A.Cave #6 — A Different Side of the 1980s [5 RECs]
Architects Office—Blue Daisies—John Fekner City Squad—Strafe Fur Rebellion—Strange Fruit Abiku
The following piece was written in 2021 for the French zine PSYCHO DISCO, from the great punk cartoonist & musician Alex Ratcharge. Naturally, it was translated into the zine’s mother tongue. Here, enjoy its contents via the savage tongue—en anglais. There is some new material added.
ARCHITECTS OFFICE - Caswallon The Headhunter [Silent; 1986]
Architects Office was a conglomeration from Boulder, Colorado, which is in the western half of the United States. Known primarily as a hippie haven, Boulder is, in actuality, boring as fuck. I once spent hours digging through a musty record store only to come up empty. Then again, at the time, I wasn’t hip to the Office. Probably flipped past a stack of sealeds, but I doubt it—this album exudes cool/weird vibes. In fact, the cover of Caswallon The Headhunter is a still from a Stan Brakhage film. As a sort of John Cage of cinema, Brakhage was an avant-garde institution, and Architects Office collaborated with him over a period of years. Based on a story written by Brakhage’s wife Jane [see below], Caswallon The Headhunter’s full stage production included a theatrical backdrop, elaborate costumes, detailed choreography and original films, in addition to AO’s real-time soundtrack. Caswallon is the only proper vinyl offering that Architects Office managed to get out. Considering it was the salad days of home-taping and mail art, they mostly released cassettes. Architects Office was not possessive, as their name can testify. My copy is warped and the jacket is taped together, but it plays mostly fine and thus I am able to enter the mythical world of Caswallon whenever it strikes my fancy. A mist-shrouded olden time when “...nobody would shave their pubic hairs...” and warriors would “...use lime-wash to make their hairs stand on end” (punk!). Close your eyes and imagine what effect “The Third Ill-Fated Disclosure” had on a medieval past featuring King Arthur and the denizens of the British Isles contending with invading Vikings and the iron-fisted rule of the Roman Empire. As a man and a woman recite the narrative, tape manipulations engulf the surroundings. Sheets of synthetic noise rain down amid sounds of flung crockery, violent chewing and animals howling in the night. “Exhausted 329.4” foregrounds heavy, labored breathing that segues from faintly erotic to possibly torture-induced, culminating in a disturbing climax. “Party/Party 327.5” makes use of a conversation that Stan Brakhage tape-recorded in 1949. Time enters a slipstream and vanishes into the vortex. By the end of the second side, treated horns and liquid electronics take on slightly more recognizable shapes, but retain the “flock of druids bathed in moonlight” scene-setting. Caswallon The Headhunter calls back to ancient oral traditions while anchoring it in the modern era via musique concrete techniques. Pierre Henry meets Ursula K. Le Guin and they exchange stories across the fire-pit. Michael Moorcock brews the coffee and after the tales are told, everyone gets a good night’s rest.
BONUS INFO: Mentioned in the above piece is Brakhage’s wife at the time, Jane, a writer and artist in her own right. This past December, a fascinating article appeared in the New York Times upon Jane’s death at age 87. After divorcing Brakhage—in 1987, shortly after this record came out—she continued in the mode of their spartan life, dividing her time between traveling the country like a nomad and living in a barebones cabin in the Colorado mountains. She wrote 14 books, including Wolf Dictionary, which is about how wolves communicate with each other. I highly recommend reading about this complicated and brilliant woman at the link below. Unfortunately, no mention of Architects Office. That’s why you subscribe to Anonymous Cave.
This should be a gift link that anyone can open…..HERE.
