Here we have another cassette that was released by the Canadian magazine Musicworks that focused on Canadian avant-garde music since the late 70's. Musicworks was founded by Andrew Timar and John Oswald in Toronto. They released dozens of cassettes that
accompanied the Musicworks magazine that published on the relation between science, technology, ecology, sonic environments and music.
Music As Transformation was assembled by composer and sound artist Tina Pearson in 1983. It features edits and excerpts by different Canadian composers involved with experimental music, field-recordings, abstract composition and also contains sequences of spoken discourses. Amongst some of the composers that are present are R. Murray Schafer, known for his concept of acoustic ecology, David Mott, a baritone saxophone player and composer from Toronto and Gordon Monahan, a Canadian pianist, visual and sound artist.
The compilation creates its own unfolding narrative blending natural field-recorded sounds with avant-garde composition within an existential or reflective framework based on the experience of environments and life-cycles. It takes the listener on a subtle transformative trip through sounds of folk traditions, water, rain, fire and other ecological elements weaving in and out of those sound-spaces constantly going back and forth from improvisation and electro-acoustic music into the dark yet sunbursting universe.
A beautifully assembled piece that can't be titled anything else but Music As Transformation. It reminds me a bit of the music by Darren Copeland that was published on the blog some time ago. Even though the extensive tracklist is available, the cassette has been unindexed to maintain its natural flow.
Music As Transformation - The hypnotic focussing of the word mandala
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.
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!
The Passions Organiques volumes were a series of international home-taping compilations created by the French Organic Tapes label from Grenoble during the 80's. For the most part the compilations contain electronic, industrial and minimalistic ambient sounds with a slight emphasis on French acts. However the Organic label also published many international musicians and created special releases around certain countries like the great Polish Road cassettes that I posted some time ago. The less fortunate dimension of the releases by Organic Tapes is the poor sound quality. There is a lot of hiss on these tapes and the sound volume changes each track. Nevertheless these compilations were assembled with a lot of care and there are some true pearls to be heard that don't appear on any other release.
Passions Organiques Vol.3 - Instrumentaux is a nice electronic home-taping journey gathering some household names of the international cassette network like Los Paranos (FR), Marzidovsek (YU), In Aeternam Vale (FR), The Dead Goldfish Ensemble (UK) and Pacific 231 (FR) but it also gives attention to even lesser known acts. The cassette came out together with Volume 4 of the series in a large VHS case, but I decided to post both cassettes seperately, so the other volume will come to the blog somewhere in the future.
As said, not really desirable sound quality, but nevertheless some nice minimal synth, industrial and ambient electronic tracks. You can find Volume 1 of the series over at Tape Attack.
Here is another totally obscure compilation of cassette-culture from The Netherlands on Truuktape (Trick Tapes). It compiles Dutch and Belgian home-taping artists of which some are known and others have sank into obscurity. Present on the compilation are: Unovidual (Flemish home-taper Henk Wallays who played great minimal synth), Totallos, Zyklon B, Oefening Kunstbaardt (mythical Rotterdam project that released one of the most sought after 7 inches of the Dutch minimal synth underground), Johan Schaaphok, Bert vd Kerk, Jan vd Einden and Lorraine.Tru.
It's a great compilation that really displays the Dutch underground zeitgeist of the period. Half of it is electronic minimal synth experimentation and the other half is collage and experimental tunes with subversive poetry and such. On the B-Side there is a moment that we hear the Dutch former queen Beatrix speak to the parliament about the greatness of the country. Within the Dutch squatting scene and punk circles it was very common to ridicule the monarchy. During her inaugaration in 1980 a war broke out on the streets of Amsterdam between squatters and the state. The riots were known as Geen Woning, Geen Kroning, meaning No House, No Coronation. Even the Dutch army had to intervene at a certain point. It was a time when alternative lifestyles and anti-authoritarianism were peaking in Holland, the legendary Staaltape shop (dedicated to DIY cassettes) was right around the corner of the Royal Palace on the Dam Square of Amsterdam and half of the city was squatted and inhabited by underage punks and junkies. A moment of a no-future mentality, nearly no employment for the youth plus the threat of nuclear warfare between the big East and West powers.
Truuktapes apparently hailed from Amsterdam and did this great compilation combining the forces of the musical DIY-attitude from those days and capturing a certain mentality just by using the right political and poetic sound bits and pieces. A way of undermining control, sharing a certain mentality with the listener and displaying the little means you need to be creative. This truly shows the power of the home-taping scene and the cassette as medium. You start playing the cassette and you get surprised by a collage of musical madness of empowering nature that you can tap into immediately and contribute to the same day. It's not made to be the greatest music, it's a message.
