Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0018

Listen to this: https://www.mixcloud.com/mosurock/heathen-disco-show-381-22-august-2024

tracklist for the unconvinced:

• Doldrums – On the Green

• Turing Machine – Swiss Grid

• Turing Machine – Don’t Mind If I Didn’t

• Panthers – Post-Fascist Fantasies

• Pitchblende – Your Own Arturo

• Pitchblende – Flax

• Unrest – Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl

• Keiji Haino – Drifting (soft)

• Strafe – Set It Off

• Indoor Life – Voodoo

• Sapat – Maat Fount

• HNO3 – Doughnut Dollies

• Andrew Weatherall – We Count the Stars

• Imagination – Just an Illusion

• James Brown — Just Enough Room For Storage

• Government Issue — Jaded Eyes

• Moving Targets — Changing Your Mind

• Love Battery — Damaged

• The Mice — Crystal Silence

• Subhumans — Peroxide

• Low Life — Rave Slave

• Sinead O’Connor — Mandinka

• The Fall — Cruiser’s Creek

• David Bowie — Ashes to Ashes

• Sheila and B. Devotion — Spacer

• Love 666 — MDMA

• Multicult — Foreign Object

• Breakdown — Sick People

• The Dark — Face in the Mirror

• Lee Ritenour — Countdown (Captain Fingers)

• Del Shannon — Runaway ‘67

Starting this set and newsletter off in a fashion that’s getting all too familiar (and once again too close to where I am).

I learned yesterday morning that an old friend, Justin Chearno, has passed on. I discovered Justin’s band Pitchblende when I was a teenager, right at a moment when I was drinking from the veritable firehose of a college radio station’s record library. One day while skipping school (to go to another school, where this library resided) I copied their first CD Kill Atom Smasher onto one side and change of a 90 minute cassette, and stuck the whole of Milwaukee band Dis-‘s first CD on the rest. I played that tape until it stretched out. It got me through at least one year of high school in chaotic, mind-shattering fashion. I never got to see them play (their lone visit to Pittsburgh was before my time, and logistical issues failed an extension I offered them to play an end-of-year outdoor concert in 1995), but their records continued to spin my head – a DC band playing outside the parameters of the DC bands I knew; lashed to neither pop nor ‘core, drawing from a much wider pool; dizzying, progressive and perplexing.

This is all the Pitchblende available on Bandcamp. Thanks Cargo! Numero Group, where you at??

So there’s that, and there’s some years later when I moved to Brooklyn. All of a sudden I’m hanging out regularly with people whose music formed and informed my tastes in the interim: Jon Fine from Bitch Magnet and Vineland; James Murphy from Speedking, now a burgeoning recording engineer; his drummer Jerry Fuchs from that project, now playing with Pitchblende’s Justin Chearno and Scott DeSimon in Turing Machine; and a handful of other folks in that orbit. I didn’t know my head from my feet, but I knew how the works of these people shaped who I was, and these guys put up with me for years, showing me the secrets around, across and under a city I was weeks before too timid to wander out into, bringing me around to Billy Werner’s DJ nights at The Raven, parties in the basement at 85A, long-since demolished lofts in Williamsburg, breakfasts at Florent at 4:30 in the morning which fueled me just enough to show up to my office job, dazed but presentable, mere hours later. I met who they knew and my circle grew wider, both in terms of connections and experiences. I heard stories and wound up in part of them. I saw bands I’d never have gone out for on my own and got to go meet them backstage. This wasn’t my only crew but it without them I don’t know if I would’ve lasted that first year.

