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From the same studio that brought us 48 Chairs (Gerry & The Holograms), The Fall, and The Blue Orchids, while following the bona-fide bloodline between Danny And The Dressmakers, Toolshed, and 808 State, the "difficult second album" by Biting Tongues (released on a minuscule cassette run by The Buzzcocks' vanity label) has since become a near mythical artifact of Mancunian DIY. Cementing the path between the Absurd label's kitchen sink synth assaults and Factory's 99 informed downtown aspirations, Biting Tongues' bass-driven, pounding-sounding, schizo-skronking, squat-pop put the emergence of punk-funk under a blinding interrogation bulb then hid 'round the corner evading secret police. Pouring three letter words like "ESG", "DAF", "PIL", and "ACR" into Ken Hollings Scrabble bag would result in a unique form of wordy dictaphone agit-rap and closed-circuit commentary to Graham Massey's overqualified punk ensemble, laying foundations of future Manc activity using uncertified sand and gravel tactics, only to be safety checked every 38 years, or thereabout. Live It, the lost Biting Tongues album, still breathes. Including what the original members of this pioneering post-punk platoon unanimously consider their greatest work, Biting Tongues seldom-heard, second roll of the dice was presented to The Buzzcock's own label New Hormones to coincide with full-length DIY debuts by Ludus, Dislocation Dance, and a distinct tightening of purse strings. Recorded on half-price studio time (in the midst of a multi-track repair session) and duped on to compact cassettes to keep pressing costs down, the album Live It even entirely bypassed the non-existent art-department before landing in the hands of a small readership of peculiar-punk die-hards, instantly slipping into obscurity, evading official band future discographies, and reaching an imaginary status in the history of unchartered Manc-manufactured messthetics. Now available, on vinyl, with two sleeve variations and extensive notes from Graham Massey and Ken Hollings, Live It is a welcome misplaced release and an essential addition to Finders Keepers' Cache Cache catalog. Biting Tongues make wise heads!
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"... Let's talk about the dangerous counterrevolutionaries who went out and bought a cheap synth and a rudimentary drum machine. The ones that got what 'punk' was really about. The democratization of art . . . Sniffing Glue said learn three chords and form a band, Throbbing Gristle said why learn any chords at all... I am an artist because I say I am. More Marcel Duchamp than Malcolm McLaren. So, sisters and brothers, who do you think led the counter-revolution? Well I'll tell you. It was the man who stormed the Bastille and kicked the door down in the first place and he did it on the July 16th, 1977. With the help of Tommy Vance. John Lydon's playlist that night on Vance's show included Tim Buckley, The Creation, Augustus Pablo, Bobby Byrd, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Peter Hammill, and Can and put paid to any punk rock 'year zero' claims. Meanwhile, locked out of the studio, Malcolm had to listen to the counterrevolutionary manifesto being broadcast across the metropolis. Mark that date in your diaries, sisters and brothers: 16th July, the anniversary of the birth of 'post punk'. Just over a year later in October, Lydon rammed the point home with the release of Public Image, a personal and musical manifesto in 7" form. The music on Plastic Dance 2 is the strangely colored, distorted, and frighteningly beautiful fruit of the seeds planted on that fateful day. Lessons learned and inspiration taken from the sonic aesthetics of dub, knowing that not all disco sucked and that even jazz was allowed. Music shaped by wonky approximation and appropriation. The artists on Plastic Dance 2 were artists because they said they were. Listen to their work and you'll know they were. Listen in transcendent wonderment as George Attwell creates alchemical space funk in his home studio... as a future Mock Turtle and members of The Manchester Music Collective channel Robert Calvert and Bill Nelson... as Korzynski comes on like a Jeff Mills remix of Terry Riley. Listen in the wide-eyed joy of being as Stabat Stable's drum machine runs amok to the accompaniment of discordant organ stabs... as a future founder of 808 State channels Albert Ayler alongside a galloping synth arpeggio." --Andrew Weatherall
The second volume in the Plastic Dance series compiled by Andy Votel and Doug Shipton. Featuring exclusive liner notes by Andrew Weatherall. Features George Atwell, Vibrant Thigh, Stabat Stable, Cos, Beach Surgeons, Cosmic Overdose, Andrzej Korzynski, Ti-Tho, Gerry And The Holograms, and pragVEC.
