The Stone Roses reunited in 2011. Photo from stoneroses.org

An announcement made this week revealed that a long awaited, much disclaimed rumour has finally seen the light – the return of messyrs Brown and Squire along with Mani and Reni to boot.

After years of throwing to-the-grave insults at one another while Mani has been going around as a Mother Teresa type figure between camps trying to patch it all up again The Stone Roses have decided to call it quits and pick up the phone.

This news is not difficult to accept when put in its context. John Squire’s career as a visual artist has hardly ignited the world, despite some inspired Middle Eastern-style patterns on canvas shown at a recent East London exhibition, while The Seahorses disappeared into 90s mediocrity before you could work out any of the Roses related anagrams of their name – in the same way that the Stone Roses might have gone if they had continued on their slippery slope after 1995. Mani can’t really be expected to pay the mortgage as a bit-part bass man in Primal Scream and he has been one of the biggest driving forces in rallying his old band back together. And what happened to Reni? I can’t see him living out the rest of his life in a council flat in Salford, bequeathing a dusty scrapbook of pictures and NME awards on the mantelpiece to his grandchildren. Ian Brown of course has molded himself a successful solo career playing his former group’s Greatest Hits at his shows and tatttooing the three stripes of Adidas into the minds of a young generation unwillingly caught up in the decaying hype of Roses mania.  Yet it wouldn’t surprise me if he ever considered remitting his differences with his old band mates before while still playing encores of I Am The Resurrection.

An outsider of the music business for over a decade, Squire has been nonchalant towards the subject of the past at the best of times, recently declaring that “music is for young people”. So why should they risk diluting their legacy of energy and attitude inspired by The Clash and acid-house for a big pay off? Maybe there’s some unfinished business there after all. But it’s probably more to do with money. The number of pedestals their first album has been placed on has made it near impossible to avoid. The Stone Roses now have to accept that it is something they’re stuck with for the rest of their lives.

Many bands from that era have already reformed after long or short break-ups: The Verve, Blur, Pulp, The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine and Chapterhouse (not counting untold more) all made brief appearances so the timing is right then for the Mancunian outfit to reunite. Even after selling hundreds of thousands of albums in the nineties and headlining Reading that isn’t enough to sustain a musician some fifteen years later. The tough times of the recession have seen former band mates now more willing than ever to put their differences aside to pay the bills. The serious drug problems are now a thing of the past (can’t afford it anymore). The guitarist was only joking when he said he would never work with the talentless f****** c*** again. Oh look we’re popular in Japan now, thanks internet. The way things are looking at the moment The Smiths will no doubt be next on the list of big reunions.

The music industry is just as responsible for these reunions as it desperately seeks ways to make money, partly due to the sinking ship scenario which some believe the internet is accountable for, so a rising demand for a nostalgia circus seems to fit the bill. “We are running desperately low on talented new acts and we need some entertainment to fill the arena domes. Bring back that band from the eighties, the one with those vibrant young female backing singers, maraca player who handed out ecstasy to the crowd and a free styling rapper on stage. (Do you want to..?) No, we just want the band, thank you.”

For the right money you can get whoever you want to play whatever you want almost exactly as they did in the first place. Even the haircuts have survived intact apart from Mani’s shocking ponytail. Seeing the band rattle through their classics will no doubt be an opportunity for the younger fans to see what they’ve only heard about in legend and older heads to take pills for the first time in over a decade. But this time with old sagging faces playing the songs like they were supposed to sound back in the day. John Squire now looks a dead ringer for Dot Cotton and Ian Brown has and always will sound like a concrete mixer. The fact that these groups seem to fit in with so seamlessly with today’s music scene sadly says much about how far it has progressed since the early 90s as it does about our want it all-want it now greed culture and obsession with the past. None of the reformed groups mentioned above have so far taken any serious steps towards making new records (bar The Verve) so it doesn’t exactly inspire anything other than a marketing opportunity – a day out in Hyde park to coincide with a singles compilation. But most importantly – where are the acts that are breaking through now? The ones who today’s generation of fans will care enough about in 20 years time to demand tours. Maybe they’ve already been curtailed by the amount of attention directed towards the past.

Photos of A Place To Bury Strangers backstage/gig in Paris, 2011 by Patricia Falchi for Echo Magazine

IN July 2011 Echo Magazine’s editor Alex Hancock conducted an interview with A Place To Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann at their home studio in Brooklyn. The vocalist and guitarist spoke among other things about his interminable love affair with the city, the band’s notoriously frenetic live shows and his penchant for setting amplifiers on fire. In the interview he also revealed the plans for the group’s upcoming third album and gave the low down on their split from a well-known label.