Bands change, people get busy. Turing Machine was incredible but played less frequently as Jerry moved back to Georgia to finish his degree and play with Maserati; when he came back, a switch had flipped: DFA had launched with “House of Jealous Lovers” by The Rapture, and he got in the drum seat for The Juan MacLean, Holy Ghost, !!!, and occasionally LCD Soundsystem. Justin started a band called Panthers with most of the members of Orchid, and they soon signed to Vice Recordings and toured all over the place. Jon got some high profile editor gigs at various business magazines and married happily, and James grabbed hold of both DFA and LCD, to international renown. I remained in the catbird seat, supporting my friends while trying to establish a throughline in my own life, between a career, the weight of running away from the collapsing Twin Towers on my shoulders, and bathing in the noise I couldn’t get enough of. When Panthers’ cycle cooled off, Justin became an employee and later a buyer at a wine shop in my old neighborhood, learning the business while relying on his refined tastes to become one of the country’s, and soon the world’s foremost proponents of natural wine; by the time I’d moved to Chicago, he was sommelier and co-owner of The Four Horsemen with James and a few others, and I’d get to witness secondhand the family he’d start and the incredible life he’d put together, traveling all over the world in pursuit of connecting wine, vineyards, their proprietors, chefs and kitchens. It was easier to check in via social media now and then but everything was going up for him in both family and professional life, and it was always exciting to see what was coming up next, be it a trip to France and decadent times therein, winning a James Beard award, or the forthcoming Four Horsemen cookbook to which he had contributed.Here was a guy who graciously, selflessly showed me what was possible. Not every experience was extended to me, nor were they all good times, or good for me, but I soon figured out that certain things would be better if I got to experience them on my own, and the list grew. Watching him work up close and then from afar carried the same buzz, and he was always open to talk about it.

Justin remained driven and keen on the opportunities that his taste, ambition and influence allowed him to open. In a short matter of time he had NYC figured out and proved to me without showing exactly how (since that varies from person to person) that if I wanted it, I could get there too. Unbeknownst to him, he'd done the same thing for me musically in the years past. That’s not something I’m ever going to forget or take for granted.

Reruns today because life is heavy. You haven’t read a lot of these anyway, or at least not for a good while.

VOID Sessions 81-83 LP (Dischord)

purchase from Dischord

For a lot of people, Void is about as far as they need to go in their discovery of hardcore punk. These people are mostly the ones who got way into Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat and the top-tier bands of the early ‘80s, decided to do a little exploration of their own, and ended up with The Faith/Void split LP, released on Dischord in 1983. Many have recognized that these two bands are not well-suited to appear across from one another on the same record, and will go out of their way to tell you about it. I liken this to the kind of people who pose on Pink Floyd by hyping the Syd Barrett era, then shut down if you ask them their thoughts on More or Obscured by Clouds. It’s just silly. The Faith were a great hardcore band, one of DC’s best and certainly one of the toughest of the era. That Void totally obliterates their contribution is a moot point.

Very few bands could match the aggression, intensity, and amateur/ weirdo vibes on display within Void’s dozen tracks from the split. It is quintessential American hardcore, the sound of young people deciding that they never again would listen to authority, borne of ‘70s suburban angst and released into the wallowing recession and Cold War paranoia of the early ‘80s. School friends Bubba Dupree (guitar), John Weiffenbach (vocals), Chris Stover (bass) and the late Sean Finnegan (drums) came up together in Columbia, Maryland, the first planned community of the 20^th century. They saw the shit sandwich that life was about to feed them right around the time that they graduated from high school, just as punk was making inroads into the youth of nearby Washington, DC. They instead smeared it all over the walls in an unstable mix of high energy punk, stray metallic riffage, and pissed-off exclamations, torn from a young man’s throat (“Everywhere I go I see rules / They’re on the streets and in the schools … I’m not the hand of their tools/I’m gonna live by my rules/Why should I listen to those fools?/I’m gonna live by MY RULES”). Violence and generalized hatred soaked their worldview, a rancid frustration spewed back at the system. Sessions 81-83, a new collection of the DC area band’s demos, outtakes and a few live tracks, omits the best-known Void tracks (just get the split already, if you’re not already holding), but tells the story of what led up to it. Even if all this collection did was give you more Void tracks, it would be enough. Fortunately everything here is above the board in terms of quality, and it’s a great opportunity to watch the seeds of frustration as they start to grow.

