Glasgow’s ‘DIY Ethos’ has existed in various shapes and forms for at least twenty years now. RM Hubbert has seen an awful lot of this since his days in the endlessly creative math-rock outift El Hombre Trajeado, who in their time played with the likes of Deerhoof, Nick Cave and Malcolm Middleton. The group was laid to rest in 2004, but they have since made all their records available for download on bandcamp, with the option to name your own price, like you did for In Rainbows all those years ago.

In the mean time, Hubbert’s been stupidly busy with various projects, most recently the 7-piece guitar-only improv group Burghead, but the last couple of years have seen his solo project take some precedence. In that time, Hubbert has recorded an achingly honest debut album, collaborated endlessly, played in various kitchens as part of his ‘Will Play for Food’ scheme, and is about to embark on a European tour supporting Mogwai. We caught up with him to talk about music, Glasgow, and The Man (that is, the one who grinds you down).

You’ve been going solo for a couple of years now, usually equipped with just the guitar. Is this a more fragile arrangement? What’s the biggest advantage to it?

It’s certainly a more convenient arrangement! Doing solo, instrumental acoustic guitar makes it very easy to do shows in more unusual spaces. Makes touring a lot simpler too. That’s not the reason I do it though. I started writing the solo pieces as a way to help deal with my inability to communicate clearly in any other way about my depression. As the subject matter was so personal, I felt uncomfortable getting other musicians involved.

Tell us about your decision to make largely instrumental music. Where does the flamenco influence come from?

I’ve been making mostly instrumental music for the last 16 years or so, first with El Hombre Trajeado then as RM Hubbert. I’ve always liked the way that the listener can imprint his or her own meaning onto instrumental music, with that narrative changing over time. It’s much more difficult to achieve that with lyrics. Learning flamenco was actually a fairly arbitrary choice; I needed something to take my mind off things when my father was dying. I figured that flamenco would be a hard thing to learn.

You were recently signed to Chemikal Underground; How did you feel about this? Being Glasgow-based, would it be fair to say it’s pretty significant for you?

I was really happy to join Chemikal Underground. I’ve known them all since before the label even existed and think that what they have managed to do over the last 16 years is nothing short of amazing. They are still a DIY label at heart and that is important to me. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been at all interested in signing to a label other than them.

Do you think your music reflects the fact you’re Glasgow-based at all?

Not particularly, to be honest. I don’t think that there is a discernible ‘Glasgow sound’ right now. This is a good thing.

You’ve made most of your material freely available, with the option to contribute to the artist, explaining on your website that ‘Obscurity is a far greater threat to artists than piracy’. Tell us about that decision. How would you explain it to someone who might be looking to make millions off of their releases?

It actually started more as curiosity. I have been interested and involved in the Open Source software movement for a long time and was very interested in how those principles might translate to music. I started a label called Ubisano with my friend John Williamson and we released First & Last as an experiment in doing things this way. It has worked well for us so far. We found that in the majority of cases, when people are given the choice to pay what they want for music they will actually pay more to support the artist. To put in simple terms, we made more money and distributed the album more widely than we would have done if had followed a traditional model.

As for someone that in making millions off of music, my advice is to become a plumber instead. Those fuckers are loaded.

Do you consider this an act of defiance against ‘The Industry’? Or more of a withdrawal?

Not defiance, just indifference. The traditional music industry model simply doesn’t work without spending a lot of money up front and even then it’s rare to break even, let alone make money.

Last December you supported GY!BE, having supported Silver Mount Zion previously. Tell us about that. How did you feel about the re-union?

I had a great time playing with both of them, they are all really cool, welcoming people. As were their audiences I might add. Playing the Barrowlands for the first time was pretty incredible too. It was the last thing I had to do on the little list that I had made in my head when I first started making music. The 16 year old me was happy about that.

I saw Godspeed a few times that week and all I can say is that it was never forced and easily as good as the first time round.

Are there any Glasgow-based artists you’re particularly excited about just now?

I think that Glasgow is having a really inspired time right now. Some of my favourites, in no particular order are Remember Remember, Yahweh, Happy Particles, Correcto, Trapped in Kansas, Campfires In Winter, The Ballad Of Mable Wong, Human Don’t Be Angry, Aidan Moffat, Stevie Jones, Alasdair Roberts, The Unwinding Hours, The Phantom Band, Make Love, Finn LeMarinel, iSSHO Taiko Drummers, Tattie Toes, Divorce & Gummy Stumps. Plus many, many more.