Part 1: Get on the Train

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds” - Arthur Miller, Death of A Salesman

Exiting the subway wiping off the drips of sweat running down from my forehead to nose I step out into the typically morbid humidity of a New York summer evening. The atmosphere comes dense and clinging. I walk through the blocks on Williamsburg’s South Side moving hastily along under the overpass into the neighbourhood’s alleyways, observing children’s tricycles left abandoned in the road, curbside hustlers leaning in through car windows to talk business, old women hunched and weather beaten pushing trolley carts full of worn pieces of curtain fabric material slowly towards the warm scent of laundry. The shouts of a young couple heard and then seen through an open apartment window with their hands and fingernails raised at each other. Greased-up men wearing narrow vests and drinking warm brown beer from thin brown paper bags play card games outside on the iron steps kept radiated by the solar warmth. A sign that reads ‘No Soliciting’ hangs loosely above their wares spread out in front of them on a rug – bathroom appliances, frying pans, children’s clothes, antique books about medicine and novels in Spanish, each object from the dismantled pieces of people’s households. A cop car siren rings in the distance and fades into the relentless, humming ambience of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, which washes out across the East River twenty four hours a day.

I then reach the heights of Williamsburg’s urban cool, graffiti chasing the brick walls and former industrial buildings out of sight, art studios, yoga and pilates classes popping-up behind former shop fronts, hip cafés full of poets and writers scrambling notes together at vintage typewriters, dazzling eateries serving heart of palm and other procured exotic delicacies atop wooden bar tables beyond capacity and photo booths tucked into every available enclosed space now canvasses for straying marker pens or stencils. Warehouses opening their doors to gigs of dangerously passé synthesizer lounge-pop for half-interested audiences, their brows disguised by lensless spectacles verging on self-parody. You wouldn’t think that this thriving area of gentrification, comfortably middle-class, would also be home to one of the most destructive and unscrupulous bands of the last decade.

I arrive at the door of a warehouse, the last building on S 2nd street before a derelict sugar refinery building looming sideways and angled outwards like a broken industrial age dinosaur cuts it off from the Demerara coloured river.  A great metal shutter for trucks, seeming out of proportion beside the smaller human entry-door, stands imposingly against the front of the building. I check the address with a couple of plaid-shirted scenesters walking towards a bar on the opposite side of the street to make sure that this is the right one. Fixed onto the wall a buzzer with no name on it offers a null invitation. The door swoops open before I even get a chance to ring it. “Hi there. Is this Death By Audio? I’m here to see Oliver Ackermann.”

“Come on in,” a girl replies casually from inside “It’s through the doorway at the end of the corridor.” I thank her and step into the hallway. The clinical ceiling, walls and floor, each white, give it the disinfected charm of quarantine in a laboratory. Following the laser of burning strip lights along to the end of the corridor and through the doorway I’m confronted by what looks like an apocalyptic hideout bunker – it reminds me of the sci-fi hover ship interior in The Matrix. A wall of bicycles and mechanical parts stretches out in a long chain to my left, paired up, a couple of battered leather couches draw the eye away from the dusty concrete floor and a small utility kitchen sets itself away in the corner. The space is not so much a habitat for artists but a passageway through the jungle with cables hanging like creeper vines from branch-like brackets, a large net drooping from the ceiling for catching falling objects or people from the mezzanine level. Dominating the centre of the overgrown room is a heaped graveyard of used guitar amplifiers, some cut through the middle, their canvas screens torn and sagging like sad wrecks of mutated plastic and metal. The luxuries of comfortable living here are kept to a survivalist’s minimum.

Peering around a corner to the right is a small monitor room with a glass window through to the adjacent studio. Oliver is sitting back in a leather office chair, the others stand behind, one resting his arm over the back of the chair and pointing at something on the computer screen who I recognize as Dion Lunadon – the band’s gritty bass player. The other one looks familiar but turns out to be a Travis, frontman of the band Grooms, who I’ve never met before. Oliver spins around in the chair to face me and after a delayed moment of recognition enthusiastically sweeps up onto his feet with a look of joyful excitement on his face, “Hey man! Yeah I know you! You’ve been around for a few years now! How you doin?”

The warm welcome lasted for minutes as he quickly showed me around the headquarters – studio, living space, music venue and pedal workshop next door where the reputable Death By Audio effects units (used by a full classroom of rock’s most famous guitarists) are designed, tested and hand-built by Oliver and co.

