Welcome to Ion Engine!
In this issue: interviews with Heather Leigh and Brian Hogg, reviews of Mercuro-Chrome x Meteor/Rodeo, Stable, Mark Vernon and Audrey Bizouerne & Neil Davidson, and some spicy links!
‘What I love about poetry is its ion engine’, wrote Edwin Morgan in his poem ‘A View Of Things’. The same could be said of music. As Ken MacLeod explains in his introduction to a new anthology of Morgan’s science-fiction poetry, an ion engine is ‘a tiny continuous thrust that can’t lift you off Earth but can shift your orbit and, by mere persistence, take you a long way - to anywhere, in time.’ Music can lift you off Earth - from Glasgow To Saturn, to drop another Morgan reference - but it often shifts your orbit in subtler ways. Morgan is my greatest Scottish cultural hero, whose socialist modernism has deeply informed my own outlook on culture, politics and life. So when it came to naming this newsletter, I knew exactly where to look.
Ion Engine is partly an extension of my Going Underground column for The List, which is on Covid-enforced hiatus for the forseeable. There will be interviews and reviews, plus a few other treats. In terms of what gets covered, I’m not too hung up on defining underground and experimental music, and I have no interest in nationalist gatekeeping or boosterism. And it’s never just about the music: in addition to providing cultural, social, political and economic context, I want to highlight links to activism. Ion Engine is a celebration of community, and I want it to be inclusive as possible. Tories, fascists, racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes and other bigots aren’t welcome here. I hope you enjoy the newsletter, and to leave the last word to Morgan, ‘push the boat out compañeros… unknown is best’.
Q&A: Heather Leigh
The pedal steel mystic on her new lockdown album and the joys of gardening
Emerging from the Texan underground in the late 1990s, Heather Leigh came to prominence in Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast, Charalambides and Scorces, her duo with Christina Carter. Since relocating to Glasgow in 2004, where she co-ran the underground record store and mail order Volcanic Tongue, she has released several solo albums and collaborated with Jandek, Peter Brötzmann, Chris Corsano (as Jailbreak), Stefan Jaworyzn (as Annihilating Light), and Robbie Yeats of The Dead C, to name but a few. During the past few years she has stepped up her solo activities, from the fearsome solo guitar of Me-Ba and the raw electric blues ritual of Nightingale to her first studio album proper, 2015’s I Abused Animal, a song cycle which foregrounds the glassy beauty of her voice and her intensely focussed pedal steel playing. Throne followed in 2018, an album of sensuous gothic pop, dark psychedelia and ragged Americana. Last month saw the surprise release of Glory Days, an album recorded in her Glasgow flat during lockdown.
Glory Days is part of Boomkat's Documenting Sound series. To what extent did lockdown shape the process and the mood of the album?
It shaped it completely. When Boomkat invited me to be a part of the series at the end of March, while I was already physically in lockdown - really only venturing out for essentials or short walks - I was still in the throws of frantically rescheduling cancelled concerts, checking on family/friends and coming to grips with our new reality. While I’m ultimately accepting of the situation, initially it was devastating to watch all of my work for the year disappear, I had a lot of exciting concerts/new collaborations in the works! My situation being nothing special of course, we’re all facing great uncertainty in every respect at the moment. Of course you could argue that’s life in general but these feel like overwhelming times. I had planned to have a quiet year anyway as far as traveling goes. I’ve spent the last six years touring near constantly and needed a break and the time/space to work on new music but it’s one thing to make a decision to calm it down and quite another to be FORCED to. So, to put it bluntly, I wasn’t really in the headspace to record and initially in lockdown I found myself writing and painting more than making music, but then came Boomkat’s invitation. I took their remit seriously in terms of my process which was essentially to record something quickly without thinking about it too much, a document of the moment, whatever that meant to me.
Read the full interview with Heather Leigh here.