BLUE DAISIES - Wilt [Iridescence; 1985]
Based in Los Angeles, Blue Daisies played fractured rock music that was pleasantly bent and flirted with the avant-garde. The scrap of info that put the Blue Daisies on my radar was the fact that Steve Stain was the drummer. Steve Stain is responsible for the delightful, bizarre, slightly unhinged and certainly unheralded The Brain Feels No Pain (New Alliance; 1986) album. Subbing for Steve on a few songs on Wilt is Brad Laner. After starting as a teenager in Earth Dies Burning, Brad went on to be in Severed Head In A Bag, Steaming Coils, Electric Company and Medicine, to name just a few. Freak cred established, I plucked a cheap copy from the ether. At first glance, the cover throws you for a loop cuz it looks kind of like some kind of post-youth crew/proto-moshcore nightmare. But this was 1985 and punks sporting corporate logos and baseball hats was still a few years off. Blue Daisies tapped into the West Coast “tribal post-punk” scene that began with Savage Republic, shared a smoke break with Fourwaycross, and ended in tragedy with Perry Farrell’s Psi-Com. Labelmates for the Daisies included the aforementioned SR, Half Japanese, Eugene Chadbourne and even the first appearance of Sonic Youth/Lydia Lunch’s classic “Death Valley ‘69.” Wilt is fun, noisy, grinding, and plenty (of fools) would say “dated.” “Slot,” with its clanging percussion and slurred chanting, seems like a product of Stain’s fevered cerebrum. “Suck Me” is a sarcastic anthem for punks who want to move like ragdolls that ends in a psychedelic rave-up. On the flip, “Dance Dance Dance” further jerks the puppets around, much to their delight. “Everything And Nothing At All” was actually re-purposed a couple years later for the Blissed Out Fatalists album (reissued in 2012). “Es Amor (Hand Job)” subverts LA “punk-funk” with junk percussion and turntable abuse. Closing cut, “Beautiful Kid,” leans full-force into this emerging sound, dodgy rapping and all. In a parallel universe, Blue Daisies are still out there, touring arenas with Fishbone and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
JOHN FEKNER CITY SQUAD - Idioblast (Vinyl Gridlock; 1984)
This record is pure, unfettered joy on twelve inches of polyvinyl chloride. Not sure where I first heard “I Get Paid To Clap,” but it was love at first machine-drum thwack. Vinyl Gridlock put out three flexis and two 12”s, but most of this material is on the sole LP that Fekner and his City Squad eked out during the mid-’80s. Idioblast is a lost classic, a future shock narrative ahead of its time, and yet completely of its era like few artifacts before or since. The cover tips you off from the jump—a crude but effective collage featuring slogans like Toxic Junkie, Industrial Fossil, Growth Decay and Soft Brains Watch The Screen And Buy The Jeans. Hell, the first lyric on the album is “The place to be is on the space shuttle/if you’re brave enough to get on it,” which seems to anticipate the Challenger disaster two years later. NYC native John Fekner was a pioneering artist who specialized in stencil and graffiti art, so his interest in hip-hop transcended mere novelty. All of the tracks on Idioblast directly reference the ideas that inspired Fekner’s visual art. His guerilla stencil works on decaying public structures in the late ‘60s are crucial antecedents to the graffiti explosion a decade later, in which he also played a key role. As an MC, he acquits himself well on “Rapicasso,” almost justifying that endearingly corny title. Splitting the difference between hip-hop and new wave, “The Beat” is like Thomas Dolby meets Run-DMC and should’ve been a radio staple for at least one sticky summer. Channeling Fekner’s slogan-stencil aesthetic, “Travelogue The 80’s” is a tour de force reminiscent of Negativland’s experiments in audio culture jamming. Overtop dueling drum machines, television news samples tell the tale of society spiraling into deadly farce courtesy of fundamentalist thought and rampant corruption. “2 4 5 7 9 11” opens side two with a Howard Beale soundbite and proceeds to lay down a funky, melodic jam that could soundtrack either a couples roller skate or a drug-fueled evening out. My favorite part is the breakdown where the female MC lays down her bars in an android-like cadence. This kind of goofy political rap would soon morph into the humorless pastiche of Consolidated, but it’s fresh as the day’s first bagels on Idioblast. “I Get Paid To Clap” is irresistible, another duet between a cool chick and a hip dude as panned noises mimic the cacophony of the city. They want to know: “R U A Vidiot?” Up to this point, John Fekner City Squad is in rare company alongside pioneering post-no wave beat outfits like Death Comet Crew, Rammellzee and 3 Teens Kill 4, but the last two songs throw you off-balance yet again. “The Sight Of The Child” features a nameless youth describing his post-apocalyptic world over a bed of bluesy harmonica. “Wheels Over Indian Trails” comes blowing in on drippy acoustic guitar like some ‘70s private press obscurity as an earnest Fekner sings about white Europeans colonizing the New World and defacing the natives’ land. Initially, the song seems miles from the congested urban pollution of the preceding tracks, but it works somehow and solidifies the idiosyncrasy of this peculiar record. Luckily, I was able to procure a sealed version of this epochal release and I am pleased to report that the Another Four Years! 6” flexi does indeed keep Idioblast close company during these dark times. One last lesson on the cover lands particularly hard in the current moment: Beauty’s Only Screen Deep. Indeed.
