The Fall in an unholy union with James Chance, The Lounge Lizards and Half Japanese grabs you, than fill your boots.
Escupemetralla ‘Remotitud (2020)’
Video/Track/Available Now
Sharing their dark visions and nightmares during lockdown the mysterious Escupemetralla (which were informed means “spitsshrapnel” in Spanish) has been dropping the most haunting, unsettling tracks alongside blog postings and related video art every week. An organism, an organization, a fiendish underground hub of the disturbing avant-garde and experimental the anonymous makers of these soundbites and broadcasts from the damned have offered up this esoterically atmospheric ‘remoteness’ score.
Still in the dark, Escupemetralla offer up this transmission statement: ‘the result of a series of retro-transmissions to be carried out in the mid-twenty first century at the “Thorne’s Cone Light Reversion Laboratory for Children”, Los Alamos, Texas (Federal States of Mexico and Puerto Rico). In a certain way, Escupemetralla are just virtual entities that will actually exist in several years’ time.’
Whatever is happening, it proves a frightening vision that chimes with the ongoing crisis of Covid-19 lockdown. Prepare to be spooked.
Related posts from the Archives:
Escupemetralla ‘Fe, Esperanza Y Caridad’ Review
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
ICON SPECIAL
Dan Shea
The Monolith Cocktail is ecstatic and grateful to have coaxed a guest spot contribution from the impassioned and adroit musician/writer Dan Shea. Roped into his family’s lo fi cult music business, The Bordellos, from a young age, the candid but humble maverick has gone onto instigate the chthonian Vukovar and, with one part of that ever-shambling post-punk troupe, musical foil Buddy Preston, the seedy bedsit synth romantics Beauty Stab. An exceptional talent (steady…this is becoming increasingly gushing) both in composing and songwriting, the multi-instrumentalist and singer is also a dab hand at writing. His first time ever for the MC, Dan shares a grand personal ‘fangirl’ purview of major crush, the late Rowland S. Howard, on the eve of Mute Records appraisal style celebration reissue of his highly influential cult albums ‘Teenage Snuff Film’ and ‘Pop Crimes’.
Rowland S. Howard ‘Teenage Snuff Film/Pop Crimes’
(Mute) Remasterd Reissue Albums /27th March 2020
Teenage Snuff Film
“You’re bad for me like cigarettes, but I haven’t sucked enough of you yet”.
Curls of Morricone guitars, the ‘Be My Baby’ beat slowed to a kerb crawl as it is on every song on Teenage Snuff Film and a voice so soft it smashes stars.
Then in the middle, a spiraling surf guitar run; subtle organ chords in the background and the sort of strings I am contractually obliged to describe as sweeping. Teenage Snuff Film is an immensely important record to me, so important that I kicked a perfectly attractive possible suitor out of my flat when he described it as “boring”. Cute as he was you’ve got to draw a line somewhere and we have never spoke again.
The first time I heard Teenage Snuff Film I was sixteen and I think that’s the perfect time to hear a record like this. It all comes back to the beginning, conjuring up a world I was yet to experience. Now I have been there, watching the party end through a haze of smoke slumped insensible with my head on the shoulder of a femme fatale (of several genders), I can’t help but prefer what I had imagined.
Following ‘Breakdown (and Then)’ in which he writes his own epitaph (“Crown Prince of the Crying Jag”) there is ‘She Cried’. One thing he does a lot on this record is admit to his own cruelty and use this admission to gain your sympathy – it’s a lowdown, filthy trick and one I frequently find myself doing. ‘She Cried’ again uses a bastardised Hal Blaine beat and with his customary rusted, pealing bell guitar sound he lays waste to a perfectly pleasant 60’s girl group song. From amidst this wreckage The Horrors are conceived in unholy means.
‘I Burnt Your Clothes’ does the same thing as ‘Breakdown’ but more unpleasantly and lyrically, more violently and with the addition of frenetic horror movie organ vamping.
‘Exit Everything’ pivots around a propulsive bassline from the similarly dearly departed Brian Hooper that threatens to steal the show from Rowland S Howard: also listening to this record and in particular the sizzling hi hat patterns on this track, you can’t help but wish Mick Harvey would play drums more. There must have been some reason he took the drum stool in The Birthday Party besides Phill Calvert just being tired of everyone’s shit.
It’s at this point I have to revert to cliché and describe this album as cinematic: it’s a cliché Rowland clearly endorsed as the liners state ‘Written and Directed by Rowland S Howard’. With that in mind, I apologise for how flooded with spoilers this review / hagiography / fangirl diary is.
‘Silver Chain’, as co-written with Genevieve McGuckin who contributed the fantastically understated and slightly mad keyboards to These Immortal Souls records, is a thing of real beauty. I struggle to do things like this justice with my words because I am very aware as a musician myself that throwing a mixture of technically accurate adjectives and superlatives at something this heartfelt is just entirely risible. What I will say is that when it all builds to a crescendo, screeching violins and hymnal organ, as Rowland sings “I tattooed your name in a ring round my heart”, that invisibly in the act of singing this he tattooed his own on mine.
Then ‘White Wedding’. It’s got to the point now that whenever I hear the original, usually on the radio at work, I find myself wondering “Why are they playing that shit cover of a song off Teenage Snuff Film?”. Somehow he discovers a deep and primal longing in this song, recasting it as if it were an ancient folk song he found under a rock or in Nick Cave’s basement.
