Blog - Page 4 of 6 - MÜ Magazine

21 Gun Salute to one of the greatest guitarists the world has ever seen.

Jeff commanded huge respect and love from all the other great guitarists, more so than any other player I’ve encountered. His influence, innovation and his sheer mastery of the instrument is unparalleled.

I once heard him play ‘Yesterday’ in Ronnie Scott’s, where he played the entire melody on harmonics.

Other sets on big stages, where his jazz fusion dexterity and fearless questing put him up there with his own influences of John Mclaughan, and Miles Davis. Combine that with the dissonant punk of Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix and his own delicate finger picking style, gave him a unique edge, tone and versatility of sound.

I was honoured to meet him a few times and he was always very modest and real gent. But one of the biggest honours I’ve ever had was him covering the Killing Joke song “The Death & Resurrection Show“ with Johnny Depp recently and saying in a TV interview that the original is one of the heaviest records ever ! That’s from the man himself, Beck is regarded by many, to have invented Heavy Rock with his first Jeff Beck Band album ”Truth” in ‘67.

All these great artists being snatched away from us recently Is really shocking and makes me realise we must make the most of the time we have, right now. We never know what’s round the corner.

Condolences to his family, friends and colleagues .

Rest easy to the fiery angel of our sonic cathedral.

Youth x

I'm Not Sure At All

Album review

I’m Not Sure At All is as exquisite as debut albums get. A wandering storybook of impossibly beautiful harmonies, rolling keyboards and a beautifully intimate vocal that is as vulnerable as it is fearless.

Marlody’s high achieving classical pianist background is evident throughout. The musicianship is sublime, seamlessly shapeshifting from minor to major to construct gift after gift of dark beauty, pain, survival and solidarity.

When she was a girl, Marlody was one of the higher-achieving classical pianists of her generation, winning competitions and destined for greatness. She hated it and drew a line under that part of her life. In the intervening years, putting more and more distance between herself and her classical origins, she listened to Yo La Tengo and Shellac and a hundred other things that took music to new, untutored extremes. I’m Not Sure At All is the outcome.

The album opener, Summer, captures the emotions of losing a parent – thoughts that remain unresolved, the forlorn grief of new beginnings metamorphosising into fragile hope. It’s delicately meditative and cathartic.

The subjects that Marlody presents often deal with an aftermath of some sorts – the debilitating effect of psychiatric medication on Words, the self explanatory Runaway, solidarity with all those people who’ve contemplated taking their own lives on Friends In Low Places, the history of an adulterous affair, with a piercing sympathy for the emotional state of the adulterer on Wrong. The subjects are delivered with calm and fragile beauty. Their truths become powerful and hopeful. Is there a right or wrong answer to those truths? Or is our instinctive response what matters? It’s ok to be not sure at all.

I’m Not Sure At All is released on 13^th January 2022 on Skep Wax Records

https://marlody.bandcamp.com

https://www.instagram.com/_marlody_/

To celebrate the launch Marlody will be performing two concerts

14th January, 7pm: Unitarian Meeting House, Tenterden, Kent – tickets from here

15th January, 4pm: Betsey Trotwood, London – tickets from here

for Dame Vivienne (Swire) Westwood
April 8th 1941 – 29th December 2022

Yesterday’s dress will now shine
Despite the dark of death’s cupboard
As you close the door to the showroom
And walk the way shadows walk

Into a new form of light
Where the saintly will now meet the sequin And where the young girl from Derby’s
Still designing as her crowds comprise deep
dream talk.

From war baby to Dame. From SEX
To Branson’s Virgin Air Stewards
Your control of the image and the shape
Of female need shifted seams

From unfashionable gusset to gain
And then on towards glamour
You polished the diamond
That with a punk stung swipe made spit
Gleam

Before smoothing all as the clothes
You made became anthems
Of outrage, and liberation as motion
Turned to World movement and the ripped

T-shirt as totem stood in a fiery field
Of its own. The leather dress walked
Your way. Fishnet and basque broke desire.
As your art framed all women or as women

Framed you, dares were thrown.
And courted by you. Whether beside or post
Malcolm. When he shot the bolt
With the Pistols you were remaking it

Across thread. Each stitch was a stance.
Each template a teasing. Each ease
And constriction a way to make a dress
A thing said. If not a poem, a song

Or a cinerama of being. Dear Vivien
Today, shoulders are colder as your streak
Of sensation follows the untimely trek
Of the dead. But as you step aside,

A new catwalk continues, bridging
Dimensions as angels and stars
Vie for you. They’re after a new outfit now
For which you can reimagine the astral

Let’s have God look like Lydon
And then dress the Devil in punk pink
Like Jordan or like something from Jarman
In a pretty boy spunk stained blue.

