Steffen Basho-Junghans Tuesday 10th November

The Rammel Club presents a night of guitar wrangling.

Steffen Basho-Junghans

The blurb says he’s a master of the six and twelve string guitar and I’m in no way going to dispute that, the last time I saw him play was at an Instal fest in Glasgow a few years ago and he had the audience eating out of his hand. When he stopped playing it was one of those rapt could-hear-a-pin-drop moments, which he duly then defused by telling us about going to see Tangerine Dream when he was a kid. This fellow has absorbed the usual Takoma influences and come out the other side with a personal style that manages to beguile and challenge in equal measures. We’re really looking forward to seeing this guy.

www.bluemomentarts.de/





Plum Slate

" Reverberant open-string/no-string improvisation for acoustic guitar." Hell, I’m not even quite sure what that means but it’s got my mid-section a-tingle already. You may recognise Stuart from such bands as Smear Campaign, Stuckometer, Barbarians and his label Total Vermin.

www.myspace.com/totalvermin


Bonsai Projects

When I first met Ali, I knew him firstly to be an extraordinary illustrator. When he popped round for a cup of tea and informed us he was going to do some music I didn’t think much of it but then he turned out to be brilliant as that as well. What a cunt eh? They say “somnambulist folk, guttural blues and comedic ramblings” and I’d probably agree. Let’s hope he plays his Shellac cover.



www.myspace.com/bonsaiprojects

Tuesday 10th November
The Chameleon
Nottingham
£6/5adv

Record covers

Picked a whole bunch of second hand records this week...This is just a handful of the album covers that i can find on the t'internet. I'll see if i can scan some of the more obscure ones in. It's a pity the Octopus LP wasn't in such great condition, that coulda paid my rent for the month, still completlely playable tho just a bit of surface crackle and the occaisonal skip. Someone has coloured the octo-girls nips in with biro.

Sister Iodine Weds 28th Nottingham

Sister Iodine (France)

Founded in the early ‘90s, Sister Iodine spurt out savage gouts of fiery, primal guitar drizzle that could be taken as no wave, free rock, or JUST VERY FUCKIN LOUD depending on how you woke up this morning. They were invited to open Sonic Youth’s "Sentational Fix" exhibition last year which might give you some idea of the primal pounding you’re gonna get from them. New recorded bumpf out on such labels as Editions Mego and Premier Sang.



Eli Keszler (USA)

From Providence, USA. Keszler uses drums, along with crotales, bells, bowed metal, strings, and amplification to create a unique whirlwind of sound that balances sparse droning harmonics with intense, fast, free rhythms. He’s played with artists such as Jandek, Phill Niblock, Roscoe Mitchell and Loren Connors to mention a few. You ain’t likely to get a second chance to see this guy.

Usurper (Scotland)

Great, skronking wasteland jams from Edinburgh. They’ve worked with Dylan Nyoukis (Blood Stereo) which only hints at the gibbering insanity that you can expect from them.

Bitumen (Nottingham)

Weds 28th October

The Chameleon

Nottingham

£6/5adv

Dennis Wheatley

THIS EDITION ISSUED BY THE BOOK CLUB.

Gary War

I've been slightly obsessed with Gary War's LPs on SHDWPLY and Sacred Bones. Slurred, narcotic pop.I'd like to interview him for the next issue but maybe he's a recluse.

Party time

Space Travel Is Boring

This will be great. A (free!)night of electronica, ambient and post rock sounds with visuals based around space travel and the moon landing. Looking forward to it.

Rashied Ali

Fuck.

Dolphins into the Future/Apalusa/Floris Vanhoof/Adam James Davis

A night of celestial ambience and drone in Nottingham. Bring yer own flotation tanks. From Belgium...