The final three tracks of the record are, for me, where the record’s heart is: any noir director worth their salt knows that it’s the climax you’re talking about on the way home. ‘Undone’ is the kiss-off of all kiss-offs: that trademark shower of splinters rhythm guitar approach most obviously spotted on the title track from The Birthday Party’s Junkyard is back but so are Bernard Herrman strings and the fastest drums on this record. He accentuates his filthy Valentines with scything one note atonal guitar fills until the carnival organ escapes from Cave’s ‘Your Funeral, My Trial’ and propels him to greater heights of loathing. The cruelty of the earlier songs on the record is still there but undercut with an obvious vulnerability, particularly in the ‘Coy Mistress’ quoting midsection.
‘Autoluminescent’ is just achingly sad: there is a reason they named the biopic after it. Another truly beautiful vocal performance: Rowland’s voice is not discussed enough. The focus is always, obviously, on his guitar playing but when I hear Rowland’s voice I hear one of the saddest instruments in the world. The only voice as sad and as beautiful as his for me is Billy McKenzie but obviously they sound nothing alike. While Billy masked his vulnerability (or tried unconvincingly to do so) through his technical expertise, Rowland takes strength from his. The result is the slurring, croak of a grievous androgynous angel. It’s the kind of sadness you experience when you’ve cried as much as you possibly can and you’re starting to smirk at your own ridiculousness.
What makes this song as heartbreaking as it is? It’s the way his voice cracks and frays as he slips into desperate, insane self-aggrandisement: “I’m bigger than Jesus Christ….I am dangerous, I cut like the sharpest knife” then settles again. Again I can’t do it justice and you’re just going to have to listen to the thing.
If you’ve heard of and enjoy Nick Cave, Swans, The Fall, The Gun Club, etc. and you haven’t already then why? Why not? For me Rowland S Howard is every bit Nick Cave’s equal, asides from in work ethic: Rowland penned and fronted four albums across three decades where Cave does that in three years plus umpteen soundtracks. Most of them haven’t been as good as this album but that’s alright because for me personally not much is.
Cooking Vinyl‘s track list of this record originally also included a version of ‘Shut Me Down’ after this, which I’ll be discussing in the Pop Crimes section. I see no reason whatsoever why this alternate edition should be absent from this record: The new deluxe edition with less material?
‘Sleep Alone’ brings this record to a tumultuous close with another utterly filthy Brian Hooper bassline and the most deranged guitar playing on this record. “This is my journey to the edge of the night, I’ve got no companions Louis Celine’s by my side”.
It builds, and builds until it ends with just that voice again sounding incredibly damaged and vulnerable but defiant and then there’s an outro of feedback skree and noise that could easily fit onto a Whitehouse record.
Making these things more accessible to more people can never be a bad thing: maybe next Mute can reissue the These Immortal Souls back catalogue so I can own a physical copy of Never Gonna Die Again without having to resort to prostitution. Given that Mute already issued these records in the first place there would be no reason to issue deluxe editions minus several tracks.
It is however disappointing that on neither of these reissues has there been made room for the original version of ‘Shut Me Down’ which makes the lachrymosity of the version on Pop Crimes sound like K-Pop in comparison; or Rowland’s heartbreaking cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Ocean’ which for my money (not enough for a deluxe double red vinyl edition) is an improvement on the original, this obviously not faint praise.
Pop Crimes
“My life plays like Grand Guignol, blood and portents everywhere”
Years of silence followed: make no mistake, in terms of gaps between records Rowland made Scott Walker look like Edward Ka-Spel or Mark E Smith. Then he produces a great album that is again annoyingly out of print, HTRK’s Marry Me Tonight. A wonderful album but I’m not going to write about it here.
A word of warning here: obviously the tenor of this piece has made it clear I am not writing objectively and these two records are very much a part of me at this point in time, so you may ignore this and I don’t blame you. Disclaimer aside, this album will break your heart and there’s no two ways about it.
‘I Know A Girl Called Jonny’ refers to Jonine Standish from HTRK and she sings on it in a voice that sounds almost exactly like his. Another languid, androgynous croon that makes you wish he’d reprised the Lydia Lunch ‘Shotgun Wedding’ record with her. It’s all pleasant and correct: Mick Harvey is playing a variation on the Be My Baby beat, strings are scraping, guitars are slashing and it feels like a warped girl group record. ‘Shut Me Down’ follows, and in this setting also has a 60’s pop drama: a French film embrace, black turtleneck clad lovers departing at fountains in the snow and knowing they’ll never see each other again. This time the chime of a vibraphone underscores what sounds like a Billy Fury record playing at half-speed. Then something interesting happens. Your heart just breaks. I won’t reproduce any lyrics because the ones that look the best on paper aren’t the ones that sound the best but it is another fantastic vocal performance.
Then comes his cover of Talk Talk’s ‘Life’s What You Make It’ and throughout this I have tried manfully to avoid dwelling on the biographical details behind these records: a great record should stand alone without them and I firmly believe this does. However, for a dying man to re-record ‘Life’s What You Make It’ bitterly recasts it.
When I first heard this record he was still with us: I had no idea that the man was dying. I bought a copy in Liverpool’s Probe Records, spotting the name and that incredibly distinctive face looking back off the cover. Birdlike, broken boxer’s nose, otherworldly and androgynous swathed in red light. “At long last, the lazy fucker”.
Maybe the hints were there, but Rowland was singing and writing about death since he was a teenager. On Pop Crimes, which reprises the previous track’s angular, extended lope with regular lead guitar breaks and a descended bassline akin to ‘Exit Everything’ on the previous record there are several turns of phrase that catch my breath: “open heart surgery kiss” and the phrase Pop Crime itself. Several friends of mine, some collaborators, have latched onto this phrase and shamelessly half-inched it. I in particular have stolen a lot from Rowland.