English rose, you raised thorns
Into fashion spiced buttons.
You made from dresses desire
And changed with one sketch, attitudes.

So, stake your claim with such stars.
The women weep. The men shudder.
Your uniforms for love’s armies
Win more than mere platitudes.

You changed the way we behave.
You made clothes destination.
McQueen and Versace and the scene
Shapers still here dream of you.

Just as you dreamed for them.
Vivien, what are you wearing?
What will we wear when time takes us?
Angel’s wing? Fire? Somewhere perhaps

In what’s left us we will at last in fading light
Glimpse what’s true.

David Erdos 29/12/22

Jeff Morgan 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

Boris – W

Sacred Bones

In 29 years of playing and 26 in this lineup, Japanese rock trio Boris have never stood still. Thus, they follow ‘NO’, 2021’s album of furious, and relatively lo-fi, crustpunk, with one of the most detailed, sonically advanced records they’ve ever made. ‘W’ ranges from spooky abstract-but-intimate songs through ‘Loveless’ era My Bloody Valentine wooze to the churning doom metal Boris are best known for. But at every turn each edge is razor sharp, each sound is hyper-present, everything is hyper-real. For a band this established to sound so vivid and new is quite some achievement.

Mazen Kerbaj

Sampler / Sampled

Morphine

So, this is just all the way out there. On ‘Sampler’, Lebanese trumpeter Kerbaj pushes his instrument as far as it will go in all directions with various processing to produce hundreds of snippets and blurts of the most gloriously weird noise, intended for sampling and manipulation. On ‘Sampled’, a who’s who of far leftfield electronicists from Kampala to Kingston and Ramallah to Mexico City take up the challenge and mangle and twist it any which way but loose.

Carmen Villain

Only Love From Now On

Smalltown Supersound

The Norwegian-Mexican American instrumentalist and producer Carmen Hillestad has matured record by record and collaboration by collaboration. Her fourth solo album is next level even by her lofty standards. At times it leans to ambient, fourth world, dub techno, Steve Reich-ish minimalism and more but it’s way beyond all that: fully immersed in it this is genuinely ecstatic, in the old school Greek ‘ekstasis’ sense of taking you beyond yourself. Ultra detailed, ultra lush, ultra embracing, it’s a masterpiece, frankly.

Miranda Forester seeks to question the place of the female nude in the western canon. More accurately the place of black women in that equation. Working directly from live observation Forester, as the artist progenitor inverts the androcentric gaze as described by John Berger: As a systematic way of apprehending women as objects to fulfil the wish fulfilment of the heteronormative male psyche. The western art world has been dominated by men’s desires being projected onto female docile bodies, artists like Pablo Picasso amongst others have made huge play on their relationships with women. Extracting their image and agency their feminine essence thus literally objectifying the same women in a style that they do not fully own, placing them in the category of muse, rather than of artist collaborator. So much so that whole books and careers have been based on asking the question of where women artists are: ‘Why Have there been no Great Women Artists’ by Linda Nochlin. Which acts as a generationer for the argument that follows beyond it that there have been great women artists they have just not been given the space in the male cannon and it is the work of revision to see that the record be corrected to reflect these contributions.

It was the recently deceased Bell Hooks who, problematised the predominantly default white female gaze adopted by many a feminist thinker, who in enfranchising if at all women who live at the margins of society. Due to intersections like race gender and class ability etc, do not augment the argument in order to fully reflect the diversity of the fem presenting individuals. It lends itself to in essence to a continuantion of the misfiting violence of the male gaze, just empowered by the girl boss mentality of late capitalist ideology. Quoting ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Famle Spectators (1997)’ one of Hooks interlocutors remarks in relation to seeing Black women assume the same positions of that conferred onto their white counterparts: This action amounts to “Transfer without Transformation”. There is an amnesia in placing black women’s bodies in the position occupied by white women without the relevant transformative learnings; without real difference; without breaking from conventions made by men for men. The mire memetic assumption of the postion of dominant control is by itself unsatisfactory.