Visit www.rmhubbert.com for links to all of Hubbert’s releases, many of which you can name your price for. Hubbert is headlining a show at the Arches on the 26th of this month, along with Finn Marinel. Tickets are available from Monorail, as are hard copies of Hubbert’s releases.

Listen – this is just a student newspaper. We don’t have the time or resources to even begin to understand how scenes originally created with the intention of alienating just about everyone can gain worldwide appeal. So let’s start making some dubious but fun assumptions – we’re all a bit unhappy. Some of us are seriously unhappy, and cannot rely on traditional or mainstream artistic endeavors to help us navigate our own dark recesses, mainly because such endeavors are the produce of systems that are making us unhappy in the first place. So if you’ve got tens of millions of people looking for salvation elsewhere, you’re gonna have a hard time alienating them all, no matter what you’re making.

Obviously it’s more complicated than that (everything is). But it does go a way to explaining how the genres surrounding Black Metal continue to flourish, despite attempts by media sources the world over to irrevocably associate the music with all kinds of nasty things; church burnings, murder, national socialism et al.

Naturally we’re all much smarter then that. Tonight, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room, bring their own transformative take on the genre to Glasgow. Signed to Sunn0)))’s Southern Lord label, WITTR hail from the rural outskirts Olympia, Washington in Northwest USA, and are currently based at a self-sustaining farmstead there.

The show is part of a brief tour culminating in a performance at ATP. We went to chat about Black Metal and radical environmentalism.

Aaron Weaver, amongst other things, you’re labeled as a Black Metal band. Our publication hasn’t come into much contact with the genre, so for the benefit of our readers, what are your thoughts on that particular term?

We all know Black Metal started off as a scene with one hundred, two hundred people, localized to a few towns in Scandinavia. Now it’s a worldwide phenomenon. There are black metal bands in every country on earth. There’s probably a thousand black metal bands in China just now who we’ll never know about. It was just one of those cultural scenes that was, and still is, genuinely unconcerned with commercial viability. A lot of homegrown punk rock scenes are like that, it’s all about the local community, one hundred people connected to one place. And I think that’s a hallmark of black metal, it should spring from the place it comes from. When I listen to Darkthrone, Immortal, Burzum, Emperor, to me it sounds like Norway. It sounds like the archetypal endless winter, the snow, the ice, the extremely long dark nights around the winter solstice.

You’ve often talked about your lyrics and particular vision being strongly driven by eco-anarchist ideals.

With regards to WITTR, it’s an attempt to connect spiritually to the place we live. It is not any sort of right-wing, blood in the soil notion. It’s just the idea of respect and reverence for the land that sustains us in that basic, primary way. That’s our fundamental principle; we’re trying to channel the spirit of the northwest, which is really quite a special place. In Europe of course there’s an extremely unfortunate right wing connotation of cultural heritage, being linked to land through blood, I think it’s a sad thing and I do not envy European bands who have to figure that out and find their own stance. In America we don’t have any history, nor any sort of culture, nor any sort of ancestral lineage. It’s all about our immediate experience with the place we live. And I think that’s the basis of all spirituality, all religions and mythic experience evolve out of a cultures experience with a place. What’s our food source? What are the animals we interact with? What’s the weather like? These primary interactions with nature are the things that create our whole reality. That’s the eco-anarchist idea. Everything fundamentally derives from our experience with nature, and specifically the nature of the nature where we live.

What differences do you see between the kind of restraint that you exercise, and what you could call an irrational fear of technology?

This has to do with a deep questioning of the things you’re given as a modern person, your culture, the things you ought to do and how you ought to earn your living, or how you ought to think about the natural world. Saying to one’s self, do I really want to walk down this path that’s been presented to me?

So there’s something Huxleyan in that, as in, people tend to assume that whatever direction science and technology takes us in, it’s invariably good, progressive and positive.

