Carl Vaz

Photos. Texts. Music

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Which language exactly??

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#brussels psychedelic dentist.

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Great video show @ Argos, Brussels. Design by Sarah & Charles.

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And I thought that I was paranoid!

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Mysterious crowds in Brussels

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Brian Eno - David Byrne. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. 1981.

I remember hearing the first track - America is Waiting and thinking WHAT is going on?

Rock music stripped down to its bare bones and then rebuilt using kitchen trash percussion and malfunctioning science-fiction props. And the lyrics - lifted from tv shows, radio, and records like (luckily they cited their sources in those days) the Music in the world of Islam series.

This is the record that still, after 35 years, makes suffering the Brian Eno hype worthwhile.

Regiment starts with an incredible groove. Despite its dubby funk, it seems somehow tribal, or at least local in a global-village kind of way. Nothing, however, prepares you for the entry of the Lebanese vocal, a wonderful wobbly wordless wail which you can never forget and which sent me scurrying around the second-hand shops looking for the source: “The Human Voice” from the Music in the world of Islam series, also still in one of my boxes. I wonder what ever happened to Dunya Yunis, the “girl from a northern mountain village” who sung it. I wonder if she knows anything about how far her voice has travelled since she recorded the original in 1972 and much later appearing on “Pump up the Volume”…

The Jezebel Spirit.  is, after all this time, the track that sends shivers up my spine. The crazed energy of the lyric is propelled by the insistent bass drum. but it’s…

                                       " start blowing out sister…“

                      the gasps of the woman that give me the creeps

           "you have no right there, her husband is the head of the house.”

A friend of mine, suffering from an extended schizophrenic episode, was once, well, basically kidnapped by members of an evangelical church and taken off to some farm in Derbyshire to be exorcised. I’m sure they meant to help him, and it did make something in him change, but he could only ever talk with horror about the experience. Things flew around the room, he felt stuff coming out of him…

“you know that track on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts? It was just like that. I became her, the girl you hear on the record. The music was playing in my head and it wouldn’t stop. I was gasping for breath but it felt like I was drowning. ”

When he got home he destroyed his copy of the LP and refused to listen to it ever again.

" Out Jezebel, out! In Jesus’ name!“

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Memory Box - Dad 7

A long time ago, back in the 1980′s I was coming down from an LSD trip when I walked into the bathroom and I saw my dad standing there. I started talking to him, reached out my hand, and then realised that I was looking at myself in the mirror. I must have stood staring at him / me for an age because my friends had to come in and drag me away from the mirror.

Now he’s lying here, helpless and I see myself lying there in his place. He’s lost weight, and although he’s shorter than me, he resembles me more and more the closer he comes to his end. He regresses back into his childhood as my adulthood accelerates to overtake him. For this brief moment we meet in the middle. I see myself, and it is a vision of Death.

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Dub Syndicate. Tunes from the Missing Channel On-U-Sound 1984.

"The show is coming! it's gonna be just so different...."

Dub was ever present in the record shops and the streets of Brixton. But I arrived late to the party, having got there via Bristol: The Pop Group - Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Adrian Sherwood. I started to seek Sherwood's productions out - African Head Charge, New Age Steppers, Dub Syndicate. How the music was made, I had no idea - just that it somehow melded distortion with psychedelic echoes in an electronic, other-worldly space, and that it went really really well with grass.

The record starts with "Ravi Shankar" a plastic skank sitar which puts you on the wrong foot, because the real star is the rock-steady bass that morphs half way through into a squelching monster, exploding the headphones just like it shows on the cover.

I bought a drum machine back then, an Akai that could play a thousand times faster than any human: Beats became jittery textures and electronic drones. I used it for my video soundtracks, Paul the technician showed me (don't tell anybody, he warned me) how to wire an output from the drum machine into the video mixer so that my footage would skip and jump and shatter into pieces in sync with the sound. But it still didn't sound like Dub. It was my friend Gus who patiently explained with a mixing desk and a "copycat" tape echo box how it worked. He worked the mutes and the sends, dropping snares and rimshots into echoey spaces, fed back the signal while spinning the equaliser knobs wildly to create screeches and deep sonic bombs. I got it: the mixing desk, no, the whole studio was a musical instrument for composing and playing space. Gus wasn't bad at it at all, in fact he's still at it, but Sherwood was a virtuoso, his desk a Stradivarius.

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Memory Box - Dad 6

- Theres like, all this stuff going on here...

- like what?

- well, for instance, you see that guy there...

A nurse has just walked in to check someone else's notes, Dad's voice falls to a whisper, but I'm afraid that it's still too loud.