Forester has asserted herself in the business of making work that the participants feel seen in. A position that is both linked to the queer gaze, one that cancels out the binary paradox associated with the male gaze. In this I mean the power dynamics of object and subject are replaced by the politics of desire. A scopophilia without the penetrative male gaze, with all the cast of assumptions and expectations brought on by patriarchy.

The influence of cinema in Foresters artistic language, can be seen not just in her technique of using image transfer as a form of mark making from movie stills. But also in the framing of her works action. Though the splicing and cutting togther elements of the homely like the Flora and fauna, that would be naturally part of her sitters lives. In conjuction with the way in which she carefully isolates elements of her sitters bodies splicing these elements to the point of ambiguous tangling so tight. It replicates the action of a hot encounter, intimacy, plationic touch in flirtation. Rendering this ranage of emotions ultimately transparent in the way she uses PVCs and other such material as her canvas of choice. Make for works that force the viewer to always look beyond the nature of the frame. Engage with what lies beyond that which is visible.

Inadvisable form her work is the parataxis of placement, not only in the way Forester constructs her work but also in the way she images the universe within which these works function. One of her main influences for her work is the film: by Cheryl Dunye entitled ‘Watermelon Woman’, a post-modernist work that breaks the fourth wall in cinema as, the name protagonist and director of his film Dunye. In assuming both roles, she narrates and stars in her own construction. Aiding us in understanding the Cheryl’s place in the mist of the confusion her friends and others feel towards the project behind uncovering who this mythical watermelon woman is. The movie is a story of coming to realisation, the project that one wishes to embark on is not always clear and thus does not always gather you praise or support. But the journey will teach you about your place in the world and my be as valuable as the end.

The movie ends on this note “Sometimes you have to create your own history, the watermelon woman is fiction”. In this call to make up your own history, in acknowledgment of the artificiality of her movies fiction. The film breaks the down the forth wall and interrogates the audiences own, relationship with their watermelon women like projects in their lives. What is stopping you form making your own creative myths? This moment where verisimilitude is broken where the audience become not only passive by stander but are enfranchised into the cast. Is something Forester actively does with her models, they aren’t only props she is writing them in to history. Though her work can be seen as figurative and not veristic, it relies on the same principle as film that of audience by in.

The gaze is central to understanding of Miranda Foresters work as it provides a key primer in deciphering her intentions and ultimately her aim. Which is to make work for women of her community, in a language that is both accessible, but beautiful. Beyond that it moves the conversation beyond the stayed white feminist, game of occupying the same space as white men without evolving past that as a model for liberation. Liberation comes from the freedom to speak in a visual language that is of the community and with consent. Ultimately Foresters work speaks to how beautiful the margins are compared to the dead centre.

The emergence of a new “underground” in East Africa

David Cecil, Co-founder, East African Records

Uganda exercises a powerful magnetic attraction for those who enjoy a bit of risk and chaos. Its feverish nightclubs, lush climate and distinctive rhythms have drawn increasing numbers of sonic adventurers from all parts of the world. Since I first came here in 2007, I have witnessed the mushrooming of genres, scenes, labels and style tribes that were unthinkable 15 years ago.

I was a refugee from the squat party and free festival scenes in Europe, which had largely collapsed by the mid-2000s. The exhilaration of zooming around Kampala on high-speed motorbike taxis and grinding till dawn in Dancehall clubs shook off my post-rave lethargy and European alienation. A plan rapidly formed in my mind to kickstart a new “underground” scene in Uganda, planting the best of European counter-culture in the fertile soil of East Africa.

The Happier Tilapia

The term “underground” does not translate well in the cultural context of Uganda. An “underground” needs a lucrative “mainstream” against which purist creatives can rebel. Uganda is a financially poor but culturally rich country. Accordingly, for most Ugandan creatives, making money from their art is an imperative, not a compromise. The noble ideals I had embraced in the UK underground – of art for art’s sake, of anti-capitalist resistance – are a remote luxury in Uganda. Either you make money from music, or you probably won’t make music at all.

