brain massage

day 3, sheffield

fungal infection of brain with skittering electric wheeze.  throats of many creak, hooves of failure, snail antlers showing stations of xx passion,, hans bellman kneecaps. guid times.

Dalston Victoria, London, July 28th

DON'T TRUST THESE GONKS

These couple of chookies left the touring entourage waiting for nealy 2hours after the gig as they waited to share their wee bbq fish.  Didnt offer to buy a round, then finally when the fish arrived and they had it too take away they dissapeared enroute to the bus stop to eat it, or so they claim, i reckon they were inspecting each others belly buttons.  fail.  Usurper set hence forth gets 0/10.  Fuds.

MURPHY/HARRISON... scoffing albino and heavy biscuit tip.  Great tape wooze emerged into skittering third eye mess.   Don't ever put beats behind it, dudes.

Blood Stereo set was all just a warm up for the melodica moonshine meltdown,, its the way to go.

Pengo was a tough out,,, hitting many right spots, the band sure did work up an appetite, especially The Finkster.

the Gaaah gas between sets is starting to hot up, Blood Stereo even got a stylophone intro, intrigued to see what more herbage will do to the pineal gland of master mumble.

Off to Sheffield today, first day in the van.  Anyone for Hummus?

BRIGHTON, Saturday July 27th.

The papered snash fart of a first night of the tour...

Infinite Gaaah was confused on his roll for the tour,, total headscratch.. " just ramble on!" i said.  As herbs are ingested on the road then his inner compere will burst forth and enlighten brains.

Theatrical confusion of Duncan Harrison, wild tape wonk with occasional oration. "started off like Howard Steltzer then just took it up a level.".  Grody goodness.

We (blood stereo) played a set of improvised grape induced good feelings, tapes, objects and blab with a"thrilling" bike horn vs trumpet mouth piece finale. Swaying span.

Usurpers private jet was late to land,, so next up would be the big bellied beast of Pengo, Rochesters finest export since the garbage plate (ie: never really got exported).  The classic sound was dragged out with a heavy Finkbeiner curry stained guitar sound up front..  Nuuj on his orange box of magic elctronic wha? and Schoen on tape glump, then some fine vein splitting sax wail before the vocal hoodoo kicked in.. the rest my friends is a bit hazy.. ouch.  Crious comrades.

Usurpers set is vague,,, talk of animals, jungle, giraffes, mosquitoes... scraping, popping, fake hand shenanigans.

Elkka advised the audience to not take the brown acid.

this afternoon we hit London, the Dalston Victoria, where the beers are nigerian and the fish are big and barbequed.


" wonderful sonic landscapes in the magic scout hut ~ the ticking & whispering of Blood Stereo, the apocalyptic rain dance of Pengo ~ axe, sax and a large white balloon..." - Michael Kemp

Pengo, Blood Stereo, Usurper, Infinite Gaaah Tour

July

27th BRIGHTON Westhill Hall

28th LONDON Dalston Victoria (afternoon show 3pm start)

30th SHEFFIELD The Audacious Art Experiment

31st MANCHESTER Kraak
 

Aug
1st LEEDS Wharf Chambers

(NO Blood Stereo this show, you will be confused by the quartet of Cann Campbell Foster Nyoukis)

2nd NEWCASTLE The Lit & Phil
 

3rd EDINBURGH Summerhall
 

4th GLASGOW Old Hairdressers

When the world was in darkness and darkness was ignorance and ignorance was contentment... along came enlightenment.
With enlightenment came disenchantment and disenchantment was a poor distraction... and now we long for a distraction.
So the world requires distraction as distraction provides contentment and contentment was ignorance... along came Gaaah.
Like most living myths and like most leaders living or dead our new guru could likely be described as a fibber, a gobshite or a Boaby Liar, but if we insist on having our days occupied then why not kill time dead with the guff and half-truths professed by an entertainer engendered of inconsequence?
Tom Roberts The Infinite Gaaah prescribes a way of life variously referred to as "lunkism", "neo-ludditism", "goof", "OUT", "roughage", "wrong" and "the knacker's yard" by both it's disciples and detractors, but all of the aforementioned read awfy like "a real hoot" to this non-believer.
The Infinite Gaaah will deliver sermons across two countries in the week of July 27th 'til August 4th 2013 and has enlisted the services of some of his flock: from the Brighton order of Chocolate Monks come profoundly Southern fried psalmists Blood Stereo, Edinburgh envoys Usurper shall perform rituals devoid of symbolic value and missionaries from the congregation of psychedelic toxicity in Rochester, USA Pengo will be at the front of the herd preaching the good and gone grace of Gaaah.
Not to be confused with a busload of artists touring "avant-garde" sounds, this is a mobile group immolation highlighting the inherently uninteresting proposition of existence while offering an amusement arcade's worth of worthlessness soundtracked by the oldest music there is.