Dolphins into the Future

"A casual interweb cruiser could be forgiven for confusing Dolphins Into The Future the “band” (aka the one-man tape-loop blue-age ambient project executed by Belgian Cetacean Nation ambassador Lieven Martens) with Dolphins Into The Future the book (written by dimensional traveler Joan Ocean concerning her 20-year-long real life spirit quest to commune with a school of 200 wild Hawaiian Spinner dolphins). And, to be fair, they’re a LOT alike. Both deal heavily in trippy, drifting logics, vibrational holograms, and an overdose of psychedelic pastel artwork. But Ms. Ocean’s books are out of print so instead we have ...On Sea-Faring Isolation, Mr. Dolphin Martens’ vinyl debut under the DITF banner, after a 2-year string of increasingly blissed tapes and CDRs. Composed of three interwoven pieces per side, Isolation is one of those baffling magic eye LPs that seems to dissolve yr memory of it during the very act of listening. Turquoise webs of billowing synth smoke curl and dissipate into grey horizons of open sea field recordings. The wooden mast of a ship creaks quietly while astral bells toll away in morning fog. You are alone. This record could make a sailor homesick, and Joan Ocean weep. Beautifully composed and sequenced, with just the right amount of wobbly porpoise sonar prisms bubbling up from the deep, this LP exceeded all our expectations (and they were high). A fantastic voyage into the pan-dolphinic dawn." - Not Not Fun.



Dolphins gets a mention in David Keenan's article on hypnagogic pop in this months issue of The Wire.

Florian Vanhoof (Belgium)

Apalusa (Low Point Recordings)

"For me the obvious comparison here is some of the earlier Stars of The Lid music before they went more classical. Throbbing low end droney bass with some lush sounding feedback combine to make a really thundering warm sound. Listening to it on headphones it's proper taking me somewhere else as well which I like.... It's one of those floating in space records which you shut your eyes and imagine you're off there floating about minding your own business. Though there is a certain ominous presence on there hence me saying it veered on the dark side of things. It's fantastic though and if you're into drone music this is one of the best things I've heard in ages. Excellent!!" Norman Records.
http://www.myspace.com/apalusa

Adam James Davis

"Adam James Davis is an artist from Nottinghamshire who is inspired by the symmetries, periodicity and harmonies of our world and the greater universe, as well as by the concept of "universe as music instrument" to be harnessed by technology and innovation. Adam likes to use music as a personal expression of the euphoria gained when contemplating such said harmonies, like self-similarity, interconnectedness and superunification, as well as a metaphor for such concepts. He also thinks harmony and rhythm are one and the same."

£5
Tuesday 25th August
Chameleon, Nottingham

Cats

Dolphins into the Future and more coming up...

Ok, some details of upcoming Rammel Club gigs are emerging...

Rammel Club #7

Dolphins Into The Future (B) + Floris Vanhoof (B) + more t.b.c.Tues 25 Aug 2009



Rammel Club #8

Blues Control (USA) + Tropa Macaca (PT) + Prize Pets
Sat 05 Sep 2009





You can read a review of their latest album here


Rammel Club #9

Sister Iodine (F) + more t.b.c.
Wed 28th Oct 2009





More details etc up soon at the Rammel Club site. Plenty more exciting shit coming up soon.

Vinyl

It's been quite a good month in term of discovering booty in the charity shops and second hand record shops of Nottingham and surrounding areas. Those of you with a keen eye will notice my cat Madog's tail in the first picture. He usually likes to sit on any new vinyl purchases just to make sure.

Not pictured are the Mott the Hoople LPs, Teenage Tragedy-LP (Rhino collection of teen DEATH songs), The Sweet-Ballroom Blitz/Rock N Roll Disgrace 7", Shangri-Las-walkin' in the sand/it's easier to cry 7" and Brian Eno-the lion sleeps tonight 7" that i picked up over the weekend.

Sky Saxon R.I.P

Biographies

I have been reading a lot of biographies lately, in no particular order here are 5 that have touched me and that i recommend.

1) I'd rather be the devil- Skip James and the blues by Stephen Galt.
2) Black Sun: the brief transit and violent eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff.
3) A Magick Life:The Life of Aleister Crowley by Martin Booth.
4) The Ghastly One:The Sex-Gore Netherworld of filmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough.
5)The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer.

Actually, i've only just started that last one but it's been interesting so far so i have high hopes for it.

Molten Gods

If anyone is Nottingham this Saturday night (the 27th) and doesn't yet have crippling tinnitus then i suggest heading down to Chameleon to check out Molten Gods, Kaya King and Horacio Pollard. £3 in. It'll be fucking loud.

Listen to Liquorball

I've been listening to a lot of Liquorball lately. This is the closest i could get on yoootooob;



I hope your ears bleed.