It was too fast paced an introduction for me to take in, and one which went hand in hand with their jagged reputation for hyper-intensity and unpredictability. In contrast my jet-lagged brain, having arrived on a cross-Atlantic flight the day before, had spent the last 6 hours being dragged around Manhattan cooking in the heat and was beyond any kind of preparation. “You have a great set up here. I wish I’d brought a camera with me.” – “Hey! Yeah! Wow no worries man. We’ve got a camera you can use. Hey Dion, where’s the camera?”

When the mini-tour was completed I gulp down a whole bottle of water to refill my dehydrated body and instantly feel the thirst again. “Hey do you want anything to drink?” Oliver asks politely “Yeah, I could do with a cup of tea.” But there doesn’t appear to be any tea or even a kettle. Hoping he would offer me a beer instead, we sit down on one of the worn-out couches empty handed. After a brief catch up I take a cigarette from him and start the tape rolling.

Oliver sits back relaxed with his arms outstretched. Wearing a strikingly eccentric look of late – a tremendously bushy moustache in combination with a squirrel-tail mullet – much different from his usual flopped-over mop of brown hair, he still retains his characteristically chirpy and excited teenage-lad mannerisms beneath the vast growth of his facial hair, itself a nod to Stalin. He answers my questions with the composed reactions of a man who plays with pit vipers for a living and seems to know what to say before I even ask. I start again from the beginning as my exhausted brain begins to slowly shut down. “So.. err.. tell me about New York.”

Part 2: All Tomorrow’s Parties

“I think there are still a lot of places you can go with a guitar” - Kevin Shields at APTBS gig in 2009.

My route into the world of A Place To Bury Strangers originally came by Myspace back when it was still a popular, functional and relatively painless way of listening to music from new and unsigned bands. The first track to appear on the playlist button happened to be just the kind of mind-erasing, violently ecstatic music that had appealed to me after I first cut my teeth on My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno’s no-wave punk compilation No New York. To Fix The Gash In Your Head’s jittering drum patterns, stunningly fierce textures and distant monotone vocals compressed under walls of high-gain fuzz and nerve scraping distortion were constant personal bliss. When I later played it at clubs and parties it cleared the dance floor like a swarm of wasps.

It was a fender bending work of outsider art, a third generation take on the pop formulae bent by the Ramones, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Joy Division. While the raucous energy of The Velvet Underground’s European Son, noise rock still in its raw primitive and embryonic stages, The JAMC’s Upside Down, the feedback-laden debut single that the Reid brothers thought would turn them into an overnight pop sensation, and the dissonant slam, right-up-to the catastrophic descent into weightlessness, of My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise, all mashed the boundaries of the avant-garde and rock ‘n’ roll into a shape which paved the way for this band to exist, A Place To Bury Strangers dared to push beyond the limits that rock music had been previously.

“On the first album almost all of the songs were like demos” he notes, astutely downplaying their self-titled, DIY debut released on indie-label Killer Pimp. Yet all of their material since has shared with it a predilection for pop melody crushed under the enormous weight of skyscraper-depth noise, mostly down to Oliver’s fixation with distortion and building his own effects. His preliminary band Skywave were just as impressive in that respect but he hasn’t looked back since forming A Place To Bury Strangers in 2004 after moving to the Big Apple from the small town of Fredericksburg, Virginia – where, he says, “Making music was something I did to fight against the boredom of suburban life”.

The forward-going momentum, changing fronts of development and the speed, pressure and restlessness of which New York is famous for seem to be synchronized with the front man’s personality. He talks about the city as home and inspiration, the perfect place for him to start a band like A Place To Bury Strangers. “Even before I came here I wanted to make big music, stuff that was off-the chain. Then I moved to New York and it had that in magnitude. The intensity, the skyscrapers, the fast living, the hugeness of it all. All those things that attracted me to the city.”

In their early days the band received the accolade “the loudest band in New York”, something which Oliver has since publicly shown contempt towards. Whether it was originally coined by a lazy journalist or by the band’s agent, it has effectively obstructed almost everything that has been written about them since. By taking it for granted or at least trying to prove it otherwise, journalists have continued to fall into the trap of pigeonholing the band as just that. In reality it’s a claim which is highly likely to be true but it says as much about them as “the noisiest band in Brooklyn”, which is probably more accurate. It’s something however, which the band is unlikely to lose any sleep over – their live performances fully outweigh that slogan.

Part 3: Lose Your Mind

“For some performances, blinding Halogen lamps were pointed at the crowd, [or] at others strobes flashed constantly and a huge wall of mirrors at the rear of the stage forced the audience to confront themselves.” – Journalist on Throbbing Gristle concerts in the 1980s.