‘Nothin’’ is another cover version this time of a Townes Van Zandt song. This one isn’t such a stark transformation but it’s a fantastic song well suited to his voice and turned me onto the artist’s work: which I guess is another useful function of the cover version. Inviting you into the artist’s living room rather than throwing you out of it because you were disparaging of a genius.
‘Wayward Man’ compels me to use the word swagger and I don’t like that, I absolutely hate that word. It’s the only one that fits: there’s something sexy about it. It struts about all over the place in spite of itself. There’s a particularly nasty descending guitar riff Rowland plays at several points which takes me aback almost every time.
Again it’s the record’s climax where I really have to wax lyrical. ‘Ave Maria’ is another fantastic lyric: it’s all in the delivery but when he sings the phrase “History led her to me” it carries with it the grim inevitability of what happened next. I’m finding myself welling up simply imagining the instrumental bridge towards the end, which sounds simply like the ascension of a soul. Distant vibraphone again, a gentle surge with JP Shilo‘s violin pulling us all skyward. An overhead shot of the moment of rejection as it happens then we’re back to ‘Be My Baby’ drums slowed to a drunken heartbeat crawl. The final verse takes us into the final track on the album, and the final song we heard from the great man.
‘The Golden Age of Bloodshed’ from which my header quote to this section was drawn is, again, shorn of biography incredibly moving but with full context it’s just…fucking hell. A walk to the gallows rhythm serves as a backdrop to some of Rowland’s best guitar playing: all the shower-of-splinters chainsaw noises, pealing bell single notes and fuzz tantrums you can fit into the song’s short runtime. There’s a mordant black comedy to these lyrics, with their Schopenhauer references, “Catholic girls with Uzis” and a “harsh new brand of aftershave that gives you a thousand yard stare”. There’s even a “take my wife” joke any Northern standup would be proud of:
“I’m suspicious of my wife, I suspect she left long ago
I recall my finger on the button of the ejector seat
But I can’t recall letting her go”
This sounds intensely alive and vital in the shadow of death. Then it all comes to a climax with a final burst of noise trailing off into nowhere: a fade-out, a ticking rhythm disappearing off into the fog of the world. The credits roll. I am not merely dragging this cinematic metaphor to its brutal end I am again paraphrasing the liner notes that list Rowland as the director.
Cherish these records: it’s a shame he’s not around to enjoy the plaudits or the financial reward with which he may not have died skint and we may have had more to enjoy by him. I am a fervent believer that we should cherish the angels that walk among us before death beatifies them, ironing out the creases and possible unpleasantness that did not allow us to properly revere their beauty while they were alive. But sometimes it’s not possible, so allow these records into your heart and home; hope, a dangerous thing, but hope that it continues to inspire and enflame.
Related posts from the Archives
(Author) Beauty Stab Interview
(Author) Vukovar ‘Cremator’ Review
(Author) Vukovar ‘Puritan’ Review
Mick Harvey ‘Four (Acts Of Love)’ Review
Mick Harvey Live Report
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Choice Albums of 2019: Part Three: Chris Quelle to Yugen Blakrok.
December 10, 2019
Choice Albums of 2019 Part Three: Chris Quelle to Yugen Blakrok
Welcome to the final part of our ‘choice albums’ features of 2019. To reiterate once more in case you missed parts one and two, because we’ve never seen the point in arguing the toss over numerical orders, or even compiling a list of the best of albums of the year, the Monolith Cocktail’s lighter, less competitive and hierarchical ‘choice albums’ features have always listed all entrants in alphabetical order (since our inception, a decade ago). We also hate separating genres and so everybody in these features, regardless of genre, location, shares the same space.
Choice were made by Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea and Gianluigi Marsibilio.
Previous parts:
One
Two
Q…………….
Quelle Chris ‘Guns’
(Mello Music Group)
“The definition of enterprising, Quelle Chris remains a singular underground voice, loading latest album ‘Guns’ with intelligent angles on a topic never far from the news” – RnV Apr 19
You’ve got guns, we’ve got guns, the serious ones…Quelle Chris leaps to your attention at the best of times, now notwithstanding an album called Guns and his head engulfed in firearms on the sleeve – he could well have parodied the world’s accessory of choice such is the way he owns his own lane (the next album will guaranteed to be off on a completely different tangent). Instead of simply just pointing and shooting, his firing range is well-rounded opinion and scenario without turning Guns into documentary, his chuntering under his breath potent enough to never have to repeat himself, and knitted tightly enough to get you going back over and over. He holds back some of his stock off-kilterness – “I was never a weirdo, they just had to acclimate” – for production that can go from slight and soulful to screwface to thick and sludgily underground. That said, we can’t pass by the fact that on ‘Straight Shot’, he builds into a solemn contemplation somehow featuring comedian James Acaster as an apparitional, free-roaming sensei. (Matt Oliver)
R………………
Raf And O ‘The Space Between Nothing And Desire’
(Telephone Records)
Imbued by both the musicality and spirit of David Bowie, Scott Walker, David Sylvian (both as a solo artist and with the fey romantics Japan), Kate Bush and in their most avant-garde mode, Bjork, the South London based duo of Raf (Raf Montelli) and O (Richard Smith) occupy the perimeters of alternative art-rock and experimental electronica as the true inheritors of those cerebral inspirations.
