Doklands

After 13 years of (almost) daily updates, it is with a certain amount of relief that I can announce that Doklands is no more. It's been tremendous fun, and I value those people who I've met along the way, but after so long it's going to be so refreshing to not have opinions about everything. May each and every one of you enjoy yourself as much as I have here.

--dok

Here's the young Roky Erickson with the 13th Floor Elevators with their garage classic You're Gonna Miss Me. There are so many great elements to this song. One is undoubtedly Erickson's harmonica playing, a violent shriek that follows his singing without respite. Then there's the famous electric jug playing of Tommy Hall. Yes, that juddering undercurrent that runs throughout the song is nothing other than an amplified jug. Legend has it that it was always filled with cannabis, and over the years the sound of the leaf infused into the ceramic itself. And last, but hardly least is Erickson's performance, patterned after the likes of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and James Brown. Apparently he was a rather insecure young man and wanted it to seem as if his singing was a natural expression of his authentic wildness: in truth he practised for hours on end in seclusion so no-one would realise how much hard work and dedication it took to get that voice. Find this as the opening track of the band's debut, The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators (1966).

13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me
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In 1984 Van Morrison was in the middle of a journey that was to take him through Scientology and Theosophy and into a turbulent relationship with religion that has never seemed to go away. In other words, he was just about the least cool man on the planet. Did I know that at the time? Did I buggery, I just wanted to hear his new album, A Sense of Wonder. It's a real mixed bag of old blues and r'n'b songs and some dodgy Celtic adornment. But at the heart of it is one of the greatest things he ever did, his cover of Mike Westbrook's Let The Slave.

It's a setting of a text by William Blake, taken from his work of epistemological liberation America, a Prophecy. The original has some brilliant moments, but for me it's always spoiled by the vocal performance of Phil Minton. With Van that's never a problem, he manages to be plainspoken, gutsy and fuelled by emotion. His call for social revolution is inextricably linked with the spiritual. Still brings a tear to my eye. Just don't go digging too deep in this era of Van's work, this is as good as it gets.

Van Morrison - Let the Slave (incorporating The Price of Experience)
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Some bands are metal but only one is literally metal. Compressorhead are Fingers, Stickboy and Bones, a band of actual robots. They get guest vocalists in to do the tricky singing part, which in my book is a bit of a cop out. It must be possible to get a set of horns and some weirdly resonant sheet metal to handle that end of things, surely? The band are fuelled by compressed air anyway, imagine that tonne of metal used as the backing for some full scale intonarumori bruitism action. Until that crossover comes, here's what the band sound like when relying on a flesh-based singer for their signature theme. From the 2017 album Party Machine.

Compressorhead - Compressorhead
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Here at Doklands we've heard a fair bit of Ernesto Gonzales, codenamed Bear Bones, Lay Low. His 2019 release Ses Kondi might be his best yet.

A lot of his early music was based around drones, and like much of the best of that genre was all about finding the rhythms hidden inside the drone, the subtle pulsing and beating of marginal discord. The same sort of feeling is present within Lord, but in a much more exciting way. It's already very rhythmic stuff, a sort of ecstatic trance music, but what Gonzales has done here is to go deep inside the rhythm, to find the beat within the beat: not to play it, but to make you add it yourself as you hear his contribution. This is not music to be a passive bystander to, it demands your participation.

Bear Bones, Lay Low - Lord
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I've held back on sharing Derek for many years because (a) it could fairly be described as terrible and (b) this rip of it sounds as if it was recorded off the radio. Still, I remained obsessed with this stupid song for years. It's from the deliberately naff school of '80s indie music, halfway between messthetics and naff; songs made as an art laugh, not because they demanded to be heard. It's tat, but it's idiosyncratic tat. I know absolutely nothing about The Danglers other than the fact that this comes from their sole release, a 10" mini album called Books and Parcels (1983).