- the reason he looks so tired is that he's a nurse in the daytime, and a hotel manager by night. I don't think he sleeps at all!

- really? how do you know that?

- I see it.. at night they move things around and this room becomes a hotel, like a, a lobby... with guests and everything, and he's the manager. They're all up to something, you wouldn't believe it.

- are you sure it's not a dream? I ask

- and people disappear. They disappear from here, they think I don't notice but I do, I've been writing it all down. That man, the one who was opposite me, they dissapeared him last night.

- maybe they just went home? got better and they could move to another ward?

- no-one gets better here.

Oof. I must talk to the nurses, he's clearly delusional. Could it be the medicines he's on? I go off into the corridor with the excuse of going to the loo and corner one of the nurses.

- yes, we'd noticed that too. We think he might have a fever, we're going to put him on antibiotics.

When I come back he's asleep and I sit next to him, looking around. Grey modular ceilings, grey-green curtains, no view to speak of, beeps and hisses from the equipment, grunts and groans from the patients. I remember a book about torture in Northern Ireland, sensory deprivation: no sound, no light, or the opposite: high-volume white noise and 24 hour daylight. A classic psycho experiment. No wonder he's going loopy after 3 months in here!

Dad is unwakeable, so I get up to go. As I leave I notice that he has Le Carre's "The Night Manager" next to the bed.

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Cabaret Voltaire 2x45 1982.

I still have trouble deciding which way round the record sleeve goes. It was sold as a black square, suprematist, anonymous, then inside it has this suprisingly generous design, collage, spiky shapes, silver ink... Turns out the inside was by Neville Brody, the outside by the Cabs themselves. But which is which?

It was impossible to miss the Cabs in Sheffield. Even if you didn't like them, there was always someone discussing their latest record, telling anecdotes or spreading rumours. Actually they were skinheads. Cokeheads. Ran a drugs operation. Were totally paranoid. Kept guns in their studio. Messed up remixes because they were jealous of the original songs. etc... I didn't really care because I always thought they were cool.

2x45 was one of my favourites. The cod-arabian Yashar is overshadowed by other tracks: Nort's clattering drumming on Wait and Shuffle is prescient of Drum and Bass. Protection sounds the most special, in hindsight. A straight, unwavering beat over which sax, bass, synth and organ interlock in a manner reminiscent of minimal music or african choirs. If you concentrate on one musician you hear mistakes, bum notes, hesitations, but the total is a kind of cohesive, playful joy. And it goes on and on until really, you've had enough! I've no idea what the vocal is about... as usual for Cabaret Voltaire the grain of the voice was more important than the words.

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Tony Oxley. Tony Oxley. 1975

I realise now that many of these records I bought for the cover. I bought this second hand, probably in Rare and Racy, the Sheffield book and record shop with a fast turnover in interesting records. Partly because we were hungry for new sounds, and partly because we were just sometimes hungry and had to sell books and records again to buy bread, a train ticket, videotapes or whatever.

The cover is by Alan Davie, and I recognised it at once, having once been to an exhibition at Gimpel Fils gallery. I was fascinated by his magical sign language that invaded the paintings, a bit like AR Penck but usually more colourful. His works sometimes remind me of Kandinsky or Hilma af Klint but more chaotic and more hippyish at the same time. As a punk of course hippiedom was anathema to me but somehow the freedom in his work seemed very vital, inspirational.

Back then, when I bought this, electronic percussion was all the rage. I remember Paul proudly demonstrating his Simmonds drums, hexagonal slabs of perspex that produced, under his sticks anyway, a falling piooooh paoooooh dooooeeee sound. Drummers used contact microphones to trigger samples of ever larger snaredrum sounds, passed through ever larger reverberation units. Snares that could kill. How different Oxley's electronics are here. Side A has Oxley in free improv mode, the electronics barely present, a kind of colouring in the background. Side B has the electricity more upfront, and on "South East of Sheffield" the percussion instruments are press-ganged into resonating along with noisy circuitry, creating a grimy landscape of sound: ambient or industrial music avant-la-lettre.

Listen to Tony Oxley and Derek Bailey playing back in 1995

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Dad 5

I've been away for almost two weeks now and am nervous about seeing dad again. I remember that first shock of seeing him, shrunken, tubed and wired.

But actually he looks OK. They've moved him into another room, away from Shoutyman. Just one tube now and he seems to have got some colour back. But he's sound asleep.

- Dad, can you hear me?

- ugghhmmm.

- Dad, it's Carl. I've just come back.

- hmmf, helluvyoubeen?