Sublime in execution, subtle but with a real depth and levity, TSBNAD is an astonishing piece of new romantic, avant-theater pop and electronica that dares to unlock the mind and fathom emotion. I’m not sure if they’ve found or articulated that space they seek, between nothing and desire, but the duo have certainly created a master class of pulchritude magnificence. Lurking leviathans, strange cosmic spells and trips into the unknown beckon on this, perhaps their most accomplished and best album yet; an example of tactile machinations and a most pure voice in synergy.
The influences might be old and well used, but Raf And O, as quasi-torchbearers, show the way forward. They deserve far more exposure and acclaim, and so here’s hoping that TSBNAD finally gains this brilliant duo their true worth. (Dominic Valvona)
Rafiki Jazz ‘Saraba Sufiyana’
(Konimusic)
It’s no idle boast to suggest that the North of England based Rafiki Jazz could be one of the most diverse groups on the world stage. Testament of this can be heard on the troupe’s previous trio of polygenesis albums: an untethered sound that simultaneously evokes Arabia, the Indian Subcontinent, Northern African, the Caribbean, South America and Balkans.
The troupe’s latest visionary songbook is a filmic panoramic beauty, no less worldly and stirring. The opening diaphanous spun ‘Su Jamfata’ encapsulates that perfectly; mirroring the group’s musical freedom and spiritual connection; lilting between a myriad of regions with stunning vocals that evoke both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Saraba Sufiyana translates as “mystic utopia”, a title that epitomizes the group’s curiosity and respect for other cultures as they build a brave new sonic world of possibility. One that takes in all the dramas and woes of the current international crisis and the lamenting poetry of venerable hardship – the final quartet cycle of prayer and spiritual yearning, ‘My Heart My Home’, beautifully conveys a multitude of gospel and traditional religious plaint, ending on the stirring Hebrew field song ‘Shedemati’. Devotional music at its most captivating and entrancing. (DV)
Rapsody ‘Eve’
(Jamla)
“An unflinching belief system sees off the ill-equipped not so much striking a chord as demolishing it with style” – RnV Sep 19
Certainly not short on confidence or ambition – second track ‘Cleo’ goes for self over Phil Collins’ most famous ode to lifeguards – this is good and sassy throughout from an emcee going from strength to strength. ‘Eve’ = education, verbs, entertainment, dovetailing with the knowledge and understanding of Sa-Roc and the fearlessness of Rah Digga. “To be more than a woman now comes with some ties” – but digging in and challenging the status quo is all Rapsody knows, not by just saying that women on the mic aren’t going quietly, but you should know that they’ve always been putting in work. Every track is named after an influential female figure (‘Oprah’, ‘Serena’), and 9th Wonder’s lion’s share of production is a direct reflection of the orator – wise, feisty, a savant of pure hip-hop’s nuts and bolts, playful, and able to take on anyone on away turf. A safe pair of hands for the artform’s future that’s celebratory, but adamantly not cutting corners. (MO)
Ras Kass ‘Soul on Ice 2’
(Mello Music Group)
“In the mood for a high score body count, maximising velocity on every single word as if it’s his last” – RnV Sep 19
If you’re fake, wack or simply don’t measure up to his standards, eternal underdog Ras Kass will call you on it, the ‘sequel’ to 1995’s Soul On Ice roaring out the traps with two opening cuts that should soundtrack summits and state of emergency think tanks. In a way the phony stasis of hip-hop should keep up its shoddy work – it’s all ammunition for the West Coaster to dismantle and hopefully reroute some career paths. More than just a battler to the death doling out deliciously vindictive punchlines, the world in its entirety is made to wobble on its axis once Ras has got stuck into society as well: again, thank God life is hurtling towards hell in a handbasket, so Ras can take its photo like an end of rollercoaster insta-snap. His knowledge of album flow and addition of prestige guests, plus production that 1) makes Ras flip his lid and 2) makes him even more potent when reducing the heat…how many more warnings do you need? Go get. (MO)
Royal Trux ‘White Stuff’
(Fat Possum Records)
Royal Trux has returned without great proclamations and arrogance, to put themselves to the test with a music scene completely revolutionized since the early 90s. The duo have maintained the avant-garde drive and the desire to be something else, completely different from whatever the word Rock means today, because even if important projects such as The War On Drugs, The National or others are easily indicated in one vein, the Royal Trux remain other, but not only in terms of sound, their choice is an aptitude that deeply distances the duo from any other band.
Twin Infinities (1990) could be a good problem, such a monumental work of historical impact can lead to comparisons, further comparisons, but in the end an album like White Stuff also touches important peaks in songs like ‘Sic Em Slow’ or ‘Under Ice’. The psychedelic progression is preponderant in tracks like ‘Purple Audacity #2’, and the dreamlike wandering that lasted about 20 years offers a solid and iconic cue. Hagerty and Herrema show that they can complete themselves extensively, but above all they can make up for each other at the limits of the other, hiding personal and non personal smears and imperfections: it’s clear that the tumultuous journey that ended in 2001 is an example of what it means to complete, wander and start again. (GM)
S………………
Sad Man ‘Untitled Album’ ‘Indigenous & Indigenous 2’
Haphazardly prolific, Andrew Spackman, under the plaint alter ego of the Sad Man, improves with every release he puts out. Included yet again in the choice features, a trio of releases from 2019 cement a growing reputation for pushing the electronic music envelope. Still on the peripheral, Spackman has been working like a boffin from his shed, building the homemade musical contraptions that form the base of his loony and radical deconstructions for years.