The Danglers - Derek
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Do you want to listen to the of the best histories of punk in a single performance? Jeffrey Lewis's punk timeline is a bit sketchy at times, especially when he draws it through the weird folk and freakout bands of the 1960s but he can be forgiven just about anything for his dry delivery and the fact that he performs part of every single song he mentions. And hey, he's sticking up for his hometown too. This is a classic recording that never got a proper release, copyright and licensing restrictions proving entirely insurmountable. This low bitrate version from 2004 is all there is as far as I know.

Jeffrey Lewis - A History of Punk on the Lower East Side
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Look, I'll be honest with you, I just don't get the Gentle Stranger aesthetic. Are they the soundtrack to an invisible dadaist theatre troupe? Are they a improv DIY jazz trio? Are they a live sampling jam band? I don't know and have to treat each new moment they bring with bewilderment, trepidation or exhilaration. Things seem marginally clearer on Obvious As Snow, the final track from Love And Unlearn (2020). They send us home with a smile on our faces, as long as crawling inevitability and droning existential dread is what makes you smile. Hey it may be ghastly and terrifying, but at least you can hear it coming.

I'm trying to tell it's really good, btw. No need to thank me.

Gentle Stranger - Obvious As Snow
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I am so sick and tired of being the only person I know who listens to Jamie Harrison's music. I'm also sick of how many different Jamie Harrisons there are out there, and I want mine to grow gargantuan and consume all the others. MY Jamie Harrison is the folk singer, the one who plays quirky tunes that sound as if he's trying to make all his mates laugh and cry at once. They're songs of friendship and togetherness and stupid in-jokes, and they've got this strange sense of communal intimacy about them.

Harrison recorded today's song twice, once as Blueprints from the album The Struck World And The Bad Planet (2010, great album but sound quality not all it could be) and as Blue Prints from Honesty! Fraternity! Night-Vision! (2017). That's what we'll listen to today, a song full of fluidity and propulsion. A song that threatens to fall apart, but that gets rescued, and us with it. I think it's the best thing he's ever done. He sounds so mournful and handsome and young!

Jamie Harrison - Blue Prints
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I loved The Clash as a teenager. Not trying to claim there's anything special in that, I think it was pretty much obligatory to do so. But as the years went on they started to sound a bit iffy, their politics seeming more and more like clothes to be worn to suit the occasion. Really badly cut clothes at that. It was when one of their dreariest songs got stuck on a jeans advert that I lost all faith.

Or almost all. The Clash's cover of Willie Williams' Armagideon Time has always remained there on the mental playlist, and rightly so. Absolutely one of the top few punk/reggae crossover numbers, and a recording so on fire that they even included the studio engineer telling them to wind things up rather than try to re-record it. Justice Tonight / Kick It Over is the extended dub mix that showed up on Black Market Clash, and it's everything you want it to be. 9 minutes of Paul Simonon's bassline? Yes please.

The Clash - Justice Tonight / Kick It Over
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Here's a track from the 1982 album Für Mich and it's testimonial to the fact that Thomas Dinger should be remembered as more than simply Klaus' little brother. Alleewalzer is without doubt one of the most immediately melancholy pieces ever recorded. It's a deceptively simple number played with a celestial clarity that veers well into camp territory. Music for the drag ballerina rotating on the music box.

Thomas Dinger - Alleewalzer
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Calling something a hyperobject is a bit of a bold claim. It's a term used to define a coherent object that is massively distributed throughout space and culture, but not necessarily in a contiguous manner. Their very presence distorts our perceptions of everything that surrounds them, like some sort of aesthetic black hole. And that's perhaps not a bad description of Evol's Hyperobject 1

Evol are the duo of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp. You can install their works on any drive you please, and their excessive length and difficult listening nature will cause you to recontextualise everything around them. I've had Hyperobject 1 sitting on my PC since 2012, and have been absolutely terrified of the bugger. It's 60+ minutes of solo synth twiddling, and it sounds like an experiment in deconstructing techno and laying all the bits end to end. It's utterly formidable, and I've seldom been able to take more than a few minutes of it at once. But hey, why don't you try to make something of it? Just stick it in a corner somewhere and find out what happens every few years when you remember it's still there.