Many of the songs from the split are featured here in earlier versions, assembled from a 20-song demo recorded in November 1981, and a ten-song session from a month later (of which three tracks would end up on Dischord’s legendary compilation, Flex Your Head). Each of these versions, particularly “War Hero,” stands up on their own, and deserves to be heard in rougher contexts. Weiffenbach allows youth to trump decorum over and over again; screaming “Fuck all discipline, I just wanna kill/I want to die in a war!” when you’re around 18 or 19 years old, and several years removed from there being a military draft, you’re basically trying to piss people off, no way around it. Later on, they twist the knife with a similar rant called “Draft Me Please,” the products of a war-primed society with nothing to fight for. These guys lived in a broken system, but knew better than to celebrate the dysfunction around them – you make more of a statement when you frame it against your own problems, which is what Void seemed to be about from the get go. “I’m so fucking filled with hate/I just need to decapitate,” Weiffenbach yells at the beginning of “Time to Die,” and you half-believe him; you have to, at least in part of that statement, accept the frustration at hand. It’s the other part, the declaration of violent intent, which the performer really needs to sell without crossing the line into actual psychopathy. Void came closer than most in making this sound as malevolent as it reads, certainly more than the comic book/“Chiller Theater“ taunts of bands like the Misfits

Everything Void ever did sounded closer, less thought out, and more dangerous than most hardcore bands of the day. They just went for it, with no forethought for care or consequence. Dupree’s guitar playing is pure punk economy, running structured riffs with little flourishes here and there when there was time to take a quick break from the noise assault he laid down. Stover and Finnegan kept up the speed in the rhythm section (along with the military sentiments, as Finnegan’s snare work recalled then-recent releases by Crass), over which Dupree’s guitar interlocked and pushed the rest of the band even harder. The purity level at play here is unreal, young insolents tearing up the frame with a ferocity few others could muster. A recording from one of the last Void shows bears out how this attitude spread to the band’s audience, and almost back on one another – someone in the crowd grabs the mic and announces “If this goddamn band doesn’t play ‘My Rules,’ I’ll kill ‘em all!” Void launches in after some deliberation. It is telling that their music peaks out the genre, the cul-de-sac of hardcore expression, much like the ones found in the suburbs that bred their rage.

Eventually the tension snapped the band into pieces. A full-length, entitled Potion for Bad Dreams, was slated for release in 1984 by Touch & Go Records, but it never happened. It’s made the rounds in tape trading circles, and displays little of the Void sound as it was known. “Spacey, error-ridden metal sludge” might be a good explanation for what it sounds like, and guitarist Dupree has allegedly blocked its release time and again in the intervening years. It makes sense, in a way; no reason to tarnish a spotless legacy, and in no way does Sessions 81-83 do anything but fortify Void’s place in the pantheon of hardcore history as we know it. Anyone who tells you their band sounds like Void is probably full of shit.

THE MALE NURSE s/t LP (Decemberism)

best of luck…

The Male Nurse slipped through the art galleries and clubs of Scotland throughout the '90s, a loose collective centered around frontman Keith Farquhar and members of The Country Teasers, The Rebel, and The Yummy Fur. Beset by tragic results where basic unmedicated survival could not be counted upon, they only released three singles and a split while active, but this collection resurrects the tracks from an unfinished album and Peel Sessions, all of which is exclusive to this release. They’re much suaver and more subdued than their lineage would have you believe, a occasional and unique quality of the at-risk, Farquhar maintaining the temperature in some bizarro world fantasy where Pulp and The Fall were the same band -- louche, melodic, melancholy, and elegantly wasted (he sings the phrase "Berlin Alexanderpants" at the end of “Channel 4 Theme”), swooping analog synths giving the effect of drugfists of Xanax reaching out of the din and kissing your temples. This music’s sat with its legacy for some time, heard by the few, and copies are still floating around since their quiet unveiling in this form sometime in 2016. As listeners I don’t think you can afford to wait any longer.

GABI LOSONCY HH LP (Kye)

If I had spent my last $21 on this record and had no way of knowing how I would take care of myself afterwards, I would probably just laugh a bit to myself before I go crawl under the porch and die. I don’t really want to spoil the surprise here but the game within is one of an oppressive courtesy, an industrial favor being paid you by some architectural benefactor to promote a sanitary environment, when really all it’s doing is locking your brain into locating a tone and letting you do all the work. You’ll need to listen carefully, but by then it’s too late; you are its benign captive, one hour out of your experience on earth claimed by Gabi’s powers of observation. Clear vinyl. Kye has ceased operations since the release of HH, probably a wise move in the face of utter totality as evidenced within.