- I was in Brussels, I'm here now again for a week or so.

- What time is it?

- 2.30

- morning?

- no, afternoon.

- lost track.. I keep falling asleep and then...

he drifts off again. I go and interrogate the nurses about his condition - you can almost never catch one of the doctors. When I'm back he's awake again and proceeds to tell me in great detail how the digital box on the TV works at home. I know, but I just have to keep nodding. Then he starts on about the central heating.

- Dad, I'm fifty three, I know how a thermostat works. Anyway, it's still warm. I don't need the heating on yet.

- Nights are drawing in,

- Yeah, since June already.

- and you don't want to catch a cold...

- Really, dad it's warm enough at home.

- He's not convinced but leaves it. Shrugs. and then starts snoring.

To clean my lungs of the hospital gases I go for a walk, and while I'm wondering what to do, the bus to Peckham comes along, so I jump on it. It's pretty full but I get a seat. An old west-indian woman gets on and I offer her my seat: "Well, thankyou very much young man, but don't you bother about me, I'm only going one stop." Wow, what an accent! English as if spoken by an aristocrat from the 1930's. Must have learnt it in school in Jamaica. No one, even of that generation in England really speaks like that any more. It puts a smile on my face.

I can't believe Peckham. I was here last to look at the Flat Time House before it disappeared but now I really notice the changes. Hip coffee joints in the most unlikely places, it's not far off The Mission or Brooklyn. House prices must be off the map. I think back to when my mother died and I was talking to dad about finances. He said "well, the rent's not too high" and I almost fell off my chair. I thought that the house I grew up in was theirs, ours. It never occurred to me that they might still be renting in a street where most of the older residents had left after cashing in on their investments. Dad just shrugged. - it's much less hassle you know, he said.

When I get back to Brixton I buy a Guardian and this article is waiting for me:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/24/the-bubble-that-turned-into-a-tide-how-london-got-hooked-on-gentrification

[carlvazartist]

Young Marble Giants. Colossal Youth. 1980.

As with many of these records, I heard this one around at some mates' house. It belonged to Quentin who I first met sitting at a table in a crowded, noisy pub. I was fascinated with his purple eyeliner and hair extensions - he was a posh, gentle, incredibly polite version of Boy George. It was only when he stood up to go to the loo (ah, England! I can say toilet, loo instead of restroom) that I saw that he was wearing a skirt, much too short, his long skinny legs ending in some garish trainers which spoilt the image somewhat. 

We'd listened to Colossal Youth on poppers, and I thought it was an incredibly funny record and I persuaded Quentin to lend it to me. When I listened to it again the next day, after my headache had passed, I found that it wasn't funny at all but a record of such simplicity and beauty that I had to own a copy that very day. 

Those riffs: killer riffs (check Credit In the Straight World) played effortlessly, economically, seemingly unvirtuosically. The production incredibly sparse. Sometimes not even a drum machine, and when there is one it sounds like a shitty Bontempi organ rhythm machine. I can imagine what would have happened if someone like Trevor Horn had got hold of them, and I don't mean that well. 

These are just all perfect pop songs - Idea for a concept album project: take Colossal Youth as a demo tape (because after all, that's what it sounds like) and produce each song in a different way. It contains the templates for everything from hard rock, punk, disco, a house anthem, a garage tune...

Listen: https://www.discogs.com/user/carldvaz/collection

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Liquid Liquid: Successive Reflexes 1981

I've always been a sucker for a good record cover, and here that was what clinched the deal. Dark blue print on heavy silver cardboard, now very worn. And the exoticism of it. New York hipster musicians who I'd never heard of. That percussion-heavy thing I would hear live again and again while I was living in Sheffield, but when I bought it, the only thing I knew that came close was 23 Skidoo. I remembered it being a laid-back kind of disc but as I listen to it now, there's a insistent, nervous NYC energy that propels the music, sometimes exploding into a smash of cymbal. Music stripped of harmony, Punk without the guitars: just rhythm, bassline and vocals.

I dreamt, stupidly, of New York as a grainy black-and-white film with this record as its soundtrack. What took me to the States in the end was another percussion-heavy music: the Art Ensemble of Chicago (records now lost!) who blew me away totally at a gig in Sheffield. A few days later I heard that I could apply for an exchange to the Art Institute of Chicago. I didn't need to think twice. Somehow in my head I'd conflated the two institutions - but as it turned out, it was not a bad mistake.

Listen:  https://www.discogs.com/user/carldvaz/collection

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Illegal America.