Sure, I mean that is the fundamental myth of modernity. People still believe that things are getting better and better with each subsequent generation, that society is evolving. And I just can’t believe that. Any rational person can look at the reality of the ecological situation we’re in and understand that it is unsustainable, and realize that at some point in the next fifty or one hundred years this modern world we’ve created will collapse. As soon as you accept this, which is a hard thing to accept, you also have to throw out the myth of progress. I think that’s another fundamental part of a philosophy that questions the basic tenants of civilization – dealing with this idea of progress. I don’t want to romanticize pre-modern existence, clearly things are much easier and better for more people now then they were a thousand years ago, depending on the rubric you apply to what is ‘better’. The thing that really bothers me is this sense of triumphalism, this sense that we’ve reached the end of history, that we are the generation of people who have figured it all out. This idea that we have arrived at a system that is the best; politically, economically, ideologically. It’s clearly not true. We look at society a hundred years ago and talk about how backwards it was, we can’t believe the things they did. People will do the same to us in the future. And I think that’s the role of art; literature, film or music existing on the fringes, pushing radical ideas in the mainstream. I mean think about say, Jamie Oliver and organic eating and all that, yeah it’s a fad, but really it was pushed in there by hippies, freaks, y’know? Crazy outsiders. I think that’s another role that Black Metal plays, it deconstructs the rules of society by channeling through lands of nihilism and extreme misanthropic vision. And that’s not the goal, the goal is not to arrive at this place of self-loathing and nihilistic, depraved existence – the goal is to use that dark mind space to think about yourself, to put up a mirror to yourself and society. It’s a catalyst for transformation. A lot of people see it as an opportunity to destroy themselves. And, I think that’s fine. Sure. But it’s not how I see it.

Lets talk about your own sound. You’re described as a duo, tell us about your live set up tonight.

The band has always been me and my brother Nathan, a third guitarist comes and goes, I really don’t envy that job. And then our sound engineer incorporates some other sonic elements, we want it to sound huge. We’ve never had the intention of trying to be a rock band who just gets up on stage and plays a show, we see WITTR as more of a sound installation as much as anything. Of course there’s a rock element, a certain sort of aesthetic and set of assumptions. But we take our own approach.

When I listen to your tracks I tend to get lost in them in the same way I would listening to a drone or psych record, or even something like Burial (Will Bevan). It’s like strolling about in a mist.

There’s a trance element that’s fundamental to our vision. But then again, I’ve always seen black metal as having these shamanic overtones. The role of a shaman in traditional society is to live on the fringes, someone who’s compromised in some way. These days it’d be someone who’s schizophrenic, someone who’s totally out there on their own trip. But in traditional society, it’s their job to delve into the other world, to deal with the spirits there both malevolent and benevolent. And that’s terrifying work. The other world is not a safe place. It’s a really dangerous psychological space to enter. I think all music fulfills that role in our society; it’s artists sacrificing themselves in some way, entering into a dark dangerous space to achieve something, to pass on something greater.

We’ve talked about Black Metal a lot. There’s also an ambient element to your sound, is this something that’s always been present in black metal or something you think you’ve cultivated?

Definitely something that’s always been there. As soon as you have two distorted guitars being picked really fast, the chaos that’s created by the sound-waves interacting in that uncontrollable way creates that ambient effect. You get ghost-notes, ghost-harmonies that aren’t being played consciously by the performer, but appear just as a function of the physics of the sound-waves. That’s the basis of that ambient aspect, a droning, static-ridden, cold soundscape. So when you combine that with that relentless style of drumming, it can’t help but transport the listener to a different space. Black metal’s never been about a load of thrashing about like at a hardcore or a thrash metal gig, as far as I’m concerned its all about inward journeying. Music listened to with your eyes closed.

www.wittr.com. ‘Two Hunters’ and ‘Black Cascade’ are out now on Southern Lord.

It could be that I’m growing up but lately, I find the image of a room packed full of people listening to a performer in attentive silence more arresting than that of the youth dislocating each other’s arms and egos. I remember the final show at the now defunct ‘Posi-Crypt of a Thousand Drunks’. As well as Edinburgh hardcore party Shields Up, it featured a performance from Timothy C. Holehouse. Crouched in a corner surrounded by pedals, his minimal noise-drone and haunting, looped vocals froze the otherwise high-energy crowd to the floor, which was pretty refreshing in an age of musical ADHD. When twenty lives simultaneously come to something like a halt, the screeching is pretty intense.

This is what’s happening tonight downstairs in a full-to-capacity Sleazy’s,  the silence so complete at times that the more delicate moments of the performance are threatened by a beeping drinks till. Not that any of the noise junkies sprawled about on the floor care at all, some gazing up at the stage in reverence, some clearly utilizing the waves to engage in some ferocious introspection. Tonight, artists from the Australian-based ambient and experimental label Room 40 come to Glasgow; Rafael Anton Issirai, Label Curator Lawrence English, and Liz Harris, AKA Grouper.