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Documenting 48 Chairs, the unlikely coupling of British free jazz bastion Lol Coxhill and the saucy synth pop don't-wannabes known as Gerry And The Holograms, 70% Paranoid is a rare incognito full-length album. It bridges the micro-niches of electronic jazz and punk jazz from a band formed in 1979 at an axis where DIY and new wave hadn't quite collided! With sprinklings of post-punk female vocals worthy of PragVEC and Suburban Lawns, featuring angular art rock paeans to voodoo dolls and closed-circuit TV, this privately pressed LP comes directly from the man who gave Factory Records's Martin Hannett some of his best ideas and wrote the blueprint for Manchester's new musical order. Imagine if Talking Heads became Mark E Smith's backing band for a week before being sacked for wearing a Frank Zappa t-shirt while Eric Dolphy forgot to take his headphones off. If that sounds attractive, one should be paying double. A genuine lost moment from the post-punk era with progressive pop credentials from the university of Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias before everyone got a job at the local Factory. Why are you the only person who doesn't know about this? As one of the few fully formed feature-length album projects of the immediate independent post-punk era, the 1981 album 70% Paranoid by 48 Chairs is still often referred to as one of Manchester's best-kept secrets by many of the anti-genre's most switched-on collectors and critics. Combining the talents of the squat-pop synthesists who brought you Gerry And The Holograms with the free jazz Brit-skronk of Lol Coxhill and gelled together with vocals by female punk one-timer Fran Kershner, this seldom-travelled, hand-assembled LP was both deeply underground and wildly overambitious, earning it an inverted status as a genuine "unknown pleasure". Politely waiting in queue for delayed accolades to this day, 70% Paranoid was born out of a direct reaction to the short-lived journalistic cranny known as "new-music" which bridged the pigeonholes of punk-rock and new-wave allowing a small wide-eyed flock to escape the coup in the process. Evading the final nails in the coffin of prog and jazz-rock and dreading the reverse reverb of the New Romantic onslaught, a certain breed of overqualified underdogs, with small plates and huge Zappa-tites took the Mancunian manifesto of do-it-yourself and decided to do-it-your-own-way instead, with a secret hope that the book shelf was gonna collapse either way.
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Cache Cache present a reissue of Madfilth, originally released in 1980. From the pumping heart of the Magnetic System comes the "dirtiest" Da-Da-dancefloor anti-jams with this lost 1979 blueprint of Italian conceptual cosmic disco played by the cream of the Goblin studio band. Carving its own grubby niche as an early prototype of cosmic disco cum Italo space funk whilst simultaneously harboring Dada hat stand satire with a junkshop glam aesthetic, this ecological illogical poplitical crab cabaret clearly broke the mold before way before the jelly had set. Fans of "other" obtuse outernational agit-camp might find a fantasy fusion between France's Jean-Pierre Massiera and Sweden's enviromental marvel Kapten Zoom while trying to unravel the Madfilth tangle. Originally drip fed out of Cesare Andrea Bixio's Cinevox stable as one of a tight grip of non-soundtrack LPs, made to test the label's commercial potential, Madfilth would follow the band Goblin -- and their non-cinematic Roller (1976) -- as well as the eponymous long player by The Motowns (1971) in what was perhaps the last-ditch attempt at custom built popsploitation, combining the skills of overqualified composers with undercooked conceptual mind farts. This micro-brewed oddity finally quenches the acquired taste of a new breed of shambolic psychotropic guzzlers proving that 1979 was obviously good year for fool's gold. It is beneath the flamboyant rhythm rants and vari-speed osric slop of alt-comedic sarcy-satirist Alberto Macaro (a genetic beneficiary of a vaudevillian comic bloodline) that the Magnetic System maestros Franco Bixio and Vince Tempera act as the sonic driving force behind this unmarked treasure trove of eight-musical diamanté discoids. It will also come as little surprise that Cinevox/Dario Argento favorites Goblin were not too far away with the bass player Fabio Pignatelli alongside sports rock drummer Agostino Marangolo joining in. Madfilth's inclusion of Goblin synth maverick Maurizio Guarini and the band's mid-period guitarist Carlo Penessi (founder of the band Etna) pinpoints the jobbing Goblin session group during the time they recorded the soundtracks for the films Buio Amiga (1979) and Squadra Antigagsters (1979). This lesser celebrated late '70s era also witnessed the mutating Goblin rhythm section providing discoid backbeats for records such as Giorgio Farina's Discocross LP (1978), Simonetti's own Capricorn alter-ego, and the homoerotic nightclub spin-off Easy Going, all of which, alongside Madfilth, provide a strong mutual stylistic support system for their claim to cosmic discos deep red bloodline.
