We’re on a very special mission with Dr Cosmo's Tape Lab

It’s been too long – way too long baby – it’s been too long. But hey I’m back – it’s good to be back (do we reference that these days – probably not) There’s a whole heap to write- half finished posts and notes – they’ll surface over the coming months.

So where to begin (again)

This is about Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab – oh and what a laboratory this is – and their forthcoming long player – Beyond the Silver Sea. All shimmers and strums – harmonies and hums.  A tale of finding the future and living there – I guess. I had received a random message from Mr Stuart Kidd – yes he of The Wellgreen fame (well they are in my house – i mean famous in my house – not that they live in my house) about new projects – new sounds and a possible  place to start a review.

So through cables and code I ended up in my soundcloud (hey, hey, you, you get off of my (sound)cloud) listening to the experiments of two wonderful musicians and their attempts to create an almighty concept album on 4-tracks of tape. The Beatles had four tracks – these guys too. See what you can do with your imagination. And as I always point out – this isn’t retro – this isn’t looking back – it’s just trusting the tape to do its job - to record the experience. Before we begin - I just need to say - they haven't put a date on its release- they're hoping to get a vinyl release soon - so here's to that. So let's talk about the 'Beyond the Silver Sea'. 

And what an experience it is – a mini rock opera –in between The Wellgreen,  running a record label The Barne Society and thumping the skins in the Roogie Boogie band – Stuart had found time to write a (a quick one) musical opus of sixities psychedelia and analogue science fiction.

So let me make sense of this positive sixties psyche and take you ‘Beyond the Silver Sea. Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab are Joe Kane and Stu Kidd with narration and additional material by Adam Smith (because there’s a story in all of this). Now I should be wary of a concept album for the 2000s – it might all go Kanye West or Sasha Fierce (remember that) or Beady Eye (there are a concept band aren’t they?)

So this album starts with a story – a narrated tale of ‘Max’s’ endeavour to escape his restrictive life in a world where no sense reigns and escape to a place ‘beyond the silver sea’.  Instantly recalling Brian Wilson’s attempts to tell us his tale of a magic transitor radio on a side of seven inch vinyl inserted as an afterthought in the Holland album – there was a worry coursing through my veins – what with the Stanley Unwin forced surrealness of ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’ and I tried not to recall that ‘War of the Worlds’ record – you know it was in all the Woolworths’ as a child (all the Woolworths)

But I’m here to listen But luckily for you ane me – this turned out to be a Tommy – a concept you can listen to – through and through.

And if I’m honest the story took a slight back seat at first – but slowly it began to fit – it started adding sense to the whole heap of sounds coming my way – this mish-mash of The Small Faces, Brian Wilson blended with a heavy dose of The Who and some Teenage Fanclub tuneage.  It’s an album full of twinkles and strings, harmonies and things (In Lieu of Something Better) where reverb and open chords tell of confusion and discord as Max’s attempts to ‘get out of this place’ get more confused and affected by time.

Through these backroom bedroom recordings come some wonderfully crafted tunes – recalling the Dukes of Stratosphear’s attempts to confuse and dazzle in equal measure. This could be a lost classic (an odessy and oracle we never knew about) or a confident pricking of the past and then presented as a new future.

There’s an analogue elegance between the layers of sounds and each and every play lends itself to references and nods of the knowing. I can hear the work of the mighty Ray Davies seeping into the albums seams creating psychotic reactions  in this Glasgow city – an alternative Detroit -  squelches and soothing sounds. There’s a hint of The Seeds in here too. Oh you can tell what I’m saying it references and remixes that era – those tunes through country, rock and bossa nova. Simple love songs – simple pleasures – garage psychedelia  - there’s a wonderful song called ‘Painted Birds’ – now it’s part of the narrative – a narrative of smoke filled cafes and new wave jump cuts as we hot foot it through Camden 1966 – all heavy fringes and dark eyes – tight trousers and getting high ,high, high.

So do I believe in the silver sea – do I want to escape?  There’s experimentation in this four track heaven – the sounds spring out of nowhere – a translated and transformed – there’s a moment where Chas and Dave meets Back to the Future uptown as a cockney knees up descends into Lee Perry’s spacedub in the form of ‘Pie,mash and liquor’. It’s an album torn out of time and rooted in the past yet knowingly moving on.  It has humour at its heart.  Serious songs from smiling faces – or smiling songs from serious faces?  Whichever way you want it – it works.

As Max’s journey takes us to The Storehouse of Fools in a quest to get away from it all with Trixie at his side (except she isn’t) this place of ramalamma boogie woogie – all denim (the band and fabric) with lasers and lights then head into the Townsend fury and Foxy Lady honky tonk of ‘Dr Chester’s Pleasures’ as we are taken to the stars. You see anything is possible when you can commit it to tape – when you can experiment – reshape – chop and mix – sprinkle this and turn out that.