In willful ignorance of this fact, I set up Tilapia Cultural Centre, a place where the few purist creatives and freaky outsiders could watch weird movies, listen to weird music, smoke herb and drink ourselves silly. Within a few months, our Friday live music nights were packed. Africa is often associated with live music in the European imagination, but in practice, much of the continent has abandoned the mastery of musical instruments to gospel groups and cheesy hotel entertainment. So, by providing an open-minded venue with all the equipment necessary and free rehearsal space, Tilapia helped to reignite an aspect of the Ugandan scene that had all but died with the advent of the digital era.

On the back of this modest success, Tilapia launched electronic music nights, catering for the fringe clubber crowd who wanted something other than the Top Twenty Pop slop. The bemused locals and Rastas were thus joined by a growing number of Ugandan freaks and hipsters, among whom were a number of “kuchus”, aka the LGBTI community. Intertwined moustaches and multiple feet glimpsed under toilet doors soon led to moralistic murmurings that Tilapia was becoming a “gay bar” and a “drug den”. We laughed it off at the time, little knowing it would soon prove to be our downfall.

Meanwhile, in September 2012, a group of DJs at Tilapia organized the first-ever Ugandan Rave Party, called Hatari Voltage. This blended traditional European Rave culture (glowsticks, Techno and designer drugs) with new African club culture (Afro-futurism, South African House and selfies). Hatari Voltage brought together the new African bourgeoisie with young international NGO workers from Europe, plus the naughty freaks who patronised Tilapia. It was a resounding success, spawning successive editions with an ever-growing audience.

Another significant musical event took place at the same time in Kenya: the third and largest edition Rift Valley Festival (RVF). Sean Ross, the founder of RVF, was another veteran of the UK warehouse scene. RVF was chaotic but well-organised, free from the usual police & thieves harassment that plague large-scale events in Kenya. Importantly, it was priced low and promoted openly, avoiding the elitism that typically characterizes international events in Kenya. Sean programmed local pop artists alongside brilliant but unknown acts from Europe and West Africa, challenging the audience to dance to music they’d never heard before.

My journey took a dive when I was deported to the UK abruptly in early 2013. Due to my alleged support for the LGBTI community, dark forces conspired to kick me out of Uganda. It was a bleak moment, as I was separated from my Ugandan wife and kids, as well as my beloved Tilapia, which was then surfing at an all-time musical high.

The Birth of Nyege Nyege

While in exile, I took the opportunity to travel East Africa, savouring the sounds and scenes of the region. With a fresh bunch of lunatics, I helped set up an events company in Kenya called Bad Mambo. In 2015, we organized an East African tour for UK sound system champions Mungo’s HiFi and I asked two European mates, Derek Debru and Arlen Dilsizian, to sort out the Ugandan gig. Their typically chaotic planning spiralled out of control, resulting in an international extravaganza: Nyege Nyege. This 3-day anarchic music festival, with acts from four continents, was a glorious, disorganized money toilet. There were more performers and crew than ticket-paying audiences, but it was clearly the start of something huge.

I was fortunate enough to have my deportation overturned just in time to attend Nyege Nyege. Over the next two years we ran a ramshackle recording studio in Kampala called The Villa. It was so badly designed that one visiting producer preferred to record in the garden, but some wondrous magic emerged from there. We hosted everyone from members of the Gorillaz to Norwegian Pop producers to West African kora players. Arlen had a vision of setting up a label to release this material, plus ethnomusicology oddities from around the region; thus, Nyege Tapes was born, which has since become a world-renowned label.

East African Records

A twelve-piece Norwegian calypso band called the Frank Znort Quartet had played at Tilapia in 2012 and I’d stayed in touch with their charming double-bass player, Johannes Saboe. In 2016, he proposed that we set up a music distribution company, to get the region’s cornucopia of music onto the world market. International appetite for African music was growing exponentially, with the rise of Afrobeats, Afro-House and successive waves of vintage re-releases via foreign labels. However, looking at a map of where contemporary African releases were streaming from, east Africa was a musical “black hole” (as one industry guy put it).

Johannes’ proposal came at a time when some of us in Nyege Nyege felt increasingly sidelined from the growing success of the festival. It was attracting a lot of attention and funding, but all the budget seemed to be spent on flying in artists from abroad. Perhaps unfairly, we viewed Nyege Nyege as being more focused on becoming the darlings of the international avant-garde than helping the local scene grow. Resentment was festering and egos were clashing, so in 2017 some of us branched off to set up East African Records (EAR).