Perhaps coming near to his most perfect album yet, Untitled is a full spread of cosmic techno imbued and ridiculous pottering’s, debris, flotsam and more celestial dancefloor goers. The Indigenous moiety of releases however further muddies the waters, as Spackman’s improvised mixes of his own tracks go into jazzier, tribal and skittish realms of unpredictability. All three are worthy of your attention. (DV)
Sampa the Great ‘The Return’
(Ninja Tune)
“A debut to have critics clamouring” – RnV Aug 19
Brought to the fore by the fantastic front foot funk of Final Form, The Return is an event calling the shots as to which top 10s it’ll occupy in the year’s retrospectives. Culturally rich, musically articulate and ambitious, and with a rhymer fighting for every movement and inch of space with a heavy side of attitude blowing bubblegum bombs, The Great one carves out a singular mic presence. The album’s extended length turns the Aussie-based sovereign’s debut into act-by-act theatre, full of moving parts and motifs in shifting through global soul and jazz, always evolving and with twists, turns and exclamation points to jolt you from you wind down and settle you back down from a vicious dancefloor circle. These variations mean that even if your powers of endurance aren’t up to much, you can still make two or three separate playlists from the styles she assimilates and owns, including the crowns previously held by Hill and Badu. (MO)
SAULT ‘5’ and ‘7’
(Forever Living Originals)
Knowing next to nothing about this limbered band of no wave funk ravers, I completely came across this release by chance. SAULT has released two albums of similar sassy ESG meets Liquid Liquid buffalo girls hopscotch this year; the sound of New York, an 1980s one I admit, but they have given it a touch of the contemporary to make it once more dynamically and soundly relevant and alive.
There’s nothing in it really, both albums are equally class in merging political funk with post punk, Annie, R&B, early Hip-Hop and neo-soul to infectious heights of both smooth and elasticated contorting. Buy both. (DV)
Seba Kaapstad ‘Thina’
(Mello Music Group)
Soulfully churning a cornucopia of intricate but organic kinetics and beatific yearnings, the polygenesis Seba Kaapstad create a beautiful cosmology on the sumptuous Thina. Capturing the moment and mood with the most meandrous and softened of diaphanous deliveries, they merge R&B with jazz, hip-hop with neo-soul to forge a seamless celestial and spiritual imbued traverse. Joyful and lamentable in equal measures, Seba Kaapstad lushly reaches dizzying heights on this magically sophisticated bowed, arching, liquid soundtrack. (DV)
Silver Sound Explosion ‘Pop Dithyramp’
Hooray the Silver Sound Explosion is back together after splitting about six or seven years ago. They were and are a wonderful band from the Manchester area. They recorded many demos that make up this their debut LP. And after much encouragement and prompting by myself, they have finally released it.
They’re led by Ben Fuzz, one of those songwriters who has soaked up the spirit and history of Rock N roll and releases the spirit in finely written pop songs that take in 60s pop, garage rock, late seventies power pop and the post punk 80s indie, and mesh it all together to make the most perfect pop imaginable.
You will be hard pressed to find a better debut LP this year; an LP that deserves much more than a small scale release on the bands band camp: creeping out without any fanfare. And it is a pay what you want to download release at that. So what you waiting for?! Fill your winklepickers. A true undiscovered gem that needs discovering. (Brain ‘Bordello’ Shea)
Širom ‘A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse’
(tak:til/Glitterbeat)
Channeling the varied topography of their respective parts of the Slovenian landscape via a kitchen table of both recognizable instrumentation and found assemblage (everything including the kitchen sink and water tank), the Širom trio of Iztok Koren, Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin create another vivid album of dream realism with their second LP, A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse. Inspired by this environment yet ambiguous, they float across the borders to evoke a certain mystery and yearn to create something new. In so doing, they’ve coined the term ‘imaginary folk’ to describe their amorphous blending of geographical evocations and echoed fables.
From the Mongolian Steppes to sorrows of East Europe and the hints of the Appalachians and Sumatra, Širom draw inspiration – whether intentional or not – from a fecund of sources; the Slovenian backdrop melting into a polygenesis mirage. With this spiritual, ritual, dreamy longing for a kaleidoscope of real and imaginary cultures the trio’s second album for the Glitterbeat label’s instrumental imprint tak:til is as poetically wondrous as it is (sometimes) supernatural and otherworldly. An alternative folk fantasy imbued in part by the hard won geography, Širom once more wander unafraid across an ever-ambiguous musical cartography that (almost) fulfills their wish to produce something unique: A soundtrack of infinite possibilities. (DV)
Snapped Ankles ‘Stunning Luxury’
The whirring and exciting sounds of post punk circa 2019 coming at you like a extravagant wholemeal piece of chiffon scarred alternative disco meat; the sound of Devo fucking the brains and beats out of the B52s whilst the horny ghost of Mark E Smith watches on making cutting asides whilst stomping on the hopes and dreams of the not yet born love child of David Byrne and Lena Lovich.
Stunning Luxury is dirty, it is funky, it is experimental, it is blistering rock ‘n’ roll. (BBS)
Stereo Total ‘Ah! Que! Cinema’
This LP is bloody genius. Any LP that kicks off with a track that sounds like The Prodigy but played on a Bontempi organ is not going to go very wrong, and then carries on with the pure blissfulness of French lo-fi garage pop.
This LP is so good it has pissed me off a little. I thought I’d made the album of the year with the Bordello and Clark Atlantic Crossing LP, but this has knocked it into a cocked hat. But I don’t mind, especially when there are bands capable of making records of such beauty; when bands can come on like Stereolab one minute and a French Velvet Underground the next – ‘Brazil Says’ is a track worthy of the Velvets at their finest: pure pop heaven.
