Author: andrea Page 58 of 71

WARPED REALITY has a contest! A first for us. And not only that, but it’s for one of our favorite bands, Ut. In honor of Mute’s August 14 re-release of the classic Ut albums In Gut’s House & Griller, we will have two sets of each to give away!

From Mute’s press release:

Ut: Two Classic Albums Reissued on CD
The Critically Acclaimed In Gut’s House and the Steve Albini Engineered Griller

Blast First / Mute reissue two classic UT albums —In Gut’s House (1988) and Griller (1989)— on 14th August 2006.

Sprung from the downtown No Wave scene, Ut (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young) originated in New York City in December 1978. The inheritors of the fertile collision between rock, free jazz and the avant garde that first manifest itself in the Velvet Underground, Ut soon became a serious force within the New York music scene.

The band were joined briefly by film-maker Karen Achenbach in 1979 before resuming as a three-piece and migrating to London in 1981. Ut toured the UK with bands such as The Fall, The Birthday Party, The Raincoats and Pigbag. Originally releasing albums on their own label, Out Records, the band became a favourite of John Peel’s and recorded a Session for his show in 1984 before joining forces with Blast First in 1987.

The critically acclaimed In Gut’s House was originally released in 1988 and made NME’s Top 50 that year. As The Washington Post exclaimed, “With In Gut’s House, Ut has scraped and droned one of the finest underground rock albums of the year… The tightly interwoven, firmly focused sound… is rich, spooky, urgent and quite unexpectedly beautiful.”

In 1989 the band recorded and released the album Griller. Engineered by label mate Steve Albini, who shared Ut’s raw aesthetic. Griller captured the gripping intensity and sheer power of the Ut experience.

Unfortunately, Griller was to be Ut’s final release and in March 1990 Ut played their last concert in Paris.

A seminal influence on later bands such as Sonic Youth, and spiritual companions of The Fall, the miracle is not simply that Ut survived for 11 years, but that every Ut performance blasted away everything inessential and reached for the primal nerve.

Ut never softened or diluted its force, its restless confrontation and its pull on the secret heart of rock and roll.

“It isn’t rock anymore. But what is? There’s no one like them” –NME

TWO PRIZES, TWO WAYS TO WIN.

1) Which Ut song had its debut on the Thurston Moore-curated cassette accompaniment to
the Noise Fest festival at White Columns in 1981?

OR:

2) Give me your most creative definition of the word “Ut.”
Go Dada, go Wikipedia, go Haiku. Just have fun with it.

For reference, my extensive recent interview with the band: Part One; Part Two; and Part Three.

You can post your answers here in the comments or e-mail them to
andrea (at) warpedrealitymagazine.com. Make sure you leave your e-mail address
or other contact information.

Two winners will be drawn on AUGUST 1, 2006.

(More information here. You can also pre-order the albums through Mute or Amazon.co.uk.)

Ut, “This Bliss [live]” | from Early Live Life; recorded at Club 57, 1981 | THANKS TO HK FOR THE TWEAK ON THIS ONE.

It’s wiltingly hot here and I can’t seem to drag myself out of the house to go to AS220’s Foo Fest. My fan is working overtime but it’s no use. Perhaps I’ll just stick my head in the freezer.

Or, post some more music from Cold Storage.

Ah, much better.

In 1983 Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow, the Work) collaborated with Belgian songwriter Catherine Jauniaux to create Fluvial, a work that melds jazz improvisation, avant-garde instrumentation and vocal techniques, and a cabaret (Voltaire) sensibility. Music for the Merzbau, the album bursts with invention, thanks not only to the impressive roster of players (among them the aforementioned Hodgkinson, Charles Bullen, Tom Cora, Bill Gilonis, and Dom Weeks) but to Jauniaux’s marvelous, fascinating vocalizations, which run the stylistic gamut from traditional French chansons to breathy folk to Dadaistic glossolalia. The album is constantly in flux, but its stylistic omnivorousness is well-matched by its fearlessness and robust sense of humor.

(Pretend I posted this yesterday, in time for Bastille Day.)

Jauniaux also collaborated with Dom Weeks and Cass Davies of Furious Pig on the lone album by Het, “Let’s Het!” True to its subversively wry title, the album is engaging and impossible to categorize, a dense, melodically inventive work.

Originally released on Hodgkinson and Gilonis’s own Woof imprint, both albums have been re-issued by ReRUSA subsidiary Ad Hoc.