Reviews
Mercuro-Chrome x Meteor/Rodeo (self-released)
Mercuro-Chrome's 2019 tape Athlete of Joy/Athlete of Despair was an absolute knockout: devised by Tut Vu Vu's Jamie Bolland for a performance with costumes by Movern Mulgrew, it combined autotuned poetry with an Ornette Coleman derived rhythm and a KRS-1 microsample. Adapting his poem 'On All Fours', Bolland read out a litany of identities in a warmly robotic voice that blossomed into rococo vocoder flourishes. In the scramble for reference points, I came up with Robert Ashley, Sun Ra, Daft Punk and Kanye, but ultimately Bolland dealt us a curveball, on that was gorgeously strange and moving.
This latest release teams Bolland up with Meteor/Rodeo, aka Joe Howe of Germlin and Banana Oil fame. The collaboration was instigated by artist Rob Churn for a performance at Glasgow's Old Hairdressers in April. Covid -19 had other ideas, but the project continued in earnest, with Bolland and Howe exchanging files via email. Built around improvised electronics and text... 'Untinned Animal' unfolds over throbbing bass tones and florescent synth swoops, with Bolland waxing gnomic about surveillance society and a reterritorialised California. There's something of HAL 9000 to Bolland's gentle cyborg tones, but with the sinister edge replaced by a friendly absurdism.
The vocoder is woven in at opportune moments, teasing out the melodic potential of Bolland's spoken word cadences. There's a hypnotic quality to it all, yet the electronics morph continuously, as Howe tweaks the synth tones and adds fizzing percussive accents. '(after Bruegel)' plays similar tricks with repetition, as Bolland paints surreal landscapes over a subtly modulated synth figure. 'Scorpions' takes a sharp turn into cosmic jazz and abstract electronics, as a flute flutters and winds its way around crinkled static and low end warp. Richard Teitelbaum's collaborations with Anthony Braxton come to mind, but Bolland and Howe are on an interstellar journey of their own. An essential purchase then, with proceeds going to Unity Centre and Ubuntu Women Shelter.
Stable - Hypoxic Grand Mal Seizure (Outlet Archival) Summer of Death (self-released)
Andy Brown, erstwhile drummer in noise-rock miscreants Divorce, has been quietly releasing extremely loud music as Stable for the past couple of years. Brown is modest about his achievements, but the man knows how sound works: his noise has the spectral quality of electro-acoustic composition. Released on Kay 'Helena Celle' Logan's excellent Outlet Archival label, Hypoxic Grand Mal Seizure opens with sound of Darth Vader inhaling and exhaling industrial quantities of glass fibre, with the apparition of a crowd floating in and out of the mix. Brown matches the inhalations with a pounding kick drum, then adds a relentless cymbal that sounds like an alarm clock playing heavy metal. The piece gathers intensity and momentum, as if malevolent Clydeside welders are sealing you into the belly of the QE2.
Layers of pink, brown and white noise gradually seep into the steel coffin, while somewhere in the gloom, chains rattle and a bell rings: oppressive and invigorating. As cyborg beetles gnaw at your flesh, the Darth Vader breathing morphs into a horrific death rattle mantra, which my brain processes as 'order'. Just when you’ve reached your psychic and physical pain threshold, Brown dials back the noise, leaving beautiful tonal feedback and delay, and pitch modulation that feels like gravity is falling away from under you.
Summer of Death is dedicated to Wetherspoons boss 'the cunt Tim Martin' and kamikaze lockdown pub goers. Brown lowers you into a churning lava pit, your flailing limbs turning crispy as the low end pulls you under. He expertly sculpts fizzing static into a jacking machine rhythm, which fades that out only to return in the form of juddering beats and brown acid squelch. Grimly ecstatic end times techno.
Mark Vernon - The Dominion of Din (Amplify 2020)
Mark Vernon is one of Glasgow's undersung sonic heroes: in addition to co-curating the experimental broadcasting platform Radiophrenia and the Lights Out Listening Club, the sound artist has racked up an impressive range of recordings, both solo and in collaboration with Barry Burns, Hassle Hound and others. Following hot on the heels of the splendid Paper Gestures for Jason Lescaleet's Glistening Examples label, The Dominion of Din is his contribution to Amplify 2020, the online experimental music festival.