I think the playing of Ah! Quel Cinema may become a daily event this year; an LP to lose yourself in the pure beauty of perfect lo fi pop. (BBS)
SUO ‘Dancing Spots And Dungeons’
(Stolen Body Records)
Stolen Body Records have released some wonderful albums this year, and here is yet another one. This is a fine pop album, all power punk chords and girl group kisses. Part Blondie part Suzi Quatro, it really has a late 70s feel to it; the kind of record you can imagine blasting from your old tiny transistor on a summer night. An LP with a lovely warm sound (maybe one of the best sounding records I’ve have heard all year) it embraces all that is magical about pop music; it is sexy, laid back, moving and fun all at the same time, an album of extremely well written and crafted guitar pop songs with a 70s new wave twist. Dancing Spots And Dungeons is a really lovely sounding record. (BBS)
T………………
The Telescopes ‘Exploding Head Syndrome’
There is no place like drone, well not at least if you are a member of The Telescopes: Just over thirty minutes of top class dronery, not something I normally spend my Friday evenings listening to but as they say a change is as good as a rest.
If this LP were a debut album by some young new psychsters they would be being raved about and hailed to the rafters as the second coming, the next new big thing. I hope the same platitudes are heaved onto this wonderful LP by this wonderful band, as it really has taken me by surprise how much I love it and I feel guilty in not expecting to like it. For that The Telescopes I offer my humble apologies you have indeed blown my head. (BBS)
Thirty Pounds Of Bone and Philip Reeder ‘Still Every Year They Went’
(Armellodie Records)
This is a bewitching LP of old sea shanties recorded on a working fishing boat at sea; a wonderful idea and quite stunningly performed. There is a beauty in the loftiness which captures the dark magic romance of the sea and also keeps alive some quite genius beautiful old folk songs.
Acoustic guitars blend beautifully with the sound of crashing waves and sea birds weaving a spellbinding web of sound. In this day and age of here-today- thrown-away-tomorrow it makes more than a refreshing change to hear a album that you will keep and play and be a mainstay in your music collection for the rest of your days: a truly beautiful collection. (BBS)
Toxic Chicken ‘Uncomfortable Music’
This LP has everything that I love about the magic and joy of music. It has humour and a madness that at times reminds me of the great Syd Barrett and the wonderful White Noise Electric Storm LP. It is eccentric pushed to the extreme. Songs with the subject matter of eating politicians and love songs for cats and for Mother Nature and what is bad about England, but that track only being under two minutes long does not quite manage to list everything.
Uncomfortable Music is certainly an enjoyable and rewarding listening experience, and at times, the subject matter does live up to its title. But this album is a pay-what-you-want to download, so is well worth a listen. Another great album from a great artist: And I mean artist. And the track ‘Little Snail’ is the best dance track I have heard all year. (BBS)
Owen Tromans ‘Between Stones’
(Sacred Geometry)
In the spirit of maverick adventure, Hampshire-based singer-songwriter Owen Tromans walks a similar path to the arch druid of counterculture and psychogeography traversing, Julian Cope. The co-founder of the most informative sonic accompanied rambling fanzine guide, Weird Walks, Tromans (and his co-authors) circumnavigates the hidden British landscape of run-down flat roof pubs whilst waxing lyrical about the fantasy role-play meets Black Metal flowering of the Dungeon synth scene, and the more well-known traipsed chalk pits and megalith landmarks.
The soundtrack is important, both as an enriching experience and communicative tool. And on Between Stones the soundtrack could be said to be a surprising one. Ambling certainly; wandering this sceptered Isle imbued typography with all the ancient lore it entails, yet far from held-down to the British sound, Tromans actually channels a English pen pal version of R.E.M. and the great expansive outdoor epic trudge of Simon Bonney on the album’s hard-won stirring opus ‘Grimcross’: Imagine an 80s American college radio John Barleycorn. There’s even a touch of a mellower Pixies and early Dinosaur Jnr. on the grunge-y ‘Vague Summer’, and hints of Mick Harvey throughout the rest of the album.
Beautifully conveyed throughout with subtle Baroque-psych chamber strings and a country falsetto, Tromans follows the desire lines, hill forts and undulating well-travail(ed) pathways on a most ruminating magical songbook; a thoughtful and poetic accompaniment that goes hand-in-hand with those “weird” and wonderful walks. (DV)
Trupa Trupa ‘Of The Sun’
(Glitterbeat Records)
Freshly signing over to the German-based label Glitterbeat, the multi-limbed quartet play off gnarling propulsive post-punk menace and tumult with echo-y falsetto despondent vocals and hymnal rock on their fifth album, Of The Sun. Feeding into the history of their regularly fought-over home city, Gdansk, Trupa Trupa create a monster of an album steeped in psychodrama, dream revelation and hypnotic industrialism.
A sinewy, pendulous embodiment of their Polish city environment and metaphysical philosophy, Trupa Trupa write “songs about extremes”, but use an often ambiguous lyrical message when doing it: usually a repeated like poetic mantra rather than charged protest. On one of those framed “extremes”, the wrangling guitar-heavy post-punk-meets-80s-Aussie-new-wave ‘Remainder’ sounds like Swans covering The Church, as the group repeat the refrain, “Well, it did not take place.”
The PR spill that accompanies this nihilistic-with-a-heart LP is right to state, “Of The Sun is an unbroken string of hits.” There are no fillers, no let-up in the quality and restless friction, each track could exist as a separate showcase for the group’s dynamism: a single. East European, Baltic facing, lean post-punk mixes it up in the Gdansk backstreets and harbor with spasmodic-jazz, baggy, math-rock, psych, doom and choir practice as this coiled quartet deliver an angst-ridden damnation of humanity in 2019. (DV)
U……………….