***

Catherine Jauniaux, “Doresc Trei Babys”

Catherine Jauniaux, “Une Escadrille des Sorcieres”

Het, “Penis”
BUY:
Ad Hoc Records | Downtown Music Gallery

ARTWORK BY JACQUES JAUNIAUX

An airless former meat storage unit in an industrial corner of Brixton in London hardly sounds like a place with any potential to spark creativity. Originally discovered by David Cunningham (Flying Lizards), Cold Storage (as it became known) became the de-facto home to London trio This Heat, who recorded there virtually every day (sometimes for days at a time) between 1977 and 1981.

Initially it didn’t seem like a viable space. Dotted here and there with old blood (like an au naturel, three-dimensional Jackson Pollock), covered in metal cladding and with no source of light or air, it had a forbidding, even negative energy about it. As This Heat drummer Charles Hayward noted in an interview with The Wire [August 2005]: “We opened it up and the lights didn’t work. We had torches —the beams entered the space and there was a subclimate in there. There were clouds; it was really, really cold. And I quite genuinely had this picture in my head that we were going to see the red, glinting eyes of some sort of albino wolves. We couldn’t quite work out how big it was. It was a very strange space, a mysterious sort of cavern. It was very primeval, like an installation piece.”

Despite the aura of unease, the group was determined to make it a place where their creative processes would bloom. To counteract the oppressiveness, they filled the space with “music and lots of creativity.”

That they did. This Heat accomplished a great deal in their relatively short existence. It’s difficult to encapsulate their sound in words. The ground so often shifts. At times nearly evanescent and muted, at others almost brutally concise, the group’s incredibly dense, full-bodied sound is three-dimensional, surrounding you with a fascinating array of textures and colors. It is so complete as to seem architectural, but it is not oppressively so.

In fact, this is music that is explicitly anti-oppression. For a group that worked in a nearly hermetic and obsessively detailed manner (sometimes staying in the studio for days on end) the music constantly fights against inertia and stagnation. Taken as a whole, the group’s music is consistently forward-thinking (in an organic rather than self-conscious way), conceptually vibrant, and radical. The lyrics are sung in a deceptively deadpan tone, but get beyond that and you discover explicit political commentary and deep emotional engagement. The group’s masterpiece, Deceit, was written during the Cold War/Reagan/Thatcher years, but it of course resonates deeply with our own current political climate. If anything, the group’s thesis statement has gained in power since it was first released in 1981.

Long frustratingly unavailable, the group’s entire output has recently been re-issued by Chris Cutler’s label, ReR. The 6-CD box set, Out of Cold Storage, is a treasure trove: the two studio albums, This Heat and Deceit, are here. So is “Health & Efficiency,” possibly the group’s finest moment, and the closest they come to an out-and-out pop song. In addition, there are discs collecting the group’s Peel sessions (Made Available), a compilation of live performances, and some alternate takes (Repeat).

You’ll also find “24 Track Loop,” which was until recently only available on the Soul Jazz comp In the Beginning There was Rhythm. True to its name, the song was built from a 20-second loop of two organs and viola recorded in mono and manipulated in real time through the mixing desk. This was then looped again, varispeeded to different pitches, and made into one long loop that was then edited down to the final version. (Pre-ProTools, no less.) The box set includes an alternate version, “Repeat,” that stretches out to nearly twenty minutes. Both sound as though they were made tomorrow. Although inspired by dub techniques, “24 Track Loop”’s use of pitch-shifting, echo, and reverb prefigures Jungle and Drum n’Bass by twenty or so years.

Cold Storage was not just a home base for This Heat. It also served as a rehearsal and recording studio for many bands, including the Raincoats and Young Marble Giants, Flying Lizards, Ut, Essential Logic, Robert Wyatt, The Homosexuals, Test Dept., and many others.

Sadly, the studio ultimately fell victim to mismanagement and went bankrupt. But not before giving us a wealth of incredible, varied music. Thankfully a great deal of it is being re-issued and reevaluated.

This Heat, “24 Track Loop”

This Heat, “Repeat”

Flying Lizards, “Her Story” [vocals by Vivien Goldman; for more of her work visit this recent post from Postpunk Junk.]

The Homosexuals, “In Search of the Perfect Baby”

INTERVIEWS
Charles Hayward Interview | from PERFECT SOUND FOREVER • Interview with Robert Wyatt about Cold Storage | from THE WIRE • Interview with Colin Newman about Cold Storage | from THE WIRE

BUY
Out of Cold Storage| ReR USA | Flying Lizards | Amazon | The Homosexuals, Astral Glamour BOX SET| Amp Camp