Dylan Nyoukis - The Acrylic Widow LP out now

"Nyoukis excells at turning what could just be duck impressions & growls into a whole that's a narrative, and piano & organ give a haunting harmonic undertow to a sound effect journey here. Whiney creaks & little ghostly feet stamp their way along. You end at a bathtub drain, where you gurgle your way down to a sewer and meet a scraggly haired troll who speaks an unintelligible language. When you come up the manhole, a guy with an accordion starts following you around, pumping maniacally. You then visit an orchestra tune-up and strike up a conversation with a bumblebee in the next chair." - Weirdo Records

"Coloured vinyl LP in an edition of only 250 copies: this is a great, strategy-spanning set from Dylan w/a creepy/melancholy low-key vibe that is quite unlike anything in his back catalogue. Compiled from various actions and recordings from across the globe, this has all of the occult sonic appeal of the best of the Biota or Mnemonist sides, with a feel for submerged narrative that is uniquely compulsive. When the moody organ drone kicks in halfway through the opening “The Dog Lady Dream With Pedal Underfoot (For Mike Collino)” it feels as unearthly as Meredith Monk's keyboard work on Key, providing a mesmerising counterpoint to the laminal application of field recordings, street chatter and small instrument abuse. It's genuinely beautiful and very affecting, easily one of Dylan's most perfectly realised works. The rest of the LP ain't no slouch either, moving from huffing accordion drones over bonging springs in a kind of simultaneous homage to the brothers Bohman and Rupenus through to some great tectonic drone work via a fuzz of ghostly microtonal chatter and a final time tunnel into the thundering tonsils that would give Alan Bishop 'the willies'. Hands-down Dylan's best side to date and, dare we say it, his most 'musical' long-form statement since, uh, well, just since. Comes with a great colour insert and extensive sleevenotes by Seymour Glass of Bananafish. This is a monster - highly recommended!" - Volcanic Tongue

"1. Dry coughs and outta-wack piano chords play into Boy Scout bike repairs, ‘test the bell, spin the wheel!’ Hot air leaks from a perished rubber hose. With knuckles like hazelnuts, these sounds shine like delicately laid cobblestones, laid end-to-end without no fuss or haste, they are tram tracks. Late night thumps, ‘boof, baff’ and a lousy Soft Machine organ solo talks a Brighton raver down from gritted jaw oblivion.
2. Ideas are put through the wringer in stereo effect. The domestic bric-a-brac builds up: a motorcycle revving, the dry crunch of gravel underfoot…a jumble sale of sweaty woollens, singing out through pinched throat to make un-sense of the phrase ‘iss, sum bear-lae-um’. An unexpected kitchen sink gamelan makes for a feverish listen. Tension is introduced via leathery lunged accordion but there’s no crass crescendo. Fading out like pinched guts.
3. Euro voices abound in tangled syntax. Verbs sounds & nouns renamed. Sure, there’s blubber and chunder…’you, you, you and me’ that’s slam-up-bang to babby titter-chat for starters. Then the downs come in, re-directed by taut tape loops making the ecstatic, grooving on the surface of bubble. The proclamation, ‘I’m right here’ leaves us in no doubt who you are sharing your damp bedsit with tonight, slurping up the old wine as red as pooled blood.
4. Another take on the stretched ritual. A parrot squawks underwater struggling for fresh O2. Furious eraser scurrying action is met with the stony silence of a 14 year old girl while apples crunch between strong white teeth. Our old friends, words, are worried and fretted in a dark experiment; turned over looking for new seams and valves to shuck and prise open like ripe clams until mucus-like muscle slips free and falls to the flagstones below.
This is a living séance with The Acrylic Widow. Wisdom from the Old Ones, the thin Venn diagram slice between frantic scuttling & sweet Miskatonic stoned." - Posset