The core aim of EAR is to get the region’s music distributed professionally to an international audience. In terms of curation, EAR has always been hands-off, with no prejudice regarding genre or style. This means EAR doesn’t have a particular market but needs to identify the audience for each particular release. Working with our partners Ditto Music, we identify suitable playlists on the major streaming platforms for each release, and pitch to them. Many of our strongest releases are now ending up on official playlists, getting hundreds of thousands of streams for our more successful acts, which is no mean feat for upcoming African artists.

We also set up a full live recording studio in a lush, tropical garden, hosting a network of local and international producers. While few artists had any money to pay for sessions, the studio introduced us to many artists who we could educate about professional distribution, and they in turn helped us to understand how the local industry worked. While we’ve spent more time making music in the studio and doing gigs across the region than counting Spotify streams, the distribution service has quietly grown in the background. We now handle around 70 releases/year for over 120 artists, with a handful of these earning some decent money.

Foreign incursions and local excursions

The years 2017-19 were a rollercoaster, as we courted fate with risky events while investing ever more energy into stimulating the local scene. Our international reputation was growing, without our noticing. We were contacted by Joss Stone’s manager and hosted her in early 2017, shortly followed by Jamaican Reggae legend Eric Donaldson (singer of 1968 hit “Cherry Oh Baby”). In 2018-19, we went on to host DJ Moocha (Kool FM, UK), Skitz & Rodney P (BBC 1Xtra), Mungo’s HiFi (again), DJ Vadim (UK), Roland van Campenhout (Belgium), Tom Dogu (Ancient Astronauts, Germany), Martin “Youth” Glover (UK), Simbad (France) and DJ Raph (Kenya). For each of these visiting dignitaries, we organised studio collaborations with upcoming East African artists. Wherever possible we’d take them on a regional tour, visiting our friends’ venues in Nairobi, the Kenyan coast and beyond.

Many of these visitors were my musical heroes, filling my record crates from my teens through to the present day. I’ll never forget the ecstasy of hearing Youth work the dancefloor with a unique dubplate version of Little Fluffy Clouds, in the very same Naivasha campsite where Rift Valley Festival was originally held. This was a musical wet dream for me and a culmination of years of sweat in the often-thankless tropical obscurity that was the “underground” of Uganda.

It’s taken a while but many of the studio collaborations are finally coming out. Youth’s first African EP dropped in May 2020; the first official Mungo’s HiFi & EAR release, “Pull Up On Mi Bumpa”, came out in August 2021; and in November we released “Posers”, our third DJ Vadim collabo. And we’re finally going physical, with five vinyl releases scheduled for 2022: Nilotika Cultural Ensemble produced by Switchstance Recordings (DE); Blessed San and Moocha remixed by Controlled Weirdness (UK); Eric Donaldson and Lion Story (Burundi), with remixes by The Orb; Youth producing Albert Ssempeke and Lion Story; and a double album featuring various artists from Uganda and Kenya, produced by Gilles Peterson’s studio partner Simbad and ADA Studios in Kenya.

The end of the party?

2020 found us in a deliciously inflated state, bursting with creative residencies and live shows when Covid abruptly sat on our plans. The deathly silence that ensued was something of a relief at first, a time to reflect, plan and give our livers a rest. As desk work became the only thing left to do, our distribution output doubled during the pandemic. We helped artists finish projects, get videos made and produce new material in the studio. However, without gigs to promote the releases and generate revenue, most artists became listless and depressed. This was made a lot worse by the Ugandan government’s decision to impose one of the harshest lockdowns in Africa; at the time of writing, all clubs and bars are still closed after nearly 2 years, with a 7 pm curfew.

Nyege Nyege was hit very hard, both at home and abroad. They had two editions of the festival wiped out and their first major tour of Europe cancelled. It was gutting for the artists, but arguably the festival needed a break. To many of us who were part of it from the start, Nyege Nyege had become too big too quickly and lost its original charm. The last time I attended was in 2018 and I was shocked at how many people were getting robbed and beaten up. It was just too crowded, with endless queues and dense throngs everywhere; it was becoming like the worst bits of Glastonbury. More sickening was the penetration of the mainstream, with corporate logos and naff acts booked by tel-com sponsors. The main crowd were no longer dedicated music fans, but hordes of Insta-junkies lured in by slick advertising, pursued by gangs of thieves and gropers. I didn’t bother going in 2019 but heard with a glimmer of schadenfreude that Derek and Arlen themselves were pickpocketed on the first day of the festival.