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Well-documented as one of Frank Zappa's favorite ever groups and instantly recognizable as the blueprint of '80s Mancunian electro pop, the inflated alter-egos of Gerry & The Holograms (and their unrivaled brand of conceptual sarcastic synth pop) successfully remodeled, ridiculed, and redefined plugged-in punk before hitting the self-destruct button and burying the evidence under a pile of hand-mutilated microgrooves for over 35 wet summers. Having risen from the electronic embers of Manchester's first genuine psychedelic band, via Vertigo commissioned prog and experimental theater, then refined through the musical mind behind the most inspired vinyl moments of Martin Hannett, John Cooper Clarke, and Jilted John - the discography of the GATH anti-band remains unrivaled as the most idiosyncratic and enigmatic pivotal post-punk artifact from the first electronic entrenchment of pop. The first-and-only listenable two track record by this masked art-rock studio duo, entitled Meet The Dissidents, originally appeared in record racks in 1979, selling-out instantly only to be sequel-ized by a totally unplayable situationist-inspired follow-up which was glued into its own sleeve destroying the grooves in the process (rivalling that of Peter Saville and Durutti Column's Debordist sandpaper re-hash by at least three years). With a life-span shorter than the hours on their studio bill, the band would find bedfellows amongst other incognito groups like Naffi Sandwich, The Mothmen, and Blah Blah Blah within the Absurd Records stable - a daring Mancunian imprint that sat awkwardly between older and younger half-sister labels Rabid and Relentless. With an 11 release library of mostly non-returning faceless atonal electronic punk/DIY industrial bands, Absurd would spearhead and pre-empt the subsequent decades of Mancunian independent record labels that followed in the footsteps of the more commercially successful Factory Records. Despite just one official title to their name however, the true identity behind Gerry And The Holograms would unify those sister-labels and collectively play an important supporting role in Manchester's independent music history with a story which goes back as far as most rain soaked memories can attempt to forget. On Thursday July 2, 2015, The Guardian Newspaper published an article with the snappy title "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle - 10 Classic Stolen Pop Songs From Saint Louis Blues To Blue Monday" in which journalist Clinton Heylin made the claim that "If 'Blue Monday' had a starting point, it was Gerry and the Holograms" illustrating the vivid similarities between the two tracks.
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"Leaving you spellbound in its androgynous vocal delivery, Spider King's Animals is a haunting children's march that paralyses me with each listen." --Cedric Bixler-Zavala (The Mars Volta, ANTEMASQUE)
An unknown pleasure torn out of Manchester's lost DIY manual, this overqualified/underexposed post-punk pop pillar casts an almost invisible web across the history of Manchester's inner-city music scene, trapping appendages of The Mothmen, Martin Hannett, Gerry and the Holograms, John Cooper Clarke, Blue Orchids, Naffi Sandwich (The Naffis), and The Fates in its glue. As a central mast of Manchester's 1970s/'80s "deserted" DIY era, spanning angular jazz funk, punk, and sarcastic synthpop, Spider King also played a huge role in Manchester's honorary adoption of The Velvet Underground's Nico (as her lead guitarist), fronted Martin Hannett's first band, and inhabits a key position in the careers of Sad Café, Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, and Paul Young, not to mention AC/DC's Mancunian debut. With dozens of self-penned songs, unreleased demos, and two of the best collectable Manc punk-funk 45s to grace collectors' want-lists, it's almost unbelievable (even tragic) that Mike King's late-'70s/early-'80s work never saw a full-length release -- until now. Shot to Pieces represents one of the most elusive, jagged pieces of Northwest England's punk-funk puzzle, recorded sporadically between 1979 and 1983 with a cast of characters from the Rabid/Absurd label family (such as behind-the-scenes synth-wielder John Scott from Gerry and the Holograms) and producers like Laurie Latham (The Blockheads). Commonly recognized by stalwarts of the era's mutating genres as "the one that got away," Spider King is the archetypal artist's artist as well as the outsider's outsider and the hardest-working man in no-business, who is now attracting a whole new audience of champions from bloggers, vinyl nerds, and well-respected contemporary musicians, with his appearances on mixtapes and compilations. On hearing this essential release, one could argue that these lost spidergrams are more relevant in 2016 than they were when those arachnophobic A&R men shooed him away decades ago. For those who ain't afraid to get bit, say hello to the Spider King.
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The work of an incredible, idiosyncratic, and obscure early-'80s French futurist DIY project lead by Jean-Luc Aimé (Univers Zero), this feature-length album of elusive recordings from rare vinyl and cassette co-op releases (collected as the first-ever LP of the project) represents the bone fide axis point where zeuhl-skool meets synthpop, dark ambient, and early electro. A lost art-ifact from a micro-genre in which ZED, Eskaton, and Heldon share outernational tape space with Vox Populi!, The Normal, Colin Potter, and Luc Marianni, this work occupies a unique place on the shelves of fans of early DIY electro and post-punk, while ticking the boxes of '80s VHS OST enthusiasts and followers of the growing interest in European cassette zine projects. These melodic, macabre pieces fuse multi-track cassette experiments with homemade special effects from the hand of an accomplished multi-instrumentalist working on the outer reaches of disenfranchised progressive pop and reluctant techno, defining then deconstructing genres that have yet to exist. Stabat Stable were fueled by futurist gothic imagery and operated on a plane parallel to their European and American contemporaries; there are few artists like them, and virtually none more enigmatic. This benchmark record is the first signpost to a darker part of your musical want-list, as the invisible glue for fans of the aforementioned anti-genres. File under "Not Yet."