Burial Hex live at Roadburn 2009

Here's a video of Burial Hex live at Roadburn 2009



Looking forward to seeing him at the next Rammel Club gig
Pocahaunted
Burial Hex
Sun Araw
Kogumaza

Friday 19th of June
Chameleon
Nottingham
£7/5adv (Advance tickets will be available from the Rammel Club site via paypal shortly or Anarchy Records in Nottingham.)
8pm doors/8.30pm start.

And i'll hopefully catch his set at the Equinox Festival supporting Comus. Can't wait for that, 'First Utterance' is such a strange record, probably one of the few records that actually gives me the creeps.

Burial Hex + Pocahaunted + Sun Araw poster

As usual the poster was done by Dan Ward and as usual it's mint. Bit pervy as well.

Feral Debris issue four out now!

Yup, after an interminable wait issue four is out for your perusal. Interviews with San Francisco's kings of fuzz Wooden Shjips, London's messtheticists Black Time,the blackened doom of Moss and ravaged '70s guitar monster Raven. Thomas Moronic interviews author JW Veldhoen, Chris Summerlin goes to work on the myth of Jandek and Old Uncle Rocky spews hate in your general direction. Plus record and film reviews and art from Dan Ward and G.Lansard.

The accompanying cd-r contains new and exclusive tracks from Astral Social Club, Blood!,Burd,Scarr and Broken Sleep,Homocidal Republic,Hunter Gracchus,Murder Book and Roses, Pascal Nichols, Putavegas and Slicing Grandpa. Fucked up electronics, blissed out fuzz, dislocated folk and jazz, walls of noise and crazed space punk. It's all in there baby, there's even some quiet tracks.

Photocopied to fuck. It's £3 postpaid anywhere.

Pocahaunted/Burial Hex/Sun Araw/Kogumaza

And if that wasn't enough..here's what we've got planned in June.

Pocahaunted

With new LP’s just out on Ecstatic Peace and Troubleman, Pocahaunted bring their swirling psychedelia to Nottingham. Hints of ‘80s pop, drone, tropical beats and guitar blur into a beautiful wall of sound.

“A cindering tapestry of guitar string propelled by other-worldly beats of oblivion.”
Weird Forest

“Nod-out acid rock rhythms with wordless choirs of abandon and power vocals extrapolated from hypnagogic 1980s pop.”
Volcanic Tongue

http://www.myspace.com/pocahaunted





Burial Hex

Burial Hex is Clay Ruby’s (also a member of free folk group Davenport and pagan doom unit Jex Thoth) solo project and melds the grim, frost bitten atmospherics of black metal to twisted electronica and caustic ambience. Records out on Aurora Borealis.

"OPPRESSIVE NECRO ELECTRONICS!"

“Ominous strings moan and drift, melodies abstract and spare, stretch out and sprawl like a graveyard fog. Slowly, other sounds enter the mix, percussion, rumbling drones, strange beastly growls, eventually, the tranquility is shattered by what sounds like a descent into hell, anguished wails, squalls of strings, screams and shrieks, more growling and grunting, which soon give way to an avalanche of crumbling distorted noise, feedback, and amp buzz, whirs and grinding glitch, a serious wall of intense blown out fury.“
Aquarius Records

http://www.myspace.com/burialhex

Sun Araw

Sun Araw blends the cosmic ambience of John Coltrane’s ‘Interstellar Space’ LP with the fuzzy drug riffs of Spacemen 3 into a blissful mass of ragged sound.

“A drugged out, bluesy blend of face melting drones, fuzzed out guitar riffs, and repetitive clangy rhythms. Ritualistic and somehow modern, Sun Araw walks the line between pop and drone.”
Aquarius Records



http://www.notnotfun.com/sunaraw/

KOGUMAZA

”Kogumaza are the re-united guitar section of former Nottingham band Wolves Of Greece. They combine the guitar density of Glenn Branca (whose orchestra they have both been a part of) with the heavy throb of Lungfish and the insistent rhythms of Mo Tucker, courtesy of Ms K.E.Brown on the drums, to create a swirling, spiritual murk.”

http://www.myspace.com/oogamaza
http://www.honeyisfunny.com/kogumaza/

Friday 19th of June
Chameleon
Nottingham
Not too sure of prices yet- i'll post 'em when i know for sure.