Grouper is headlining tonight’s bill. After helping English to finish his fantastic, physically-draining set, she sits at a table centre stage, cradling an electric guitar, and facing a pair of mics, plugged into various pedals at her feet. On the table is a selection of audio tapes, and four walkmans plugged into a mixer. Throughout the set, Harris mix and matches the tapes, a selection of field recordings and ethereal noise which occasionally falter and betray their analogue format. Over these, she strums and picks at her densely layered guitar, murmuring, crooning and whispering in an impossibly gentle, indistinct wail.

The result is intoxicating, and before long I’m fairly much lost in a centre-less soundscape with no points of reference, except maybe for Harris herself – as a friend remarked, there is something about watching her at work that is like watching a musician in their bedroom. This is the kind of awkward intensity which you get scared of looking away from, for fear of missing one subtle act which could define the performance. And before I know it, the tape runs out, the guitar cuts off, and Harris just has time in the ensuing silence to utter a curt ‘thanks’. No pretension here whatsoever. Just an honest exploration of truths we already know.

This tour celebrates Room 40’s 10th anniversary. ‘Hopefully we’re just as good-looking as we were back then’ announces Lawrence English. Trust me, he is. Here’s had he what to say to us;

Do you think people respond to your labels music, or ambience and noise in general, in the same way they did ten years ago?

Whilst there’s been a lot of changes in the way people listen, how they interact with music and what they value about music – I feel fairly strongly that the relationship of most people who interact with the label is the same now as it was then.

Do you think younger listeners, say my age, have the same sort of patience?

A good question, and I think so for the most part – I mean age has little to do with how people might listen and engage with the music. Like all things, the longer you explore the more you get from it.

To someone who might of never heard any of Room 40′s releases, or anything vaguely experimental, they might associate terms like ‘ambience’, ‘noise’ or field recordings with inactive processes, something that belongs in the background. How d’you think your music in particular escapes this? Do you think it does at all?

I guess this is a very personal thing. For some people, when they hear a pop song all that really focus on is the voice, the lyrics – they sing a long and perhaps never listen with any focus on the bass or drums sections in the piece, when in fact it’s these parts that give the piece it’s rhythm and pulse.

For my music it’s the same thing, if you let it seep into you, the detail and the depth of elements like field recordings or textural elements come into focus (as do the other musical elements) and suddenly you hear a whole other universe of sound you perhaps might not get from music that’s concerned with more ‘pop’ related formats. For me, what excites me most about music is when I hear people explore the details of the sounds – take Grouper for example or Tujiko Noriko or Tenniscoats – even though these musicians work with recognisable structures, voice, electronics and other ‘familiar’ sounds, it’s the way they work with them – the depth and subtlety of sounds they use that makes their work so deeply engaging.

Music and sound is absolutely a two way process, the more you listen the more you hear.

Is there anything in particular you like to see at your shows on the part of the audience / the live experience in general?

I like for people to get lost in the sound and to have a sense of the two ways of listening – with the ears (higher frequencies, cerebral sound) and with the body (low frequencies, physical sound) sound isn’t just about little membranes in your ears vibrating, it’s about the whole body.

Aye. Physical Experience. I thought my ribs were gonna cave in. Ever had any truly unique reactions at shows because of that?

There’s been a few shows that have been really special – due to sound system or space. In Brisbane I made parts of the ceiling fall away once this year – everyone become covered in a fine white powder as I vibrated the ceiling. Also in Russia last year the sound system was so powerful I was able to make the entire room vibrate with the most unnatural intensity, really felt like the makings of an earthquake. I have to say vibrating a bottle of booze off the bar was a first in Glasgow!

Cathartic stuff indeed. I was stupid to ask Lawrence if he saw the label going another ten years from now; “

‘Most certainly’ he said, ‘it’s a true pleasure to spend time working with such wonderful artists’.