So we journey ever onwards – beyond the silver sea to ‘The Stars My Destination’ all Lennon squawk and shimmer a lonely ‘other’ planet boy cry. Dr Cosmos’ Tape Lab have produced radiophonic workshop organic indie music for 2014 and beyond – it’s conceptual – it’s bombastic – it’s fantastic. A kind of subtle fairy animals (you get me?)

Finally we reach our destination. Way beyond and further. Ready for ‘The Long Sleep’ – it’s got this early baggy feel to it – sort of (World of) Twist otherness. There’s a hint of Gary Numan  cutting a duet with The Zombies rolling over and over (it may have been the time of day I listened – but that’s what I’m hearing in the chorus) All Barberella backbeat – squelches and reverses – slipping down to simple chords and harmonies falling into air and space.

 

Dreams falling into line on tape. 

Yes the whole thing is ambitious and at 44 minutes you’ve got to put the effort in – otherwise you might lose the story thread. But once that’s all seeped into the unconscious you just listen – and let the lab carry out its experiments on you.  All put down on four tracks of tape – as I said – if it works for The Beatles – then it’s going to work for anyone. And it works for this talented twosome.

You know we can find the things we want to be - beyond the silver sea.

So who wants to join me – beyond the silver sea?

As this long player is yet to be released - you can do no harm in checking out their rather fabulous soundcloud site. There's lots of songs and snippets from the album. It should be out very soon - so you can buy it then.

Go to it here

A proper taste of Dr Cosmo's Tape Lab

Here’s some information too:

Stu does- vocals, drums, glockenspiel, percussion, monotron, casiotone, acoustic guitar, lead guitar

Joe does- Vocals, tack piano, bass, lead guitar, acoustic guitar, electric harpsichord, Moog synthesiser, organ, melodica

Recorded July to November 2013 on a Tascam 424 Mk. III four-track recorder

Summer is here

It’s that hot part of the year. That hazy wind down time and feeling on your knees as summer finally arrives in this profession of pace and progression. I’ve found myself turning to the sounds of nature to calm and revive me. I was listening to a youtube film of a thunderstorm yesterday – there was ten hours of it.

I mixed Satie and Eno in there too in some sort of attempt to create an ambient super group – or was that System 7?

I’ve always listened to these sounds. Melting brain and mind moments. Today it’s the Aphex Twin – seeking refreshment in layered tones and liquid rhythms. When radio was FM – actually when it was AM – you could scan the airwaves and happen across tones and sounds and tests and trials. I have a cassette tape somewhere of birdsong – just endlessly going on and on – channelled through the airwaves – saying that  - I might just have taped the outside world rather than the sounds I thought were coming from my radio. You’re head gets like that when you’re young.

But laying restless in the night – all hot and bothered – I become ever more aware of those patterns and rhythms – screeches and squelches – distant engines and drifting conversations taking place in space. I’m enthralled to the sound of the city. And in the heat all that is solid melts into air. It may be the fact I work in a school – those drifting lessons – science lectures and shouts – open doors and the ever present gated reverb of corridors built in concrete.

It’s like a Joe Meek and Spector soundclash.It’s a sound I like.

I used to make ambient tapes – way back when I couldn’t (still can’t) mix. I’d use tones and stretches of sound to meld into something else. A tape loop or a found sound merging with a Beaumont Hannant track or Autechre (first album folks – on vinyl too) and make my super friend Daryl listen to it in post comedown revelry on drives from Venus (the club – not the planet) as we wound back to our communal town of shite and steel. Just listening as lights went out and the sun came up. Heady – easy days – my friend. That late eighties early nineties explosion of sound. It seems an age ago. Do you know what I mean?

It is – in fact twenty four years ago.

Nineteen ninety four was twenty four years after The Beatles – they  seemed ancient then – so I guess me blethering on about The Orb and all sorts of sonic business – must sound like that old lag in the bar – harping on about the ‘real’ stuff. Richard (composer – one part Pale Blue Dot) and I once met a guy in a local public house reminiscing about the festival circuit – we named him ‘Tone Henge’ – we all know an ‘Anthony Henge’. I’m becoming one – except I’m talking about sequencers, samples and psychedelia.

I haven’t ever seen the Aphex Twin. I don’t want to really. I also don’t know that much about him. Every now again an interview will surface and revere the sounds and add to the status. Which is fine by me. They’ll be an allusion to his time in a bank vault – or when he played sandpaper at a concert – it’s all fine by me. Because Richard James has made some incredibly interesting – non conformist electronic music over the decades. I was listening to Daft Punk – at home – they hadn’t come to play at my house – it was just a CD. And I was lazily invoking Kraftwerk and Adonis and DJ Pierre and Master at Work. They have made something of this ‘electronic music’ lark and then suddenly – I’m switching from Daft Punk to the true pioneers and I’m mining the Richard James back catalogue – and here you see that uncompromising approach to electronica – there is no sympathy for the modern world. This is a Kraftwerk feeling that a future full of robots is actually quite a daunting prospect – Kafawerk – see what I did there?