James Ferraro/P.A.R.A/Monopoly Star Searchers

Hey a little update. Just to let you know that it will be James Ferraro headlining rather than Skaters as such. Should be pretty damn cool. Here's the bumpf on his new LP on Holy Mountain;

"Clear and Discovery were originally released as two companion CDRs by James Ferraro (of the whole Skaters / Lamborghini Crystal / 90120 / Splash / Nirvana axis) and comprise the August 1974 (Taj-Mahal Travellers) of his discography. Both albums contain absolutely beautiful whirling hall-of-knives-style synth drone that makes one want to reference Klaus Schulze or Bobby Beausoleil. Clear bursts with flam beats and a cluster of melodies muffled like a calliope wrapped in a soggy tarp, while Discovery is comparable to Daft Punk's album of the same name but played in reverse at 16 rpm through a boombox in a boiler room.

These two records contain the sounds of pulling out with tapping beats of fluid dropped on a soft convertible top (open), much like those fictitious Giorgio Moroder songs for the upcoming Olympics in Atlantis or a reworking of that award-winning song from Revenge of the Nerds - or is it "Wonderwall"- into a theme for a future ski jump at the Great Pyramids. Are you ready for the lizard people to compete? Now available as mastered vinyl LPs with a digital download." - Holy Mountain.

"Ferraro creates a new age for the new agers. You know that crazy Pillsbury commercial where the dough boy lies back and drifts across this white background with ecstatic floating music sweeping him along? Well it's not far off, at least in effect. It all meets somewhere between Arvo Part, Terry Riley, and the Healing Sounds of Crystal Bowls, only as interpreted through immense draperies of washed-out production." - Ear-Conditioned Nightmare.

And here is a video of The Skaters live;



We've also added the awesome Extended Network to the bill.http://www.myspace.com/extnddntwrk

Skaters/P.A.R.A/Monopoly Star Searchers

The next Rammel Club gig...

Rammel Club 4- the poster

Aaron Dilloway, Nate Young, Mutant Ape live in Notts

Rammel Club 4

The Wolf Eyes chaps Dilloway and Young plus the force behind Turgid Animal (and Feral Debris contributor!) Mutant Ape. I suspect this might be a noisy one.

Aaron Dilloway
Nate Young
Mutant Ape

I'll post more details/poster etc when i've got them.

Weds April 8th
Chameleon
(Market Square, next to Bell Inn)
Nottingham
8pm start
£5/4 cons

An acoustic Aaron Dilloway ?!!



Nate Young solo jam

The poster

In case you are wondering our posters are designed by dan/model fighter.
You can find him here

Astral Social Club album of the month at Aquarius

Astral Social Club's new album Octuplex on VHF has been made album of the month at www.aquariusrecords.org .Don't forget you can see him and Mark Durgan play live on;

Saturday 21st of February,
Chameleon(Market Square,Nottingham, next to Bell Inn)
9pm start,10pm first band
£5/4 cons.

Here's the review in full;

ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB Octuplex (VHF)

It's a weird thing, but we've always noticed that musicians, especially avant outsider musicians (and even then ESPECIALLY metal musicians) seemed inordinately fond of electronic music. Every time a band would come in the store, they would head straight for the electronic section and end up buying a bunch of weird techno or jungle or whatever.

Which then might make it less surprising that recently some of our favorite noise makers seem to be heading in that direction with their own music. Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel is gone, and in its place, Our Love Will Destroy The World, whose first record was indeed some bastardized dance music, a strange hybrid of blurred buzzy drone music, and thumping club jamz. Similarly, Neil Campbell, aka Astral Social Club has been peppering his recent record with similarly club worthy jamz, but again, those sounds still soaked in the same sort of blissed out psychedelic ambience that most people associate with his Astral Social Club.

For this latest full length, Campbell once again starts things off with a track that would almost sound more at home on Planet Mu than VHF. A skittery bloopfest, with a thick grinding synth bass line, and bloopy bleepy beats, but all wreathed in processed guitars and blurred soft focus buzz, which leads right into the second track, still electronic, but not actually danceable, it sounded more like a club jam on 45, the beats stumbling over one another, like a jumbled, almost hyper speed Pierre Bastien, a million little mechanical men, spewing a symphony of clicks and bleeps and loops, all wound around buried melodies and long thick streaks of hiss and fuzz.

