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Annie had always loved reggae and dub, but now – living in London – she was soaking in the stuff. The Crass crew already knew Sherwood (On-U Sound), and he and they both recorded at Southern Studios in London. Sherwood and Annie met, and got on like the proverbial house on fire. An LP, joint venture of both On-U Sound and Crass’ Corpus Christi label, came into being. It was called Soul Possession and was unleashed in 1983.
Soul Possession is easily the most extreme LP Annie has released to date – an unsettled and unsettling collection of rhythmic soundscapes, over which Annie intones some of her most grim and grisly lyrics. Soul Possession is not about beauty, though it does have some dark, lovely moments. It is an album that has a political point to make, and it does so very, very effectively. It is a brutal reflection of the brutality of modern life. It is steeped in the aesthetic mindset of Crass – indeed collective members Penny Rimbaud, Pete Wright and Eve Libertine are featured players.
Annie, the chanteuse, is just in her formative stages here, and her breathy/breathless rants have more in common with the urgent vocal delivery of Alan Vega or Don Van Vliet than they do with Judy Garland. Sherwood’s production is an evil wonder – a haunted house full of bubbling baselines, eerie electronics and clattering graveyard percussion. ‘Closet Love’ sets the scene for the LP, a gently funky bass spars with a jittery drum machine and an abrasive keyboard, while Annie coos a nightmare scenario of lovers ripping each other apart/rotting in each others’ arms.
‘Third Gear Kills’ has a great, grim groove and Annie spins a hypnotic tale of automotive violence and sex, à la JG Ballard’s Crash. ‘Turkey Girl’ feels like an explicit homage to Captain Beefheart. It boasts a catchy melody and the most traditional song structure on the LP, but the lyrics are a monstrous parody of the tales of male sexual prowess one might find in a blue blues song. (“Wanna slice my cock on your pop top”, the clearly deranged narrator barks at his “turkey fuck girl”.) ‘Burnt Offerings’ calls to mind Mark Stewart and his Maffia, and punctuates its tale of torture and mind control with a sad piano melody, which helps make Annie’s performance all the more harrowing.
‘To Know Evil’ advances on the listener like some huge, mutant reptilian monster, before settling into an evil, repetitive groove over which Annie catalogues the horrors of war. Strangely Annie abandons her vocal duties entirely for ‘Sad Shadows’, giving the song over to Crass’ Eve Libertine who gives her best angry-ghost-howling-in-the-wind delivery to Annie’s images of female oppression. The song is both haunting and haunted and grows oddly funky as it progresses.
‘Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours’ may well be this scary album’s scariest moment, with its horror movie soundtrack/backing track and Annie’s flock of harpies multi-track vocals – of which Diamanda Galás might well have been proud. The final track, ‘Waiting for the Fun’, arrives with evil bass lines, funky drums and another hornets’ nest of vocals – which return again and again to an oddly plaintive, folk song melody.
Critics were effusive with their praise. Clearly this was the work of an artist to be reckoned with.
For those ‘in the know’, Annie Anxiety was now a known quantity. She never did make it to Berlin – she would live in London for the next decade. She would soon abandon her post in the Crass collective, and be issued a card to carry indicating her position as resident diva for the On-U Sound crew. A dub chanteuse would emerge.
Right place, right time.
But that’s another story…
Robert R Conroy
New York City, September 2010
Taken from Robert R Conroy's notes for the insert of this reissue of Soul Possession.
The CD is beautifully packaged in a digipack with artwork taken from Little Annie's own paintings and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording.
Also available in this series of reissues are Little Annie's Jackamo and Short and Sweet.
Track Listing
1. Closet Love
2. Third Gear Kills
3. Turkey Girl
4. Burnt Offerings
5. To Know Evil
6. Sad Shadows
7. Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours
8. Waiting for the Fun
Running Time: 48 minutes
Jackamo is probably one of the best LPs you have never heard, but once within its realm tread lightly and carefully. Here there be monsters. The great American author of weird fiction, HP Lovecraft, once remarked that for a tale of terror to be truly memorable “(a) certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present”. Such outer, unknown forces are at play here. Annie took her own personal fear and pain, and transmuted same into something existential.
This is truly music from the haunted dancehall. ‘Unexplainable dread’ – in both the Edgar Allen Poe and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry sense of this term – runs riot. But what keeps this LP from sliding into the pit of its own dark night of the soul is Annie herself – her pluck, her humor, her graceful facility with the English language and most of all her humanity.