Or on the other hand it might just be that the Aphex Twin likes a minor key. I dunno.

Caution: failed artist attempt sentence approaching. I once made a sound installation with a wonderful artist – it was just someone walking up the stairs – just walking around – played over a projection of a room – I hid the speakers in the ceiling. There were no stairs in the room. It was unnerving. In my mind anyway – Aphex seems to tap directly in to that feeling – Xtal wheezys and gasps for breathe and beats pound relentlessly as your chest tightens – ambient sounds for the asthma generation. Wave your inhalers in the air. It combines that Vicks loosening congestant with rave culture capital.

It suits that state of mind here at the start of summer.

Richard D James has released so much music under so many monikers it would be impossible to document the scale of electronic manipulation and creation that has come from his mind to yours (ours) but I often find myself returning to those early ambient works. Those moments of genuine freedom when he wasn’t necessarily thinking of careers  - there’s that wonderful feeling of possibility when you’re young. You’ve yet to reference Stockhausen, you didn’t have immediate access to the back catalogue Kraftwerk or Transmat Records or Metroplex Records – you’re just trying to make sounds that exist in your mind a reality so you can play them to someone else – well even play them to yourself. You just let time disappear as you endlessly change an LFO modulation or move the VCO to change the frequency.  Days ran into weeks when I became wrapped in the micro manipulation of wav forms that emitted squeaks and bleeps from my Roland Juno 6.

You just make music.

The Juno 6 sits in the garage now. Alongside sequencers and old drum machines, tape reverb systems and blown speakers. But it’s not me I’m concerned for -  with the start of the holidays that Gove wants to snatch away from children – you worry for the future Aphex Twins – in bedrooms with time on their hands and sounds in their minds. You need to lose time as well as sleep to commit sounds to tape.

You need to have no other distractions. Let the summer begin. 

And here is Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 82 - 95

I am counting bleeps

I had a feeling this was rolling into some guitar based – keeping the indie spirit [dead or] alive and sometimes it was the sound of machines that soothed my heart and perhaps I should write about that.

I guess those industrial towns that bring the soul down were crying out for the onslaught of technological future music and despite my loathing of a system that exploits and plunders people as commodities I’m thankful Detroit has burned and burned over the years. Because to be honest this is where I trace most of my musical journeys [oh you can say it was New York or Chicago or London and Manchester] but i think my heart lays somewhere in that Motor City. Admist the burned and broken buildings resides soul and I know you got soul.

But I don’t want to be all historical – and social – and political today – I just want to write about beats and bleeps. We know that these tunes are political statements – they are weapons – they undercut the banality of pop culture in an effort to create something new. They are opinions – wrapped up in LFO modulation calling out from that thick black vinyl to those who see new futures and horizons.

They make me want to dance.

I guess the thrill of the pill and the sublime experiences of acid house culture stay with you over time – but I was dreaming to the sound of repetitive beats for a long time before [if you count The Ronnettes – Be my Baby as a floor stomper] This Scunthorpe soul was amazed by the KORG catalogues in ‘Paul’s Music’ and Roland keyboards on TOTP – in fact the first instrument I owned wasn’t a guitar - it was CASIO MT65. Sort of creamy white with a few orange switches – it had simple drum loops and sounds you couldn’t modulate. But it felt like a synthesizer to me – like I was a member of The Human League or Depeche Mode.

And over time I would return to the euphoria of the acid bass line, the heavy beats and gated reverbs of ‘dance music’ – I just call it ‘music’ but you know some people get hung up on all of that. So it turns to late Saturday night this weekend just gone. Emma has ventured out – in celebratory style to drink, eat and laugh - looking happy and beautiful as she leaves for the taxi. Which leaves me at home with the twins and Constance – thankfully sleeping and thus giving me an evening to.

So where to start – as ever it starts with the beats – not the guitar and I find ‘High Tech Soul’, a DVD ordered some time back and still yet to be viewed. That’s because of children, tiredness and the fact that Emma knows that Derrick May ,Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson will not make her laugh like The Odd Couple or Miss Congeniality will. Nonetheless this paean to the emerging Techno scene of Detroit – the history it is not – but all the greats are on show – discussing those underground sounds that make you get down, finds its way to the DVD and I watch enthralled and amazed at the sound that Detroit produced – I remember those nights when Eddie ‘Flashin’ Fowlkes played – or Ritchie Hawtin or Weatherall and I was all out of breath and smiling and giddy and fawning and super charged and on it.

And then as I check the Guide [you see it’s The Guardian in our house – not just on Weekends either – papers should be delivered] I see that Fabric are hosting the 25th Birthday Party for Metroplex,with Juan Atkins manning the decks amongst other legends of Detroit.

And I am home – with children listening

And I am still dancing

MODEL 500:  No UFOs 1985