Evol - Hyperobject 1

At Doklands we love it when bands genuinely don't seem to know what they're doing. Naive outsiders doing what they can rather than what they should are the best. That's certainly the case with Santa Cruz-based Nessie and her Beard, who made a sort of droning atonal dream pop. It was multilayered lo-fi experimentation with the odd flash of beauty and brilliance, but mostly it was just very peculiar indeed, absolutely not the sort of thing you'd be doing if you knew your limitations. So hurrah for that, and hurrah for the fact that their music can still be heard 13 after it was recorded. Nessie comes from a 2007 album that's either called Bard or Bold Hard, and if you want to get past the wall of noise there's something that might almost be twee underneath.

Nessie and her Beard - Nessie
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Soccer96 have what may be the best pseudonyms in music. Keyboard player Dan Leavers is Danalogue, and drummer Max Hallett is Beatamax. Ask me again tomorrow and I'll tell you they're the worst pseudonyms in music, so take that for what it's worth. Buy It comes from their Tactics EP (2020) where they're joined by the no less sensibly named Alabaster de Plume. Most attention will probably be given to the particularly timely I Was Gonna Fight Fascism but honestly Buy It is the killer track here, a polyrhythmic beast full of cynicism. It's taut and intense and the spindly anger is off the charts.

Soccer96 - Buy It
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Here at Doklands we love the Swiss jazz scene, all those bands influenced by Don Li and Nik Bärtsch. Stephan Thelen's Sonar are one of them and lately they've been adding veteran ECM alumnus David Torn to their mix. Cloud Chamber comes from Tranceportation Vol.2 (2020). They play with Necks-like restrain in pursuit of the the minimal groove, tightly wound and threatening to explode at every moment, with Werner Hasler's electronic interjections acting as a potential release valve. Heavy as fuck.

Sonar w. David Torn - Cloud Chamber
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2020 may have dumped a shit tonne of misery on the world, but it has at least brought us a new album by Lascelle Gordon and his band Vibration Black Finger. One of the highlights of Can You See What I'm Trying to Say is the defiantly experimental Persia & Cornelius. It's got the reverb and sonic oddness of a lockdown recording, with a whole basket of homebrew sounds scattered across a deeply romantic and slightly intergalactic jazz piano number. It just goes to show you can be soulful and mystic and still have a fundamentally revolutionary approach.

Vibration Black Finger - Persia & Cornelius
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This is about 20 years old and to be honest I've no memory whatsoever of writing it. The mix is terrible and the bitrate paltry. I've just listened to it for the first time in god know how long and found myself rather digging the bass, especially when the filters start to sweep in. Finish is cheesy as hell though, sorry.

Dktr - Pisgah Dub
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Did you ever come across a piece of music so perfect that you immediately fall in love with it? The End of Music (2012) is no shallow claim, it is quite literally the end of music. It's 15 minutes of scratchy run-out grooves, stretched and smushed and brought to life like an overexcited mechanical heart. It's a tongue rasping against the imminent silence, lapping up the vinyl and licking the bowl clean. Other musicians might try to sell you the end of music as some kind of fashionable pose, but this is the real deal. Let me say it again: Perfect.

Ergo Phizmiz - The End of Music
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No Bra are always a fascinating if not exactly enjoyable listen. What If... (Down with the Patriarchy) from their 2019 album Love & Power continues that tradition. There's an uncomfortable tension between Susanne Oberbeck's disaffected drawl, and the drifting industrial tones. Sometimes there's a bassline that sounds as if it's coming from a room at the other end of the building and is subconsciously picking up on the rhythm of her words. What If... is a provocative agenda for destroying capitalism via excess, defeating consumerism by going beyond desire. Distinct echoes of Salò here. It's probably not somewhere you want to go yourself, better to trust the reports from frontline.

No Bra - What If... (Down with the Patriarchy)
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Breathy, earthy electronica posing as something rather more palaeolithic and recorded in a Maltese cave that once housed goats: that's the remarkable pedigree of Field Walk from the album Goatherder (2019). Kristian Craig Robinson has created the most ancient-sounding music this side of Armenia, with instruments made from twigs and seeds. This is the place we go back to when we dream, the forgotten unconscious.

Capitol K - Field Walk
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