Upwards At 45 Degrees
Discussing music discovery pre-streaming , even pre-internet, its easy to sound like some ancient explorer describing a primitive civilisation. We so take for granted the ability to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want that it now feels like a human right. In the early nineties finding out about records was simple enough but actually hearing them was a different matter, unless they were playing it on the radio, you were seeing a band live or you knew someone with a copy it was nigh on impossible to hear the music. So knowing someone with an amazing record collection was important. For me I was lucky enough to have a friend in Simon Williams . He was in about 10 bands at any one time like Chug, The Colgates and Pimp and he had the biggest, bestest vinyl collection in the whole of Telford. He introduced me to the likes of Throbbing Gristle , Big Black, Negativland and Sexton Ming, there was a rumour he had even met Bill Childish. He is the person responsible for my enduring love of the album Jehovahkill by Julian Cope. In the summer of 1993 we would frequently go on Cope pilgrimages , we travelled to the Alvecote slag heap where Cope was photographed wearing only a Turtle shell for the cover of Fried and we visited Avebury in the vain hope we’d encounter the Arch-Drude in the shadows of Silbury Hill. The journey always sound-tracked by this album.
Cope’s Notes 6 - Jehovahkill is the latest of Julian Cope’s occasional booklets/demo collections exploring his back catalogue. Cope paints a vivid picture of his life at the time of writing Jehovahkill ; an expectant father with a burgeoning passion for Scalextric and Krautrock and a habit of unwanted astral travelling. To return to the importance of owning records, when Cope discusses the contribution of his band mates and crew it is not just their musical talents that shaped this album but more importantly the contents of their collections. He says the album really started to take shape when guitar tech Rizla Deutsch showed the rest of the band a tape of rare Klaus Schulze recordings called Elektronik-Impressionen . He later discusses the impact of hearing Spat Europa by Asmus Tietchens and how that record came to inspire the drumming on the album “this was precisely the direction I wanted - wanton, edge-of-losing-it stuff”. In itself, a pretty neat description of this one-of-a-kind record.
Jehovahkill had a complicated birth, rejected multiple times by its A&R , infinitely remixed and delivered massively over budget. To hear it now it doesn’t sound like it could possibly have come out of a major label system, and so it came to be the last album Cope released on Island who dropped him shortly after its release. Cope was briefly signed to the Echo label in the mid nineties but for almost 30 years now has been self-releasing, un-encumbered by A&R input on his own Head Heritage label. Part of me wishes he would work with a label once again, he’d certainly benefit from the promotion . I would love to see him on the Today show, Graham Norton, Great British Bake-Off. Not to be laughed at and othered but because his ideas need to be exposed to more than the existing circle of fans. Likewise, as much as the occasional Cope’s Notes collections are essential for fans, they’re not quite the detailed follow-up to Head-On/Repossessed i’ve been waiting on for decades, in my head that would be the publishing event of the year.
Violent Magic Orchestra
Metal is best when its played agonisingly slow or recklessly fast. Watching Sunn 0))) (whose album White 1 Julian Cope guested on) at the Barbican in April the music they made that night felt inevitable, it sounded like their amps were designed only to make music that funereal. Violent Magic Orchestra feel equally as inevitable all be it at the opposite end of the slow/fast Metal spectrum. VMO are a Japanese band who attempt to smash together peak happy hardcore with the language and feel of Norwegian Black Metal (of course). Their second album Death Rave was released this year on the Never Sleep label, it regularly tops 170 bpm. I imagine it is the first and last album to feature both Gabber Eleganza and Mayhem’s Attila Csihar. I don’t know if it says more about the versatility of Metal or ‘Dance Music’ but both Sunn 0))) and VMO are both culturally Metal bands whose music shares more in common with electronic music than anything else , in Sunn 0)))’s case Ambient/Drone and with VMO Gabber . VMO are definitely engineered to be experienced live, there is quite often so much stimuli coming from the stage I found myself involuntarily laughing. The strongest possible recommendation from me.