Uncommon Nasa & Kount Fif ‘City as School’
(Man Bites Dog)
“Blockbuster burners laid end to end as outlaws of the corridors, “trust the process, avoid the nonsense” at all costs” – RnV Nov 19
If Uncommon Nasa and Kount Fif were headmasters, the pep rally would be a Deftones meltdown and the Ofsted inspection would get ‘Funcrusher Plus’, ‘The Cold Vein’, ‘The Multi Platinum Debut Album’ etc straight on the syllabus. Blocky, rocking beats, rhymes that hang with a critical pause and judder across the page for greatest impact, b-boys and backpackers and headbangers all in the same corner…City as School gives hope as to what the underground can still be. By mining the last great boundary and perspective shift from the mid to late 90s, its drum machines and steel rain synth sweeps also sound like a comic book metropolis to sink yourself in, and its New York influence replicates there being so much to take in amidst a battery of dazzling lights, but with something always rumbling in the sewers. “History don’t repeat, it rhymes” is Nasa & Fif’s ‘O Captain My Captain’ call to arms – class not to be dismissed. (MO)
The Untied Knot ‘Falling Off The Evolutionary Ladder’
(Sonic Imperfections)
Imbued with a sense of scientific methodology and monocular dissection, the experimental United Knot duo of Nigel Bryant and Matt Donovan attempt once more to sonically convey the wonders and enormity and chaos of the universe on Falling Off The Evolutionary Ladder.
With both band members serving a variation of roles in the improvisational and electronic music fields, Bryant and Donovan have all the experience and skills needed to create something that is refreshingly dynamic as it is ponderous. Playing hard and loose with a myriad of influences, Donovan’s constantly progressive drum rolls, tribal patters, cymbal burnishes and more skipping jazzy fills recall Faust’s Weiner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier and Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier, whilst surprisingly, on the late 60s West Coast rock experiment ‘Rhythm From Three Intervals’ a touch of Mick Fleetwood. Meanwhile, Bryant, on both bass and atonal guitar duties (both also share the synth), channels Ax Genrich, Jah Wobble and Youth.
On what could be the duo’s, in this incarnation, last furore together, the Untied Knot sound far from weary and burnt-out: going out on a high. They stretch their influences with improvised skill and depth, a buzz saw, scrawling caustic but investigative soundtrack for the times. (DV)
V………………….
Vampire Weekend ‘Father of The Bride’
(Columbia Records)
Vampire Weekend sings on Father of The Bride, of a humanity that lives on a suffering planet. The album is, however, an opportunity to subvert a catastrophic narrative and, in fact, throughout the work, it raises, through a series of pop melodies perfectly designed by Ezra Koenig and his companions, an aura of incredible positivity. Vampire Weekend give their best in songs like ‘Married In a Gold Rush’ or ‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin’, which through a dialogue between various piano chords draws a line that links stories, eras and ideas, not only in music but also in politics. The key to the album is the story of a humanity that, on the brink of a catastrophe, finds the right coordinates to find itself, to be reborn.
The Vampire Weekend in each of the 18 tracks try to deconstruct, both conceptually and semantically, the idea of an end in itself chaos applied to the world. The essence of the poetic and tragic paradox of life itself is sung in ‘Harmony Hall’: “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die”.
Vampire’s songs always show an ethereal shine, this characteristic has always been fundamental for their clear and absolutely unique songwriting. The culture in which Ezra & co are immersed is a melting pot functional to the construction of a strong identity, and that in a few years has also established itself in the live dimension of the band. The album plays with the tragic and stimulating oppositions of contemporary society, confronts itself with the cultural and technological change that pushes all of us to a deeper analysis, which also touches on issues such as faith and the mystery of humanity.
Ezra Koenig is a pop-priest, but he doesn’t need to draw moral conclusions, he simply points to a new way to tell us the tales of the world.
Exactly in this set of meanings and themes moves this band that, in recent years, has shown to be a multifaceted reality but perfect.
The strength is all in the centered ability to develop a story, an idea and a vision of the world that is transformed into storytelling that speaks and is combined with the present. (GM)
Verb T & Pitch 92 ‘A Question of Time’
(High Focus)
“Grown man hip-hop in the business of casual downtime – will see off those that can’t handle ‘Time’ on their hands” – RnV Sep 19
One of the UK’s great unflinching voices – get all up in his grill and he won’t bat an eyelid, just deconstruct you with a slight shrug – teams with a producer becoming a fixture on the phones of homegrown hip-hop’s best and brightest. A muscular sound full of fluid funk melodies, dimming the lights before snapping out of it with Mobb Deep levels of hectic on ‘Frostbitten’, is glided over by modern life manifestos with the usual one-take snap that could go back to chatting at the bar at any moment. This is the 14th+ album Verb T has put his name to in a remarkably consistent run, but there’s much more to simply knowing what you’re gonna get. He won’t be starting anything stupid, but has formed yet another partnership of strong potential when in cahoots with someone who sounds like he’s tracked his partner’s every move for the whole of the noughties (also see Pitch 92’s ‘3rd Culture’ collaboration from this year). Beats and rhymes not to be questioned. (MO)
Vukovar ‘Cremator’
(Other Voices Records)
In a constant state of erratic flux, you never know which particular inception of Vukovar will show up when the time comes to laying down their brand of hermetic imbued visions for posterity, the only constant being de facto avatar, whether anyone agreed or not to this appointment, Rick Antonsson.
