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

Ice Cream Blisters - + / Or -1987- (Cassette, GGE Records), US

Here's another cassette by Ice Cream Blisters, a band from Kent, Ohio that was formed by Mike Crooker and Chris Mezzolesta with the involvement of friends. These same people also created their cassette label GGE Records that played an important role in the American home-taping circuit, releasing own and other US home-taping acts as well as collaborations with foreign home-tapers. As far as I know Ice Cream Blisters released about five tapes. I posted their When Nature Fails, Art Steps In cassette from 1986 last year on the blog.

+ / Or is a much more experimental release by the group containing lengthy synthesizer adventures, guitar manipulation, wind and brass instrument improvisation and fine field recordings. Along the way topics like Second World War and Christmas are touched on with a genuine love for absurdism. It's another great example of the free spirited American home-taping scene that had an uncompromising drive to create music. It also represents the distinct American music tradition based on the expression of the weird and the wacky. The approach and sound of Ice Cream Blisters keeps reminding me of Blacklight Braille, but ofcourse there are plenty of other strange American bands from that like-minded realm that existed during the 80's (and actually well before that), specially in the deeper abyss of the home-taping universe.

Maybe more Ice Cream Blisters will surface in the future. At least here's another one!

Kindly donated by the Y Create Archive

Get it HERE

Detachment / McMarian - Cienie (Shadows) -1988- (Tape, A.R.S.), US/Poland

Here's another obscurity from the Polish home-taping circuit from behind the Iron Curtain. This time it's a split-cassette between the American act Detachment created by Craig Coe from Dayton, Ohio recorded between '86 and '88 and McMarian one of Poland's great industrial home-taping acts created by Marcin Bednarski and Piotr Kalinowski from the city Kraków.

It's an interesting fact that this isn't just a Polish cassette and that the members of McMarian were somehow able to share and receive music material over the borders of the socialist state, even if the political system was in its very last stage before the collapse. The Polish home-taping scene had been created by necessity since these type of bands were unable to release their music officially, nevertheless one can see that they did have ties with the international cassette culture. Cienie, meaning shadows, is a vivid example of this mechanism, that through its "secret" distribution had much more meaning than just having a taste for particular music. It's part of an unclassifiable almost non-existing area where art opened up a place for individuals who could gain some autonomy through their marginalized practices to counter the political and cultural programming of the totalitarian regime.

I can't find much info on the Detachment project from the US, but it somehow reminds me of the minimal synth sounds of Patrick Gibson from Australia. A very nice combination of experimental sounds and rhythmic industrial minimal synth. The tracks by McMarian have an even stronger foundation in rhythmic industrial music creating loops of manipulated rhythms in combination with samples. Specially the last tracks on the tape remind me of the primitive era of Esplendor Geométrico from Spain or the early Australian industrial act Mesh.

Actually the music is quite nice, unfortunately it's buried under a thick layer of white noise. I tried to digitize this several times to get a better sound (dolby, no dolby, equalizing etc.), until I found out it will just turn out to be like this. With renaming files and cutting I've spent four hours on this tape. The opening track by Detachment also starts low in volume and then starts to peak later on. Anyway, that's one of the things with those obscure tapes from Eastern Europe from the 80's, the quality is not that high. But because of its background and totally different cultural and technical circumstances the music should be appreciated in its lo-fi nature as a testament of the underground. It actually sounds better directly from cassette, as if the music has become one with its medium.

This tape was limited to 50 copies.

Kindly donated by the Y Create archive

Get it HERE

Ice Cream Blisters - When Nature Fails, Art Steps In -1986- (Tape, GGE Records), US

Here we have another nice tape from the American cassette-culture network of the 80's by Ice Cream Blisters. A band that came from Kent, Ohio that was founded by Mike Crooker and Chris Mezzolesta and friends, they also did the home-taping label GGE in Kent. Ice Cream Blisters made a couple more tapes and were for example also featured on the Exart compilation Music From The White House: U.S.A.. Their music is quite an eclectic mix-up of many different musical genres and styles like most of the weird American bands from that time.

When Nature Fails, Art Steps In definitely fits a no future mentality having a nice punk style and attitude combined with some deranged new wave sounds and pure sound experiments. It reminds me of other American bands like The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Blacklight Braille or Strange Fruit Abiku, ofcourse Pere Ubu that also hails from Ohio and probably also many other US bands I am overlooking now one can find in the Mutant Sounds archive. Nevertheless, Ice Cream Blisters has a signature of its own and the lengthy tape has many different musical highlights. From the demented violin infused Vivaldi to the nice lo-fi pop track Drive It Down.

I guess that the punk attitude of Ice Cream Blisters makes sense in the light of US (art-)punk in the North-Eastern and Mid-West states of the US that already had their own special punk-history since the 60's (think The Stooges and the Detroit scene etc). By the way, you can hear that a lot of effort was put in this release. Strange how they have remained so unknown, even after all the music that the blogs have been reviving for the last decade. Maybe some more of their music will surface with the time. It's really good! And not on Discogs.

"Don't be a cardboard celebrity that people pose next to. Don't live in fear of something you don't know really exists, think your own thoughts, they are worth more." 

This tape was kindly donated by the Y Create archive

Get it HERE

Blacklight Braille - The Carbonek Album -1991- (LP, Vetco), US

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

Blacklight Braille was an ever morphing band from Cincinatti, Ohio led by musicians Owen Smith and Doug Knight. The band claimed their own style called "Fringe Rock". Once they described it in a very good and thorough interview from 1993 as:

"Music created by rock musicians, yet not quite meeting the classical definition of rock' n' roll. It differs to the degree that it might be said to fall within an entirely different location, fringe rock. When we started, we were doing a music that was so far out on the fringe that the beauties were cryptic or hidden. It is highly improvisational music created with the available technology, and it searches for new and different musical instruments and sounds, You can't dance to it, but it does have elements of rock music."

Blacklight Braille made numerous albums on their own Vetco Records and started out in the mid-seventies as a collective of street performance artists and musicians under the name Bitter Blood Street Theatre. They acclaimed some underground fame in Cincinatti for their weird shows. Eventually they created the project Blacklight Braille with their first totally demented and experimental collage album Electric Canticles Of The Blacklight Braille in 1981. 

Later on Blacklight Braille was also picked up by the international deviant music scenes through the many albums that they distributed to radio stations worldwide. Besides their Fringe Rock music they also started to incorporate the somewhat occult fascination for British King Arthur and the Arthurian Legends. The musical influences became even more diverse and were now being accompanied by oral stories and poetry, regularly dealing with the Arthurian Legends.

The Carbonek Album, (Castle Carbonek is the place where supposedly the Holy Grail is kept) is a strange Arthurian concept album in which the world of Arthurian legends unfolds. About ten different people are part of the band for this occasion and the album goes into many directions, ranging from electronic ambient synth sounds to the new age sounds of fountains to dark experimentation with spoken tales. It has a humorous yet serious approach always keeping a pace with Arthurian atmospheres and concepts with tracks like The Fountain Falling From The Ace Of Cups, The Gift For Galahad and Guinhwyvare The Tall And Fair. It sort of reminds me of later work by Legendary Pink Dots, although more demented in approach. Also It makes me think of Big City Orchestra and their vast discography of albums.

Blacklight Braille is another one of those great US bands that is very much overlooked considering their unique music and the efforts they have put in their albums. Look out for the rest when you can!

Path to the Holy Grail over HERE