The LP commences with a subtle apocalypse, a sledgehammer wrapped in velvet, a confession, a manifesto, a masterwork. ‘As I Lie in Your Arms’ is a truly amazing song, a sprawling, astonishing amalgam of dub groove and Caligari cabaret. Few tunes have so perfectly captured the horror of that 3am-hour-of-the-wolf-insomnia when the waking nightmares come calling. When the uneasy sleeper is suddenly aware and starts asking those most horrible of questions: “Am I really happy?’, ‘Was it all worth it?” and “What have I done?”.
Against Wimbish’s gently insistent/life-support baseline, Noah’s clattering percussion and the ghostly, elegant piano melody of Yamamoto, Annie intones this – what? Monologue? Colloquy? A ‘sugary soliloquy of lust’? She lays in the arms of her lover and can lie no longer. A gorgeous litany of dislocated disappointment pours forth. The aching, ragged beauty of Annie’s vocals are surpassed only by the brutal/gorgeous precision of her words. “As anxious night turns to endless day and nightmares turn to daydreams, we will crawl across the floor and laugh at all the splinters”.
Meanwhile Sherwood drapes the whole proceedings in a groovy/ghostly dub shroud. The rest of the album could have been blank and the LP would have still been a major work just for this track alone.
But the remainder of Jackamo is anything but blank and/or filler. One has barely a moment to recover from the quiet devastation of the first song before the vicious, jittery assault of the second. ‘Bastinado’ is a form of torture that consists of beating the soles of a prisoner’s feet. In Annie’s skilled, bloody hands the practice becomes an emblem for the rampant violence of the modern world, which she lays out in a laundry list that is both hideous and blackly hilarious.
‘Chasing the Dragon Down Broadway’ is a Harold Pinter-play-bad-trip-tribal-stomp to a blaring soundtrack of Captain Beefhart and Martin Denny. Then the monstrous title track arrives. Quoting Mr. Lovecraft again, the author suggests that the truly ‘weird’ in art commands “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe‘s utmost rim”. He could have been describing the song Jackamo. It is a beautiful nightmare, a sumptuous, evil, sonic vortex that pulls the listener down into a netherworld of bat squeaks, psychedelic soundscapes and graveyard tablas. Meanwhile, Annie’s rantings echo in the distance, sounding like Judy Garland babbling through some late-night set in a bar full of mugwumps in William Burroughs’ Interzone.
Released to rapturous reviews on the fledgling British indie label One Little Indian, Jackamo should have set the world on its ear. But as luck would have it, another band on One Little Indian happened to release a record at just about the same time as Annie did. The label was utterly blind-sided by the sudden, huge success of the Sugarcubes’ first LP. In the ensuing months, as the label scrambled to deal with its new megstars, other releases on the label – including Jackamo – got lost in the shuffle.
Robert R Conroy
New York City, September 2010
Taken from Robert R Conroy's notes for the insert of this reissue of Jackamo.
The CD is beautifully packaged in a digipack with artwork taken from Little Annie's own paintings and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording.
Also available in this series of reissues are Little Annie's Short and Sweet and Soul Possession.
Track Listing
1. As I Lie in Your Arms
2. Bastinado
3. Chasing the Dragon Down Broadway
4. Jackamo
5. Jack Yo Mama
6. One Mourning for Marvin Gaye
7. Rise
8. Hier Encore
9. Down by the Station
10. Rise Dub
Running Time: 47 minutes
Released: January 2011
The new Natural Snow Buildings double-album Waves of the Random Sea may now be pre-ordered from Blackest Rainbow.
"Stunning new record from Natural Snow Buildings, the collaborative project between Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, the minds behind Twinsistermoon and Isengrind respectively. This new epic from the French duo is their first physical release since 2009's well received Shadow Kingdom, also issued by us here at Blackest Rainbow, and it follows on from 2010's download only The Centauri Agent and both Twinsistermoon and Isengrind full length LPs. So 2010 has been a relatively quiet year for Natural Snow Buildings in comparison to 2008 and 2009. Mehdi and Solange have been working on 'Waves of the Random Sea' for us for quite sometime, both in terms of art and audio, and it really has come together beautifully. Solange has created a truly stunning series of artworks that spread across the 4 panels of the gatefold sleeve, and the music is a gorgeous tapestry of dreamy drone blurred with their enchanting ethereal folk balladry. This release continues to show how important every aspect of a Natural Snow Buildings release means to them, I was blown away by the standard of the music and artwork. Pressed on heavyweight virgin vinyl, and housed in a beautiful gatefold sleeve featuring artwork by Solange. The vinyl edition features an extra track not on the CD and all tracks in their entirety."