YUZO IWAYA Daylight Moon LP (Siltbreeze)

An ex-pat in the City of Brotherly Shove for decades, the late Japanese guitarist Yuzo Iwata carried an undeniably heavy rep, having played in groups in late ‘70s Tokyo and as a member of Tori Kudo's Maher Shalal Hash Baz in its earliest cycles, and as Siltbreeze’s Tom Lax made obvious, “there's no one else in Philadelphia can make that claim.” For his final solo album, Iwata teamed up with what I’d guess was a neighborhood band (guitarist Zachary Sulat, bassist Michael Heinzer, drummer Virginia Flemming) for a heady, informed session of Velvets-y chug and extended psych/cerebral wanders, with requisite sand dune crawl (“Border”) and disintegrating tape/blown limiter satisfaction (“Drone Beetle). It’s a music-first approach where nothing here goes over-the-top just to prove a point (though it does get loud), and that's a welcome relief from the bombast of a lot of comparable psych records of our time; these are conversations being had through music, wordless understandings that engender more togetherness than most speeches ever could. Much of this conversation seems to begin and end with Iwata’s approach on guitar and improvisation, which like his path, is wholly unique to the region and his journey. This music sounds like shared friendships, experiences, and understandings that do not form overnight. There’s a level of trust here that is facilitated by the music, providing a depth that is completely earned.

TEMPLE s/t LP (Mental Experience/Guerssen)

Note: this record provided the inspiration for me to rebrand from Still Single to Heathen Disco.

No joke: this was order padding for my International Harvester box set, with an intriguing hype blurb that sold me something very true. Temple was a quasi-band out of Cologne in the mid ‘70s, when a fellow named Toby Robinson was working at Dieter Dierks’ studio and managed to book late night sessions for himself (under a variety of aliases) and likeminded individuals, under the organizational title Pyramid. Alongside Robinson in his aliases, Temple was fronted by a folk-ghost woman named Pauline Held and her dark rock “head to toe leather” compatriot who went by the name Poseidon, whose voice reminds me of a very deadpan, clenched-jaw Peter Murphy. They attempted to balance hard, proggy rock with space echo folk, and somewhere in the path invented a glam-Goth sound that was rarely considered this far back. They also don’t sing together much/at all, making for a dynamic schism in the two hands of the group’s sound. Only a few years early to the trend, Temple’s five tracks (three shorter, two longer) all have a lot going for them, to the extent that all the descriptions sell short the project – opener “Heathen” keeps a menacing half-time beat and discordant, scattered tones that nevertheless leave a mark, the kind of proto-postpunk strutter that would absolutely kill at the right time of night at the necessary volume (and I know just the tracks to play around it), even with the Deep Purple style organ breakdown in the middle. “Leaves Are Falling/Black Light” doesn’t shy away from the two halves philosophy, with a Fields of the Nephilim-without-the-pith-helmet caravan deadstops into this floating guitar/synth/Mellotron haze as the drums fall away and Pauline starts reciting the title over and over. If this is their folky side, they don’t sweeten it any, and this ambient, Hawkwind-esque section holds untapped, draining power. “Ship on Fire” combines a driving beat and Poseidon’s leering presence in a space rocker that gets overtaken by delay and a cavalcade of Zeus B. Held’s synths, which loft this one into a low orbit. 11-minute closer “Crazy Hat/Kingdom of Gabriel” inserts five minutes of megaphone “Roadhouse Blues” amphetamine choogle into the midst of a pastoral folkpsych wander, seemingly just because, and doesn’t miss much of a beat, even on the fadeout. This didn’t see any tangible issue until the mid ‘90s when Robinson released his holdings on CD through the Psy-Fi label, making this likely the first vinyl edition to torch human hands. However you wanna focus on it, these folks had something interesting going on which should be a “drop everything” moment for what remains of the readership over here.

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Reach out to your friends today, especially the old friends.

Best,

Doug Mosurock