The first time I saw A Place To Bury Strangers, a multi-syllabic mouthful to this day, there being no abbreviated forms that do it justice, was in a former morgue, fittingly freezing cold and sparse. At every show since I’ve witnessed a highly volatile fusion of unstable and antagonistic energy on stage. Everything is thrown in the faces of a usually tense and standoffish audience, who either capitulate in violently tempered manoeuvers in the dark or stand there dazed and motionless for an hour like a mass congregation of depleted souls.

The intensity is taken up a notch by their disorientating visual stage effects – refrigerator-size dry ice machines, which pump out enough smoke to fill a venue in minutes and epilepsy-inducing strobe lights that make their gigs a heavily tripped-out, hallucinatory experience even without drugs. Depending on the band’s mood or the patience level of the sound engineer, the audio mix ranges from a bass heavy dancehall sound to a bright, refined Fender amp punch. During other times, particularly at festivals or venues with poor systems, it can just be an assault on the ears for 40 minutes. Their unpredictable nature has been observed between two shows in the space of less than a week.

“We set it up in such a way that you’re not exactly sure what’s gonna happen. Sometimes it may take you some place you’re not expecting to, or we’ll blow an amp up and all of a sudden you better be ready to think of something to make it sound cool. You have to be quick on your toes.” Oliver explains. I ask him if he can hear what the rest of the band are playing through the massive sound debris and whether this isolates him from the music at times, “We try and make things more and more blurry. It even gets to where there’s a sound within sound. I hardly use the monitors and sometimes the sound man will get pissed off so I’m having to keep a close ear on things all the time. But I can definitely hear what’s happening in there.”

And then there are the on-stage theatrics – a band manager’s worst nightmare. Towards the end of a set he might wildly swing his guitar around by the strap over his head and then drag its corpse into the backline, deliberately snap through the remaining strings on its neck before scraping them up-and-down against the pickups, or force the vocal microphones up against the speakers of his amplifier and strike the snarling, broken and neglected guitar into emitting a wail of terrifying ear canal blistering feedback.

Despite the seemingly high degree of chaos and the loose cannon feel to their gigs, there have not yet been any serious accidents. The guitarist revealed that his actions are a more calculated risk than you would think. “There’s never a moment when it gets beyond my control. Even if I throw an amp through the air, I don’t want to kill or hurt somebody. I’m aware of what’s around me so I know where that’s going.”

For a band whose reputation for high energy and high cost gigs proceeds them (they recently had to pay out to a festival for allegedly breaking some equipment, which Oliver claims to be bullshit) they have played a daunting number of shows each year for the past four or five consecutive years. Now reaching his mid-thirties, Ackermann no longer drinks but still smokes regularly and is only too aware of the burnout from enduring a rigorous touring schedule. “We did the US for 6 weeks and the Europe for 5 weeks. No breaks. You lose your mind a little bit. You go everyplace and everybody wants to party with you like it’s the end of the world – when you’ve been partying like that for the past 3 months!”

Part 4: Departure

“Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?” - John Cage

The band’s second album Exploding Head was released on Mute, but even a label with a heritage spanning from Fad Gadget to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Oliver incidentally remixed a track for Nick Cave’s Grinderman) wasn’t able to tame them for long. Both band and label have since gone their separate ways. Oliver gave me the low down on how things eventually derailed. “They’re a massive label with a great history and everything but they’re still kinda old school in a way. They weren’t really thinking like we were in terms of moving forward so it was disappointing.”

With his effects company recently breaking a distribution deal with a national music retailer in the US and a new label Dead Oceans set to release their third album, things are looking like spring on the horizon for the unashamedly driven frontman. Ackerman is currently working on their next record with the group’s new member Dion Lunadon, previously from New Zealand. Dion joined after former bassist Jon Mofo left in 2010 to spend more time with his family (he has now opened up a bar in Manhattan’s Lower East Side) and Oliver was quick to make clear that there was not a drop of bad blood over his decision to depart. On the arrival of the bassist he admits to a change in the group’s approach to making music: “Dion and me have been writing most of the songs together. In a way it changes what the band is. It’s the same aesthetic but obviously it has made things different and they need to be adapted.”

The frontman explains that on this record he’s interested in experimenting with what an amp sounds like when it’s being thrown across a room – hence the rope safety net suspended from the first floor of the warehouse. “It’s the craziest stuff we’ve ever made before. We’re recording with really weird techniques and doing stuff just for the fuck of it – capturing what it sounds like to be playing guitar through an amp on fire, playing guitar underwater, or playing drums in the back of someone’s van.” His logic is simple: “When you’re playing guitar and the amp is on fire then you better play! You’ve only got one shot to get it right. It sparks that bit of energy that you lose when you record digitally. We want to recreate the buzz you get hearing a Ramones single for the first time so we’re going to try to combine the craziness our first record with the hi-fi of the second.”