We kept expecting things to switch gears, and for the sound to gradually bliss out into the more 'traditional' ASC sound, long form ur-drones more along the lines of Sunroof! or Skullflower, but most of us were hoping just the opposite, that maybe he'd push further, take ASC somewhere no band like that had really felt at home, the dancefloor, albeit, some strange seriously fucked up and drug addled ALIEN dancefloor. And so he has, for the most part. The first half of the record is indeed, all fractured beats, and warped loops, woozy tripped out grooves, effects swirling and whirling everywhere, the beats playful and not quite funky, stuttery skittery, and seriously fun. This is the kind of stuff that just might lure the perpetual wallflowers out onto that dancefloor.

BUT!!! Hidden between the opening salvo of beats and loops, and the closing outer space house jam, lurks some of the prettiest droned out ambience we've heard from ASC. Processed glitchery, smeared into grainy expanses of glistening blur and shimmery starburst, draped with delicate melodies, gradually growing into a glorious wall of warm fuzz, super thick grinding buzz, smoothed into hypnotic loops and pulsing soundscapes, a more caffeinated Tim Hecker, gauzy and washed out but propulsive and kinetic, glorious sun baked upper register blow outs, wrapped around crystalline acoustic guitars, all woven into a wheezing heaving whole, some sort of super abstract avant garde raga, and finally, a brief but fantastical tangle of crunch and buzz, off hiss and glitch, warped melodies and damaged arrangements, lo-fi tape hiss slithers beneath stuttering chopped up samples, again all blurred into something dreamlike and bleary eyed. WOW.

It all might seem a little schizophrenic, and it is, but it's also the best of both worlds, and the key being that the more beat oriented tracks, are still able to function like the more ambient drone based sounds, if you're laying in the dark, headphones strapped on, those beats might not induce you to shake your tail feathers, but they'll still be able to suck you under, to transport you to some crazed soundworld, to totally mesmerize and hypnotize, which makes the whole record either the weirdest most fucked up electronic dance record EVER, or quite possibly just the best Astral Social Club release so far. Maybe both...

You can read the Feral Debris review of the album in a few weeks, the fourth issue is nearly done- just waiting to take it to the printers!

RIP Lux Interior

Mark Durgan and Astral Social Club

Ok, Rammel Club number three is on it's way.

Mark Durgan

Mark Durgan will be performing two sets, one more noise based as Putrifier and one of ‘industrial psychedelia’ under his own name.

“For the past twenty years, Mark Durgan, known under the Putrefier moniker and his label Birthbiter (1986), is one of the few genuinely curious anomalies operating today. Disassociated with a lot of noise, he is more of a true outsider of this scene, somewhat akin to the older sound poets.”
Volcanic Tongue

He has just released a cracking new LP under his own name on Family Battle Snake's new label Pan Records.


Astral Social Club

Featuring Neil Campbell (ex-Vibracathedral Orchestra) and John Clyde-Evans (aka Tirath Singh Nirmala). Recent LP ‘Plug music Ramoon’ provided “sonic explosions and two looooong journeys to sustained ecstasy combining percussive sticks and bells, resonant electronics, keyboard odysseys and some experimental vocal work from helmsman Campbell.”Expect throbbing electronic minimalism, psychedelic drones and pounding krautrock rhythms.


Burd & Scarr

Ghostly, industrial ambience from Nottingham duo.

Plus DJ's until 2am (including me and Steve Harbinger Sound).

Saturday 21st of February
Chameleon
(Market Square, next to Bell Inn)
9pm start, 10pm first band
£5/4 cons

If you fancy going to see The Lords play first at The Arts Organisation then they'll be selling a combination ticket at a cost of £7 will which get you into both gigs. More info on that soon.

The Monks

I could be here all day, i can't wait to see Transatlantic Feedback

Tell it like it is man...

Thanks to all who came to the Emeralds gig the other night. Special thanks to all the bands and individuals who played. Great stuff.

Emeralds and Birds Of Delay

Here's the poster for the next Rammel club night. Hope you can make it.