As the world now knows, you can’t live off streaming revenue, but East African Records has precious few other sources of income in the pandemic era. Accordingly, we became reliant on one of the few sectors I once vowed never to join: the NGO industry. In 2020-21 we made more money off a handful of NGO gigs than we did from all the creative studio work and streaming combined. This has led to one very interesting outcome, however, which is a renewed interest in education. In late 2021, we were funded by the French Embassy to deliver workshops in music production to aspiring female producers. It was a resounding success, and we are now working to develop this programme to train more women over a longer period.

Of course, the party isn’t really over, but the landscape has changed, perhaps forever. We should be celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tilapia with an epic live show, but instead, we’re turning down offers to do yet another virtual performance in the metaverse. But we’re looking forward to 2022, regardless of what Covid decides to do. With all the clubs closed, a new scene has been emerging in Uganda: off-radar parties, where you go and rave in some beautiful forest with a hundred kindred spirits. That small-scale type of event feels nicely back-to-the-future: before the European rave scene got squashed by cops and crackheads; before Nyege Nyege went mainstream; before Tilapia got shut down by the sex police. The new direction of East African Records – focusing on education and online distribution – also feels more sustainable and positive. That might not sound very rock & roll, but it will help us and our friends keep our heads above water instead of moaning about the death of live shows.

Uganda is still the friendliest country in the world, with one of the coolest and most organic music scenes I’ve ever encountered. If you fancy a trip here, please hit us up on social media, or drop us a line at [email protected]. Hope to see you soon!

Note: At the time of writing, East African Records expect to launch a Kickstarter in early 2022 for the next round of music production workshops, which will result in the first EP of Ugandan music produced exclusively by women. Your support will help to make this a regular programme and get some excellent music made.

Instagram: east_african_records

Facebook: eastafricanrecords

Lucy – Lucy Plays Wanton Witch

Stroboscopic Artefacts

Bangkok-resident Malaysian artist Wanton Witch has already radically redefined industrial techno / electronica aesthetics with her 2021 self-titled debut album. Now the sounds are turned on their head again as Stroboscopic Artefacts founder Lucy, not so much remixes the record as builds a whole new one from its constituent parts. The result is a pitch dark, fierce as anything, but ultimately life-affirming thrill ride that doesn’t let up.

There aren’t many UK bands in the Punk genre that have had the lasting impact that Crass have. The collective have received an equal amount of love and hate over the decades and all without having any mainstream success. There was no crossover hit, no jeans commercial “sell-out” mega-hit and most folks in the street would give you a blank stare if you dropped their name in idle chit chat.

But … fuck my old pleather boots if they did not light a fuse in the underground. Declaring punk dead the minute it hit the suburbs Crass brought anarcho politics, animal rights and peace punk sloganeering to a generation ready to experience something a bit more real than safety pins, edgy swazis and boot boy bovva. Sure it descended into its own cliché of dog on a rope rhetoric and monochrome stencil style artwork that adorns bedroom walls and computer screens from Gothenburg to Osaka but to be first and to inspire is to reach god-like status.

This in itself is hilarious as Crass bashed organised religion (in fact organised anything) whenever they could with their iconic logo being a pastiche of the Christian cross, the Union flag, the Swaztika and the Ouroboros. Did the collective become too big and a snake that ate itself ? That is a question for late-night punk purists.

So what is Normal Never Was? Last year Crass put their DIY money where their loudspeaker is and offered the stems for their ground-breaking debut album “The Feeding of the 5000” up for grabs online with the challenge – take it, shake it, break it – mix it backwards, forwards and upside down.

All proceeds from this batshit project go to Refuge a charity that supports victims of domestic abuse – needed post lockdown more than ever. Great idea. Great cause. Does the music hold up?