Interview by Alex Hancock

Echo Magazine uncovered Mama Rosin’s singer/guitarist Robin Girod and accordian player Cyril Yeterian outside a pub venue in London’s Barbican on the first launch night of their latest album – a split-collaboration with garage rockers Hipbone Slim & The Knee Tremblers. The band recently debuted on Jools Holland with their mix of rash, energetic tropical roots music and gypsy punk. After an energetic set that got the room shaking and audience foot-stomping while the band two-stepped around them, they spoke about their influences from Mississippi blues to tropical and cajun music, their plans for the future and going from the strange to the bizarre with the figures involved on their record label.

How did your collaboration with Hipbone Slim & The Knee Tremblers come about?

We are both from the same label. We played together at a very strange blues festival in France and we decided to play together at the end of our show and smashed the room up. Then we thought – ‘we have to record that’.

How would you describe your music to people who have never heard it before?

We like to call it tropical-psychedelica. The drummer uses a tropical rhythms and we use a lot of reverb. There’s always repetition and sometimes we’ll have some songs that are 10-minutes long. With the accordion and the melodies we try to have something of the Caribbean in there. We like the exotic style of calypso – we are not a political band but we are sensitive to the energy and the passion in the hard political content of early calypso, blues and Cajun music. It’s all about the inner fire.

You appeared on Jools Holland last year and since then you’ve been busy touring across the continent.  What are your plans after?

We are going to play some festivals this summer and we have a lot of gigs lined up. There will also be a Voodoo Rhythm night at the Lexington in October with Hipbone Slim, ourselves and The Monsters – one of the best fucking garage punk bands in the world. We have seem them and we can assure you that. Cyril is going to become a father in autumn so we are trying to play as many shows as possible before then.

I’ve heard your label mentioned a lot recently but who runs it?

It’s called Voodoo Rhythm and it’s founded by a guy called Reverend Beat-Man. They are principally interested in the garage, blues, trash, rock n roll. It’s one of the best labels in Switzerland – they have around 40 bands from all around the world. Our favourites are Roy & The Devil’s Motorcycle, The Monsters, Bob Log III, a band from Spain called Wau y Los Arrrghs!!! who are now on Slovenly records, The Dead Brothers and The Come ‘n’  Gos.

Can you tell me more about this Reverend Beat-Man character?

He is a very good father for his son and for his bands. We really like him although he’s a man of two faces. He became famous for a project where they put a boxing ring on stage and then  fight while playing music. It was really weird and violent. He toured around the world but stopped because he broke his back. That was more than 10 years ago.  These days he runs the label and plays solo concerts.

I heard that you guys have started putting out other people’s records now.

Yes we have our own label, Moi J’Connais, which is influenced by Voodoo Rhythm, Honest Jon’s and Mississippi Records. We were inspired at first by the Sonic Boom compilation Spacelines, and then decided to make a compilation of our personal influences to explain to people why we play the music we play. We like music from all over the world and too much of it has not been re-released on vinyl. So we decided to reissue some really obscure, old stuff,  rock ’n’ roll, calypso, Cajun, zydeco music and we also release 10” records for new bands. We reissued a record by Blind Blake, a blues/calypso singer from the Bahamas, who inspired a lot of people from Johnny Cash to the Beach Boys. He played in a hotel for American tourists so he changed his music to a bit more jazzy which was incredible. We met somebody in France who flew over to the Bahamas to track down the tapes and we released the on CD and LP. We are proud to have him on our label.

Following their sensational burst onto television screens worldwide the exotic Switzerland-based outfit are now expected to be working with Jon Spencer on their next album.

Reverend Beat-Man, Hipbone Slim & The Knee Tremblers, Mama Rosin, DJ Lucador and The Monsters are playing at The Lexington on October 29th.

Alan Mcgee at EVOL 191. Photography: Pete Dunlop / Flickr

Review by Andy Nisbet

“The Creation Records story is about the death of the independent” laments Bobby Gillespie, frontman of Primal Scream and former drummer of The Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s an observation that not only draws a conclusion to the story of Creation – the former independent label founded by agent provocateur Alan McGee – but one that also offers a diagnostic on the relationships of those involved.  As one of the key players throughout the Creation story, Gillespie’s comment is perhaps an unfair summary to afford the label and belies the true extent of the legacy that the independent has left.