BONUS INFO: Somewhat instigated by the above, there is going to be a John Fekner City Squad 2xLP coming out on Modern Harmonic this year. The double album will encompass the Idioblast album plus singles, EPs, flexis, comp cuts and unreleased tracks. Not sure when the release date is, in fact this may be the first the wider world is hearing about it. But what I can tell you is that I wrote the liner notes. At over 2000 words, they provide more context about what you may have just read/listened to. Super excited for this. I’ll drop a note when it’s announced.
STRAFE FÜR REBELLION - s/t (Pure Freude; 1983)
Dunno why this group isn’t world-famous, but if I can help make that happen—even with an abbreviated spiel in a punk zine—well, let’s get this fuckin party started. A collaboration between Bernd Kastner and Siegfried Syniuga, the German duo transmutated and emancipated lovely and harrowing sounds from the jealous gargoyles that hold them close. These guys levitate up to the draftiest sections of the castle and come back with true alchemy in the form of song. Shorthand description goes like this: If Nurse With Wound was a rock band. Not good enough for you? Strafe Für Rebellion laughs in your face (“a soundless message of death” according to the following LP and the one that eludes my grasp). “Bum Bum” immediately puts your hackles on notice as an assortment of clattering, knocking and thudding sounds join with warped vocals and all of a sudden you are witnessing an infestation of ghosts. Eerie and thrilling—the Strafe Für Rebellion experience in a nutshell. “Siamang” approximates mutant disco as played by the succubi that live in the walls of Dracula’s fortress. “Blaue Mig” is a terrifying trudge, like Swans set loose in the primate enclosure. Strafe Für Rebellion’s sound palate is extensive—field recordings, shakers, violins, Turkish lutes, metal-on-metal and layers of voices like otherworldly choirs. The b-side is even more haunted, almost like Syniuga and Kastner had already used up so much creative energy this early in their career that Mephistopheles has come for his due way ahead of schedule. (Faust had perhaps more of an influence than just the Tapes). Alas, I do not have the accompanying 7” that came with the LP, so to that I say—”Send it to me, please, goddammit.” If you extract any pleasure from the dark, twisted genius of groups like Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, Die Tödliche Doris or Village Of Savoonga, then you deserve a dose of “punishment for rebellion.”
STRANGE FRUIT (ABIKU) - On Top Of A Hill EP (Babel; 1983)
This little record has the distinction of being the only one on this list that I picked up at an actual brick-and-mortar store (Ridgewood NY’s Deep Cuts). It was a serendipitous find, as only a few months prior I had gotten a bit obsessed with this long-gone Michigan band. Featuring a pre-Crucifucks Steve Shelley, a pre-Two Dollar Guitar Tim Foljahn and Steve Miller from The Fix, Strange Fruit must have ruled the Kalamazoo art-punk scene for their brief existence. Or maybe everyone hated them. Based on this three-song 7”, you can see why Sonic Youth snatched Shelley up when they had the chance. While it’s obvious that at least one person in the band had a copy of No New York, Strange Fruit’s songs have a loose but feral quality to them that is casual in its violence; a sense of sickness curdling into cruelty. Their sound is a cauldron in which stirs noise guitar, tumbling rhythms and enchanted singing from goth-chanteuse Sherrie Feight. I’m imagining a bill with Strange Fruit Abiku, L-Seven and Dark Arts from Chicago. That’s a witchy night full of promise and premonition. What’s with the name? The single is under Strange Fruit, but “Abiku” shows up all over the packaging. By the time they made their LP (Sin Eaters Picnic) the following year, the band had added Abiku to the proper name. And then there’s another LP on Babel that seems to be a split between Abiku Red and Ark Of Bone (which may be the same band). That one is called A Phosphorus Seed and based on the one track I’ve heard, it’s as high-quality as the flagship act. Mysterious shit, indeed! At first, I thought the copy I had picked up was a late ‘80s repress, but further research indicates that it is indeed an original. Fortunately, Steve Shelley has finally made some moves towards getting this music out there. Under his Vampire Blues label, he released a digital version of On Top Of A Hill which adds three more tracks that are just as good as the original material. Sin Eaters Picnic is even better than the single, so here’s hoping Steve reissues it, or perhaps I’ll stumble onto a copy one of these days.