Well, I will start off by saying that I am reviewing this with a disadvantage. There has been a delay in One Little Independent getting the tracks to me so I am working from WAVs and a jpeg of the front cover. Got no details about the remixers aside from names that trail off on a long-form filename. You know what it couldn’t be better than this, in this case. The first time I heard Crass was on a tape when I was 16 that an older woman at Barnet College made for me. It had Feeding of the Five Thousand on one side and “Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records” by Chumbawumba on the other. I can remember liking the song titles more than I liked the music and went back to listening to Pixies, Sisters of Mercy and Nuclear Assault. What I can remember in subsequent listens to the album over the last few decades is my love for the more traditional lo-fi Steve Ignorant fronted punk numbers and loving the content but not the style of the spoken word pieces by Joy De Vivre and Eve Libertine. Just not a spoken word listener – I still skip those tracks now.

Well here all the tracks on the album get at least two remixes each with a myriad of styles on offer – some transforming the tracks into beasts that barely resemble the source and others that add cyborg limbs to the organic base.

“Asylum” the Christ baiting intro to the album that I skipped so nonchalantly is given a big beat Euro style remix by Brainquake which sees Eve Libertines vocals stretched and slowed to great effect. The meaning rendered just as powerful as the original but now you could swing your hips to it. Meanwhile, The Misanthropist mix on CD 2 is a dark industrial take with big dirty Justin Broadrick style riffs. The pain and bile drips from every word as the industrial machine minces the church.

There are plenty of reasons to pick this album up, the great source material, the charity that benefits and the sheer why the fuck not approach to making your stem files available for the world to manipulate at will. Another great reason is the showcasing of artists to a whole new audience. Over the 40 tracks on offer here I am introduced to nearly as many electronic artists and musicians – which is gonna cost me a few quid in Bandcamp. I mean Toxic Derwish remix of Do they Owe Us a Living has me grinning and bopping in equal measure, the uplifting synth that backs Ignorant’s vitriol shines light in the dark and when it segues into Jack Matthew Tyson’s “End Result” I am arms in the air, glow sticks at the ready and remembering seeing The Shamen at the Camden Palace back in 1990. The same song gets a completely different going over on “Kooky’s Punky Loves Beats Remix” which amps the bass into a deep reggae throb and brings the guitars right up in your face like Sigue Sigue Sputnik then dops in a dirrrrrty electro dub section. Oooof! As you can tell with 40 tracks on offer here there is no way I can go in-depth on each one without writing a manifesto length piece that will be ignored. But maaaan there is so much here to stimulate the shell likes. Al Poison Reidh gives End Result a grime/electro makeover whilst the track that pissed off The Exploited and Special Duties “Punk Is Dead” becomes a toppy, punky, choppy dub backed behemoth at the hands of Grumblemorph whilst Use Knife slather it with futurist electronica and make Steve Ignorant sound even gruffer! It feels like punk has been killed by Skynet and the mohawked masses are being strangled by ethernet cables and USB cords!

I would not be doing the original Feeding album justice if I didn’t give time to “Banned from the Roxy” Crass’s pro-peace, anti-government anthem. Montreal’s Gloom Influx stuff the track with grit and menace offering a 90’s hip hop swagger to the anger. Makes me think of Fatal and Onyx and the use of gun samples cut through the track like multi million pounds worth of export live rounds through young flesh. Origins of Dissent takes things in a much more futuristic and stark direction, this is a claustrophobic techno trip through hyperspace, firing on all cylinders – the beat brings to mind the infectiousness of German loons Eskimo Callboy. I reckon you could do an anarchist step class to this track!

To hear the starkness of “Fight War …not Wars” transformed into an EDM groover with Witch House traits by Popcorn Warlord and a deep bassy behemoth by Dub Revolutions freaked me out.

It is a compliment to all of the artists who took part to say that at no point have I wondered why they bothered. Each track is remixed brilliantly and stands on its own as a piece of music, If I am honest I am probably more likely to listen to these mixes than the original now they exist in the world. Imagine seeing a dancefloor of people bogling and grinding to Fight War, Not War or lazer pointing to General Bacardi! Coming to a pub and radio station near you ….soon.

These remixes have given this album a musical revamp which lets the message of love, peace and stopping that boot grinding down into the face of the oppressed flood out to a new generation.

To paraphrase Wattie – Crass’s not dead- no it’s not!

Review by: “Mighty” Matt Mason of Total Rock

21 Gun Salute

Marlody

I'm Not Sure At All

FROCK AND SHOCK

Boris – W- Review

Mazen Kerbaj – Sampler / Sampled – Review

Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On- Review

The female nude from a different gaze.

Ugandan Experiments