I left this cassette unindexed in its A and B side because there is no tracklist available and I don't know which band is which. Also in its statement as a collage of many sounds and tracks I present this here in its purest cassette form. As a compilation. Without knowing what to expect. It reminds me a bit of the pirate radio squat tape I uploaded a long time ago.
"I plant a knife in the ribcage of conscience, in the twist of thought of the executive power of the constitution, let's tolerate the fellow man like we were once cherished by the motherboard of desire. Let's cut the throat of the damage that always disposes us. Let's humiliate ourselves by self-destruction and torments of our souls. Let's become crazy and give ourselves to institutions or to the Russians near the Maas River. Give me a gun and I'll kill the queen and hurt morals.... etc".
The shock effect in writing is the impotence of poetry.
Industrial Asylum is a punk and post-punk compilation that was released in The Netherlands in 1983. It mostly (if not only) contains obscure English bands. I actually doubt that there is a Dutch band on here. It displays one of those characteristics of punk compilations which is to focus on a particular country, region or city and gather the various punk forces from that one place. Here some obscure groups from England were gathered to be heard by a Dutch punk audience. But aside from this cassette being released in Holland, I think most of these tracks are (and were) also quite hard to find and to hear in Britain so the release has an importance in itself.
The compilation gathers some nice post-punk and power-pop tunes, some anarcho-punk poetry, but also experimental sounds. The poems of Andy T moniker of punk poet Andrew Thorley are a returning theme on the cassette, he also released a great EP on Crass Records which he recorded in collaboration with Penny Rimbaud during the early 80's. The Manchester band Outer Edge kicks off this compilation with an energetic tune. They were also compiled on the legendary Manchester post-punk compilation Unzipping The Abstract from 1980, but aside from that I never heard other material by them. Wigan based band The System seems to be an anarcho punk group that's a bit more known. They were resurrected in the past years. The band Sons Of Earth play a weird cover of The Doors' Hello I Love You entitled 'The End'. For the rest I don't know much about the bands on here.
Some of the interesting tunes are played by bands like Untermensch, Giraffe In Flames and Oracle. Maybe someone has more information on these bands or has more recorded material. In any case this is another rare compilation of English punk and post-punk bands and is transmitting some strong musical energy here and there. The recordings are somewhat lo-fi in quality, but I think that only strengthens the punk nature.
This is an interesting sound-poetry record I found in Italy not too long ago. It came out on the wonderful
3ViTrePAIR label that was founded by Enzo Minarelli, an Italian artist and sound-poet that played a protagonist role in gathering sound-poetry artists on different compilations and hosting poetry festivals during the 80's. He created compilation series around his concept of Polipoesia, that was based upon a manifest on poetry he created. The series were each dedicated to the poetry exchange between different countries. Here we have the compilation that focused on sound poetry from Canada and Italy.
The Canadian poets on the compilation are all from Quebec so the main language used here is French, hence the references to Antonin Artaud the French dramatist and subversive theatre director who also did strange recordings on radio that could be seen as sound poetry to a certain extent. In the liner notes written by Minarelli references are also made to French poets like Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck. The Canadian representatives on this compilation are Pierre-André Arcand, Jean-Claude Gagnon, Alain-Martin Richard, Richard Martel and Gilles Arteau. The poets from Italy are aside from Minarelli himself Gian Paolo Roffi, Corrado Cicciarelli, Massimo Mori and Luigi Pasotelli. Sound poetry has always been important in Italy and this series is another strong example.
The music ranges from sound experiments to casiotone rhythm minimalism to the use of mouth harps, voice manipulation and more. It gives a mail-art music feeling from back in those days that can be experienced on compilation series like the VEC Audio Exchange for example. Here are some contextual words from the liner notes:
It seems, today, after a great deal of sound poetry is touching the limits of the extremest noise, denying value to the word, almost atomized, if not disapeared because it has been reduced to non-significant sound, the thread of the word is taken up again, proposing it in its natural shape. [sic.] Such a return to and into the word can also be explained as a return to a more immediate communication, to a listening pleasure, keeping in the right side the needs of the audience in a theatre or in front of a TV. The authors herewith included prove and point out how the sound experimentation is no longer synonym of ambiguity of communication, but is still possible practising sound experimentation with intelligent grace and refined, oral taste. In a word, more harmony, less disharmony. So, sound poetry is, or can be for those who want to understand, the next step of certain written poetry, at least the right entry door to continue into the oral a process of invention that in the written field it's no longer original and it is still into the most stagnant impasse. - Enzo Minarelli
Merry Christmas and an Archaic New Decade to all friends and followers of the blog!