Go to www.room40.org to check out the latest news and releases surrounding the label. For more interesting, exotic gigs in Glasgow like this one which you should really be going to instead of Viper, take a peek at Cry Parrot on Facebook

There’s a few things going on tonight, but what stands out for me is Chris de Laurenti’s performance, entitled N30: Live from the WTO 1999. I’m wondering into Tramway theatre One, sit myself down on the floor, and after a much needed welcome from Laurenti himself, the lights get dimmed. What follows is a heady mix of field recordings from the infamous counter-action directed at the Seattle World Trade Organization conferences of 1999. Above us, across what feels like a stereophonic stratosphere, is a collection of time-indexed police radio-chatter, both censored and uncensored samples that Laurenti had issued to him by way of what we would call freedom of information, and illegally garnered recordings.

Over the course of the hour you hear a lot of things. A prominent feature of the field recordings are the drums. Amid the throng of Laurenti’s recordings are samba percussion bands, marching bands, blazing house music, and more spiritual offerings in the form of bells, gongs, and harmonies. It’s a entirely unsettling experience when the drums cut out, the radio chatter growls menacingly, and violence breaks out. Rumours of rubber bullets being fired fly through the crowds, people appeal to the police and each other for peace, and anger erupts in response.

Here’s what the performance makes me think; Imagine you’re involved in something so activated as a protest, or a demonstration. At the time, all you are really concerned with are two things; Firstly, whether or not you are having any kind of effect. Secondly, and in some courses of action more importantly, whether or not you are going to get arrested. What Laurenti’s performance primarily highlights is the circle of information and events that you rarely consider. Whilst a collective of hippies beat their drums and chant tired slogans, a whole network of terribly oppressive, under-paid cops scheme away at the fringes, containing and exposing the protestors.

Laurenti’s superbly executed sound piece is an exploration of how we are informed and ultimately controlled, falling right in line with Arika’s quest for the bigger frame behind radical music. Emotive, brave, and fully prepared to engage in some serious civil disobedience.

We went to talk to guitarist Rupert Orton to see if he had any idea what was going on sonically. ‘D’you wanna sandwich? We’ve got loads’.

I was looking at your touring schedule, you’ve just gotten back from the States, now you’re here, and soon you’ll be in Europe. You must be one of the busiest bands in the UK. Noticed many differences?
It’s intense innit. Every country’s slightly different, we were quite surprised with America, first proper tour we’d done there, three weeks straight… we were a bit anxious because, y’know, we’re playing what’s essentially American music, but there’s clearly still a soft spot for UK artists going over there and giving them our interpretation or whatever. France is always great, they go wild for it over there.

American music, yeah, I mean arguably there’s a nostalgic element in your songwriting, particularly that rattling piano that features quite prominently. D’you you view yourself as part of a revivalist movement?
Naw, absolutely not, I completely reject that, I mean undeniably we take an inspiration from fifties music, because when me and Jim would sit down to talk about the music we loved, we came back to the fifties again and again, it was more to grasp the raw punk rock energy of like, y’know, what people like Little Richard were about… I mean just imagining what it must have been like to see little Richard in the mid-fifties in the deep south, like a man wearing make up, wearing pink suits, bashing the fuck out of pianos, screaming about wanting to fuck your daughter when really he’s looking at your son, d’you know what I mean? It’s just, astonishing, and we thought if we could just get a little bit of that…

Naturally because so many people associate you with an ‘antiquated’ genre a lot of names get thrown around, but who are your real influences?
Well you’ve got MC5 and the Stooges from the 60’s, in the 70’s you’ve got New York Punk Rock like the Ramones, the New York Dolls… in the 80’s you’ve got some really incredible bands like The Birthday Party (Nick Cave’s original band), and The Gun Club especially, absolutely revolutionary how they married Punk Rock and Blues, I mean that’s how I got into listening to the original blue’s records by listening to their Robert Johnson covers…. More recently I suppose you’ve got Grinderman, first album a couple of years ago was just mind-blowing, in that a bunch of guys in their fifties could make such an incredibly powerful record that’s so stunningly relevant. The lyrical content doesn’t focus on pink Cadillac’s or driving to the prom, it’s about Jim’s live in London.

On Nick Cave, how was it working with Jim Sclavunos (Grinderman, Bad Seeds) on the new album?
Fantastic, the first album was very, very raw, recorded in a rehersal studio, two days, no overdubs, live to mic, exactly what we wanted, but it’s just SO raw, that when you turn it up four or five notches on your system it turns to white noise, which I actually quite like! But there’s only so far you can take that without creating a whole record of white noise… we were doing a show in Helsinki last year, sold out, everyone going nuts, and they liked it so much they played the first record over the P.A when we were done. And it was just, wow, I’d never heard it on a club system before! Just, noise! Quite astonishing! And I want my records played in clubs, in which case they need to retain their definition! And I hope and think that’s what’s happened with the new record. You can turn it up to ten and whilst it’d still blow the doors off, it’ll retain that clarity.