Vernon describes the 50 minute piece as a radio play made from sounds recorded in Glasgow between 2002 and 2020, specifically nuisance sounds that impinged on his flat: bins being emptied, people spilling out of the pub, tradesmen, nesting magpies, an infernal burglar alarm... These field recordings are deftly processed, edited and overlain so that the quotidian and the uncanny sit side by side. Saxophone muzak wafts unctuously in and out of earshot, as Vernon's microphone roams through what sounds like a busy kitchen. Pans clatter and clang, knives slice and chop, before we end up in the backyard to empty the bins.
Through clever blends and transitions, Vernon obscures his sound sources: at one moment we might think we're hearing a kettle boil, only for it to take on the deeper resonance of a bath running. A lonesome piano playing 'Fure Elise' floats in from next door: an audio verite snapshot or a constructed scene? Either way, it advances the narrative and provides a witty comment on the accidental juxtaposition of sounds in a busy neighbourhood.
Reverb and tape delay fog and smear the sounds further, so household appliances become abstract compositions for amplified percussion a la Tony Oxley, or whistling feedback loops and ominous drones. Yet at other points, Vernon presents them clean, so the perspective suddenly shifts to Vernon getting in the car, only to be called on by a workman attending to a blocked pipe. Such irruptions of realism bring us back to earth and can also be very funny, not least when drunken revellers break into the Cranberries' egregious Troubles dirge 'Zombie'.
Yet Vernon never lets you get too comfortable. As the drinkers disperse and the bar staff lock up, a nocturnal jazz requiem starts up, like an Art Ensemble tone poem via Bill Dixon at his heaviest. I can only guess at the source of those lowing horn like tones: those magpies pitched down to a crawl? That burglar alarm, screwed and chopped? We hear a drunken singalong of Radiohead's 'Lucky', before Vernon abruptly stops the tape, relishing the ability to finally exercise control over these unwelcome sounds. A few seconds of silence gives way to ghostly coda of spectral tones.
I'm hesitant to use the term Lynchian in a musical context, seeing as it's come to denote any kind of spooky reverb-laden Americana. Sure, we can describe Vernon's sound design as Lynchian, but where he most closely resembles the master is on a narrative level, as he plays with temporality and moves through dimensions to create work that is uncanny, absurd, and often moving.
Audrey Bizouerne & Neil Davidson - Supermarket Ballads (self-released)
A lovely album of guitar duos from Audrey Bizouerne and Neil Davidson. Recorded ‘in a living room floor with a wooden parquet floor’ over two days in February, Supermarket Ballads has a conversational intimacy and warmth, combined with a compositional focus. Bizouerne is one of the busiest musicians on the Glasgow scene, performing with Gift Horse, Rev Magnetic, Alex Rex and Bill Wells, while Davidson is a leading figure in Scotland’s improvised music community (check his great label Iorram). One of the most rigorous and thoughtful improvising guitarists around, Davidson always gives his fellow musicians space while posing questions and challenges.
Bizouerne’s style is more rooted in rock, folk and jazz. She tends to take the melodic role in the duo, teasing out delicate figures and chordal figures on her Fender while Davidson obsesses over a pattern or tone on acoustic. ‘Apricot Window’ balances Davidson’s minimalism - a repeated crotchet note – with dreamy tremolo chords from Bizouerne. ‘Milk Winter’ is darker and more insistent, tapping into a downer Drag City/Touch & Go vibe while avoiding post-rock cliché. ‘Potatoes Birthday Blue’ is tender and reflective post-rock miniature, while ‘Rosemary Arms’ gestures towards Davey Graham or Sandy Bull with its modal acoustic figure.