Wait a second, is that Jesus? Portrayed as a punk? Well, that will always be a bit of a tricky analogy within punk circles and beyond. But anyhow! Bijna 2000 Jaar Geleden (Translated: Almost 2000 years ago) is a rare Dutch (hardcore) punk compilation from the first hour compiling different punk bands from smaller cities of The Netherlands. It was released by the Volendam based punk label Anti-Esthetische Dienst (anti-esthetic service) created by Niels de Wit who is also compiled on this cassette with his band Gepøpel.
Ironically Volendam, of all places in the Netherlands, is actually mostly known for the worst of the worst commercial sound of Dutch schlager pop-music of which I won't give any examples here. It's a tricky and fairly untrue statement but I would say that most real and influential punk from The Netherlands from the early days did not come from the big cities, but more so from small places. The Ex, one of Holland's most important real anarcho-punk groups also partially came from the village of Wormer, which tells us something.
Bijna 2000 Jaar Geleden came out as the alternative Christmas gift for the whole family for the end of the year holidays of 1983. It mostly consists of live recordings of punk bands that either sing in Dutch or English. The songs have typical punk subjects like anti-religion, anti-establishment and the opposal of the average daily life in society. Short and simple tracks often badly recorded as they should have been. One of the highlights is the track "Kortjakje" which is a famous Dutch children's song about Kortjakje, a poor and maybe alcoholic woman who is always ill throughout the week except for Sundays when she goes to church. The punks invert the plot of the song in the booklet and ask the question: why can't Kortjakje be ill on Sundays?!
This cassette came with an extensive booklet containing DIY collage, visual information on the lyrics of each band and ofcourse some drawings on the Christmas theme. As always I added the scans to the file below. This is another nice relic from the Dutch punk scene. More of the A.E.D. label and dozens of early Dutch punk tapes can be found in the No Longer Forgotten Music archive (it requires some searching).
What an amazing ride it was musically in 2019. In terms of material it looks very bright for the blog in the next year. I might even have larger opportunities coming that would lead to a great amount of treasures of obscure music but we have to wait how that unfolds. But even now I can almost not believe some of the stuff that still lies around here, so I'm generally content. A decade ago when I was a teenager I was dreaming of creating a blog like Archaic Inventions and the surprising thing about it is that I managed to make it happen somehow.
2020
An additional music discourse that I want to introduce to the blog in the next year is a.o. the attention for the underground origins of dance music, to retrace some of its autonomously conquered components and explore a bit of the ethics away from what became part or has always been part of the new era of neoliberal gentrified club culture. Also I felt I had to bring some more punk music to the equation as you can see, because I find that the music zeitgeist has been marginalizing some of the important DIY functions lately compulsively changing the view on the so-called creative conditions for a praiseworthy piece of music to exist. It's a tendency that also divides certain musical genres from their often common origins and polarizes the music scene more than it brings people together. The world has changed.
I'm working on a couple of reissues with great (reissue) labels (Discos Transgénero, StroomTV, Futura Resistenza etc.) writing liner notes for them (more on that soon). Also I will publish a cassette of my own music (old and new) soon in the beginning of the next year and hopefully another album later on. Maybe I have one or two other surprises up my monkey sleeve. Anyway, I'm just doing what I can do, or something like that. I just want to say much love to you all and I'm grateful to all you listeners out there. And grateful for all you talented people in and out of music! Also for the great amount of creativity on the upperground, but realize that the underground has to receive some sustainable care too. Really more than ever.
So ofcourse (far away from this blog) a special thank you to the marginalized music multitude, the people showing local resistance, music activists and the unpaid or the unruly who keep organizing events and concerts, who are making their unorthodox music, who keep pushing under difficult circumstances. Keep it weird and feel comfort in the fact that you feel that you don't want to uphold an image publically (online), we're all connected.
A last special thanks to all the music blogs out there still doing what they do best. It's a huge effort, in free time, for the love of music. Respect!
Here is another great tape from the home-taping cassette network, this time from the US. It's quite an unknown one that compiles 25 different artists from various genres with home-taping tracks created around the theme of sleep. Yes: sleep, dreams, snores, lullabies and other sleepytime sounds that are meant to keep you awake or to put you to deep hypnotizing sleep.
As for the artists I'd say that some of them are to be found more regularly on US home-taping cassettes like the mind-warping The Evolution Control Committee that came from North-Canton, Ohio or Hermanos Guzanos from Fairfax, California. But about most of the acts I have no clue who they were. I also don't know who released this compilation, how many were made or when it was exactly released.