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Having lived off the small change and 45 adaptors of each other's pockets since 2005, Finders Keepers and Cache Cache co-founders Andy Votel and Doug Shipton spread their wings and pool their DJ bags for a series of sporadic various artists compilations focusing on the global punk and makeshift electro records that have kept their beer-soaked dancefloors and distorted sound systems moving. Meet the younger, sarcastic sisters of some of the classic Finders Keepers family and their spotty friends, then watch what happens when jazz-punk underdogs cock their legs to their overqualified elder brothers. Plastic Dance presents ten unacquainted and elusive slices of synthetic squat pop, angular funk, teapot kosmische, and fraudulent disco from self-propelled imprints and global co-ops. Named after Günter Bernas's obscure DIY anti-band, this ongoing series combines rare, unknown, and untraveled wax nuggets of nightclub punk, art school zeuhl, and quasi-political pop united by soldering irons, C-60s, and sarcastic synth tones. Featuring a cross-section of unobtainable, unreleased, unknown, and unwanted reluctant punk and snide synthpop with sleeve-notes by respected DJ/haç hack/Situationist addict John McCready and artwork by airbrush-legend Terry Pastor (Ziggy Stardust/Soft Machine/Arthur C. Clarke), Plastic Dance becomes flexible under heat. Includes tracks by Killing Car, Cybotron, 53 Bus, Plastictanz, Don Gere, Zed, The Tunes, Sirons, Biting Tongues, and Andrzej Korzynski.
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Cache Cache presents a compilation featuring rare German home-recorded tape tracks from the 1980s. Curated by Felix Kubin. "In the summer of 1982, in a cottage in the Bavarian forest, a 13-year-old boy sits with his brother on the sofa and stares at the television. What he sees will transform his life. In rapid, revue-like sequences, young costumed people jump around in front of a painted background. The entire spectacle might be a direct transmission from Mars. The music accompanying all this is so radically new that the terminology to describe it doesn't exist yet. Most of all, it is unexpectedly bizarre, minimalistic and electronic. The astonishing performance is garnished by four amateurish dancers obviously assigned to the musicians by a decree of the TV broadcaster. Nothing fits together, yet the combination is pure genius. His little brother is drafted to write down the names of the bands Palais Schaumburg, Der Plan, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Lorenz Lorenz, Der Körper und die Seele (trans. 'The Body and the Soul'). Back home in Hamburg, as if possessed, the boy begins to experiment with a synthesizer, a home organ, and a voice and tape recorder. He is not the only one to begin explorations in this direction. The entire Federal Republic of Germany is just at the boiling point. A new form of home music is coming into existence. It has nothing to do with violin-playing children, scratchy sweaters and well-combed relatives listening on the sofa, but rather combines the fears with the dark abyss of industrial society. Remarkably, it is the same industry that made the tools available to the raging youths: cheap Casio keyboards, synthesizers, drum computers, and four-track tape recorders. Suddenly, anyone can acquire his own means of production to use in protest against the industrial forces. In their freshly-established home studios the protagonists practice the new underground music, the "undirected aggression of liberated sounds," as Frank Apunkt Schneider expressed in his book Als die Welt noch unterging (trans. 'As the World Was Still Ending'). Everything that isn't nailed or riveted down is used as an instrument: baking trays, cartons, room lamps, toys, wooden flutes, whistles, cans, trays, record players, televisions, a doorbell, a telephone. Out of the living rooms of the nation drones an obsession with noise, sparing not even the children. And what became of that 13-year-old boy who sat in front of the television back then? He hasn't had a television for the last 25 years and is just now writing these lines. His enthusiasm for the cassette scene has remained to this day. And while collecting the pieces for this compilation, he had to keep pinching himself in the arm." --Felix Kubin; Artists include: Dit + Uta, Z.S.K.A., Neros Tanzende Elektropapste, Kleines Schwingvergnügen, Das Gluck, Andy Giorbino, Plastiktanz, CHBB, Eisenhauer, Holger Hiller, Wat?Sanitar!, Cinema Verite, Lustige Mutanten, Pyrolator, x2, Twist Noir, Grune Rosen, Pierre Godot, Anadolu Bayramlari, Co-Mix, DIT, and Frank Schroder.
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