‘Argentina Lip Lip’ finds Davidson coaxing an unstable harmonic shimmer from rubbed strings, while Bizouerne plays feedbacking E Bow tones. Over three minutes they build a jangling tension, before Bizouerne releases it by kicking in a choppy delay: DIY Fripp and Eno vibes. Davidson uses a similar technique on ‘Bulk Chalk’, bringing a keen metallic edge to the acoustic resonance, while Bizouerne’s palm-muted chug blossoms into chunky riffage. ‘Baignoire Bacon’ sees Davidson in his Zen Derek Bailey mode, all snapped strings and free improv jumble, while Bizourne responds with taps and squiggles. It’s no free for all though – both players show restraint and maintain their focus on the overall shape of the piece. A really promising duo: more please.
Q&A: Brian Hogg
The legendary chronicler of Scottish rock and pop on Edinburgh's counterculture
Brian Hogg's latest book, Cosmopolitan Scum! Edinburgh, The Arts and The Counterculture, chronicles Auld Reekie's bohemian happenings, from the Paperback bookshop and Traverse Theatre in the 1960s, to Richard Demarco's pioneering exhibitions of contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s, and the publishing activities of Rebel Inc. in the 1990s. There's plenty of music in there too, from the folk scene that spawned Bert Jansch and the Incredible String Band, to the post-punk legacy of Fast Product and Creeping Bent. A lifelong champion of marginal sounds from Scotland and beyond, Hogg produced the cult music zines Bam Balam and Strange Things Are Happening, and worked for legendary Edinburgh indie label Zoom Records. In 1993, Hogg published All That Ever Mattered: The Story Of Scottish Rock and Pop, which remains the definitive account of the music's first four decades. It's an honour to feature him in this inaugural edition of Ion Engine, where he talks about Edinburgh's lost prog bands, the city's crucial contribution to post-punk, and his encounters with Captain Beehfeart and Vivian Stanshall.
Firstly, can you tell me a little about yourself? Your background, how you got involved in the Scottish music scene?
Music has been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. I turned thirteen in 1964 but was already an avid listener to Radio Luxemburg prior to Beatlemania. The following year I began going to Edinburgh’s beat clubs - the Greenhill, the Gonk - and would devour the music press to inform my growing vinyl habit. By the late 60s I was working for Bruce Findlay in Bruce’s Record Shop. I moved to Dunbar in 1974 when I got my teaching diploma but kept in touch with Bruce who subsequently set up Zoom Records. I had seen an early Simple Minds gig at the Astoria and gave him a call to suggest he check them out. Coincidentally they had been up to his office with a demo and he was equally impressed after catching them at the Mars Bar in Glasgow. I gave up teaching, we signed them to Zoom and I worked there until 1980 when the label was dropped by Arista, who co-funded it. After that I went freelance and began writing retrospectives - usually about 1960’s music - and from there helped compile and annotate reissues. So my involvement was initially that of a fan, then briefly a facilitator before latterly becoming a chronicler.
Read the full interview with Brian Hogg here.
Spicy Links
It doesn’t get spicier than a The Old Police House gig. The Newcastle/Gateshead collective have been knocking it out the park with their lockdown broadcasts. Helena Celle, Usurper, Tina Krekels & Adam Campbell, Letitia Pleiades, Stable, and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra are among the Scottish acts featured across the 13 episodes to date.
Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra have made the most of lockdown, using Zoom to commune with international guests. They feature on the first episode of London improv platform Mopomoso’s digital show.
An interview I did with the excellent soft tissue for Counterflows Festival.
A 30th anniversary celebration of A Day For Scotland: my first ever gig, Singing Kettle not withstanding. I’m one of four speakers, alongside festival organiser Lisa Whytcock, Hue & Cry’s Pat Kane, and Peter Lynch of the Scottish Political Archive.
Ion Engine will return on July 27 with an interview with Desi futurist Kapil Seshasayee and much more. In the meantime, push the boat out, compañeros!