Another interesting cassette in the typical American home-taping style, with lots of silliness, humor, cool electrified tracks, pop songs and experimental sounds. A perfect soundtrack to the time of hibernation during this winter that is commencing! Zzzzzzzz
Here we have one of the pivotal compilations covering the Polish underground from behind the iron curtain during the 80's. It came out right before the change of the political system in Eastern Europe in 1989 on a French label. Obviously many of these bands only released their music marginally in their own circuits. They had to operate in the underground because of their subversive nature and artistic expression directly or indirectly opposing the socialist regime. Poland had a longer history of underground bands and artists fitting that realm already in the early 70's, with examples like the mythical psychedelic band 74 Grupa Biednych and improvisers like Grupa W Składzie. The Polish music underground has always been heavily inspired by Jazz and improvisation. Also more known bands from Poland that were accepted by the regime during the 70's like Niemen or SBB were quite experimental in their approach. Polish jazz played a hugely influential role behind the iron curtain during the 60's and 70's and became a trademark of adventurous quality jazz. During the 80's a broader underground had emerged in different Polish cities. The improvisational groups were now accompanied by new wave bands, punks, industrial noise makers and everything in-between. Quite a strong grey and bleak accent was being put in the music, reflecting the last bleak decade of communist totalitarian repression. More and more Polish music was slowly finding its way to the west by cassettes that were swapped as well through Polish dissidents that made their way to the west of Europe. One of the greatest post-punk bands that had a Polish singer (Andrej Dziubek Nebb) was Holy Toy from Norway. Their first album Warszawa (Warsaw) still stands as one of the strongest experimental new-wave albums from the 80's and incorporates a strong Polish component.
Now that I think about it, even Joy Division was called Warsaw at first ofcourse. In the imagination of wave bands and punks from the west during the 80's Poland was definitely the epitome of bleakness and a symbol of the east-west schism that was casting its darkening shadow over Europe including the threat of nuclear warfare. This was pushing the no-future mentality even further in the heads of many youngsters. Subsequently theme's like the Warsaw-Pact were often used by western wave bands from the 80's. But let's get back to this release: Polish Road was one of those important compilations for Polish bands to be heard in the west spreading their underground sounds. It's a very nice, although heavily fragile, recording of different bands ranging from punk, wave, industrial and improvisation groups. It was released as a double cassette in a VHS case. The first volume consists of more experimental and punk groups, while the second volume has more improvised and electro-acoustic bands on it of which Reportaz might be the most known. The music was all recorded between 1985 and 1988, often containing live recordings. I won't go into every band separately because it's too much work, although from some bands I will upload more tapes in the future of the blog.
Polish Road can be seen as a critical undermining of the socialist regime and a time document of what was going on at that time in the Polish underground, while Solidarność was already making big leaps and the change of political system was very near. Please note that I'm putting this music in a political narrative, but a lot of this music was just artistic expression and didn't have any political agenda in itself.
After the communist period a hopeful time arrived to Eastern Europe during the 90's (apart from Yugoslavia), but nowadays we know how much political difficulties we are facing yet again. It slowly fosters the realization that this music and its urgent character, pushing through all possible limits, whether having no audience, no listeners or the lack of technical production or musical skills, yet giving expression to the inner spirit and the need for change in society, could still be perfectly inspiring today.
Many more obscure Polish cassettes will be uploaded to the blog with time.
Here we have another (and also last) of the Exart compilations that had a country as their theme. Exart was the tape-label by Hessel Veldman aka Y Create. He used to be one of the key figures in the home-taping network of the 80's releasing and collaborating with numerous musicians. Besides the Y Create project he was in the band Gorgonzola Legs and did many collaborations with his wife Nick Nicole, Cora and fluxus artist and Dutch underground cult-figure Willem de Ridder.
De Ridder also had his Radiola Improvisatie Salon radio program which played a hugely important role for the home-taping scene in The Netherlands. The idea was that every tape that was sent to the radio show would be played without being heard in advance. A very unorthodox and adventurous approach that sometimes led to the discovery of jaw-dropping musical pearls of unknown musicians. Music From The White House Volume 2: It's A British Treat consists of different English artists (as well as an Irish one) who were mainly active in the home-taping circuit. Most of the cassette comprises of projects by Steve Hartwell who played music under many different guises like The Dead Goldfish Ensemble and The High Tech Pagoda's. Then there is Dave Arnold (a multimedia artist from Essex who used to run the Dead Happy Records label during the 80's) under his project The Starkman as well as a track of his post-punk group Turn Blue. Also Rob Baylis is present under his disguise The Detective and many other artists.
Like many of the Exart compilations the A-side shows more poppy home-taping tracks and the B-Side more sonic experiments. Other Music From the White House volumes are here and here.