'Special Edition' limited to 50 copies which comes with CDr of bonus material and screenprinted poster available from HERE

In Memory Of Damian Bisciglia

It was with great sadness that I awoke early this morning to this news from Eric Lanzillotta
 "I am sad to report the death of Damian Bisciglia. He took his own life earlier this week. He was only 52 years old, but leaves behind a great legacy of work.
I first became aware of Damian in the 1980s when a friend wrote his name and number on a piece of paper for me. He mentioned Points of Friction and thought we should meet each other. At that time I did have the nerve to call people out of the blue. So it wasn't until several years later that I got in touch with Damian. I knew of his work as Agog and his visual art from the cover to Randy Greif's "Bacteria and Gravity" LP released by RRRecords. I think it was probably through Randy that I first heard Agog as I got the "Putting Legs on a Snake" cassette from him.
The music of Agog was homemade musique concrete - amazing tape collages. It was really outstanding work that stood above a lot of what was coming out of the cassette culture at that time. Damian's work was superbly recorded and edited, and lovingly packaged. The packaging in a way was his downfall as he spent so much effort on it, that he made few copies of the cassettes on his own Spagyric label. The only cassette that was easily available was a split cassette with Zan Hoffman published by N D magazine in 1990. He also did a cassette for the legendary Broken Flag label, but it was towards the end of their first run and very few copies seem to have been made of that either. Probably the most heard was the Agog track on the five 7" box set edition of RRRecords's "Testament" series. His own cassettes reached fewer and fewer people over the years as his packaging grew more and more elaborate. Visiting him at his parent's house in the late 1990s, I was blown away by the creature sculptures that he was showing me. My amazement increased as he split them open to show me the cassettes that lived inside of them.
With so little available and such high quality, I wanted to do what I could to share his music. It ended up being a three year project, but I was able to release the only Agog LP on Anomalous Records in 2001. By the end of that year I was able to reissue one of the Points of Friction cassettes on CD. Both were very special releases for me. They didn't sell particularly well, but represented what "anomalous" meant to me.
But I am failing to mention Damian's work as an improvisor. He was a collector of junk materials and built his own instruments and sculptures. At times he would put himself down for only having these non-instruments. Perhaps this contributed to his shyness towards performing. I only saw him perform in front of an audience once. That was at Anomalous Records in 1994 in a duet with Joseph Hammer. Need I even say that it was amazing? His association with Joseph went all the way back the beginning of the 1980s when Points of Friction was formed with Kenny Ryman and Tim Alexander. After the group broke up, he worked mostly solo, but did collaborate through the post with Minoy, Adam Bohman, Johannes Bergmark, and Zan Hoffman. In recent years Mitchell Brown roused him to more activity helping encourage the reformation of Points of Friction and releasing a new CD of their music.
Damian's music and art remains little heard and known for the most part. I congratulate Mitchell Brown, Fredrik Nilsen, Dylan Nyoukis, Seymour Glass, Hitomo Arimoto, Ron Lessard, Eric Blevins, Zan Hoffman, Daniel Plunkett, and the others that helped get bits of his music into the world. I hope that his music does not disappear with his passing.
Earlier this year, Points of Friction played for the first time in a few years. Damian was excited about the event and excited about music in general. I got the impression that he was ramping up for more activity. Obviously there were other things that troubled him though. His life has sadly been cut short. I am thankfully for all that he gave us and will miss him.
Thank you Mitch for passing along this sad news. Thank you Nils for first pointing me in Damian's direction all those decades ago. Thank you Randy for helping me pick up that thread. Thank you Joseph for all you did." - Eric Lanzillotta

I never had the pleasure to meet Damian in person, but at some point in the 90s we made contact through the post. Traded tapes, collaborated, and I had the pleasure to interview him for Bananafish magazine. A couple of times in more recent years we tried to convince him to come play Colour Out Of Space but he respectfully declined, couldn't face the flight. My thoughts are with all his friends and loved ones.

here's a postal collaboration piece we did sometime in the late 90s.

Damian Bisciglia & Dylan Nyoukis - A Padded Suit For Ego Misters Girlfriend