VARIOUS
ARTISTS - MORE SONGS THAT WILL NEVER BE RELEASED (M200C2)
PATRICK
GIBSON - TOO SEPARATE
A
CLOAKROOM ASSEMBLY - TOM TOM TOM
(M200C3)
A
CLOAKROOM ASSEMBLY - TRACE AND RUMBLE
SHANE FAHEY - WHEN MY ANTENNA WON'T START
(M200C4)
BOXED BROWNIES
Systematics / Dead Travel Fast / Splendid Mess / Scattered Order - Live
(M200C5)
THE SYSTEMATICS - STALL
(M200C6)
PATRICK GIBSON - TWO SEPARATE
PROD - IS THE TRUCK ON FIRE?
(M200C9)
All remastered at home
from good to excellent quality cassettes.
More willfull experimentation, skewed pop, mutant electronics and
psychedelic tape cut-ups from most of the main players at M Squared. All
were released in 7" tape boxes with cover pictures pasted on and with
various paper inserts
(except for 'More Songs').
Patrick Gibson's 2 sides reveal his love of synth, organ, repitition and
Christian myth. From the loop of guitar / Newcastle scream with overlaid
heavy organ chords to twittering bleeps and the three times table - all
left field pop is here.
The material from A Cloakroom Assembly is terrific too. More slow paced
and, in places, ambient sounding (Harold Budd, et al are mentioned in the
text) there's a stately grace about most of the tracks interspersed with
some gloomy, scary patches.
Prod's mixture of rhythmic inventiveness and humourous experiments has
held up well over the years. Less song based than their single, it still
has moments of raucous intensity.
Shane Fahey's side is, maybe, less successfull than the rest as it has a
restless intelligence that isn't purposely unsettling. Jumping from pieces
influenced by early electronic pioneers (Schaeffer, Mimaroglu, etc) to
songs that would fit nicely on the (Makers of) The Dead Travel Fast LP
it's too wide ranging to be cohesive.
The live Boxed Brownies set is terrific as well. Mostly recorded via the
soundbaord at Brownies - the Paddington Green Hotel - in 1981, fiddled
with in the studio (most excitingly in the Systematics set - quite
'Faustian') and then released into a fairly uninterested world. The
continued revelation for me is Splendid Mess whose set at the Tinkliy Bonk
Ball was a bit underwhelming but who get into a real krautrock style
groove on more than one track here.
The Systematics last show is detailed in Stall but it also contains the
last studio tracks the band recorded before morphing into Ya Ya Choral.
All these tracks, once again, show that all these people were at the leading
edge of lo-fi electronics, even if no-one knew it.
