Glued To Bad Girl Sweat

Tonight I have the next Sonic Masala: London showcase, featuring batshit noiseniks Shitwife and livewire units Nitkowski. It is also featuring a London appearance from Girl Sweat, a one-man psych dirge. He is releasing his next album, Bad Happenings, on excellent label Box Records (Blown Out, Richard Dawson, a few others you will hear about shortly...), and if 'Human Glue' is anything to go by, it is going to be massive. Imagine linking a lapsteel guitar through a wood chipper and cement mixer, then strapping it to a post-apocalyptic scarecrow preacher from a dead motor city howling at the moon. That's 'Human Glue'. That's Girl Sweat. That's Bad Happenings. Pre-order here, and come to The Victoria tonight to see the man purge in the flesh.

Blown Out Boxes

There is something diabolical brewing up North. It seems that every time I hear a release is coming out of or near Newcastle here in England, you can expect it to be seriously warped. Like black pitch, A Field In England warped. Where everything is in monochrome, is melting out of the frame, slowed down and sped up in all the wrong/right places. At the epicentre of such alchemical bastardisations is Box Records. Their compilation from earlier this year, Vol. 1, included bludgeoning drawn out brutality (Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Khunnt), schizophrenic noise (Foot Hair, Luminous Bodies, Beauty Pageant) and SM faves such as the psych daemons Gnod, warped bedroom warrior Waskerley Way and the inimitable anti-folk soothsayer Richard Dawson.

One of my favourite tracks to come off the compilation though was from Blown Out, whose album Jet Black Hallucinations (also out on Box Records) is a three-course degustation of drawn-out, drawled, dank and dark psychedelic r'n'r. Gorge yourself on the kinetic ferocity of the title track, which you think would sate your hunger. But no - when those seventeen minutes are up, along comes 'Transgalactic World Eater', a full-bore funereal dirge into the bowels of the outer reaches of space, the clarity of its brutality measured through sustained speed and propulsion. But then you come to the final act, the "brief" nine-minute 'Ultrawave Communications', a track that seems to take it down a notch yet is just as unrelenting as what has come before. Feed off the hypnotic teat and rejoice - THIS is what psych rock is all about.

Buy Jet Black Hallucinations here - STAT.

2014 - Curlew

One of the most underrated singer/songwriters in Brisbane - indeed, in Australia - is Mark Zian. His wry, sardonic, slightly skewed world view is at once immediate and oblique, simplistic yet philosophical in a slightly anguished way - with a delivery that is earnest and self-deprecating. His work with Curlew, Knee Chin and I Am Not A Nihilist has always impressed due to its ingenuity and brazen honesty. Zian doesn't play nearly enough shows, and some of that is due to the supposed inaccessibility of such an approach to music.

Bullshit.

Listen to Animal Urges, Curlew's album of this year - it's an unqualified gem of a record. Mix Gareth Liddiard with Richard Dawson and that is the package you are getting.


As can be expected, Zian was a little reluctant to offer a "best of" list or article for Sonic Masala. But being the perennial observer that he is, he gave me this poem, one of hundreds that he has written over the course of 2014, that sums up the year rather succinctly.

 Frozen Cake 

Lunch at work and ladies were talking about having to take a cake into school when it's their child's birthday 
We never had such traditions. 
'What about the kids with allergies', one asks 
'Well their parents bring in a cake and they cut it up and freeze it so they don’t miss out when the others have cake' 
I thought this was ridiculous. 
'But why would you want your child to miss out? It wouldn’t be fair to them' 
'Because life isn’t fair they will have to learn that lesson soon enough might as well start with cake.'

I agree wholeheartedly. Buy Animal Urges here, and push to get Zian in any of his guises out into the open more often for 2015. He is playing a solo set at Rics on Monday January 5 - this will be the perfect start.