J&C: A TRIBUTE, BY DARYL WORTHINGTON OF BEACHERS
The label formerly known as Jehu and Chinaman is a contradiction.
I've never met label owner Steve Dewhurst in person, despite releasing a tape on his label. My only clue as to what he looks like comes from the scraps of evidence I've scraped together from Facebook. All of my dealings with him have been over email or Facebook messenger. Our relationship encapsulates 21st century broadband detachment.
And yet, the label feels an intimately personal thing. It's run from one man's house, it puts out releases in small batches and your tapes arrive in a hand written envelope. But lots of labels do that. What makes J&C seem so personal is the tapeography genuinely feels like one man's deranged record collection which he's decided to share without the outside world.
Spend a few days going through the J&C Bandcamp, and you'll realise why that's a wonderful thing. Â
Labels, festivals, magazines and promoters now tend to fall into one of two categories. Ones which stick to an aesthetic, releasing a stream of things which rigorously adhere to a style and sound, reflecting the absurd reality that as the internet opens up people's ability to research and choose from an almost infinite range of art, they increasingly do their best to specialise in as narrow a niche as possible. Â
Another kind go the other way, constantly chasing the Zeitgeist like a fuck head marketing guru. Just like said fuck head, they do all right, but no one really feels attached to them. Their relentless strive to be contemporary has left them with no identity. If they died, no one would care enough to write an obituary.
Both approaches are successful, hell, maybe J&C's impending demise is connected to its decision to not choose either option. If that's the case, it's been a glorious failure in celebrating the beauty of curation as an art form in itself. A noble failure worthy of the two animals its former name commemorates. If it's not the case, it's just been glorious.
Scammers - A Song That Can Exist
Phil Diamond's baritone vocals are the sound of a big band crooner in a post big band crooner world. Swooning pop music with knife edge moroseness. Â
A Song That Can Exist is all warmth and melody, pissed up and piss stained romanticism, an album of grotty euphoria. From the opener '27' onward, it's the sound of an evening swigging wine alone at home, sending that text message you know you'll regret in the morning, even before you've sent it. Â
The drunken drawl of the voice stretches to the slobbering brass in a lament of dwindling youth. "If 27 is the age to die, then 25's the age I should have tried."
It's an album of love songs and masochism, punishing yourself while looking at the stars. It' s incredibly witty, but you know you shouldn't laugh. Â
Scammers makes a distinct brand of pop music, but this lushly orchestrated set of ballads stick out because the softer arrangements give the songs a greater bite. Â
The best music tears you in a way where you don't know whether you're happy or sad. If the album's title track doesn't make you feel this way, you're already dead.
Circuit Rider UK - Alienist
A bleeping, twitching album of electronica, its greatest triumph is not falling into the rigid genre boundaries that needlessly block off most electronic music. Â
Melodies come and go on Alienist, moments of sweet harmony quickly dissipating into discord, a process eerily reflective of reality.
Song structures are unconventional, unpredictable but never obnoxiously so. Sweet organ chords counterbalance the mechanical glitches. Spindly arpeggios add a sense of momentum and rhythm, but the distinguishing feature of the album is the space. It's never saturated, never overloaded, instead painting an intricate tapestry where every detail reaches crystalline definition.
Lutto Lento's Partition was my first encounter with J&C - its haunting black and white graveyard cover photo stealing my attention. The blurb, talking about an album inspired by Poland's 18th Century subjugation at the hands of the great powers of Europe, meant that as a history graduate and fan of experimental music, I had to hear it. Â
From the church bells and choir singing at the start, it's a deep, arresting universe of sound. Field recordings and what seem like gramophones blurting out broken military march music build an unsettling, spooky story. It's a bizarre work of art which sits between musique concrete, audio guide, and history essay. Â
Normally, if I read a description like this for an album, I'd assume it's total gash. Somehow, Partition does exactly what you hope it will do, without disappearing up its own arse, an impressionistic take on the tragedy which has so often blighted the history of huge swathes of Eastern Europe.
Signor Benedick the Moor - Garage Raps Vol. 1
Probably J&C's biggest curveball, and the release which shows why the label's diversity is so vital. Â
Garage Raps is bat-shit crazy. It's exciting, witty, and full of bile. It lurches from drum machine fuelled garage rock to abstract sound art to hilarious social commentary. In 'G6.1 02100.' Signor Benedick makes clear his role as the absurd outsider, avoiding the macho metal posing of someone like Death Grips, and never becoming so preoccupied in being weird as to become a novelty act. Â
While his breakthrough El Negro had a polished bombast to it, Garage Raps is dirty, grungy and nasty. Mostly, the tape is a reminder of what 'experimental' music should be - something beyond music for chin stroking in cafes. Something which doesn't have to be elitist. Garage Raps is populist music which challenges prejudices of form, genre and context. Â
Calling it experimental might seem inappropriate, but that just reflects how the genre has become constrained by rigid, funding defined guidelines - totally defeating the object. Like everything on J&C, Garage Raps is experimental in that it tries to cut out a position for itself outside of fashion. If there is one sentence which could sum up the whole label, that was it.
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