Danny O’Connor’s documentary chronicles the label and its founding figures, from its post-punk Glaswegian conception through to its Britpop zenith and eventual capitulation at the turn of the century, scraping below the surface to produce an intrinsic look at the characters that made the label tick.

Featuring retrospectives from McGee, Creation artists, as well as those worked behind the scenes, Upside Down is a candid account that a simple eulogy to the label’s stars would have missed. It’s a great sub-plot to the story of the influential label, which had a roster that read like the blue print of the who’s-who in British music during the 80s and 90s. The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Ride, Super Furry Animals and, of course, Oasis all played their parts in a success story that lasted nearly two decades, with a ripple effect that is still being felt in today’s bands.

O’Connor splices retrospective film with interviews from those on the frontline there to tell the stories of the bands. Like last years’ People are Strange (The Doors documentary), there is a veritable treasure trove of archive footage some of which has been buried deep within the Creation vaults for nigh on quarter of a century.  The depth of film, ranging from Jesus and Mary Chain post-show riots to the Oasis super-gigs at Knebworth captures pivotal moments in British music in an open and honest light.  While the story may have ended somewhat unseemly over a decade ago, the legend lives on – and as if to emphasise this, BP Fallon is brilliantly cast as a rock ‘n’ roll sage throughout the documentary.

Upside Down is an impossible tale to tell without Alan McGee leading the narrative and, O’Connor’s succinct blending of testimonies from those who know him best delivers a warts ‘n’ all portrayal of the label boss. While some of McGee’s posturing (particularly in his early interviews) can seem like the contrived behavior of a narcissist, the diminutive Glaswegian was a master at the playing the game.  McGee’s greatest strength was knowing when and how to throw himself on to the frontline and, in much the same way as Andrew Loog Oldham and Malcolm McLaren before him, he blurred the lines between label/manager and artist. Upside Down is in itself a timely reminder (if one was needed) of the soundtrack they provided for a generation.

Review by Matthew Mowatt – Nouveau Casino, Paris – Aug 24th, 2011

There’s that age-old argument between music snobs and critics alike: Are you more of a live music person or a studio produced type? This question may not apply to many bands (because they are horrible in any way one listens to them), but it does to important ones – I’ve heard some stories about live Dylan (fans have been complaining for years regardless whether he plugged in or not). The fact is that, after listening to all five of White Denim’s albums, I was feeling quite hesitant to watch them live – “They sound like a mix of a lot of other bands that I wouldn’t like to see on stage.” How wrong I was to have told myself this.

As I arrived to the Nouveau Casino, the Royal Bangs had already blasted off. Despite the fact that there weren’t very many people during their set, front man Ryan Shaefer was giving it his all with equally energetic backup from drummer Chris Rusk and guitarist Sam Stratton. By nearly the end of their set, the crowd swelled and the prospects were looking good. The Royal Bangs finished, well, with a bang, leaving a thirsty bunch of fans giddy with anticipation.

There was little intermission between sets as White Denim took nearly no time setting up. At first, when I saw bassist Steven Terebecki, I thought he was some nerd-attempting-hipster roadie who, awkwardly positioned at center stage, was doing a sound-check for the real bassist. In fact, the staging of the band took me off guard completely as Terebecki stayed center stage on bass and singer/guitarist James Petralli hid away at stage left, leaving drummer Joshua Block and guitarist Austin Jenkins to form a kind of separated duo on stage right/back. Seeing this, looking at the distinct style of each member (not only in clothing but attitude) I knew that I was in for something unexpected. Terebecki took the band forward in what I correctly guessed seconds later as the opening to The Doors “This is the End”, only to quickly morph into one of their own songs before I knew what had happened. It gave me this whiplash effect of the ears, second guessing myself throughout long solos from both Petralli and Jenkins. This effect was played a few times, or so I thought, as Jenkins hammered-on an AC/DC “Thunderstruck” while jumping into “Let’s Talk About It”, arguably their best-known tune. The band became more of a biological experiment in sound, subtly and quickly mixing in familiar tunes (as an homage, perhaps?) only to bury them with their own jamming, riffing and rocking – did I just hear Boston “More than a Feeling”? Maybe, but I’m not sure. Now I hear “Shake Shake Shake”. And I don’t recall them ever stopping between songs, giving the entire hour-long set a feeling of some super sound organism of absolute rock. The chemistry (pun welcomed) between Block, Jenkins and Petralli was something I’ve hardly seen at live shows: they shot out smiles and nods to each other, communicating with gestures and sounds, giving an air of “this could possibly be our best show ever” attitude, and I sensed no deception behind this, while Petralli, standing in a darker part of the stage, occasionally smirked with the rest of the guys, but kept humbly quiet (except for the singing, of course) on his side. No surprise that White Denim appropriately titled one of their albums Workout Holiday, because this is what they were having in front of me.