Artist: Steven Severin
Title: Blood Of A Poet
Catalogue No: CSR135CD
Barcode: 8 2356650482 5
Format: Digisleeve with innersleeve
Genre: Dark Ambient / Soundtrack
Shipping: Now
Acclaimed solo artist and founding member of the legendary Siouxsie And The Banshees, Steven Severin’s debut album for Cold Spring Records is titled "Blood Of A Poet (Le Sang d’un Poete). This album is his entire soundtrack to Jean Cocteau’s 1930 black & white surrealist classic and is the second in his ongoing series of "Music For Silents".
During their reign, Siouxsie And The Banshees established themselves as one of the foremost alternative artists and the only survivors of the London punk scene to evolve, innovate and succeed until their final demise in 2002. Severin has since committed himself almost exclusively to scoring for film & TV.
Since May 2008 Severin has been performing live accompaniment to silent films, startling audiences across the globe who have now come to expect the unexpected from the man who has crossed paths with such diverse luminaries as John Cale, Alan Moore, Jarboe, Lydia Lunch, Marc Almond, Merc Cunningham, Robert Smith and the Tiger Lillies. "Blood Of A Poet" received it’s premiere at the Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood in January this year and this October sees Severin embark on his first ever solo tour of the UK hosted by the Picturehouse chain of cinemas, culminating in a performance at TATE BRITAIN on 3rd December.
Tracks: 1. The Wounded Hand | 2. Walking Statues | 3. L'Hôtel Des-Folies-Dramatiques | 4. Glory Forever | 5. The Snowball Fight | 6. The Desecration Of The Host | 7. The Card Sharp & The Angel | 8. The Lyre
Artist: Fire In The Head
Title: Confessions Of A Narcissist
Catalogue No: CSR120CD
Barcode: 8 2356649912 1
Format: CD in jewelcase
Genre: Power Electronics
Shipping: Now
"Confessions Of A Narcissist" marks the final full-length release by Fire In The Head ending six years of sonic warfare with an assault of manic, self-indulgent industrial electronics. Drawing as much influence from early punk / hardcore as from industrial / power electronics, F/I/T/H was conceived as a cathartic outlet to explore and ratify the delusions and social perversions resultant of psychosis and the darker side of man's conflicted dual nature, to fan the flames which engulf the borders between obsession, compulsion, lust and need. The tracks on this release were recorded in 2007-2008 and are the last of the "short, sharp, shock" vocal tracks which Michael abandoned in favour of "epic" length industrial / ambient compositions. Features guest appearances from Nick Blinko (Rudimentary Peni) and J. Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed), with exclusive artwork from Blinko. Stickered for stores.
Tracks: 1. Gag Order | 2. I'm Not Here To Coexist, I'm Here To Win | 3. Home Is Where The Whore Is | 4. Psychotic Underground Mk. II | 5. Get The Rope | 6. Narcissist's Mantra | 7. A Means To What End | 8. The Machinery Of Death | 9. Home Invasion | 10. Complacency Is Your Disgrace | 11. The Magi | 12. Some Dreams Last Forever | 13. Gag Order (Choked Again)
Ectopic Ents is proud to announce the release of the long awaited new studio album by Foetus, entitled HIDE.
HIDE features ten new compositions by JG Thirlwell, who describes it as a “neo-symphonic avant-psychedelic concept album informed by the culture of fear”. Kicking off with a nine minute operatic opus featuring the guest vocal talents of opera singer Abby Fischer, HIDE is an immersive album infused with strands of progressive and contemporary classical, as well as Thirlwell’s twisting cinematic journeys, bombast and sombre interludes.
Thirlwell produced the album and performs most of the music. Also guesting on the album are long time collaborator Steven Bernstein on trumpet and Leyna Marika Papach from Thirlwell’s Manorexia ensemble on violin. In addition Elliot Hoffman of Carbomb plays drums on a track, and there are appearances from Ed Pastorini, Jeff Davidson and Christian Gibbs (Lucinda Blackbear).
Initial quantities of HIDE will come with a free 5" x 5" sticker of the album front cover, signed by JG Thirlwell.
Currently we are selling the album on CD only.
Go to The Foetus Shoppe to hear previews and order.
Strumming Music For Piano, Harpsichord And Strings Ensemble.
