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It’s been busy this week. Work & travel are keeping me away at the moment. I promise to have something substantive up by Monday someday? (Soon.) Until then, keep yourselves out of trouble with this archival post (from January, back when all of four people were reading this), an article about Fall-obsessed C-86 misfits Prolapse. This was originally published in the late, much missed Puncture#37, late 1996.

I discovered Prolapse when I was living in the UK. My boss at the time conveniently happened to be one of the most forward-thinking A&R people in Europe. One day he played “Tina This Is Matthew Stone” —a song that compresses Edward Albee’s raging, tempest-in-a-teapot domestic drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” into seven vibrant, exhaustive minutes. After I picked my jaw up off the floor I knew I’d stumbled upon my favorite band for life. And lo, it came to pass.

They can be a bit of an acquired taste, but then, anything worthwhile often is. And hey, MP3s are free! Try ‘em. Then buy everything they ever recorded. You won’t regret it.

In addition to offering some Prolapse samples (from the beginning to the end, really) I’m also giving you another rarity: Prolapse ranter extraordinaire Mick Derrick’s side project Cha Cha 2000. Imagine Kraftwerk interpreted via an Atari 2000 meltdown…

For more information on Prolapse please visit Graham’s most excellent Prolapse page. Or, you can always add your 2¢ over at Wikipedia or the ever-entertaining Prolapse: Classic or Dud?

Prolapse, “Serpico” [from their first album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places, 1994]

Prolapse, “Black Death Ambulance” [from Pointless Walks]

Prolapse, “Fob.com” [from their final album Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes, 1999]

Cha Cha 2000, “Autobahn” [apologies for the sound. This is directly off vinyl. For more info on this try Lissy’s.]

Buy: Insound | Cherry Red | Try Ebay. too!

PHOTO: PROLAPSE AT ROTA, 1994(?). IF YOU KNOW WHO TOOK THIS PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

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