Suffused with disillusion, as they row across a veiled River Styx (or in this case, as alluded to in the yearning slow junk ride over the lapping black waves of tortured cries of ‘The River Of Three Crossings’, the Japanese Buddhist version of that mythological destination), Vukovar and converts add more fuel to a bonfire of vanities to an overall sound that reimagines Bernard Summer as the frontman of a Arthur Baker produced Jesus And Mary Chain.
Though always wearing their influences on their sleeves, there’s also this time around a trio of cover versions, both obvious and more obscure. These include a despondent if scuzzed growling bass with radiant synth live version of the Go-Betweens ‘Dive For Your Memory’, a cooed ethereal voiced dreamy, with phaser-effects set to stun, diaphanous vision of Psychic TV’s ‘The Orchids’, and, most poignant, a gauze-y heaven-bound ghostly homage (complete with Hebrew vocals) to the late Tel Aviv cowboy Charlie Megira, on the hymnal ‘Tomorrow’s Gone’.
Cremator is a death knell; the end of one era and setting in motion of a new chapter: whatever that ends up looking or sounding like. It just happens that they’ve bowed out in style with, perhaps, the original lineup (of a sort) most brooding masterpiece yet. Long may they continue, in one form or another. (DV)
W…………………..
White Fence ‘I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk’
The unassuming maverick artist Tim Presley paints outside the lines; his idiosyncratic applied coloring-in like a double vision of kaleidoscopic floating blurriness. Deeply felt yet softened and often languid in practice, Presley’s off-kilter musings blend lo fi psychedelia with quirky troubadour sadness, jilting punk, library music, and early analogue synthesized music, and on this latest album of sweetened, hazy malady, the Kosmische to create the most dreamy of soft bulletins.
Amorphously wafting between the bucolic and tragic psychedelic whimsy of England, the Warm Jets era of Eno, the fragility lament of Nilsson and the cerebral lurch of The Swell Maps, Richard Hell and David Byrne, Presley’s bendy vulnerabilities sound understated and lo fi but dream big. The title-track, with postmodernist élan, embodies this spirit perfectly, merging the magical if unsure twinkle of Willy Wonka with Pete Dello, Syd Barrett and a slacker Ray Davis. Suffused venerable organs, monastery-like intonations, and the lightest of washes all sit well with the gangly disjointed lolloping guitars and the woozy drug-induced new wave rock’n’roll longing of such tragic mavericks as Johnny Thunders, who Presley dreamt appeared before him, from beyond the grave, with a message of encouragement: “To be honest and simple”.
Tethering a multitude of ideas and influences to something more concrete and solid can’t have been easy, but I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk captures those blurred reimaging’s within the amorphous boundaries of a successful off-kilter album of dreamy magnificence and wonky indulgences. (DV)
Y……………………
Your Old Droog ‘Transportation’
(Mongoloid Banks)
“The smoothest source of scornful, so-what couplets and eyewitness accounts” – RnV May 19
An end of year round up in itself given that Droog release two more stellar albums within months of one another, Transportation edges out the prior It Wasn’t Even Close (though just buy both and be done with it) on account of its vaguely attached vehicular theme (see the ad campaign-in-waiting ‘Taxi’). Otherwise it’s Droog groundhog day: punchlines to pull faces to, and that ever pleasingly natural delivery that for all its cheek-pinching aggression is like a serene countryside commute, while a batch of funk, soul and psych rock rifles gambol and prance (YOD doesn’t seem to have a natural habitat beats-wise, everything’s fair game to get taken). Also housing a bunch of sampled misfits, the kind of which you’d only meet on the night train or on the highway with their thumbs out, ‘My Plane’, including the most straightforwardly effective dis on everyone, and ‘Train Love’ smooth it out with a knowing nod, still creating an expressive world as easy on the eye as the ear. (MO)
Yugen Blakrok ‘Anima Mysterium’
(IOT)
“Prophecies and riddles raining down like an RPG sherpa, where you best take the right path or else” – RnV Jan 19
Hip-hop has a long, varied and invariably inaccurate relationship with the scientific and forces of another nature. On Anima Mysterium, South Africa’s Yugen Blakrok pulls back the curtain to her own vision of Alice in Wonderland, a grimly relentless world of full moon theoreticals, secret handshakes and rune-patterned combination locks to burial ground gates. Karma is looking bad, and believable, with this one. With her expressive doom-mongering, Kanif the Jhatmaster’s 50 shades of black production is as big a trigger for imaginations running wild, leaving you fearful as to what’s not being revealed, intimation and presence of blank gaps as powerful as revealing truths by torch light. Which brings up another premise – Yugen, delivering parables like she herself is being subjected to some sort of mind control. You’ll be hard pressed to find an album from the last 12 months that sounds like anything like this one: umpteen rewinds later and you’ll still only be half way towards the truth. (MO)
Quarterly Revue Playlist 2019: Part Two: Apparat, Cairo Liberation Front, Tinariwen, Sampa The Great, Seba Kaapstad…
June 25, 2019
PLAYLIST
Compiled: Dominic Valvona/Matt Oliver
Art: Gianluigi Marsibilio
From an abundance of sources, via a myriad of social media platforms and messaging services, even accosted when buying a coffee from a barristo-musician, the Quarterly Revue is expanding constantly to accommodate a reasonable spread that best represents the Monolith Cocktail’s raison d’etre.
As you will hear for yourselves, new releases and the best of reissues plucked from the team – me, Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea, Andrew C. Kidd and Gianluigi Marsibilio (who also put together the playlist artwork) – rub shoulders in the most eclectic of playlists, with tracks as geographically different to each other as Belem and Palermo.
Digest and discover as you will, but we compile each playlist to run in order so it feels like the best uninterrupted radio show or most surprising of DJ sets.
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