Various Artists - There Is No God And He Is Your Creator -1987- (Cassette, GGE Records), US

Merry Christmas and an Archaic New Year to all Friends and Followers of the blog!

 

To end this year with I reckoned that we needed something with an adagium that covers both these end of the year holidays as well as the situation we have found ourselves in throughout this year. There Is No God And He Is Your Creator (a title as oxymoronic as the title of this blog) was another fine cornerstone compilation of the international home-taping circuit created by GGE Records, a cassette label that was based in Kent, Ohio. The people behind the label also played in the band Ice Cream Blisters. 

 

There Is No God And He Is Your Creator compiles quite some known acts from the era like the Belgian experimental synth groups Bene Gesserit and Human Flesh created by Alain Neffe. It also contains a Merzbow track and a track by A.D. Aker known as a Dutch musician who was one of the founders of experimental music collective De Fabriek. The US tape-music legends Big City Orchestra provide a fine humoristic cover of Throbbing Gristle's Subhuman. Aside from those bands there's a lot of obscure American home-taping stuff on here ranging from lo-fi pop to strange collaged rhythms. Quite a nice bunch of tracks all together.

 

Kindly donated by the Y Create Archive

 

Get it HERE

 

 

Lots of things have happened the past year in terms of the discovery of unknown material and it has been rewarding and beautiful to have been in contact with many musicians and to have even been collaborating with some great labels that provide todays reissue jewels. I'd like to thank you all for the opportunities you gave me and the enthusiasm you share about music.

Archaic Inventions is a blog that still remains part of the underground with a loyalty towards the larger blogosphere in the way I discovered that space more than a decade ago. I'm not sure yet whether this blog will last longer than the next year, but only time, energy and life decisions will tell. Again. Much love to all readers, spreaders of the word or occasional bypassers here. Stay safe in this mad world and keep fighting all the corruptive powers that are surrounding us. Oh and listen to some nice music!

 

See you with some good stuff from the past in 2021!

 

- Bence AI

Various Artists - The Value Of Quality - A Concise History Of West-European Folk-Art -1982- (Tape, Aerosol P&P), Belgium

The Value Of Quality is a nice early 80's DIY compilation with mostly Belgian acts that was released on the Aerosol P&P label that was run by Guy de Bièvre who was also the person behind the home-taping act One Hundred Poems From The Japanese.

Like with most Belgian tape compilations this one too has many contributions by Insane Music For Insane People protagonist Alain Neffe. On the cassette we find different minimal synth tracks by his projects Bene Gesserit, Pseudo Code, Cortex and Human Flesh. His projects have seen many reissues on a variety of labels these last years. In the past his musical output on cassettes were probably Belgium's most wide-spread home-taping sounds. I am not sure whether the tracks on here also appeared on own releases, because there is simply too much material for me to verify.

Then present on this compilation is Flemish singer and artist Claude Perwez aka Kloot Per W. Also there is an industrial noise track contributed by Angst which was a project by Flemish writer, poet and musician Erik Vloeberghs. He also had projects such as The Firing-Squad, Kwajongens In Bloei and The Parts. He was closely related to the Antwerp based industrial and interdisciplinary art group Club Moral.

Furthermore present here are British home-taper Jack Marlow (possibly based in Germany back then) and the legendary French minimal-synth and artist collective La Fondation from Paris that consisted of many amazing music acts like Nini Raviolette, Hugo Weris and Lefdup & Lefdup.

Speaking about A Concise History Of West-European Folk-Art the only non-European contribution on here (I think) is the Canadian punk band Zyklon B, although it might be a Belgian punk band with the same name. The rest of the contributions are undoubtedly Belgian and unknown and perhaps own projects of Guy de Bièvre.

In any case this is another nicely varied cassette relic of the Belgian industrial, minimal synth and home-taping scene! The Value of Quality of the cassette recording is fluctuating from white noise backgrounds to cleaner production, but hey it's quality stuff in the end that has a value.

Get it HERE


Update: I see that this was uploaded a long time ago to the No Longer Forgotten Music Blog. Escaped my attention. Anyway worth it to give this some more attention and it was fun digitizing this. More stuff to come soon!