So enjoyment is something you like to see at your shows?
Absolutely, definitely, I mean what we’re playing is high-energy rock and roll, and whilst some might concieve that as some violent, I actually view it as something quite cleansing. So we’re pretty psyched that we’ve managed to sell out most of our tour, especially Glasgow! … Last time we played here we were playing some vegan restraunt (Mono) in front of twenty people, but it was still a full on show, and we love it.

‘Burning Your House Down’ out now on [PIAS] Recordings.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

GRINDGAZE
The ferocity of Grindcore, the crushing apathy of Shoegaze. Sullen, crooning vocals about all the good stuff – sexual ambivalence, nihilism-lite, Bill Murray’s adventures in Japan, accompanied by brutal, down-tuned 20 second beatdowns.

NO-STEP
What the club scene really needs to do is to stop having so much fun and focus its energies on alienating absolutely everybody by banging out terribly produced, super discordant, un-danceable auto-tunes and having an elite of about twenty folk proclaim them the most important output in the history of the dance floor. Plus anybody who’s come into contact with no-wave will know that the pictures are roughly a thousand times better then the tunes, so no-step will spell a golden age for people arrogant enough to put pictures of their nights out up on Facebook and show you what a good time THEY’RE having, thus making everyone just a little unhappier! Result!

BATTLEFOLK
Not a genre as such and more of a suggestion on how to improve folk in all its incarnations – there aren’t nearly enough beefs in the folk / singer-songwriter community, and if there are they simply aren’t airing them explicitly enough.

RELATED; BAD-ANECDOTE-WAVE
Rubbish stories about what happened to you the other night when you were taking the trash out or whatever are the best. Lets see some heart-wrenching acoustic sweetness being dreamed up to convey some utterly frivolous tales.

TREE-IN-THE-WOODS-CORE
This is simple – any band, any set-up, any style, anything, so long as they never record and perform exclusively in empty venues. A notoriously tricky scene to negotiate without selling out, like every other band in the world ever did.

RIOT-GOAT
A bit like Riot Grrrl. But freakier.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

Swans by Beowulf Sheehan

Central member Michael Gira has remained active since then, playing with the more melodically inclined Angels of Light, but now, 13 years later, Swans have returned with their 12th studio album ‘My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky’. The forty five minute record is a dense, unsettling and often beautiful accomplishment – a vicious collection of sharp dynamic variance and entirely unconventional songwriting.

Having just started their world tour, Michael seems in high spirits when I talk to him. ‘We’re travelling through the mountains right now, it’s pretty special’.

You’ve been keen to point out that you don’t view the band’s reformation as a re-union, why is that? Is this part of a move to escape the sound associated with the band?
We’re not revisiting the old Swans. This is a way for me to push forward and develop, and make some good music in the process, we just happened to decide to release it under the name of Swans. The last thing I would want is for what we’re doing now to turn into an exercise in nostalgia.

The new record sounds huge, how much continuity do you see between it and say Angels of Light, or Soundtracks for the Blind?
Certainly there is continuity between from Soundtracks from the Blind, in fact they all figure in the new album, these elements all contribute, but there’s also a key difference. I don’t know what, but it makes perfect sense to me because I’m the same person (laughs). But yeah, the touring we’re doing now really brings out the difference.

Good! Tell us about the tour.
It’s going extremely well, we are all transforming around it.

Do you detect a new dynamic in the new arrangement?
Well I mean, me and the band get along incredibly well, there’s no bickering or drama. One thing about this tour is that it’s a real physical commitment, some of the songs we’re playing are like twenty minutes long, it’s a real ordeal getting through them without having a heart attack! But at the same time, it’s a lot like say going to church, you get lost in something bigger then yourself.