So, after an encore, which was lengthy and subdued, calming a juiced-up audience, the argument no longer remains for White Denim for that small pocket of music snobs (some of who were, after the show, imitating the finger-stretched gymnastics of Terebecki, others talking about the references the band had made during their splicing and hybridizing of familiar tunes into their own Joycean progressive rock novel). If you’re a fan of White Denim’s studio albums, then their live music will make you a loyal fan for life.

The Telescopes live (present line-up), Photo by Julie R Kane

“The Telescopes sound is one that commandeers the stomach as an additional bass amplifier, and then insinuates its way up the throat and into the cerebral cortex.”

The Telescopes – Live Aftertaste [Static Charge]

Review by Benjamin Halligan

Is it their aesthetic consistency that has given rise to ways in which The Telescopes have been propelled through the most mutually incompatible series of places? It is a trajectory that runs from the Top Forty (during the early 1990s, when their music was associated with the modish British shoegaze scene, and championed by indie music writers accordingly) to the present underground (multimedia noise gigs in upstairs pub rooms in the urban hinterlands of Northern England, self-released drone and feedback recordings). There has been no resurgence from or for The Telescopes as they’ve never really gone away – although they have shape-shifted (a stream of personnel across nearly quarter of a century, and their incorporation, at times, of other groups, but with Stephen Lawrie remaining the one constant presence), absented themselves for periods, and employed other names for side projects (Unisex, Infinite Suns). This consistency has meant that the “back catalogue” is nothing of the sort: it remains a live body of work, and one that continues to be actively explored, pushed, reworked and re-imagined. Shoegaze, drone and postrock musics in general, particularly those more explicitly grounded in psychedelia, are particularly appropriate forms for such retroactive treatments: the shifts possible in texture, ambience and modulation mean that the familiar can be reborn as entirely unfamiliar, with groups free to riff off the blueprint ad infinitum rather than deliver the fine print ad nauseam.

The new release from The Telescopes encapsulates this atemporality. This live album, Live Aftertaste, recorded in 2010 and described in the press release as a “livid document”, looks back to look forward. It implicitly finds the future of The Telescopes in the band’s past. So the album opens with the monumental “There Is No Floor”, first heard on the 1989 LP Taste and, in a live version, on the semi-official 1990 bootleg Trade Mark of Quality. But here the delivery of this feedback-driven, slow-motion crash of a song – now free-floating, now locked back into the driving beat, with vocal lines rising above and falling back into the maelstrom – works to first hollow out and then re-engender the originals. The earlier versions’ skeleton remains, bluntly demarcating each section, but the new flesh seems entirely different: metastasised, distressed, engorged.

This 1989/1990/2010 continuum, and channelling, is consistent across Aftertaste: the tracks “Threadbare”, “Violence”, “Please, Before You Go” and “Suicide” can be found on all three releases, in the same sequence. Sadness Pale is sourced from the 1989 12” The Perfect Needle (the title song of which represents another long line of development for The Telescopes: The Perfect Needle #4 can be found in 2006’s Hungry Audio Tapes). In each case, the 2010 take heightens the tendency towards echoing drums marshalling bubbling slipstreams and roaring swells of busy, feedback-edged guitar. The Telescopes sound is one that commandeers the stomach as an additional bass amplifier, and then insinuates its way up the throat and into the cerebral cortex. The vocal delivery has inverted too: shattered shards of confession, a disorientated grappling with a sense of self, seemingly so as to order the tactile world around, are now intoned, chanted, creed-like recitations rather than imbued with an emotional realisation, and are in a lower register than before.

Live, Lawrie is known to wander dazed through his crowds for just such songs, bumping into bodies, and even to take to the floor – delivering syllable-specific line-readings from a foetal position. As a performance strategy it is more a genuflexion to the event, and to those (present) who are making it, rather than an extreme form of public naval-gazing – and his token of absolute trust in those who have sought-out recent gigs. Sense-making is left open to the listener or observer too – to join the dots between the runaway, fragmentary lyrics of, say, “There Is No Floor” and see what narratives arise: “Riot sister riot throw down riot sister fall / Come on, now…now… riot sister / Girl beneath between and under each / and every ceiling to the floor”.