(SR 297CD) : OUT 10/12/2010
Sub Rosa presents unpublished works by minimalist composer/vocalist/performer Charlemagne Palestine. Charlemagne Palestine wrote intense, ritualistic music in the 1970s, intended by the composer to rub against audiences' expectations of what is beautiful and meaningful in music. A composer-performer, he always performed his own works as soloist. His earliest works
were compositions for carillon and electronic drones, and he is best known for his
intensely performed piano works. These unpublished pieces from the mid-'70s are
works built on the same principles that he developed and established over the years
for the piano. This is a unique variation on composition that introduces a perpetual
rise inside a continuum of sound. "All of the Strumming Music manifestations seem to
have originated from Charlemagne's physical relationship with the colossal carillon
bells in the tower of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. I met
Charlemagne Palestine in 1968. The intensity of his listening impressed me as the
intensity of his playing would later, when I heard him play on the carillon and the
bells to 'his church.' I realized later, when Charlemagne had started to develop his
series of piano pieces called Strumming, that he was assaulting that concrete
ceiling and literally pushing through its three feet to release the sonic energy in
the piano, much as he had with the carillon. Charlemagne's interest and work in
electronic music increased in the late '60s, and in 1970, he decamped to southern
California where he became a graduate student working with Morton Subotnick. It was
during this year at CalArts (1970-71) that Charlemagne developed an approach to the
piano that was not only extremely repetitive and physical, but predicated on the
theory that, given the right stimulus, the instrument had a voice of its own and
could produce a whole array of high overtones that seem to jump out on their own as
if by magic. Over the next few years, he developed and polished the music that came
to be known simply as 'Strumming.' The rapid alternation between single notes and
chords and different registers became a technique that he seemed to own, and it
really only worked with this magic piano. 'Strumming' was the physical technique;
the melodies and harmonies that resulted made the music breathe and feel alive.
After a while, the ear doesn't distinguish between notes that are sounded by hammers
and those which are." --extract from the liner notes by Ingram Marshall. Housed in
an 8-page digipak including a 16-page book.
artist: Brian McBride
title: The Effective Disconnect (Music Composed for the Documentary “Vanishing of the Bees”)
catalog#: krank150
formats available: LP / CD / Digital
release date: October 25, 2010
content:
! From Brian McBride: When George and Myriam approached me to compose for their film they
suggested I concentrate on four different themes: the gloriousness of the bees, the endurance and
hardships of traditional beekeepers, pesticides and the holistic nature of non-industrial agriculture. I was
especially intrigued with the idea of combining some of their mournful aspirations with something more
serene. Composing began in May of 2009. I had decided to start fresh not using anything that I had
already recorded. Preparing the music for the film, I knew that I needed to provide more built-in changes
in the structure of the pieces to give George and Myriam more flexibility. As I worked, I purposely
distanced myself from the more continuous architecture employed in my previous recordings in favor of
several mini-suites. In the thinking about the music, I hoped that the pieces would do justice to the
“gloriousness of the bees” theme, striving for a more overt hopeful quality. But old traditions die-hard and
the hopeful side of the music was eventually more subsumed by the lamentable.
! I should also mention that if you have seen the film, this record will not contain all the music used
and scored for this film.
! I am incredibly honored to be a part of this project even if the final compositions turned out to be
more appropriate for a different and more forlorn film. I know you have a lot to think about in this world
but if you care about food or the world around us, you deserve to at least consider the arguments within
this honest and real piece of film-making.
track listing:
1. Mélodrames Télégraphiés (in B major 7th) Part 1 2. Mélodrames Télégraphiés (in B major 7th) Part 2
3. Girl Nap 4. Several Tries (in an Unelevated Style) 5. Supposed Essay on the Piano (B major piano
Adagietto) 6.!Toil Theme Part 1 7. Toil Theme Part 2 8. Toil Theme Part 3 9. Beekeepers vs Warfare
Chemicals 10. I Know That You Don't Like the Future Like I Do 11. Chamber Minuet
selected discography:
When the Detail Lost Its Freedom 2005 kranky
press quotes for When the Detail Lost Its Freedom:
“A lush combination of everything from understated trumpet to an exultant, aspiring melody, feel like
messages from some lost, distant landscape.” All Music Guide
“Without flashy production, without a flashy image, and without a super-fast riff or commercial hook,
McBride manages to create all the gravity in the world.” Brainwashed
“McBride conjures up a pulsing world of what sounds like manipulated strings, harmonica, and low end
found sound rumbles that sounds like something that needs to be played at the end of man.” Almost
Cool
“Were subtly and nuance the currency of the music community, Brian McBride would be its richest
member.” Star's End