Many of our readers will know Devendera Banhart, who features on the album track ‘You People Make Me Fucking Sick’, how was it working with him?
Well Devendera’s a great guy, we’re good friends, maybe you don’t know about it in the UK but it was my label (Young God) that put out ‘Oh Me Oh My’ (2002) as well as ‘Rejoicing in the Hands’ (2004) and ‘Niño Rojo’ (2004) which I actually produced, so yeah we’re very close. I came to recording that particular song in a very odd way, and when I started singing it I realised I was singing exactly like Devendera, so I figured it’d make perfect sense to include him on the album.

You also included your daughter’s voice on the track which sounds quite childish and sing-song-esque, don’t get me wrong because I mean this in an entirely positive way but she transforms the track into something all together terrifying, what was behind that decision?
Well yeah exactly! I just felt it needed a little something else so we decided to overdub her onto the track, it just made sense to me, it adds a certain implication to the lyrics I feel.

A twisted childhood innocence say.
Sure, yeah. I mean I wrote this song while I was absent-mindedly whipping around on some music website, looking at pictures of stylish young people full of violent sexual urges, and so I decided to write a love song from the point of view of a stalker.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

THE COSMIC DEAD
(http://www.myspace.com/thecosmicdead)

The Glasgow-based DIY adventure team Winning Sperm Party have taken to renting out the ‘Practice Pad’ rehearsal studios in Maryhill and throwing fairly mental parties featuring hundreds of bands and pretty good falafel. The Cosmic Dead, a revolving line up of musicians, finished off the recent night in one of the studio’s smaller rooms by completely flooding it with smoke, lighting up the place in red, and unleashing a thirty minute sonic assault on the hundred or so ears lost in the fog. There’s an obvious nod to Sunn0))) as the set opens up, with the band blasting the crowd with a distorted, tonally-saturated wave of droning power chords. Then, slowly, there’s an eerie transformation as an entirely transcendent kraut-beat jam unfolds, featuring the kind of effect-heavy guitar work that you’d be more then happy to slowly drown in, all underpinned by a hypnotic, eternally repeating bass grooves. Epic, life-affirming adventures in space, catch them at the Captains Rest, October 25th.

CLOCKED OUT
(www.clockedout.bandcamp.com)

I don’t even wanna talk about Clocked Out! They’re just really, really, really fun yeah?! That’s it! I swear! Fast, tanked-up, forget-the-nine-to-five funcore? For anyone with healthy punk sensibilities, playing the Book Yer Ane Fest IV DIY punk and hardcore festival in Dundee December 4th.

HONEY AND THE HERBS
(www.myspace.com/honeyandtheherbs)

Lets go surfing with Honey and the Herbs! There’s a good selection of photos detailing what these chaps get up to on their myspace; If you can think of something better to do then traipse around the West end in a Morris Minor with a plethora of instruments and soul-sodden lyrics, I want to hear from you. There is a seriously rich and pleasing garage and psyche-influenced sound to be enjoyed here – plenty of organs, plenty of heart-felt wailing.

ULTIMATE THRUSH
(www.myspace.com/ultimatethrush)

Ultimate Thrush are good at all sorts of things, particularly costumes and some brutal variety of post-hardcore, post-everything party tunes. Go and see them live, its thrilling stuff. Sporadic, spontaneous and bristling with the kind of filthy excitement you usually associate with a prison riot gone wrong. Truly the best kind of totally awful. They’re playing stereo with other Glasgow treasures October 24th.

And thats just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a few of the countless others; Citizens, Holy Mountain, Second Hand Marching Band, Paws, Bronto Skylift, Two Minute Noodles, PVH, Gummy Stumps, Eternal Fags, Divorce, Les Bof!, Flags Raised, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji, Robbie and the Bastard, Jackie Onassis, Black Sun, Ug!, Cheer, Tangles, Noma, Kylie Minoise, honestly the list and the joy is never ending. Furthermore, there are some truly excellent promotion outfits in the city just now, watch out for shows organized by the likes of Cry Parrot, Winning Sperm Party, Unthank Collective and This is Our Battlefield. So, remember, if meat is murder, then cheesy pop is just plain exploitation – go vegan and reject every stale union vomit-fest. Spend the money on your fantastic local scenes instead.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

Annabel Mehran

So, we’re living in an age of deafening headphones and noise worship; and feedback (as in cyclical noise) is an element that shocks few music lovers these days. Indeed, it positively delights many. So it’s a sobering and uneasy experience to witness a somewhat distressed Joanna Newsom squirming in discomfort when dogged by a particularly nasty hissing one song into her performance tonight.