“Suicide”, which closes all three albums, retains its disconcerting, lengthy lacuna: the music fades, leaving background static and audience chatter as underscored (and so appropriated and locked into the track) by an insistent bass/cymbal rhythm. That is: the low-end and high-end of the audio spectrum remain occupied by the group (the higher, sharper inner circumference and bell of the cymbal, in particular, is employed to this end) and, apart from the occasional stream of guitar feedback (or the sound of fingers on strings), the space for the vocal and melody is jarringly vacated so as to be given over to the time and place and the people that occupy it.

The Telescopes remain uniquely, unapologetically themselves and Aftertaste verifies that achievement. The levelling, uncompromising nature of their noise and silence in Aftertaste is one that leaves few musical legacies in the field of serious indie guitar music standing in the post-Taste period.

Benjamin Halligan’s publications include Michael Reeves (Manchester University Press, 2003), Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics (Ashgate, 2010, co-edited with Michael Goddard) and Reverberations: Noise, Affect, Politics (Continuum, 2012, co-edited with Michael Goddard and Paul Hegarty).

Comments appreciated.

Review by Benjamin Halligan

Bridget Hayden brings to her first solo release sonic preferences for echo and expanse that look back to her previous musical work: as a (now former) member of the Vibraphone Orchestra and, in recent years, playing with Stephen Lawrie of The Telescopes as the experimental drone/noise duo Infinite Suns. But “A Siren Blares in an Indifferent Ocean” is singular, intimate and a defiantly individualised sound: this is a recording in dialogue with itself, and that speaks of an intense interaction only with the instruments to hand. Or, rather, the instruments that came to her hand: the four track port-a-studio used to record the out-of-tune, second-hand guitar (and pedals, but no delays) was found on the street.

The resultant noisescapes, however, are not geared to a purity or atmospheric of poverty-founded or -induced outsider art. There is, rather, a fecundity of sound and the full aural spectrum is continually occupied. It is immediately occupied too: the album begins with a burst best described as the sound of being locked in a metal tank or container in the hull of a cargo ship. This is the intense yet nuanced sound that can arise during partial sensory deprivation, once all other senses are blocked and hearing comes to replace vision in order to, sonar-like, intimate the size of the surrounding cell. Thereafter, and for much of the remainder, Hayden establishes loops – a post-riff exostructure that remains in tension with individual streams of static, churning or muffled rumbles, and hiss and air. These soundscapes are not unpleasant or tart but bustle with work and offer multiple points of entry. They sometimes tally with a time signature, occasionally yield a palimpsest-trace of voice, and even verge on familiarity. Hayden’s soundscapes lull and transport, certainly, but to waking dreams rather than into revelry.

This is a very different experience of the container than the disorientations achieved by Miroslaw Balka for his 2010 installation, “How it is” – an actual container in which uncertain visitors rapidly bank for the walls, arms outstretched, or refuse their loss by sight by improvising weak torches with mobile phones. Balka delivers absolute isolation whereas Hayden remains present: the sound of her hand (perhaps even palm) on the guitar, as heard in thuds rather than strums, is coaxing and teasing. The thuds deliver obscure or garbled messages, like the rapping on the table at a séance, and a conscious beckoning to the listener to follow, presumably into these sounds. In short, Hayden – here at least – is closer to the live experience of Rhys Chatham’s guitar orchestras than Dylan Carson and Earth.

Hayden’s text carefully marshals the noise into a sense of sense: sirens over oceans warn of a danger of toxic pollutants – and tracks such as “Breaking”, “Trash Momento”, “Pale Skin” and “Waste” suggest the biological perils of the cresting waves of poisoned ecosystems. And the idea of an ocean also aptly proposes the kind of swirling, deepened, murky and limitless sounds that Hayden employs. “Lost Chart” and even “Silk Wheels” brings to mind the perspective of a boat on that sea – to be surrounded, caught-up in the swell and, encircled by an unbroken vanishing point skyline, to be left to one’s own devices: rhythmless music that turns the mind inwards, pushing into the psyche (the siren blares in this ocean rather than above it), rather than streaming out, rhythmically, through the limbs. The album’s second track, entitled “When Dusk”, positions this journey as one into the night.

Yet a siren can be both a warning and an enticement: the blare of the siren, in Hayden’s beckoning, and post-shoegaze aspect, replaces the song of the siren. At any rate, narratives of pollutants, enticements, dangers and discoveries all remain exclusive to the solitary human figure and human subjectivity – the ocean, and nature in general, remains indifferent.

Benjamin Halligan’s publications include Michael Reeves (Manchester University Press, 2003), Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics (Ashgate, 2010, co-edited with Michael Goddard) and Reverberations: Noise, Affect, Politics (Continuum, 2012, co-edited with Michael Goddard and Paul Hegarty).

Comments appreciated.