I'm suprised this even survived - it seems to be an exercise in ephemera: Loose-leaf folded sheets in a cardboard sleeve. To open it you had to tear the dollar bill pasted to the front, itself apparently, an illegal act.

I'm not sure where I got this - it could have been the ICA bookshop, with its few square metres stuffed to the gills with art, philosophy and criticism. I used to go there when I'd just got my grant check. That was a financially dangerous exercise but more justifiable than the record store. 

But just stop and imagine, re-wind and re-read: a GRANT CHECK?

Ours was perhaps the last generation to get a fully-funded further education in the UK. Even though our school seemed to be held together with tape and bits of string, there were weeks when we could only afford to eat toast, we had to take shit summer jobs and the charity shops were our only fashion outlets, we came out of college (almost) without debts. What a shock when I got to the States. And another when I returned to see the UK grant system dismantled and fees skyrocketing.

Illegal America chronicles transgressive work by artists. Sometimes daring or thought-provoking, sometimes just downright stupid. I bought it for the one page on Gordon Matta-Clark and his anti-architecture, where destruction and creation become one, whose work links (in my head) to Gustav Metzger and prepares the ground for Cornelia Parker, among others.

[carlvazartist]

And, talking of On the Corner.

Miles Davis. On the Corner. 1972.

What a sleeve! Imagine that being YOUR street corner. All the blaxploitation cliche's right up there in your face in dayglo colour as if to say: So? What's your problem, man? It's the disc that splits the Jazzheadz in two, those that claim Miles had sold out and those that claim that this was where he really got started. There's a electrified mainline running straight here from Sun Ra, not just afrofuturism but worldfuturism, mixing up the drones and tablas of Indian music with freejazz solos and minimal funk, feeding everything through a wah pedal, the pedal that speaks.

I heard this first at a party, in a house which usually resounded to Dub enough to seriously piss the neighbours off. I stumbled in to a dark room reeking of hash. Only the music kept me in there, it's multiple, parallel grooves making my head spin more than the smoke. There's a part on side B, I think in "Helen Butte" where the keyboard players spin an endless unresolving series of chords. It seems impossible that it could stop, and I'm always disappointed when it does.

Our listening was disturbed by a loud banging and screaming above us. Those of us who weren't completely out of it ran upstairs to witness an incredible scene. About six or eight people lying on the floor gasping and flailing about under a layer of white foam. I left, confused and feeling a bit sick. Later I heard what had happened. They'd dropped some acid and were lying in the dark with a strobe light on, listening to the music thumping up from downstairs. Two of my friends, the merry pranksters Dave and Gus (who told me the story) sneaked out to Dave’s house down the road, came back with a foam-filled fire extinguisher and opened the door to the room, shouted "Now we’re going to find out who our friends are" and emptied the extinguisher all over them.

Listen to On The Corner. You won’t need a strobe, believe me!

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T.A.G. The Delivery. 1985.

I first heard this on a bootleg cassette, although as I got it from one of the band, I guess bootleg isn't really the right term. I knew a couple of the musicians in The Anti Group through friends. I'd met the bass player, Barry in the pub, we’d talked about music and he’d told me he was "in a band". That didn't really mean much as about 80% of the drinkers in The Washington seemed to be in a band at the time. But a few days later I met him at the 97 busstop with his battered guitar case and nearly fainted when I saw that it had DVA stencilled on it. 

Clock DVA, one of my favourite bands. Adi Newton, one of my favourite voices. 

He explained that they were changing the name - that the band had split, the others going on to form The Box, Adi Newton staying with The Anti Group. Later I got a copy of a copy of a cassette of a Berlin concert. So over-copied that it ran much faster than the LP making it still sound sluggish to my ears. Their music was even darker than DVA, the lyrics even stranger... "A Zulu with a chicken's head." was on my cassette along with "Ocean", disappearing from the LP.

But it was the instrumental Delivery itself that blew me away, and it still does. An insistent, pounding drum machine whose rhythm is constantly re-interpreted by the musicians as they play long, jazzy overlapping themes, sometimes drowned in waves of electronic noise. It’s a kind of 1980′s Northern version of On the Corner. What pisses me off totally with the record is that the track is spread over two sides. Just when they're getting groovy, some idiot makes the most inappropriate fade in the history of Industrial Music. And then it fades back in again on the B side, just about placating the listener. I can listen to Barry's last bass notes, a slowed down heartbeat echoing into the distance, for ever. I wonder what happened to him? Industrial Music though, never really described what Adi Newton and his groups were about. Discogs has this record down as: Electro, Contemporary Jazz, Experimental, Industrial. For me they were in a league of their own, although they lost me after "Teste Tones".