This kind of thing can have a serious, immediate effect on the sensitized ears of the classically trained. It’s a shame that the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, for all its pomp, circumstance and wildly over-priced tickets, can’t get a handle on this, and prevent these initial anxieties.

Luckily this appears to have little effect on the overall performance. On the basis of her three LP’s, you’d be forgiven for associating the crystal tones of a harp with notions of gentle innocence and clarity. The visual element of Newsom shifting about on the stool, literally wrestling with a six foot instrument, is arresting, and reveals a messy, emotional turbulence you’d more readily associate with the jagged world of guitar based singer-songwriters. Tonight’s set is a collection from across the harpist’s back-catalogue, featuring a minimal line up compared to the orchestras she has previously played with.

The band features collaborators Neal Morgan and Ryan Francesconi who, as well as feeding into the sound a range of string instruments and some very emotive, earthy drumming, were responsible for some of the song-writing to be found on latest release Have One on Me, and re-arranging and shortening some of Newsom’s grander creations. Completing the line up are session muscians taking up violins and the trombone, plus a few other surprises.

It genuinely works well. The group’s sound is organic and punctuated, never overwhelming. As a result, this tends to ground the audience in the immediate situation – Newsom’s storytelling is complex, and she wouldn’t want you to get lost. Respite comes in the form of the shimmering spaces created by Newsom’s expertly executed solo harp flourishes, unleashed in tasteful frequency (“That last one gave me a blister!” she complains after a particularly gruelling work-out). Part of what’s so good about what is going on tonight is for all their arpeggios and seamless chord changes, Newsom and co. never comes off as pretentious, aloof, or otherwise unreachable; each song resonates with that folk-based spirit of welcome that has characterised much of her work.

This kind of execution, a technical brilliance which radiates a certain effortlessness and freedom, is rare, and despite some technical difficulties and a somewhat tepid atmosphere, tonight’s performance is a pleasure to witness.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

Perhaps it has been a decade now since you last handled an audio cassette, unless of course you’re a fan of the numerous genres still thriving on the format. The grainy texture unique to analogue recordings is the perfect vessel for several DIY styles, from noise and power-electronics, to ambience and kosmische. Merch stalls at such gigs are brimming with boxes of different albums, live sets, rarities and improvisations by various artists, all on tape, sometimes completely anonymous and maybe even unique; far removed from the regimented iTunes libraries of the digital age.

Locally, there is a fair bit of this going on. Local Noise/Assorted nastiness label At War with False Noise is still pedalling various delights on cassette including prolific, shrouded-in-mystery noise outfit Culver (providing “instructions on entering the void”) and Glasgow’s own Cheer (filling up tapes with heartbreaking waves of messy ambience). Similarly, Sick Head Tapes have released various singles by local one-man “kosmische metal space ritual project” Nackt Insecten and Kylie Minoise.

If the rumours are true though, all this hands-on fun will be hard to come by in as little as a year. Commercial production of the format has ceased and we’ve been living off the overstock ever since. Rumour or not, stocks will one day run out. Our favourite tunes have long since vacated these awkward relics and fled onto hard drives and servers in lonely bedrooms and basements all over the world. Disseminated by the likes of Myspace, Spotify and of course, for some lucky ducks, the joy of the Murano Street mass Shared iTunes Library, an inadvertent masterstroke by Sanctuary Housing.

Physically then, our music has disappeared. Are we losing anything else? If you sit down and listen to an album on tape, what you’re listening to is the album as an entity. Even if you do skip certain tracks, the process of traversing and fine-tuning that reel acknowledges this. Today, with the ability to instantly jump between any track from any outfit comes an impatient urge to simultaneously satisfy every musical craving. This attitude has consequences; any DJs starting out at house parties will be familiar with that moment when halfway through your delicately mixed and perfectly arranged minimal techno set, some fool comes stumbling over your decks insisting you stick some Kasabian on. A more serious point might argue that decent artists will exploit this attitude and start releasing albums of equally gratifying singles, rather then a sixty-minute experience, a feeling I certainly get from Radiohead’s In Rainbows for example.

Not that I’d want to be a victim of nostalgia; I needn’t mention the benefits of the modern age, and looking back I’m not sure I could take the trauma of having my Peter and the Wolf audio cassette munched up by my parents’s car tape-deck. Still, I think I’ll be stocking up on c60s these next few months.